The hour was pretty late when I made it back to the house. The sun had set, and it was raining again.
I unlocked the front door to the place I had called home for so long... I hadn’t been inside this structure since I found Izzy here.
It smelled like home, and that made me so very mad. I dropped the bag that held the few clothes I had been wearing since running away and stared down the hall towards the kitchen. All was dark and quiet.
I would have said no one was home, but Rick’s car was in the driveway. Rhoda slipped from my arms and stalked into the kitchen, sleek black tail curving behind her.
I placed my hand on the aged wood bannister and closed my eyes. At nineteen I had slid down the banister into his arms, both of us falling and laughing and then making love in the foyer of his home. Newlyweds, crazy in love, me, not thinking at all about the woman he had kicked out of the house for me. No sympathy for her. No apologies.
Once a cheater, always a cheater, they say.
They’re usually right.
I kicked off my shoes and left them on the front door mat. He hated it when I did that. I almost took a step up but couldn’t. I wanted to leave the shoes there, an act of rebellion so many years later, but I hated it, too. I hated a sloppy house.
I pushed them to the side, under the bench, next to his loafers.
Whatever had happened to Diana, the woman he had been living with when we met?
I sat on the bench and tried to remember.
First, we had kissed spontaneously on a beach retreat with the church college group. Rick had been flustered and apologized and hugged me too tightly. Said it was the moment, the beauty of the ocean, the joy of the Lord welling up inside of him.
Then a few weeks later, a frantic call from Rick…I would understand, and he had to talk to someone. The pastor had found out he was living with Diana. Rick wanted to make it right, but she wouldn’t marry him. Didn’t believe in marriage. What should he do? Follow his calling or his heart?
I said follow his calling, because I was heartless and wanted him to kiss me again.
He did both of those things.
And then, my birthday, and our whirlwind drive to Vegas where he married me, and we returned to Portland to the cautious acceptance of his boss and the disappointment of my parents.
But what had happened to Diana?
I didn’t know. After he chose his “calling”, he never mentioned her again.
But she had picked the curtains for this house, I had a feeling. And the dishes. Or maybe he had, and she had had to live with them, too. Because everything in the house was his possession, even the women.
I leaned my head back on the wall.
Poor Izzy. Another young girl suckered by the well-dressed, smooth-talking, man in charge.
Rhoda meowed from the stairs. I glanced up.
She was in Rick’s arms.
His face was ashen, and wet with tears. His foot still strapped in the boot he had to wear because I had run over it.
He had always been good at crying.
“I’m so glad you are safe.” He held the cat close to his heart, stroking her ears. He must have been talking to Rhoda.
“Is she going to be okay?”
Rick moved slowly, one agonizing step down the maroon carpeted stairs at a time. He sat next to me, his thigh brushing mine.
My heart responded. Damn it.
“Yeah. She’s okay. She’s going to go home to her parents.”
“Good.” I swallowed. “I’m glad.”
“Home to Boise.”
How to respond? I didn’t have words.
He laid his hand on my knee. “I’m a really crappy human.”
“I know.”
“But I have always loved you.” He turned to me, cupped my cheeks in his big, rough hands, and kissed me, deeply.
I melted into his embrace, knowing I would regret it when it was over, but too hungry for his touch to care, too starved for the feeling of being with him, safe from the world outside of us.
We made love in the foyer, not like newlyweds, but like warriors who found themselves together, after the battle, scarred, scared, and desperate. When we were done, I wept while he held me and whispered those same nothings in my ear that Ethan had whispered.
Sometime later…an hour? Half an hour? Rick wrapped me in his arms and scooped me into his lap. He ran his fingers through my hair. I couldn’t tell if it was real or a dream, or a nightmare.
“Three things, Maura. You first.”
I shook my head.
“You can do it.” His heart beat against my cheek, where I lay on his chest. “One…”
“I wouldn’t have dropped out of college.” I found myself playing his game, my responses a reflex to his voice.
“Two?”
“I wouldn’t have run over your foot the other night.” My voice came out in a whisper, like it knew I didn’t want to talk.
“And three?”
“I would have told my mom we were through.” I pressed my face against his chest, his body warming my lips through the thin layer of T-shirt.
