Evidence of Life

Chapter 19



Abby studied her reflection in the powder-room mirror. She looked okay, she thought, in her black jumper and white, long-sleeved blouse. Not too casual. She looked like an elementary school teacher, Nick would have said. She had always thought he meant it as a compliment, but now she wondered if he would have preferred she wear tight skirts and form-fitting sweaters. She sat on the closed toilet lid. Once she’d been sure of him, his affection for her, his approval. Now she wasn’t, and it felt awful. Her breath kept hanging up in her throat as if there were a bone stuck back there. She couldn’t imagine facing a classroom filled with second graders. But she had to, or she’d lose herself and Jake, too. He and Mama were counting on her.

She grabbed a few tissues in case her self-control failed her and tucked them inside her purse. In the kitchen, she made toast, ate half and tossed the rest out for the birds. And when she threw her napkin into the trash, she thought of the fax. Buried now beneath yesterday’s coffee grounds and the wrapper from the spark plugs Jake had bought to get the mower running.

She fished out the half-damp, crumpled message, unfolded it over the sink, wiping at the stains. Hank Kilmer’s phone number was still visible, and enough of the letters stood out from the blots to make sense of the words.

My...Sondra has be...miss...for .early a year I don.. recogn....he name ..ck Bennett. May we talk in...so....

Where was Hank Kilmer’s wife, Abby wondered. Who was she? Why would Nick have written her fax number inside a matchbook cover from the Riverbend Lodge in Bandera? Had he and Sondra Kilmer lunched there together that day last December when Kate had seen him in town? Was Sondra the woman who’d been unhappy with Nick over a botched real-estate deal? Abby looked out the kitchen window at the freshly mown yard. She wished she had shown Jake the matchbook. The sight of it might have forced him to tell her what he knew.

Abby glanced at the clock, folded the fax and picked up her purse. If she didn’t leave now, she’d be late.

* * *

She had every intention of keeping her appointment with Charlotte Treadway, but then drove right by Clark Elementary to the freeway and headed south into Houston with the rest of the commuter traffic. She told herself she was crazy. She saw an exit ahead and told herself to turn around. She passed another exit. This isn’t rational. Several more exits. How will you explain it?

The city skyline loomed. Now what? She had no idea where to find Hank Kilmer; she would have to call him. She glanced at her cell phone lying on the console near her knee. She pulled onto the shoulder, cut the engine. In the distance the cluster of buildings jutted from the horizon. Their tops were lost in swirls of dirty yellow sunshine. The traffic snaked past her, relentless, hell-bent. How had Nick stood it, driving into this day after day?

Her phone went off, jangling through an assortment of mechanical sounds that was supposed to be Beethoven’s Ode to Joy. Abby picked it up, studied the caller ID window.

Mama.

Abby could picture her, happily thinking of her daughter on her way to work, on her way to resurrecting her old life. Of course Mama would call; she would want to wish Abby luck. Abby laid the phone in her lap. She wished she could be where her mama and Kate and Jake wanted her to be, in a schoolroom on the road to recovery. Instead, against even her own better judgment, she was here on the side of the freeway, half-scared but determined to see Hank Kilmer. So there was no point in answering the phone. No point in speaking to her mother. Not now.

Once her mother’s call went to voice mail, Abby dialed Hank Kilmer’s number. Four rings, five. She was trying to decide what message to leave when a man answered sounding breathless.

Abby jerked upright. “Mr. Kilmer?”

“Yes?”

“This is, this is Abby Bennett. We—we have corresponded via fax.” Her voice tipped up at the end as if she were asking him.

There was a moment of silence. “Where are you?” he asked.

“I-45 near the Loop,” she said warily.

“I’m closer to downtown. Are you familiar? I could give you directions to the house.”

“No.” Abby wasn’t so deluded as to think that would be wise. “Could we meet somewhere for coffee?”

He named an IHOP south of the Loop and told her what he was wearing: a brown sport jacket and an orange-striped tie.

