I take another breath, closing my eyes for a second and then leveling my gaze at him.
“Please don’t pretend you had no idea. It was you, Sam.”
15
SAM PULLS BACK, BITING HIS LIP. I DON’T KNOW HIM WELLenough to read his response—whether he had an inkling and is just playing dumb, or he’s truly shocked and appalled.
I didn’t meet Sam until over a year into my relationship with Jamie. He’d been on a sabbatical in California until then, meaning my only exposure to him was seeing his photograph in the apartment and hearing his voice on speakerphone in the car a couple of times. He looked and sounded too erudite to be much fun, but since Jamie was such a fan, I’d figured I’d at least be able to tolerate him.
Our first meeting was at Jamie’s apartment, not all that long after I moved in and Sam had returned to the East Coast. He was fresh from tennis in Central Park with Jamie, still a little sweaty and with his hair swept back off his face. Inexplicably, and without an ounce of warning, my heart hurled itself against my rib cage.
I certainly did my best to hide my attraction to him, especially when—despite what steps I took to fight it—that attraction swelled from twinge to vague, troubling crush, and eventually to a shameful infatuation. But Sam is an observer, and highly intuitive, and I was sure he must have decoded things like my regular failure to hold his gaze and the frequency with which I begged off from dinners that would include only the three of us or double dates with him and the concert violinist he was seeing for a while.
“I’m sorry,” Sam says finally. His tone sounds heartfelt, with no edge at all this time. “I wasn’t aware, Kiki.” He shakes his head and drifts over to a window, looking out, even though there’s little to see. “I take that back. I did wonder a couple times, but I suspected it was all in my head. I swear that’s the truth.”
“No, it wasn’t in your head.”
“Butthat’sthe reason you called off the wedding?”
“Not entirely. But what I was feeling helped crystallize something I’d begun to suspect—that as much as I cared for Jamie, I wasn’t in love with him. Back in my twenties, something happened at work that really knocked me for a loop, and in hindsight I realize that I gravitated to him partly because I was still craving a safe harbor.”
He turns toward me and cocks one of his thick, dark eyebrows. “You want to say what that something was?”
“Maybe another time. But—I’m glad to have cleared the air. We have to get to the truth about Jamie, and that means we need to be in sync.”
“All right,” he says quietly. “Let’s be in sync then.”
I nod, and as I take a seat on the couch, he crosses the room and lowers himself into an armchair across from me.
“You really think the dog adoption means Jamie couldn’t have killed himself?” he asks.
It’s hard not to be frustrated by how dubious he sounds. “Don’tyou?”
He lifts a shoulder, not quite a shrug. “As horrible as it is to think someone murdered him, I can believe that theory over him taking his own life. But is the adoption enough to prove it was a homicide?”
“No, but it’s something to start with, and I feel we have to act on it.”
“How?”
“You could talk to Drew.”
“Why not the cops?”
“I tried,” I tell him. “I called the detective yesterday, and though he promised to pass along what I’d learned, he didn’t sound very invested, and my guess is that they’ve made up their minds about Saturday night. And to some degree I can’t blame them. They’ve apparently had, like, two murders in this area during the past four years.”
Sam leans back in the chair and then glances off into the middle distance. I try not to stare because looking too closely at him risks stirring things up in me, bringing back feelings I hated myself for.
“Jess Nolan,” he says finally.
“What?”
“Jess Nolan. That must be one of the two people you mean. She was killed in the woods behind the Foxton County Fair.”
Yes, that was the girl I read about. And I know that fair, I realize. I wanted to go with Jamie last summer.
“Did you know Jess at all, Sam?”
“Only vaguely. She worked at the tennis club, and I’d seen her around a bit. People were really shaken up by what happened.”
