Stephanie puts the twins down for their afternoon nap and starts tidying up the house. She’s deeply exhausted – she’s been stumbling through her routine tasks, her eyes are burning and her body aches all over – but her mind is racing, flitting from thought to thought, unable to settle on anything. She knows she should lie down herself, but how can she sleep with all this running through her mind?
Can she really trust Patrick to tell her everything? Should she talk to Erica herself? Patrick has warned her to stay away from Erica, told her that she’s dangerous. But the doubts have started to creep in … What if Patrick just wants to keep Stephanie from talking to Erica? From hearing her side of the story? Everything she’s heard so far has been mediated through Patrick.
Maybe Erica will turn up again. If she does, Stephanie decides, she won’t run away. She will ask questions. Maybe even try to get Erica to see reason.
She finds herself in their bedroom, but instead of lying down, she glances restlessly around the darkened room.
She turns on the overhead light and starts searching through her husband’s chest of drawers. She doesn’t even know why she’s looking – there’s nothing there; she puts away his clothing in these drawers all the time. She looks anyway. When she’s done with his chest of drawers, she goes through his side of their closet, feeling disloyal and wondering why she’s wasting her time. She searches through shoeboxes on the floor. He keeps his handgun, a Glock 19 9mm, in a safe on the top shelf. She knows the combination. She opens the safe and looks inside. Nothing in there but the gun and a few rounds of ammunition. There’s nothing else in the closet but clothes.
Next, she tries his office at the end of the hall. Patrick’s old computer is on the desk. She has her own laptop and so does he; he never uses this one any more. Is there anything about his old life on this computer? It doesn’t matter, she has no idea how to get into it. It’s a mystery why he even keeps it. She pauses and thinks.
Why does he keep it?
Maybe there is something there. She turns it on, tries a few combinations related to her name and the twins’ names and birth dates, but nothing works. Sighing, she turns it off again and searches through his filing cabinets. There’s absolutely nothing there pertaining to his earlier life with his first wife.
She’s reaching around inside his filing cabinets, about to give up, when she feels something stuck to the underside of a drawer. She touches it tentatively – it seems like a small key, covered by tape. She tears at the tape gently, careful not to rip it.
She pulls it out and looks down at it. She’s right: it’s a small, silver key, covered with masking tape. It can’t be the key for the filing cabinets, because they aren’t lockable. She studies it closely. There’s nothing on it except a number: 224. She has no idea what it’s for. But if it didn’t come with the filing cabinets, what is it doing there? The only conclusion is that Patrick must have put it there, where she wouldn’t find it.
It doesn’t look like any of the other keys they have in the house. She wonders if it’s for a lockbox, or a safe. If it is, it isn’t in the house or she’d know about it, unless he’d hidden it somewhere. She hurries down the stairs, after looking in on the twins briefly. She probably has about another hour before they wake up. She tears the basement apart looking for anything that looks lockable, but finds nothing, not even in the crawl space under the house.
She finally comes to the uncomfortable conclusion that whatever the key fits, it isn’t here. And then it hits her. Of course. It’s a key to a safety deposit box.
And she doesn’t know anything about it. He’s hidden it from her.
Stephanie is conflicted when Patrick returns from work that evening. She’s worried about him – he’s pale and tense – but she’s angry and suspicious. Why did he hide that key from her? Why has he hidden the fact that he has a safety deposit box from her? Should she broach it with him?
She’d wrestled with it the rest of the afternoon. She thought of holding the key up under his nose and saying, ‘What’s this, Patrick?’ and dragging the truth out of him. What else is he keeping from her?
If she’d been able to, she would have gone to the bank and looked in the box herself. But she knew he’d be home soon. Finally, she’d retaped the key to the same spot on the underside of the drawer of the filing cabinet.
So much for honesty.
They put the babies in the swings in the living room so that they can talk.
Patrick looks more worried every time she sees him, and she feels a rush of concern for him. She watches him, waiting.
‘I’ve talked to a lawyer in Colorado,’ he says.