Abby pulled into traffic. What sort of man wore orange?

Nick wouldn’t. He wouldn’t think this was smart, either, meeting a man she didn’t know, regardless of the color of his tie. But Nick wasn’t here.

* * *

If it hadn’t been for the tie, Abby might have missed Hank Kilmer altogether. His skin, even his thinning hair, was as colorless as dust. He wasn’t wearing the glasses she’d expected, and he was much taller than she had imagined. Over six feet, but he stooped as if his height pained him. They shook hands, and Abby slid into the booth. Hank folded himself onto the bench opposite her. Even seated, his shoulders slumped forward as if his back were burdened with a sack of rocks. He’d taken off his jacket and rolled the sleeves of his gold shirt into messy cuffs at his elbows. The awful orange-striped tie was loosely knotted at his neck. Everything about him seemed careless and unkempt. Unhappy. Nothing so neat and precise as his handwriting had indicated.

Abby slipped off her own jacket. She glanced around the restaurant full of diners, mostly men, bent over full plates of bacon and eggs. In the booth across the aisle, an older man was speaking intently to a young blond-haired woman as he stroked the inside of her wrist. They looked unnaturally enraptured given the earliness of the hour and the way they were dressed, both of them in business suits.

Not married, she decided. She wondered if they would make it to the office. She wondered if the man’s wife had dropped their kids at school and gone to do the grocery shopping. Had she done the laundry, swept their kitchen floor? Had she planned what she would serve this cheating man for his dinner?

“I can’t believe you called. I’d given up,” Hank said.

“I wasn’t going to,” Abby told him.

“Well, thank God you did.” He sounded fervent, too fervent.

Abby eyed the door, wanting to leave, but when the waitress came, they both ordered coffee.

“So,” Hank said when the waitress was gone, “your husband’s been missing since April?”

Abby nodded. “But your wife’s been gone since February, you said.”

“Late February or sometime in March, near as I can figure.”

Abby frowned.

The waitress reappeared with their order. She set the cream pitcher and sugar shaker on the table. Abby smiled and thanked her, but Hank Kilmer didn’t even glance up. He poured a stream of sugar into his mug, took up his spoon and stirred a series of concentrated circles.

When he lifted his mug to drink, she noticed his knuckles were thick and misshapen. She wondered if it was from slamming his fists into walls. She wondered why he didn’t know when his wife had disappeared.

“We were separated,” he said as if he’d read Abby’s mind. “She’d moved out, but I figured it was temporary, like the other times.”

“You’ve been separated before?”

“Yeah, but she always came back. She doesn’t like being apart from our daughter for too long. Caitlin’s eight. She and Sondra are close.”

“Oh, she must miss her mother.”

“You have no idea.” Hank stabbed the table with his index finger. “No kid should have to go through this. Sondra is Caitlin’s mother, for Christ’s sake. She shouldn’t do this to her own kid. Just disappear without a f*cking—aaagh—” He groaned and wiped his face. “I’m sorry. It gets to me sometimes.”

Abby lowered her gaze. She could hear her pulse in her ears.

Hank shoved his spoon around. “I want this nightmare to end. But when you don’t know what the hell it’s about—” He shot her a hard glance. “You understand, right? You’re in the same boat.”

Abby did understand, but she didn’t want to share Hank’s boat or anything else with him. She felt pity for him, this big, moon-faced, homely, infuriated man. She wondered if it was his anger at his wife that had bleached the color from him.

Hank said, “There must be a reason why your husband had Sondra’s fax number.”

“I don’t know of one.”

“Well, is he by any chance an attorney? Is he the same Nick Bennett who represented those kids in the case against Helix Belle?”

Abby said he was, but with reluctance, not liking it.

“I thought so! That’s the connection.” Hank sounded celebratory.

Abby felt her heart stall in her chest. “I don’t know what you mean.”

“Sondra was a judicial assistant for Judge Payne, Harold Payne?”

“The case was tried in his court,” Abby remembered.

