“I believe you. I just think that you probably made some kind of mistake. Will you admit that that’s a possibility?”
“No, I will not admit that that’s a possibility. I’ll admit that everything I saw up until Saturday night was my opinion. Maybe the fencing trophy didn’t belong to Dustin Miller. Maybe Matthew Dolamore had some other reason for following people around in the middle of the night. But I saw him at the scene of the crime. With my own eyes.”
“You were drunk.”
“I wasn’t that drunk.”
“That’s not what I heard.”
“Where’d you hear that?”
“I talked to one of the detectives. Yesterday, before we drove home. He told me that you were extremely intoxicated.”
“I wasn’t. I’d been drinking, but . . .”
“They interviewed the bartender. You had at least five drinks, including a martini.”
“I don’t know if I had five, exactly.”
“You know that with your meds it’s like having ten drinks. Did you even eat dinner that night?”
“I don’t know. Look, don’t yell at me. I was drunk, but I know what I saw. Did you tell them about my meds?”
“Who? The police? They asked if you drank a lot, and I said no. I said that because of your meds you were usually very careful not to have more than two drinks.”
“Great.”
“I’m on your side, Hen. I’m worried about you.”
“Don’t you need to get to work?”
“It’s Columbus Day.”
“Oh, right.”
“I do have work to do, but I can do it from here. I don’t want you to be alone.”
Hen caught herself clenching her teeth together, then stopped. “I was going to go to the studio today. I can’t be here all day. Not with . . . not with him next door.”
“Okay. You should go to the studio. That makes sense.”
Hen drank some coffee and tried to eat some toast, but even the feel of food in her mouth made her want to vomit. She changed again and told Lloyd, now on his computer in the living room, that she was going to the studio.
“Can you do me a favor?” he asked.
“Okay,” she said.
“Promise me you’re only going to the studio. Promise you won’t do anything foolish.”
“I promise,” she said, and went out the front door, not even looking at the Dolamores’ house as she got into her car.
Chapter 21
Even though Matthew and Mira were told that police had visited and spoken with Henrietta Mazur, they still decided to go ahead with the order. The judge granted it at three that afternoon, and they were told that a process server would deliver the order directly to Henrietta either that evening or, at the very latest, the next morning.
“It won’t prevent her from continuing to say that she saw you at the scene of the crime,” Detective Shaheen told Matthew over the phone.
“I know. I just don’t want her following me. I don’t want her in my house. I don’t want her talking to my wife. The last time this happened she attacked someone.”
“I know. We’ll do everything possible to make sure that doesn’t happen again.”
Mira went to the bedroom with a migraine, barricading herself in, shades drawn. Her headaches were not frequent, but when she got them—always from anxiety, Matthew thought, even though she disagreed—they’d wipe her out for a day. Matthew (his stomach not great) ate cereal for dinner. He realized that since Saturday night he hadn’t had a moment to really recollect what it had felt like to bring that piece of metal down on Scott Doyle’s skull, to feel the crack that meant his life was going to spill out of him and away. The glory of that singular moment had been immediately ruined by Henrietta, appearing like a ghost in the parking lot, her eyes meeting his. He tried to separate the two events, to acknowledge that it was possible to do something both divine and reckless at the same time. And yet, somehow he’d gotten away with it. It was what he’d thought might happen. Henrietta Mazur was an unreliable witness. Worse than unreliable. A false witness. A mentally ill woman unable to tell fantasy from reality. In some ways, it had worked out perfectly.
As the evening passed—Matthew feverishly reading everything he could find online about the homicide of Scott Doyle—he found himself thinking about Henrietta more than he was thinking about the killing. He kept coming back to that frozen moment, the two of them looking at each other, a current of electricity between them—as Scott lay at