She's Not There (22 page)

Caroline felt her breath catch in her lungs. “The night Samantha disappeared…What?”

Another moment of hesitation. “I saw them.”

“What do you mean, you saw them? You saw them together? When?”

“Hold on. Hold on,” Steve cautioned. “I didn't say I saw them
together
.”

“What
are
you saying?”

“It was after I'd gone back to my room to try to talk some sense into Becky, you know, try to talk her into coming back to the table, but of course she wouldn't listen, and I was about to leave the room, I'd opened the door, and that's when I thought I saw Hunter walking down the hall. And I remember wondering what he was doing over in our wing. And then, when I ran into Rain in the lobby, I just put two and two together…”

“And kept the answer to yourself.”

“What was I going to say, Caroline?
Happy Anniversary. I think your husband's having an affair!
I didn't know that for a fact. It might
not
have been Hunter I saw. He and Rain might
not
have been together. Even if they had, it might have been perfectly innocent.”

“Well, they
were
together and it damn sure wasn't innocent. Instead of checking on the kids, my darling husband was, in fact, screwing a woman who was supposed to be my friend, and if you'd told the police what you saw…”

“I told them what I
knew,
which unfortunately was nothing. Even if the man I saw
was
Hunter, even if he and Rain
had
been together, I had no reason to believe he hadn't checked on the kids when he said he did.”

He was right. Still Caroline wasn't ready to let her brother off the hook so easily. “You should have told me.”

His answer was as direct, as forceful, as an arrow to the heart. “You shouldn't have left your kids alone.”

The simple statement took her breath away. She doubled over, gasping, the teacup slipping from her hands and dropping to the tile floor, shattering into a hundred tiny pieces.

She heard the shuffle of feet moving toward her. “What's going on in here?” Michelle asked over the ringing in her ears.

“My God, what have you done?” her mother said, scrambling to pick up the broken slivers of china.

“I'm sorry, Caroline,” her brother was saying. “I shouldn't have said that. You know I didn't mean it.”

Don't be sorry,
Caroline thought, feeling her knees about to give way. It was the truth, after all. He'd just said the same thing she'd been telling herself for the past fifteen years.

Which was when the doorbell rang.

“I'll get it.” Steve excused himself, running for the front door as if he'd literally been saved by the bell. He returned as Michelle was helping Caroline into one of the chairs grouped around the kitchen table. “There's someone named Lili here to see you,” he told his sister. “She says you've been expecting her.”

T
he phone was ringing.

Caroline reached toward the nightstand beside her bed and lifted it to her ear, noting it was barely 6:30
A.M.
Was it Arthur? Calling so early because he wanted to check in on her before she left for work, to tell her how much he missed her, even though it had been less than twenty-four hours since they'd been together?

But instead of Arthur's soothing baritone, it was Peggy's husky alto she heard. “Have you seen the morning paper?” she asked before Caroline could say hello.

“No. Why?”

“I'm coming over,” Peggy told her. “Don't look at the paper. Don't answer your phone. Don't check your computer until I get there.”

“What are you talking about? What's going on?”

“I'll be there in ten minutes.”

“Wait…what…?” The phone went dead in her hand. Caroline sat there staring at it for the next several minutes. “What just happened?” she whispered, heading for the bathroom as the phone rang again.

Don't answer your phone,
she heard Peggy say.
Don't check your computer. Don't look at the paper.

“Why not?” she asked out loud, ignoring the phone's persistent ring as she washed her face and brushed her teeth, then pulled on a bathrobe and headed down the hall.

Michelle sat up in bed as Caroline passed her room. She rubbed her eyes and stared accusingly at her mother. “Who keeps calling?”

“Just some idiot making crank calls. Go back to sleep. You don't have to be up for another half hour.”

“As if I'll be able to sleep,” Michelle whined, pulling a pillow over her head as Caroline closed the door to her room.

Don't look at the paper,
Peggy admonished in Caroline's head as she ran down the stairs to the front door, throwing it open and lifting the morning paper into her hands.

EVERYTHING, MY FAULT,
read the headlines in bold black letters, and beneath it, a picture of her smiling face. Caroline had never seen the picture before, although she knew exactly when it had been taken because she recognized the Starbucks logo in the window behind her head.

