Min takes a sip of tea and then puts her cup down. ‘I just find it…odd… that the two of you survived that day at sea, and Greg didn’t. And that you get most of his money.’
Jill feels something slithering down her spine like a snake– an accusation.
‘It was an accident,’ Ted says firmly. ‘He slipped and went overboard. And I didn’t know I would get his money. He never told me.’
Min shoots back, ‘That’s not true. He told me that you knew, that he’d discussed it with you. So, forgive me my suspicions, but I’ve suspected you since the day it happened. Greg was far too good a sailor to go overboardall on his own.’ She stares back at them knowingly.
Jill can taste bile at the back of her throat.
Chapter Forty-Seven
TED STARES BACKat Min with pure animosity. Perhaps this is it. Is she their blackmailer, then? That is what they came here to find out. They must get her to admit it. ‘What exactly are you suggesting, Min?’ Ted asks. His voice has the ring of cold steel. Jill sits rigid beside him.
‘Do I have to spell it out for you?’ Min says.
‘Why don’t you.’
She leans forward. ‘I think you pushed him off the boat. I think you got out there in the stormy weather and saw an opportunity, and you took it. Because you hated him, and you knew you’d get his money.’
‘That’s not what happened,’ Ted says.
Jill breaks in. ‘Min, how could you eventhinkthat?’ she cries. ‘You weren’t there! You don’t know what happened, you didn’t see how we tried to save him, how we circled and circled, looking for him, with the waves so high, when we might have been swept overboard ourselves!’
Min sniffs. ‘So you say. But you’re right, I wasn’t there. No one was there but you two. Which isconvenient.’
‘How dare you!’ Jill hisses. ‘You’re just angry that Ted’s getting the money instead of you! You don’t know anything! How can you fling such a baseless accusation at us?’
Ted realizes that Jill is trying to goad Min into an admission.
But Min remains cool. She doesn’t rise to the bait and admit how she knows, that she put the cameras in their house. Instead, she says, ‘I spoke to that special agent, from the Coast Guard. He came here to talk to me.Heseems to think it was murder.’
Ted is taken aback. He didn’t know that Ramirez had spoken to Min. ‘When was this?’
She ignores the question. Instead, she says, ‘I know something that youdon’tknow.’
Ted goes still, waiting. Apprehensive.
She says, ‘Greg was dying. He had pancreatic cancer. He only had months to live.’
The news stuns him. He immediately rejects it. ‘I don’t believe it.’
‘Believe what you like. He asked me to go to the doctor with him, because he didn’t have anyone else. He didn’t want to giveyouthe satisfaction.’ She sits back in her chair. ‘There are medical records. He would have died anyway, leaving you his fortune.’ She gives a small, fixed smile. ‘I sometimes wonder if, after you pushed him off the boat, he had time to think that you’d go down for murder unnecessarily. He would have liked that. Oh, but that couldn’t happen, because there wouldn’t be anyevidence, would there?’ It’s the way she says it; it makes his blood run cold.She knows.
Ted looks back at her cold eyes. This is not a Min he even recognizes; this is someone else.
She rises from her chair. ‘I think you’d better leave.’
In shocked silence, Ted and Jill follow her to the door. Ted feels hollow inside. If what she said is true, and Greg was dying anyway, it was all for nothing. And all this horror that has followed– it was unnecessary. He’s afraid of what Jill will say as soon as they are out of earshot.
They walk down the corridor in silence and wait for the elevator. Jill just stares straight ahead. He can see the whiteness of her knuckles where she grips the strap of her purse. She waits until they are outside the building, and then she lets him have it.
‘He wasdying?’ she hisses into his ear in a low voice. ‘For fuck’s sake,we did it all for nothing?’ They’re out on the sidewalk and no one is nearby to hear them. Now her eyes bore into his and they are beyond angry. They are entirely unforgiving.
‘She must be making that up,’ he protests, keeping his voice down. But he fears it’s true. He feels strangely detached. What a mess he’s made of things.
‘Why would she make it up?’
He focuses back on his enraged wife. ‘To fuck with us. She’s obviously fucking with us! Everything she said was calculated. Saying she thinks we did it. Telling us that Ramirez was there. She was playing with us. She wants to punish us because we’re getting the money, and she isn’t.’ He pauses, catches his breath. ‘If it’s true Greg was sick, she’s probably kicking herself for divorcing him– if she’d just waited a couple of years, she would have got it all.’
