The very last day I’d sat in the interrogation room with Detective Daern, he’d tapped a number printed on a sheet of paper I recognized as one of my phone statements. I’d handed them over the month before, no subpoena necessary.
“What’s this?” he said, pointing to the number the Visitor had called me from. I knew they’d eventually get to that since he’d rung my regular cell instead of the burner.
“Not sure. Must’ve been a wrong number,” I said.
“You don’t remember?”
“I guess not.”
“You talked for a couple minutes. Kinda long for a wrong number.”
“Maybe we struck up a conversation. I’m always looking for material for my books; it’s funny where you find inspiration.” I said all this with a straight face, looking directly at Daern.
He watched me for a second, then nodded to his partner. “Go ahead and show Mr. Drake out.”
“It’s okay,” I said, standing. “I know the way.”
The day after my agent let me know the good news about my manuscript, I sent it off to the email address the Visitor had given me. I got no reply initially but received a postcard in the mail about a week later, a gorgeous sunset going down behind an island that might’ve been in Polynesia somewhere. On the back, typed, was this:
Taut. Good characters. Too many metaphors. Liked the happy ending.
So did I. So did I.
I caught Rachel’s eye as we settled into a table kitty-corner to hers. She was still talking with the other mothers and flashed me a brief smile. She was holding a beer, and when she laughed at something one of the women said, it sounded genuine. I was glad.
The pork was delicious and the beer was cold and the day was perfect, but as it wore on, I felt myself falling back into a groove I normally wore deeper at night. My thinking time. I’d taken to lying awake for hours in the dark, my mind treading and retreading the events from the months before.
Really it was one thing that kept coming back to me. Something innocuous, but glaring whenever I thought about it.
The broken window in the Barrens’ front door.
I’d tried accepting that the Visitor was responsible, since Father Mathew to this day still denied he’d killed David, but the broken window kept getting in the way. The Visitor was a pro. He’d gained access to my house with barely a sound, no jimmied lock, and no broken glass. What had he said when I’d accused him of trying to gas me and my dad? Not my style. And neither was the broken window. It had almost been like an afterthought. A stark and undeniable clue pointing to someone breaking in. Someone outlining in neon that THIS WAS A ROBBERY GONE WRONG.
In other words, a little melodramatic.
I looked at Rachel again. She was watching her boys and Kel’s girls playing. I thought of what David had told her the night she realized what Joey was being subjected to. I thought of the summer storm behind her eyes that thrilled, and if I was honest, frightened me a little at times. An intensity like a flash of lightning over a raging sea.
I could see her that night, lying in bed planning what she was going to do. The conversation with Sadie, the rest of the day while she went about her errands, then picking up the boys to leave town.
But what kept me awake in those hours before sleep finally dragged me under was what happened after that. If I wrote the scene, it would go something like this:
Around one in the morning, Rachel gets up from the spare bedroom Sadie made up for her and the boys. She looks at her children and silently leaves them where they sleep. Maybe she finds a gun never registered by Sadie or her ex-husband in a closet or basement. When she has it, she leaves the house and drives the twenty miles back into Sandford. She shuts her lights off as she enters the Loop, but it’s probably needless—the street is silent and motionless, almost everyone sleeping. Almost.
She parks at the far end of the turnaround and walks the short distance to her house, making sure to keep out of the streetlamps. She still has her keys, and David’s forgotten to arm the alarm like he usually does.
She doesn’t try to hide the sound of her entry, makes enough noise to rouse her husband and simply waits in the hall where there is nowhere to hide and chances of missing go down considerably. David steps out of their room to investigate the sound, makes it almost to the kitchen before a single shot lights up the dark. Enough for him to see her face in the muzzle flash, maybe see the way her eyes burn.
She tears through their room, snagging some cash and jewelry, then leaves, stopping on the front steps to knock a single pane of glass from the door with the butt of the gun before hurrying back to her car. She drives away, not seeing the old man two houses down from hers standing in the dark of his living room, awake and watching.