Imani returned to the smell of curry. It struck her as she entered the house, a cloud of cumin, ginger, and other pungent aromatics combining to form a scent so strong that it had physical presence. She pushed through it to enter the kitchen where she could crack the window that Philip should have opened when cooking. He’d made lunch, she thought. Perhaps for both of them.
Neither Philip nor Tonya appeared to be downstairs. She could see nearly every room from the kitchen entrance, and they were all empty. Even the bathroom door was cracked, revealing a darkness beyond that suggested no one was inside.
Imani headed to the second floor, half searching for the house’s occupants, half fleeing the overwhelming odors. By the time she hit the landing, the scent had sufficiently dissipated for her to shift focus from smell to sight. The bedroom doors were all closed, she realized. That wasn’t unusual for Vivienne’s and Jay’s rooms, as they routinely shut their doors to deter her commentary on the pigsties they’d left behind. But her door should have been cracked. Imani closed it only to sleep. Air smelled odd when trapped in tight spaces.
She approached her room, Philip’s name on the tip of her tongue. A sound stopped her. She could just make it out through the door: a guttural moan followed by a high-pitched wail that could have been a ululation—or orgasm.
Imani pulled back her door. Some women that she counseled swore they wouldn’t want to know if their husband was having an affair. They professed that they’d prefer to live in willful ignorance rather than shake up their comfortable existences and upend their children’s lives. Imani always doubted that they meant it, though. Their very presence in a therapist’s office meant that such ignorance wasn’t bliss. Not knowing was killing them as much as knowing. Deep down, nobody could stand being kept in the dark.
Philip’s head was tilted back against the bedframe. His eyes were wide. His mouth open. His chest exposed in all its blinding whiteness. A duvet, one or two shades lighter than Philip’s skin, moved up and down above his waist, a back arching and flattening, or a head lowering and raising.
The moan sounded again. Philip ignored it, turning his head toward the door. “Imani?” The covers abruptly stopped moving. “You’re home early.”
His tone wasn’t alarmed enough for a man caught in bed with another woman. Imani tentatively approached, unsure of what might pop from beneath the covers. As she did, the moans continued. They emanated not from beneath the duvet, she realized, but from the television atop the credenza.
Before she could see what was on the screen, Philip rolled toward the nightstand. She got a flash of bare bottom. At the same time, the television went dark.
“I didn’t mean to interrupt anything,” she said.
Philip’s face reddened. His blush was one of the features she’d always found attractive on her husband. There was something innocent about the ability to be so blatantly embarrassed. “Sorry,” he said. “I was home and had nothing to do.”
Blood rose to Imani’s cheeks. “It’s fine. I get it.”
“Didn’t expect you to walk in.”
Her husband’s persistent shame made her wonder if he’d been watching something particularly offensive. Bondage, perhaps. Or, worse, a Tonya look-alike going at it with an older Irishman. “Maybe I’m glad I did,” she said, trying to keep her tone flirty. “What were you watching?”
Philip eyed her as if she was hiding something behind her back.
“What?” She kept her pitch high and playful, knowing that her face was likely advertising her concern. “I’m not allowed to see?”
“Sure. I’ll show you.”
Philip clicked the television back on. The video continued from where it had left off with a dark-haired, bronze woman, perhaps Afro-Latina, obviously faking enthusiasm for a man with tanned arms and a belly even paler than her husband’s own. The woman didn’t exactly look like her. However, she definitely didn’t resemble Tonya.
Imani felt her shoulders drop from the tense position level with her clavicle. She smiled at him, remembering her earlier musing about perfunctory sex. Surely she was to blame for that as much as Philip. “Well, now that I’m here, I suppose I can put on a little show.”
A grin erased her husband’s prior expression. He patted the bed beside her. “The real thing is always better.”
Imani pulled off her top, momentarily forgetting what had urgently driven her home. Tonya was not seducing her husband at the moment. She was.
The shock of her arrival hadn’t completely calmed Philip. A few kisses to her breasts, a grab of her buttocks, and he was ready to perform. She concentrated on his face as they began, forcing herself to think only about the relationship between her movements and his expressions, what he liked, what made him lose control. Several times, she suffered a pang of guilt. Her friend was missing, and she was making love. Surely there was something callous about that. Something cruel. Each time she thought about it, she instructed Philip to go harder, bringing her back into the room. Real physical pain was always easier to bear than its emotional counterpart.
