“Only to the person who mattered, and that was my wife,” he said. “Guess what? She didn’t believe me. Never has. Everyone who knew me—who I thought knew me—believed the worst of me without ever questioning it. Do you know how that feels? To realize that all the people around you think so little of you? That it never once occurred to them to ask questions? To be skeptical? To give you the benefit of the doubt? If that’s what people think of me, then I guess that’s who I am. Why should I bother being anything else?”
Anger and hurt rolled off him in waves. It was a deep wound.
“Does Cassidy know why you and Dani were having marital issues in the first place?”
He shook his head. “I don’t know, honestly. When things started to go south, she was a lot younger. The first time we separated, Dani and I decided to just tell her that we were having trouble getting along and we were going to take a break. Now that she’s practically an adult, I don’t know. I don’t think Dani would tell her but it’s possible Cass figured it out or heard Dani talking to someone else about it. She’s never said anything to me.”
“You don’t want her to know,” Josie said slowly. “Because if she did, she might think the worst of you, too. That’s why you’re keeping your distance.”
Again, he remained silent, but Josie knew she was on to something. It was clear from all the texts between him and Dani that, in her eyes, he’d become a source of perpetual disappointment. Not just to her but to their daughter. Turner didn’t fully own it, but he also didn’t do much to avoid living up to it. It made a bizarre sort of sense. Get Cassidy used to being disappointed in him so that one day, if she found out about his supposed affair, it would just be par for the course. For him, it wouldn’t be so painful to see her devastation if she believed he’d actually had an affair. He’d be somewhat inured to it.
Turner was nearly as emotionally messed up as she was, maybe more now that she’d had so much therapy.
“Tell me about this pattern of behavior, Quinn. We’ve already wasted entirely too much time on my bullshit.”
Josie laid out the theory she and Gretchen had come up with as quickly and efficiently as possible. Then she repeated her question from earlier. “Is there anyone you can think of from Alden in the months before you moved who might have had an interest in Dani?”
He scoffed. “An interest? Thanks for watering that down for my benefit.”
Josie smiled weakly. “Maybe I should have led with that.”
“There’s no one,” he said. “At least, not that I remember, but like I said, we didn’t see much of each other back then. Ask Annette. See if she can get you a list of Dani’s friends and coworkers from back then. I’d ask her, but I’ll be damned if I try to convince her my wife was the one having an affair.”
“Noah and the Chief already interviewed friends and coworkers in Alden, but I’ll ask Annette to look at the list and make sure we haven’t missed anyone.” She patted Spot’s side and hauled herself to her feet.
“Quinn,” he said, making no effort to get up, “right before Dani changed her mind about following me here to Denton, there was this day I came home from work, and she was on the front porch with a trash bag. There were buckets and buckets of those yellow flowers they always sell in the fall.”
“Mums,” Josie said. “Chrysanthemums.”
“Yeah,” he said. “That’s it. They weren’t there when I left so I knew she just bought them except she was throwing them away. Every last one. When I asked her what she was doing, she told me they had some kind of mold on them and they needed to go. We had an argument. I asked how much they cost and she said it was none of my business. I told her to take them back for a refund and she said she’d handle it.” He paused for a deep breath before continuing. “She didn’t buy those mums, did she?”
Josie couldn’t answer that, but she nodded anyway.
“What do yellow chrysanthemums mean?”
“I don’t know.”
But she knew where to find out. The book about the Victorian language of flowers that Professor Dustin Emmer had let her borrow was in one of her desk drawers at the station. By thetime she got back, Gretchen was printing out some documents, plucking them frantically from the printer.
“I have something you’ll want to see,” she said.
Josie flipped through the pages of the old book carefully until she found what she was looking for: yellow chrysanthemums, running a fingertip across to their meaning.
Slighted love.
THIRTY-SIX
“What am I looking for, exactly?” Josie flipped through one of Maxine Barnes’s credit card statements while Gretchen drove.
“I didn’t have time to highlight any of the entries but you’re looking for charges for gasoline. Every Friday.”
In the center console, the other statements were rolled up and stuck inside the cupholder. There were at least four of them and the most recent one was late February, five months earlier.
As Gretchen navigated through heavy festival traffic from a concert that had just let out toward Northeast Denton, Josie searched for the charges. All the statements showed the same thing. Maxine Barnes had stopped at the same gas station almost every Friday morning at nearly the same time—sixa.m.—for almost seven months.
“She gets gas on Fridays,” Josie said. “What am I missing?”
“She got gas on Fridays at a station in Ormes.”
