A hand rises to my mouth. “Oh, how awful,” I say, and I can’t imagine it, Tate finding either Will or me dead.
“She and Tate are in school together,” Will declares, looking at Officer Berg and then me. They share the same teacher. They share the same peers. The island school serves children in grades kindergarten through fifth while the rest, those in middle school and beyond, have to be ferried to the mainland for their education. Only fifty-some students go to the elementary school. Nineteen in Tate’s classroom because his first grade is combined with the kindergarten class.
“Where is the little girl now?” I ask, and he tells me that she’s with family while they try to connect with Jeffrey, traveling for business in Tokyo. The fact that he was out of the country doesn’t make Jeffrey Baines any less culpable in my mind. He could have hired someone to carry out the task.
“The poor thing,” I say, imagining years’ worth of therapy in the child’s future.
“What can we do to help?” I ask Officer Berg, and he tells me he’s been speaking to residents along the street, asking them questions. “What kind of questions?” I ask.
“Can you tell me, Dr. Foust, where you were last night around eleven o’clock?” the officer asks. In other words, do I have an alibi for the time the homicide occurred?
Last night Will and I watched TV together, after we’d put Tate to bed. We’d lain on different sides of the room, him spread out on the sofa, me curled up on the love seat as we do. Our allocated seats. Shortly after we’d gotten situated and turned on the TV, Will brought me a glass of cabernet from the bottle I’d opened the night before.
I watched him for a while from my own seat, remembering that it wasn’t so long ago that I would have found it impossible to sit this far away from Will, on separate sofas. I thought fondly of the days that he would have handed me the wine with a lengthy kiss to the lips, another hand feeling me up as he did so, and I would have found myself easily wiled by the persuasive kiss and the persuasive hands and those eyes. Those eyes! And then one thing would have led to the next and, soon after, we would have giggled like teenagers as we tried to hastily and noiselessly make love on the sofa, ears tuned in to the creaks of the floorboards above us, the rasp of box springs, footsteps on the stairs, to be sure the boys still slept. There was a magnanimity about Will’s touch, something that once made me feel giddy and light-headed, drunk without a drop to drink. I couldn’t get enough of him. He was intoxicating.
But then I found the cigarette, a Marlboro Silver with lipstick the color of strawberries along its filter. I found that first, followed shortly after by charges for hotel rooms on our credit card statement, a pair of panties in our bedroom that I knew weren’t mine. I realized at once that Will was magnanimous and intoxicating to someone other than me.
I didn’t smoke. I didn’t wear lipstick. And I was far too sensible to leave my underwear lying around someone else’s home.
Will just looked at me when I shoved the credit card statement under his nose, when I asked him outright about the hotel charges on our bill. He appeared so taken aback that he’d been caught that he didn’t have the wherewithal to manufacture a lie.
Last night, after I’d finished that first glass of wine, Will offered to top me off and I said yes, liking the way the wine made me feel weightless and calm. The next thing I remember was the siren rousing me from sleep.
I must have fallen asleep on the love seat. Will must have helped me to bed.
“Dr. Foust?” the officer asks.
“Will and I were here,” I tell him. “Watching TV. The evening news and thenThe Late Show. The one with Stephen Colbert,” I say as Officer Berg transcribes my words onto a tablet with his stylus. “Isn’t that right, Will?” I ask, and Will nods his head and confirms that I am right. It wasThe Late Show. The one with Stephen Colbert.
“And afterThe Late Show?” the officer asks, and I say only that afterThe Late Showwe went to bed.
“Is that right, sir?” Officer Berg asks.
“That’s right,” Will says. “It was late,” he tells the officer. “AfterThe Late Show, Sadie and I went to bed. She had to work in the morning and I, well,” he says, “I was tired. It was late,” he says again, and if he notices the redundancy, he doesn’t show it.
“What time was that?” Officer Berg asks.
“Must’ve been around twelve thirty,” I say because even though I don’t know for sure, I can do the math. He makes note of this, moving on, asking, “Have you seen anything out of the ordinary over the last few days?”
“Such as?” I inquire, and he shrugs, suggesting, “Anything unusual. Anything at all. Strangers lurking about. Cars you don’t recognize, cruising by, surveilling the neighborhood.”
But I shake my head and say, “We’re new here, Officer. We don’t know many people.”
But then I remember that Will knows people. That when I’m at work all day, Will has been making friends.
“There was one thing,” Will says, speaking up all of a sudden. The officer and I turn to him at the same time.
“What’s that?” asks Officer Berg.
But just as soon as he’s said it, Will tries to renege. He shakes his head. “Never mind,” he says. “I shouldn’t have brought it up. I’m sure it means nothing, just an accident on my part.”
“Why don’t you let me decide,” Officer Berg says.
Will explains, “There was a day not so long ago, a couple of weeks maybe. I’d taken Tate to school and headed out on a few errands. I wasn’t gone long, a couple of hours, tops. But when I came home, something was off.”
“How so?”
“Well, the garage door was up, for one. I would’ve bet my life I put it down. And then, when I came inside, I was nearly knocked over by the smell of gas. It was so potent. Thank God the dogs were okay. Lord only knows how long they’d been breathing it in. It didn’t take long to find the source. It was coming from the stove.”
