Page 17 of The Widow's Husband's Secret Lie
“An intrauterine device. A doctor inserts it into your uterus, and it is used to prevent pregnancy.”
Wow, that makessomuch more sense than the lights. Stupid Google search.
“What am I going to do, Poppy?” I wail. “My husband was a monster. Now he’s dead, and I’ve got his child growing inside me. And not only that…” I glance nervously at the window, where I half expect to see Grant’s face peering out at me. “I’m seeing him everywhere I go.”
“Alice.” She squeezes my hand in hers. “You’renotseeing Grant. Grant is dead, sweetie. This is simply all the stress catching up with you.”
I nod, reluctantly accepting that this might be true. I want so badly for it to be true. I need this nightmare to be over.
After Poppy leaves, I try to relax. I decide to go upstairs to take a shower, hoping the scalding-hot water will ease some of my tension. When I get in, I turn the heat up as high as it will go. I still feel tense, so I turn it in the other direction, as cold as it will go.
Just as I’m emerging from the bathroom with a towel wrapped around my chest, the doorbell rings downstairs. God, I hope it’s not Poppy with another casserole. I peek out the bedroom window at the driveway, and my heart does a somersault when I see what is waiting downstairs.
It’s a police car.
17
I don’t even havetime to dry my hair. I pull it back into a messy ponytail, then I throw on a pair of blue jeans and a cardigan. I sprint down the steps as quickly as possible just as the doorbell rings for a third time.
When I throw open the door, there’s a familiar man in a shirt and tie paired with a trench coat. I recognize him as Detective Mancini, who briefly spoke with me after my husband’s tragic accident. He’s an older man, with salt-and-pepper hair that’s mostly salt and deep lines etched into his craggy face.
“Hello there, Mrs. Lockwood.” He tips an imaginary hat in my direction. “I’m so sorry to bother you again. It’s Detective Mancini.”
“Yes, I remember you.” I force a smile to disguise the fact that my stomach is doing somersaults. “Is… is anything wrong?”
Detective Mancini hesitates. When I heard he was investigating my husband’s accident, I asked around and found that he was a detective who didn’t always play by the rules but got the job done. But the last I heard, they had officially ruled Grant’s accident just that—an accident.
“Could I come in?” he asks.
I would rather not invite a detective into my home, but if I don’t, he might think I have something to hide. So I obligingly step aside. “Of course.”
He follows me into the living room, and I offer him a seat on the sofa. He doesn’t take his trench coat off when he sits down.
“Could I get you anything?” I ask. “Some tea perhaps? Casserole?”
He shakes his head. “No, thanks.”
I settle down in the love seat across from him, my entire body buzzing. “Can I ask what this is about?”
“Well,” he says, “we got an anonymous tip. Someone called in and told us they thought the brakes in your husband’s Mercedes had been cut. That it wasn’t actually an accident.”
Someone called and left an anonymous tip? Who would have done such a thing?
And then I think of the man following me around town—the one who looks suspiciously like my dead husband.
“Oh my God!” I cry. “That… that’s horrible! I can’t believe it could be true…”
“We don’t know for sure,” Mancini says. “Unfortunately, even though it’s against protocol, we didn’t check the car after the accident. And now your husband’s car has been compounded into one of those cubes at the junkyard. So we can’t possibly know if it’s really true.”
My shoulders relax by a few millimeters. The car has been destroyed. All the evidence is gone.
“But I have to ask you,” he says, “did your husband have any enemies? Anyone who might have wanted to hurt him?”
Detective Mancini’s left hand has a very light tan line where a wedding ring used to be. I wonder what happened in his own marriage. I wonder if he could possibly understand.
Well, I’ll never know. Because I will never tell him the truth.
“He didn’t have any enemies,” I say, “but there’s a man who cleans for us that Grant never entirely trusted.”
