Eddie takes the detective out to the backyard. There’s no ride to the police station, no Eddie in the back of a car, and I tell myself that this isn’t serious. This is nothing, really.
If it were something, he wouldn’t be offering the detective bottled water with a smile.
I stand in the kitchen, absentmindedly cleaning the counters, putting glasses in the dishwasher, anything to keep my hands busy and make me look just as relaxed as Eddie does right now.
But I’m not Eddie, and when Detective Laurent comes back inside, I have to fight the urge to go hide in the bedroom and lock the door.
It sounds stupid, but I’d thought this kind of money and lifestyle insulated you from things like this, the police showing up at your door with questions and hard eyes.
The detective is friendly enough, though, holding up her empty bottle. “Recycling?” she asks, and I take it from her, smiling like I’m totally unbothered.
She leans on the counter, casual, and asks, “How long have the two of you been seeing each other?”
I have no idea if this is an actual question she’s asking as a police officer, or if she’s just making small talk, and my palms sweat as I reach up to tuck my hair behind my ear.
“A few months?” I say. “Eddie and I met back in February, started dating in March?”
Great, I’m doing the questioning thing that makes me sound like an unsure little girl, not the kind of woman who belongs in a house like this.
But the detective just smiles at me, her dark eyes warm, the skin around them crinkling.
“Your fiancé says you used to be his dog-walker.” Wrinkling her nose, she gestures around us. “I said, ‘What the hell do people in this neighborhood need a dog-walker for?’ but that’s the bougie set for you, isn’t it?”
I laugh along with her, nodding even as my heart keeps pounding and my hands keep shaking. “I said the same thing. But it was a good job, and I like dogs.”
I could not sound more insipid if I tried, but that’s the point, right? Make her think I’m no one worth even talking to. And whatever this is, it has nothing to do with me. Plain Jane, blending into the background again.
Drumming her nails on the counter—sensible, short, square, only one thin gold band on her left hand—Detective Laurent nods. “We all have to do what we can to get by,” she says, not unkindly, and then gives me a nod before checking the phone she has clipped to her belt.
“I better get going. Sorry again for interrupting y’all’s evening.”
“It was no problem at all,” I tell her, dying to ask why she’s here, what she said to Eddie, but also wanting her to go, to pretend that this night never even happened.
“Let me walk you out,” I offer, but she waves me off.
“No need.” Then, reaching into her jacket, she pulls out a business card and hands it to me. Unlike the card Eddie handed to John that day, this one is thin, the paper cheap. It’s stamped with the Mountain Brook PD’s crest, and has her name—Detective Tori Laurent—and number. “I told Mr. Rochester to call if he has any questions. You do the same, okay?”
And then she’s off, her sensible shoes squeaking on the floor, the front door opening and closing.
As though he’d been waiting for her to leave, Eddie comes in through the back sliding glass door and lets out a long breath, shoving his hands through his hair.
“Are you okay?” he asks, and I make myself smile up at him as I wrap my arms around his waist.
“Yeah, fine,” I say, even though I definitely am not. “What did she want?”
He leans in close, resting his chin on the top of my head. “To talk about Blanche. And Bea.”
“Did they find her?” My voice is quiet. It’s such a gruesome question, a gruesome image, them finding Bea after she’s been in the water this long …
“Not Bea,” Eddie replies, his voice rough. “Blanche, though. They found Blanche.”
“Jesus,” I mutter, trying hard not to think about what exactly they found as I pull out of his embrace.
His skin has gone a sort of grayish-green, and a muscle keeps ticking in his jaw. He looks more like the Eddie I first met than he has in ages, and my stomach lurches.
“Is there more?”
“She was … there was a fracture on her skull. Like she’d been hit by something. Or someone.”
He turns away from me, then, rubbing the back of his neck, and I stand there, absorbing the news, peeling through the shock and fear to see what this means.
Now I’m not just nauseous, I’m cold. Numb, almost as I reach up and press my fingers to my lips. “She was murdered?” I ask, my voice barely above a whisper.
Eddie still has his back to me, his shoulders tense, and I can’t help but add, “And Bea?”
“Considered a homicide, now, too,” he says. “That’s what they wanted to talk to me about. To tell me they’re now investigating her disappearance as a murder.”
I feel like my vision is graying out, and my knees are suddenly weak, watery. “Oh, god. Eddie.”
I don’t know what else to say.
We were finally starting to make peace with Bea’s ghost. We’re engaged, for fuck’s sake. Talking about a wedding. And it’s one thing to have lost your wife in a tragic accident. But to find out someone did it on purpose? That’s a nightmare.
And then another thought occurs to me. “They don’t…” I don’t even want to finish the sentence. Don’t want it hanging there in the air between us.
