"You’re kidding, right? Because if you’re not kidding, you’re nuts.” Diego sits at the kitchen table, his spoon halfway to his mouth. He’d just been about to dive into a tempting bowl of Shay’s granola. I like to hit him up in the mornings, before he’s made plans. Marigold sleeps late on Saturdays, but Diego is an early riser. He always wakes up in a good mood, too.
That is, if I don’t spoil it.
By my silence Diego correctly assumes that I’m not kidding.
“You’re nuts,” he says again. “Do you happen to remember what happened the last time I drove you into Seattle on the trail of a kidnapper? And do you happen to remember that you yourself were kidnapped while I stood around in the park half out of my mind? Do you remember that my mother has still never forgiven me?”
“All of this is true,” I say. “But this is different. I’m not investigating a suspect. I just want to talk to—”
“That’s what you said last time!”
It’s clear I have to tell Diego everything. I pull out a chair and sit down. “Joe thinks Shay is a suspect in the murder of Hank Hobbs,” I say.
“That’s ridiculous.”
“Of course it is. He also thinks it might have been my father.”
Diego blinks. “Not so ridiculous,” he says. “I mean, he just shows up on the same weekend that someone is found dead…”
“Yeah. Exactly. So I’m going to go from the weird girl who sees things to the weird girl who sees things whose father is a murderer. Can’t wait.”
“It doesn’t matter what your father is, or does. Anyone who knows you knows—”
“Diego, you sound like a guidance counselor. Come on.”
“Well, it’s true. I never knew my father. He could be a murderer.”
“But he isn’t, is he?”
Diego takes a sip of juice. His father is something we never talk about in this house. Nineteen years ago, Shay went on a trip to Spain and came back pregnant. She simply told her family that she was having the baby and raising it, and his father would never be discussed. Somehow, she pulled it off.
I’ve asked Diego about his father. He’s told me that he knows some things, but it’s obviously difficult for Shay to talk about, so he doesn’t ask her about it. And when I press him for details, he fixes me with his beautiful liquid eyes and tells me to ask Shay.
I still haven’t worked up the nerve.
“My granola’s getting soggy,” Diego says.
“So’s your logic. And if those two candidates for the slammer aren’t enough, the other suspect is Mason Patterson. Do you want Marigold’s brother to go to jail?”
Diego doesn’t say anything. He’s thinking.
“This woman was engaged to Hank Hobbs twenty years ago. Maybe they reconnected. Maybe she knows something. Maybe if we just go down there and talk to her, we’ll be able to go to Joe and give him a new suspect. Just think how grateful Marigold would be if you took the heat off Mason. You’d be the man.”
“When you start talking like a bad TV show, I know you’re desperate,” Diego says. “I don’t care about being a hero to Marigold. I just want to bask in her lovelight.”
“Oh, gross!”
Diego grins. “But I’ll take you.”
Diego may give me a hard time, but secretly, he loves surveillance. We sat outside Betsy Dunwoody Wheeler’s McMansion in Bellevue in Diego’s old Saab, watching the house.
“What if she doesn’t come out?”
“It’s Saturday morning. Everybody goes out on Saturday morning sometime.”
“Wait, I see the side door opening—”
“It’s her! Duck!”
“Why?” Diego asks me. “She doesn’t know us.”
“Oh. Right.” I peer through the windshield as Betsy gets into a Mercedes SUV.
“Looking good for a mom,” Diego notes approvingly.
It’s true. Betsy has a trim body, and her chinlength blond hair is glossy and full. From behind, you could mistake her for a teenager, especially for the jeans and tiny jacket she wears. She starts the car and drives down the long driveway toward us.
She turns into the street and we follow, winding through the neighborhood and then out onto the main road. When she turns at the light, we turn. When she picks up speed, we pick up speed.
“You’re loving this, aren’t you?” I say to Diego.
“Don’t push it,” he says.
Suddenly, Betsy pulls over.
“She’s going to that Starbucks!” I yell. “Pull over!”
“Why, do you want a latte?”
Betsy gets out of the car and goes into Starbucks.
“Wait here,” I say to Diego.
“Bring me a cookie!” Diego yells after me as I scoot out.
I follow Betsy into the Starbucks. I maneuver close to her, pretending to study the muffin selection.
“A tall two-shot nonfat latte,” Betsy says.
Bingo.
I race back to the car.
“Where’s my cookie?”
“She ordered a double-shot nonfat latte,” I say. “Just like the cup on Beewick. That was definitely her!”
“What now?” Diego asks. “Should we go in and talk to her?”
I shake my head. “She’s leaving. We have to keep following her.”
Diego pulls out after Betsy. We follow her through the hills, up and down the twisting roads, trying to keep at least one car behind her. Finally, she pulls into the long, curving drive of the Conifer Country Club.
We drive in. Diego parks the car an aisle away from her.
“We’re going to have to talk to her quickly,” he says. “We can get busted if we don’t. We’re not members.”
