•••
I choose carefully what I will wear to the police station. I dress in a tastefully subdued gray shirtwaist with black piped trim and eyelet lace at the neck and cuffs. I haven’t worn my wedding ring in many weeks, but I slip it on now before I go. Kat doesn’t ask where I am going, but I can see that she wants to know.
“Just some business to take care of in the city,” I tell her. “I’ll be home later today, I promise.”
Elliot drives me to the train station, and again, as before, offers to accompany me.
“Now, how would I explain you? You are unexplainable.”
“I suppose I am.”
“I’ll be fine.”
“I don’t know,” he says, frowning. “Maybe it’s time to prepare yourself for learning that he is not dead after all,” Elliot says. “Maybe they found him and he’s alive. Maybe that fall down the stairs wasn’t that bad.”
“It was bad. He could barely breathe when I left him. And if he’d been found alive they would’ve said so; they wouldn’t ask me to come in to provide additional information. I don’t want to talk about this anymore, Elliot. It’s making me nervous.”
We ride the rest of the way to San Mateo in silence.
The city has improved greatly in the months I have been away. Everywhere there is the aroma of fresh lumber and paint and the sounds of hammers and saws. New buildings have risen, most ofthe piles of ash are gone, and the landscape has gone from desolate wasteland to reborn city. It is much easier to get a carriage from the train station this time, and I am at the new police station many minutes before eleven o’clock.
I am told to wait after I give my name to the uniformed officer seated at a tall desk in the tiled lobby. I spend the minutes before anyone comes for me calming my thumping heart. When at last my name is called I am taken to a room with an oaken table and chairs that are new and that smell of tung oil. There’s a woman seated there with a stenography machine that also looks new. Next to her is a man I do not know. It is not Detective Morris.
“Thank you so much for coming in, Mrs. Hocking,” this man says, his voice cordial, his smile polite. “I’m Deputy Ambrose Logan.” He is a little older than me, perhaps thirty, and he reminds me a little of my brother Mason with his dark hair and eyes. When I ask where Detective Morris is, I am told that the case of my missing husband has been referred to the U.S. Marshal’s Office. I have to ask this Deputy Logan what that is. He tells me the U.S. Marshal’s Office deals with cases that are federal in nature. I don’t know what that means, either, but I do not ask. The deputy reaches down to the seat of the empty chair on his other side and lifts up a file thick with papers and sets it in front of him. A photograph of Martin slides out when he opens it and lands askew between us.
“May we begin?” he says.
At first the questions are the same as those I answered when I first reported Martin missing. But as the minutes go by and as the woman in the room taps out everything I say, the deputy’s questions become more and more about me. He keeps looking at the papers in that file. So many papers.
He asks me if I saw Martin the day of the quake, if I knew that Martin was traveling back to San Francisco that day or that his automobile had been found outside San Rafaela on the road to San Francisco.
He knows about Belinda.
He knows Belinda was in my house the morning of the quake and he knows Martin was married to Belinda all the while being married to me.
He knows about Candace.
God in heaven, he knows about Annabeth.
My head is spinning. Deputy Logan has so many papers. What else does he know? The room is getting warm and I want to leave.
I rise to go because we are no longer talking about the whereabouts of Martin Hocking. He is instead accusing me of being an accomplice of Martin’s, of being a part of his terrible schemes. Of collaborating with him to get to Belinda’s gold and Kat’s inheritance.
But the deputy bids me to please retake my seat, that it will be better for me if I finish the interview.
Better for me? How can anything he is saying be better for me? This man thinks I am like Martin Hocking. I am nothing like Martin. How dare he suggest I am?
The deputy just wants the truth, that’s all he wants, he says, and I tell him Ihavebeen telling him the truth.
But, no, he says. I’ve not been telling him the truth. I tell him I have. And he says I have been lying to him since the moment I sat down and told him my name.
30
Beads of sweat break out on my forehead and on the back of my neck, even though the room has suddenly gone cold.
“My name is Sophie Hocking.” I force myself to look Deputy Logan straight in the eye. I say it again. “My name is Sophie Hocking.”
The deputy says nothing. He doesn’t pull out a sheet of paper from that bulging file of his, and he doesn’t contradict me. He just continues to look at me, studying my face.