“No. Please, no.”

She carried the paper into the kitchen and spread the front section across the table, the phone resuming its awful ring as her eyes flitted from one terrible paragraph to the next, from one damning statement to another. It was all there. Every indiscreet word she'd uttered; every heartfelt confession she'd made. Her deepest secrets laid bare in black and white for all the world to read: her guilt at having left her children alone, her continuing despair at the loss of her younger child, her complaints about her narcissistic mother and difficult older daughter, Hunter's upcoming nuptials to a “considerably” younger woman that left her feeling “pissed,” even the details of her last night with her former husband, when he'd told her he was leaving and she'd abandoned all reason and pride and begged him to stay.
I pleaded with him not to leave me.

She flipped to page ten, where the story continued, covering her return to teaching and the subsequent suicide of one of her students.
I feel so guilty,
she was quoted as saying beneath another candid photo of her laughing.
Everything that's happened. It's all my fault. Everything, my fault.

“This can't be happening,” she said, watching the printed words blur and disintegrate, only to regroup and return in larger, bolder type than before. “Please just let this be an awful dream.”

Ten minutes later Peggy was on her doorstep. She took one look at Caroline's ashen complexion and gathered her into her arms. “Tell me everything.”

“Everything all right at home?” he'd asked as she returned to the bedroom, cell phone in hand.

“Everything's fine.” She'd turned her phone off and tossed it onto the pile of clothes lying on the floor. Then she'd climbed into bed beside him, burrowing into his side, allowing his strong arms to surround her. It had been a long time since she'd been in bed with a man, even longer since she'd felt safe. “Well, as fine as it can be where my daughter is concerned,” she continued. “Like I said, she can be difficult.”

“I guess it's hard being an only child.”

Caroline's eyes filled with tears and she tried to look away. Arthur's hand, gentle on her chin, stopped her, forcing her eyes to his.

“What's the matter?”

Caroline hesitated. “She wasn't always an only child.”

“I'm not following.”

“I haven't been completely honest with you.”

He waited, said nothing.

“I'm not sure I know where to start.”

Again he waited, his silence urging her to continue.

“My last name isn't Tillman,” she admitted. “It's Shipley.”

“Caroline Shipley,” he said, a slow smile spreading across his face. “Should I know that name? Are you famous?”

“More like infamous.”

“Caroline Shipley,” he repeated, eyes narrowing, then opening wide with recognition. “Oh, my God. The woman whose daughter disappeared…”

“Yes—‘oh, my God'—that's my middle name.” She waited for him to pull away in horror, but instead he gathered her even closer into his comforting embrace.

“Thank you,” she whispered, clinging to him.

“For what?”

“For not being repulsed by me.”

“Why on earth would I be repulsed? I lost a child of my own, remember? I can only imagine what you went through. What you're going through…”

She was crying in earnest now. “It'll be ten years next week. I can't believe it. Ten years.”

“Do you want to talk about it?”

She shook her head, not because she didn't want to talk about it but because she was afraid that if she started talking, she wouldn't be able to stop.

“I remember how guilty I felt after Jenny and Lara died,” he was saying, speaking more to himself than to her. “Survivor's guilt, I think they call it. I kept thinking that if only I'd been there, if I'd driven Lara to school that day, if I'd been walking beside them, I could have saved them. Or maybe it wouldn't have happened at all. They'd still be alive.”

“Or you might have been killed, too.”

“I didn't care. I wanted to die. I'm sure you felt the same. You blame yourself, you think it was your fault…”

“It
was
my fault,” Caroline said, encouraged by his openness, his understanding of her pain. “Everything, my fault.”

“It wasn't.”

“I left my children alone in a hotel room.
So I could have dinner with friends
.” The words began spilling from her mouth, as she'd known they would, a decade's worth of suppressed guilt and rage. She told him everything, embellishing facts already known, sharing the feelings of shame and despair she'd kept bottled up inside for ten years. She talked about her treatment by the Mexican police, their suspicions that she and Hunter were responsible for whatever had happened to Samantha. She took the blame for the deterioration of her marriage, for her strained relationship with Michelle. “They tell you it gets easier with time,” she said. “But it doesn't. If anything, the opposite is true. It gets worse. Life just keeps piling on more and more for you to feel guilty about.”

