According to her phone’s GPS, it would be a nineteen-minute drive to Jennifer’s house.
Melissa hated lying to anyone—especially her family—but Mike and her mother would have tried to stop her if she had told them where she was going, and, more importantly, why.
Melissa suspected that Jennifer might be the person behind the TruthTeller posts, but had brushed off a possible connection to Riley’s disappearance. All of that changed with one sentence in Jennifer’s text: You’ll recall how much I always wanted a child.
Melissa had initially begun second-guessing Jennifer’s motives for shooting her husband when she was so adamant about inheriting the entirety of his estate once her conviction was set aside. Money, however, was only one possible motive that prosecutors explored during the original trial. Investigation into the couple’s marriage revealed that Jennifer had undergone two unsuccessful courses of in vitro fertilization with her husband. Curiously, though, the autopsy of Doug Hanover’s body made clear that he had gotten a vasectomy, and his medical records established that the procedure had been performed shortly after he graduated from business school—two decades before he met Jennifer.
Taken together, the evidence suggested that Hanover not only misled Jennifer about his ability and willingness to have additional children, but also permitted her to put herself through a physical and emotional process that was doomed to end in disappointment. Where the prosecution fell short was their inability to prove that Jennifer ever learned the truth about her husband’s vasectomy until after the autopsy. The evidence also portrayed Hanover as a cruel and selfish man. Melissa was not surprised when the two prosecutors trying the case made the decision not to use the evidence, and that was the last time she’d given much thought to it—until now.
Once she made the turn at Water Mill onto Scuttle Hole Road, she knew there’d be no further turns until she passed the golf club and winery on this road. She steered with one hand while she pulled up Katie’s number on her phone with the other.
Katie picked up almost immediately. “Oh, thank heavens you called. I didn’t want to interrupt when you must be getting ready for this press conference, but what’s going on? It sounded at the top of the news like it was about to happen any second, but now they’ve moved on to other stories.”
“It’s Charlie. He’s having some kind of a panic attack. His sister thinks he’s shutting down from the trauma of this on top of Linda dying.”
“What do you mean, a panic attack? He needs to get out there. Can you call Neil and see if he can do something for him? Maybe call in a prescription out there, just to calm his nerves. Or can you and Rachel do the press conference together, and he can just stand there? What does Mac think?”
The barrage of Katie’s questions made Melissa realize how desperately she wanted to be with Charlie, to see with her own eyes what he was going through. She was certain she could help him through it, the way her mother had gotten her to climb out of the pit of her own guilt so she could refocus on the search for Riley.
“I don’t actually know,” she said. She felt the burn of shame in her cheeks as she explained that the police obviously believed she was lying about what happened yesterday and that Charlie was distancing himself from her on Mac’s advice.
“Are you kidding me? Melissa, I am so sorry. I’m the one who told you to get him a lawyer.”
“Stop, it’s not your fault. I’m calling you for another reason.” She told her about the message she received from Jennifer Duncan and its possible significance.
“Wait. Jennifer is out on Long Island? Did you tell the police?”
“No, it would seem like a desperate attempt to shift their attention from me. I saw the way they looked at me. They really think I did this. I don’t even have my car anymore, so I’m driving this stupid U-Haul. I’m going over to Jennifer’s place right now.”
“Alone?”
“That’s the only way this works. I told her I needed a friend to talk to.”
“I’m the friend you talk to in your time of need,” Katie said, “not a woman who may or may not be a murderer and a kidnapper.”
“I see you haven’t lost your sense of humor.”
“Seriously, this sounds too dangerous, Melissa. If nothing else, we know she’s capable of pulling a trigger under the right circumstances.”
“If she wanted to kill me, she could easily have done that already. If she is the one who took Riley, it’s because she actually wants to raise her as her own. She desperately wanted children, and Doug took that away from her. She could come up with some kind of private adoption story and hire lawyers to make it stick. She could even move to another country and disappear. Reaching out to me might be a tactic to avoid being a suspect—the way killers attend their victims’ funerals. Or maybe she hates me enough to want to see me in agony. Either way, as long as I don’t let her know I suspect her of anything, she has no reason to hurt me.”
The silence on the other end of the line signaled Katie’s continued disapproval. “And yet you called me specifically to say you were going to that woman’s house. You see the irony in that, right? You know this is dangerous.”
“Just on the off chance something goes wrong. If you don’t hear from me in an hour, call the police.”
“I don’t like this.”
“You don’t have a choice.” She gave her the address. She was almost there.