Allegations like this could ruin careers, true or not.
She winced. “Or what? You’ll sue me? Try to get me fired? With who as a witness?”
Heat settled into my balled fists, and my cheeks flamed. Still, I kept my voice low. “Witnesses aren’t always a positive.”
She glared but took a step back. “Are you threatening me?”
“Did I threaten you? With what I just said, I had hoped you’d learned how dangerous assumptions can be.”
To steady my breathing, I forced my eyes away, and they landed on her desk. A file, closed, rested on the otherwise uncluttered surface. On the tab of the file, a student’s last name was obscured by a sheet of paper, the type on the paper too tiny to read. But I read the first name on the file’s tab clearly enough.
Hannah.
I left Pam there, glowering after me, my knees unsteady as I walked back to my car. I climbed inside, leaving the door open, and before I could lose my nerve, I ripped open the tan envelope some creep had given my six-year-old daughter.
The envelope contained a single photo. It had been printed on copy paper rather than glossy photo stock, and faint lines marred the image. Nevertheless, there was no misconstruing the activity depicted, or the identity of at least one of the participants.
Two tangled bodies, one of them my husband’s.
The picture showed Sam having sex with another woman.
If she was a woman at all. The female was thin and faced away from the camera. She easily could have been in her teens.
If I’d eaten more than half a sandwich since Sam disappeared, I might have vomited on the asphalt.
I closed my eyes, hard, but the inside of my lids proved an ideal screen. Images unspooled in flashes: two bodies in movement, slow at first, growing more insistent, finally falling away in exhaustion.
My eyes snapped open, but I couldn’t again look at the photo. I turned my head, focusing instead on the fabric of the passenger’s seat. A seam had started to fray, thin worms of thread tangled where the seat butted against the center console. There was also a small chip in the cup holder. I hadn’t noticed these imperfections before. Not that they mattered. The car wasn’t mine.
I turned my attention back to the photo. I pictured Sam and me in similar moments. I remembered the first time, when he had tried so hard to be a gentleman but the tequila had insisted. Then the next morning, when daylight should’ve sobered us, but instead had intoxicated us further. There was that morning we celebrated the close of escrow. The night we popped the air mattress while camping. The afternoon we decided, hey, why not go to Tahoe and get hitched. Then there were the two random workdays we had conceived our children, special only in hindsight.
There were countless such memories, each with a jagged edge designed to wound.
But none of these was recent, and maybe it was this distance that gave the mental images their glow. The closest we had come to creating a new memory was the morning before, when Sam had modeled those ridiculous zombie teeth, and it had almost been like before. But as always, life distracted. Though just a day earlier, I hadn’t realized then how close we were to being broken.
I tried to study the photo, searching for signs that it had been created with photo-editing software. That was Sam’s face, but was that his back? Was that his arm?
After a few seconds, I had to look away. Hands shaking, I folded the envelope and stuffed it into my purse.
I understood why this envelope had been given to Audrey rather than me. Whoever was behind the photo wanted me to know how vulnerable I was, how easily my children could be hurt. The monster had gotten to Audrey. What if, next time, the intent wasn’t just to deliver a threat?
Because that’s clearly what this was. A threat against my family.
What wasn’t as clear was who was in the photo with Sam. Was it this mysterious Hannah? Someone else?
I flipped the photo over. On the back, written in black marker, was a number: 1.
20
The address Sam’s maybe-mistress had given me was a Craftsman downtown with peeling white paint and a meticulously maintained yard.
A brunette with the wide eyes of an anime character answered the door. She wore yoga pants and a sweatshirt, baby blue this time, with her dark hair secured in a ponytail. I would have recognized her even if she hadn’t been dressed almost identically to the way she had been that night on the trail. The bruises, for one thing. The worst of them the purple-black of a ripe avocado, they took up nearly half of her face.
She greeted me by name then introduced herself as Brooklyn Breneman. “I’d shake your hand, but pretty much every part of my right arm is broken or sprained,” she said.
What did I say to that—Sorry? Glad you’re healing? Kinda feel weird about saving the woman who may have been sleeping with my husband? Everything I considered sounded inane, so I settled on a silent nod.
She stepped aside so I could enter. As I passed, I sized her up. Her hair color was right for the photo I’d been given, but I wasn’t yet sure about her build. One thing of which I was certain: the faint smell of hard alcohol.
“I assume you got my number from Sam’s phone?” she asked.
Great conversationalist that I was, I nodded a second time.
She gestured to a chair for me, patches of the beige microfiber worn nearly to white, while she took the couch. She winced as she settled into the cushions, cradling her arm.
“Tea?” she offered. On the table sat a teapot and two cups, one empty. The second was filled with an amber liquid that definitely wasn’t tea.
I declined her offer. She took the filled cup and sipped. “This is my friend’s place,” she said. “I can’t go back to my place until they arrest Carver.”
“He knows where you live?”
“He knows a lot about me. Probably about you too.”
Of course it was true. He had stolen my wallet and van. Still, the way she said it made my flesh crawl.
“What do you mean by that?”
She settled back into the couch and shrugged with one shoulder. “We have a lot to talk about.”
Brooklyn placed a throw pillow on her lap, then her injured arm on top of the pillow. She pulled up the edge of a bandage, and the gesture was so close to Sam’s tending of my scrape the night of the attack that I couldn’t breathe.
While I figured out how my lungs worked, she said, “I guess I should start by thanking you. If you hadn’t been there, I’d be dead.”
I meant to tell her that anyone would’ve done the same, but I was having trouble finding my voice. I had so many questions—how she knew Sam, how Hannah fit into all of this, what she had meant by her comment that Carver probably knew a lot about me. But one question was more urgent than all the others.
“Do you know what happened to Sam?”
When she nodded, her impossibly large eyes widened further. I could see my husband being taken in by those eyes. “I know part of it, at least. But it’s complicated.”
“I can handle complicated.”
Her expression was one of doubt as she again picked up her mug of fake tea. She didn’t drink. I suspected she only wanted to occupy her hands.
When she didn’t immediately start talking, I prodded: “How do you know Sam?”
She stirred the tea with her index finger, then absentmindedly wiped it on her yoga pants. “He was helping me with Hannah.”