Page 22 of The Better Sister

Guidry was jotting down notes again. “And those are worth...”

“About a hundred dollars retail,” I said. “But the kids resell them. You can apparently get more than a thousand dollars for them on the aftermarket.” Guidry’s eyes widened. Yes, it was a lot for a pair of sneakers, but the thought that my husband might have been killed for them made me want to break the rest of the windows. “I’ll pull up a picture and email them to you,” I added.

“So that’s it? Headphones, a speaker, and the shoes?”

“Like I said, we didn’t have anything valuable here. Unless they were going to back up a moving truck for the furniture, I don’t know what they’d be looking for. Please, check on whether he was meeting with this client, the Gentry Group.”

She said they’d be checking on everything, but was already asking Ethan for more details about the three items that had been stolen. I could see she was going to chalk the episode up to a residential burglary gone wrong.

“He took an Uber to and from the meetings. They should be able to tell you where they picked him up, right?”

She jotted down a few more notes and assured me she’d contact them. First I had asked her to run my loser sister’s phone records. Now I sounded like a jealous wife who wanted to double-check her husband’s whereabouts, even in death.

As Ethan and I exited through the sliding glass door, I considered imploring her one last time to look more carefully at Adam’s work, but worried it would look like an attempt to deflect attention from myself. Because that’s how guilty I felt.

We had streamed fifteen minutes ofElf, which Adam called my “Instant Chloe Happiness Movie,” no matter what season, when I hit the pause button.

“A movie can’t fix this,” I announced.

“Bet you wish you hadn’t flushed all that weed last summer,” Ethan said dryly. Yet another fight with his father, even more colossal than the one regarding the shoes. “I can’t believe he’s not coming back.”

I started to cry and then forced myself to stop. I had to be strong for Ethan. “Let’s go back to the city. You okay with that?”

“Fuck yeah.”

Once we were in the car, he asked if we could swing by Kevin’s house to get his backpack. He’d been so tired when I picked him up that morning, he forgot all about it.

When he hopped out of the car, I tried again to remember everything Adam had told me about the work that had kept him late most of the previous week. Just an hour earlier, with my flip-flopped feet still sandy from my climb over the dunes, I had broken up with my lover, “at least for now,” I told him. Under the circumstances, of course he understood. He kissed me when I left—it was a good kiss—and then said he had something he needed to tell me, even though it might hurt me: he didn’t think Adam had actually met with the client he’d supposedly spent Thursday and Friday with.

I asked him how he could possibly know that.

“I checked yesterday. When you said he was late to the gala because he was meeting with the Gentry Group, it didn’t sound right to me. He hadn’t billed a single minute to Gentry for the last ten days.”

The person I was sleeping with behind Adam’s back was one of his law partners, Jake Summer. He was the one who had convinced Bill to buy a table for the Press for the People gala, so he could be there for my big night without raising any suspicions.

“Maybe he just hadn’t done his time sheets yet.” One of the many things Adam hated about private practice was the requirement that he account for his time in six-minute increments.

Jake had shook his head. “He filed his time sheets last night, a little before seven.” It must have been during the car ride. “He had a few phone calls and emails billed to various clients—less than two hours total—but nothing for Gentry.”

“Two hours?But he was gone all day Thursday and Friday.”

“He blocked out both days as client development, Chloe.” Client development. Meaning, not billed. Two full days of time in a black hole. “I’m so sorry.”

So when I asked Guidry to look into Adam’s schedule, I had good reason. But I couldn’t exactly tell the police about that, could I?

My thoughts were so focused on why Adam might have lied about seeing a client that it took a few of Ethan’s taps on the back window of the station wagon before I popped the hatchback. We rode in silence back to the city, Ethan choosing the playlist and playing games on his phone while I wondered if Adam had been having an affair, and if I would have even cared if I’d known about it.

13

Before her partner opened his mouth, Guidry knew Bowen was going to say something about the wife being involved. He’d made his mind up before they’d even walked into the house the previous night.

“You said I was jumping to conclusions? Did you see the way she was fiddling with those vases? That was straight-up rain-man bullshit.”

Thoughts were pinging so quickly in Guidry’s head, she was having a hard time making room for Bowen’s comments. “Says the man who has been stuffing Mike and Ikes in our fleet car upholstery.”

She decided to walk through the house one more time.

The house was one story, exempting the basement and the pool house. Adam Macintosh had been killed in what was basically the middle of the house, near the entrance of the living room, but only a few steps in any direction from the kitchen, master, and the other two bedrooms. The house had been trashed, but the pandemonium wasn’t divided equally. The master was untouched, as was the living room.

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