Somebody I Used to Know (16 page)

“But what about—”

Reece took the paper back from me. “I didn’t say I had all the answers. But I think we can stop imagining this is your deceased girlfriend showing up twenty years after her death. I’m sorry, Mr. Hansen, but that girl died. In a fire. And her parents went on the best they could. And all I can really keep coming back to and wondering about is why that girl had your name and address in her pocket when we found her body. Until you have a decent explanation for that, you may want to consider not talking to me at all.” He turned and looked at Brosius. “Isn’t that right, counselor?”

Brosius placed his hand on my arm. “Come on,” he said. “We’re going.”

CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

I
called Laurel a couple of times on my way home. Once before I left the parking lot of Brosius’s office, and then again when I stopped at a traffic light. She didn’t answer, but I left a message both times, and in the second one I asked, “Why didn’t you tell me they found those obituaries? Why were you talking to the police without me?”

But asking the question into the dead air of voice mail didn’t make me feel any better. It just made me feel angrier and more confused. I pounded the steering wheel a couple of times in frustration, which only left me with sore palms.

Then I reached my apartment and found Heather Aubrey waiting for me in the parking lot.

*   *   *

I invited Heather in because she said she needed to talk to me about something important. I didn’t ask what it was. She followed me inside and sat on the couch.

I dropped into a chair across the room. I saw the watch Marissa had given me on the end table, its second hands dutifully ticking off the time in two different places. Heather looked good. She wore tight jeans and knee-high boots and some kind of colorful scarf that wrapped around her neck several times. She crossed her legs, gently brushing Riley aside, and bounced her foot in the air. As I watched her in my apartment, I remembered how I’d always thought she was out of my league. I tried to figure it out in college, and I still wondered exactly what she saw in me. There were better-looking guys, richer guys. Why had she chosen me?

Marissa tried to explain it to me once. She said I wasn’t a typical college guy. Sure, I was good-looking—thanks for that, I told her—but I didn’t look like everyone else. I was smart and sensitive, but still something of a guy’s guy. I watched sports. I played basketball at the rec center.

I trusted Marissa’s instincts about these things. When we met in college, she was slightly more experienced than I was. She’d dated a lot in high school, even had one serious boyfriend for over a year. I’d dated a little in high school. I went to dances, groped some girls occasionally at parties and mixers, had even had sex with a few of them. But Marissa seemed to have lived a life. I saw the pictures of her and her high school boyfriend, Blake, in her dorm room and listened to the stories of their good times and bad times together: getting drunk at dances, sharing rides to and from school. The way Blake turned mean when they finally broke up, showing up at her house in the middle of the night and calling her name. It all sounded very Stanley Kowalski, and it made me feel like Marissa lived in a different world than I did.

But Marissa was good at reassuring me. Once a girl got to know me, she said,
if
she got to know me, she’d know how charming and considerate I was. She’d know I was the keeper.

I accepted all of those compliments from Marissa—who I pointed out was completely biased by that time, since we were in love—and I figured Heather might have seen the same things in me, even though she ended up marrying a successful, golf-playing dentist.

I was always much happier, much more comfortable being myself with Marissa. I loved her.

I still did.

“Have you been waiting long?” I asked Heather.

“I was in the neighborhood,” she said. “I thought I’d see if you were around.”

“I was at the police station. Before that, I was at Emily Russell’s funeral.”

Heather didn’t seem thrown by either of my admissions. She simply asked how everything was going with the case. “Do they know anything else yet?”

I told her no, that they knew nothing except that a young girl had been murdered. A young girl who I thought looked a hell of a lot like Marissa. “But I might be the only one making that connection.”

“That’s what I wanted to talk to you about,” Heather said.

“Emily?”

“Marissa.” She fiddled with her watch. “Do you have anything to drink?”

“You mean a real drink?” I asked.

“Wine? Beer?”

I went out to the kitchen, grabbing a beer for myself and a bottle of red wine that had been sitting on my counter for six months. I didn’t know if it was any good or not, but I went ahead and opened it, blew the dust out of a glass, and poured. When I handed the drink to her, our hands brushed a little, and she smiled up at me.

