Page 114 of Take Your Breath Away

My voice was breaking. I didn’t have to fake that. “It’s not her.”

The lie was, obviously, an impulsive strategy. My hope was that if I could get Matt to believe this was not Brie’s body, he’d have to figure out what his next step might be. And given that I was the one most qualified to identify Brie, maybe he’d need me a while longer to put the pieces of this puzzle together.

Then again, he could shoot me now and be done with it.

His skeptical expression told me he wasn’t entirely persuaded I was telling him the truth. “What are you talking about? You lost it. That was fucking grief.”

Still holding on to the shovel, I shook my head. “Not grief … relief.”

“How the hell can you know it’s not her?”

“You expected me to be able to tell if it was her, but now you’re asking me how I can know that it’s not?”

“Tell me how you know.”

“The necklace,” I said. “Brie didn’t own a necklace like that.” I was taking a chance he wouldn’t recall an item of jewelry Brie’d been wearing that night.

“You sure?”

I just looked at him. He got the message and sighed.

“So who the fuck is it?” he asked.

“I’ve no idea. This is your fuckup, not mine.”

Now Matt, in addition to looking pissed, appeared mystified. “I went to the right house. I know I went to the right house. I’d scoped it all out. There was nobody else there. How do you explain that?”

“I don’t know.”

“Thirty-six Mulberry.”

“Yes.” Curious, that he would remember that detail but not the necklace.

“An old house. Needed work. You were going to update it, fix it up.”

“Yes.”

How did he know that?

He was thinking, trying to remember other details from six years ago. He slowly raised a finger and pointed it at me. “Mice.”

“What?”

“You had a mouse problem, I figured. Flour on the kitchen floor. Waiting till morning to look for tracks.”

I nodded.

“I walked right through it, in the dark. Left shoe prints. First job I ever did where I had to vacuum before I took off.” Matt was thinking so hard I could almost smell wood burning. “You sure about the necklace?” It was clearly a detail he was fuzzy on.

“I’m sure,” I said.

“She have, like, a sister or something? A friend, who slept over? Anything like that?”

Feed him something. Mess with his head.

“A friend,” I said. “Sometimes, when I was out of town, like that night, she’d have someone come stay with her. Made her feel less anxious.” Then, thinking fast, I added, “A friend from her school days. Parents dead, no spouse, no kids. Sort of person, if she went missing, no one would even have noticed.”

Matt was moving his head side to side slowly, not buying it. “No,” he said. “No.” And then, very slowly, a calmness came over him.