“So can I have them?” Bennett asks.
“No!” Marissa and Matthew say in unison.
“Maybe a few after dinner,” Matthew concedes. “But only if you eat something green. Like a pile of broccoli taller than a tree!”
Matthew tickles Bennett, who laughs and squirms away.
Marissa’s fingers close around the hard roll. A thought comes to her. It’s so insane she almost doesn’t ask the question.
Then she does. “Were you and Skip in your office last night?”
Matthew pauses in flattening out the box. “Huh? No, we just hung out in the living room and kitchen.”
He looks at her quizzically, then appears to grasp the reason for her question. “Oh, maybe Skip wandered in there for some reason when I ran upstairs to tell Bennett his pizza was ready. Maybe he had to make a private call or something.”
Marissa nods. “That must be it.”
As Matthew reaches for a ruler and he and Bennett begin discussing how big to make the cardboard base, Marissa glances in the direction of Matthew’s office.
If someone wanted to break into the house, the office, which faces the leafy side yard, would seem like the easiest entry point.
Enough, Marissa tells herself sharply. She isn’t thinking straight; her mind isn’t reliable right now.
Skip has no connection to the open window in Matthew’s study. Skip was a guest in their home last night—not an intruder this morning.
If he wandered into the office last night and dropped the roll of candy, it was because he bent over to tie his shoe or something, not because he was wrestling with one of the windows.
Matthew reaches over and begins to massage Marissa’s neck. She can feel the tightness of the cords under his strong fingers. “You okay, babe?”
“I didn’t sleep well.” It isn’t a fib; although she fell asleep shortly after climbing into bed, she awoke in the middle of the night and tossed and turned until she finally rose at a little after 5:00 A.M.
“Why don’t you take a nap? Bennett and I will tackle the dinosaurs.”
She doesn’t want to leave her little family. She yearns to be here, in the cocoon of the kitchen, shaping warm clay in her hands as the three of them create an imaginary world.
“We can’t have you stressed and tired for tomorrow night. And I can’t wait to see you in whatever you picked up from the store.” Matthew’s voice drops to a low whisper: “And get you out of it.”
Marissa briefly squeezes her eyes shut. She doesn’t have any outfits Matthew has never seen.
She could tell Matthew a partial truth about why she rushed off to Coco, filling him in on the disturbing Natalie-Polly connection. But she is not going to spend her anniversary talking about Natalie.
She’ll have to come up with a plausible-sounding reason for wearing something she already owns to their special dinner, she thinks.
An excuse. A fib. Smoothing things over for the sake of appearances.
I should just call it what it is, she thinks. I’m lying to my husband.
Something I’ve learned to do well.
CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT
AVERY
I’M IN LUCK. The Whistler Bar & Grill opens at noon on Saturdays. I need to confirm what I strongly suspect—that Chris Bishop, Matthew’s father, was sneaking around the dock while Matthew and I spoke. The question is, did Chris go to see his son—whom he’s supposedly estranged from—or was he following me?
I’ve already determined that the Whistler is four blocks from Chris’s office on Sixteenth Street, in northwest D.C.
If the axiom is true—like father, like son—it’s possible Chris also stops in at a regular place after work for a meal or a couple of his favorite drinks. And men talk to bartenders the way women talk to hairdressers.
I know I can’t simply barge in and act all nosy about one of their customers. That’s why I ran a few errands first.
Now I sit in my car, parked at a street meter outside the bar, assembling my props. I pull out the flimsy fake-leather wallet I just purchased at CVS—it seems like something Chris might actually own, given his predilection for cheap options—and remove all the cash I have in my own billfold, a grand total of $24, tucking the money inside. The wallet looks a little pathetic, even if it’s one I’m claiming to have found in a nearby parking lot, so I contribute an old metro card of mine, a business card I picked up the other day for a new nail salon in my neighborhood, and a few random receipts I grabbed out of a trash can at CVS. I just have to hope whomever I hand it off to won’t examine the contents too closely. Which leads me to the final items—ones I hope the bartender will take a good look at.
What sort of grandfather would Chris be without a few family photos?
It was easy to buy a USB cord at CVS and use it to attach my phone to the photo-printing machine at the back of the store. I made prints of photographs I already have, the ones I surreptitiously snapped with my phone when I was standing in front of the Bishops’ bookshelf during our second session.
It took a bit of cropping and filtering, but I ended up with reasonable facsimiles of the black-and-white wedding shot of Marissa and Matthew surrounded by their wedding party, as well as an image of Chris, Matthew, and Bennett—three generations of Bishop men—standing in front of a Christmas tree.
I maneuver the prints into the clear plastic inserts in the wallet, then check my appearance in my rearview mirror. I’m still in the jeans and black jacket I wore to meet Marissa in the park and Matthew on his boat, but I’ve tied my hair back in a knot and I’m wearing glasses with nonprescription lenses and cherry-red frames, which I also purchased at the drugstore, for $14.99. If someone were to describe the way I look right now, the glasses would be the main thing they’d remember.
I step out of my car and walk toward the restaurant, bending the wallet back and forth in my hands so that it seems more worn. It’s still a little too new looking, so just before I reach the door of the Whistler, I drop it on the sidewalk and grind my heel into it.
I scoop it back up, pull open the door, and blink as my eyes adjust to the dimly lit restaurant. It’s a dive—old dark-wood furniture, dust motes swirling through the few beams of sunshine streaming in through a dirty window, with the smell of old beer spills and even older cooking grease.
A half dozen or so customers are at tables and booths. Two servers stand behind the long wood bar, talking. One is a youngish-looking man with a mustache, and the other a middle-aged woman with bleached-blond hair.
Women typically have better memories for faces than men, so I claim an empty barstool closer to the female server.
“Get you something, hon?” she asks.
“As long as I’m here, I’d love a Michelob. But I actually came by for another reason.”
She flips off the cap and puts the bottle in front of me, then narrows her eyes. “I’m trying to figure out if you’re the type who wants a glass.”
By way of answer, I tilt up my beer and sip from the bottle.
“So what’s the other reason?”
The bartender with the mustache is listening to us, but I don’t blame him. Not much else is happening in this run-down place.
I lay the wallet next to my beer.