Page 59 of She Didn’t See It Coming

The man in the ravine hadn’t been panting, slobbering, horrible.

He’d been an older man that she’d been sleeping with for three months.

And he didn’t drag her into the ravine, with his hand clapped over her mouth so that she couldn’t scream, but by now she’d told this story so often she almost believed it herself.

She was so convincing when she was talking to the detectives all those years ago. She played the part of the frightened, desperate victim perfectly. She was rather proud of herself. It made her realize that she could make people believe almost anything.

No, he didn’t drag her into the ravine. He was already there, waiting for her, because she’d asked him to meet her there. She was tired of him. He was too dull, too predictable.

At first, he’d seemed exciting, forbidden, because he was so much older.

And he’d found her seductive. The boys her own age or a little older were terrified of her.

He wasn’t intimidated, and she liked that.

In retrospect, he was certainly a creep, sleeping with a sixteen-year-old girl.

But he’d made sure she was sixteen, the age of consent in Connecticut, before he slept with her.

He was married, and he was risking enough already, he told her.

It had all seemed so exciting in the beginning.

The secret trysts. Hiding them from her parents.

Having this other life that they knew nothing about.

It was thrilling. They thought she was just a schoolgirl in tenth grade, a straight-A student.

They had no idea. But it got old rather quickly.

She liked the double life, but she began to find him too boring, too conventional.

It took all the fun out of arranging secret meetings when the man you were doing it for turned out to be dull as dishwater. She’d had enough of him.

She broke it off, but he wouldn’t accept it.

He began to call her at home on the landline when she stopped answering his calls on her cell phone.

He told her that he loved her and that he couldn’t live without her.

He wanted to leave his wife so that they could be together.

He was delusional. She had to be blunt. “Rich,” she said coldly, the second-to-last time she saw him, “I don’t love you.

You don’t love me, you just think you do.

You love your wife. Go back to her and leave me the fuck alone. ”

“You’re just saying that,” he protested. “You don’t mean it.” He continued to pester her. He was desperate, unhinged. So she arranged to meet him in the ravine.

And when he turned his back, she smashed him over the head with a sharp rock.

She perhaps should have stopped there, but she hit him again, and again. She waited until she was certain he was dead, and then she emerged onto the road, where she was spotted, and went into hysterics.

What happened next was nerve-racking. She told her story to the police, over and over again.

She told it well, without deviation. But three things worried her.

The detectives were banging on about “overkill”—apparently the first blow had been enough to kill him.

And it’s true that he’d dropped like a stone.

They questioned her repeatedly about why she bashed his head twice more rather than run away when she could.

Secondly, the man, Richard Dunbar, was a respectable businessman, with no known history of attacking women.

And lastly, her best friend, Susan Cleeve, knew she’d been seeing an older man on the sly.

She even had a vague description. And Alice had let her lover’s first name, Rich, slip once when she was talking to Susan.

So she’d told Susan that it had happened exactly the way she’d told it.

He’d grabbed her and dragged her into the ravine because she’d refused to see him anymore.

He told her that if he couldn’t have her, he was going to kill her with his bare hands, so she had to fight back.

Susan believed her and was persuaded to say nothing about their relationship.

Susan might still be out there, and it makes Alice uneasy.

What if she sees the news stories about Bryden Frost, and Alice’s mother?

Alice doesn’t like loose ends. She doesn’t want to go after Susan to cover her tracks.

She’d liked Susan. And she doesn’t want to ask for Derek’s help to find her, because Alice doesn’t want to tell him that she bashed her lover’s brains in when she got tired of him.

She’d much rather Detective Salter make an arrest and stop looking into her and Derek. Or else she might have to get creative.

···

Late Sunday night, Jayne arrives home completely exhausted. All she wants is to get into her pajamas and go straight to sleep.

As she undresses in her bedroom, she has the strange sensation that something isn’t quite right. She glances around her bedroom, but there’s nothing specific she can put her finger on. She calls Michael to wish him good night, waking him from sleep.

“I’m sorry, I just wanted to hear your voice,” she says.

“No problem. I’m glad you called,” he assures her.

She talks to him as she wanders around the apartment in her pajamas. She’s in the kitchen, glancing around. Something feels different, but she can’t determine what it is. She pauses in her conversation.

“You all right?” Michael asks.

“Yes, I’m fine,” she says, though she’s a bit rattled.

She quickly sweeps her eyes around the rest of the kitchen.

She has that feeling again, her hair prickling at the back of her neck.

Instinct, Michael called it. An awareness of danger, in the service of survival.

She returns to the bedroom, where she opens her drawers.

She can’t tell if anything is different.

But the books on her bedside table—surely one was stacked on top of the other? Now they lie side by side.

“What are you doing?” Michael asks on the other end of the phone. “It sounds like you’re cleaning or something.”

She’s already in the bathroom and opening her medicine cabinet. Then she knows for sure. Things have been moved, she’s certain of it. “Michael, I think someone’s been in my apartment.”