His embrace tightened around me. “One,” he began. “I wouldn’t have slept with Izzy. Not ever. I would have ignored her cues. I would have walked away when tempted. That’s the most important one. If I could go back, I wouldn’t do it again.” He paused, waiting for me to fawn over his acknowledgment.
All I did was grip the T-shirt in my fingers. I never wanted to let it go.
“Two, I would not have called the cops on you that night.” He kissed the top of my head. “And three, I would not have dared you to hit me, either. You throw a really solid punch and it hurt like hell.”
I tugged on the back of his shirt and pushed his chest with my forehead, rocking him, and trying to hold back a laugh.
“That was a mistake neither of us would ever make again.” I looked up at him, his hand to his nose.
He pouted, as though his broken nose still bothered him.
The laugh escaped. He squeezed me, then pushed me away to look at me, and then pulled me in for another kiss.
I blocked his effort with the palm of my hand and stood up. “That’s why I regret that I didn’t call my parents. If I had told them we were through this would have never happened.” I shivered, my feet cold on the terracotta floor. “You wish you hadn’t slept with Izzy, but you did. And she thinks you want to leave me for her.”
He remained seated and leaned back on his arms. “She’s gone. Or going. She’ll be back in Idaho before you know it, a distant, but terrible memory, I swear.”
I stared at his handsome face, his messy salt and pepper hair. His full lips. He was beautiful. He made my skin crawl.
“Four.” He started in again.
“Four? We don’t do four. We do three regrets, then we move on. It’s your little magic formula. Three and then we move on. So, move on.”
“Four, I would have made you love Jesus, somehow. Some way.”
“All right. That’s enough.” I stopped where I was and squared up. “You love Jesus during office hours and love yourself the rest of the time. You and I both know that if you had gotten into medical school you’d be working at a hospital instead of a church.” I could have continued, would have, but he just stared at me, a hound dog look on his face. He was full of remorse or a great actor. I didn’t care which. “I’m moving back in. If you don’t like it, you can leave.” I stomped up the stairs like a child.
“That’s my girl.” He didn’t shout, but I could still hear him.
I had to admit a night in my own bed felt wonderful. I also had to admit that it felt empty without Rick. The little sofa in my office made my back hurt, and my neck hurt, and my head hurt. But the empty Tempur-pedic bed in my own bedroom made my heart hurt.
To make an uncomfortable situation worse, Rick was working from home now, and would be around all day.
I hadn’t gotten up yet. The bed embraced me, and everything smelled so nice like my laundry detergent and the morning air that snuck in through the window I like to keep cracked in the night. But I had my laptop out and I was in the middle of a deep web search for clues to whatever it was Linda Smith was hiding.
With a piece of tape over my web camera, I dug through the unsearchable websites with my Tor browser. I hunted specifically for unsolved crimes in Indiana from twenty years ago, especially featuring pretty, young ladies. Even with those limits there was a lot to look through. Most of it depressing, some of it fascinating, and none of it seemed to be relevant.
There was a quiet knock on the bedroom door and Rick stepped in with a cup of coffee. I could smell his special hazelnut blend. It smelled like morning.
“Good morning, baby.” He settled into his side of the bed and held the cup towards me, but didn’t make me take it.
“Morning, Rick.” I set my laptop aside and accepted the cup of coffee.
“How’s the hunt going?”
“I don’t feel any closer than I did on day one. Adam didn’t have any enemies.”
“Not even his ex?”
“She’s the only one. But why would she kill him? I haven’t killed you.”
“I apologized, and he didn’t. That might make a difference.”
I sucked in a sharp breath. It did not make a difference. Not in the slightest. “We’ve talked. She’s not a killer.”
“But doesn’t the wronged female have the strongest motive?”
“They broke up a year ago. Why wait this long to kill him? Seems like a wronged lover would kill in a fit of passion while the anger was fresh. Plus, in all the murders I’ve ever worked, none were a wronged spouse. And in all of the wronged spouse cases I’ve ever worked—”
“Which is most of them.”
“Yes, it is. The bulk of the work I’ve done has been catching cheaters. And none of the wronged spouses have ever resorted to murder.”
“There’s a first time for everything.”
“True, but how does the mutilation fit in? If she had castrated him, I could see it. But thumbs and toes? Unless they had some kind of fetish I’m not familiar with…” I rolled my eyes. “I just can’t make that motive fit the crime. Not that she’s off the list entirely, she’s just not my priority.” I sipped the coffee. Strong. Hot. Perfect. Like Rick, and exactly not like Rick at the same time.
