Somebody I Used to Know (10 page)

“Well, I was wondering if your dad, or maybe even you, knew anyone who worked in the registrar’s office at Eastland.”

“Probably. Why?” she asked, a sliver of caution slipping into her voice.

“Right. You’ll want to know why.” I took another drink of my beer. And then I told her I wanted to get a look at Marissa’s records, specifically to see if they might show a different reason why she dropped out of school right before she died. While I explained, Gina’s face closed off. A curtain of anger I recognized all too well dropped across it, and she picked up her wineglass but didn’t drink. She held it, swirling the liquid.

“You asked me here to use my father’s influence to look at someone’s personal records. Is that it?” Gina asked.

“Yes, that’s it. You can say no if you want. I understand I’m not your favorite person right now.”

“You know,” she said, “my dad never liked you. He didn’t like your job, and he told me not to marry you. I always came to your defense with him. I defended your work. I said it was important, and it is. I believe that. Do you know what he’d say if I brought this to him? It’s a huge ethical violation.”

“She’s dead, Gina.”

“Is she?” she asked.

I sat back. “What are you talking about?”

“We were never really married, were we?”

“What do you mean?” I asked.

“I mean we went through with everything,” she said, waving her hand in the air to show the fruitlessness of our time together. “We got the license, and we said the vows, and we got the gifts. But you were never really married to me. I think it’s funny that everybody looks at us and thinks
I
was the one who didn’t want to be married to
you
.”

“You did ask me to move out,” I said.

“But you were never really there. You were always hung up on Marissa.”

It sounded strange to hear her name in Gina’s mouth. I thought back over the time Gina and I spent together, going back as far as when we started dating. I knew I mentioned Marissa from time to time, and certainly during the inevitable litany of our previous lives and relationships. But I didn’t think I’d
dwelled
on her.

“Did it really seem like I was hung up on her?” I asked.

“You didn’t talk about her . . . too much,” Gina said. “It’s the
way
you talked about her.” She sipped her drink. “You never talked about me that way. And I know you kept that little box of memories of her in the closet. I know that watch came from her, the one you used to take to the jeweler for a tune-up every once in a while.”

“I don’t see how you can hang all of our problems on a girlfriend I had in college, even if she did die.”

“You’re right,” she said. “I can’t put all our problems on her. But she didn’t help.”

“I’m sorry if you felt that way.” A silence descended between us, if the word “silence” applied when Irish fiddles were squealing overhead like tortured animals. I wished I’d never listened to Laurel and I wished I’d never contacted Gina. I took a couple more drinks of my beer and looked at her. “I’ll just go.” I started to get up and then remembered something. “Wait a minute. You said you had something to tell me. What is it?”

“It’s not important,” she said.

“You can’t say that,” I said. “You said you wanted to talk. Is it something about Andrew? Is something wrong?”

“Nothing’s wrong,” she said, “and Andrew’s fine.” She reached up and ran her hand through her thick brown hair. “I was just going to tell you . . . I was going to say I didn’t blame you for any of the troubles we’ve been having lately. I know you’re not stalking me or Andrew or doing anything weird.”

“Why the sudden change of heart?” I asked.

“It’s not sudden.” She tapped her neatly manicured nails against the tabletop. She always did that when she was thinking of the right words to say. “I’ve never doubted you in any real way.”

“But?”

“But I’ve been thinking about Andrew’s future a lot. What will he think when he looks back at this time in his life? Will it just be chaos? His parents never got married. I divorced the next guy I was with. I just wanted his life to be orderly, and you got caught up in that. I see that it wasn’t fair.” She stopped tapping. “So is that okay?”

“It’s good. Thanks.” It looked like there was something more on her mind, so I asked. “What else?”

“To be honest,” she said, “I was going to talk to you about figuring out a way for you to see Andrew again. To spend a little time with him.”

My heart almost jumped out of my mouth. “That’s great.”

But Gina was shaking her head. “I don’t think I can do it now. The fact that you’re asking me to do this for you. I was willing to give you the benefit of the doubt on the other stuff. But this—”

“Come on, Gina. Don’t be that way. You know I love Andrew. You know his happiness is all I want.”

