Page 19

Lizzie

Every time I try to talk to one of the officers passing me in the hall of the police station my throat tightens.

It feels as though someone is choking me.

The words won’t come. I just want to ask when they think I can leave.

My phone has no service and I’ve been here for hours.

There are no windows in the station, which feels like such a cliché, but it’s true.

I have no idea if Grayson Sommers’s death has made national news.

Not that he’s famous per se, but Bex is well-known enough, and more important, she’s a beautiful white woman who may have murdered her husband, which will be catnip to every attention-starved news network on the planet.

I’ve never been interrogated before. It lacked all of the hokey charm of the gazillion seasons of Law the fact that Bex’s husband is dead, possibly brutally murdered; the fact that she is likely the prime suspect.

I think back to the moment the henfluencer told me that Grayson Sommers was dead.

“How do you know?” I’d asked.

“Eliza Jane, over there.” She had nodded in the direction of another table. “She’s got a cousin who’s a cop out by the Sommers place and he just tipped her off.”

The woman continued to stare down at her phone. “This is insane.”

“What? What else?”

She tilted her screen toward me and that’s when I saw Grayson. Or rather, what was left of him.

“Isn’t it illegal for a cop to text photos of a crime scene?”

She shrugged but didn’t take her eyes off the small screen.

The photo must have been taken quickly and secretly with a phone.

Only the torso was visible and it was slightly blurry.

In it, Grayson’s plaid shirt was ripped in two.

His bare chest was splayed out over the sharp blades of some kind of farm equipment.

They had ripped through his entire abdomen, flaying the skin open.

The floor of what I assumed was the Sommerses’ barn was coated in dark blood, so dark it almost looked black.

I choked back a gag.

“Ohmygod…ewwwwwww,” the henfluencer squealed.

“What?” everyone around her demanded in unison.

“Someone apparently sliced off one of Grayson’s body parts and put it in the kitchen freezer.”

“Which one?” I asked.

“Not sure yet. But I bet he got the Lorena Bobbitt treatment.”

“Do you think Rebecca did this?” another tablemate had asked me hungrily. “You’re friends with her. Weren’t you with her last night? It looked like you were with her last night in her photos.” This last line came out like an accusation. She moved her chair slightly away from me.

“No. Absolutely not. She didn’t do this. And I don’t know anything.” I stood up, desperate for air. Desperate to leave. I wanted nothing to do with any of it. I wanted to erase those terrible images from my mind. It isn’t real, I told myself.

“I was with her l-last night,” I stuttered when someone else repeated her question.

“Why didn’t y’all come to the welcome circle?” another voice asked accusingly.

“I was tired.”

“Were you with her all night?”

“Well, right until bedtime.”

“So she could have done it.”

Everyone close to us was listening. I dropped my voice to a whisper. “But she didn’t. She wouldn’t.”

“How well do you know her?”

I didn’t know how to answer that question. Because at one point I would have said I knew Bex better than anyone. But that was too long ago. Suddenly my phone rang with a number I didn’t recognize.

I sent it to voicemail and seconds later it rang again. I didn’t want to answer it. I wanted to call my husband. I wanted to call Bex. I wanted to get the hell out of there.

But when it rang a third time I walked to the back of the room and answered.

Sure enough, it was the police. They knew I’d been with Bex the night before. “How?” I’d asked dumbly.

“She tagged you on Instagram.”

Ace detective work. They asked if I wanted someone in the ballroom to come find me and get me to the police station. I managed a quiet no . “I can drive.”

The officer on the line gave me the address of the station and I silently thanked God that they hadn’t tried to march me out the way they did Olivia Jackson.

That’s how I ended up here, being questioned for more than an hour. Now I just wait. When the detective was questioning me, he told me I shouldn’t leave just yet and I didn’t know if he meant the police station or the state.

I’m greedy for information as I sit beneath these fluorescent lights, constantly checking my impotent phone to see if service has somehow miraculously returned.

