Page 32 of The Instruments of Darkness

“Also, he liked the fact that Stephen was ambitious and could talk stocks and bonds. Tom knew that Colleen would always be financially secure, thanks to his own efforts, but in Stephen he saw someone who would work hard to consolidate comfort into actual wealth. For Tom, love was secondary and overrated. ‘Like’ was sufficient—he wasn’t utterly devoid of emotion—but he’d grown up poor and had no illusions about it. Better, in his view, to be moderately happy and more than moderately wealthy, than to be very happy and moderately poor. He didn’t link contentment with love, only with the absence of financial worry. He wasn’t right, but neither was he completely wrong.”

“Did he love you?” I asked.

“In his way, and I loved him. We were fortunate in our union; our daughter, less so in hers.”

I found a piece of the dancer’s leg, or thought I had, but it didn’t fit.

“I never liked jigsaws,” I said.

“Really? I’m surprised. I thought you were about to use it as a clumsy metaphor for your vocation.”

I had to hand it to her: Evelyn Miller was a piece of work.

“My grandfather was a policeman,” I said. “He read every day, all his life. He never went anywhere without a book and could discourse on literature like a professor. When he died, I laid the novel he’d left unfinished in the casket with him. He was a literate, literary man, but he couldn’t play Scrabble worth a damn and didn’t enjoy crossword puzzles.”

She took the errant piece from me, substituting it with the correct one.

“I feel you’re circling me,” she said. “Why don’t you ask me straight out what you want to know?”

“Because I’m not certain you can be objective and without objectivity what you have to say will be of less value.”

“You might be surprised at my capacity for objectivity.”

I had listened to her description of her late husband, so perhaps she was right.

“Your daughter admits that she struggled with depression, and feelings of anger toward her son, but she says that all was mostly behind her by the time Henry went missing,” I said. “Even during it, she claims she never stopped loving him, which I don’t dispute. Her husband told me he didn’t believe she ever wanted to be a mother, and in the event of a divorce would have ceded custody of Henry to him. Today, one of Colleen’s friends said it was Stephen who was both emotionally and physically distant from the child, to the extent of displaying minimal interest in him. Not all those statements can be correct.”

“They aren’t,” said Evelyn. “Stephen’s lying.”

“Remember what I said about objectivity.”

“This is me being objective. I didn’t precede Stephen’s name with the words ‘that cocksucker.’?”

I wasn’t sure that would work as a dictionary definition of impartiality.

“Go on,” I said.

“Stephen is like some kind of alien building a simulacrum of a human life,” said Evelyn. “He has a wife, a family, and hobbies, but only because he read somewhere that they’re the components of a regular existence. None of them engages him, not on any deep level.”

That chimed with what Piper Hudson had observed about Mara Teller: a version of a life, as opposed to an actual one.

“Then what does?”

“Success, and how other people perceive him, which equate to the same thing for him. He wants to be envied and admired, but more the first than the second. He chose a wife who wouldn’t embarrass him by drinking too much, talking out of turn, or getting fat. If he ever truly wished for a child, it was only to complete the picture. His image of married life came from cheap wedding catalogs and vintage reruns of Leave It to Beaver.”

I waited for her to pause for breath.

“Are we still being objective?” I asked.

“Not so much.”

“I didn’t think so, but I wanted to be sure. I have a few more questions.”

“I’m listening.”

“Did Colleen ever speak to you about her physical relationship with her husband?”

“No, but I could read between the lines. She spoke about Stephen being tired a lot, working too hard, or traveling. I know those euphemisms. I used them myself over the years. I got the impression that it wasn’t a make-or-break issue for either of them. Some couples are like that.”

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