“Think I did it?” he asks, turning around. He’s still pale, but his expression isn’t quite so intense now. “No, they just wanted to let me know that things had changed. They’ll have questions, of course, but I got the impression they were looking at me as the grieving widower, not a suspect.”
The more he talks, the more that the normal Eddie, the Eddie I’m used to, starts bleeding back into his face and voice. I can practically see his other persona sliding on like a shell. Or a mask.
He looks at me then, frowning. “Christ, Jane, I’m so sorry.”
“Sorry?” I step toward him, taking his hands. “Why would you say that?”
Sighing, he pulls me into his arms. “Because this is such a fucking mess, and I don’t want you to have to deal with this. I don’t want you … I don’t know, sitting in some little room, answering questions about something that happened before you even fucking knew me.”
I thought I’d felt as scared as I could, but now a new horror rushes over me, making my mouth dry as I look up at him. “You think they’ll want to question me?”
“They mentioned it,” he says, distracted. “Just that you should come along when I go in.”
I’ve spent the past five years avoiding attention, avoiding questions, definitely avoiding cops. Fuck, if they look into Eddie over this, they’ll look into me. His fiancée. The girl he got engaged to less than a year after his wife disappeared.
John, the call from Phoenix, now this. I can practically feel the teeth of a trap starting to snap closed, and I close my eyes, pressing my forehead against Eddie’s chest and taking deep breaths.
Eddie’s hand goes to the back of my neck, rubbing. “Don’t let it worry you, though.”
“It doesn’t,” I automatically reply, but he gives a rueful smile, reaching out to cup my cheek.
“Janie, you’re pale as a ghost.”
I capture his hand before he can pull it back, pressing it closer to my face. His skin feels so warm. Mine is still freezing. “This is a lot, I know,” he says. “I’m still trying to wrap my mind around it. But I want you to know you have nothing to worry about, okay? I’m not going anywhere, and we’re going to get through this.”
He’s speaking in this calm, measured tone, but it doesn’t help. In fact, I think it might actually make it worse, and I step back from him, running a hand through my hair.
“Eddie, your wife was murdered,” I say. “It’s not going to be okay. It can’t be.”
Things like this weren’t supposed to happen here. I was supposed to be safe here, this place was supposed to be safe.
And even though Blanche and Bea had disappeared before I even arrived in Thornfield Estates, there was a part of me that felt like maybe this was my fault. Had I brought this here? This sordidness, this violence? Did it cling to me like some kind of virus, infecting anyone who got close to me?
It was a silly, self-absorbed thought that didn’t make any sense. But what made even less sense was the thought that Bea and Blanche could’ve stumbled into something that got them killed. Who would’ve wanted to hurt either of them? And why?
And why was Eddie so calm?
“I know, it’s fucking awful,” he says on a sigh. “Believe me, I know.” Closing his eyes, he pinches the bridge of his nose. “But there’s nothing we can do about it now. Worrying about it isn’t going to change it.”
Worrying about it isn’t going to change it. I want to tell him that it’s pretty fucking normal to worry about who might have wanted your wife and her best friend dead, but something stops me.
Eddie takes my hands. “Focus on the wedding,” he says. “On the rest of our lives. Not this.”
“It’s just that … I don’t really like the police,” I say, and he frowns in confusion.
“Why not?”
Spoken like a rich white guy, I think to myself.
Instead, I consider my response very carefully. This is another moment where I feel like a bit of truth in the lie might be useful.
“There was a foster family I lived with,” I say. “In Arizona. They weren’t exactly in it to do good work for kids, you know?”
When I glance back over at him, he’s got his arms folded across his chest, watching me with his chin slightly tucked down. His listening face.
“Anyway, when I was sixteen, they thought I was stealing from them, and they called the cops on me.”
I had been stealing from them, but given that they were using most of the money the state gave them on themselves, rather than to take care of me and two other kids in their care, I hadn’t really seen what the big deal was.
“The officer they sent was a friend of my foster dad’s, so they took me down to the station, and it was…”
Even as I talked about it, I remembered sitting there, smelling burnt coffee and Pine-Sol and shaking with so much rage that I could barely talk. But I can’t tell Eddie about the anger. He won’t get that.
“It was scary,” I finally say. “And I guess I never really got over it.”
Not the full story at all, of course. No mention of the real Jane. Of that last night in Phoenix.
But Eddie doesn’t need to know those things.
Making a clucking noise, Eddie uncrosses his arms, pulls me back into them.
“This isn’t supposed to be about me,” I say, tilting my head up to look at him. “Sorry.”
“Don’t be,” he says before kissing my forehead. “And don’t worry about any of this. Bea and Blanche are gone. This doesn’t change anything.”
But when he lets me go and turns away, I see his hand at his side, fingers flexing and unflexing.