She finished her glass of wine and stood up.

“It’s funny,” she said. “All these years I was in competition with a dead girl. I lost back then, and I’m still losing now.”

She walked out and didn’t look back.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

I
spent that Friday night with the guys from my basketball league, including Laurel’s husband, Tony. One of the guys on our team, a real estate agent, had recently become engaged, so we all met at a local bar for drinks, darts, and food. Emily Russell didn’t come up once, and I was happy to have the distraction.

On Saturday, I volunteered at the shelter, making calls on behalf of their spring fund-raising campaign. Someone brought in doughnuts, and we all cracked lame jokes about donors’ silly names and bonded over the variety of rude ways people told us to get lost. That afternoon, Riley and I took a long walk through the community park, and I managed to give my apartment a much-needed cleaning and vacuuming. We walked again on Sunday, and then I spent a leisurely morning lounging around, reading the paper and catching up on work e-mail. I spoke to Laurel once and told her I’d reached a dead end with Gina, and Laurel actually acted surprised that my ex-wife—who had twice called the police on me—didn’t want to assist me with an unethical search of my deceased ex-girlfriend’s college records.

Some people never lose their optimism.

“You haven’t heard anything from the cops?” Laurel asked.

“Nothing,” I said. I’d read the local paper from cover to cover that weekend, and the news about Emily’s death seemed to be slowing to a trickle. What else was there to say? She’d been murdered, but they didn’t know who was responsible. Her parents were preparing to bury her back home in Kentucky. Everyone was at a loss.

“Keep your chin up,” Laurel said.

“Thanks, coach.”

“Do you want to come over to the house tonight?” Laurel asked. “It’s cold, but we’re grilling out. Hamburgers and hot dogs. You and Tony can talk about basketball or beer or whatever it is you guys like to talk about.”

“I’m stuck on something else here. You? Hamburgers and hot dogs?”

“Do you think I’m a total killjoy? I let the kids indulge sometimes.”

“You don’t mind having your single friend along for the ride?” I asked.

“Of course not.” She paused. “Plus, Sally’s working on a term paper for her history class. And I just happen to know you minored in history in college.”

“So you’re using me.”

“She’s writing about the Kennedy assassination. Didn’t you write a paper about that once?”

“I did,” I said. “I still have dreams of arresting Fidel. Didn’t I help her with a paper on D-day last year?”

“She likes you. She thinks you’re smart. I haven’t told her otherwise. You know, sometimes the kids refer to you as Uncle Nick.”

“Really?”

“Really.”

Pride swelled in my chest. “That’s pretty cool. Okay,” I said. “I’ll help the kid.
And
eat your food as payment.”

“Great. And I’ll keep working on this Emily Russell stuff when I have the time.”

“I don’t know if it’s worth it,” I said.

“I’ll keep trying,” she said. “We’ll see.”

After we hung up, the reason I wanted her to stop echoed in my head like a clarion call:
It’s too painful. It’s just too painful.

*   *   *

Then I stepped out my door on Monday morning, and it all came back to me. Hoping for a quick walk with Riley before I went to work, I opened the door and someone called my name.

“There he is. Mr. Hansen?”

I spun toward the sound of the voice. The morning air felt warmer than I’d expected, and I had stepped out in a pair of gym shorts and an oversized sweatshirt. Riley was peeing near my foot when I saw a vaguely familiar blond woman approaching me with a microphone, followed closely by a guy with a huge camera mounted on his shoulder.

I froze in place. The red light on the camera glowed, meaning it was recording.

“What?” I asked. “What’s this?”

“Katherine Pettis, Local Twenty news. How do you feel about being named a person of interest in the murder of Emily Russell?”

