“I found this in the parking lot of a CVS. I wanted to return it, but there’s no ID. The only thing I could find was a receipt from here.” I pull out the receipt and hand it to her.
“Let me see.” She pulls up the reading glasses on a chain around her neck and peers through them. “Yeah, that’s us. Hmm, two Cluny and sodas.”
“There’s a few family photos, too. Maybe you’ll recognize him.… Or her. The owner of the wallet.”
I tap on the wallet, indicating the plastic sleeve with the photos.
“Fancy,” she mutters as she looks at the wedding portrait. Then she flips to the one in front of the Christmas tree. “Son of a gun. That’s Chris Bishop. Now don’t we look all festive!”
I take another sip of beer, trying to strike the right affect. Interested, but not overly. “So you know him?”
“Oh yeah. He comes in here pretty often. I’ve probably served him hundreds of Clunys over the years.”
So it was him. I bet Chris followed me from the parking lot of the park to the boat; I left immediately after my phone call to Matthew, and Chris’s LeSabre was still in the lot. I was so intent on moving forward toward Matthew’s surprising destination, I never looked back.
Maybe Chris was tracking me before that, too—from the Cub Scout gathering on the grass to my car. He acted strangely when he introduced himself. If he recognized me from the Post article or other interviews I’ve done, why wouldn’t he simply ask?
Perhaps his curiosity was piqued when he saw me interacting with Marissa. He could rightly assume she’s one of my clients.
But there’s no universe in which a normal reaction to that discovery would result in his following me. Why not simply ask his daughter-in-law?
“Thanks for dropping this off. I’ll get it back to him.” The server flips back to the wedding photo, then notices the cash. “I should pocket this to make up for all the one-dollar tips he’s left over the years.”
Keep her talking, I think to myself. “Oh, one of those,” I say, grateful I’ve got an emergency twenty in my makeup bag so I can leave a generous tip when I get my bill. The last thing I want to do is pay with a credit card and leave a clue for Chris.
“He’s all right. Bit of a loner.”
The other server, who has inched closer to us, interjects, “Not last time he was in, Darlene. I’m actually the one who served him those Clunys. Chris met someone here.”
“Really?” She frowns.
I let my gaze drift away. Their conversation will be more uninhibited if I appear to disengage.
“Yeah, I think it might have been his son.”
“I didn’t even know he had kids till I saw those pictures. He never mentioned a son.”
Before I came here, I cross-referenced the date on the receipt. It was the same night I had my second session with the Bishops, the one we arranged for at 9:00 P.M. in their home because Matthew said he had a work event. But the time on the receipt was 8:17, so Matthew could easily have had a drink with his father first.
And when Matthew opened the front door for me, I smelled alcohol on his breath.
“Want to see a menu, hon?” Darlene offers.
This conversational topic has played itself out; I can tell she’s ready to move on.
But I’m not. I point to Matthew standing beside his father in the wedding photo and look at the male server. “Was he here with this guy?”
“Coulda been.” He shrugs.
I flip to the more recent photo of Matthew with his dad and son. “Him?”
Darlene shoots me a strange look.
“No, definitely not that one.”
Goose bumps appear on my skin. It’s as if my body knows what is coming before my brain recognizes it.
One person has been woven through every single one of my sessions with the Bishops. Sometimes he’s invisible, sometimes he surfaces at unexpected moments. He’s linked to both Matthew and Marissa. To Natalie. Possibly Marissa’s assistant, Polly. And to me.
He isn’t just the stitch connecting me to the Bishops. He’s the whole damn spool of thread.
I slowly flip over the photograph again, aware that Darlene is staring at me with sharp eyes. “Him.”
The male server looks down at the wedding picture, tracking to where my index finger is pointing. I’ve singled out another tall, smiling, light-haired man in a tuxedo—not the one next to the beautiful bride, but one on the periphery of the image.
Electricity shoots through my body. I’m getting closer to the axis of the mystery; I can sense it.
Darlene clears her throat. “Maybe I ought to find Chris’s phone number and tell him about the Good Samaritan who came here to drop off his wallet.”
I ignore her and keep my eyes on the male server, barely breathing.
“Yeah,” he finally says. “I think that’s him.”
My finger is pointing to Skip.
CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE
MARISSA
MARISSA HAS EXPERIENCED THIS SENSATION of absolute dread and fear only a few times before.
It happened during two of her pregnancies, when her doctor’s face fell while administering her sonograms. And another time, when she momentarily took her eyes off Bennett at a county fair and he was swallowed up by the crowd until she located him fifteen minutes later at the petting zoo.
This afternoon, when Matthew suggested she take a nap, her mind had been too fractured to quiet. Instead, she’d reached for her laptop resting on the nightstand. The Natalie-Polly connection was haunting her, and she needed to get to the bottom of it. She’d plugged Polly’s name into the search engine, along with Natalie’s. But nothing had come up. So she’d added the name of the real estate company where Natalie worked. Still nothing. She’d stared at the computer screen for another minute and had been about to shut the lid, but then her fingers had begun moving again, trembling as they’d typed in the name of another woman who has been haunting her. Her old best friend: Tina Lennox.
She wasn’t sure what she was looking for exactly. What new information could there be to see? No baby announcement. Or Employee of the Month recognition. There would be no wedding photograph. Not even a mention of a high school graduation. Tina’s life ended before it could really begin.
The first few items that appeared were familiar to Marissa: a couple of old Associated Press stories and a few longer ones by The Baltimore Sun. Marissa had clicked on Tina’s yearbook photo, the one all the newspapers ran, and stared at it for a long time. For the photo, Tina had worn the yellow sweater that she and Marissa had decided was the prettiest one Tina owned, and her hair was curled.
Then Marissa noticed a few new mentions of Tina had appeared. At least, they were new to Marissa.
Local man recants admission of murder of Tina Lennox: former high school English teacher Marvin Miller claims police coerced a false confession.
That article was from four years ago.
In another one, dated nine months earlier, on the anniversary of Tina’s death, Miller repeated his claims of innocence. I’ve spent half my life sitting in a cell while the real killer walks free, he was quoted as saying.
Marissa had stared at the screen, her hand over her mouth, feeling nausea rise in her throat.