“She went to work for him a couple of months before the Helix lawsuit was filed, worked for him almost two years.”

Abby added more cream to her coffee, even though she hadn’t tasted it.

“Sondra was wound up about that case,” he continued. “She talked about it constantly. She talked about your husband, too, especially after he won. She could practically quote his closing argument from memory. It started to piss me off, frankly. I wondered then if there was some funny business going on.”

“No,” Abby said, and she was thinking of her marriage at the time, that when Nick won the settlement, their relationship couldn’t have been better. Nick himself couldn’t have been happier or more content. She certainly had not been wondering about any funny business.

“I’m not trying to say I’ve got proof of anything between them. But the fact is they apparently worked together, and now she’s gone and so is he.”

“But they didn’t disappear at the same time. You don’t even know for certain when your wife left.”

“Like I said, we were separated. She moved out last January. She’d rented a house over in the Heights and opened up an interior-design business.”

“I thought she worked for Judge Payne.”

“She quit after the holidays. She said she was sick of getting hit on all the time. It was kind of a shock, to tell you the truth. She’d seemed so happy, then boom.” Hank fell into a fractious silence.

Abby pulled her jacket into her lap; she found the strap of her purse.

Hank put out his hand as if he might hold her in place. “Your husband went missing in April, right? What’s the story there? If you don’t mind my asking,” he added.

Abby gave him the short version.

“Man, that’s rough,” he said when she finished. “I was out in the Hill Country a week or so after the flood. Things were bad.”

Abby already had an idea of what he’d say if she asked why he went there. She sensed—and she’d guess later it was the horrible gift of prescience—that his answer would be the beginning of the end of what was left of her life, the one she believed in, relied on, treasured. But she asked anyway. “You have a place out there?”

“Sondra’s granddad left her some land in Kerr County with a cabin on it. It’s on high ground, but that was a lot of water.”

“It was okay?”

“Yeah, it’s old but solid.” Hank kept Abby’s gaze. “What a hell of a thing, though, your whole family gone.”

She said she still had her son Jake. “He won’t be happy when he finds out I was here.”

“How come?”

“He thinks I’m at work. So does my mother.” Abby glanced at her watch. It was past nine. Charlotte Treadway would be wondering what had happened to her. She would call Hap to complain.

“But you blew that off and called me because you have doubts, right? What are you thinking, that your husband and daughter didn’t drown?”

“There’s no indication that happened. No bodies, not even the car was found.” Abby hesitated. She didn’t want to say any more, and yet she was compelled. She hated how desperate she’d become, how helpless it made her feel. It had robbed her of everything, even her ordinary discretion, her dignity. “I thought they were going camping,” she said and described Lindsey’s phone call, the one from Boerne. “I’ve never been sure what she said, something about her daddy, about how he was taking the scenic route or the easy route. I don’t know. I think she was crying.”

“Maybe he had a heart attack or something.”

“The boy at the gas station said he saw them drive away.” Abby toyed with her cup, thinking of the cabin, its remote location. She thought of Nick jotting Sondra’s name inside a book of matches in handwriting that was as familiar to her as her own. She could see it, the rushed slant of his “S,” the extra loop on the “r” that made its shape seem almost girlish. She could see him smiling over it, smiling at Sondra, and she felt insulted. She felt the awful insinuation that seemed implicit building in her mind, and she tightened her jaw. She looked at Hank. “I’d like to go there,” she said even as she was thinking how insane it was, completely insane to involve herself on any level with this man and his problems. Didn’t she have enough of her own?

“Go where?”

“To your wife’s cabin.”

Hank’s eyes widened. “You think Sondra and your husband—?”

“I don’t know.” Abby didn’t want Hank to say it, having an affair. “It might not be that.”

“What else then?”

“She worked for Judge Payne.”

“So? What does the cabin have to do with that?”

Abby pulled the book of matches from her purse and pushed it across the table with the tip of her index finger. “Do you know this place?”

“Riverbend Lodge? Yeah. It’s a dump on the highway outside Bandera.”

