In the morning, I woke before Gavin. I wanted to shower. As I was passing his desk, I noticed his pocket calendar. I had seen him remove it once or twice from his blazer pocket but thought nothing of it. He had never before left it sitting, as it was right now, on his small desk beside his wallet and keys. What drew me to it that moment? Most likely it was the sleep sex. It was the connection to my mother. And so just as I had read his e-mails and my mother’s e-mails, just as I had gone through their computers and drawers, I opened it. My mother had disappeared on Friday, August 25. I folded back the weeks, seduced as I was then—as I am now—by that date. What had been on his calendar that day? A haircut? A staff meeting with other detectives? A dinner with friends? On two facing pages, the calendar showed the week beginning Sunday, August 20.
And there they were, the two words. Annalee. Bakery.
He had written her name in that Wednesday, the twenty-third, two days before she would be killed. He had met her—or at least planned to meet her—for lunch at twelve thirty. I recalled the day. My mother had said she was meeting a possible client in Burlington about a lake house he was contemplating. But that almost certainly had been a lie. She had been meeting Gavin.
I closed the datebook and took a step away from the desk. Even if he hadn’t seen Annalee Ahlberg that day—even if for some reason either he or my mother had canceled, and my mother had done something else that afternoon—they had been in contact. His insistence that he hadn’t heard from her in years? An absolute lie.
And it seemed to me, if you are capable of one lie, you are capable of two. Or three. Or many. The first lie is the hardest. The rest, I had learned myself since I had started dating Gavin, came rather easily.
I turned and watched him sleeping. I thought of what had happened last night and what he had told me of his history. How much of it was the truth and how much of it was fabrication? It occurred to me that he and my mother might in fact have been lovers, a realization that sickened me, but far worse possibilities crossed my mind as well. I recalled what the coroner had stipulated as the cause of my mother’s death: A subdural hematoma. A violent head injury.
I told myself that I needn’t be frightened. I had been alone with Gavin a lot since we had met. But I was scared, I couldn’t deny that. I went to shower as I had planned, hoping to clear my head there and decide whether to confront him with what I had learned. When I closed the bathroom door, I locked it.
I dressed in the bathroom. When I emerged, he was in his kitchen making coffee; it smelled heavenly. He was wearing an old rugby shirt he liked and a pair of baggy gym shorts. He turned to me and looked a little sheepish. The sky out the window was a flat sheet of gunmetal gray. The lake was choppy.
“I woke up and was…” he began, his voice trailing off awkwardly. “Did something happen last night?”
I nodded.
He put the black plastic scoop back in the canister. He wrapped his arms around my waist, pulling me against him. I let him, but I was reserved. I could tell he thought it was because of the sleep sex. “I am so sorry,” he murmured. “Was it awful?”
“No. It was strange. You were a little rough—”
“But only a little?”
“Maybe a little more than a little.”
“Tell me the truth: Did I hurt you?”
I thought of the bruises I had noticed in the shower, but I answered, “Not really. No.”
“Can you talk about it? I need to know what I did. I need to know how upset you are.”
“Why?”
“Well, because I care about you. I don’t want to lose you.”
I pushed him away and took a step back.
“If you had to testify under oath in court,” I said, speaking carefully because I knew how much I was risking, “could you honestly say you had not seen my mother in years?”
“What in the world does that have to do with last night?”
“Nothing.”
“Then what’s going on here? Was I talking in my sleep, too? Did I say something about her?”
“No. You were only moaning.”
“Well, I guess I should be relieved. But clearly you were pretty disgusted. You are pretty disgusted.”
“You left out your datebook,” I told him.
His face went a little blank for a moment while he tried to understand what I was referring to. Then he leaned back against the counter and shook his head, annoyed with me. He knew what I was talking about. He knew what I had seen. “Do you make it a habit of going through people’s things? Did you rifle through my wallet, too?”
“No.”
“Kind of a violation, don’t you think?”
“Kind of a lie, don’t you think?”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“The fact I saw your mother two days before she disappeared is part of the record. Everyone who needs to know knows. I told them.”
“But not me.”
“Nope.”