“We don’t know yet,” Heron said, still leaning forward, close enough for me to see the yellow flecks in her deep brown eyes. “This Jack Smith doesn’t exist, and by that, I mean the details on his license don’t match any records. Lily, it may not even be his real name.”
I wanted to rewind what I’d heard and listen again at quarter speed. If I did, maybe something, anything, would make sense. Their words sounded like gibberish, an alien language I couldn’t understand. “You’ve made a mistake, I—”
“What kind of problems was Jack having?” Stevens said.
“Problems?” I whipped my head up and looked at him, searching my brain for any concerns Jack might have shared with me of late. I wondered if I should mention he’d seemed a little agitated a few times. He worried about money a lot, I knew that, and he was always careful about not overspending. On more than one occasion he’d said he wished he could spoil me with lavish gifts, and I’d laughed and said it wasn’t the 1950s, thank you very much, I was perfectly capable of treating myself. Jack had countered that wasn’t the point, but I’d waved him off and told him to stop being silly.
Then there had been another occasion just last week in the shopping mall parking lot. It had been uncharacteristically busy because of a big sale, and a teenager in a shiny black Audi had taken the spot Jack had patiently been waiting for. Jack had yelled at him, called him a “pretentious git for nicking my place.” Once we’d parked elsewhere, and I’d suppressed a laugh after Jack translated git (jerk) and nicking (stealing), I said, “You never get bent out of shape for stuff like that. For a moment there I thought you’d go all Kathy Bates on him, like in Fried Green Tomatoes. What’s up?”
“Nothing, it’s fine,” he’d said, before apologizing and leaning over to kiss me. “I hate showy knob-heads. Next time remind me to call the idiot a spunk bubble.” At that point I’d collapsed in a fit of giggles, and we’d walked to the shop arm-in-arm, the mini confrontation already forgotten.
Looking at Stevens now, I decided neither of the incidents were worth mentioning. They were trivial. Irrelevant. What would I gain by bringing them up when I knew they meant nothing? “He didn’t have any problems.”
“Was he depressed?” Heron said softly. “About losing his job?”
The inference became clear as their heads tilted to one side, sympathetic expressions at the ready. “He didn’t kill himself,” I said, and as they exchanged an almost imperceptible glance, I wondered if I’d put the idea into their heads by somehow misrepresenting who Jack was. “He wouldn’t do that. He wouldn’t.”
“We have to consider all possibilities,” Heron said.
“Not that one,” I fired off, straightening my back. “Because you’re wrong.”
As she opened her mouth to respond, her phone rang. She answered it swiftly, asked, “When? Where?” and finished with a curt “Uh-huh, fine,” before hanging up and turning to me. “They found some clothes farther down the beach. It may be nothing, but they’re sending—” Her phone beeped, and she held it up, screen pointed at me.
I let out a sharp gasp. There it was. The dark green American Eagle shirt I’d given Jack for Christmas, the one I’d chosen because it complemented his amber eyes, and which was so soft, I couldn’t resist hugging him whenever he wore it. It was my favorite as much as his.
“They found this hoodie.” Heron brought up another photo, and my hands flew to my mouth as I closed my eyes.
“Ask them if it has a hole in the left pocket,” I whispered. “Half an inch long.”
Heron fired off a text and I stayed silent as we waited for the reply, but when Stevens’s phone rang, I jumped. As he moved to the kitchen to take the call, I struggled to comprehend what was happening. First, I refused to accept Jack may have harmed himself, and I didn’t believe Heron’s tale of his identity being fake, either. She’d made a mistake, or there was a glitch in the system. Someone, somewhere had made a clerical error, mixed up Jack’s records with somebody else’s. Jack Smith was a common name, and there had to be a thousand possible things that could have happened to create a mishap like this, and the ensuing confusion.
Still...doubts tried to wriggle their way in through the cracks of my mind, nibbling and distorting what I knew to be true. Jack hadn’t shared much about his past. As I’d informed the police, his parents had died, and he had no siblings, only a few distant family members in England he never saw or stayed in touch with after moving to the US as a teenager. What if only part, or none, of that was true? No. I wouldn’t doubt the man I loved, and with whom I wanted to spend the rest of my life. The man who’d said he had the same feelings for me.
The beep of Heron’s phone ripped me out of the jumble of thoughts that had turned themselves into a minefield, making me incapable of taking a single step without the risk of blowing what I believed to be the truth wide open. She exhaled slowly, and said, “There’s a hole in the hoodie. Left pocket. About half an inch.”
Before I could process the information, collapse or let out a scream, Stevens walked back in with a dark look on his face. “Another round of storms is coming in, worse than the first. The coast guard has to suspend—”
“But Jack’s still out there,” I said, finding my voice. “They can’t stop looking.”
“The search will resume as soon as it’s safe to go back out,” Heron said, getting up and walking over, her palms facing me in a calm down gesture that did nothing to settle the crescendo of panic. “I promise you, they’ll start looking as
