“Do you mind if my colleagues take a look around the house while we talk?” Adderly asks.
The two officers glance at me and then glance away in apparent disinterest to how I might respond. Consenting to a police search is unwise, and yet again I recognize that a refusal would increase suspicion. Adderly strikes me as competent. I’ve seen enough police procedurals on television. Should I decline a voluntary search, it wouldn’t be long before Adderly reappears at the door with a search warrant.
“Your officers will be careful, right?” I ask.
Adderly tilts his head, unsure what I mean.
“The house is full of antiques, fragile things that, in some cases, can’t be replaced if damaged.” As I give this explanation, Adderly’s expression softens. In his eyes, I’m an eccentric but harmless fuddy-duddy—the exact impression that I’d hoped to convey. I point to the three-foot-high blue ceramic vase stuffed with peacock feathers. Intricately carved red flowers are etched into its sides, making it a rare example of early Chinese porcelain. My parents acquired it as a wedding gift back during the Kennedy administration. “Believe it or not, that vase has been appraised at upward of a half million dollars.”
Adderly’s eyes flare open in shock.
“It’s absurd, isn’t it? It’s so valuable I dare not even dust it anymore for fear of damaging it.”
Adderly laughs. He assures me his officers will be “extremely gentle” with my belongings, and as they climb the stairs and open doors into closets and bedrooms, I tell him the approximate time of my visit with Laurel the previous two days.
“Do you know, I think that woman hasn’t changed a single diaper yet. Not a single one. She sits around in bed all day expecting the nurses and me—me!—to do everything for her baby.”
I expect Adderly to bring up the KISS bracelet, which is buried in my handbag, but he doesn’t so much as open his notebook. Perhaps he will use questions about the security bracelet as a pretext for subsequent interviews. True to their word, the other officers return downstairs and declare they haven’t so much as scratched a single antique, for which I thank them profusely.
“Laurel told everyone at the hospital that she looks at me as some kind of mother figure. Can you get over that? Apparently, she appreciates my companionship, which, let me tell you, is incomprehensible to me. Do you know what she said, though? She said she’d love it if I came again today but that I really shouldn’t because someone was coming today who she really had to talk with.”
Adderly’s eyes widen. He picks up his notebook and jots something in it. Obfuscation is my game. I need to cast suspicion in as many quarters as possible if I’m to have a long-term hope of deflecting suspicion from myself.
“Who was this other person?” Adderly asks.
I shrug my shoulder. “Beats me. All day, I’ve been wondering the same thing. I mean, please don’t think this presumptuous, but James told me Laurel doesn’t have a single good friend in the whole world.”
Adderly picks up his pencil again, starts scrawling more things in his notepad.
“Hey, you don’t think James is responsible for Anne Elise going missing, do you?”
Detective Adderly narrows his eyes. In my purposefully silly, ping-ponging way, I’m throwing a whole lot of different possibilities at him. Until this moment, he hadn’t considered that James might be behind Anne Elise’s disappearance. “Why would I think that?”
“Nothing. Nothing at all,” I say so hurriedly the words collide together.
“Has he been acting oddly?”
I gaze at the fireplace, stretch out my arms. “I love James. You understand that, don’t you? James still loves me. I know he does. He still comes home to me each night. We have dinner together, tell each other about our days. It’s almost like our lives were before he met that woman. I wish he would come home and light a fire in the fireplace for us. You understand that, don’t you?”
“A baby’s life is at stake. That is what I understand.”
“We’re all under a lot of stress. You can appreciate that. Sometimes, under stress, people do things you don’t expect of them. In James’s case, he’s been drinking heavily. I worry about him. Do you know what I thought when, opening the door, I saw you—an officer of the law—on my doorstep?”
“What?”
“I thought you were going to tell me there’d been an accident. That, driving home drunk, James crashed his car. I thought you’d tell me I’d never see James again.”
Adderly looks at me as if expecting me to say more, and in my reticence he sees a loyal wife, a wife who, however wronged, is constitutionally unable to cast aspersion upon her husband. I have said enough, however, to change Detective Adderly’s focus on the case away from me. He may investigate James. He may investigate Laurel. But he won’t be investigating me. There are many ways to a man’s heart. Should James or Laurel discover Adderly’s investigating one of them, they’d become distrustful of each other, grow apart, fall out of love.
Adderly points to the portrait hanging above the unlit fireplace. “Who’s that?”
“That’s a portrait of the finest man who ever walked the planet: my father, Jack Riggs. Of Riggs Bank fame.”
“Riggs Bank?” Detective Adderly scratches his head. “Sorry. I never heard of them.”
Ten years ago, in the aftermath of the regrettable scandals that consumed my father’s last years before retirement, the bank’s directors were forced to sell off its holdings. All branches were renamed during the PNC Financial takeover, so toxic had the name of Riggs become, and yet it hurts, learning how the name is now meaningless to a man like Adderly. Ten years should barely be a drop in the collective memory of this city. The name should still inspire awe and respect, not blank stares.
“Detective Adderly. I’m not in the habit of spouting off with unfounded allegations, but do you want to know my gut feelings about Anne Elise being missing?”
“Sure,” Adderly says, whether out of real curiosity or to humor me, I cannot tell. He cracks his knuckles. “Go ahead.”
“Look into Laurel. She’s postpartum depressed and is frightened that James is going to dump her. James met her parents yesterday, and they struck him as shady people, both of them with criminal backgrounds or something terrible like that in their pasts. Erratic, slimy people. That’s what they are. Drug abusers—that kind of people. James hardly has a bad word to say about anyone—‘ac-cent-tchu-ate the positive’ is his favorite expression—and yet he kept ranting to me about how horrible Laurel’s parents are. Her father kept saying how Laurel should give up the baby, get rid of it. Put her up for adoption. Or leave her in an orphanage. What kind of man tells his daughter to get rid of her baby?”
Five minutes after Detective Adderly and his two officers leave, I decide to have some fun. Simpkins had given me Laurel’s cell phone number, but so far, I haven’t had use for it. Now, though, I ring her up. By the time I’m through with her, I’ll rattle her so bad she’ll have no choice but to leave James. The phone rings and rings. Laurel must be one of those graceless slackers who deigns not to answer her phone. So I leave a message. A long message.