There are two churches on the island. The other one is Catholic. “I overheard people talking about it at school pickup. I checked and found the obituary online, the notice of the memorial service. I assume there will be a funeral eventually but...” he says, leaving that there, and I easily deduce that the body is still being held by the morgue and will be until the investigation is through. Formalities like a funeral and a wake will have to wait until the murderer is caught. In the interim, a memorial service will have to do.
Tomorrow I work. But depending on what time the memorial service is, I can go with Will after. I know he’ll want to go. Will and Morgan were friends, after all, and, though our relationship has been rocky of late, it would be lonely for him, I think, walking into that memorial service all alone. I can do this for him. And besides, selfishly I’d like to get a good look at Jeffrey Baines up close.
“I work until six tomorrow,” I say. “We’ll go together. As soon as I finish up. Maybe Otto can keep an eye on Tate,” I say. It would be a quick trip. I can’t imagine us staying long. We’d pay our respects and then leave.
“We’re not going to the memorial service,” Will says. His words are conclusive.
I’m taken aback, because this isn’t what I expect him to say. “Why not?” I ask.
“It feels presumptuous to go. You didn’t know her at all, and I didn’t know her that well.” I start to explain that a memorial service isn’t exactly the type of thing that one needs an invitation to attend, but I stop because I can see Will has already made up his mind.
I ask instead, “Do you think he did it?” I keep my eyes trained to Jeffrey Baines on the other side of the window. I have to crane my neck a bit to see, as the Baineses’ house isn’t directly across the street. I watch as Jeffrey and the officer exchange words in the driveway, before parting ways and heading for their own cars.
When Will doesn’t answer my question, I hear myself mutter, “It’s always the husband.”
This time, his reply is quick. “He was out of the country, Sadie. Why would you think he had anything to do with this?”
I tell him, “Just because he was out of the country doesn’t mean he couldn’t have paid someone else to kill his wife.” Because, on the contrary, being out of the country at the time of his wife’s murder provided him with the perfect alibi.
Will must see the logic in this. There’s a small, almost imperceptible nod of the head before he asks, backtracking, “What’s that supposed to mean anyway, about it always being the husband?”
I shrug and tell him I don’t know. “It’s just, if you watch the news long enough, that’s the way it seems to be. Unhappy husbands kill their wives.”
My gaze stays on the window, watching as, on the other side of the street, Jeffrey Baines pops the trunk of his SUV and tosses the luggage in. His posture is vertical. There’s something supercilious about the way he stands.
He doesn’t sag at the shoulders, he doesn’t convulse and sob like men who have lost their wives are supposed to do.
As far as I can tell, he doesn’t shed a single tear.
CAMILLE
I was addicted. I couldn’t get enough of him. I watched him, I mirrored him. I followed his routine. I knew where his boys went to school, which coffee shops he patronized, what he ate for lunch. I’d go there, get the same thing. Sit at the same table after he’d left. Forge conversations with him in my mind. Pretend we were together when we weren’t.
I thought of him all day, I thought of him all night. If I’d have had my way, he’d be with me all the time. But I couldn’t be that woman. That obsessed, hung-up woman. I had to keep my cool.
I worked hard to make sure our run-ins seemed more like chance encounters than what they were. Take, for example, the time we crossed paths in Old Town. I stepped from a building to find him on the other side of it, surrounded by pedestrian traffic. Another cog in the machine.
I called to him. He took a look, smiled. He came to me.
What are you doing here? What’s this place? he asked of the building behind me. His embrace