With the sun so harsh she couldn’t let her girls outside, and with all the tension and anxiety in town, Helen Richey finally agreed to allow a television set into the tent. She asked Jonathan to go out and buy one, only to have him remind her he already had one in the trunk of the car. He happily set it up.
While her daughters sat at the kitchen table eating tuna sandwiches, Helen sat in the front room of the tent, watching the clips of the police news conference on the WKEY noon news, careful to keep the volume low so the girls wouldn’t hear. She saw Diane Mayfield and listened to her question about what could be done to alleviate the town’s fears. When Chief Albert responded that the police were on top of the situation and might have more information later in the day, Helen shivered despite the warm air in the tent.
Carly Neath, that sweet girl, was dead. What if Jonathan had something to do with it? What if her husband had followed the young woman as she walked home Friday night? And what if Jonathan had also been involved in Leslie Patterson’s disappearance last week?
Helen switched off the television, sat back down on the wicker chair, and tried to concentrate. The Surfside Realty business card she’d found in Jonathan’s wallet indicated he’d had an appointment in Ocean Grove last Thursday afternoon. If that was true, why hadn’t he told her about it? And if Jonathan was in town on Thursday, that meant he could have been the one who left Leslie Patterson tied up at the Beersheba Well gazebo in the middle of the night.
Where was he now, she wondered, as she got up, walked over to the screen door, and opened it. Helen looked up the street to see if he was coming back from his walk to the hardware store. He was forever doing errands, and in her heart, Helen suspected her husband was looking for reasons to get out of the tent and away from her and the kids.
Her mind raced. What if, somehow, Jonathan had cracked under the pressure of her demands that they live in a way he detested? That would make her partly responsible for what had happened to Carly and Leslie Patterson. She couldn’t live with that.
Helen went inside. “Finished with lunch, girls?” she called as she strode resolutely toward the back of the tent. As soon as Jonathan got back from town, she was going to encourage him to get out the big umbrella and take the kids to the beach. Then she would be free to do what she had to do.