Evidence of Life - By Barbara Taylor Sissel Page 0,101
noticed? Even the judge said he was letting me go because I was unreliable. The asshole suggested I get help, but the truth is that he disapproved of my relationship with Nick, our—” Sondra touched her upper lip delicately with the tip of her tongue as if, unlike Abby, she couldn’t bring herself to say it, the word “affair.”
How did I not know, Abby wondered. How could I have been so blind? She remembered her impatience with Nick and his mood swings, and her decision to leave it alone. This, too, shall pass. But maybe on a deeper level she had known there was something more beyond the trouble with Helix Belle. Now that she thought about it, Nick had been cleared of suspicion within a matter of days. Less than two weeks had passed when Helix withdrew its allegations, yet his moodiness had dragged on through the holidays, into spring. He’d not been himself on the day he left for the Hill Country.
Sondra said getting fired was probably the best thing that could have happened to her. It had forced her to leave Hank, she said, to open her design business. It sickened Abby to listen to her go on about her intention to divorce Hank and marry Nick. Sondra mentioned the sale of the cabin, that Nick had promised to help her arrange it. “There would have been enough money then that we could have gone anywhere and started over. I wanted that desperately,” Sondra said. “I tried to explain it to Nick, that he couldn’t—” She broke off.
“Couldn’t what?”
Sondra twisted her bracelets. “The thing is, he kept stalling and I ran out of cash. What else could I do but go back to dancing at the club? Nick was furious; he stopped taking my calls, but what did he expect?” She looked up at Abby and her eyes swam with tears, heartbroken shadows and a softer light of blank confusion, bemusement...some horribly wrong, discordant note that seemed out of place. She sat back and drew her purse onto her lap again.
Abby’s pulse tapped in her ears, light and paper-thin.
“If only he had listened to me last December, he would be alive now. I want you to know that. I want you to know that I gave him every chance then, just the same as I’m giving you every chance now.”
“What do you mean?” Abby asked carefully.
“The last time we met, before the flood, was in Bandera. It was near Christmas. Nick didn’t want to come, but I said if he didn’t, I would call you and tell you everything about us.”
“You were there, with him, at the courthouse in Bandera?” Abby was thinking of Kate’s December sighting of Nick.
“There was a problem with the title on my property. I needed Nick’s help to fix it, but then he ran into some friend of yours, or so he said, and it freaked him out. I don’t know because I was in the restroom, so he could have been lying.”
No, Abby thought. He hadn’t been lying, but neither had Kate, and Abby felt a tiny ripple of relief.
“He just wanted to get out of town after that,” Sondra said. “He swore he would take care of everything from home, that he’d be in touch after Christmas, but he wasn’t. It pissed me off. I went to his office one day and waited by his car. He had to talk to me then, but he was so cold. He said we were a mistake.”
Had Nick broken it off? Abby wondered. Had there even been a relationship between him and Sondra, or was she making it up? But she had Nick’s door key, his jacket had been at her cabin. She was here now as if she had some kind of claim on Nick, however bizarre that seemed. What did it add up to, if not infidelity?
“I didn’t speak to him again until the gas station in Boerne. Oh, you should have seen the look on his face.” Sondra clapped her hands together the way a child might if she were thrilled with herself.
“I thought you were in the car with him,” Abby said, but Sondra seemed not to hear her.
“Fucking weather screwed up everything—” She stopped, and her gaze drifted as if she were studying something in her mind.
Glancing at her cell phone, Abby considered whether she could grab it and run out of the house. She didn’t know, couldn’t decide. What did Sondra intend? Suppose she did have a