Inside, though, she had such clarity. The grieving, complicated as it would be, could come later.
In the end it was Randi and the police who gave her the head start.
Earlier, she’d overheard Randi saying that in the end it’s always two men throwing themselves at each other. An accidental shove at a bar. An argument over a bill.
Aren’t there some states, she’d heard Detective Mendoza joke to Walters, where murdering your contractor is a misdemeanor?
* * *
*
We were both frustrated,” Dara admitted. “Everything was taking so long. Charlie was very upset. The tension kept building.”
“That morning, did your husband say he was going to confront the contractor?”
“No. He was just going to work.”
“Can you guess why one or both of the men might have been on the third floor?”
Dara paused. “Charlie suspected the contractor was using the third floor, maybe to entertain a date. You know. We were concerned. The students . . .”
It all came naturally, like smoke ribbons from her mouth. It was true, after a fashion. Nothing was ever simple.
“We found cigarette butts up there,” one of the deputies said, as if on cue.
“If they’d caught fire . . .” Dara said, shaking her head.
* * *
*
Yeah, I like it. It tracks, she heard Mendoza saying to Walters. Fella’s pissed. Work’s not getting done. Can’t even find the contractor. Thinks the guy’s up to no good.
So maybe he gets here, tries to catch him in the act? Walters said. Or hears him and charges up the stairs— —just as the contractor’s coming down. They struggle on the stairs, a do-si-do and BAM . . .
* * *
*
There would be more questions, she knew. They asked for samples of handwriting, they took more prints, put things in bags, took fibers from her shirt and Randi Jacek’s, scrapings under nails. They still wanted to talk to her sister. But at the end of it, they let her go home, Detective Walters offering to drive her himself.
She declined.
It never crossed her mind to tell them the truth. Telling them about the contractor’s wife would mean telling them about Charlie and about Marie, all the private things.
It wasn’t their business, any of it. It was hers and Marie’s, all of it.
* * *
*
She called Marie at the Ballenger and told her to go home immediately. To lock up the house and wait for her.
Then she told her about Charlie.
The call was brief and awful.
Marie kept crying. She couldn’t stop crying and Dara had to hang up or she’d never make it.
* * *
*
I’m so sorry,” Randi Jacek said, touching Dara’s arm as she moved to leave. “If I hadn’t made you come here, you wouldn’t have had to see—”
Dara felt something stir in her chest, against her heart. She moved quickly past and heard a sound in her throat that felt like a scream.
In the stairwell, in the parking lot, in the car, she tried to let it out, the scream, the cry, the breath. It never came.
THRESHOLD
She was pulling into their driveway when she saw the car out front, a weathered minivan, rust-dimpled and sputtering exhaust.
Dara could make out two girls’ heads in the backseat, both swathed in winter hats, one plain purple pom-pom and the other shaped like a unicorn, a silvery horn bopping to and fro.
It was only then that she saw the figure on the front porch bouncing on her feet to keep warm. Sunglasses, a hood, but the same faded parka from the night before. Was it only the night before?
Exiting the car, Dara approached the woman without knowing what she was going to do, with no idea what was inside her.
The woman, her face weather-beaten, looked tired, frightened, her head darting from her minivan to Dara and back again.
“Do you know who I am?” she asked.
“I guess so,” Dara said. A curtain twitched in the bay window. Marie, Dara thought, watching. Hiding.
The woman shook her head, pressing her mittens over her ears.
“The detectives called,” she said. “They told me about Char—your husband.”
“Why did they tell you?” Dara snapped.
“They were asking questions. About my husband mentioning any trouble at work,” she said. “I’m so sorry for your loss.”
Dara said nothing, staring into the woman’s sunglasses—oversize, bottomless—and seeing only the dark flutter of her own eyes reflected there.
“I don’t know what Charlie told you. Or if he told you anything.”
“I know more than he did,” Dara said coolly. “I know you used him.”