“We’re on top of it. The best thing for you to do is stay home and wait—”
“Down,” Bella whispers and plants a sweet kiss on my cheek.
I acquiesce and lower her to the floor. “And if I don’t?”
“Mrs. Cavanaugh.” The detective sighs.
“Let’s have a snack, shall we?” Claudette’s bustling in my semiclean kitchen.
I glance over my shoulder to see she’s managed to seat all three children at the table. Crew is doling out napkins.
“I’m going up north to the lake house. And if he isn’t there, I’ll come right back. It’ll help, right? Please. I can’t just sit here anymore.”
Silence fills the other end of the line for a second or two. Finally: “Veronica.”
“Hmm?”
“Who is Natasha Markham?”
I let out a little gasp the moment I hear her name. Instantly, her image appears in my mind. Auburn hair, dark-green eyes. Even in my memory, she’s looking right through me. “She’s . . . an old friend of Micah’s.”
“A girlfriend?”
“She was Micah’s girlfriend,” I admit. “She was my college roommate.” For a brief moment, I relive a montage of memories: the day Micah leaned in and kissed me for the first time in our tiny dorm room while Natasha was at class, Natasha’s interrupting a study session at the library we hadn’t told her about, the look of realization on her face when she figured out her boyfriend had fallen for her best friend. “But we haven’t seen her in years. What does Natasha have to do with anything?”
“Maybe nothing. We’re just following up on any possible lead. And Micah? You have no reason to believe he’s been in contact with Natasha?”
“No.” My mother had been dead less than a year when I started college, but being with Natasha made it feel like I still had family. “We just talked about her. The night before he left. I mentioned her. Micah gave no indication he even knew where she was.”
But just speaking her name aloud brings back memories.
Thursdays were movie night. We rented old eighties flicks and ate microwave popcorn and shared blankets. We ate ice cream out of the same tub, passing it back and forth. We shared toothpaste and laundry detergent.
But all that ended when Micah and I got closer.
“It was a dramatic few weeks all those years ago, but we made a clean break.” I catch Claudette’s glance. As if she can hear the detective’s line of questioning on the other end of the line, she raises a brow and almost imperceptibly shakes her head in a silent it’s a shame, but I told you so. “Why? Do you have reason to believe he’s been in contact with Natasha?”
“I’m not ruling anything out at this point.”
“Any word on the plane off the Atlantic coast?”
“Not yet, but we should know soon. As soon as I know, you’ll know.” He clears his throat. “You’re a person of interest in the case, Veronica, and while that isn’t the same as being a suspect . . . Look, I can’t force you not to go to the lake house, but at this point, if you do, think how it’ll look, your taking off right as the news breaks. I’d appreciate it if you stayed local.”
But the police up there don’t even care enough to drive by the lake house in a timely manner. And I have to find Micah. This wretchedness could be over in a few hours if he’s on the lake. I envision it—Micah bundled by a fireside, a week past a shave, getting his head together. Hey, Nicki-girl. You found me. Relief fills my system. Of course he’s up at the lake. He’s taking a breather. He’s spent the days on the water, with a fishing pole in his hand. That’s why he isn’t answering the phone. Everything’s been building lately; he’s been living in a pressure cooker.
And I’ve been a hormonal mess.
“Call the lake house again, all right?” Guidry says. “If he answers, great. Give us a call and go see him. But if he doesn’t . . .”
I take a deep breath. “Thank you for calling.”
“We’ll be in touch.”
He hangs up. There’s plenty he didn’t say, but I heard every word.
Natasha was my college roommate. Micah chose me over her all those years ago. The detective assumes Micah has gone back to her, and the local press thinks he’s dead.
It’s ridiculous.
Maybe Natasha can confirm they’re wasting their time if they’re trying to pin something on me. She knows how I feel about Micah, how I’ve always felt about him. I haven’t had a phone number for her in years, and I doubt she’s still using her college e-mail account, so I open my laptop and navigate to Facebook. I locate her page, but it appears as if she hasn’t been on the site since May—at least that’s the date of her last posting. There are no pictures available for viewing beyond her profile picture, which is perhaps her as a baby. I leave her a direct message with my phone number, then google her to see if anything pops up. A LinkedIn account and other avenues of social media appear, which I’ll investigate once Claudette leaves.
“Are you all right?” Claudette asks.
I shake my head but can’t manage a verbal response.
Guidry doesn’t know my husband, and the press doesn’t know anything about us.
Of course Micah went to the lake to decompress. Just like he did when I nearly lost my mind after the miscarriage. And I’ll prove it to the world.
Chapter 13
November 17
The “new” insurance card Micah gave me, the one I thought we’d given to the fertility clinic, is invalid. The group number doesn’t exist. Micah fabricated the insurance, I suppose, so I’d think we were still covered, so as not to interrupt our mission for another baby. And because he’d been paying the bills out of pocket—$5,000 here, $2,000 there—the balance in our savings account is dangerously low.
It’s more proof that he never took a job with Diamond Corporation . . . at least not a job that offered health insurance. But given our plans to attempt IVF again after the miscarriage, why would he have left United without a decent health care plan?
So maybe there’s another secret Diamond Corporation, but he’s apparently gotten pretty good at using a print shop, seeing as I’m holding a believable insurance card with a faulty group number. Not to mention the deposit receipts complete with a Diamond logo.
And then there’s the fact that we’re two months behind on our mortgage, which I just now learned when I opened the mail.
So what’s going on?
The job he wasn’t offered . . . I can only assume he invented it to keep me at ease during the IVF process.
We’re going into debt to grow our family . . . and to live in this family-appropriate house, in this safe, enclosed neighborhood. Leaving Old Town was my idea. I couldn’t stay there anymore. The bad energy . . . the miscarriage . . . I’d needed to put it all behind me.
I glance at Claudette, who is practically purring over her cup of green tea, sweetened only with natural stevia. “I’ve put too much on his shoulders,” I say. “He’s under a lot of pressure.”
“It’s perfectly all right to demand what you deserve.”
“I would’ve been all right in a two-bedroom condo.”
“Honey. No one’s all right in a two-bedroom condo.”
I wonder if she’s ever lived in one.
“Have you looked through his things yet?”
I scoop another heaping teaspoon of sugar from the bowl and stir it into my mug. It’s my first caffeinated beverage since before we conceived the twins. “He doesn’t have anything to hide.” It sounds like a lie, even to my own ears, considering he’s been hiding plenty.
She lifts a shoulder in a subtle shrug. “Then there’s no harm in looking, is there?”
“My dad comes home on the train,” Crew is saying across the room. “Maybe he’s on a train.”
“My daddy doesn’t go on trains. He’s on a plane.” Elizabella takes a bite of her peanut-butter-topped celery, which Claudette provided. “It’s in the water.”
I shiver a little every time she references it. Remembering how eerily her drawing predicted the accident churns my stomach.
“Why do you think she’s saying that?” Claudette asks.