One month ago today I buried my soul under the weeping willow Ben and I had planted together in the backyard, and I had been digging at the patch of dirt ever since. Technically, Ben wasn’t buried where I had rested a stone plaque honoring him, because the police hadn’t released his body to me yet. A couple more weeks, they kept telling me the autopsy would take. By the time they finished, I wondered if there would be anything left of him to bury.
We had called it a memorial service, but I didn’t want to remember. I wanted to forget. Forget that he was dead. Forget the lies, the cheating, the hollow left inside of me that led him to kill himself. If only the past year had never happened, I wouldn’t be standing in the bedroom that we had shared, packing up our things for storage, wishing I could erase Ben’s death from my mind and replace it with our happy life before.
I was exhausted from missing Ben. It felt as if I had set down my heart and forgotten where I left it.
I stood beneath the only picture that remained on our Hendricks Way bedroom wall, the one taken at our wedding. Both of us were barefoot, walking hand in hand down Sunset Beach, my white dress flowing behind me as it caught on the salty breeze, Ben’s hair ruffled into curls. A perfect day. The absolute best day.
I lifted the frame off the hook and stared into the past. How could he strip me of all the good memories by leaving me with only the bad ones? All the hungry kisses, gone. The passionate nights as we explored each other’s bodies, gone. The weekend getaways and night swimming and reveling at each child’s birth, gone, gone, gone. Holding the frame above my head, I threw it across the room, watching with a morbid satisfaction as the glass shattered and wood splintered.
“Mom, what was that?” Elise’s voice echoed from down the hallway.
“I, uh, I just accidentally dropped something, sweetie,” I called back, stuffing the tremor in my voice down.
The person I was before was different from who I became after. That’s what grief does, steals every ounce of joy and exchanges it for sorrow. It robbed me of my future and turned me hateful. I couldn’t even tell you what I was angry at. Myself? My kids? The mailman who accidentally switched my mail with the neighbor’s? The waitress who mixed up my dinner order?
I yearned for my old life—the one where I didn’t grieve or lose my husband to another woman. But reality has a way of eroding such hopes. This vacant bedroom was the daily reminder that I was a widow too young, with no one to share my friends’ secrets with, or to make fun of television shows with, or to tease me about the gray hairs I fruitlessly dyed.
Damn, I missed Ben. Wanting to wade in the grief, yet resisting the wallow, that was the irony of death. I wanted the pain, and yet I hated the pain. It had only been days and I already missed my house. The Colonial floor-to-ceiling windows. Lustrous, original oak floors. Large wraparound porch. Four-poster bed with a down pillowtop. Custom-made kitchen island. I appreciated my brother opening up his home to us, but Hendricks Way had been my home for so long that it was imprinted on me, the creaks of the floorboards a part of my lifeblood.
I pressed my hand to the window overlooking the backyard. I was disgusted by the neglected state of my garden, but I simply couldn’t push myself to deal with it. Weeds crowded the black-eyed Susans, overshadowing their yellow petals that contrasted against their black centers. My poor hollyhocks had been a showstopper with their apricot and purple blooms, but now they wept of thirst with their heads bowed and leaves brown. I couldn’t bear to watch my passion flowers struggle for life, their bright purple tendrils a distant memory. Behind my fence the gentrified urban neighborhood sprawled out as far as I could see, homes hidden beneath ancient oak trees, connected by winding footpaths where privileged children rode bikes and moms kept up at a fast jog behind them.
Young and ambitious, Ben and I had picked this neighborhood and this house together. I had dabbled in architecture in college and instantly fell in love when I saw this run-down neoclassical Greek Revival style with a touch of Italianate—an architect’s dream. It had been built in the 1860s by an eccentric North Carolinian family of means with a knack for innovation. In a time when the concept of air-conditioning wasn’t even a twinkle in inventor Willis Carrier’s eye, the home’s designer used nature’s solution. Floor-to-ceiling walk-through windows offered a consistent coastal breeze to maintain a comfortable room temperature. And for those brutal summer days, hot air would naturally rise up the grand staircase—up, up, up to the belvedere—where it exited through a row of small, open windows near the eaves. Louver vents offered an escape for the southern heat, along with vents in each of the bedrooms. This avant-garde ventilation system was pure genius, if you ask me, though Ben still preferred the convenience of modern AC.
