“I’ll try,” I promised, but my hands were shaking. I wasn’t a cop, but I knew a lead when I had one. I also knew my husband. He had checked into the hotel around dinnertime, and there was a Thai restaurant within walking distance. He had eaten there. I could feel it. No one but me would know that.
When we pushed open the door, a bell chimed. The restaurant was empty, and pop music drifted softly out of the Muzak system. The intoxicating scent of fried seafood made my mouth water, despite the fact that I didn’t like Thai food. A fifty-gallon aquarium filled with bright orange and white koi took up one wall. A thirty-ish Asian woman sat behind the counter on the opposite wall, reading a tabloid. She looked up, and I gave her as sad a smile as I could muster. She returned my smile with her own inexplicably sad one.
I wondered what time they opened for dinner and checked my watch—two fifteen. “Hi. My name is Claire Barnes. I’m looking for someone. Can you tell me who was working on the evening of September twenty-eighth?” I tried to look forlorn, but I was fearful that I had come on too strong. It was a cop question, not a sad woman missing her husband question.
The woman nodded. “I work every day,” she said in stilted English. “Every day not Tuesday. We closed Tuesday.”
“Do you just work the register, or are you a waitress, too?”
She shook her head as if she didn’t quite understand. “I work tables, at register, in kitchen. This my father’s restaurant.”
I reached into my purse and pulled out five of the fifteen pictures of Greg. I shut my eyes for a moment. I needed her to say she had seen him. I fanned the pictures in front of her, as I had done with Joe at the hotel.
“Do you remember seeing this man?” I asked. “Take your time. Think about—”
“Yes. I seat him. He sat in this booth.” She walked out from behind the counter and pointed at the booth right behind the register. “It was early. Only few table with people.”
Excited, I started to thank her.
She added, “He was with woman.”
Chapter 8
“That son of a bitch!”
Drew put his arms around me and moved to shield me from the people on the sidewalk who had turned to look. “Look, you don’t know anything yet. Dinner isn’t an affair. Does he work with a woman? It really could have been innocent.”
“If I believe that, then I’m a complete idiot. I’ve been so adamant that Greg didn’t leave us, but he did, Drew. I really think he did.” I put my hand over my mouth, feeling the bile rise in my throat. I sank to my knees in the middle of the sidewalk, not caring who might be looking.
Drew managed to get me back to the hotel and tuck me into bed. “Take a nap,” he instructed.
I drifted in and out of a sleep interspersed with visions of Greg and spotty dreams, like a stuck filmstrip—Greg tied to a chair, blindfolded, loud and angry men with guns pointed at his head; Greg lying half-dead on the side of Route 96 somewhere; Greg in my hotel room pushing the hair off my face, shushing me, telling me everything would be okay. Greg.
When I woke up, the clock read six thirty. I looked toward the window. The dark gray sky with shafts of slanted light on the horizon gave no indication if it was dusk or dawn. My mind played back the day’s events with the final realization of Greg’s affair thudding in my chest. I thought of my girls, home with my mother while I chased… Who? Invisible kidnappers? I was a fool, gullible and na?ve. I knew what everyone else must have seen—a woman too desperate to believe her husband had left her, clinging to the fantasy of a mysterious “disappearance.”
When I flung open the door between our adjoining rooms, Drew was lying on his bed, watching television. He jumped for the second time that day. “You’ve got to learn to knock.” He grinned.
“Is it morning or night?”
“Night.”
I was surprised. “Are you hungry?”
“Famished.”
“Me, too, and I want to get very, very drunk.”
“Claire…” He shrugged.
“Don’t,” I admonished. “Lecturing me about anything right now would be a very bad idea.”