“That’s—it can’t be. Is that this past Friday?” Owen said.
“Yes!” Keisha said triumphantly. “The victim filed for divorce on Friday morning, and the papers were served on the husband at his home address a few hours later. The same day she disappeared. Is that motive, or what?”
“Not only is it motive, that’s probable cause right there,” Owen said. “A woman goes missing the same day she serves her husband with divorce papers, then she turns up with a fractured skull, dumped in the river. The husband has a big bruise on his face and scratches on his hands. That settles it. We’re going to the judge right away to get a warrant on that house,” Owen said, and stood up.
Owen wasn’t about to drag his feet and risk letting that creep Rothenberg get away with killing the lovely Kate. He knew something the others didn’t, something sensational that had been in the ME’s report. He’d kept it on the down low so it didn’t get splashed across the front page of every newspaper in the state. Kate Eastman was murdered on her fortieth birthday, the same day she filed for divorce. And on that day, Kate Eastman was ten weeks pregnant. That bastard had murdered his pregnant wife. Owen planned to lock him up for that crime if it was the last thing he did.
25
The day after he identified Kate’s body from photos at the Belle River police station, Griff woke up on the sofa in Aubrey’s cabin, feeling like he was coming down with the flu. He had a sore throat and burning eyes, his entire body ached, and the left side of his face was puffed up and tender, like he’d cracked a tooth. Griff got up and searched through the medicine chests in the bathrooms and the cabinets in the kitchen and came up empty. How was it possible that in this entire house there was not one godforsaken item that could help him? No furry old Advil at the bottom of a drawer. No vodka stashed in the back of a cupboard. Not even an expired box of mac and cheese that he could mix with water and eat from the pot to try to dispel the chill. Instead he found dried-up toothpaste, old bottles of ketchup and Sriracha, and a half-eaten jar of blueberry preserves in the fridge. He stood at the sink and ate the preserves with a spoon. After that, he still had a growling stomach, and endless time on his hands to mourn what was lost.
That list was long. Griff had no wife, no money, and no friends except Aubrey (who was really more hanger-on than true friend). His phone was out of battery and he didn’t have a charger. He was stranded without a car—didn’t even own a car, since Kate had taken the BMW and now the cops had impounded it. He had no idea when Aubrey was coming back and no way to reach her, since there was no landline that he could see. He had no advisers and no lawyers at a moment when he surely needed them. He didn’t even have religion to comfort him, because he lost his faith years ago when his mother left them out of the blue to go back to Sweden.
This dark moment was always coming for him. Maybe it was where he was fated to spend the rest of his life, or maybe it was a test, the first step on a perilous journey to some other, happier existence.
Griff built a nest of cushions on the floor as close to the woodstove as he could get without singeing his clothes, and lay down on top of it, wrapping himself in an ugly afghan from the sofa. He stared up at the cathedral ceiling and tried to think straight, but drew a blank. The ceiling was made of a raw, silvery wood that Aubrey told him had been salvaged from a historic local barn. That’s how the people were around here—they wanted to tell you about the provenance of the wood in their houses. They would explain how they’d grown the tomatoes you were eating using only organic methods, and that their children went to schools that had no walls, where they made musical instruments from found objects. In a moment of delusion when they first moved up here, Griff thought it might be worthwhile to be a part of that. He’d investigated buying a small organic farm, and when that proved too expensive, getting some chickens for the backyard, though it turned out raising chickens in downtown Belle River was against the law. He’d even talked to Kate about having a child.
Hah.
When Griff’s father’s empire collapsed, the only part he truly minded was seeing his suddenly old and frail-looking father go to jail. That was partly for his father’s sake and partly for his own, because Marty Rothenberg was a surprisingly loving dad, and Griff missed him very much. (His mother was a different story.) The money, on the other hand, he was glad to see the back of. Nobody believed that, but it was true. All the money had ever done was separate him from people, make it hard to tell who actually cared about him and who just wanted something.
Take Kate, for example. He always thought they were exactly alike. They’d grown up together, in the same rarefied air. The doorman buildings on park blocks. The gated communities filled with lavish second homes standing empty till their owners cared to visit. The islands whose runways accommodated only private jets. Naturally they kept bumping up against each other over the years. There were some differences. Her family was merely wealthy, where his had the riches of sultans. But the class difference between them made up for that. Her people came over on the Mayflower. His father was born in Brooklyn, had stubby fingers, and always wore cheap suits to prove he wasn’t ashamed of where he came from. Griff’s fashion-model mother had bequeathed him her blond hair and bone structure, but he had his father’s heart (and short stature). His father was a mensch, a man of the people, and his crimes had been driven mainly by the desire to make other people happy. Nobody else saw that, but Griff did. He saw the good in everyone. For instance, he’d always seen the good in Kate Eastman.