Page 81 of Close Her Eyes

Cyrus sighed. “It was a long time ago. He might have been different back then.”

Mettner stared at Anya for a long moment. Then he turned to Cyrus. “You have photos of this stuff? In your file?”

“Why?”

“How can you be sure that what they found in there was a hearing aid?”

Cyrus said, “We’re sure.”

Mettner pressed on. “You’re leaving out a lot of context. What did the stuff look like? What condition was it in? Where was it found inside the garage?”

Josie felt a spark of excitement. Mettner was on to something.

He added, “And how damn long does it take to process fingerprints? Our guy does it in a matter of hours.”

“The state police are backed up,” Cyrus pointed out.

“But you could get us photos, couldn’t you?” asked Josie. “You could make a call right now. Someone in your office could send them to you in minutes.”

Anya put a hand on Cyrus’s forearm. He visibly startled. She managed a wan smile. “Please, Cy.”

A silent moment passed between them. From where Josie sat, it felt intensely private, like she and Mettner shouldn’t be witness to it. She felt relieved when Cyrus broke eye contact with Anya. He patted her hand and said softly, “Give me a few minutes.”

FORTY-TWO

While Cyrus was gone, Mettner got them all coffee, which they drank in silence. Josie was beginning to feel the weight of the day and the murder cases her team had been tasked with solving, together with the heft of the secrets they’d started uncovering in Bly. Her head pounded. The sutures on her scalp burned.

“I’ve got them,” Cyrus said, striding back to the table.

He resumed his seat and the three of them crowded in around him, peering at his phone screen. He swiped through a half-dozen photos and then back, showing each one again.

Mettner said, “That’s a tackle box.”

Cyrus nodded, stopping on a photo of the workbench in Garrick Wolfe’s garage. The bright red, rectangular box sat in the middle of the bench.

Anya said, “If this is evidence that Garrick murdered Susanna Hadlee, why would he leave it out like that? I lived with him and Marie for almost a year and I never saw that box.”

Cyrus said, “I’m sure he hid it when Marie was alive.”

“Keep going,” said Mettner.

The next series of photos showed the four items inside the box. Each of them was crusted with dirt, badly decayed, and barely recognizable. The skull plate was about the size of Josie’s hand. The necklace was so dirty that they could not make out the charm. The piece of clothing was dark and frayed, any pattern impossible to identify. At first glance, the hearing aid looked like a dirt-covered rock. It was only in the close-up photo that Josie could make out the small wire that ran from the large piece that went behind the ear to the smaller earbud that sat inside the ear canal.

Cyrus said, “Obviously this is not what most hearing aids look like now, but if this was Susanna’s then we’re talking the late eighties. The style seems about right for that time.”

Mettner said, “I believe you. That’s a hearing aid. But look at the items, as opposed to the box.”

“What is it?” asked Anya.

Josie said, “The box is new. Clean. In perfect condition. The items inside are obviously extremely old. Like Cyrus said, if these belonged to Susanna Hadlee and we assume that she died at the time that Dermot Hadlee told everyone she had ‘left’, then that was over thirty years ago.”

“It’s interesting that you say that,” said Cyrus. “Because I also called to see if they’d gotten prints from any of this. Nothing from the items inside the box. Too old, too degraded, and if they tried to get them, they’d run the risk of destroying some of the items. But on the outside of the box, they found two sets of prints.”

Mettner said, “Whose prints?”

“Garrick Wolfe’s—his are in the system since he had a DUI a few years back—and Vance Hadlee’s.”

Anya gasped. “Vance?”

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