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“I don’t care about your goddamn warrant. You should have called us first. You have seriously overstepped here, Wright. Get your people out of the water and off my property, or there will be hell to pay. You hear me? That’s my boat out there. Does your warrant allow you to seize my property?”
Wright didn’t flinch. His face was like stone. There was no power in Rory’s voice, only panic. A shiver went down my back. This wasn’t about the phone. Wright’s eyes met mine. I think he saw my fear. His eyes narrowed and he turned back to Rory. He opened his mouth to speak, but he was interrupted by a shout from behind him. A man in a diver’s hood and mask had emerged from the water beside the boat. He shouted again, something I couldn’t quite catch, but the woman in the boat obviously heard it, and her body language changed completely. She stiffened and whipped her head around to look back toward us. She stood up and the boat rocked under her feet before she steadied herself. I thought she would shout to Wright, or gesture to him to return to the jetty. Instead, she just stood there and stared at us. When Wright turned back to look at us, he seemed to have grown taller.
“Why don’t you wait right here, Mr. and Mrs. Jordan? Like you said, your attorney will be here any minute.” He didn’t wait for us to respond. He walked back to the jetty and exchanged a few short words with one of the uniformed officers, who came to stand alongside us. We weren’t under arrest. We could have left, maybe, just gotten in our car and driven away. Maybe even all the way to Canada. But we didn’t. We stood there that morning and watched as Nina Fraser’s body was raised up from the water. Rory was shaking. I reached out and took his hand in mine. He looked at me like he was seeing me for the first time. He took off his jacket and gave it to me. I leaned against him, and he put his arm around me.
“You put her there, didn’t you?” I said, quietly, so that I couldn’t be heard by the police officer. “You helped him. You tried to hide her. Why?”
He was quiet for so long that I didn’t think he was going to answer. And then he said, “I wanted it not to be true. I wanted it all to go away.”
I closed my eyes against the pain.
“I love you,” I said.
“I’m sorry,” he said.
CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX
Leanne
At 3:30 P.M. on Sunday, one week to the day after I went looking for Andy in the barn to tell him how pissed I was that Nina hadn’t returned my calls, Matthew Wright came to the inn. I was the one who opened the door to him. A lot of time has passed now, and I remember everything that happened next in a series of images, almost like stills from a movie. The colors are so bright, the details so minute and exact. I remember that Matthew looked exhausted. He had the beginnings of a scruffy beard. The shoulders of his jacket were damp with snowmelt.
“Can I come in? We need to talk.”
I knew right away that they’d found her. The distant look was gone. For the first time since I met him, he’d abandoned his professional distance, and there was real compassion in his eyes. I gestured to him to follow, and I led the way into the house. I kept my eyes down, and I noticed dust on the top of the baseboards. I hadn’t been keeping up with the cleaning. Grace and Andy were in the living room. Grace was doing the math homework her teacher had assigned for her, and Andy was trying, and failing, to help her with it. Before I left the room to answer the door, they’d been laughing. When I came back with Matthew on my heels, the laughter stopped.
“Um... it might be best if I speak to you alone, for now,” Matthew said.
“No,” I said. “Whatever you have to tell us, Grace is going to have to hear too. Better we hear together.”
There was no way to protect Grace from it. Everything would be public knowledge sooner or later. We knew now how it worked. Everything would be dissected and analyzed and discussed like it was entertainment. I sat on the couch so that Grace was between me and Andy. I took her hand. After a minute, Matthew sat in the armchair opposite us. He was awkward. The self-possession he’d had at every other meeting seemed to have deserted him. He sat with his feet apart, and he leaned forward, resting his forearms on his thighs. He took off his gloves, and the skin on his hands was red. He must have been out in the cold for a long time.
“I’m so sorry to tell you this. Nina is dead. We found her body earlier today.”
Despite everything, the words hurt. My skin prickled with sudden heat, and my vision darkened at the edges. Grace squeezed my hand hard, and that brought me back. The fire was going and the room was warm, but I remember that her hand felt cold to the touch.
“Where?” asked Andy.
“Her body had been wrapped and weighed down, and placed in the pond at the Jordans’ house in Stowe.”
Grace was sitting between us, and Andy and I weren’t touching, but I still believe that I felt the shudder that went through his body in that moment.
“Simon killed her,” I said.
“We think so, but we have more work to do. I... I understand that this may be very difficult, but in the interests of building the strongest possible case, it would help us enormously if you didn’t comment publicly for now.”
“You don’t need to worry about that,” Andy said. “We won’t be talking publicly about Nina or any of this ever again.”
Grace was holding my hand so tight. She wasn’t crying. None of us were crying.
“We want her back,” I said.
Matthew bowed his head. “Yes. Of course. That may take a little time. There are procedures... I can tell you more about that when you’re ready. And then she will be returned to you.”
I wept at that. The words hurt so much. Returned to me. I’d dreamed of that, of having my girl handed back to me. My girl. Not her body. Not just her cold remains. But our Nina was gone forever.
“I’m so sorry,” Matthew said. I thought he would leave then, but he didn’t. He waited. A minute passed before he spoke again. “There’s something else I need to tell you. I need you to hear it from me.” He couldn’t look me in the eye. “We went to the Jordans’ house to speak to Simon. Simon’s car was there, but he wasn’t. We’ve tried to find him, but so far we haven’t succeeded. We’re not sure exactly how long he’s been gone.”
Matthew looked at us expectantly. My thoughts were heavy and slow, but I forced my brain to cooperate. How should we react? With anger? Outrage? I couldn’t muster either, not even an artificial version.