Then she swallowed the wine. Her mouth curled like she’d sipped something that had been strained through dirty socks.

“Is it that bad?” I asked. “Do you want a beer instead?”

“It’s fine,” she said. “I wouldn’t have bought it, but it’s fine. I like good wine. I can suggest a few different kinds.”

“I don’t like wine at all,” I said. “Somebody gave it to me. Like I said, if you don’t want it, I can dump it. What did you want to tell me about Marissa?”

“Okay,” Heather said. “You want to get right to it.” She sipped more of the wine and made less of a face.

“It’s been a long couple of days,” I said. “I’m sorry to be short, but I’d love to hear what you want to tell me.”

“Okay.” She rested the wineglass on her knee, keeping her fingers wrapped around the stem. “We talked the other day about the night Marissa died. And that man she was seen with. I felt like you questioned my story about that man because you thought I had ulterior motives. We dated before you met Marissa. We kind of dated after Marissa, and then again after you got divorced. There was always something between us, right?”

“You don’t need to worry,” I said. “Someone else confirmed your account. Hell, they confirmed more than you told me. I don’t have any doubt Marissa was involved with that man in some way. Some real, intense way.” I stopped to take a drink of my beer. It couldn’t taste as bitter as I felt. Maybe nothing tasted good anymore. “I guess I’m glad you told me the truth. I’m glad more than one person told me the truth. I needed to hear it.”

Heather’s shoulders slumped dramatically. “I’m so glad you feel that way.” She reached up with her free hand and swiped it across her brow. “I’m relieved. I know it’s tough to hear about someone you thought you knew well.”

“I did know her well. Just . . . just not as well as I thought, I guess.”

“Who told you this news about her?” she asked, and then started shaking her head. “You know what? Never mind. I don’t need to know. If it was a good friend, then that person was just trying to help. That’s all a friend should ever try to do.”

“Yeah. Right,” I said. “It’s like eating my vegetables or something. It sucks going down, but it’s for my own good.” I slumped lower in my chair and drank more of my beer. I didn’t care about the bitter taste. I liked what it was doing to my head.

Heather stood up and moved to the end of the couch closest to my chair. She rearranged the cushions and sat down, wearing a sympathetic frown on her face. “I’m sorry.”

“What did you want to tell me?” I asked.

She studied me for a moment. “It’s not important now.”

But I could see she
wanted
to tell me. And I wanted to hear. Was I supposed to just sit there and swallow my curiosity? I couldn’t. And I knew that Heather knew that.

“What is it?” I asked. “Just tell me.”

“Oh, boy,” Heather said.

I recognized the words and the approach. It was straight out of her playbook from college. She’d act like she didn’t want to say what she had to say, but I knew she did. And not only did I know she wanted to tell me, I knew it was going to be something bad. Heather used this tactic when she wanted to say something nasty about one of her friends. She liked to act as though the information was being dragged out of her. It wasn’t. She wanted to share. And I wanted—
needed
—to hear it. We both knew that.

“Heather. Tell me.”

“It’s Marissa,” she said.

“What about her? If you know something, tell me.”

“I know that news about the man at Razer’s knocked you for a loop. I know it came out of nowhere. But it really didn’t surprise me.” She took a big drink of her wine. “It didn’t surprise me because Marissa cheated on you in college. She’d been unfaithful to you before that night.”

CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

I
straightened up in my chair. “What are you talking about, Heather?”

“I’m only telling you this because you seemed to want to get at the truth about some things.” Her voice took on a defensive tone, as though she wanted to emphasize that it was me and not her behind the secret being revealed.

“That’s not the only reason you’re telling me,” I said. “In fact, it’s not even the primary reason, but I don’t care. I just want to know what you’re talking about.”

“Do you remember that guy named Dan Killian?” she asked. “He was a year ahead of us.”

Jealousy. I felt it creeping up on me. Jealousy over someone I hadn’t dated, hadn’t seen, in twenty years.

