of the heat.
“I appreciate it,” I replied. “I won’t take much of your time. I just want to confirm something.”
“I have to go. I can’t stay. I can’t be seen speaking with you. My sister has the kids, and I can’t leave them with her for too long. We’re moving. Next week, going to…” She stopped, shook her head. “No, I’m not saying where we’re going. You understand, of course?”
She bent forward slightly and I could see a thin, long white scar up near her hairline. “Of course. Let me make this really quick,” I said. “Your husband, he was a police captain, and you hired Matthew Murphy during divorce proceedings, right?”
“Yes. My ex-husband was hiding income and stiffing me and the three kids. I wanted Murphy to find out where he was putting the money. My attorney said Murphy was good at that sort of thing.”
“Your ex, he was a suspect in Murphy’s murder, correct?”
“Yes. State police detectives questioned him several times. They spoke with me, too.”
She shook her head, then added, “I was his alibi.”
“How so?”
“The night Murphy was killed, my ex-husband showed up at my house nice and early. He’d been drinking. He was morose, suicidal. Insisted on coming in, seeing the kids. I couldn’t get him to leave.”
“Didn’t you have a court order?”
“Yes. Keeping him away. One hundred yards at all times. That’s what the judge’s order said. Lot of good that did. He’s six four and two hundred forty pounds and he knows every cop in the Valley. They’re all buddies. What was I supposed to do? Fight him? Call for help? He did what he wanted to do.”
“I’m sorry. The alibi…”
“So, he started drinking. Then he started beating on me. Kept it up for hours. Until he passed out. Woke up in the morning and apologized. Said it would never happen again. And it didn’t, for a whole other week.”
“You told this to the state police detectives?”
“I didn’t want to. I wish I’d had the guts to say to them, ‘Sure, he did it. He told me he did it,’ and maybe get him out of my life that way. But I wasn’t able to.”
I hesitated. “The thing I’m interested in is-”
“I know what you’re interested in.” She reached up and touched her forehead, running her finger along the small ridge of the scar. “When he punched me, his class ring from Fitchburg State-that’s where we met-cut me pretty badly. Gave me this to remember him by. You want to know how he knew about Murphy. Right?”
I nodded.
“He threw it in my face during an argument. Screamed at me, ‘So you figured I wouldn’t find out about the private eye you hired?’ ”
I could see tears in the corners of her eyes.
“He got an anonymous letter. A plain manila envelope. It had a copy of everything Murphy had uncovered about him. All the confidential stuff that was supposed to just go to me and my attorney. Postmarked from some place in Worcester. I don’t even know anybody in that city. So, who would send this to my ex? It cost me two teeth when he knocked them out. It should have cost Murphy his life, if only I’d been lucky enough to have it be my ex-husband who got so enraged that he went after him with a gun instead of someone else. Maybe it did cost Murphy his life. Maybe somebody else got the same envelope. I don’t know. I wanted it to be my ex who did it. It would have made things so much easier.”
She pushed back from the table. “I have to go.” She glanced around nervously, then turned, head down, shoulders scrunched forward. She pushed through the coffee shop doors and raced through the mall, dodging shoppers as if fear itself hovered in some black cloud, right behind her ear, whispering dangers.
I watched her and wondered whether I had just seen what Ashley’s future might have been.
28
Hope was standing on the short redbrick pathway up to their front door when the headlights from Sally’s car swept across the lawn. She waited, a little unsure what to do. Once she would have walked back to Sally’s car to give her an end-of-the-workday hug, but now she was uncertain whether she should even hesitate so they could enter together. She shuffled her feet and stared down the neighborhood into the darkness. It seemed to Hope that the two of them had quietly taken to coming home later and later in the day, so that the silences that awaited them through the evening had less time to weigh on them.
“Hey,” she said as she heard Sally’s car door slam shut.
“Hey,” Sally said back, her voice exhausted.
“Tough day?”
Sally walked slowly across the lawn toward her. “Yes,” she said cryptically. “Let me tell you about it inside.”
Hope nodded and stepped up to the front door. She stuck her key in the lock and opened the door wide. It was black inside, and it seemed that the night flowed right past her into the house, like a dark and dangerous current. Hope stopped right inside the entrance vestibule and instantly knew something was terribly out of place. She inhaled sharply.
“Nameless!” she called out.
The overhead lamp flicked on, and Sally stood beside her.
“Nameless!” Hope called out again.
Then: “Oh my God…”
Hope dropped her backpack to the floor and stepped forward. Fear had outstripped all other emotions, filling her with ricocheting sensations: a burst of cold, a flash of heat, a wash of damp. “Nameless!” she cried out again. She could hear the panic in her voice. Behind her, Sally was turning the lights on, throwing illumination into the living room, the hallway, the downstairs television room. And finally the kitchen.
The dog was spread out on the floor, motionless.
Hope groaned, something deep, from some place within her that she had never felt before and threw herself onto Nameless’s body. She sank her hands into his fur, trying to feel for some warmth, then pressed her ear up against his chest, listening for a heartbeat. Behind her, Sally stood, frozen, in the doorway. “Is he…”
Hope let out another moan, her eyes already blinded with tears. But in the same moment, she reached beneath the dog’s body and, in a single motion, lifted him up in her arms. She turned to Sally, and without speaking the two of them raced back out into the darkness.
Sally drove fast, faster than she could ever remember, as they headed south on the interstate, driving toward the animal hospital in Springfield. As she wove between cars, the speedometer touching 100 mph, she heard Hope say, “It’s okay, Sally. You can slow down.”
Hope might have said something else, but Sally understood only that Hope had lowered her head into the dog’s muzzle, which muffled what she said. It only took them a few more minutes to make the final miles, and as they cut through the sullen city streets, Sally found herself unable to say anything, but listening to each ravaged sob coming from Hope in the backseat was a little like being sliced by a knife.
She saw the red-and-white EMERGENCY ENTRANCE sign and swerved the car to a stop in front. The sound of the car tires got the attention of the nurse attendant at the triage desk right inside the sliding glass doors. Before Hope had carried Nameless more than a couple of feet, the attendant had helped her to put the dog’s limp form on a stretcher.
By the time Sally had parked the car and come inside, Hope was already huddled in the
