Page 83 of The Wives of Hawthorne Lane
After I told Colin what happened to Christina, he was furious. I followed him out to the garage, where he put on his coat and took a flashlight from his workbench. I begged him to call the police, to leave this up to them to resolve, but there was no reasoning with him. He was determined to go into the woods on his own and find the man who attacked our daughter.
He’ll come back to this one later. He jumps to the final statement, reads the relevant section again, the narrative unfurling more clearly now.
Audrey Warrington
I was at the fall festival when I saw Colin Pembrook walk out of the woods, heading in the direction of his house. He seemed to be in a rush, but I followed him. I’d wanted to talk to him about something important. I’m not proud of this, but Colin and I had an affair. He tried to blackmail me into continuing our arrangement, but I’d told my husband, Seth, the truth earlier that night. You can ask Seth yourself if you’d like. He will tell you the same thing. I wanted to tell Colin that it was over, that my husband knew about us and he had nothing left to hold over me, but when I caught up with him, I could see that there was blood on the sleeve of his jacket. He was holding a flashlight that had blood on it as well. I asked what happened and he told me to mind my own fucking business. In the time I’ve known Colin, he’s been a violent and vengeful person. I’m concerned he had something to do with the person that died in the woods tonight.
Detective Olsen flips back to Georgina Pembrook’s statement, where the story reaches its conclusion:
I hid in our guest room while my husband was out looking for the man who’d hurt Christina. I don’t know how long he was gone. I must have fallen asleep, because when I woke up, it was pitch-black outside. I went to our bedroom to check if he was home, and I found him in our bed with blood on his clothes. That’s why I came to you. I don’t know exactly what my husband did, but I know what he’s capable of. He would kill me if he knew I was here, but I had to say something. I couldn’t live with myself if I didn’t.
Detective Olsen had watched her carefully as she recounted her story. He’d have to have been asleep at the wheel to miss the signs of abuse on her: the swelling around her eye that was blossoming into quite a shiner, the wavering note of fear in her voice as she spokeabout her husband, the way she seemed to flinch whenever Detective Olsen so much as cleared his throat. There was no question that this woman was afraid of her husband, that it had taken a lot for her to come forward and speak out against him, but she was whip-smart too. Probably, Olsen suspected, smarter than most people gave her credit for. Olsen wanted to believe her, he really and truly did, but he wasn’t entirely sure that he could. Just as with the daughter’s statement, something felt off about the whole thing. He just couldn’t put his finger on what it was.
And then there’s the anonymous call to consider. The tip he’d received earlier about looking into a strange man who had been casing the houses on Hawthorne Lane. He rewinds the recorded call and listens to it again now:
There was this man wandering around the block. And he just, I don’t know, something felt off about him.
The voice sounds faintly familiar. Almost like Libby Corbin’s, but he can’t be sure. Whoever had made the call had done her best to disguise her voice.
But why would she have made that call? Was it possible that she was trying to shape his perspective on Dean Tucker, get him to see Dean as a criminal prowling the neighborhood with nefarious intent, and to direct his attention away from whatever is hiding underneath these statements, the ones that are painting a tantalizing picture of one dangerous man killing another?
Detective Olsen may never know for certain. But what he does know is that the women’s statements were enough to warrant a search of the Pembrooks’ residence, something he’d dispatched his team to do while he finished interviewing the witnesses.
His cell phone buzzes now, rattling on the metal table beside him. It’s the call he’s been waiting for. “You find anything?” Olsen barks.
“Sure did,” his partner, Ruth Sutherland, responds. Sutherland is a good kid with the makings of a great cop. “The guy was asleep when we got here. Caught him red-handed. Literally. His knuckles are all swollen, and there was blood all over his hands. And we found his jacket and flashlight in the garage, both with blood on them too.Forensics is lifting the bloody prints on the flashlight now, but given the blood on his hands, I think it’s safe to assume they’ll be a match.”
“Why wouldn’t he have washed up?” Colin Pembrook is a lawyer, and a good one from what Olsen can gather. Why would he let himself be caught so easily? “It doesn’t make sense to me. This guy goes out and kills someone and then just goes to sleep without even washing the blood off his hands?”
“No idea, old-timer.” Olsen pretends to hate it when the kid calls him that. But he smiles on the other end of the line despite himself.
“Maybe he wasn’t thinking straight,” Sutherland continues. “Or maybe he passed out before he had a chance. We found some sleeping pills on his nightstand. Who the hell knows. But there’s an ADA on the scene now. She’s telling me that with the statements we have and the evidence in the house, we have enough to make an arrest. Do you want to come down here and do the honors?”
“This one is yours, kid.” Olsen doesn’t have to see Sutherland to know that she’s smiling as she ends the call.
