Page 106 of Old Money
I’m not billing for this so don’t worry. I guess you’ve seen the news about Chapman. Awful business. I still say it looks more like a disappearance than a suicide. You wanna disappear someone, you do it in the woods. And this guy disappeared in the woods on an island, in the middle of an international water border. It’s a little too perfect, y’know? Kinda like Yates’s record.
It’s been eating at me ever since I sent you that light background file. I don’t like a light file, especially when I know there’s more out there. Yates is rotten—you can smell it on him. So I gave it one last shot, and this time I went old-school. I pulled his recent phone records to doa manual search for red flags. I thought I might catch him calling old dealers. I didn’t—no suspicious numbers. But I did spot a very surprising one. Do you recognize it too?
I peer at the image he’s pasted beneath: a scanned list of outgoing phone calls from last week, with one number circled, halfway down the page. I do recognize it. I asked Jeremy to get it for me earlier this month. It’s the landline registered to Barbara D. Dale. She didn’t answer when I called. But she picked up the phone for Patrick. What’s more, she stayed on the phone with him for twenty-two minutes.
Jeremy’s clocked this too. I glance at the little note he’s scribbled beside the phone number:
22 mins? Barely takes one to say “sorry.” What do you think he used the rest for?
Chapter Forty-Six
Google Maps still claims it’s twenty minutes to Aunt Barbara’s house. I get there in seventeen. Seventeen! A lot shorter than your leisurely phone call with the guy who killed your daughter!
I turn the cranky old car in between the hedges at the top of the long driveway, and leave it parked there, deciding to walk the rest of the way. This is an ambush, after all.
My shoes crunch loudly on Barbara’s gravel driveway, and I slow myself down. I cannot be livid when I knock on the door. But I am livid. Twenty years and she hasn’t spoken a word to us. But she gave him the time.
The house is large for one person—a white, Mediterranean-style rectangle, built on the far end of a cliff-side street, overlooking the Hudson. This side of the river has a different feel to it—the streets are wider, and the driveways are all hedge lined and ungated. The trees aren’t so tall and overgrown, allowing for more breeze and sky and a hell of a lot less humidity. But I don’t know what possessed her to stay here all these years. She may be across the river, but her view is Briar’s Green.
I’m about ten feet away from the front door, when suddenly, it opens.
“Alice?”
Aunt Barbara stands in the half-open door, her eyes narrowed.
“I—” I begin, the sight of her startling me out of my angry fugue. “Hi.”
She stares at me, unblinking, her lips parted.
“What is it, Alice? Are you all right? Is Theo all right?”
She asks in a quick, mechanical tone, as though getting it out of the way.
“Everyone’s fine,” I say, firming up my own voice—remembering why I’m here.
Aunt Barbara holds still, looking at me. She closes her mouth.
“May I?” I gesture to the door. “I won’t stay long.”
She takes a step back into the dark entry, her mouth a pinched line. Finally, she opens the door.
“I was having tea,” she says as I step into the cool front hall.
I wait for her to ask if I’d like some, but she just extends an arm out and turns crisply on her heel, leading me down the hall. She looks—well, she looks so much likeher. Aunt Barbara always reminded me of the Roman statues I’d seen on school museum trips: tall and broad shouldered, her hair piled atop her head in thick auburn swoops. It’s paler now, and glinting with silver strands, but overall, she’s shockingly familiar.
“The house is nice,” I say—some childhood reflex kicking in at the sight of the aunt I once adored.
It is a nice house, though very different from the one she shared with Uncle Greg and Caitlin. Their home had knotty hardwood floors, almost soft to the touch from a century of polishing. There were photos on the walls and a broken grandfather clock in the foyer, which chimed at odd hours, and the whole place smelled a bit like fireplace. This place smells like nothing at all. The floors are dark and make no sound beneath our footsteps, and there’s nothing on the walls but sandy-cream paint.
“That’s right,” Aunt Barbara says in front of me as we enter the open living room. “You’ve never been here before. I’ve never invited you.”
I stop in my tracks. Barbara stops too, turning halfway back to me.
“Man,” I say. “I don’t know why I expected you to be nice to me.”
There’s a caustic satisfaction in her plain, unguarded rudeness. The child in me could sob; the rest of me—the angry, aggrieved adult—is utterly relieved. I don’t have to be nice to her either. At least we don’t have to fake it.
Behind her, I see glimpses of the river through the wide windows of the living room. A glass door opens onto a veranda, accented with shrubs and small potted trees. There’s a table too, but something tells me she won’t invite me out there either.