“Is it anywhere near your wife’s cabin?”

“Not really. You pass it going there, I guess.”

“Look inside.”

Hank opened the cover. “That’s Sondra’s fax number.”

Abby said, “That’s Nick’s handwriting.”

“This is how you found me?”

Abby nodded.

“But if he wanted to get in touch with her, why wouldn’t he just call her? She has a cell phone, or she did have.”

“He might have faxed her documents related to the trial,” Abby said. “I haven’t any idea, really, but there’s something else you should know.”

He waited.

“My friend Kate ran into Nick in Bandera last winter, not long before you lost touch with your wife.”

Hank’s brows shot up. “Alone or—?”

Abby shrugged. Kate hadn’t mentioned seeing Nick with a woman, but given Kate’s history, that might not mean anything.

Hank’s gaze considered her. “Your husband—he was implicated when the money went missing last fall from the account that was set up for those kids, wasn’t he? But it was that other guy, Helix Belle’s own attorney—Sanders, Sandover, something like that—”

“Adam Sandoval.” Abby supplied the right name. “Nick had nothing to do with it.” She stopped short of saying that she’d gone looking for Sherry Sandoval; she wasn’t going to repeat any of what the Sandoval’s neighbor had told her. It was as Kate said, nothing but gossip. It couldn’t be more....

Hank said he remembered the raw deal Nick got. “Sondra went on a rant about it.”

“Did she ever talk about Adam? She must have known him, too, from the courtroom.”

Hank kept Abby’s gaze, and she watched the wave of disquiet creep over his expression. Her own breath felt uncertain. Even her surroundings, their entire conversation, seemed unreal now, the product of bizarre imagination.

“Jesus, he’s gone, too, isn’t he? He jumped bail. It was all over the news.”

“Last spring, right before the flood, not long after your wife—”

“My wife and your husband took off.”

“Nick didn’t take off, not with our daughter.”

Hank’s eyes widened at the bite in Abby’s words. She didn’t care.

“So what is all this, then?” He matched her hard tone, spreading his hands. “A coincidence? My wife worked for a judge who oversaw a case where two of the opposing attorneys are now missing, along with a helluva a lot of cash. What’s next, or maybe I should say, who’s next? The judge? Is he going to disappear?”

Abby didn’t have an answer. She picked up the matchbook, returning it to her purse.

Hank’s sigh was heavy and unsettled the air. “I still don’t see what the cabin has to do with anything. Sondra never went there much. She’s a city girl, can’t stand being stuck in the boonies. She only kept the place because her grandparents loved it, and she loved them. But now that they’re both gone, she’s talked about selling it.”

“It’s isolated, then.” Abby found Hank’s gaze, saw him take her meaning.

“Yeah,” he said. “It’s a great place to hide.”

* * *

“Mom? What are you doing?”

“Driving home,” Abby said. “Can I call you back?”

“No, Mom. Jesus, Gramma called me. That teacher from the school called and said you never showed. Gramma’s been trying your cell phone and the home number all morning. She’s about to go up to Hardys Walk.”

“Oh, God, Jake, I’m sorry. I wasn’t thinking. Hold on.” Abby laid the cell phone in the passenger seat and steered the car over two lanes of traffic and onto the shoulder of the freeway. Cars rushed past so close, they shook the BMW. Abby closed her eyes a moment, making herself breathe, then picked up the phone and apologized again.

“But what are you doing?” Jake demanded.

“I realize you’re angry with me, and I wish I could explain. I have to do this, that’s all. There’s just no other way, and I’m so tired of arguing—”

“Mom, stop. You’re jabbering.”

Abby pressed her lips together.

“You went to see the guy who sent the fax, didn’t you?”

“Who told you?”

“Gramma. She figured that’s where you were.”

Abby danced her fingers along the top of the steering wheel.

“I don’t know how you can accuse me of keeping stuff from you,” Jake said.

“I haven’t accused you, Jake.”

“Maybe not in so many words, but you make it pretty clear.”

