“Not much of one. I was thinking about it. How if I were you—if I’d lived through what you have—I wouldn’t let Mom and Dad out of my sight, either. I mean, I know you don’t remember anything. But maybe deep down you do remember your first parents, and the way that you lost them, and it made you . . . it’s made you stick close to Mom and Dad, all these years.”
I winced. “I don’t know. Maybe. I’ve tried and tried to remember, but it’s all . . . blank.”
We were both quiet for a moment.
“On a different note, have you talked to Tony?” asked Martin. “You should call him.”
“Okay. Why? Anything wrong?”
“No, no. Only that your married doctor called him.”
I did a double take. “Will?”
“Yep. Tony threatened to—um, how to put this tactfully—he threatened to cut off Will’s dick and feed it to the snakehead fish in the Potomac if he ever came near you again.”
Tony would have meant it, too. “But why did Will call Tony?”
“You should ask him. Tony, I mean. I’m just repeating secondhand. But I gather Will’s desperate to talk to you and you haven’t been answering your phone. So he was trying to get Tony to pass along a message.”
I thought about this. I certainly hadn’t been answering my phone. It was buried in sludge at the bottom of the Chattahoochee River.
“Will moved out. Out of that house we drove to, the one on Lorcom Lane. That’s what he told Tony, anyway.”
“Jesus. Fuck.”
“Whoa. You really have unplugged. Don’t think I’ve ever heard you swear before.” Martin sounded amused. “My offer to kneecap him stands, for what it’s worth. Anyway, I gotta run. Drink a margarita for me. And listen, Sis, will you be home for your birthday? Or Thanks-giving? Mom’ll want to know.”
“I don’t know.” It was the truth. My birthday was in fifteen days. Thanksgiving fell two days after that. If the next couple of weeks proved remotely as interesting as the last one had been, I had absolutely no idea where I might be.
? ? ?
ONLY ONE PERSON knew for sure why Betsy was lying.
Contacting her seemed a staggeringly stupid thing to do, but I couldn’t see that I had an alternative. I waited until midafternoon, when it would be nine in the morning in Atlanta. I used the time to purchase yet another prepaid phone, this one from a reputable phone store and loaded with a hundred euros in credit. On the off chance that she -actually took my call, I didn’t want to risk being cut off.
A hushed female voice answered the phone at the Sinclare residence. Mrs. Sinclare was resting and not accepting calls, the woman informed me, but the family appreciated my thoughtfulness at this difficult time.
“I think she might want to speak with me,” I insisted. “Could I trouble you to check? Please tell her it’s Caroline calling.”
The voice hesitated. “I’m not sure. What may I say it’s regarding?”
“I’ll hold,” I said, ignoring the question. “If you could tell her that Caroline . . . Smith is on the line.” That ought to get her out of bed.
A long pause followed, punctuated by several clicks, as if an extension in another room was being picked up and the first one disconnected. I heard breathing.
“Mrs. Sinclare? Are you there?”
More breathing, then a hoarse laugh. “Do you know where I’m standing right now? In my laundry room. My goddamn laundry room. It’s the only place in the house where I can shut the door and escape all these people who’ve come to be helpful. And the funny thing is, you’re the only person in the world who would grasp the irony in that. In my hiding in here with the dryer lint, to take a call from you.”
“I’m sorry. I never meant for you to—”
“Shut up, you little tramp,” she spat. “I’ll do the talking. We’ll speak this once, and then never again, do you understand?”
I was too stunned to respond.
“You’ll have seen the newspaper stories by now, I imagine. You’ll have read my account of how my husband died.” Her voice sounded flayed, raw from weeping. “You will have noticed there was no mention of you. There will never be any mention of you, not in connection with my husband, do you understand?”
No, I did not. “Why did you lie?”
She drew a shuddering breath. “Your whore mother tried to destroy my family thirty years ago.”
“Your husband did destroy my family thirty years ago,” I retorted. “You’re not the only victim here.”
“That was all . . . behind us. Decades behind us. There was no reason for you to come here. No reason to rip open old scars. And there is nothing—do you hear me?—nothing that would give me greater pleasure than sending you to prison for the rest of your life.”
“So why did you—”
“Shut up!” she hissed. “I said what I said because I had quite a long time to think, tied up and gagged in here on the laundry-room floor. You made sure of that. If I identify you—if I tell that it was you who killed Ethan—everyone will wonder why. Don’t you see? Why would some hoity-toity professor with no prior record gun down my husband? The police would want to know the motive.” She was crying now. “Every-thing would come out. All of Ethan’s affairs. Everything about him and Sadie Rawson. And that something terrible happened that day and that two people died and somehow their baby girl got shot.”
“You mean me.”
“I mean you,” she whispered.
Then she said, “If I tell the police the truth, it would ruin you. But it would ruin me, too. I would be a pariah. Known all over Atlanta as the wife of a . . . a philandering murderer. The wife of the man who shot a baby girl and left her for dead. You were so little,” she moaned. “Still in your pink pigtails, hiding behind your mother’s skirts. Can you imagine the shame if all that came out? It’s not the kind of thing that people would forget.”
“So you—you made up a story about a crazy man with a gun?”
“It was the only way out that I could think of. People will believe me. They already do.”
She was clever. And correct. People would believe sweet Betsy Sinclare. I felt impressed, and a little sick.