She said, “How did you get this number? Emily Nelson is dead, and this is a tasteless joke. Whoever you are, you know Emily’s dead! What you’re doing is repulsive.”
I told her to calm down, and I revealed several facts about Dennis’s various crises and stints in rehab that only I—Emily—would have known. I could practically hear Adelaide’s jaw drop. Then I said, “Cut the shit, Adelaide. It’s me. Emily. I’m not dead. Put me through to Dennis.”
Dennis said, “I knew you weren’t dead. My psychic told me she couldn’t reach you on the other side—so you must still be here.”
“You must have quite a confident psychic,” I said.
“The best money can buy,” Dennis said.
“I need to come see you,” I said.
“Cocktail hour,” he said. “I’ll be waiting.”
I found him lying on the couch at one end of his cavernous loft/atelier. He put down the coffee-table book on Mughal miniatures and rose and kissed me on both cheeks.
Adelaide came in with a tray and two martini glasses filled with Dennis’s favorite mezcal-mango cocktail. The rims of the glasses were frosted with chili powder. They were much better than what I’d been making for myself at the Hospitality Suites.
“Cheers,” I said. “This is delicious.”
“Right back at you,” said Dennis, raising his glass.
“It’s good to be back,” I said.
Dennis drained his glass in three swallows. How did Adelaide know to reappear with another cocktail and remove his empty glass?
“I knew you would have to do something heroic to get out of that marriage. But I had no idea you would have to fake your own death. Everyone around here was devastated. Everyone except me. I knew it was all a charade, just like I knew the happy marriage was a fraud.”
“How did you know?” I said. “I didn’t.”
“I don’t mean to sound cynical, but most marriages are. And in your case . . . the whole world knew. By the way, some of the kids who work here were saying that you were having an affair or had a drug habit or something, and that you’d asked them to help you get a fake ID. I don’t know why you didn’t come to me. I could have found you the best fake credentials. The British husband was cute, but he didn’t have the brains or the stamina to keep up with you, to swim with a shark like you, dear. We all knew you’d get bored. You would have been out of there years ago if it weren’t for that beautiful son, who can now become a much more interesting child, the product of a broken home.”
A pang of missing Nicky shot through me.
“I need a favor,” I said.
Dennis said, “If you want your old job back, you’ve got it. We haven’t hired a permanent person. Life in the war zone hasn’t been the same without you.”
I said, “Really, that would be great. But I have a little . . . red tape to cut through first. Some things I need to take care of. I’m not totally sure yet, but I might need to talk to a lawyer. I know we have good ones on retainer.”
“A divorce lawyer?” Dennis said.
“I don’t know,” I said. “Domestic.”
“I know a great one,” said Dennis. “When that crazy male stripper was suing me, this guy made him go away. Consider him at your disposal. The psychic too, if you need her.”
“Thanks,” I said. “I’ll let you know. Meanwhile I need something fabulous to wear.”
39
Stephanie
I still don’t know how it happened, but Emily made it clear that we were never ever to talk about the dead insurance investigator. Our vow of silence—her gag order, you could say—started immediately after we pushed his car over the ridge.
I took Emily to her car. She told me to follow her for a while. We kept going along the back road until Emily pulled over at a diner, and I turned into the lot.
We got a table by the window, far from any other customers. Emily ordered coffee and a grilled cheese. That sounded fine. Perfect, in fact. I ordered the same. I shouldn’t have been hungry after all the potato skins I’d eaten in the bar, but I was.
I was thinking how to begin to say what I wanted and needed to say when Emily said, “That never happened.”
“Excuse me?”
“What just happened never happened. Mr. Prager . . . the car . . . none of that occurred.”
I thought about it. “All right.” That certainly solved a lot of problems. “Someone’s going to find out. There have got to be consequences.”
“Consequences.” Emily rolled her eyes in a way that made consequences sound like the stupidest and most offensive word in the language. We fell silent when the waitress brought our food and ate in silence.
Emily seemed so confident. But I was sure that someone would track us down. I had gone to help a friend. And I had become a criminal, an outlaw. I imagined the Wanted poster with my face on it. The tape that Emily recorded beside the submarine ride was nothing compared to what she had on me now.
We were not allowed to talk about that, either.
“It didn’t happen,” Emily said. We finished our meal and got up and left the diner.
And after a week and then another week of nothing happening—no consequences—I was almost willing to believe that she was right.
Nothing happened. There were no consequences. Maybe it had all been a bad dream. Something I’d imagined.
But now, when I picked Miles up at school, when I read to my son and put him to bed, I was no longer the same person. I was a mom and a blogger and an accessory to a murder.
40
Sean
The first alarming thing was that there were two cars parked in my driveway. One was Stephanie’s. That was strange in itself because a week had passed since she’d moved out. And though we still, so to speak, shared custody of the boys, ferrying them back and forth from house to house, and though she still picked them up at school in the afternoons, I hadn’t seen much of her.
Our relationship, if you could call it that, was doomed from the start. And there was no way it could have survived Prager’s visit. The chance—the fact—that Emily was alive would have made it impossible. I was furious at Stephanie for not telling me that my wife had a sister. And Stephanie was enraged at me . . . I didn’t want to tally up the things about which Stephanie had every right to be angry.
Well, I wasn’t all that sorry. I didn’t mind not having Stephanie around force-feeding me and Nicky her nourishing meals. It was fun to be just two guys again, father and son grabbing a pizza on the fly. It was good to be home, where we only had to deal with each other and we got along fine.
I got back in touch with Alison, so I had someone to pick up the slack when I had to work at the office and didn’t want Nicky to stay with Miles.
So now the fact that Stephanie was in my house was a little unusual. It made me uneasy. Well, maybe she’d come to retrieve something she’d forgotten. But whom did the other car belong to? Had Stephanie and whoever it was come here together? Another insurance investigator? I hadn’t heard anything from Prager since that initial visit, and I didn’t like that, either. No news was not necessarily good news.
The other car was an old brown Buick with Michigan plates. I didn’t know anyone in Michigan, except Emily’s mother, and I couldn’t say I knew her. We’d never met.
Maybe it was Emily.
I’d had a bad day at work. I’d found it hard to concentrate. That was understandable. I had a lot going on.
Carrington, the VP of international real estate, the guy who’d brought me into the firm and whom I felt I could depend on, perhaps because we’re both British, had given me several hints of impending trouble. The broadest hint was over lunch at the Oyster Bar. We had three scotches each and oyster stew. He said he hoped I wasn’t off my game, or that I would soon get back on it. I’d been working hard and, I thought, doing well. But on the day I came home to find the two cars in my driveway, I’d seen a project that should have gone to me assigned to a kid from Utah who’d just come to work for the firm.
As far as I knew, Nicky was spending the night at Stephanie’s, and I’d bought a bottle of good scotch with which I intended to curl up in front of the flat screen and stream Inspector Morse.