It occurs to me at this moment that I have no idea what I’m going to say. But it’s too late now. I get out of the car and we walk toward Betsy. She’s grabbed a tote bag and is heading for the front door of the club, swinging the bag as she walks. She reaches the front door before we can catch up and disappears inside.
“Now or never,” Diego says.
I push open the door. My foot hits a deep rug on a bleached wood floor. A huge orange glass object is spotlit on a shelf, looking like a giant clam. I see paintings. What Shay would call window treatments, not curtains. The whole place screams “tasteful.”
“Go,” Diego says. He gives me a small push in the middle of my back.
I need it. I’m intimidated.
“Betsy!” I cry. My voice sounds like a croak.
I try again. “Betsy?”
She hears me this time. She turns, already smiling, thinking I’m a daughter of a friend, perhaps. I see her searching her memory banks.
So I blurt out the thing I shouldn’t say, the only thing I can say.
“Isn’t it sad about Hank Hobbs?”
Her smile disappears. I see panic in her eyes now. And the panic opens her up to me like a picture book.
I see…a small, empty room with a raised platform and a view outside to the tops of trees. Skylight overhead. I hear a woman crying.
…a white carnation, its petals brown and crumbling.
…an ache somewhere, something hurting, a knee.
“Yes. I haven’t seen him in years, though.” She backs away a step and then the smile is there again, a practiced smile.
“That’s not exactly true,” I say.
Her eyes flick from me to Diego, and suddenly, she looks hard. “Who are you?”
“We live on Beewick Island,” I say. “We—”
“I don’t know you.”
“We just wanted to ask you a few questions,” Diego says. “That’s all. We’re not here to harass you.” He smiles at her in a friendly way.
Usually, when Diego turns on his charm to any female with a pulse, he gets results. But not with Betsy.
“You’re not members here, are you?” she says in a glacial tone. Her gaze roams the hallway behind us. “I’ll find someone to escort you back to the parking lot.”
“How’s your knee?” I ask.
“My knee?” She looks confused again.
“I know it’s still bothering you.”
“An old ski injury. How do…”
“And that room you built at the top of your house, where you go to be alone…you were going to do yoga there, but all you do is cry. Alone. Where no one can hear you.”
“H-h-how do you know these things?”
“You wonder if your whole life is a mistake, but then you look at your children and you think, How could I think that? But you keep thinking it.”
“Who are you?” she whispers.
“The carnation that means so much to you…”
Now she gives a cry and steps back, her hand at her throat.
Diego puts a hand under her elbow. There’s a fireplace at one end of the long hallway, with some armchairs around it. He walks her all the way there, gently places her in one, then draws the others closer. We sit.
“What is this?” Betsy asks. “What’s going on? Who are you?”
“My cousin is a psychic,” Diego says. “She sees things.”
“And you were drawn to me for some reason?” Betsy’s green eyes are wide. I can tell that this excites her. Betsy’s not a skeptic. She’s eager to believe.
“Yes.” I pitch my voice low, trying to sound more mature, like someone she’d listen to…and give answers to. “Hank’s death left disturbances behind.”
“Oh.” The word is a cry, and Betsy presses her hand against her heart. “It did.”
“You loved Hank Hobbs,” I say, because I’m picking this up most of all. “You met him on Beewick Island. You saw his new house, the house he was buying so that you could be together.”
She bites her lower lip and looks up at me. “How did you know about the carnation?”
“The carnation?” Diego asks.
I nod to give Betsy encouragement. I know what I saw, but I don’t know why I saw it, or what it means to her.
“It was…a joke,” Betsy says. “From one afternoon when Hank and I were together…after he found me again. He couldn’t remember my favorite flowers, and I teased him, because he remembered everything else. The day we met. The song that was playing the night we got engaged. What I wore, the things I said…it was amazing. So I reminded him that I didn’t have a favorite flower, but the only flower I couldn’t stand was a carnation. That night, when I got home, I opened my purse…and there was a carnation.” She smiled. “I don’t know how he found one and sneaked it in there, but he made me laugh. That was the day I knew I still loved him.”
“So he looked you up,” I say.
“It had been so long. Twenty years. And he e-mailed me out of the blue—Are you the Betsy Dunwoody with eyes the color of sea glass? We started writing, and then we met, and then…” She looked at the fire. “We didn’t have an affair. We just wanted to be friends. We didn’t want to fall in love.” She looks down at the rings on her left hand, a band with three large diamonds, and, above it, a squareshaped diamond.
“You were thinking of leaving your husband.”
“Yes,” she whispers. “How do you know these things? Do you…see things in me? Things you want to tell me? Because there is so much I want to know.”
I see bottomless need in her eyes. Here is a woman in need of so many things—reassurance, direction. I don’t really have any for her. I can’t tell her about her life. I can’t tell her if she made the right choices. She doesn’t understand that even though I can pick up flashes from her, I can’t validate her. But that’s what she wants.
I’m not sure what to do. I search in my mind for the right tone, the right words. And then I think of a role model. The person we look up to more than anyone, the person who spells it out for us, the person who asks the right questions in the right way.
Oprah.
“Tell me more about Hank,” I say. “He seems to be a key for you.”
