“Uh, I’m just thinking about that night.... You said Percy meant nothing to Jamie, but what if he meant something toher?”
“They’d had, like, three dates, and one of them was her showing up unannounced at his house with a pizza, so it’s hard to picture her deciding to murder him because he’d given her the cold shoulder.”
“Still, the police should be told about her. Can you mention that, too, when you speak to Drew?”
“Sure.... Look, sorry, but I need to go.” He pushes himself up from the armchair. “We can talk more about this later.”
I rise from my seat too. “Do you think I’m totally off base, Sam?”
“No, I don’t. But as I said, it’s a lot to take in.”
I see him to the door, and when we end up reaching for the doorknob simultaneously, our hands accidentally touch. My breath catches in response.
“I’ll call you tomorrow, okay?” Sam says. “After I speak to Drew.”
And then he’s gone.
As I listen to the sound of his car driving off, my mind’s a jumble of emotions, some scuffling with each other. It’s a relief, cathartic really, to have finally unburdened myself of a secret that tortured me for well over a year and left me ashamed and remorseful. And with it finally out in the open, it means that I can talk more easily to Sam. But at the same time, there’s a whole new awkwardness to contend with. Was he embarrassed by what I said? Does he pity me?
Based on his reaction tonight, it seems pretty clear that my attraction to him wasn’t reciprocated in even the smallest measure, that he never experienced what I felt.Feel.Yes, feel, because there’s no way todeny what’s going on with me now. Despite five months of working hard to banish the man from my brain, two short encounters with him this week have rekindled my infatuation, as if it’s been lying stealthily beneath the surface for all these months. I’m going to have to do my best to squash those feelings—because I need Sam’s help right now, and we have to interact with as little clumsiness as possible.
I pour another half glass of wine and wander from one room to the next in a circle, reflecting on what Sam said about the party. Even if he didn’t notice anything out of the ordinary, someone clearly arrived at the house either furious with or threatened by Jamie.
And I can’t dismiss Percy as easily as Sam did. Maybe there was even more to the relationship than he knew, and she was enraged to find she was being jilted. Plenty of men have died at the hands of a woman they dumped. I need to find out more about her.
Reaching the dining room for the third time, I take a seat at the table and use my laptop to do a google search for Percy West, Litchfield County. The only relevant link I find is to an Instagram account. When I click through, I see that it’s public, with her appearing to post a couple of times a week. It’s definitely the woman who was at the party. She labels herself a “garden guru,” and her posts—both photos and reels—mainly feature her posing with plants or flowers, looking playful, even flirty. She doesn’t mention her actual job title and she doesn’t tag her workplace.
But there’s nothing about the posts that makes her appear, in Sam’s words, not quite right.
Why had she lied to Jamie? To make herself more appealing in his eyes? I search next for the Salisbury Garden Center, a place I’m familiar with—and from my time in this neck of the woods, I’m pretty certain it’s the only place like it in the town. According to the website, the doors open at eight thirty tomorrow morning.
As I lean back in my chair, my gaze drifts aimlessly over the table, surveying the files and notepads I’ve scattered there. Lying in the midst is the list of properties I found at Jamie’s apartment. I’ve been so preoccupied this afternoon and evening that I lost track of my plan to google them.
That will be a top priority tomorrow, when my brain isn’t as fried. But so is learning more about Percy. I’m going to head to the garden center as soon as it opens.
And then, just out of curiosity, I look up Jess Nolan, reading a few more stories about her murder. It doesn’t seem as if the police ever had a suspect, at least as far as the local press was aware. According to the accounts I read, one person who knew her casually recalled seeing her at the fair, and several people reported noticing a woman fitting her description, but she’d been alone on each occasion. So what Sam said could very well be true. That she struck up a conversation with a guy who worked at the fair, perhaps on the fringe of the fairgrounds so they hadn’t been noticed, and then snuck off into the woods with him—where he assaulted and killed her.
Before going upstairs, I make one last loop around the first floor, double-checking that the doors and windows are securely locked. Thanks to Sam’s presence, I’d managed to put the frigid room episode out of my mind, but as I head to bed it’s all I can think about.Don’t be silly, I think. As I assured myself earlier, there’s no such thing as ghosts. And no one breaks into someone’s home to run their AC.
I sigh gratefully when I enter the bedroom a few minutes later and find that it’s hot as hell.
FOUR YEARS AGO
He grabbed the rock and carried it with him as he tore through the woods. It was a risk, he knew. It was covered with hair and blood, and some other gunk, too, and since it was big, he could only wedge half of it into his pocket. He had to cover the rest with his hand.
But he’d heard enough about forensics to know that his fingerprints might be on the rock or his DNA, something to fuck him up. It would have been stupid to leave it behind.
His car was at the far end of the parking lot, which he was relieved to see was pretty empty, and he’d noticed earlier there weren’t any cameras. He walked casually, like he had all the time in the world, but he could feel the sweat pooling on his back and on his hands, too.
He reached his car and slipped into the front seat, and within a minute he was pulling out onto the road. As soon as he was back at the house, he stashed the rock and his clothes behind the furnace in the basement and then took a shower so hot it almost burned his nuts off, scrubbing his skin until it was nearly raw.
In the morning he was on the road soon after six, though not in his own car this time. It took him only fifteen minutes to reach the Massachusetts state line, and then he kept going, another thirty minutes pastGreat Barrington. He ended up hurling the rock into a field that looked like it hadn’t been farmed in decades, and then heaving the clothes he’d worn last night into a dumpster at the edge of a town.
He’d never planned for things to turn into a fucking shitstorm, though maybe he should have. Because after weeks of smiling and flirting and finally dropping the hint about the fair, she’d started this coy, clingy routine:Why can’t we drive there together? Don’t you want anyone to see us? There’s no actual rule at the club that says we’re not supposed to hang out with each other.
It had started to work his last nerve. And then it got worse as the night wore on—her getting all coy again and being weird about being in the woods, and then making it clear she wanted to get out of there. The worst was when she’d bolted like a deer, as if he was some kind of monster. And he knew she would just run and tell everyone how he was a loser and she’d ditched him right then and there.
16