“I remember him,” I said. He was an acquaintance more than a friend. I didn’t like him. He and Marissa were in a few classes together. She talked about him from time to time. He played in a band. A stupid band. I thought every guy who played in a band was stupid. And so were their bands.

“I think you and Marissa had been fighting,” she said. “This was about three months, maybe four, before she died.”

“I remember. We fought because she wanted me to come visit for a weekend. I was working back at home, and she was here for the summer. But I couldn’t come. I couldn’t get off work. She just didn’t understand what it was like to really need to have a summer job. She didn’t have to worry about that.”

“I was here that summer,” Heather said, sipping more of her wine. She’d grown used to it apparently. She didn’t make a face when she drank it anymore. “She and I saw each other sometimes out at bars and things like that. It was a little sleepy here in the summer. Sleepy but nice. She’d complained to me earlier that week about you not coming. She said you’d fought about it, and she said she didn’t understand why you just didn’t do what she wanted.” Heather laughed a little. “I guess that’s what all girls want from their boyfriends. Anyway, that weekend I saw her somewhere. Johnny B’s, I guess it was, because they had live music. And Dan’s band was playing there that night. Marissa and Dan spent the whole night together in the bar. Drinking and laughing. It didn’t seem right considering that she was dating you. And then they left together at the end of the night.”

I gritted my teeth while she told the story. The bitterness of the beer had made my mouth dry, and I worked up some saliva before I said, “Just because they left together doesn’t mean—”

“She told me, Nick. A week later we were out again, and Marissa told me. She said she felt horrible, and she wanted to tell you.”

“Why didn’t she?” I asked, the muscles in my face tight.

“I talked her out of it. I said . . . I knew you, and I told her you weren’t the kind of guy who could handle news like that. It wouldn’t just roll off you.”

“
Should
it just roll off me?” I asked. “My girlfriend cheating on me?”

Heather stood up. She came over to my chair and sat on the arm, placing her hand on my shoulder. “No, it shouldn’t. I’m not saying that. I’m just telling you all of this because . . . because maybe you’re too hung up on the past. Maybe all of this is because you haven’t let go of what happened. If you had a clear picture . . .”

“Heather, why do I get the feeling you’re enjoying this?” I asked.

She drew back, breaking off contact. “That’s not true.”

I remembered that summer. I remembered the distance, physical and emotional, that grew between us during those weeks we were apart. When we saw each other, we fell back into our relationship with great ease, but the time apart nearly killed us. Had she cheated? Had she taken advantage of our time apart to spend a night or two with another guy?

“Thanks for telling me,” I said. “I think.”

“Let me get you another beer,” she said.

I finished the one in my hand and put the bottle on the table. I didn’t care if she cheated. We were young. People screwed up. I needed to let it go. What did it matter?

Heather breezed back into the living room with an open beer and the bottle of wine. She refilled her glass, and when she handed me the beer, our hands touched again. She looked at me, and my fingers intertwined with her fingers. I felt the coolness and condensation on her hand from the beer bottle.

It had been a long time. A long, long time.

She slid down onto my lap.

We forgot about our drinks.

CHAPTER THIRTY

A
text from Laurel woke me the next morning, telling me she was on her way to my apartment. I put the phone down and rolled over. Heather was just waking up, stretching and lifting her arms high above her head. Then she brought her hand down and ruffled my hair.

“Is that work?” she asked.

“A friend’s coming over,” I said. “You remember Laurel Davidson, right?”

Heather made a face. She showed about the same level of disdain for Laurel as she had for the wine. “She never liked me. She always acted like she needed to protect you.”

“Protect me? From what?”

“I don’t know. She just seemed like a very territorial friend.”

“She’s loyal, if that’s what you mean, and she’s helping me with all of this,” I said. “Emily’s death . . . we’re trying to make sense of it.”

“So she’s the one to blame.”

“To blame for what?” I asked.

“Keeping all of this alive in your head.” Heather was trying to sound a little playful, but I wasn’t interested.