Not Alex, whom she’d met before. “Do you remember his name?”
“Oh, what was it…Roy, I think. He told the cops the same thing as me—that she seemed really upset and shaken by our conversation.” She whipped her head over to look at me. “And no, he’s not a suspect. He was photographing a concert that night, and he headed straight into Manhattan for it. There were witnesses.”
Who the fuck was Roy?
“Wait, not Roy,” she announced suddenly, almost proudly. “His name was Lloyd.”
Chapter 8
For a moment my mouth gaped open like a fish’s. Edie was seeing Lloyd? My Lloyd, the object of my obsession? Did people know?
“Are you sure they were dating?” This was just a month or two after Edie and Alex had split. The next revelation blared: Maybe Edie had been cheating on Alex with Lloyd earlier that year, too. Perhaps he was the other man Alex wouldn’t name.
She narrowed her eyes at me. “Well, it sure seemed like it.”
And then the question boomeranged back into me. Did I know? Had I seen something that summer? Had my intuition finished a puzzle and sat proudly back until I was drunk and uninhibited and suddenly able to catch up? Was there a split, forgotten second when I knew on the night of August 21?
“She was sick,” Mrs. Iredale announced, “and she was upset. Edie was someone who turned to relationships for—for comfort, so it doesn’t surprise me she was seeing someone new. He said it was casual. Afterward, I mean.”
Alex told me Edie had ended the affair “after a few times”; if my hunch was correct, she’d picked it up again after they’d broken up. Or maybe she’d never quit.
“Of course. I’m sorry.”
Mrs. Iredale stood, crossed as far as the fireplace, and stopped. “Lindsay, there aren’t…things don’t always fit together the way you want them to.” I thought of her late husband, of the moment she learned her daughter was dead; I stared at the dark circle of coffee in the bottom of my cup and nodded. “Whatever you’re trying to go back over and see how it looks if you piece it together a different way—it won’t change anything. It just is what it is.” She turned and walked into the kitchen.
I stood to follow her and noticed a few framed pictures propped up on the mantel—one of Mrs. Iredale and a nerdy older guy, presumably her second husband, on vacation somewhere warm. Another of Mrs. Iredale and her late husband—god, he looked just like Edie, gangly and good-looking—waving under bright layers on a ski vacation. And one of Edie, teenage and lovely, sitting under a tree and reading obliviously while the wind tangled her halo of hair. I gazed at it, half expecting her to look up at me and wave. Edie, I whispered silently. Did you know you’d grow up to be kind of a bitch?
In the kitchen, I handed my mug to Mrs. Iredale and watched her load it into the dishwasher. “I get the feeling you didn’t know about Lloyd, so I’m sorry if that was…by design on Edie’s part or something,” she said. An observant woman, like Edie. She closed the dishwasher and looked out the window, toward a bird feeder. “No sign of the sun coming out. I’ll get your umbrella.”
* * *
The umbrella promptly snapped inside out, and I arrived at the bus stop soaked and bedraggled, damp hair spooling across my forehead and neck. I climbed into the bus’s brightness and caught my reflection in the window. The bags under my eyes had ballooned, the lines from my nose to my mouth deeply etched. Had that been a help or a disaster? I felt the questions growing and multiplying, two for every one answered, spreading like cancer cells.
On the one hand, Mrs. Iredale had a point, one mark in the suicide column: The stew of mental illness, drugs, and a pounding stream of bad news did point to the conclusion that she and the cops had come to. On the other hand, why the fuck had Edie been seeing Lloyd? If he came out and collected her, and he didn’t live in Calhoun, then certainly they must’ve clambered up to her room together…
We wheezed to a stop at a red light, and I turned over another odd detail: What had Mrs. Iredale been doing there just hours before the potential crime? “You can’t know,” she’d said. A slip, a tell