“Like what?”

That was when she told him about Errol, the boy in her class who'd committed suicide, and how her school principal had subsequently asked her to resign.

“He had no right to do that.”

“I knew something was wrong, you know. With Errol. I could see it in his eyes. I tried to talk to him, get him to open up. I think he was on the verge, but then I looked up at the clock. Michelle had a dentist appointment and I knew how upset she'd be if I was late. And he noticed. He was such a sensitive boy. He clammed right up, insisted he was fine, told me he'd see me the next day. So I let him go. I went to pick up Michelle. And he went home and hanged himself.”

“You had no way of knowing what he'd do.”

“I knew he was vulnerable. Errol's dead because of me, because I wasn't there for him. Just like Samantha is gone because I wasn't there for her. I'm the common denominator in this equation. It's all my fault. Everything, my fault.”

He shook his head. “I'm so sorry.”

“For what? You have nothing to be sorry about. Not where I'm concerned anyway.”

He kissed the top of her head, burying his face in her hair. Neither of them said another word until Caroline reluctantly announced it was time for her to go home. Michelle would be waiting and there was school the next morning.

“Will I hear from you again?” she asked as she was leaving his apartment.

“Count on it,” he said.

“I'm such an idiot,” she said to Peggy, her fingernails scratching at Arthur's byline. Except his name wasn't Arthur. It was Aidan. A much trendier name. She almost laughed.

They were sitting at the kitchen table. Peggy had made a pot of coffee and taken the phone off the hook.

“You couldn't know.”

“I should have been suspicious. It's so obvious, thinking back.”

“How is it obvious?”

“The way we met, for starters. One of those ‘meet cute' situations you only see in the movies. He probably engineered the whole thing, counted on his charm to win me over.”

“He couldn't have known it would work.”

“Why not? It's probably worked before. I'm sure I wasn't his first target.” Caroline shook her head, remembering. “If it hadn't, I'm sure he would have tried something else later. Lucky for him, I was so easy. I should have known,” she said again. “The way he quoted Keats. What banking consultant does that? What banking consultant says things like ‘Mexico on my doorstep' and ‘a temperature that rarely strays ten degrees from moderate'? He probably got that out of some travel brochure. And what the hell's a banking consultant anyway? Does such a job even exist?” She jumped to her feet. “He said he had a wife and daughter who'd been killed by a drunk driver. Did he make that up? Did he actually invent a dead child in order to worm his way into my confidence? Was it all a ploy to get me to confide in him by pretending to confide in me?”

Peggy shook her head. “I guess we'll never know.”

“He played me. Oh, how he played me. Played on my emotions, my sympathy. Not to mention he flattered me, told me I was mysterious, that I had deep thoughts.”

“You
are
mysterious. You
do
have deep thoughts.”

“Are you planning to write a story about me, too?” Caroline asked.

“And a sense of humor,” Peggy added, reaching for her friend's hand.

“How could he betray me like this?”

“He's a reporter. It's what they do.”

“Do they all sleep with their subjects for a story?”

“Interesting that he fails to mention that. And at the risk of sounding prurient, was he any good?”

“He was great,” Caroline confirmed. “More's the pity.” She poured herself another cup of coffee and returned to her chair. “What's it saying online?”

“More of the same.
Lots
more of the same. Don't read it.”

“Why not? Everyone else will.”

They heard Michelle's footsteps descending the stairs. In the next second, she was standing in the doorway, still dressed in her flannel pajamas. “I thought I heard voices,” she said, staring at Peggy. “You're here awfully early. Is something wrong? Why is the phone off the hook?” She replaced the receiver. Immediately, the phone started ringing. “Are you kidding me? What's going on?” Her eyes landed on the morning paper spread out across the kitchen table. “Is that a picture of you?” she asked her mother, dragging the paper toward her. “Shit. What is this?”

Caroline walked to the phone and picked it up. It was her mother. “What have you done?” Mary demanded.