The blinds clattered closed. “He doesn’t have a key? How do you know that?”
“He flagged me down, coming home from work—before he’d called the cops. Told me he had to break a window to check on them. Said she changed the locks.” Izzy knew the words sounded bad even as she was saying them. They always investigated the husband, even when the husband was … well, Paul. “I’m surprised he didn’t knock on your door too.”
Clara thought for a moment. “I was probably at the grocery store,” she said. “One of the few luxuries of my lifestyle is that I get to avoid that madhouse on weekends.”
Izzy pictured Paul going door to door, getting no answer, his panic mounting with each passing moment. That look on his face as he stood in her driveway, as if she, a total stranger to him, might be able to explain everything … “I felt awful for him,” she blurted out.
“But why would she have changed the locks?” Clara shifted on the cushion. “Like he’s going to, what, start taking the furniture while she’s at work?”
Natalie shrugged. “Maybe her lawyer advised her to. Maybe she changed them for an unrelated reason and just hadn’t given him a key yet. Who knows.”
“Tons of explanations,” Clara agreed quickly. “I’m just thinking out loud. It’s better when no one can hear me think.” She was twisting the end of her ponytail around her fingertips so ferociously that Izzy half expected the whole clump to detach itself from her head in surrender.
“Do you know if they have family in the area?” Izzy asked. “I can’t believe no one else has pulled up over there.”
The other women stared at one another blankly, and an uneasy silence filled the room. “How is it possible that I’m such a shoddy friend to have never asked that?” Clara mumbled.
Izzy was about to answer when she caught the station logo flashing on the TV screen. “Oh! It’s on!” She dove for the remote and turned on the volume.
“New developments tonight in the missing persons case of a local woman and her two children,” the anchor said, on cue. “Authorities are broadening their search and issuing the AMBER Alert across additional states, after the estranged husband of Kristin Kirkland has alleged that certain funds are unaccounted for, and she may be traveling with a large sum of cash.”
The women exchanged looks again. Large? How large?
“Given that it’s uncertain exactly when Kirkland and her children went missing in the thirty-six-hour window between Saturday night and this morning, that raises additional questions about how far they may have gotten and how fast. So far, searches for the vehicle in Ohio, Kentucky, and Indiana have come up empty. Let’s have another look at the make and model of the minivan…”
A photo from a car lot flashed on the screen with the license plate number in bold print beneath it. Then the picture changed to one of Kristin and the kids, taken at a Fourth of July picnic just a couple months ago from the looks of the flags and banners in the background. She had one arm around each twin and was smiling serenely into the camera, as if everything she could ever need was right there in her arms.
“Kirkland is the mother of four-year-old twins from a previous marriage: Aaron and Abigail. Their biological father is deceased. Authorities are calling this a critical missing persons case, assembling a team of detectives and working around the clock, so we expect to know more by our morning report.”
“Um,” Izzy said, as she clicked off the TV. “How much do gynecologists make, exactly? Do you think she cleaned him out?”
“Her college administrator’s salary can’t be much,” Rhoda said. “They had to have been mostly living off Paul’s. How much could possibly be left?”
“What if someone else took the money, and took Kristin and the kids too?” Randi asked, tears blinking into her eyes. “What if we’ve been sitting here joking around when they’re in real trouble? It hadn’t occurred to me they could really be anything other than fine.”
“Let’s not get carried away,” Rhoda said. “I mean, I’ve never heard of someone staging a crime scene by packing up the china.”
“Right,” Natalie said. “As a military wife, I’ve seen some pretty cold divorces. Custody battles can get nasty when one parent’s home address is at the mercy of their next deployment. Women who seem sweet as pie will do crazy things to cut those ties. And I wouldn’t call Kristin sweet as pie. There was always something too perfect about her, wasn’t there?”
A silence descended. Clara turned and lifted the slats again, and she and Izzy peered out, shoulder to shoulder, like children. No. Like sisters. She and Penny used to do the same thing, looking for the curious but regular sight of Mrs. Timmons coming down the sidewalk with her Siamese cat on a rhinestone-studded leash, back when all Izzy coveted of her sister’s was her rainbow-colored headband.
“It might be turning out I didn’t know Kristin as well as I thought,” Clara said finally, turning back to the group. “And I never claimed to know Paul at all. But whatever’s going on here, I’m willing to bet she didn’t do anything he didn’t deserve.”
“Team Kristin?” Izzy asked.
“Win, lose, or draw.”
6
People who tell you, “Don’t sweat the small stuff,” mean well, but I’ve noticed that the more you sweat, the healthier you get!
—Flyers for Clara’s mother’s aerobics classes, circa 1985
Clara loved Yellow Springs. They’d come here from Cincinnati last year, from a cookie-cutter town house complex she’d never quite felt at home in, and she still reveled in the newness of it. Or, rather, the lack thereof. She loved that the houses here were as eclectic as the people who lived in them, that century-old farmhouses like hers were adjacent to towering beauties like Kristin’s, midcentury additions like Izzy and Natalie’s, and earthy bungalows like Randi and Rhoda’s. She loved that the backyards didn’t meet neatly, that even though hers wasn’t fenced, she wasn’t peering out her kitchen windows into someone else’s. She loved the outbuildings—the old art studio that Benny used for his tools and odd projects, the chicken coop behind Randi and Rhoda’s that yielded so many eggs Clara would sometimes find a basketful on her back porch, and Kristin’s honeysuckle-rimmed detached garage that afforded both of their properties privacy but not total seclusion.
She loved that she could walk Thomas to school and cross paths with other families on the way. She loved that the roads to town weren’t gridded out but curved generously, and that what was around each curve might surprise you—even if you’d walked the route the day before. She loved that she could stroll by Benny’s accounting firm on the way to the market or the library and surprise him with one of his favorite lattes or join him for lunch. She loved that she could window-shop while Maddie napped in her stroller. She loved the weekend visitors who you could tell wished they lived there, and the college students with their big ideas and sometimes ridiculous clothes, and the mystery surrounding the exact address of their most famous resident, Dave Chappelle, who had traded in an entertainment deal worth millions for this and who occasionally could be spotted at Dino’s Cappuccinos.
And she’d always loved, as she suspected Dave did, that it was an unlikely place for a media circus.
But it was there in the morning, cluttering the sidewalk to the edge of her lawn. From her vantage point at the window, Clara watched the reporters huddled around their vans drinking four-dollar coffees brought from Dayton as they gave instructions to their cameramen, checked their equipment, and readied themselves for the early broadcasts.
She crawled back into bed. Benny turned to face her and reached over Maddie’s sleeping form to lace his fingers in hers. For once, last night Clara had welcomed Maddie’s cries in the darkness, had jumped at the chance to snuggle her back to sleep. She’d been awake anyway.