And finally, I had to repair things between Sarah and me. I thought that if I could accomplish the other things on my list, this last and most important thing on it would fall into place.
A trip to Canborough and Groverton, I hoped, might help me accomplish a few of my goals.
Once Sarah had left for work, I put in a call to a local car rental agency and reserved a sedan. I told them I’d probably need it a couple of days. I just didn’t know whether one day out of the city would be enough to do everything I might need to do, so I grabbed an overnight bag from the closet and tossed it onto the bed. I had saved packing until Sarah was gone so I wouldn’t have to answer any questions about what I might be up to, assuming, of course, that she would even have asked me. Even though we’d slept in the same bed the night before, and been in the kitchen at the same time grabbing some breakfast, we had not spoken.
I didn’t want to give her the wrong idea, seeing me pack a bag. She might think I wasn’t coming back. No sense getting her hopes up.
I tossed a couple of pairs of socks and boxers into the case. I must have been in the bathroom, my head full of the sounds of brush scrubbing teeth, when Sarah returned to the house and came upstairs.
She was standing in the bedroom, staring at the open case on the bed, when I came out of the bathroom. She looked at me, bewildered.
“I forgot my watch,” she said.
“You won’t need it in the home section,” I said, trying to sound apologetic. “Deadlines are somewhat ethereal. Although Frieda’s fairly rigid about cookie time. You won’t want to miss that.”
Her eyes went back to the overnight bag. “You’re going away?”
“Uh,” I said. “I was just throwing in a few things—”
“Maybe that’s a good idea,” Sarah said.
“Huh?”
“I mean, maybe we do need a bit of time. Apart, I mean.”
“You see, I was actually—”
“Where are you going to stay? Are you going to go back up to your father’s place? He might be happy to see you. You know, spend some time without all that other stuff hanging over you.”
“Uh, no, I’m not going to see him.”
“I can’t imagine Lawrence Jones would let you move in with him,” Sarah said softly. “Even for the short term.”
“No, I don’t imagine he would,” I said, feeling a growing emptiness. My detective friend Lawrence, he liked his world well ordered. I would be a piece of paper not lining up with the edge of his desk.
“Have you told the kids?” Sarah asked.
“The thing is, Sarah,” I said, “I wasn’t actually leaving. I was just figuring to be away overnight, maybe two nights at the most, sorting out some things. But not actually leaving. But now maybe I should get a bigger suitcase, take a few extra things, if that’s what you’d like.”
She started to speak, stopped, opened her mouth again, closed it. Finally, “I just figured, when I saw you packing…”
I looked into Sarah’s eyes and said, “I would never leave you.” I paused. “Unless you didn’t want me here.”
Sarah broke eye contact, saw her watch on the bedside table. She went over, picked it up, slipped it over her wrist, concentrating on the task, making more out of it than she needed to. But it only takes so long to put on a watch. Finally she said, “Where are you going?”
“I’m going to try to figure out what’s going on. I’m heading to Canborough, and then on to some place called Groverton.”
“So you’re helping Trixie,” she said quietly.
“Maybe,” I said. “And maybe not. All I want to do now is find out the truth. I’ve been suspended from work, handcuffed next to a corpse, and implicated in a murder. And”—I shrugged—“now that I don’t have a job to go to, it’s important to keep busy.”
She still wouldn’t look at me. “I used to laugh when the suggestion of you having an affair came up. The idea that someone like you, someone as nervous as you, someone whose emotions and anxieties are so close to the surface, could pull it off.” She took a tissue from the box next to her bed and appeared to be dabbing at her eyes. “Now, I don’t know anymore.”
“The lipstick,” I said.
Sarah froze, said nothing.
I couldn’t tell her that I’d already explained this to Angie. “It was when I was handcuffed,” I said. “Trixie gave me a kiss goodbye, before she ran off, with my car, leaving me there to be found by you. Maybe she thought it was the least she could do for the trouble she’d caused me.”
I knew I wasn’t being totally honest here, at least not about how I had perceived Trixie’s kiss. It had seemed like more, on her part, than a simple kiss of apology, or goodbye.
And I didn’t quite know what to make of that.
“Everything started to go wrong when you decided we should move to Oakwood,” Sarah said. “You got into that trouble, you met Trixie. If you’d never moved us out there, you never would have met her. And you wouldn’t be in this mess you’re in now, and I wouldn’t be heading in to my first day in the home section, having been humiliated in front of the entire newsroom.”