I sit back down. I ask the obvious question. “How did your earring get into Jake’s car, Lily?”
Lily says, “I don’t know. I don’t know, Christian,” and I can practically see her wheels spinning. “I was thinking, could it have somehow been on you when you moved his car that night? Or do you think maybe Jake made it back to his car after I hit him, and the earring was on him, but then…”
Her voice drifts. “But then what?” I ask, thinking it’s not possible that he got to his car, and then went back into the woods to die. It doesn’t make sense. Why would he do that? And besides, if Jake somehow made it back to his car, for the amount of blood that was on Lily’s clothes when I found them, there would have been blood in the car too.
“I don’t know. You’re right. That doesn’t make sense.”
“How does Nina even know the earring is yours?” I ask. “Did you try telling her it’s not?”
“No, Christian. She sees me almost every day, and every day I wear those earrings. She knows. We talked about them when the one went missing. She was the one who first noticed it gone. It would have looked even worse if I had lied about it.”
I think about this. “No, you’re right, Lily,” I say, meaning it. “It was good not to lie. She would have been more suspicious if she knew you were lying about it. What did you say to her? What was your reason for the earring being in Jake’s car?”
“Nothing,” she says, and I imagine Lily’s shocked expression when Nina revealed the earring to her, which is probably not unlike the look on my face right now. “I didn’t have one. I just said it was so strange that it would be in Jake’s car. I couldn’t explain it. I changed the subject, saying how happy she must be to have Jake’s car back, and that, with any luck, the police will soon find Jake too.”
This is bad. This is really bad. I can’t think of one logical reason why Lily’s missing earring would have wound up in Jake’s car, unless Lily is right and the earring was somehow attached to me, like on my coat. I tried to be so careful too. I wore gloves. I did research in advance to avoid cameras. I thought of everything, except this, leaving something unintentionally behind.
“Do you think she’ll go to the police?” Lily asks.
“And say what? That she found your earring in Jake’s car? What does that prove?”
I’m not exactly lying. It proves nothing. It’s just an earring. But the earring opens the door to suspicion. It’s a piece of the puzzle, like Nina maybe recognizing my car. That’s a piece of the puzzle too. If Nina finds too many puzzle pieces, a picture will start to form.
“Where is the earring now?”
“I have it.”
“She gave it to you?”
“Yes.”
“Good. That’s good.” I don’t know why this is good exactly. But I like the idea of evidence being back in Lily’s possession.
What I still can’t figure out is how it ever got in Jake’s car.
NINA
Christian and Lily live on a dead-end street. Theirs is the last house on the block. I’ve parked in the cul-de-sac at the end, where there are no homes, only trees. There is no through traffic either, which means I’m the only one here. I turn off my car and sit, staring through the dark copse of trees at their home. The porch light is on. It casts a yellow glow on the porch, making it warm and homey and snug, though I have no intent of going to the front door and knocking.
I sit there in the darkness watching. I know they’re home because I saw movement on the other side of the blinds, though I couldn’t identify them. It was just shadows passing by the windows.
There was only one other time in my life that I considered Jake might be cheating on me. It was early in our marriage. We were out to dinner when Jake and I ran into a colleague of his at a restaurant. The woman was one of the surgical techs at the hospital. She was beyond beautiful; she took my breath away and was the only person in my life that I ever remember making my husband tongue-tied. Even I had never had that effect on him. I remember at the time, Jake saying something along the lines of how he liked working with this woman because not only was she competent and conscientious at what she did, but that she was nice and easy to talk to, which came as a crushing blow because she wasn’t just a pretty face, although she was that too.
Jake swore he wasn’t flirting with her that night at the restaurant. He said he was only being nice and I let it go, but I never knew if I believed him. The irony was that even though I thought Jake might be cheating on me, I didn’t feel angry with him. I felt angry with her. I wondered how any woman could be so horrible as to pursue a married man, and I thought of that woman who had stolen my father from my mother and me and practically ruined our lives. I remember that I went to Jake’s hospital once. I sat in the parking lot in my car, waiting for this beautiful surgical tech to leave and when she did, I followed her to an apartment where she lived, and then I sat and watched from that parking lot, fantasizing about ways to ruin her life. I thought of many. I never acted on any of it. It was therapeutic enough just to imagine all the awful things I could do to her if I was so inclined.
My anger is exponentially worse because Lily is supposed to be my friend.
Has Jake left me for Lily? Or did Christian find out and do something to Jake?
I’m sitting in the front seat of my car. The time on my phone reads nine twenty-eight when the front door of Christian and Lily’s house unexpectedly opens. I sit more upright in my chair. Christian appears in the doorway, looking out. He lets his gaze run over the street and I think at first that I’ve been caught. I watch as Christian steps out of the house. He’s alone; Lily isn’t with him. He turns back to the door to pull it closed behind him, and then he’s practically floodlit in the porch lights. Because of the lights, he’s easy to see, wearing jeans and a hooded sweatshirt, holding a plastic bag in his hand and, as I watch, he steps from the porch with the bag, making his way toward the trash cans at the end of the driveway.
I sink low in my seat as Christian approaches. My car can’t be thirty feet away, though it’s shrouded in darkness. The porch lights don’t reach this far so Christian is far less conspicuous here, no longer spotlighted. Now he’s a mere silhouette. I can only make out the contour of him, blending into the darkness of the street.
Christian doesn’t go to the garbage bins to throw the bag away as I expected. Instead, he walks straight past them and I watch, entranced, as he comes to the street, turns and walks along the edge of it with the plastic bag suspended from his hand. I sit motionless, watching through the windshield as Christian grows smaller with the distance. He walks so far that eventually I can’t see his silhouette. My curiosity gets the best of me and I decide to follow him. I wait in the car a few more seconds, and then I press the switch on the interior lights so that they don’t turn on when I open the door. I don’t want to be visible. I slip from my car, pushing the door gently closed and setting it back into place. I don’t slam it. I stand immobile after I do, making sure Christian didn’t notice me getting out of the car.
Darkness wraps its arms around me. The night air is cool. You can smell fall in the air, the earthy scent of things dying.