Okay, so that’s Ben Sarpezze in a nutshell. A man who looks exactly like her husband from the back. So freaking what? It’s probably nothing. But then is there any such thing as “probably nothing” when her daughter is suspected of murder?
Darby opens up a new browser window on her phone and enters his information into the search. She scrolls past a few fruitless Yellowbook entries and linked ads for Ancestry and 23andMe, unsure of exactly what she’s hoping to find. Nose to the ground, she thinks, her eyes traveling lightning fast across the screen. And then, just like that, she spots a KNTV news story from nine years back and feels a corresponding pitter-patter in her chest as she taps it with her finger and waits for her slow, old iPhone to load. It’s like driving behind an elderly lady. Her patience, which was not so impressive to begin with, shrinks.
“Come on…” She taps again, but that might only make it worse. “Aha!”
Here we go. It loads.
FAMILY OF TEEN KILLED IN BOATING ACCIDENT SEEKS JUSTICE
Last summer, the Lake Travis community was rocked when a collegiate soccer player was killed in a horrific boating accident.
“He had his whole life ahead of him,” said his mother, Gina Nierling. “I spoke to him before he went out for the night and I said, ‘Be careful.’ He promised he would be.”
On board at the time of the crash were three boys, Benjamin Sarpezze, whose family owned the boat, Maxwell Johns, and the deceased, Oliver Nierling.
Sarpezze and Johns both confirmed that Nierling was behind the wheel and had been drinking heavily that night, but his family questions the timeline of events. “Ollie had combine training for the under-twenty-one youth national soccer team in a few days and he wouldn’t have been drinking, let alone heavily,” Gina Nierling went on to say.
Prior to leaving on the boat, twenty-year-old Benjamin Sarpezze was seen on surveillance video using his older brother’s ID at a local gas station to buy alcohol. No charges were pursued.
The boat hit the pylons of a bridge at roughly 10:00 P.M. before beaching on shore. After swimming to safety, Sarpezze and Johns noticed Nierling was missing.
Local personal injury lawyer Rick Sarpezze arrived on the scene promptly, having been notified of an accident involving his boat. He volunteered to contact the families, but the Nierlings claim they weren’t called until four hours after their son was discovered missing.
A civil lawsuit has been filed in county court by the Nierling family against the Sarpezzes. Oliver Nierling is survived by his parents, Gina and Bob, and his younger sister, Erin Nierling.
Darby stops reading. Erin Nierling. Something Rhea said the last time they spoke, before Darby cut her off, now floats back to her. Miss Ollie isn’t who you think she is …
Darby thought Rhea was being petty again. But what if she was being literal?
She pulls up Facebook and struggles mightily to remember her password before finally successfully resetting it. “Erin Nierling,” she murmurs as she types the name. And there, staring back at her, is the woman she knows as Miss Erin Ollie.
Her phone buzzes, startling her half to death. She groans as her boss’s number pops up and she slides her finger across the screen, prepared to do damage control. “This is Darby,” she says in her work voice. Her boss—such a dated term, but, then, he is dated—is a white-haired man named Carl who looks like he’s been squashed in one of those aluminum can compactors, everything but his earlobes that is, which get longer and longer each time Darby has to meet with him over Zoom.
“Why aren’t you at your desk?” he asks. The man always sounds like he has a frog in his throat. He’s a grandfather now, but probably not a favorite one. He would never pull a quarter out from behind a child’s ear, which is a shame in Darby’s book.
She bites the inside of her cheek, hedging. “How do you know I’m not?”
She really doesn’t have time for this. She has to get to the police station. The image of those investigators traipsing all over her house like they owned the place, looking for a pair of sparkly pink Crocs when this hard evidence was just waiting on the internet, sends shockwaves of anger down her limbs. They should pay her for doing their job.
“Because,” Carl drones, “if you were, you’d be answering my emails. You’re supposed to be at your desk by nine thirty. That’s the agreement. You can work from home if you can be trusted to work.” Carl’s emails? She can’t remember the last time Carl sent a truly time-sensitive email. She gets real emails from team members—the twentysomething and the tired dad of a newborn and the single fiftysomething-year-old who loves salsa dancing and her pug. They have a good rhythm. They sort things out together. But never from Carl. Carl is the butt of a joke, sorry to say, and she’s just not in the mood to laugh at the moment.
“What did the email say, Carl? You’ve got me on the phone now.” She’s never been this direct before. She’s still sitting in the parking lot of Little Academy. Normally she’d be home with her second cup of coffee by now—she really should clean out her car, but there are always more goldfish to be spilled and sippy cups to roll underneath seats.
Carl blusters and says something about how that’s not really the point. So, then, what, this is pointless, Carl? she wants to say. The same way I feel about cleaning my car, say?
Every minute she worries the police are out there solidifying a case against Lola, and she’s seen enough Law & Order reruns to know that once the police get stuck on a suspect it can be hard to pry their hands off of them. But pry she will.
“I’m managing a crisis,” she says, more snappily than she intends, but she’s not sorry about it. “Isn’t that my job?”
“And what crisis would that be?” Carl sounds very tired with her.
“I think you know my daughter’s preschool teacher was killed,” she says. That should be reason enough, but there’s more, there’s a lot more.
He sighs. “I’m very sorry about that, Darby.” Usually she’s so careful about responding to his emails first, making him feel important, like he’s part of the royal family—and, just like them, he’s all for show. “I haven’t wanted to say anything because I know you’re a mother, but the amount of time you spend away from your desk, sending emails from your phone, it’s becoming a problem.”
“What kind of problem?”
She imagines him tugging on one of his long earlobes as he deals with her. Maybe that’s how they’ve gotten so long in the first place. “It isn’t fair to the other employees, who are expected to be at work.”
“Right.” She nods. That must have been very difficult for him to say, poor guy. He probably worried about being PC. “Fair,” she repeats. “I know how important it is for the world to be fair. Isn’t that what you Boomers are always saying? That life, it’s so fair! Have I got the phrase right? I mean, you’d know better than me!”
Wow, she mouths to herself and yet—and yet—she doesn’t wish it back. If Griff can go do improv, she can go do some job she actually cares about if she has to.
“Are you finished?” Carl’s tone is a warning.