The cop is catching up, I will give her that. Ethan is acting as predictably as always: panicking, freaking out, shutting down, worrying. Inebriated and sloppy. He’s so banal, I simply don’t know what anyone sees in him. He is almost too dull to play with. Almost.
But the cop. The cop is interesting. She’s an acquired taste. Blunt. Very blunt. There’s no elegance to her, no finesse. That will be learned as she grows into a real investigator. Right now she’s easily led, a perfectly manipulatable puppet who can be shunted off in any direction I please. A bumper car. She’s a bumper car, fumbling through all the information provided, trying to stay upright. Trying to keep her head above water.
There’s an image. The sweet towheaded cop, water lapping at her sharp collarbones, the naked, pink flesh getting crepey and wrinkled from the soaking wetness. Dipped in silver wet and slippery green algae. The water rising higher and higher as the shadows deepen...
Sorry, we shouldn’t go there. Not just yet.
Smash cut to Sutton Montclair.
That’s better.
Here’s the deal. Brass tacks. If you give a society enough information, lay down enough threads, someone will have to follow the right one. It’s human nature. It’s the way our minds work. In a linear fashion, point A to point B to point C. So few of us have the capability to go from A to Q to H. It takes a special person to think that way.
I’m that special person.
But you already know that.
LET’S GO FOR A DRIVE
In the garage, the perfectly straight, organized, nary a spider or speck of dust in sight garage that attached to the back of their house through a covered walkway, Ethan stopped cold.
Her car. He’d forgotten to check her car. She’d left her keys...
A brief flash, an image formed, sending his heart to his throat, choking him with its intensity: Sutton, slumped in the front seat, engine running, a tube from the exhaust pipe into the front window. But when he got up the courage to look in her front seat, there was nothing. No one. The cupboard was bare.
Ethan drove a BMW 335i convertible, black with gray interior, latest model. He traded in his cars dutifully every two years. Sutton had a more practical forest green X5, or as she called it, the Official Williamson County Soccer Mom car. Not that they were keeping up with the Joneses. Not really. Ellen Jones drove an I3. Electric, sustainable, practical—Ellen to a T.
Ethan didn’t know why he was thinking about Ellen, other than he hadn’t looked in Sutton’s car on day one, which struck him as a Very Stupid Move. Clearly he needed to read more mystery novels; he would know better what to do to find his wife. Amateur sleuth he was not.
Steeling himself, he unlocked the door—they always locked their cars even in the garage, a theft deterrent—and looked inside. Empty.
Oh, the relief. What would he have said if she’d been here the whole time? It would have looked bad for him, very bad.
His search of the X5 was brief. Her car was as clean and organized as she was. Nothing out of place, no stray receipts or empty peppermint wrappers or barrettes. Everything in its place. There was nothing amiss.
He glanced at his watch, cursed, and jumped into his own vehicle. When he got back, he’d look at the GPS, see where she’d been last. Maybe that would give him a clue, though she usually walked most places during the day.
He tore out of the garage. Gentry’s Farm wasn’t far from their house, about a ten-minute drive in bad traffic. Which was always in Franklin. It was one of the reasons they walked everywhere, the constant traffic jam of locals and tourists. Tonight was no different—the roads were busy, the lights were barely synced, and his quick ten-minute jaunt was inching into twenty before he broke free of the melee and flew west down Highway 96.
He tasted bile every time he thought about Gentry’s Farm. Wilde knew exactly how to punish him.
It was their first trip out after the baby was born. They’d taken Dashiell to look at the pumpkins. Halloween was past, but there was still plenty of fall flora around, leftovers from the recent holiday haunted hayrides. Sutton couldn’t resist the idea of a baby in a cornucopia, à la Anne Geddes.
He had to agree, “Dashiell in the Field” was an unexpected pleasure. They’d almost filled the memory card on the camera, they’d taken so many shots. It was how they announced the birth of their boy, a photo of him snuggled in an angelic white sleep suit, surrounded by green-and-yellow gourds and bright orange pumpkins and a small haystack Sutton had laughingly constructed, the whole tableau dotted with the red-gold maple leaves they’d found in a tidy pile nearby. Their bountiful babe. Their bounty.
Colin Wilde knew about the photos. They’d put them on their social media accounts gleefully, racking up likes and comments. Surely that’s why he’d picked this place, to stick the knife in a bit farther, twist it inside Ethan’s intestines, make them jump and roil.
Ethan was going to kill the bastard. He knew this as certainly as he knew the moon dictated the tides.
It was simply a question of when.
TAKE A WALK ON THE WILDE SIDE
Ethan parked near the main entrance to Gentry’s Farm. The gate was closed, but he knew that wouldn’t be allowed as an excuse for missing this meeting. The darkness was severe, clouds blotting out the moon, so he switched on the Maglite and climbed over the metal railings. The farm hadn’t tried very hard to keep people out, trusting the good area and their tony, well-heeled neighbors. And really, what were people going to do in a field?
His mom’s face floated in front of him, and he remembered the stupid joke she’d told him when they’d sat him down to talk about the birds and the bees. They, because the Montclairs did everything together, including explaining how sex worked to their teenage son, who knew everything already, but humored them because this was a rite of passage and he wanted to see how they handled it.
Frankly, as it turned out. They’d spared no detail, and had done it with good humor, tag-teaming him with embarrassingly detailed descriptions. They even had a book with diagrams, so he’d be able to identify all the right parts when the time came. At the end, his mother had chucked him under the chin and said, “One last thing to remember, son. Don’t ever make love near a cornfield.”
Red-faced and mortified—not only had his mother used the term making love in a sentence, she’d talked openly about erections and vaginas and pleasuring a woman first and all sorts of other things he would just as soon forget—he’d played along.
“Why not?”
“’Cause that corn has ears!”
He’d been so caught off guard he’d started to laugh, and the three of them had howled together, then companionably gone out for curry.
He missed them. He missed Sutton. When he’d told her that story, she’d fallen over laughing, then suggested they find themselves a cornfield straightaway to test the theory.
They hadn’t, though he’d wanted to, that day with the baby. With his loves, together and perfect.
He hoofed it deeper into the field. There was a track, beaten dirt, for the hayrides, he supposed. He followed it in.