By the time Ben and I found the house for sale—and on foreclosure!—much of the wood had rotted from the Carolinian humidity or been neglected to the point of disrepair. But that didn’t deter us or our dreams. With more than five thousand square feet to renovate, it had been quite a restoration project. It took a grueling two years of backbreaking work, but in the end we had rediscovered its beauty and made it our own.
Four open boxes sat on the window seat, all of them full, all of them holding decades’ worth of memories. Next to the last box was a turquoise-and-gold urn caked in dust, a portable monument to the darkness inside me. I wondered when I’d be adding Ben’s urn to my collection.
I’d almost cleaned out the entire master bedroom, minus Ben’s bedside table. I opened the top drawer and grabbed its meager remnants. A handful of handmade Father’s Day cards from the kids. Gaudy red leather handcuffs he had bought that we hadn’t even used once, the key to which was probably lost. A Stephen King book with a bookmark halfway through, which Ben would never finish. His work cell phone. And an envelope.
A bulge crinkled from the bottom of the fold, so I opened it and peeked inside. A torn corner of paper with a street address, 3 Summer Ln, scribbled across it. A hardware store shopping list and rough sketch of the kids’ playset he had started building. And a jewelry store receipt. My nervous fingers dropped the paper and it fluttered across the dusty floor, like it was trying to scurry away. I picked it up and unfolded it, mumbling the description out loud:
18-karat gold charm bracelet
Engraved with: True love waits
Waits for what? Was this an anniversary gift Ben had planned to give me? And where was the bracelet? Though the message was cryptic, it fit us. Ben and I spent a lifetime waiting. Waiting to get married until after he graduated with his master’s degree. Waiting to buy the right house until after we saved up. Waiting for Ben’s investment career to take off. Waiting to have a second child after years of fertility struggles. We knew all about waiting; it had been a part of our relationship since the very beginning, when I’d told him I couldn’t be his girlfriend, and if he cared enough he’d wait until I was ready. It took me almost three years to be ready, but Ben had waited. Maybe this bracelet was a tribute to that—to all the waiting. To all we had endured to be together.
The stillness of the house haunted me, the silence cut by the drip of the master bathroom faucet. Ben had been meaning to fix that for months, but he simply never made the time. And then time ran out. I turned over the envelope and grabbed a pen sitting on Ben’s bedside table. It wasn’t Ben’s anymore, because Ben wasn’t here. I jotted down a to-do list, starting with fixing the faucet. Then I tossed the pen and envelope in my purse, grabbed a box, and left the mausoleum of memories.
On my way down the stairs I saw the silhouette of a person standing at the front door. The frosted glass masked all features except for the dark attire of the visitor. Then there was a knock, the sound reverberating against the vast emptiness. And another knock before I reached the door.
“Mooom! Someone’s at the door!” Elise yelled from the bowels of the house.
“I’ve got it. Stay upstairs and keep packing.”
Although the solid oak door was wide enough to easily fit two grown men in the doorway, it swung open effortlessly. The detective who had been assigned Ben’s case stood on the front porch. By now I was used to his check-ins.
“Good morning, Detective Meltzer. Come in.” I stepped aside for him, a man who almost fit the girth of the doorway all on his own.
Detective Levi Meltzer had missed his calling as a wrestler. At easily six foot two, this was the kind of guy you wanted on the streets fighting crime, because I was pretty sure his muscles were bulletproof. The man looked impenetrable. I imagined his ring name being Macho Mustache, or as Lane called him, Pornstache, a tribute to his Orange Is the New Black obsession. Lane had often quoted television shows as if he’d come up with the witticisms himself. And I always laughed as if I’d never heard them before.
