Page 82 of The Wives of Hawthorne Lane
Libby looks like she might puke, and Hannah stares, eyes unfocused, into the thick darkness of the woods around them, but Georgina is harder to read, a mixture of both relief and confusion playing across her face.
Audrey opens her mouth to explain, but then closes it again. She grabs the collar of her sweater, pulls it down, slides it off her shoulder. She lets the deep purple bruises in the shape of Colin’s fingers, stark against her moonlit skin, say everything she can’t put into words.
She sees the moment that recognition, understanding, slots into place for Georgina.
“I’m sorry,” Audrey says. And she means it. More than Georgina will ever know. “For everything. I should never have gotten involved with Colin.” She turns to Hannah. “And I never should have posted that photo. If it weren’t for me…” A wave of guilt overtakes her. If she hadn’t been having an affair with Colin, if she hadn’t allowed herself to be goaded into his twisted mind games, Dean wouldn’t have found his way to Hawthorne Lane, and none of this would have happened.
But Georgina lifts a palm, stopping her. “It doesn’t matter now. What we need is a plan.”
Audrey watches in awed amazement as Georgina takes control, orchestrating a plot to frame her husband for murder the same way she might organize a dinner party. She lays out each of their parts as if they’re actors in a play.
“Hannah,” Georgina says, “you were never here, understood? You never met Peter, you’ve never seen this man”—she gestures at the body lying at their feet—“and you’ve never been anyone but Hannah Wilson. We need to leave you out of the story entirely if we’re going to keep the police from looking into you.”
Hannah swallows, her lower lip quivering. And then she nods. “Thank you.”
“And Libby…” Georgina turns to the other woman. “The police will surely find the messages between you and Peter, so they’re going to be able to connect him back to you. If you tell them that you last saw him with Hannah, that will bring up questions we don’t want her to have to answer. So we need another story—one that doesn’t involve Hannah—to explain why he was out here in the woods tonight and why he might have attacked Christina.”
Libby is quiet. And for a moment Audrey isn’t sure which direction she’s going to go. She can tell that Georgina feels the same way, unease etched in the lines around her mouth. But after a moment that feels like an eternity, Libby finally speaks:
“I…I think I can do that.”
“As for me,” Georgina continues, breathless with relief, “I’ll make sure all the evidence points to Colin. Christina will never have to know the truth about what happened here tonight. I’ll talk to her before we go to the police, but as far as she knows, Dean was alive when she left the woods. Let her think her father did this. She’s only a child. Even if the police do believe she acted in self-defense, this isn’t something she should have to carry for the rest of her life. Let Colin shoulder that weight for her. It’s the very least he can do.”
“Do you think,” Hannah says hesitantly, “do you think this actually will work?”
“What if it’s not enough?” Libby adds, her face a pale oval in the moonlight. “I mean, it’s not like we can say we saw Colin out here. What if he talks his way out of this and we’ve only made things worse?”
“I can help with that,” Audrey says. “Leave it to me.” She wants to do this; she has to. Not just because of the guilt she feels for her part in bringing them all here, and not just to protect herself from Colin, but for all of them. She’s doing this for Hannah, who doesn’t deserve to have her life torn apart for a man like Dean; for Libby, who deserved better than what Peter did to her and whose son will not be safe as long as Colin walks free; for Christina, who is just a child, the only innocent in all this; and for Georgina and every other woman like her who has ever been hurt by a man like Colin. It’s time that they take their power back. It’s time that they come together to make things right.
The four women look at one another, their eyes meeting in the dark, and it’s as if they’re seeing each other,reallyseeing each other, all the little ways in which their separate lives have become irrevocably intertwined, for the very first time. And slowly but surely, each one nods. They’re in this together now, and there’s no turning back.
51
Detective Olsen
November 1
Detective Frank Olsen props his elbows on the table and massages his forehead. He can’t remember the last time he was this tired. It’s been one hell of a night, interviewing one witness after another. Maybe he’s getting too old for this. He remembers back in his early days on the force when an all-nighter was nothing, a stiff cup of coffee and he was good to go. But now? Now he feels the exhaustion in his bones. Maybe Mary was right when she said it was time for him to start thinking about retirement, spending more time with their grandkids, buying a little house in one of the Carolinas. But whenever he begins to consider it, a case like this falls into his lap. Something that gets his wheels turning, really makes him think.
He worries that if he retires, he’ll end up driving both of them up a wall. What would he do with himself? Detective Olsen has never been the type to sit still—he can’t picture himself on a fishing boat, staring out at the glassy water, his mind as empty as his hook, or doing crossword puzzles in a rocking chair for hours on end. What else are old retired guys meant to do? Hell if he knows. He just knows that he’s not ready to give this up yet, not when there are still cases like this one in the cards for him. The majority of the time, being a detective in Sterling Valley isn’t the most riveting job. Most of the cases he catches are about a cleaning person who allegedly stole a family heirloom, and there was that one string of break-ins last summer that turned out to be a bunch of kids with nothingbetter to do. But this case is looking more and more like a real homicide, something he can sink his teeth into, and he feels like he’s shaking the dust off, finally doing some real police work for a change.
See, Mary? I’ve still got it.
Detective Olsen spreads the latest witness statements out on the conference-room table. There are four of them, one for each of the witnesses who are still holed up in the interrogation rooms while his team conducts a search of the Pembrook house. Detective Olsen shuffles the pages, ordering and reordering them into a sequence that makes sense. With the papers laid out like this, a story is emerging. He reads the relevant portions again:
Libby Corbin
I’d invited a man I met online, Peter, to the fall festival tonight, but when he arrived, things didn’t go as I’d anticipated. He was behaving rather aggressively, making unwanted advances toward me, and when I refused him, he became quite angry. He said something to the effect that he hadn’t come all this way to leave without getting laid. He stormed off after that in the direction of the woods. I’m making this report because I’m concerned that he might have been mixed up in whatever happened out there tonight.
Detective Olsen had shown her a photo of the deceased, and she’d identified him as the man she’d known as Peter. Evidently, he’d given her a fake name in their exchanges, as the driver’s license they’d found in his pocket listed his name as Dean Tucker. Detective Olsen had done some digging into Dean Tucker. As it turns out, this last run-in with the law was far from his first. He’d found arrests for shoplifting, assault, and more than a few complaints from ex-girlfriends accusing Dean of roughing them up. It looks like Ms. Corbin had been rather fortunate, in the grand scheme of things.
He looks at the next statement in front of him:
Christina Pembrook
I was on the walking path through the woods when some man just grabbed me out of nowhere. I yelled and screamed but he wouldn’t let me go. I was kicking and fighting, and I think I must have kicked him in his genitals, as he let out a yelp and I was able to break free. I ran home and told my mother what had happened. She sent me to stay with Mrs. Corbin and said that my father would handle things from there. I’m not sure what happened after that. My mom came and woke me in the middle of the night to tell me that I needed to come down here and tell you what happened to me in the woods.
Detective Olsen pauses, considers this one again. On the face of it, the girl would have no reason to lie about being attacked by Mr.Tucker, and given the man’s rap sheet, it wouldn’t take a stretch of the imagination to believe it. But there’s something about the wording, something about the strange, detached way the girl recounted the story in the interview, that makes Olsen feel uncertain. He remembers the way she seemed to look over his shoulder as she spoke, her eyes drifting upward as if she were trying to remember her lines rather than the event itself. He gets the impression that there’s something missing here, something the girl intentionally left out; he’s just not certain what it is. He moves on to the next statement: Georgina Pembrook’s.
