“I bet.” She opens the door and motions me outside. “Let’s go.”
We sit in her unmarked sedan while I explain as much as I can, which is mostly a collection of random facts. A rundown of where I’ve been is unnecessary because Wilson has apparently been following me since I left my dorm. She watched me outside Vivienne Voxhall’s building, managed to track me down in Washington Heights. I’m getting the sense that she’s been watching me a lot. I explain what I now know about my mom’s job and why I ended up at Jules’s.
“I didn’t find anything about any of the other people my mom was doing this fixing for. But, like I said, Jules was really freaked-out, and maybe she’s just crazy or maybe she’s not. I did find a bunch of documents.” I gesture to the box in her back seat. “I don’t know what they mean.”
She glances back at the box. “You found them where?”
“In Jules’s apartment.”
She holds up a hand. “You stole something?”
“Borrowed. I didn’t break in,” I said. “The super opened the door.”
“Whichheshouldn’t have done.” She eyeballs me. “And what did you find?”
“Documents about some lawsuit against a drug manufacturer,” I say. “Jules has a whole box of legal documents all about this one lawsuit. My mom’s law firm is defending them. And there were emails from an employee threatening to expose the fact that the company lied, and another one from that employee to my mom, but it was only her name; there was no text—which is also weird.”
“Fine, I’ll take a look. But I want to be sure it’s crystal clear that you are not to come close to breaking any laws trying to ‘help’ here. You’d be surprised what a defense attorney can get excluded, claiming we put you up to it,” she says. “What you should have done when you first learned about any of this was call me, Cleo.”
“I know, I—”
“No, apparently youdon’tknow. You think your biggest problem is that you can’t find the person responsible for all this. But you know what’ll be a bigger problem? If youdofind whoever it is.” She gestures toward the building. “Up in some apartment alone where no one even knows to look. You do remember the blood on the floor in your home, right? You think this person will be happy if and when you do find them?”
My throat feels raw again. I don’t especially care if Wilson sees me crying—it might even make her back off a little. But I am afraid if I start crying now, I might never stop.
“I can’t do nothing,” I say. “I feel too guilty. I’ve gotten so much wrong about her … and I’ve been so mean to her for so long. What if … what if that’s the last thing she remembers about me?”
Wilson sighs heavily. “Your mom knows you love her. From one ungrateful daughter to another—they always know how we feel, even when we don’t.” She taps the edge of the steering wheel with her index finger. “Listen … I came to find you initially because I need you to confirm your timeline for the evening your mom disappeared. You arrived at the house at six-thirty p.m. Is that right?”
“Seriously?” I shoot her a look. “You still think maybe it was me?”
“No. I do not,” she says, looking right at me. “I never did. But I do need to know the time you got there.”
“Six-thirty, yes. I guess,” I say.
“And your dad says that you called him at around six-fifty-five p.m.?” Her tone is very deliberate. “Does that also sound right?”
“I didn’t check the clock. But I looked around inside, found the shoe and everything. And I was supposed to get there at six-thirty. I was probably a little late—I usually am. So when all is said and done? Six-fifty-five could be right.”
Wilson nods, frowns. “Because we checked with the airline, and it seems your dad’s plane actually landed at four-thirty p.m.”
It takes me a second to process what she’s telling me. Didn’t my dad tell me that he’d just walked off a plane when I first called him? Now there’s nearly an hour unaccounted for, during which time my mom disappeared.
“Okay,” I say carefully. “I don’t know the details of his flight times.”
“A neighbor says they sawyouhead into your house about five-thirty p.m. Is it possible you somehow got the time wrong?”
“Possible that I was a whole hourearly? I’ve never been earlyfor anything in my life, let alone by a full hour,” I say. “Who told you that?”
“Older gentleman, lives right next door?” she says. “He says that he saw you going up the steps then. He described the clothes you were wearing.”
“Oh, you meanGeorge?” I ask. “George has no idea where he is half the time. I mean, I feel bad for him and he’s a good person and everything, but he’s not exactly on point when it comes to details like time. He always used to yell about the garbage not getting picked up when it had been the day before. My mom said that was how they first picked up on the Alzheimer’s. He was losing whole days.”
She shrugs. “He wasn’t exactly happy being disturbed or letting us sit at his kitchen table. But he seemed lucid enough.”
“That’s George—he comes and then completely goes. He used to be a kind of famous doctor. But his wife died, and then he got sick. My mom checks in on him most weekends—she isn’t bothered by the hostility.” Because that’s the way she is—kind. Maybe that’s the same reason she hovers over me. Maybe it is just her trying to show love. “Anyway, in exchange, George does things like sweep up our yard, like without asking, which is sometimes nice and sometimes kind of … aggressive. But his kids have, like, abandoned him … Maybe he saw my mom coming home at five-thirty; we do look a lot alike.”
She makes a clucking sound. “I suppose that could be. Now is thereanythingelse you’ve left out?”
