“Right place, right time,” I said, trying to defuse the gravity of what had happened. “He would have been just fine without me.” I was all too happy to let him be the hero. Truth is, besides steering her waterlogged legs onto his back seat, I didn’t really do a thing.
“It’s kind of a miracle that he found me,” she said, then went on to explain, “I guess he got some sort of flood alert, he thought he was just coming over to reset the alarm.” It was clear she still wanted me to think they weren’t together. If her suicide attempt was spurred by guilty feelings about the relationship, I didn’t want to push. So I let it ride.
“Well, thank goodness for that alarm,” I said, then couldn’t help myself from adding, “but honestly, I think people have a sixth sense about their loved ones.” I told her about an incident Margaux once had in a community pool. A girl who couldn’t swim had followed her into the deep end, then started to panic when she realized she was in over her head. My nose was in a book—Margaux was a good swimmer, and there was a lifeguard on duty—but the moment the panicked girl grabbed on to my daughter, I felt an urgent impulse to look up. I was in that water in three seconds flat. “I think we can sense when the people we care about are in trouble,” I opined.
“Oh, Evan doesn’t care about me,” Holly replied. “I know what it probably looks like, but it’s not like that,” she said. “We barely know each other.”
I didn’t want to contradict her, but I saw the look in Evan’s eyes when he was carrying her out of the house. It was not the look of a man who didn’t care. I wondered if her dead husband had seen that look, too, and if it had something to do with his untimely death. I still didn’t have any idea how her husband had died. What if he’d found out about his wife’s admirer and driven off a cliff? I knew it was dangerous to ask, but my curiosity got the best of me. “So, how do you know Evan?”
Her answer was as surprising as if her head turned into a bird and flew out the window.
“He works for the man who owns this house,” she said. And of course I knew who that was. Because my husband worked for him, too.
“Oh! So you’re renting!” I said, seizing on the opportunity to change the subject to something less emotionally charged. The fact that Jack Kimball owned her house and employed my husband was a crazy coincidence, but hardly scandalous. Jack Kimball probably owned many houses. He was a mogul, and moguls own properties—that’s why they’re moguls.
“Do you know who owns your house?” I asked, eager to share the coincidence. If she didn’t already know, surely she’d get a kick out of learning the Jack Kimball was her landlord. And that my husband also had a connection to him.
“No,” she said. “Evan found it, we only deal with him.”
I thought about the house being owned by an LLC, and how it was entirely possible she didn’t know who owned it, just as I hadn’t until a few days ago—and probably never would have, if it weren’t for Andy’s contract.
“And you never asked him?” I said, setting up my big reveal. I couldn’t wait to tell her she had a celebrity landlord. If I sensed she was uncomfortable that I was snooping around, I would just explain that I looked up the public record to see how much it sold for to know what my house was worth. People do that all the time.
“I’m not allowed to know,” she said, and my excitement mounted. It made perfect sense that Jack Kimball would want to preserve his privacy. But I figured we could keep it our little secret.
“Because the man who owns this house . . . ,” she began, then looked down into her cup.
“What about the man who owns this house?” I asked, thinking maybe she did know after all, and was just baiting me.
She put down her coffee and looked me square in the eye. “The man who owns this house killed my husband.”
I nearly fell out of my chair. I must have looked incredulous because she explained, “He lets us live here for free. So we don’t try to find out who he is and press charges.”
I was too flabbergasted to speak. If what she was saying was true, Jack Kimball—the man who single-handedly was about to pull us out of poverty—was a killer.
And nobody knew it but me.
JACK
Three months ago
I wish I had been the one behind the wheel. I would have turned myself in right then and there. I would have faced the consequences, apologized, endured my punishment.