Page 38 of I Know She Was There

CHAPTER19

FRIDAY NIGHT, SEPTEMBER 8

I’d lost the afternoon sleeping off the migraine. No big deal. I felt better now and was happy for the dark, which usually smoothed out the daytime distractions. Or hid them. Whatever.

I got into my workout gear and running shoes and shoved the mace cannister into my sweatpants pocket. I made my way to Emmy’s room for the stroller folded up and stashed in her closet when I suddenly stopped, hovering in her doorway. I looked around the empty nursery, cursing myself for forgetting about my baby girl, even for a second. I sighed. My evening walk would feel strange without her. I calculated the days until Emmy would be returned to me: five.

I knew where I was headed: 21 Pine Hill Road. Not that I expected to see anyone there, least of all Annie Connolly. What Jeffrey had said about his and Annie’s deceit struck me as I power walked across Route 55 toward Deer Crossing. Maybe Annie had left him, the neighborhood, and her husband because she was indeed tired of sneaking around and lying. He’d seemed genuinely heartbroken by her absence—and by the way she’d left.

If she’d left.Maybe she’d tried to get out but had never made it past her bedroom door. Perhaps my first suspicion of Jeffrey had been correct. He’d been obsessed with a married woman. When she told him she wouldn’t run off with him he’d decided she wouldn’t go anywhere. After all, he had a key to her place. But if he’d gotten rid of her, he wouldn’t be hanging around her empty house, would he?

I walked up Pine Hill Road. Without the baby carriage, I felt nimble and quick, darting around the perimeters of properties, a mere specter in the wispy haze of the streetlights. This night, I wasn’t a mother soothing her baby with a late-night stroll. I was a woman on a mission. I nearly laughed. What was this mission, exactly?

One of truth, I told myself as I crept through the absent light. I had to discover something—anything—about the former inhabitants of house number twenty-one. My own happiness could depend on it. Not only did I need to prove to myself that I wasn’t a psycho, making up violent scenarios to please a brain spiraling into the darkest depths of human nature, but I also sensed that solving the mystery, like my intended reunion with Muzzy, would prove to Tim I wasn’t crazy. I was, in fact, just the opposite of that. And not only sane but also caring and compassionate. The qualities any man desired in a wife.

Soft voices filtered into my ears, and I looked around. My eyes scanned the wide length of blacktop stretching endlessly in front of me until, far ahead, maybe the length of a football field, I saw figures walking through the particulate grayness. I couldn’t tell whether they were approaching or walking away from me.

Instinct kicked in as I stepped behind a massive sycamore tree at the edge of a small, wooded lot, hoping the tree’s girth would adequately conceal me. The voices grew louder and headed my way. Why not just pass them at a jog? I could be a health-conscious runner, keeping up with my fitness regimen. Recalling the mail carrier’s motto, I could joke as I passed them:Neither snow nor rain nor heat norgloom of night keeps me from my appointed rounds.

Except that I probably couldn’t even run a quarter of a mile while keeping my breathing even. My heaving gasps for air would surely blow my cover. The voices became louder, snippets of conversation fanning out.

“He’ll be home soon,” said a clearly female voice. “I’ve got to get back before he does.”

I was certain I knew that voice.

“I tell you, I don’t know how things got...” garbled a deeper voice. I tilted my head toward his unfamiliar intonation. “There’s no possible way she could know, or that she’d take off.”

“I hope not,” said the woman, her voice undeniable. Jane Brockton. Were the two heading back from their latest tryst? They seemed to claim the entire neighborhood as their own personal playground.

The voices paused right in front of me. I bit my lip to keep my mouth closed, concentrated on breathing through my nose, and glanced around the tree, narrowing my eyes in the murk. Sure enough, Jane’s enviable figure was less than five feet in front of me, in profile, barely visible in the dark, and facing a tall, well-built man in a backward ball cap, T-shirt, and loose gym shorts. His back was to me. My pulse immediately increased. I popped back behind the tree, terrified Jane would see me.

“This is getting serious,” said Jane.

“I know,” he agreed.

“And now, with people asking?—”

“I know,” he repeated, an urgency to his voice that bordered on hysteria.

“We can’t panic,” warned Jane.

“Right. Give me some time to figure this out.”

“Let’s hope you can,” she said. “Meanwhile, we can’t be seen together. If we’re caught in someone’s headlights, there’ll be hell to pay—worse for you than me. Go around the block and circle back. I’ll cut through the Johnsons’ yard.”

“Sure thing.”

I peeked around the tree trunk in time to see Jane up on tiptoes giving the man a quick peck before they parted. Once she ducked behind a fence in the yard opposite me, I slipped out of my hiding spot and looked down the road, my pounding pulse centered in my temples, threatening to reignite the migraine. As his wavering form dissolved into the deepening shadows, I turned around and ran in the opposite direction. Jane Brockton’s indiscretions were none of my concern. Hadn’t I bought myself enough trouble, becoming emotionally involved with the happenings on Pine Hill Road?

Still, it irked me that she could so callously cheat on poor Rod. And based on what I overheard the mystery man say in the street just now—“no way she could know”—he too was cheating on someone.

I thought, yet again, of my own marriage, of Tim’s treachery, as I retraced my route along Deer Crossing’s wide, empty streets and stood in front of the silent, dark house on the corner of Pine Hill and Lakeside. I heard nothing. No sounds of nocturnal animals wandering the property, no call of an owl or howls of coyotes in the distant hills. Not even crickets. The area seemed completely devoid of life.

I stared at the Cape, which appeared two-dimensional in the dark, a paper doll’s house. My gaze inevitably strayed to the upper left window where I’d seen the woman. Like all the other windows strung across the house’s façade, it was dark, as if mocking me. A passive-aggressive posture; telling me I was crazy. No woman had ever fallen against the window while bleeding out. Except that she had. I knew she had.

I walked home slowly, feeling unaccountably depressed. Tim wanted out of our marriage; Jane Brockton was cheating on her husband with her neighbor; the couple at 21 Pine Hill had out-and-out disappeared as a mysterious woman in that house—perhaps Annie Connolly, but maybe not—was harmed, probably dead. Why didn’t anybody stay together anymore? And why were the partings so callous?

I paused at my mailbox and absently thrust my hand inside, my fingers closing around a bundle of papers. Closing the lid, I looked at the pile. On the top was a thick envelope. The return address was a local law firm. I ripped open the letter, my breath catching, reading the wordsdivorce petitionunder a scrap of streetlight filtering around me. Tim warned the papers were coming. Why hadn’t I believed him?

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