‘Okay.’
‘If she goes ahead with this, it might be expensive.’ He looks at her guardedly.
‘Of course it will be expensive,’ she says. ‘Lawyers always are.’ She reflects bitterly that she will be using her own money on a high-priced lawyer to get her husband out of this mess, rather than paying off his former lover. It doesn’t make her any happier. Her concern for her husband diminishes.
‘His name is Robert Lange; he’s with a large firm in Denver.’
‘How did you find him?’ she asks.
‘He was recommended by a friend.’
‘What friend?’
‘A friend of mine from Colorado, Greg Miller. I used to work with him, in Denver. I’ve spoken to him.’
‘And?’
‘I told him what’s going on. He knows Erica, too – he knew her back then. He’s completely on my side. He knows it was an accident.’
Stephanie feels relief. It’s good to hear that someone else who was there, when it all happened, believes her husband is telling the truth. It makes her realize just how worried, how uncertain, she really is. ‘What did the lawyer say?’ she asks. She sees the concern in Patrick’s eyes.
‘Well, you know what they’re like. He wouldn’t say anything definitive without looking into it further. But he remembers the case.’
Stephanie hasn’t told Patrick about reading those articles on her laptop. The images crowd into her mind again – the snowy car, Patrick as a grief-stricken young man. His young wife, smiling at the camera. She tries to push them away. ‘Did he say whether it was even possible to reopen a case like that?’
He looks at her, worried. ‘Yes. It’s possible, in theory.’
Stephanie looks away from him and down at the floor, frightened. It could happen. Her husband could, possibly, be investigated for murder.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
PATRICK WATCHES HIS wife’s reaction and thinks back uneasily to the phone call earlier that day. It hadn’t exactly been reassuring.
Robert Lange, the criminal attorney, had seemed surprised, initially, to hear that Patrick thought someone might try to have the case reopened. Then Patrick told him about everything – Erica’s attempts to blackmail him, the original investigation – the lawyer interjecting with the occasional question, but mostly listening in attentive silence.
‘Why don’t you go to the police?’ the attorney asked.
‘I don’t want to provoke her,’ he admitted. ‘I’m still hoping she’s bluffing and that she’s not actually going to do anything. We haven’t heard from her for a couple of days.’ He added, ‘And I don’t have any proof of the blackmail.’
‘I see.’
‘So,’ Patrick asked, ‘do I have anything to worry about? It was ruled an accident. It was an accident. But can she get them to reopen it, and try to make it look like something it wasn’t?’
The lawyer cleared his throat and spoke. ‘Well, I do have some concerns, especially from what you say about how the matter was dealt with at the time. I mean, it wasn’t much of an investigation, from the sound of it. They seem to have wrapped it up in a matter of hours.’ There was a hint of a question in his voice.
‘Yes, well, it was so obvious that it was an accident.’
The lawyer said, ‘If this woman were to go to the authorities and give them new information, they might decide to take another look. Especially if there is a new coroner, or a new sheriff, as there might well be, after almost ten years. The fact that she was having an affair with you, and that she might have had your child – that would, of course, be … relevant.’
Patrick’s heart sank. ‘Can you find out if she ever had that child?’ he asked.
‘That’ll be the first thing I do,’ he said. ‘Don’t worry, I’ll find out what’s going on and get back to you.’
Now, looking at his wife, Patrick is reluctant to tell her what the lawyer said.
‘What did he say, exactly?’ Stephanie asks. ‘Tell me everything.’
‘Well, he had some … concerns.’ Patrick gets up off the sofa and starts pacing the living room. He can’t remain still with all this anxiety running through him. And he can’t stand looking at Stephanie, so rigid with tension.
‘What? Did he think they’ll believe her?’
Patrick says carefully, ‘He said that if she went to them with new information, they might take another look.’ He doesn’t want to tell her the next bit, but feels he must. ‘He was concerned because the original investigation was – as he put it – “thin”.’
‘What do you mean?’