“How are you today, Harper?”
Although I still called him Detective out of respect, for me he was on a first-name basis. That was how often I saw him. Right after Ben’s death it had been daily, sometimes multiple times a day, that he’d drop by or ask me to come down to the station for questioning. But now, being weeks into the investigation, his visits were becoming less frequent. Which was probably a good thing. Because that meant I was becoming less and less of a suspect.
“I’m hanging in there,” I replied.
“I couldn’t help but notice the moving truck. You going somewhere?” He cocked an eyebrow.
So he was following me, watching me. Perhaps I wasn’t as out of the hot seat as I thought.
“I’m moving in with my brother for the time being. I’ve decided to rent this place out until the investigation is closed. I don’t have a job, and I can’t afford to keep paying the mortgage on this place in the meantime.”
“I see. You know not to leave town until we find Ben’s killer, right?”
Of course I knew. I had only been reminded by Detective Meltzer and my attorney a dozen times. “Yes, sir. I’m just moving across town. Not even ten minutes away. I’ll jot down the address for you so you know where to find me.”
“That’d be great, thanks. Here you go.”
He pulled out a pen and pad from his pocket and handed them to me.
I scribbled a circle, but the ink had gone dry. “I’m sure I have a spare in my kitchen.” I headed into the kitchen to find a pen, and Detective Meltzer followed me. “I haven’t heard from you in a while. Have they finished the autopsy yet?”
“No, ma’am. We’re understaffed, and the coroner is backed up for weeks so, unfortunately, I can’t tell you how much longer until we have the autopsy results. It can take up to twelve weeks, in some cases.”
“So you’re no closer to finding out who did this to my husband.” I added a touch of annoyance to make it clear I was frustrated. The frustration was genuine—I needed the autopsy results to determine cause of death, and I needed cause of death to get my insurance payout. Who wouldn’t be frustrated by this lengthy process with closure out of reach?
Detective Meltzer shook his head. “I’m afraid we found no DNA at the scene, have no witnesses, nothing to point us to the killer. I wish I had better news for you, Harper, especially given the unique nature of the crime.” He paused, and I caught him watching me root through the junk drawer looking for a pen. When I found one, I wrote down Lane’s address and handed him his notepad back.
“What do you mean by ‘unique nature of the crime’?”
“Your broken back window was taped shut with only cellophane and right next to the door, which would have been an easy access point for the thief to break in. And yet the thief instead chose to break through a dining room window. It makes you wonder: What type of thief would choose a loud, conspicuous option over a quiet, easy in-and-out?”
A surge of panic swelled up my chest, suffocating me. I was caught. “Maybe he didn’t see the broken window,” I said, wondering if my practiced breaths were giving me away.
“You don’t do a job like this without first casing the home, Harper. So it implies one of two things. Either you have an oblivious thief with an unusual thirst to kill, or the whole thing was staged. Considering you have an alibi, and we have no primary suspects with a motive to kill your husband, it leaves us with a lot more questions than answers. However, we have found a new angle.”
“What kind of new angle?” Dear God, let it not point to me or the suicide.
“We’ve gotten access to Ben’s work files on his personal computer, and we found some interesting . . . numbers in his accounting. I’m not at liberty to tell you all the details, but it looks like Ben might have been investing clients’ money in a promissory note scam. If he lost a client a lot of money, well, that could make someone angry enough to want him dead.”
The detective may as well have been speaking Chinese. “Promissory note scam? What’s that?”
“Ben’s company was in some financial trouble, so the employees were asking friends and family to buy their debt. It’s called affinity fraud, in which an investor exploits people who trust him. In exchange, each lender was promised a high interest rate yield on their loan. But it turns out all the money lent by these investors disappeared . . . along with Ben’s CEO, Randolph Whitman.” Detective Meltzer sighed. “Some of these people lost their life savings.”
