Evidence of Life - By Barbara Taylor Sissel Page 0,72
me off, frankly. I wondered then if there was some funny business going on.”
“No,” Abby said, and she was thinking of her marriage at the time, that when Nick won the settlement, their relationship couldn’t have been better. Nick himself couldn’t have been happier or more content. She certainly had not been wondering about any funny business.
“I’m not trying to say I’ve got proof of anything between them. But the fact is they apparently worked together, and now she’s gone and so is he.”
“But they didn’t disappear at the same time. You don’t even know for certain when your wife left.”
“Like I said, we were separated. She moved out last January. She’d rented a house over in the Heights and opened up an interior-design business.”
“I thought she worked for Judge Payne.”
“She quit after the holidays. She said she was sick of getting hit on all the time. It was kind of a shock, to tell you the truth. She’d seemed so happy, then boom.” Hank fell into a fractious silence.
Abby pulled her jacket into her lap; she found the strap of her purse.
Hank put out his hand as if he might hold her in place. “Your husband went missing in April, right? What’s the story there? If you don’t mind my asking,” he added.
Abby gave him the short version.
“Man, that’s rough,” he said when she finished. “I was out in the Hill Country a week or so after the flood. Things were bad.”
Abby already had an idea of what he’d say if she asked why he went there. She sensed—and she’d guess later it was the horrible gift of prescience—that his answer would be the beginning of the end of what was left of her life, the one she believed in, relied on, treasured. But she asked anyway. “You have a place out there?”
“Sondra’s granddad left her some land in Kerr County with a cabin on it. It’s on high ground, but that was a lot of water.”
“It was okay?”
“Yeah, it’s old but solid.” Hank kept Abby’s gaze. “What a hell of a thing, though, your whole family gone.”
She said she still had her son Jake. “He won’t be happy when he finds out I was here.”
“How come?”
“He thinks I’m at work. So does my mother.” Abby glanced at her watch. It was past nine. Charlotte Treadway would be wondering what had happened to her. She would call Hap to complain.
“But you blew that off and called me because you have doubts, right? What are you thinking, that your husband and daughter didn’t drown?”
“There’s no indication that happened. No bodies, not even the car was found.” Abby hesitated. She didn’t want to say any more, and yet she was compelled. She hated how desperate she’d become, how helpless it made her feel. It had robbed her of everything, even her ordinary discretion, her dignity. “I thought they were going camping,” she said and described Lindsey’s phone call, the one from Boerne. “I’ve never been sure what she said, something about her daddy, about how he was taking the scenic route or the easy route. I don’t know. I think she was crying.”
“Maybe he had a heart attack or something.”
“The boy at the gas station said he saw them drive away.” Abby toyed with her cup, thinking of the cabin, its remote location. She thought of Nick jotting Sondra’s name inside a book of matches in handwriting that was as familiar to her as her own. She could see it, the rushed slant of his “S,” the extra loop on the “r” that made its shape seem almost girlish. She could see him smiling over it, smiling at Sondra, and she felt insulted. She felt the awful insinuation that seemed implicit building in her mind, and she tightened her jaw. She looked at Hank. “I’d like to go there,” she said even as she was thinking how insane it was, completely insane to involve herself on any level with this man and his problems. Didn’t she have enough of her own?
“Go where?”
“To your wife’s cabin.”
Hank’s eyes widened. “You think Sondra and your husband—?”
“I don’t know.” Abby didn’t want Hank to say it, having an affair. “It might not be that.”
“What else then?”
“She worked for Judge Payne.”
“So? What does the cabin have to do with that?”
Abby pulled the book of matches from her purse and pushed it across the table with the tip of her index finger. “Do you know this place?”
“Riverbend Lodge? Yeah. It’s a dump on the highway outside Bandera.”