They rested like that. A wisteria and oak, intertwined. The one strangling the other, in order to survive. Ella watched Gertie all the while. But she wasn’t like Shelly. She didn’t plead for help.
Gertie backed out of the house. Shut the door softly. Maybe the cop stationed there saw her. Maybe he didn’t. Holding the lockbox, she jogged with bouncing belly down the walk, past the naked topiary, to her house. Her run-down house, which didn’t smell like cheap perfume.
118 Maple Street
Saturday, July 31
Back in the Schroeder house, Rhea poured herself a nooner of wine. Glugged, hoping to find some relief for this excruciating pain in her knee. Red and rage-eyed, she searched with her daughter for Hammy, who really was missing. They checked all the usual places, and when that didn’t work they checked the basement, where bitumen had gathered and someone had left footprints all over the tile. They found Hammy there, trapped in oil that had seeped up.
Ella cried.
Rhea intuited that Ella could not tolerate one more indignity. She needed this animal. So she waded through the muck. She lifted Hammy and rinsed him gently with detergent. Got into the car and drove with Ella and Hammy to the East Williston Veterinary Clinic, where he was declared healthy. Or she? Who knew. Who cared. It was a rodent.
“You see?” she asked. “We found him and he’s fine.”
Ella began to cry uncontrollably at that, but she was in the back seat, and Rhea up front. There was too much traffic to pull over.
When they got home from the veterinarian’s office, Rhea limped back down to the basement. Something had bothered her that she couldn’t place. A scratch carved into her memory; something not quite right.
She returned to the footprints. They were bigger than hers, but narrow. Feminine. For the briefest of moments, she turned flush, thinking it was Shelly, come home at last.
But then, beside the stairs, tucked neatly in a shadow, were Gertie Wilde’s cute and practical Payless walkers.
116 Maple Street
Saturday, July 31
Shelly’s phone. It had no signal. Wasn’t on network. Gertie charged it. Went through all the applications. Only one of them had files—the photo app. She flicked through the dozens of images she found there. Some showed shoulders. Others a side, or a stomach, or a bottom. But most showed a back. All were fresh, taken soon after whatever blow had been issued. Viewing the pictures felt pornographic, as if the simple act of seeing made her guilty, too.
Gertie remembered Rhea’s words from that night months ago: Shelly can’t keep her hair neat. It goads me. I’d like to talk about it with you, because I know you like Shelly. I know you like me. I know you won’t judge.
It came to her that the oval-clustered bruises in these photos were from a brush.
In the quiet of that den, where she’d pinned so many hopes for a better life, Gertie curled up on herself and cried.
She might have gone to the police. But to get this evidence, Gertie had broken the law. The bruises, all inside Shelly’s bathing suit line, did not have an obvious author. None were more than a year old. In other words, none preexisted the Wildes.
What if she handed this to Bianchi, and it only made Arlo look guiltier?
She returned the phone to the Pain Box. Locked it, so the kids didn’t stumble across those awful photos. Put it beside her makeshift bed in the den.
Lunch and then dinner came. She tried to pretend to the children that everything was normal. Explained that they had no reason to worry. They knew something was wrong, or else they were absorbed in their own emotions. They didn’t ask questions.
That night, Bianchi stopped by to tell Gertie that CPS was keeping Arlo for another night. She lingered in the doorway, thinking she should hand over the evidence. But for all she knew, Rhea had planted the brush that had made those bruises in the glove compartment of the Passat. Or Arlo’s nightstand. Anyplace at all.
“Is something wrong?” he asked.
She looked at him for a while.
“Point taken. Have a good night.”
She couldn’t climb the stairs, so the children put themselves to bed. They called good night from far away, their voices uncertain.
On the couch, in the dark, without the protection of her husband, Gertie’s mind roamed: Shelly can’t keep her hair neat. It goads me. I’d like to talk about it with you, because I know you like Shelly. I know you like me. I know you won’t judge.
But Rhea hadn’t just vented about Shelly that night. Boozy, she’d talked about how trapped she’d felt, and her unhappiness. These were all the things that Gertie also felt, but had always been too scared to say out loud. Sometimes having a family and people who depend on you is too much. But you can’t leave them. They need you. So you resent them just a little.