got it on in bed, the initiative had to have been hers. His body must have cooperated—hey, they had to have done it at least three times, right?—but he was probably thinking about some philosophical conundrum while he pumped away.” He muttered an obscenity, swiped a shaking hand over his face and gave up on the relaxed pose. Both feet on the floor, he rolled his chair close enough to the desk to allow him to brace his arms on the blotter. “That was crude. I’m sorry, but, you know, I wanted a father, sort of like my friends had. A guy who’d pitch a baseball, come to games, give me advice. Me, I had to depend on my mother.” Anger rolled off him in waves, but he managed a shrug. “And then she was gone.”
“Sounds like you were lucky to have her as long as you did,” Tony remarked mildly.
“Her leaving the way we thought she did was a shock.”
“I bet.” Tony studied him. A shock? A betrayal was what he really meant. Tony had to wonder again if she hadn’t betrayed her kids in a different way while she was still alive, and if Matt hadn’t been well aware. “Was there any more conflict in your home than usual right before she disappeared?”
“I’m not the best person to ask. That was my senior year. I tried to be gone as much as possible.” His expression was no longer as readable.
“Anything going on with friends of your parents...?” He hung that out there.
“I don’t know.”
“Do you recall the day she disappeared?”
Matt looked at him as if he was crazy. “You think?”
“Will you tell me what you recall?”
His mouth tightened, but after a minute he said, “It was a school day.”
Tony made a mental note to find out if high school attendance records still existed for that year.
“I had football practice after school. When I got home, nobody had started dinner. Beth had had something after school, too, and I think Emily had gone to a friend’s. Dad wandered out of his office—Emily and Beth were stuck sharing a bedroom so he could have his little sanctuary—and asked if dinner was about ready.” He shook his head, his disgust apparent. “He hadn’t even noticed Mom wasn’t home.”
“But her car must have been in the garage or parked out front.”
“She got the garage.” He winced at the unintentional meaning. “So I guess Dad might not have noticed. But, yeah, it was weird that she hadn’t taken her car.”
“Did she work?”
“Part time. Well, except during tax season. She was a CPA,” he said, seeing Tony’s surprise. “She worked—I don’t know—fifteen or twenty hours a week most of the year, filing for extensions for people, stuff like that. February through April were, like, time-and-a-half. Anyway, I thought maybe she hadn’t been able to get her car started or something, so I called the tax service she worked for to see if she was still there, but she hadn’t been scheduled to work that day. So then we took turns calling everyone we could think of, but no one had heard from her.”
I. We. The kids had obviously taken leading roles in trying to track down their mother. But then, their father had very likely known exactly where she was.
“Beth made dinner,” Matt continued tensely. These recollections were understandably vivid. “We kept thinking Mom would walk in the door and be surprised because we were all supposed to know where she’d been, but it didn’t happen. Dad waited until morning, then called the police.” A shrug said, You know the rest.
“When did someone think to check whether any of her possessions were missing?” Tony asked.
“The cop did, when he came to the house. He seemed to think we were idiots for not doing that sooner, but... I guess none of us really thought she’d just walk out. We worried she’d been in an accident or something.”
Except her husband had presumably brushed his teeth before going to bed after her inexplicable disappearance. Shaved in their bathroom the following morning, right before he’d called the cops. Under the circumstances, how could he not have noticed the gaps in the clutter on the counter and in the medicine cabinet?
“What was missing?” Tony asked, even though Beth had answered the same question yesterday.
“Her purse, I remember that. It wasn’t anywhere. Her cell phone, which would have been in it.”
And which, thirteen years ago, would not have had GPS.
“Beth and Dad thought maybe some clothes. Some of her makeup and some things from the medicine cabinet. You know.”
Birth control pills. Interesting he didn’t want to say that, given his earlier, scathing speculation on his parents’ sex life.
“So the responding officer said you’d probably be hearing from your mother.”
“Yeah, shows what he knew,” Matt said with understandable bitterness.
“You have to understand that most adults who disappear choose to do so. It puts police in a difficult position.”
Matt locked gazes with him in a challenge. “But when you’re wrong, you’re wrong.”
“I can’t deny it,” Tony admitted, then asked, “Did the officer follow up in the next days or weeks? Or did your father contact them when she didn’t reappear?”
“I...don’t really know.” It was the first time Matt had seemed uncertain.
Deciding he’d gotten enough for today, Tony stood. “I’ve taken up enough of your time in the middle of a working day. Needless to say, I’ll be in touch.”
Matt rose, too, his body language tense. “Do you know how she died?”
“I’m afraid not yet.”
“All right, then.” His expression hardened. “I hope you’ll go after my father. Who else could have killed her?”
“We do look first at family,” Tony conceded but saw no sign that it had occurred to Matt any investigation would look at him, too.
Still, when Tony stepped from the cool interior of Memorial Hall into the heat of the day, he couldn’t deny that Matt’s question—or was it an accusation?—echoed his own thinking. Indeed, who else could have killed Christine Marshall but her husband?
Matt’s vindictiveness disturbed him nonetheless. How could a vague, essentially absent father cause so much anger? Or had there been more to the relationship? Beth, determined to keep her family whole, could have refused to see what was happening.
More to the point, what if Matt’s mother had turned a blind eye to physical or sexual abuse by his father? Now, that could fuel rage aimed at both parents.
Something to think about.
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