The camera moved close enough to my face to reveal every pore and twitch. I’d seen Katherine Pettis on the local news many times, and this was her forte. She liked to go out into the field, stick a microphone in someone’s face, preferably someone in trouble, and ask them tough questions. If no one was in trouble, she stood outside in thunderstorms and hail and extreme heat. She once spent the night in a cell at the state prison to show what the conditions were like. Up close, her makeup looked thick, her cheeks bright red, and her eyebrows drawn on with a dark pencil.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I said.

Riley finished his work and started sniffing Katherine’s high-heeled shoe. I hoped they’d get a shot of him, since he would obviously make me look more humane.
How could he have murdered someone when he loves his dog so much?

“Sources at the police department have named you a person of interest in the murder of Emily Russell,” Katherine Pettis said, undeterred. “Would you care to comment? Did you know Emily Russell? Is she a friend of yours? Was she, I mean.” She frowned a little when she added that, making sure to let the viewers know she was a really sensitive reporter.

I started backing toward my apartment door. The camera tracked me, its red eye following my every movement.

“Any comment, sir?” she asked. “Anything at all?”

I went back inside, but before I closed the door I said, “Leave me alone.”

Only when Riley and I were on the safe side of the door did I look down at him and realize my heart was pounding.

“What the hell was all that about?” I asked. “Do you know, boy?”

He started wagging his tail, oblivious and hungry for his breakfast.

*   *   *

I called Mick Brosius but reached an answering service. I tried three more times with the same result. It then took me one try to get Detective Reece on the phone, but he sounded harried and distracted, not at all interested in talking to me.

“Is something wrong, Mr. Hansen?” he asked. It sounded like he was chewing his breakfast while we spoke.

“Do you know what just happened to me?” I asked.

“I don’t.”
Chew-chew-chew.

“That Katherine Pettis fool from the local news just stuck a microphone in my face outside my door. She called me a ‘person of interest’ in the death of Emily Russell.”

“And?” he asked.

“Come on,” I said. “You really think I did it?”

“You’ve known all along we’re wondering why your name and address were in that girl’s pocket.” He spoke to someone else in the room, his voice distant, then came back on the line. “I guess I don’t know what you want me to do for you right now. I’m sorry if the media invaded your privacy. It happens in cases like this.”

“Did you send them here?” I asked.

“No. I don’t talk to Katherine Pettis,” he said, sounding almost offended by the question, as though Katherine Pettis were a much lower class of person than he was. “But we have an election coming up in the fall. Everyone wants to make sure they look like they’re doing their due diligence. Somebody leaked your name to the media, probably out of the sheriff’s office. They like to do that. It happens.”

I expected him to say more, to say . . . anything. But then I understood how naive it was to think he’d have something helpful to offer me. I was a big boy in the middle of a big-boy problem. I couldn’t count on soothing words from the detective investigating the crime. And even if he did have soothing words, they couldn’t erase the images I carried around in my head. That girl in the grocery store, looking at me with such fear on her face. And then the image I could create only in my mind: her young body, twisted and bent on the floor of some cheap, ugly motel room. She was somebody’s daughter, somebody’s child. Somebody’s friend.

Why?

I pulled a chair out from the table and sat down. Riley wandered into the kitchen, his leash still trailing after him. He sniffed his empty food bowl and looked back at me. I held up one finger, telling him
just a minute
. He knew what I meant.

“So do you have any idea what happened to this girl yet?” I asked. “Or why?”

“You know I can’t talk to you in any great detail about this case,” Reece said. “And I’ve already heard from your attorney, Mr. Brosius, a couple of times. He has your best interests in mind. But I can assure you of one thing—we’re going to do everything we can to answer those questions about Emily Russell.” He paused for a moment, his chewing completed. “Everything. We’ll follow every trail we find.”

His words seemed to be directed at me. But I also knew what he was really saying.
We have no idea what happened to Emily Russell.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

N
ews traveled fast. Before I was even out the door again, showered and clean, my supervisor from work, Olivia Bloom, called, asking me what was going on and did I need to take some time off to figure it out.

“How did you hear?” I asked.

“Twitter,” she said. She was sixty-three and happily played the role of mother hen to her younger employees. I kind of liked it. It felt good to have someone treating me that way.