Page 91 of I Will Ruin You

I know Bonnie wanted to ask me what the hell I was doing, but there was no way she could. Not now. I’d crossed that line and there was no going back now. And I was already second-guessing myself. What if Marta’s witness had seen who was behind the wheel? If she had, Marta would catch me in a lie any second now.

“What were you doing in that neighborhood last night?” Marta asked.

“Following a car,” I said.

Marta waited.

“I was coming along West Ave when this asshole in a Corvette cut me off. I try to be cool about these things, but, I don’t know, it just pissed me off so much that I went after him. We were both heading east, and then he—I’m assuming it was a guy—made a hard right onto Utica and took off like a bat out of hell. I was going after him, but Bonnie’s car’s not exactly a sports car, and I lost him. I made a turn onto Wooster and pulled over for a second to decompress, you know?”

“Did you catch the license plate on the ’Vette?”

“No,” I said. “But it was white. An older one, from the seventies or eighties, I’d guess.”

“Why were you driving Bonnie’s car instead of your own?” she asked.

“Come on, sis, he answered your question,” Bonnie said.

“No, it’s okay,” I said. “We switch cars lots of times. And I couldn’t find my keys right away and saw Bonnie’s, so I grabbed them instead. It didn’t really matter which car I took.”

“What were you doing, going out at that hour?” Marta asked. “And in that part of town? It’s nowhere near here.”

I sighed and looked downward. “I didn’t really want to get into this, but...”

Bonnie touched my arm. “You don’t have to—”

“Might as well tell her,” I said. A dramatic pause. “We’d had a fight.”

“A fight?” Marta asked.

“About the boat.”

Another cock of the head. “Go on.”

“So, you know about the LeDrews suing me. As frivolous as the suit might seem, you have to take these things seriously, and I hadn’t had it confirmed until today that the union would cover any legal costs.”

I had to hope Marta wouldn’t follow up on this, wouldn’t learn that I’d been given this news yesterday.

“So I was going to sell the boat to our neighbor.”

“Jack,” Bonnie said, helping out.

“Right, Jack. He wanted to buy it and we’d agreed on ten thousand, but before we could make the deal final Bonnie went behind my back and canceled it.”

“I didn’t think it was right, or fair,” Bonnie said. “And we all love the boat. But I shouldn’t have canceled the arrangement they had. Not without talking to Richard about it first.”

Go ahead and let Marta check that part of the story, I thought. Jack would confirm it.

“Anyway, I said a few things I shouldn’t have. I know you understand better than most what I’ve been going through. The trauma, the, you know, aftereffects of what happened to me at the school. So I just walked out, went for a drive. I wandered all over Milford, and I don’t even know if I realized where I was when that jerk cut me off. I was already so tense about everything that had happened, I snapped. I went after the car. It’s a good thing I couldn’t catch him. Not for his sake, but for mine. He’d probably have beat the crap out of me or, worse, shot me. You know how these road rage things can spiral out of control. So I guess I pulled over, calmed down, and then I came home.”

“And pulled over by the Finster house,” Marta said.

“I guess,” I said. “I had no idea whose house it was.”

“Did you get out of the car?” she asked.

I had a feeling this was a trick question. Had the witness seen anyone in the car or not? But Marta had only said that Bonnie’s car had been spotted. Nothing about anyone being behind the wheel.

“Yes,” I said. “At one point. Just to kind of walk things off.”