The day after Christmas, Drew packed his duffel and headed back to the city. Hannah and Leah went to my parents’ house for the afternoon, and I rambled around the house, cleaning up from the holiday. Rain pattered off the bay window in the living room, blurring the outside world, creating a protected cocoon inside the house.
Feeling bold from my Christmas success and strong from my bracelet, I went upstairs and cautiously opened the door to Greg’s study. I was assaulted by the smell—leather, Greg’s cologne, a corporate citrusy scent, and man.
I sat down at his desk with no idea where to start and looked around as though in the room for the first time. Bookshelves lined the walls behind the desk, which was in the middle of the floor, like an office at a law firm, not a home office. The computer, surprisingly dust-free, sat in one corner of the desk next to a half-inch stack of bills and paperwork, neat and cornered. I could see him in the chair, squaring the corners and tapping the bottom of the stack on the desk. Getting his affairs in order? The corners of each of the September-dated bills were stamped “PIF.” Paid in Full.
I opened the top drawer. A black address book lay on top. I thumbed through it: miscellaneous notes, business cards, phone numbers—all household-related and vaguely familiar. Nothing jumped out at me. What was I looking for? I laid the book on the stack of bills.
The brown notebook Detective Reynolds had taken a few weeks ago rested on top of a separate stack of papers. He’d returned it the week before Christmas, and still unable to face the study, I’d asked him to put it back. I gingerly picked up the notebook, as if it were contaminated, and fanned through the pages. It contained personal notes, a jotted journal of a man on the go: pieces of a thought, some functional, some endearing; a list of songs to add to his MP3 player; a “To-Do” list that included “exercise more, lower cholesterol, be a better husband”; a stanza from a song or a poem. I felt like a voyeur. Except when he left it all behind, did he have the right to privacy anymore?
Call Karen at Omni S.D. The note was jotted sideways, as if the book had been held at an angle, perhaps while he was on the phone, holding it between his ear and his chin, searching for something to write on. S.D. San Diego? Two of the four times, we believe he was in San Diego. I hit the power button on the computer. Having not been booted up in two months, the machine took a few minutes to come to life. Once the familiar desktop appeared, I opened the web browser and Googled “Omni San Diego.” Omni San Diego Hotel appeared at the top of the searches.
I ran downstairs and found the piece of paper I had used to document the dates. Back upstairs, I picked up the phone and dialed the number on the screen before I could think myself out of it.
“Omni San Diego Hotel. This is John. How may I help you?”
“Hi, my name is Claire Barnes. I have a credit card statement saying that my husband Greg Barnes stayed at the Omni on May twenty-second, but he swore he stayed at the…” I referred to the screen and picked the next hotel down the list “… the Chariot.” I forced a laugh. “I’m sorry. He travels practically weekly for work. It’s impossible for us to keep all this straight, so we just now realized the discrepancy. Can you look to see if a Greg Barnes checked in on May twenty-second?”
“Let me check that for you, Mrs. Barnes.” The man’s tone was crisply official. After a moment, he came back on the line. “Mrs. Barnes, would you be okay with verifying your home address?” I rattled off our home address. “Yes, we have a Greg Barnes listed here on that date.”
I thanked him, hung up, and called Detective Reynolds. When he picked up, I ran through my discovery. “Do you think it means anything?” I asked.
“We’ve checked a lot of this already, but nothing’s popped.” The loud crinkling of shuffling papers came through the phone. “Hold on, okay?” When he came back on the line three minutes later, he seemed interested. “Yep, we show a corporate credit card charge on May twenty-second for the Omni. In February, he stayed at… hmm… the Grand Del Mar, it looks like.” He let out a low whistle. “That’s a five-star hotel. Surely his company wouldn’t pay for that.”
“No. But they have a special ‘cheating on your spouse’ policy that allows you to use your corporate credit card for personal expenses, and they take it out of your paycheck.”
“Wouldn’t the spouse realize the paycheck was about four hundred dollars short?”
“I wouldn’t. I don’t manage the money. I used to like it that way. I’m rethinking that.”
Detective Reynolds cleared his throat. “Okay, so we know where he stayed in San Diego. We knew that before, from his credit card statements. But what does that get us?”