Page 19 of The Vacancy In Room 10

“I’ve already told you this. Like maybe when he jumped, his phone smacked on a rock below or something—not a gun I think, just a...crack. I said this already.”

“You have, and we appreciate it. It’s just a bit more important now—the exact timing. In light of some new information—”

“What information?” I cut him off.

He puts the papers on the table with his hand placed on top. “I know this will come as a shock, Ms. Hartley, but the autopsy report came in, and... Well, it’s become evident that this was not, in fact, self-inflicted.” He pushes the report across the table, but I can’t pick it up; I just stare at him, my mind spinning. I look down at the cover page of the report, and it blurs. My head is light, and a wave of nausea washes over me.

“That’s... No, that’s wrong, that’s not possible. I was talking to him. He said that he can’t do it anymore—and then, and then...wait. You said he jumped. And I mean, he must have because he was severely depressed, and he said he couldn’t... I don’t understand what you’re saying.” I stand and pluck my T-shirt away from my chest to try to cool down and not pass out.

“Of course that’s what everything pointed to because of your report of the phone call and his documented history of depression.”

“I don’t understand.”

“He wore a Fitbit,” Detective Harrison says, seemingly searching me for something—some reaction—and I don’t know what he could possibly be getting at.

“Yeah, I got it for him last year,” I say, not sure if my words are even audible. My mind is clouded with memories of that day—he wanted to get into running and intermittent fasting for whatever godforsaken reason—because he read some article, I guess, so I got it for him just because. And of course, he lost interest in running and fasting two weeks later, but he still liked it because it tracked his sleep. He’d tell me how many times he woke up in the night, according to his Fitbit, nearly every morning. He was like a kid about how cool the information was. “What does that have to do with anything?” I ask.

“These gadgets track a lot of things...like heart rate, but they also tell us when a heart stops. And according to the watch, his time of death was hours after that phone call. The assumption was that the bang you heard was his phone hitting a rock, or...” He stops, and I know he doesn’t want to say the sound could have been Henry hitting rock.

He continues, “If he jumped and his head hit the rock, he would have likely been rendered unconscious and then drowned in the water below.” He sees the tears running down my face and pauses. “I’m sorry. I know this is hard. It’s just that that was the initial assumption from the information we had,” he says, waiting for me to put something together, I guess, but I’m not. He was found right below where his car was parked—right below where he jumped from the cliff. So what is Harrison saying?

“Neither of those things happened—the head injury or the drowning—not the way it initially looked. The Fitbit information was the first clue that something was off, but then the exam found that the wound on his head was not consistent with hitting the rock on a tumble down, and there was no water in his lungs.”

“What does that mean? I don’t know what that means,” I say, but I think I do know, and I can feel my heart pounding against my rib cage, and my hands begin to tremble.

“It means he was placed in the water after he died. And it means the wound to the head was caused by something other than rock. He couldn’t have caused that blunt force trauma to the back of his head himself,” he says as gently as he can, I suppose, but the words still thunder in my ears and steal my breath.

“You’re saying someone murdered him. That’s what you’re telling me.”

“At this time, we are documenting it as foul play and opening a full investigation, yes.”

“No. That’s not... Who could have... It’s just not possible,” I’m mumbling, and my mind is reeling. Then the door opens, and another detective I’ve seen a few times before comes in. He greets me and then sets a small device in the center of the table.

“We have additional questions now that the circumstances have changed, so we’d like to record our conversation if that’s okay with you. You do have the right to have a lawyer present, but this shouldn’t take long—just some basic questions,” he says.

Oh, my god. A lawyer.

The bile pushes up into my throat. I have to steady my breath and angrily brush away the tears that keep falling when I suddenly realize that this is, in fact, an interrogation room, and I’m a suspect.

8

CASS

A few days later, I sit in front of a box fan in the front office and peek out the blinds to watch the pool girls play Texas Hold’em at their plastic table. Rosa is with them, and she seems as if nothing at all happened last night. I wonder if they know. Crystal and Jackie told me to take the afternoon off and come celebrate my new job with a couple of High Lifes, and I said I would, but I’m not especially good at pretending nothing is wrong, and something is very wrong with Rosa’s situation.

After almost an hour of indecision, the sweltering heat makes the decision for me, and I pull a T-shirt over my swimsuit and join the ladies at the poolside.

“Hey! Look who it is,” Jackie says overenthusiastically, pumping her fist in the air. She’s obviously been pouring some Seagram’s into her Mountain Dew this afternoon. Rosa smiles at me and pulls out a chair for me to sit. Crystal pulls a High Life from the Igloo cooler by her side and hands it to me.

“Egg Platter, huh?” Rosa asks, as easy as can be. I guess if she wants to pretend everything is normal, that’s what I do, too.

“Yeah, I guess so,” I say and crack open my beer can.

Jackie lifts her plastic Dora the Explorer cup, chock-full of Capri Sun and vodka, and says, “Cheers.”

“Yeah, thanks,” I say, meeting her cup with a tap.

All the kids are out. Jackie’s boys, Gordy and Earl Jr., doing cannonballs with Kevin and making the girls scream and squirt them with their Princess Jasmine squirt guns. The new kid sits on a deck chair reading a book. That’s not something you see around here very often. When he sees me, he mindfully bookmarks his page and comes over.

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