He should be happy. Wrapping up a case like this in record time, evidence served up on a silver platter. But something is still nagging at him. Maybe how easy it all was, the way it’ll all be tied up with a neat little bow as they hand the case off to the district attorney’s office. Justice served. It’s possible it’s all in his head, but the truth, Olsen knows from experience, is often far messier than meets the eye. He thinks again of Georgina Pembrook, of the bruises on her face, and for the first time in his long career, he wonders if justice and the truth must always be one and the same.
He’s starting to be able to picture it now, that little house in North Carolina, his wife in a rocking chair by his side, his grandkids running through the grassy yard. Maybe, just maybe, this is an ending he can live with.
52
Georgina
Hawthorne Lane
Georgina’s hands shake nervously in her lap, and she clasps them together, willing herself still. She’s been at the police station for ages. Or at least she thinks she has. Time seems to follow a different set of rules here; minutes languish into hours. Surely it can’t be much longer…can it? Georgina doesn’t have the faintest clue how long it takes to conduct a search of a crime scene (her house, acrimescene!), but she’s certain they’ll find what they’re looking for. She hadn’t exactly made it difficult.
That is, of course, unless Colin has already woken up and destroyed all the evidence she’d carefully laid out like breadcrumbs before the police arrived. The idea makes her dizzy. If he figures out what she’s done…Georgina shakes off the thought.No. That won’t happen.She’s almost certain that Colin took one of his sleeping pills last night. She’d seen the familiar orange bottle on his nightstand when she crept in with his jacket, stained red with Dean’s blood, and the Maglite that had been used to kill him. It would explain why Colin fell asleep so quickly after their altercation and why he stayed asleep as Georgina used the discarded T-shirt he’d been wearing earlier that day to wipe away Christina’s fingerprints on the handle of the flashlight, then gently touched Colin’s fingers into the thick, congealing blood. He didn’t even wake as he turned over in his sleep, smearing streaks of blood on their starched white sheets. It would explain why he hadn’t heard her sneak into the garage to drop the bloodied jacket and the offending flashlight onto theconcrete floor, and it would explain why he’d still been asleep when she got in the car and headed out before dawn to file her police report, an attempt to drive the final nail into his coffin.
What could possibly be taking so long?Georgina looks up at the one-way mirror, startled again by her own reflection, the swelling at her cheekbone blooming into a mottled tangle of bruises, her hair unbrushed and wild. She runs her fingers through the knotted locks. She’s going to cut it, she decides. As soon as it’s appropriate, given the circumstances. She imagines walking out of the salon, how light and free she’ll feel, the autumn breeze on her neck. Then she remembers herself, remembers that the mirror isn’t actually just a mirror but a window. She wonders if Detective Olsen is watching her on the other side of the glass, studying her movements the way they always do on television. Georgina drops her hand and straightens her posture, sitting taller in her chair, just in case.
She’d found it hard to get a read on Detective Olsen during her interview. He’d listened intently as she spoke, jotted down notes here and there, but mostly he’d watched her with the sort of analytical detachment one might expect of a therapist. It made Georgina feel uneasy. Was it possible that Detective Olsen could see right through her? Had he somehow pieced together what she’d done?
The plan wasn’t perfect. Far from it. Everyone involved—Georgina, Libby, Audrey, and even Christina—had a motive to lie, obvious reasons for wanting Colin to take the fall for what happened to Dean. But there was nothing that could be done about that. Audrey couldn’t hide the evidence of her affair with Colin any more than Georgina could hide the abuse she’d suffered at his hands, and there had been dozens of witnesses who saw Colin assaulting Libby’s son. For that reason, they’d had to stick as close to the truth as possible in giving their statements, bending it only where they needed to in order to make the pieces of the new narrative fit. She just has to hope that it’s enough.
It had been difficult to convince Christina to go along with the story Georgina crafted at first. She was hysterical when Georgina collected her from Libby’s house on her way to the police station, when she’d had to tell her that her father had gone out looking forthe man who’d attacked her and Georgina feared he’d taken matters into his own hands. It took a rather long time to get Christina to understand that she needed to leave the part about the flashlight out of her statement to the police—it would only complicate things and she couldn’t throw away her future over something her father had done; that wasn’t what any of them wanted for her.
The sound of a door slamming in the distance pulls Georgina’s attention.Is Detective Olsen finally coming back with news?She stands, her metal chair scraping along the linoleum floor as it’s pushed back from the table, and walks to the closed interview room door. She wonders if she’s allowed to open it. She came here voluntarily; she should be able to come and go as she pleases, shouldn’t she? And yet she hesitates, her hand on the knob, until she hears Colin’s venomous, muffled voice seeping through the door.