The session lasted longer than usual, perhaps because of everything else weighing on their minds. When it was done, they both went to the bathroom to wash off the sex and the lingering scent of spices. Philip got into the shower first. Imani talked to him while pinning up her hair.
“I learned something disturbing today,” she said, loud enough for Philip to hear beneath the spray. “Tonya knew Nate. Apparently, she auditioned for him several times. He wrote this glowing letter to get Layla into the school, and he was even paying for it. Layla attends St. Catherine’s because of a scholarship that he funded.”
A squirt from the shampoo bottle was the only response.
“It was disconcerting because I was talking to her about Melissa earlier today and specifically asked if she knew the Walkers. And she’d said no.”
Philip rubbed the soap over his hair. “Maybe she thought saying yes would indicate that they were friends, and she didn’t know them well.”
Imani stepped into the shower, appreciating the warm mist from the water on her goose-pimpled skin. “But you wouldn’t say you don’t know them, then; you’d say that you didn’t know them well.” She turned on the handheld shower hose and held it to her body. “And, judging from Nate’s letter, he knew her pretty well. He talked about her background.”
Philip dipped his head under the water.
“Why would she lie?”
“I don’t know if it’s a lie, exactly.” Philip’s words came out garbled from the spray in his mouth. “She probably wanted to avoid talking about him since it would lead to conversations about his death.”
“So she completely omits the fact that Nate advocated for her kid to go to St. Catherine’s and pays her tuition. I mean, he really pushed for Layla to get this scholarship that he sure seemed to have specifically endowed for her.”
Water tumbled off the bumps in Philip’s forehead generated by his raised eyebrows. “I wonder if he met Tonya at the restaurant…”
“It’s possible.” Imani grabbed the soap from Philip and lathered it over her chest. “From the way he wrote about her, their relationship had to go further than chitchat post-audition. I think they were having an affair.”
Philip dipped his head back under the water. “I suppose it’s none of our business.”
The soap slipped from Imani’s grip. “Are you kidding me? Melissa is missing. Nate’s dead. If he was sleeping with Tonya—”
“Then Melissa would have more cause to shoot him in the face,” Philip said.
Imani watched Philip pick up the soap, feeling like her jaw was somewhere beside the dropped bar. “You can’t really think that.”
Imani heard the doubt in her own voice. Of course he could think that. She was wondering the same thing, after all.
“Well, what are you suggesting, then?” Philip asked. “That Tonya’s been having an on-again-off-again affair with Nate for years and that she finally got fed up and shot him? And then did what with Melissa? Kidnapped her only to move into the house of her best friend?”
As he spoke, Philip concentrated on soaping his body, dismissing her theory in both words and withheld eye contact. Imani had to admit that it sounded ridiculous the way he put it. But she knew from experience that people often acted irrationally under extreme stress. Irrational acts were, by nature, kind of insane.
“I don’t know,” she said, taking back the soap. “All I know is that she lied.”
“Maybe she simply didn’t want everyone knowing that Layla is a scholarship kid,” Philip said. “It must be strange going to a school where everyone has so much money.”
Imani winced. How would it be for their own kids next year? she wondered. Would they even be able to afford two tuitions?
“The police are looking into all of the Walkers’ relationships,” Imani said, bringing her focus back to something she could do about getting the woman who’d been sleeping with her friend’s husband out of her house. “They found out Melissa was talking to some guy on Instagram. If there was something between Tonya and Nate, the cops are going to ask about it.”
“So, let them ask about it.” Philip quickly rinsed off, emphasizing that he was done with the conversation by exiting the shower. Imani watched him approach the towel rack, water droplets dripping onto the marble tile, creating dark, circular impressions. “It’s their job, Imani. Not yours.”
“Melissa’s my friend,” Imani said. “And if Tonya was sleeping with Nate, she shouldn’t be here.”
Philip wrapped a towel around himself and then grabbed one for her. He tossed hers over the glass shower wall. “We don’t know anything, and we need the money. So there’s no need for you to be running around playing amateur detective. Let the police do their jobs. We have enough problems.”
Philip dropped his voice as he said it, the head of the household delivering the final word.
Imani appreciated it about as much as Vivienne when she heard it. But she was too old to say something only to have the last word. Moreover, her husband was right. They did have enough problems.
And she’d be damned if Tonya became one of them.