Elsie glances at her car. She could get in, start the engine, trail him that way. It would take only seconds to get the key into the ignition, but she already knows she doesn’t have seconds to spare.
She turns on her heels and begins to follow him. What was thisperson doing hiding,watching, while Cheryl’s friends and family mourned?
He is tall, she notices as she follows him, and as slim as a rod. He has an unusual gait, as if his bones don’t bend. But he is quick, quicker than her, and she struggles to keep him in her sights as he turns a corner at the end of the street. She hurries to catch up, rounding the corner just as he is getting into a vehicle, a utility van that he had parked out of the way, under an oak.
There is a logo on the back of his vehicle, a company advertisement of sorts, but from this distance it is blurred and indecipherable. Elsie takes the splutter of the engine as her cue, and she runs, heels pounding the sidewalk. When she is close enough, she pulls out her notepad, leafing past scrawled notes and puzzle clues, then takes a pencil and quickly sketches what she can see.
When the truck has disappeared, Elsie’s ears pounding with the echoes of adrenaline, she moves her hand away from her notebook and reveals what could be their very first piece of evidence.
Ten
Roger had arrivedjust after nine, as Beverley was anxiously turning a whiskey sour in her hands.
She knew she couldn’t ask him about Emily Roswell, the name she had heard on the radio, straightaway. She’d likely get as much information as he’d given her about Cheryl Herrera, which was next to nothing. So she’d removed his coat, hung it on the rack and allowed him to lead her upstairs.
It’s the behavior of a mistress, a shameful routine she has mastered since things began, with a crappy cup of coffee at a diner off the interstate. Henry had been sentenced and was already at San Quentin. Roger had kept in touch, telling Beverley to drop him a line if she ever needed anything, anything at all. He was grateful for how she had cooperated with the police when they were looking to strengthen their case after Henry’s arrest. Beverley had given them everything, whatever they wanted: free rein in the house, access to Henry’s business papers, her family’s calendars, photographs, water from the taps andfood from the fridge. At that point, she’d have done anything to ward off the finger-pointing, theofcourse she knews.
But there was something else. She felt she owed Roger. When Henry had been arrested, Roger was one of the only people to treat her with kindness instead of hostility and suspicion. She had been dumbstruck, entirely numb, when the police knocked on her door and told her why they were taking her husband, but Roger had placed a hand on her shoulder and gently told her to pack a bag and grab some clothes for Benjamin and the baby. “We’re going to take you to a hotel and check you in under a different name, okay?” His voice was gravelly but warm. “The press won’t know you’re there. You’re going to stay there for a few days while we search your home. Everything’s going to be okay.”
Those were the words she’d needed to hear, and she’d clung to them. She still does.
She was so lonely, back in the house, once the cops had eventually left, when there was no more digging and probing and the walls rang with silence. How could they expect her simply to tidy up behind them and continue with the rest of her life? She had been granted an emergency divorce from Henry; he hadn’t contested it. She had money of her own, from her modeling when she was a teen, and she owned the house, not Henry, so in theory she would never need a man again. But the isolation, the shame, the endless, gnawing questions, the waking up to find the planters smashed out front, the accusations hurled from the open windows of passing cars—it all got to her after a while.
So she’d called Roger, and gratefully swallowed the kindness he extended.
“Is there anything I could have done to stop it?” she asked him as they sat across from each other, her nails picking at the flimsy checkered tablecloth. She’s seen it since—survivors of tragedy will oftenlook back and talk about the small signs of impending disaster. The minute yet seismic details that indicated that their day was about to be different, that their life was about to change. They’d smashed a glass that morning, perhaps; there was something uneasy about the quality of the air in their house; they’d burned their toast. But Beverley hadn’t known, hadn’t woken up feeling any differently at all on the morning Henry was arrested.
The diner smelled of frying onions and stale coffee. Hamburgers sat untouched on Beverley’s and Roger’s plates. Curtis Lee was on the radio, “Pretty Little Angel Eyes.” She’d waited for the detective to answer. She needed him to say no. She needed him to say there was nothing she could have done differently.
“I don’t know, Mrs. Lightfoot.”
“It’s Edwards now.” She glanced nervously at her plate. Relish was oozing from the burger.
Roger sighed, reached for his food, then thought better of it, folded his arms. “It’s possible he displayed some transgressive behaviors that you missed, but you can’t be blamed for that.”
Her eyes shot up to his, her heart quickening with gratitude. He didn’t blame her. He didn’t think it was all her fault.
“These guys”—he slowly leaned back in his seat, spread his legs—“they’re clever. They pass by unnoticed, get away with these things for so long, because they are masters at manipulating those around them.” He leaned forward again, put his large hand flat on the table, and she was sure she could see his forefinger move almost imperceptibly toward hers. “A woman like you didn’t stand a chance.”
Roger came around after that. She was careful to keep their trysts hidden from the children. Benjamin and Audrey were still very young—they wouldn’t know what was going on—but hiding it all from them meant she could almost pretend to herself that it wasn’t happening, that she hadn’t become the sort of woman her mother would despise.
She rarely asked about his wife. The details she gleaned from Roger’s passing comments did nothing to make her feel any better about their deception. Enid was British; she knew that, at least. Her family had moved over after the First World War and had settled in California. Enid had been a schoolteacher for a while—kindergarten—before Roger’s job took over their lives. She was athletic, Beverley gathered, accomplished—golf, swimming, that sort of thing. Beverley could barely lift a tennis racket.
“There are three kinds of police officers,” Roger says now as he steps under the showerhead, his hair darkening to slate in the hot water, “because there are different reasons people become cops.”
She asked him why he’d joined the police. It’s a habit of hers: asking questions that demand complex answers—a means to keep him here, with her. She steps into the shower and reaches for the soap behind him, then runs the bar vigorously across her nails. She resents the fact that she will never feel truly clean again, no matter how hard she scrubs in the shower.
“You’ve got your guys who fall into it,” Roger continues. “Maybe their fathers were cops, or they didn’t know what else to do, figured it would be an easy life—free coffee, paperwork at the station—the guys who do the bare minimum, wear the uniform, get fat, collect their pension.”
She begins lathering his chest, comforted by the feel of his bones, his flesh, the hard reality of his body.
“Then you’ve got your guys with a point to prove. Now, these guys can be dangerous. They’re here for areason. I heard about a guy in Saratoga”—he lifts his elbows so she can soap his armpits—“who joined up because his own daughter was murdered. Smart guy, a good cop, but emotionally he wasn’t fit for it, wound up shooting two innocent guys because he liked them for a kidnapping case. Obsession—that’s what happens when you bring your own baggage into the job.”
“And the third?” She reaches around to his back, smoothing the soap over the muscles there, once taut but now softened with age.
“The third are those who do it because they know what’sjust.” He moves a strand of wet hair from her forehead. “They know there are people born bad, and that those who aren’t, the people like you, need protecting—simple as that.”
“I take it you’re the third kind?” She smiles. She knows Roger feels overlooked in his job, always playing second fiddle to Cornwell.
