When I was satisfied there was nothing left, I knocked on Zoe’s door, waited for her to answer. “Did you know her friends?” I asked when she opened the door. “Anyone I could talk to around here?”
“Well, there’s Liam in 1C, though I wouldn’t call them friends anymore. But they were seeing each other for a while earlier this year. I think her friends were mainly from work. She kept to herself most of the time, other than the thing with Liam. I’ve been here longer than any of them. The rest, they come and go. Oh, there was a girl who would stop by sometimes. It’s not that I was keeping tabs on her or anything, it’s just hard not to notice things when you live next door.” She smiled, again somewhat apologetically. I knew her type, making it her mission to know everything about everyone, the ins and outs of a place. She was the person to hit up for information. She would make a great source. “Liam might know more,” she added.
“Thanks. I’m done in there for now,” I said. I noticed her looking me over and realizing I hadn’t taken a bag of clothes or anything with me. I didn’t care.
I took the steps quickly to the first floor, followed the letters on the doors until I hit C, and knocked. There was music inside, and I had to knock twice before someone answered.
A man with unkempt—and, it seemed, unwashed—hair opened the door, his eyes bloodshot. I could see another man sitting on the couch and noticed that the music was part of a video game. The man in front of me said, “Yeah?”
“Are you Liam?”
He looked me over again, narrowed his eyes—I wondered if he, too, saw the resemblance. Or if it was only there when you went looking for it. “Yeah.”
“Zoe said I should talk to you, that you might be able to tell me some more about Bethany.”
He shook his head, closing the door, but I stuck my foot in the gap.
“I already told the police,” he said. “I hadn’t seen her in months. It was, like, four months ago. I can’t be the last person who saw her. The last one to know her.”
“Did you know her friend? A girl who sometimes stayed with her?”
He laughed. “No, I didn’t know her friends. I didn’t know anything about her. She never even let me in her apartment. Always said it needed to be cleaned or something. I barely knew where she worked, only that she did, that she never stayed over and didn’t like to go out.” He looked into his apartment, then back to me. “I can’t be all you have to go on,” he said, as if the responsibility were just too great, too outside his frame of reference.
“I told you,” the other guy called, not looking up from the screen. Then he faced me, paused the game, fixed his eyes on mine. “I told him, but he didn’t listen. There was something off. Something wrong with that girl.”
* * *
I DROVE HOME, REMEMBERING the last time someone had spoken those words to me, about me.
Paige saying, There’s something not right with you. Because it was the easiest explanation. The one that absolved her from seeing the truth, from admitting she’d been played.
The article had been about to go to press. I had given Paige warning. For weeks I had warned her. First calling her up, telling her the truth. Years after I had moved out of their apartment.
“I’m investigating a suspicious death,” I’d said. “His name came up. I’m just giving you the heads-up.”
“I haven’t heard from you in years,” she’d said, “and now you want to talk to me? You left, and went totally off the radar, and now you’re investigating my husband?”
“I should’ve told you,” I said. “I should’ve told you years ago, the night before I left—”
“He told me,” she said. “He told me you were drunk, and when he went back for his medicine, you made a move on him. I already knew that.”
“No,” I said. “He . . .” He what? He moved my things, opened the doors, messed with my head . . . Even after all this time, I wasn’t sure. I thought, but I had no proof. He tried to kill me. That was the thing I believed, deep inside. Waking up with the feeling of water in my lungs. The damp mildew smell of my pillow. After seeing the details of the girl who died at the college, Bridget LaCosta, overdose and drowning—I believed it even more. That maybe I had been his first attempt and it had not gone his way. That he’d had the perfect setup and had tried to stage it to fit, the story already in motion: We were out, she was drinking, she didn’t get the job she was expecting, she had to crash on our sofa. She wasn’t used to failure. We missed the warning signs. Me, finding his pills, taking so many, settling into the bath, slipping under.
He had failed. He hadn’t given me enough. Or I had fought back, ruined the scene. It went bad, one way or the other. Either way, I woke up in my bed, safe and secure—but another girl had not. And how many were there between then and now? It was too naive to think he wouldn’t have been active in the meantime. That he wouldn’t have been trying.
“He drugged me, Paige,” I said, begging her to see the rest.
“Stop calling me,” she said.
I didn’t. I couldn’t.
“It’s going to print,” I said. “It’s going to come out. I’m not using his name, but someone’s going to track it down.”
When I got the notice of the restraining order, I almost laughed.
And then the article came out. The next night I found myself behind their house, so curious—the scent of blood, my inevitable undoing. Wondering if he knew yet. If he knew it had been me.
I’d stood on my toes, could see only between the gap of the curtain, the amber light. I heard faint classical music humming in the background, from some room just out of sight. Stopping. Restarting. Like a record stuck on a loop.
I saw a glass on the table. Red wine. Just a trace left behind.
And I saw someone moving in the background, gently swaying. Spinning. I pressed my face closer to the window, my breath fogging up the glass. I saw his shoes first. Black. Polished. A few feet above the ground. Moving faintly back and forth, swinging from above.
I let out a gasp. A noise louder than that. But I was already backing away, running, flat-footed and desperate through the evening commuters. I didn’t stop until I made it into the T station, where I sat on the bench and let three trains go by before I’d gathered myself to go home.
It was Paige who found him, according to the police. Cut him down in a panic with a kitchen knife, the baby still strapped in the stroller in the parlor. She had just returned home with the baby from errands. It was the time she was always out, I knew from watching her. After work, she’d pick up their five-month-old son from day care, and they’d go to the store, or the mall, or they’d walk down through the Commons around the pond, or along Storrow Drive by the edge of the Charles.
It was why I’d picked right then to look. It was probably why he’d picked right then to do it.
I thought that was so cruel of him, even then. To leave it to Paige to discover.
CHAPTER 30