“Want to bounce ideas off me? I’m a good sounding board you know. I have a PhD in it.”
“What is Linda Smith hiding?”
“Her age.” He laughed.
“I’ll bite. How old is she?”
“She’s passing for fifty, but I know for a fact she is sixty-eight.”
“Really!” This was a surprise and could influence my search. If she was sixty-eight she wasn’t a ‘young lady’ twenty-five years ago. “How do you know?”
“She left her wallet in my office once. I had to check her ID to find out who it belonged to. Linda Smith, birthday sixty-eight years ago.”
“Generic name indicates an alter ego. Altered appearance indicates hiding identity. And now a new age. This is good.” I grabbed my laptop and resumed my search.
“She didn’t do it, though.” Rick leaned back, arms behind his head.
“Probably not, but her reason for hiring me doesn’t hold up. It’s already fall, and she wants all homeless kids off the street by Thanksgiving. Never going to happen. Too many kids and too few beds. Nothing that could be said about Adam could interfere with a goal that’s impossible to meet. That means she wants this covered up for some other reason. Until I know that reason, I can’t say for sure she’s not involved.”
“She’s a good lady.”
“By good, do you mean nice to look at and flirts with you a lot? Because that does not preclude being a murderer.” I changed my search terms to include Linda’s actual age. I wanted to ignore Rick and get my answers, but I knew from experience that he was right. He was a well-trained sounding board. And if he knew the person I was researching, all the better, because he was observant and had a tremendous memory.
I turned and stared at him. He claimed he had called Izzy “Carrie” because he had forgotten or something like that. He had some dumb explanation for the mistake. There was no way I could believe it. Not knowing him as well as I do. In fact, knowing him, the most likely reason for him to call his lover by some other girl’s name was to manipulate me. Either he wanted me to think Izzy was so unimportant to him that he couldn’t remember her name, or he wanted me to think that he had so many lovers that he couldn’t keep them straight. I narrowed my eyes. Which was it? “Rick, you’ve always been a narcissistic kind of man. For a long time, I loved you for it. For a shorter time, I’ve found it very annoying. Right now, it’s the bane of my existence. You take a lot of pride in your perfect memory.”
He grinned and shrugged deprecatingly. “It is a remarkable gift.”
“Then why did you call Izzy ‘Carrie’ that night at my car window?”
He did not have the decency to blush. He did cool down his grin just a little, but he didn’t look the least bit embarrassed. “Because when I look at you, you are all I can remember. Everyone else fades away.”
“And how many everyones are there to fade into the background? Each woman you so easily forget is one more set of diseases I’m exposed to.”
Rick placed his hand on my knee.
I knew that move. When fighting, touch each other. The exchange of warmth, one body to the next, humanizes your life partner and makes you empathize with them.
I smacked his hand.
He slid it just an inch or so up my thigh. “I started the affair with Izzy because I’ve been miserable, Maura. There are parts of our lives we just can’t share. It hurts. It’s an ache in my soul. I know I’ve had a lot of interns, and that plenty of them have been just as pretty or prettier than her. Izzy’s not that hot. But in the same way that twelve years ago I met you and you shook me to my core and touched me in all the places I’ve never been touched before, and I knew that you were the woman I had to spend my life with,” he paused, maybe realizing he was saying too much for the tack he was taking. Or maybe it was because I slapped his hand again.
“Ouch. Knock it off. I’m trying to say that Izzy didn’t rock my world and shake its foundations like you did, Maura, but there was that empty spot, that hollow spot… that spot that is about my Christianity. She met me there. Maybe the other interns would’ve, too. I don’t know. I guess I didn’t need it then the way I needed it now. But I know that to invite her over while you were gone so that I could seduce her was the worst thing I’ve ever done in my life. And I swear to you that I have never done that before.”
I had never been so angry in my life. All my muscles were tensing. My heart was racing. My face was steaming hot. I was grinding my teeth, but not to keep from speaking. I was just grinding them because that anger was growing, boiling, ramping up. I was like a volcano about to erupt. I didn’t care if I got another assault charge and lost my PI license. I didn’t care if I hurt him and sent him to the hospital. I was just so angry that he would use my lack of belief as an excuse for his midlife crisis. It was such a load of crap coming from a man who thought religion was a “wonderful tool” to help people. He didn’t know that Pastor Bob had told me about his confession. He thought he could still pretend to be better than me.