She gives a sad smile. “A key to a different past. A past I should have had. I met him at a dance at the Beewick Club. I drove up to Beewick that weekend with some friends. There was a dance on Bastille Day. We were all dressed like French revolutionaries and royalty. It was silly, but we had fun. Hank just kept coming over to ask me to dance until my escort wanted to take him outside. I didn’t care. I left with Hank. He drove me all the way home that night—all the way back to Seattle. A month later, he asked me to marry him. I didn’t have one single doubt. And then…”
“And then?” Diego asks.
“There was that business with the missing young man.”
“Billy Applegate.”
“Was that his name? I don’t remember. It was all so ridiculous—of course Hank didn’t have anything to do with it. But some horrible woman accused him.”
Diego and I exchange a look. That was Shay.
“His name got in the papers. And then apparently, there were some other things about his company, what they were doing on Beewick…”
“Polluting it,” Diego says.
“Well, that’s what they said. Hank didn’t have anything to do with that, either—he was just a vice president.” Betsy pushes at her hair, managing to brush it out of her eyes without ruffling it. “But with my parents, you just don’t get your name in the papers. Once when you’re married, once when you die, but that’s it. My dad played golf with the chairman of the board of Monvor, and the chairman hinted that maybe Hank would lose his job. The chairman said he was careless—but Hank was the most careful man! He had enemies at that company. But my parents didn’t understand. They never liked Hank anyway, and they were totally against the engagement, so they started pressuring me.”
Betsy looks at the fire again. “It was so hard for me. I didn’t know what to do. I was young, only twenty-one. Hank was more than ten years older than I was… I was just a kid. I couldn’t go against my parents. And Hank lived full-time on Beewick then. Nobody lived on Beewick. It’s not like it is now. So my parents…they just thought, here’s our daughter, marrying this guy, maybe he’s a criminal, maybe he’ll get fired, and he’s taking her to this island in the middle of Puget Sound. So I broke it off.”
Wow. Was this story for real?
Her hands twist in her lap. “Hank was so upset. He said I had to believe in him. That he was taking care of everything, that there was no way in the world they would fire him. But I didn’t listen. I thought maybe my parents were right. Maybe my first love wasn’t my real love.” She looks up at us, tears swimming in her green eyes. “But it was. It was!”
“And he never got over you,” I say.
“That’s what he said. He wanted to leave his wife and start over, start living the life he said he was meant to live. And now he can’t. And neither can I.” Betsy ends on a sob. A couple passing by looks over, but Diego’s stare tells them to butt out.
She lifts her head from her hands. Mascara has smudged underneath her eyes. “Can you tell me how he is?” she whispers. “You can feel him still, can’t you? Can you tell him I’m sorry for what I did?”
“Sorry?” I repeat. My heartbeat quickens. What will Betsy reveal?
“I should have told him that last day I would go with him. We drove up together and he showed me that house and said he was buying it for me. He laid out his whole life, his whole plan on how we would live, where we would travel… And I could see it. But I didn’t tell him yes. I told him I needed more time. But I would have gone with him! Can you tell him that?”
“I’m not in touch with Hank,” I say. “But I feel he knew that you loved him.”
Diego nudges me with his foot. He knows I’m giving her a line. But it’s not just that I want more information. I want to make her feel better.
“Betsy, did you know Nathaniel Millard?” I ask. I know time is running out. In another minute, Betsy will come to herself and realize she’s unburdening herself of memories to two strangers. She’ll feel uncomfortable, and she’ll split.
She looks blank and shakes her head.
“No idea.”
“They spent the summer on Beewick twenty years ago, along with Billy Applegate.”
“I only went to Beewick one time back then,” she says. “The night I met Hank. Hank always came to Seattle to see me. He drove in every weekend, and it wasn’t as fast a trip then, either. He was so devoted. And I never, never truly appreciated it. And now I’ve lost him!”
Now Diego rolls his eyes when Betsy isn’t looking. I agree with him—there’s sincerity in what Betsy is saying, but also just a little too much drama.
She looks at Diego. “Would you mind? Can I…talk to her alone?”
“Of course.” Diego rises and drifts off. He pretends to study a case full of medals and trophies against one wall.
“Can you tell me anything else?” she asks me. “Anything I should know about me?”
Huh? Betsy is looking at me hungrily. I have to come up with something. “Keep up with the yoga,” I say.
She nods, as though this is precious information. “And what about my husband? Should I leave him?”
What a question. How would I know?
I wonder what a psychic would say.
“You must move through your grief for Hank,” I improvise. “Grief distorts your intention. Only when you move on can you see your path.”
She nods again. “Thank you. Thank you.”
She wipes at her eyes carefully, then gathers up her things and walks down the hall. I wander over to Diego.
“That was a bust,” I say. “Hank was planning on leaving his wife, though. Joe should know that.”
“He should know this, too,” Diego says. He points to the wall. Betsy Wheeler has won the gold medal in her age class in every swim meet since the year 2000.
The significance clicks in.
“She could have swum to shore easily,” I say.