“Elizabeth Matthews.”

I jump at the sound of my own name. It’s Detective Walsh again. “We have a few more questions.”

“Have you ever met Rebecca Sommers’s children?

” he asks when I sit back down in the little room.

I shake my head. Though I can name them in age order, and I’ve seen two of them born on the floor of Rebecca’s house on her Instagram reels.

Though I feel like I know each and every one of them intimately, which I am only just starting to realize is slightly gross and unsettling, I don’t actually know them.

I’ve never met a single one of them in real life, never touched their bouncy cheeks or smelled their downy heads. I don’t know those children at all.

“I don’t. Where are her kids now?”

He pauses, as if debating whether to tell me.

“We don’t know,” he finally admits. “They’re gone too.” This sharing of information feels strategic. He will give me something and I’m expected to give him something in return. It’s a classic strategy, one I’ve used as a reporter. “We’re worried about them.”

I am too. The worry scratches at my brain and I can’t stop thinking about Bex’s face as she told me about Alice and how talented she was at the piano.

I’d never seen her so flush with pride. Then I remember what she said next, that it was Gray who wouldn’t allow Alice to go away to a special music school.

There’s something else about Bex’s face in the memory that snags in my mind. The heavy makeup under the eye, the bruise she was trying to hide. She had flat out admitted that Gray was controlling, and I know what I saw. I should mention this to the police. Both of those things could be a motive.

For the first time since seeing those pictures of Grayson Sommers after he bled out in his barn, I can imagine my old friend possibly doing it, but maybe she didn’t have a choice.

Jim Walsh watches me intently as I shudder. He knows I have something to tell him and he’s going to wait me out with stony silence. I stare at my hands. Tell him, I think. Give him anything at all that might lead them to those children.

“There is one more thing I should tell you,” I say to the detective.

***

I’m intensely unhinged the entire drive back to the hotel. My heart batters against my ribs like a moth trying to escape through a window. I told the police the truth. I did the right thing. I didn’t flat out say I thought Bex killed her husband. I don’t know if she did.

I know nothing.

All I admitted was that I knew there was tension in their marriage, that maybe he had hurt her because of that tension.

Jim Walsh gobbled these details down like a hungry puppy, didn’t even hide his excitement at my admission.

He let me go after that and when service returned to my phone in the parking lot it flooded with notifications.

I have thousands more Instagram followers. Every person who followed me before last night was someone I had interacted with in real life. But these new people are all strangers. They don’t know me, only my connection to Bex, and they want that connection by proxy. They are desperate for it.

The comments on my latest post of the nachos from last night are intense.

Where is Rebecca?

Have you seen her?

Who are you?

Peter has left three voicemails and sent a half dozen texts.

There’s no way he could know what happened out here yet.

But when I listen to them, I learn that Grayson’s murder has somehow made the national news already.

I do a quick Google search. It even made The Washington Post, which described Grayson as a congressional hopeful about to launch an exploratory committee here.

In the same article Bex is described as a stay-at-home mom and lifestyle influencer.

No mention of her as the breadwinner of that family, the CEO of a company.

The headline in People magazine reads, “Congressional Hopeful Brutally Murdered, Influencer Wife on the Lam.” The news cycle works fast, and it hates women.

I shouldn’t read the comments on this story. You never read the comments. No one is meaner or more viscerally cutting than an anonymous troll on the Internet, but I do it anyway.

I’m not surprised at all. She seemed like a crazy bitch ready to crack.

Where are you BAREFOOTMAMA????

We all have your back

Girl, Jesus is the only man you can truly trust!

If you need a place to hide out you can stay with me

Rebecca Sommers is a liar and a fraud and a whore. Now everyone will know the truth.

Her husband seemed so wonderful. I am horrified. He was exactly what I wanted in my future man. RIP GRAYSON

I didn’t think someone with that much air between her ears would be capable of pulling something like this off. I almost respect her more.