I exercised a supernatural level of self-restraint. An amount that would make any atheist start to ask questions about a higher power. Then I spoke to him with my voice so calm, so level, that he flinched. “You want to start a family with Izzy, don’t you?”
“This conversation isn’t going to make us better. It’s probably going to make it a lot worse in fact.” Rick draped his arm around me and tried to pull my ram-rod straight body next to him. “But Izzy and I were very drunk that weekend and a little high. I said a lot of things to her that I didn’t mean.”
I was practicing my deep breathing exercises like I was getting paid for it. “I’m frigid, but you are a warm man. And you want children, but I never would let you have them.” Three exceedingly slow deep breaths. In through the mouth, out through the nose. The worst part was that Rick had taught me how to use breathing exercises to control my temper.
“I did say those things, and they’re probably founded or rooted in some kind of truth. When we met, you were so active in the college group. You had a light in you, and I just knew you were going to be this amazing, influential woman of faith. And then, after we got married that light died out.”
I had begun to sink into his arm as we talked, wanting to take comfort from his strong body even as I resented his ability to comfort me, so I dug my elbow into his side.
“Maura, why did your light die out? What happened?”
I closed my eyes and pictured our first year of marriage. Me, that nineteen-year-old kid following my new husband to seminary. The other grad student wives and how they looked at me. The professors and how they looked at me. And the way Rick had disappeared into his books and his practice for three years, leaving me to fend for myself in an environment terribly hostile to newly-saved teenage brides. At least that’s how it had felt. I was on the outside of the circle. They would condescend to me, try to help me, save me, serve me. But not like me. They never did like me.
I hated repeating myself, and we had done this all before, so many times. “All those years. All those lonely seminary years.” My anger had simmered down from the breathing, and the remembering, and the warmth of Rick. I was left with that deep sorrow that made my stomach ache. “How could I love a God whose people were so cold?”
Rick turned, pulling me to him. He placed his hand gently on my cheek, tilted my head and leaned his forehead against mine. “My poor baby. Those were such hard years, and I never did believe you.”
This revelatory moment with my straying husband wasn’t furthering my investigation. But my laptop and its deep web search, and the new information about Linda had no attraction for me. I tilted my face up seeking Rick’s lips with mine. I closed my eyes and let him apologize to me with his love.
He paused, stroked the side of my face, and added, “But you could have watched your language. It would have helped.”
I shoved him away with both hands, but then butted his chest with my forehead. If we had had this talk once we’d had it a thousand times. I shouldn’t talk like a sailor if I wanted to make friends at church.
Damn him. I didn’t care if he was right.
He got up with a chuckle and we parted, me to shower and get dressed. Rick to see clients. Me to try and uncover what everyone was keeping hidden. Rick, to hide whatever he was feeling. I had been maneuvered, massaged, and manipulated by the master. He had moved in on me like a trained assassin, perfectly prepared to kill my doubts, kill my questions, rather than answer them. I could not let that happen again.
Eventually, I returned to the computer and began my search with intent and focus on Linda Smith. And my search was richly rewarded.
An interesting story rose from the detritus of the internet, concerning a single career woman named Belinda Warren from a little town in northern Indiana. Just about thirty years ago this woman was involved in a hit and run accident that killed the man who was running for office against her father.
There was a picture, and while there was something about Belinda Warren’s eyes and the slope of her shoulders that reminded me of Linda Smith, it wasn’t strong enough to make me sure. But the coincidence of the names Belinda and Linda, the possible resemblance, and then of course, the hit-and-run which hit a little too close to home for me right now, decided the matter. I had to follow up on the story. Especially since the information in the Archives of Forgotten Crime where I had found this story said no one had seen Belinda Warren since she posted bail after her arrest.
It would take a certain amount of chutzpa to get back in the public eye if you were hiding from a manslaughter charge, but if you had gotten back into public work after a crime like that, even using a new name, you would want everything about it swept under the rug.
And speaking of chutzpa, as I closed my computer I thought again about what Pastor Bob had told me about Rick’s confession.
Rick says he had deep spiritual connection to Izzy?
Bull crap. He had just told his boss that he didn’t believe in Jesus.