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She broods into the dark.
If they survive this – of course they will, she tells herself, they are all together now, and nothing is going to split them up – then she has to tell David the truth about herself. But first, she wants to ask him about who he is. She hopes – it’s frightening just how much she hopes – that he’s not the person Riley believes he is. She hopes he’s someone else altogether, that Riley’s confusing him with someone else. But Riley is usually right about things.
First, they have to get out of here. She closes her eyes briefly and says a little prayer, begging for the police to come.
Sunday, 12:05 AM
It’s after midnight when things start to unravel. The lobby is quiet, but no one is sleeping.
Riley finds the silence unbearable. She needs conversation to keep the terrifying images at bay. She keeps glancing into the dark at the spot where Dana’s body used to be, remembering her awful, lifeless face. Candice, with her scarf wound tightly around her neck. She doesn’t want to think about the killings, or about what might happen to the rest of them. So she thinks about David Paley instead. She becomes fixated on him until it’s like an itch she has to scratch. She can’t stop herself. She leans towards David, who is also wide awake, across from her on the other side of the coffee table, and whispers, ‘I know who you are.’
For a moment, she thinks he’s going to ignore her, pretend he didn’t hear. She’s about to repeat herself, more loudly, but then he leans towards her. She can see his face, resolute, in the glow of the oil lamp.
‘What is it that you think you know?’ he says back in a low voice. But he’s not whispering.
Riley feels Gwen tense beside her. Gwen places a restraining hand on her leg, under the blanket, but she disregards it. ‘I knew I recognized your name, last night, but I couldn’t place it. But I kept thinking about it and then I remembered, this morning.’ She’s not whispering any more. She’s aware of the others – now alert – listening. He stares back at her, waiting for her to say it. So she does. ‘You’re that attorney who was arrested for murdering his wife.’
The silence around the fireplace suddenly takes on a different quality; it’s fraught with the shock of the others, hearing this for the first time.
‘Arrested and cleared,’ he says crisply.
‘So it is you,’ Riley hisses with satisfaction. It feels good to be right. She turns to look at Gwen, wanting to gloat. But Gwen looks back at her with something almost like hatred in her eyes, which throws her for a minute. ‘I told you!’ Riley says to her.
‘The charges were dropped,’ David says, more firmly. ‘I didn’t do it.’ He’s looking now at Gwen, to gauge her reaction.
‘Just because the charges were dropped,’ Riley says, ‘doesn’t mean you didn’t do it. It just means they didn’t think they could prove it.’ She smirks and adds dismissively, ‘It’s always the husband.’
Gwen says, ‘Shut up.’
Riley looks at her in surprise. ‘I’m doing you a favour. I told you this guy is bad news.’
Gwen says, ‘He says he didn’t do it.’
‘Oh, and you believe him?’ Riley says sarcastically.
Lauren says, looking at David in shock, ‘Your wife was murdered?’
‘Yes,’ David admits. ‘But not by me.’
There’s a lengthy, stunned pause as everyone takes this in. Then Ian asks, ‘Did they get the person who did it?’
‘No.’
‘Hang on,’ Henry says, his voice accusing. ‘Why should we believe you?’ He’s raised his voice. ‘We’re sitting around here waiting for someone else to get killed and we find out that your wife was murdered?’
‘Let’s all calm down,’ Ian says. ‘Why don’t we let him tell his story?’
‘I can tell you the story,’ Riley says, without taking her eyes off David. ‘It was in all the papers. Some of you must have heard about it. Respected New York City defence attorney comes home late one night and finds his wife lying in a pool of blood in the kitchen of their upmarket home in an expensive suburb. She’d been beaten to death.’ She leans aggressively towards David. ‘Her head was bashed in and her back was broken, I believe. Have I got it right so far?’ she asks him. He doesn’t answer, but stares woodenly back at her.
Riley continues. ‘He claimed he came home and found her dead. The trouble was he didn’t call 911 for almost an hour. They didn’t get along. And she was insured for a million dollars. He was arrested almost immediately, but he got a very good lawyer. Because, you see, he knows people.’
She sits back in satisfaction and looks at everyone else in the room, one by one, except for Gwen – she doesn’t dare look at her. They’ve all been listening attentively to her – and now they all turn and stare at David.
Hearing Riley tell it, in her accusing, sneering way, David knows how terrible it sounds. He’s aware of them all staring at him and feels angry that he has to defend himself – again. He is always having to defend himself. At this moment, he hates Riley. Hates her not because she has outed him – he’s used to people recognizing him, after all, whispering about him; his was a very public disgrace – but because of her ugly motives. She wants to prevent Gwen and him from getting closer. He was going to tell Gwen himself. But now she’s heard it the worst possible way.
What happened to him will never go away. He will always be defending himself. And there will always be people who don’t believe him. He’s learned that people will believe what they want to believe. And it’s truly frightening how easily they’ll believe it.
He’d come home late from work, like most nights when he was in the middle of a trial. He can hardly remember the details of that trial now – he didn’t finish it in any case; someone else from the firm took it over. His wife’s violent murder had resulted in an investigation, and his arrest; he hadn’t worked for months afterwards.
He remembers coming home that night. The house was mostly dark; there was one light left on over the porch, but inside, the only light was coming from the kitchen, the stove light. They usually left it on all night, as a sort of night-light for the ground floor.
He came in the door quietly, like he always did those days. He didn’t call out, ‘Barbara, I’m home,’ like he used to. The way he did back when she was still happy to see him. He took off his coat and hung it in the hall cupboard. His first thought was that she’d already gone to bed without him. It was perfectly true that they hadn’t been doing too well together at the time. He couldn’t deny that they’d been having marital problems.
Just like he couldn’t deny that her life was insured. It didn’t seem to matter that he was financially well off already; they seemed to think that even the financially secure could never be too greedy. It had been a strike against him. He’d been astonished. He was insured for the same amount, but that hadn’t mattered either. They thought a million-dollar life insurance policy was excessive.
