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“We don’t know what’s happened to Dr. Hayes. What exactly were Dr. and Mrs. Hayes fighting about? Did she say?”
Lily shrugs. “What any couple fights about I guess.”
“How has Mrs. Hayes seemed to you lately?”
“What do you mean?”
“Have you noticed a change in her behavior?”
Lily mulls this over. “Well yes. She’s been different. More anxious. More withdrawn. Because of Jake and because she has things going on with her mother too. Her mother’s health is failing. I just assumed that’s what had her down. But between us, Officer,” Lily says, and she looks at me, as if some thought has just surfaced in her mind, but she’s not sure she should be saying it.
“Yes, Mrs. Scott?” he asks, encouraging her.
Lily looks back to the officer. Her face is humble. She’s soft-spoken, if not meek. “Please don’t tell Nina I told you this. I don’t want her to be upset with me.” Lily looks to me again, dragging this out for effect.
“What did she tell you, Mrs. Scott?”
Lily swallows. Her gaze goes back to the officer. “Nina said once that she thought Jake was going to leave her. She thought maybe he was having an affair. Honestly, I didn’t think much about it at the time, because all marriages go through rough times. I said she was probably worried for nothing. I told her maybe marriage counseling would help, if their marriage was struggling.”
“Did they go to marriage counseling?”
“No. Their lives are too busy. Jake is a neurosurgeon. He’s almost never home. And like I said, Nina’s mother is sick. They didn’t have time for marriage counseling.”
Lily opens her mouth as if to say more, but then closes it. This doesn’t go unnoticed.
“Is there something else, Mrs. Scott?”
“She said that if Jake ever did leave, she didn’t know what she would do, but that she didn’t think she could live without him.” She inhales and then exhales deeply. “Nina is a good friend. I feel terrible for saying this, but—”
Lily stops abruptly. She looks to me again, and I find myself spellbound, completely enrapt in her lies.
“But what?” the officer asks, urging her on.
“Nina said something like if she couldn’t be with Jake, no one would.”
The officer is quiet for a second. “And what did you take that to mean, Mrs. Scott?” he asks.
I watch the news. I read things. I know that in the United States, women kill their husbands more than they do in almost any other country. For every one hundred men who kill their wives, there are something like seventy-five women who kill their husbands, if not more. Some people say it’s more like fifty-fifty. When men kill their wives, often it starts with some sort of psychological abuse. Stalking. Manipulation. Gaslighting.
But when women do it, it’s usually because she’s already determined that she’s going to die if he doesn’t.
But that’s not always the case. Women kill for different reasons other than fear or in self-defense. Sometimes they kill because they’re jealous, because they’re worried their spouse is going to leave them, for life insurance payouts, or some combination of the three. It’s not impossible to believe that Nina could have done this. Implicating someone else feels like a shitty thing to do. I’m sorry about it, but at the same time, I’d do anything to keep Lily and me from getting caught.
Lily shakes her head erratically. Her hair falls into her eyes. “I don’t know.” She looks to me again, and then at the officer. “I shouldn’t have said that. I thought nothing of it, at the time. She was just mad. She was getting her feelings out, you know? Venting.” Lily pauses, a pregnant pause, and then she says, “I didn’t take it as a threat, if that’s what you’re asking.”
I’m caught off guard, in a good way, by Lily. It’s ingenious.
She’s managed to turn this around, to put the cloud of suspicion on Nina.
NINA
Earlier this evening, I left the police station in a daze, feeling harried and disheartened. It was just after five that we left. I didn’t speak to my mother the whole way home. I couldn’t speak at all. There were no words because, after that officer watched the video, he slid the phone back to me. His intrigue had lessened. He put his glasses back on his face, and he said, “Doorbell cameras record best between five and thirty feet away. Beyond that, objects can become unidentifiable. Your street is maybe twenty-four to twenty-eight feet wide, which is standard. From door to door, you’re talking much more than that because of the size of the property. It’s good that your neighbor’s camera caught this man entering your home, otherwise you might not have known that he had. I just don’t know that the video is helpful to us in finding this man. This image is distorted. It lacks clarity. We can’t see this man’s face because of the hat. We don’t know who he is, unless you recognize him?” he had asked, leading, and I shook my head. I didn’t know who the man was, which was why I had taken the video to the police. I needed them to tell me who he is. “There are no discerning features.”
“Can you enlarge it?” I asked.
“Not without exacerbating the clarity problem.”
I pulled up and showed him the other videos, taken with Ellie Miller’s camera, of the man’s car. Unfortunately the problem was the same. The car was never at the right angle for the officer to see the front or the back end of it or the car’s make and model. He couldn’t see the license plate. Even if he could have, he said that he didn’t know that he would be able to read it because of the clarity problem. His tech people will take a closer look, but he cautioned me not to get my hopes up. “There are limitations to videos like these. They’re helpful,” he said. “They’re not foolproof.”