“Randy is gone?” I had wondered why he hadn’t attended Ben’s memorial, but it never occurred to me that he’d taken off. I had assumed it was too hard for him to face. The two had been close friends since college and trusted each other with their lives, enough so that they went into business together. We had celebrated holidays and birthdays with Randy. How could he have dragged Ben into something scandalous? “I can’t believe that Ben would have scammed people.” I shook my head vehemently. “He was an honest businessman, Detective, and very generous with anyone who asked. Certainly not a thief.”
I knew my husband. He was honest to a fault. One time he had ordered a camera, the cheapest one that the company offered, and when it arrived in the mail, Ben instantly knew he had gotten the wrong model. It was way nicer than the one he had paid for. Without hesitating, he called the company and offered to return it in exchange for the lesser camera. So Ben sent it back and waited. And waited some more. In the end, we got billed for two cameras but ended up with none when they claimed they had already sent the correct camera.
No good deed goes unpunished, I’d told Ben that day.
And no bad deed goes unseen, he’d replied. That experience taught me something important about Ben’s character—that he valued integrity over everything. My husband was not a scam artist. Detective Meltzer had it all wrong.
“No one ever does imagine horrible things about someone they love, Harper. It’s how people like that get away with it. The mirage of good hides the face of evil. I see it all the time.”
For real villains, sure. Serial killers, yeah. The Ted Bundys and Charles Mansons who no one expected were psychopaths. But not a husband who stopped at the grocery store to pick up flowers, or a father who carried his kids on his shoulders. Ben was good at heart. “You don’t know Ben like I do. That’s not who he was.”
“Did you know he held a private bank account under another name?”
I couldn’t have heard him correctly.
“I’m sorry, what?”
“We think your husband was hiding money in other accounts.”
I shook my head, sending the words loose in my brain. Hiding money? Other accounts? Did he mean the trust funds for the kids?
“We set up accounts for the kids when they were born. That must be what you found.”
“No, Harper. This isn’t the kids’ accounts.”
I felt my heart seize a little. Who would he have possibly been sending money to? Maybe I didn’t know Ben at all. My shock must have given me away.
“I can see that’s news to you. I think you need to reconsider what kind of man your husband really was.”
“What name was the other account under?” It had to be the home-wrecking whore. I knew she existed. I’d seen her. That was the only possible explanation: he was funding her lifestyle while banging her.
“Does the name Medea Kent mean anything to you?”
Medea? What kind of name was that? “No, that doesn’t sound familiar.” From my purse the envelope with my to-do list poked out of the top. I pulled it out, had Detective Meltzer spell her crazy-ass name, and made a mental note to look her up later. “How much money is in this secret account?”
“I can’t divulge the specifics yet, since it’s still under investigation. There’s a lot we still have to look into. Once we have a full list of people he stole from, we’ll compile a list of suspects and keep you informed. Until then, just sit tight.” He rapped his knuckles on the butcher block. “We still have a lot of unanswered questions at this point, but we’ll get answers, I promise you.”
It was the resounding theme of this investigation—unanswered questions. Including the question of what Ben had hidden from me and why. We were never desperate for money, so why would he feel the need to steal from innocent clients? What had he gotten himself involved in? Who was this Medea person? And did it have anything to do with why he took his own life?
I shoved the one question I truly wanted answered down my throat until it stuck there. It would only paint me in a terrible light. If the investigation didn’t close, would I ever see a dime of the life insurance money? Would access to my bank accounts ever be restored? But the bigger concern was what would happen when they found out what I had done, because I could feel the past clawing its way to the surface. With this investigation getting more complicated—more unique, as Detective Meltzer put it—and drawing more focus on our family’s skeletons, it was only a matter of time before my own secret slipped out and the truth caught up with me.
Ben’s voice beyond the grave slipped into my brain, quoting his favorite movie of all time. You can’t handle the truth! Maybe Jack Nicholson in A Few Good Men was right. I couldn’t handle the truth. It wouldn’t set me free. It would put me behind bars.