Abby sighed. “Maybe we’re both insane.”

“Now you’re talking. Who is the guy anyway? Does he know Dad or what?”

“He doesn’t. But his wife might.” Abby waited for Jake to ask who the wife was, to ask why Hank’s wife would know his dad. But the silence from Jake’s end was profound.

“Jake? Are you there?”

He said, “Yes,” but the distinct hesitation before he answered was unmistakable. Ominous. Alarm prickled the fine hairs on the back of Abby’s neck; she put a hand there.

“Mom, it’s like I said before, you need to go home. You need to build a new life, because the one you had is over. You don’t need to be hurt anymore, okay? Just go home.”

Abby looked out at nothing, and when she finally said his name, she knew he’d hung up. She was talking to dead air.

* * *

Abby’s mother met her at the kitchen door.

“Jake said you’ve been into town to see that man.” She followed Abby into the kitchen. “I thought you threw away his number.”

“I did.” Abby sat down.

Her mother took a cup and saucer down from the cabinet.

“Could I have a glass of water instead?” Abby asked.

Her mother filled a glass and brought it to Abby, then sat in an adjacent chair. She took Abby’s hands. “What’s going on, sweet?”

Abby’s eyes filled. “Jake is pretty upset with me.”

“We were worried. We didn’t know what in the world had happened to you. Hap Albright called from Clark at nine and said you still weren’t there. The school is only a ten-minute drive from your house.”

“Hap was at Clark? What was he doing? Checking up on me?”

“I don’t think so. He said he just happened to be there.”

Abby made a face.

Her mother patted her hands and released them.

Abby said, “I can’t shake the feeling that Jake knows something.”

“What do you mean?”

“I don’t know. He just seems so determined that I should stop looking for answers. He wants me to go home. That’s all he ever says—go home.”

“He wants you to be okay, honey. We all do.”

Abby sighed.

“So, this man, this Hank person, did you learn anything helpful from him?”

Abby gave her mother the gist of their conversation. She said, “Clearly, his wife knew Nick, and if she knew him, she must have known Adam, too. They were all working on the same case.”

“Okay, but do you really think it’s possible the disappearances are related, that they somehow involve Helix Belle and the money that was stolen?”

“I know. It seems so far-fetched.”

“Abby, it sounds like an episode of Forty-Eight Hours.”

Abby managed a smile. She said, “I don’t know about Sondra, what she might be capable of, but Nick was cleared. He had no part in what Adam did. I know that,” she added. But did she? Did she really know Nick at all?

“Maybe you should go to the police.”

“And say what? That I think my husband, who they’re convinced drowned with my daughter in a flood, is actually alive and involved in some sort of—?” Conspiracy. Abby broke off before she could say it, remembering her confrontation with Joe at his office when she’d questioned whether it was possible that Nick had an unhappy client, one who might have followed him and harassed him. Even when Abby told Joe that Nick had mentioned that very possibility to her, Joe had been annoyed; he’d practically sneered. There’s no conspiracy, he’d said. But then she’d dismissed the possibility, too, when Nick brought it up to her.

Abby looked at her mother. “I don’t think the police would pay the slightest attention to me, Mama. I’m going tomorrow with Hank to Sondra’s cabin. Maybe we’ll find something there.”

“Like what? You don’t even know the man. Where do you intend to spend the night?”

“We’re not spending the night.”

“But the drive is too long to make it there and back in one day.”

“But I’m going to, and that’s that.” Abby stood up. “I only came by to say I’m sorry I worried you and to tell you I’m going.”

“But this isn’t like you, Abigail. What do you hope to accomplish? What could this woman, or Adam Sandoval for that matter, possibly have to do with Nick?”

Nothing good. The words rose into Abby’s mouth. She finished her water and set the glass in the sink. She thought in terms of the result she would hope for if hope were possible, and she might have laughed, but her mother’s anxiety was palpable. Abby turned and hugged her close. “I don’t know, Mama. That’s why I have to go there.”