Dear Wife - Kimberly Belle Page 0,48

for a vacuum of her own. “We start at the top and work our way down. Like a team.”

But I’m not blind, and I’m no fool. I caught her glance at my waistline. Whatever Martina is after here, I’m pretty sure it’s not teamwork.

JEFFREY

When I wake up on Saturday morning, I shoot off a text to my boss explaining why I’ve been MIA for the past two days, then pull the pillow over my head. It smells like Sabine, like that sweet-spicy stuff in the overpriced bottles on our shower shelf, and I shove it to the floor.

I stare at the ceiling and tell myself to get up, but my limbs feel hulking and heavy, like those sandbags they pile everywhere when the National Weather Service issues a flood warning. I barely slept, thanks to the constant hum of the search boats in the waters behind my house. They’re out there now, and I waver between worry and fury.

What kind of idiot do they think I am? Like I would be stupid enough to dump my wife’s body in my own backyard. Like I would ever be that reckless. I watch Dateline. I know to not pollute my own property with evidence. They could give me a little credit and search farther downstream.

Then again, I haven’t given them much reason not to suspect me, not after my miserable performance in Detective Durand’s office, my nonanswers about my whereabouts Wednesday afternoon. I’d blame it on being rattled, the knowledge he’d been checking up on me, unsettling me enough to stumble over my answers.

But the truth is, it was Ingrid. If she hadn’t been sitting right there, weighting the air in the room with her huffed sighs and cheap perfume, then I might have told him the truth. The detective is a guy; he might have understood, but not Ingrid... No fucking way I was telling her.

It was like when you get a Trivial Pursuit question you know the answer to, that panicked, white-hot moment before the answer rolls off your tongue. I took some deep breaths, blew them all out, but the answer didn’t come.

And now Detective Durand and his Keystone Cops are determined to pin Sabine’s disappearance on me, instead of finding the person actually responsible. Because it doesn’t take a genius to figure out that though they say they’re looking for Sabine, what they’re really searching for is her body.

By the time I wake again, it’s well past noon, and the noise of the boats is muffled by a low rumble coming from my front yard. Reporters have descended on the house like a flock of starving vultures, pecking at me through the glass. It’s not enough that they ruined my front lawn with their vans, they hurl questions at the house whenever I so much as walk by a window. Yesterday I pulled all the shades, but I can still feel their presence the way you feel a tornado bearing down outside, ominous and deadly.

I know from their questions that the police and their merry band of volunteers have searched everywhere there is to search. Pine Bluff’s fields and patchy woods, the town’s parks and hills and riverbanks. No bits of fabric to show for their efforts, no long strands of brown hair found stuck in a tree. If Sabine is anywhere close by, if she’s on Pine Bluff soil or in her muddy waters, chances are good that she’s dead.

Anger and grief, remorse and regret, the emotions churn in my empty stomach. There are a million things I want to say to Sabine, and now it looks like I’ll never get the chance.

The light in the room has shifted, the afternoon sun finally climbing high enough to hit the bedroom windows. I stare up at the ceiling, listening to the camera crews on my front lawn, and a wave of anxiety drags me from bed. I need to run. To pump my legs until my heart wants to explode and my chest burns with the lack of oxygen. To abuse my body until I forget these past few days ever happened.

I pull on running shorts and a T-shirt and grab my phone from the nightstand. A hundred and twenty-seven messages. I scroll through the texts and emails, variations of the same message. OMG, so shocking. Anything I can do to help? Thoughts and prayers, thoughts and prayers. I’m pleased that the tide hasn’t turned, but I’m not naive enough to know that it won’t. Ingrid is probably