Page 55 of She Didn't See It Coming
“She was also surprised to learn that neither of us were interviewed as suspects.”
“Fuck,” Derek repeats, running a hand through his hair again. He looks across the room at her. This isn’t good at all. “Was she just fishing? Or was she genuinely suspicious?”
“I think she’s genuinely suspicious,” Alice answers, “of you. She thinks you killed Bryden Frost, and now she also thinks you killed my mother.”
“She thinksIkilled her?”
Alice approaches him and smiles at the irony of it. “That’s what she said. She wanted to know where you were that night. I said we were at home together. She accused me of covering up for you. Asked me if I really wanted to live with a man who probably murdered a woman and stuffed her in a suitcase, and who ran over my mother for her money.”
“But we both know that you killed your mother, Alice.”
“I know that, and you know that, but the detectives don’t know that.”
He looks back at her beautiful face with growing unease. “This isn’t good.”
“No shit.”
“You shouldn’t have spoken to her,” Derek says angrily.
“Like I had a choice? She was always going to bring me in, and you know it. They even read me my rights.”
“We need to think,” Derek says. “We may not be able toprovewhere we were that night, but if we always back each other up, they’ll never be able to prove you did it.”
“If we always back each other up, they’ll never be able to prove you did it either.”
“What the fuck are you saying, Alice?”
“I’m saying it’s your fault we’re in this mess! If you hadn’t been fucking Bryden Frost, they wouldn’t be looking at what happened to my mother.”
He bites his tongue.
36
On Wednesday evening Tracy’s husband had come home from work, almost jaunty, reporting that another detective had been at the dealership that day trying to find holes in his alibi. “But he couldn’t, because there aren’t any. Everybody vouched for me. There’s even CCTV. They won’t be bothering us anymore,” he’d said to her. He’d brought home a bottle of wine to celebrate. She’d smiled and congratulated him. Itwasa relief. But he irritated her. How could he ignore the elephant in the room? He’d had no alibi the first time—had he forgotten?
Then Bryden’s body had been discovered that same night. She’d been so upset by it that she hadn’t been able to go in to work again the next day. But she’s back at work today. Tracy is a copywriter for a legal publishing company. The days are often slow, and she has lots of time to think. Now, she thinks about her neighbor, Bryden Frost. It’s horrifying what happened to her. Sickening what happens to women. It could happen to any of us, she thinks. She has lots of time to scroll,and has been following all the news about Bryden online, imagining her hideous final moments.
She also thinks about Kayly Medoff, the woman who accused her husband. Previously she has triednotto think about her. Medoff claimed to have been taken against her will into a van by a masked man, bound, raped, terrorized, and ultimately released. She’d named Tracy’s husband. The horrible publicity had all but destroyed them. When he was released without charge, somehow that had not warranted the same splashy attention from the media. It’s something that she’s still bitter about.
Now, with just a moment’s hesitation, Tracy googles Kayly Medoff and Henry Kemp on her computer and is rewarded with a flood of articles, some with accompanying photographs. Revisiting them makes her feel ill, and she has to close her eyes for a moment. But then she opens them again and takes a deep breath. She’s alone in her quiet office, and she reads them all with close attention. Not everything had made the news. She knows things that aren’t in here.
The only way she will ever know for sure is if she talks to Kayly Medoff herself. She can no longer go through life fearing another knock on their door. Tracy’s photograph had never made it into the news, so Kayly won’t know what she looks like. How will Tracy find her? Is she even still living in the same city? Tracy had wanted to leave Albany and make a fresh start somewhere else, but Henry had had too much money sunk into the dealership to move. She knows Kayly doesn’t work at Dunkin’ Donuts anymore. Henry told her.
Maybe she’s on Facebook?
To Tracy’s surprise, it doesn’t take long to find her.
•••
Jayne sits ather desk in her office, staring at the wall across from her, savoring a piece of dark chocolate and reflecting on the interviewwith Alice Gardner. On the wall, there is a large, framed print of an iceberg showing the tip of it above water and the bulk of it underneath. Jayne looks at it often, to remind herself that the dangerous part is hidden beneath the surface, and that what we see is just a small part of the picture.
Detective Kilgour steps in with two cups of coffee and sits down heavily across from her. Jayne reaches for the coffee and says, “Thanks.” She offers him some chocolate and takes a sip. “The hit-and-run is out of our jurisdiction of course, but let’s talk with the officers who handled the case in New Hampshire. And let’s name Derek Gardner as a person of interest. Make him sweat a little. He’s a handsome man—the reporters will jump to the obvious conclusion.”
•••
Lizzie was more than happyto loan her parents her car. Her mother had come to her after she’d returned from taking Clara to day care and asked if they could borrow it to visit some funeral homes. They wanted a private ceremony, as soon as possible. Lizzie asked if they wanted her to come and was surprised when her mother said it wasn’t necessary. But that was fine with her. She wasn’t really in the mood to visit funeral homes and cemeteries. She has things to do.
The minute her parents are out the door with her car keys, Lizzie logs on to the Facebook group. There’s a slew of new entries since she left off in the middle of the previous night. Interest in the case is picking up since it’s all over the news. The number of members in this group has shot up from 66 to 119. She focuses on the comments to her last post.
