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But I feared this morning’s call from Max—even if it might not, ultimately, turn out to mean anything—was going to have the effect of a concussive blast, knocking us all off our feet in an ever-expanding radius.
If it hadn’t been this latest development, any day the truth could have come out in a thousand other ways. Running into someone at the mall when Jayne was with me. Maybe someone would stop to say hello, offer condolences, ask if I’d ever learned what had happened to Brie, or was it one of those cold cases by now. Or maybe someone would pass by and say nothing at all, but shoot a scornful look my way. A look I’d have to explain to Jayne.
I’d always been mindful of the risks of an awkward encounter in public. So I made a point, whenever we were together, of avoiding Milford. We dined out in Stratford, or places to the west, like Bridgeport or Norwalk or Stamford. We rarely went to the movies. I had a big-screen TV and subscribed to several streaming services. Why go out, I’d say, when we have access to so much entertainment at home?
I was masquerading as a homebody when I was anything but.
When there were errands to run, especially if they took me anywhere near where I used to live, I tended to do them alone. “I’ve got this,” I’d say to Jayne. “I won’t be long.” If I ran into people who knew or recognized me when I was out solo, well, that was fine. I could deal with that. And it wasn’t as though Jayne were waiting around to accompany me. She had her own career, and it kept her busy.
As I drove around town, I went over in my head how I would tell her the things I’d kept from her. And why. The second part was a little easier. I loved her and had worried that telling her everything about myself would scare her off. You don’t bring up in conversation on a first date that your wife is missing and the police consider you a prime suspect.
But I might very well scare Jayne off now.
“It’s time I told you more about myself,” I would say. “It’s true that I was married. But what I failed to tell you is how that marriage ended. Six years ago my wife, Brie, vanished.”
I was trying to picture the look on her face when I told her. And that was only the beginning.
Brie was never found, I would have to tell her. The police, after all this time, still did not know what had happened to her. They’d had to consider whether she had disappeared of her own accord, or if she’d been abducted. Maybe there had been an accident. Brie went for a walk and tumbled down a hill, her body hidden among the foliage.
Some of the theories were more preposterous than others. But one of them had to be true, right?
Jayne would probably ask whether Brie had been depressed. Was there a chance she’d committed suicide? Left the house in the middle of the night, walked to the middle of the Washington Bridge in the west end of town, and jumped into the Housatonic?
I would have to be honest and tell her Brie had not seemed depressed. Not in any clinical kind of way. I would have to tell Jayne that the police had considered that as a possibility, but no body had been found.
I would have to tell her that very quickly the investigation focused on me. That Milford Police Detective Marissa Hardy believed I had killed my wife because I was interested in taking up with a woman named Natalie Simmons. I would tell her it was a brief affair and meant nothing, but that Brie’s sister, Isabel McBain, had been convinced from the very beginning that I’d had a hand in her disappearance, and death.
If Jayne asked why I’d been unfaithful, I would tell her I’d been an idiot. That Brie and I had been going through a bad patch, that we both had made decisions we’d deeply regretted. If Jayne asked whether I knew who Brie had cheated on me with, I would have to say yes, but I would have to add that I had never revealed this person’s identity to anyone except Detective Hardy—after some prodding—and that she had looked into this person and concluded he had nothing to do with Brie’s disappearance.
I would have to tell her Detective Hardy believed I’d used a weekend fishing trip with my friend Greg as a cover story—an alibi—and that in the night I’d actually driven back to Milford, killed Brie and disposed of her body, then returned before dawn and joined Greg for coffee later that morning. She further believed it was possible I’d drugged Greg so that he slept through the night, thereby making it nearly impossible that he’d notice my absence.
I would have to tell her that, while I was never charged in connection with Brie’s disappearance, the media was well aware that I was a suspect. (I blame Hardy for that, she no doubt leaked it in order to put more pressure on me.) For a while there, I had TV news trucks sitting at the end of my drive every morning, trying to get some kind of comment from me.
I would have to tell Jayne that despite the lack of any concrete evidence that I’d done anything wrong, Isabel continued to campaign for my arrest, even though Brie’s mother, Elizabeth, and her brother, Albert, and his wife, Dierdre, seemed willing to give me the benefit of the doubt. But Isabel’s stridency scared the other members of the family, including her own husband, Norman, from ever speaking up on my behalf.
Isabel’s harassment took several forms. She wrote letters to newspapers, filled with wild accusations, about what it was she believed I had done. The papers, thankfully, did not print them because they were deemed libelous, but that didn’t mean that they didn’t do occasional updates headlined “Where Is Brie?” or “Brie’s Fate Still a Mystery.”
Isabel hired a lawyer to sue me in civil court, where the bar is set a little lower than in criminal court when it comes to holding someone, at least financially, responsible. She didn’t win—Nan Sokolow’s firm helped me with that, too—but the legal bills wiped out most of my savings.
Isabel’s quest to get justice for her sister had always struck me as somewhat ironic, given that she’d always seemed to resent Brie and been jealous of her since they were much younger. It was a one-sided rivalry, so far as I could tell. Brie had always been happy for Isabel when something good came her way, but it was rarely the other way around. I believed it went back to their teens. Only a year apart in age, they competed in such fields as parents’ attention, academics, and boys.
Anyway, Isabel’s vindictiveness couldn’t have come at a worse time, considering that my business partnership with Greg was dissolving, and my prospects were not good.
I would have to tell Jayne that things deteriorated to the point that I decided to legally change my last name. At least that way, on paper people did not recognize me. There was no longer a need for an unlisted number. (Still a bit old school, I was and am one of the last people on earth to have a landline.) When anyone did a Google search on my new name, the allegations against me did not come up. I mean, who wanted to hire someone to work on their house who many believed had killed his wife and disposed of the body?
It was a lot to tell.
But I felt I was going to have to spill all of it to Jayne. It was better coming from me than someone else.
She’d have questions, I knew that. I’d have at least one for her, too. And it wasn’t to ask her whether she would forgive me. I couldn’t see any reason why she would, or even should. If the positions were reversed, could I forgive her for keeping something this big a secret?
No, my question for her would be more like, “Do you want to stay here and I’ll move out, or can I help you find a place?”
I would be willing to do either.
Of all the things she might choose to ask me, I imagined the number-one question would be short and to the point.
“Did you kill your wife?”
