Page 128 of Old Money
Isit in the back booth of the Martha Washington, keeping one eye on the door. It’s strange to be here in the middle of the afternoon, with the bright August sunshine pouring in the foggy windows, highlighting the splintered floorboards and the faint haze of smoke from the sputtering fireplace. I check my phone for messages—nothing new—then put it back on the table, face down. I’m still breaking the habit of idle scrolling. I check the news each day, and my phone is always on in case of updates or calls from the lawyers, but other than that, I tend to stay offline. It helps to stay in the moment and remember to mind my own business. I’ve got plenty.
***
It’s been a week since I drove Theo to the station and watched as he turned himself in. The surrender itself was an awkward scene. The young officer behind the desk hadn’t quite understood at first, and Theo had to clarify that he was not the victim of a crime, but that he’d committed one—a felony—and he’d like to report it. There was some commotion as calls were made, and a handful of cars came zooming into the lot, sirens wailing. Finally, the chief arrived, appraising Theo with a look of muted disappointment. Then he’d silently waved him to the back. I haven’t seen or spoken with him since.
I sat on the bench in the station for half an hour, lulled bythe chaotic bustling around me and the pleasant feeling of being invisible. Then, someone said my name.
“Alice?”
It was Officer Jessie. She shook her head, wide-eyed.
“I heard about Theo, but I didn’t know you were here.”
I just nodded. I was suddenly so tired.
Jessie sat down next to me, her face thoughtful. It occurred to me that this was the first time I’d seen her go more than a minute without grinning.
“Do you need a ride home?” she asked.
“No,” I said. “My car’s out front.”
“I’ll walk you to it then.” Before I could protest, she stood and nodded sternly toward the lot.
***
This was how I learned that it was Jessie who’d slipped a note in the mailbox that morning: “Take care, Alice.”
“I’m sorry,” she said, a hand to her chest. “I felt awful scaring you, but I had to do something. You weren’t safe in that house.”
She paused to let me catch up. I’d run through the morning in my mind. Had she waited until I was alone in the house? Had she been keeping tabs on me that closely?
“Wait, why?” I asked. “What do you meanyouhad to do something?”
“I knew what you were doing. I knew the specifics—I’d processed your request for the records.” She’d sighed, her face pained. “And I gave them to you.”
“You stole them for me,” I said. “That was—”
“Oh Alice, I know. It was reckless, giving you that drive.”
“Brave, I was going to say, but—yeah, that too.”
“Completelyreckless. If he’d found it while you were staying in his house?” She shut her eyes and shook her head rapidly. “I should have been straight with you, or just told you to get out of there.”
She put a hand on my arm and squeezed.
“But I knew what you were doing,” she repeated, with a small, tearful smile. “And I wanted you to do it.”
“I don’t understand,” I said eventually. “Anything.”
And Jessie—whom I’d underestimated from the moment I saw her sunny, bright-eyed face—explained.
She’d always known about the rumors, but only in the nonspecific, unsaid way that most people in the village seemed to know. She’d never consciously considered whether or not they were true (if so, surely someone would’ve done something about it back then). But she didn’t really think about the murder at all. It was a club thing, and club things were not the business of outsiders, especially those with names like Jessie Applebaum. It was just lore to her, until five years ago, when she’d the joined village PD. There were still plenty of cops on the force from “back then,” and now they were all her superiors. It was a slow, uncomfortable realization, but she couldn’t shake it. She certainly couldn’taskabout it. But she kept an ear out, always listening.
“The way they talked about Theo—or no, not ‘talking.’ ” Jessie paused, squinting into the dusk. “It was just the way theywereabout him. Like, he got written up in the newspaper once, for some big case. And a few of the older guys were passing the paper around, but in this very deliberate way. Not casually—not like ‘Here, I’m done with it’—and it was that one specific item they were reading. Something like that happens once and maybe you don’t even clock it. But then Theo was blowing up and getting all this press, and those weird moments were happening alot. Little comments too.”
Jessie was clockingeverything. But what could she do? The more she noticed, the harder it was to ignore. The rumor was slowly gelling into something like fact.
“Then, one day, someone made a crack about Theo getting canceled,” Jessie told me. “It was nothing. ‘Oh, he better quitgetting famous or they’ll cancel him.’ This was when ‘canceled’ was the big new buzzword—they were always making shitty jokes about it, like it was the most hilarious thing. But when someone made the joke about Theo, nobody laughed. Total silence.”
