‘What kind of work do you do?’ Detective Moen asks. It startles him a bit, and he turns his attention to her.
‘I’m an attorney.’ He adds, ‘I – I should call the office.’
The detective ignores that. ‘Can you confirm for us where you were that weekend – from Friday, the twenty-ninth of September, to Monday?’ she asks.
‘What?’
‘Can you confirm—’
‘Yes, sure,’ he says. ‘I was at work all day Friday, left about five. I went directly home. I told the police all of this before, when I reported her missing. I stayed in on Friday night. On Saturday, I was home, caught up on some work; Sunday I went golfing with some friends.’ He adds, ‘It must all be in the file.’
‘Did your wife have any family, besides you?’ Detective Moen asks.
‘No. She was an only child, and her parents are both dead.’ He pauses. ‘Maybe I can ask a question.’
‘Sure,’ Detective Webb says.
‘Do you have any idea what might have happened? Who might have done this?’
‘Not yet,’ the detective says, ‘but we won’t stop until we find out. Is there anything else that you can tell us?’
‘Not that I can think of,’ Robert says, his face a careful blank.
‘Okay,’ Webb says. He adds, as if it’s an afterthought, ‘We’d like to have a team come in and take a look inside your house, if that’s all right with you.’
Robert says, his voice sharp, ‘You ignore my concerns for two weeks, now you want to search my house? You can get a warrant.’
‘Fine. We’ll do that,’ Webb says. Robert stands up and the two detectives get up and leave.
Once he’s watched them drive away, Robert locks the front door and quickly makes his way upstairs to his office. He sits in the chair at the desk and pulls open the bottom drawer. There’s a stack of manila envelopes inside. He knows that beneath those envelopes is his wife’s burner phone, the one the cops don’t know about. He sits for a moment, staring at the envelopes, afraid. He thinks about the letter he got that morning, downstairs in a kitchen drawer. Somebody was in his house. Some teenager was here, snooping through his desk. And he must have seen the phone, because one day when Robert had opened the drawer, the phone had been sitting right on top of those manila envelopes. The shock of it had made him start in his chair. He knew he’d put the phone beneath the envelopes. But now he knows. That kid must have seen the phone, moved it. And now the police are going to search his house. He has to get rid of it.
He has a small window of time before they come back with a warrant. But how much time? He reaches beneath the envelopes for the cell phone, suddenly afraid that it won’t be there at all. But he can feel its smooth surface in his hand and he pulls it out. He stares down at it, this phone that has caused him such pain.
He closes the drawer and shoves the phone in his pocket. He looks out the window; the street below is empty. When the news breaks that his wife’s body has been found, there will be reporters on his doorstep; he’ll never be able to get away then. He must act quickly. He changes into jeans and a T-shirt, hurries downstairs, grabs a jacket and his keys by the front door, and stops suddenly, just short of opening the door. What if someone sees him? And later the detectives find out that he rushed out of the house right after they left?
He stands still for a minute, thinking. They’ll search the house. He can’t hide the phone in the house. What options does he have? He walks to the back and looks out the door from the kitchen to the backyard. It’s a very private yard. Maybe he can bury the phone in the back flower garden. Surely they won’t dig up the garden. They already have the body.
He spies Amanda’s gardening set on the patio, puts on her gardening gloves, and grabs a trowel. He walks to the flowerbeds at the back of the garden. He looks around – the only house that can see into his yard is Becky’s, and he doesn’t see her watching at the windows, or from the back door. He bends down and quickly digs a small, narrow hole, about ten inches deep, underneath a shrub. He wipes the cell phone down with his T-shirt, just in case, thinking that if they do find it, he can tell them she must have put it there – Amanda did all the gardening. Then he pushes the phone deep into the hole and covers it up again. You can’t even tell the earth has been disturbed when he’s done. He returns the gardening tools to their place and goes back inside.
Problem solved.
Chapter Six
RALEIGH SLOUCHES IN English class. The teacher is droning on and on, but Raleigh can only focus on the mess he’s in.
It had started quite innocently last spring, sometime in May. He’d left his backpack at his friend Zack’s house after school. It had an assignment in it that was due the next day. Raleigh texted Zack that he needed to come get it. Zack texted that they were all out and wouldn’t be back until late. Frustrated, he cycled over to Zack’s house. He wasn’t even sure why. He knew nobody was home. He didn’t have a key. When Raleigh got there, he went around the back and looked in the basement window. His backpack was on the floor by the couch where he’d left it, ignored, while he and Zack played video games. Just for something to do, he tried the window. To his surprise, it opened easily. He checked the opening. He was tall and skinny – he knew he could get through it no problem – and his backpack was right fucking there. Raleigh looked around to see if anyone was watching, but to be honest, he wasn’t too worried; if anyone saw him, he could explain. And then he went in through the window.
That’s when things got a little strange. Because he didn’t just grab his backpack, heave it out the window, and climb out after it. He knows he should have. And now, he wishes that he had. Instead, he stood in the basement listening to the silence. The house felt different without anyone else in it – full of possibilities. A little shiver of excitement ran up and down his spine. The empty house was his for the moment. A strange feeling came over him, and he knew he wasn’t going to turn around and go right back out the window.
He went directly upstairs to see if there was an office – the most likely place to find a computer. He passed by Zack’s room and glanced in. He saw Zack’s recent chemistry test flung down on his desk, and the mark was 10 per cent lower than he’d claimed. Raleigh wondered what else Zack had lied about. Then he made his way to the office and set about trying to hack into Zack’s dad’s computer. He didn’t get in, but the challenge of it gave him a curious thrill.
When Zack asked him about the backpack the next day, Raleigh sheepishly admitted he’d snuck in the window to grab it – he hoped that was okay. Zack had obviously thought nothing of it.
The next time, a few weeks later, Raleigh was more nervous. He could hardly believe he was there, planning to do it again. He stood in the dark in the backyard of one of his classmates, Ben. He knew they were away for the weekend. He didn’t see any obvious security system.
He found a basement window unlocked on the side of the house. It was still the kind of neighbourhood where lots of people didn’t necessarily lock everything up tight, whether they were home or not. Raleigh had no trouble getting in. Once inside, in the dark, his heartbeat began to settle down. He couldn’t exactly turn the lights on. What if they’d told the neighbours they were going to be away, too? But fortunately, the moon was bright that night, and after his eyes adjusted, he could find his way around all right. He took care not to walk in front of the windows – and then went upstairs to the bedrooms. He found a laptop at a desk in the master bedroom. This time he was prepared. He used his USB boot stick and got in quite easily, snooped around the computer, and then left the house, going out the same way he got in.