Page 58 of Take Your Breath Away

“That night I came over, found you sitting in the tub, taking a bath in your piss and vomit. The night you finally decided you had to get it together.”

“I haven’t forgotten that.”

“But I guess you forgot what you said to me.”

“What did I say, Greg?”

Another pause. “You said, ‘It’s all my fault.’ You said, ‘I fucked up.’ I asked you, I said, ‘What are you talking about?’ And you said, ‘Brie.’ But I never told a soul you said that. Never told that detective.”

An unmarked car came to stop out front of the house. Detective Marissa Hardy had returned.

“I’m gonna have to get back to you, Greg,” I said, and ended the call.

Twenty-One

When Tyler had wandered into the kitchen and found that police detective there, he thought, Holy shit.

His first assumption had been that she was there because of what he and Cam had been up to the night before. They’d done a little more than get ripped on some vodka. They’d wandered into one of the local cemeteries and, putting their combined weight behind the effort, managed to knock over half a dozen gravestones.

They’d gone to the cemetery only intending to get drunk, but then Cam had begun speculating on how hard it would be to knock over one of those marble slabs, and one thing led to another and whaddya know, it wasn’t that hard at all. At least, not with some of the smaller ones. After they’d dropped the sixth one, they saw some headlights at the entrance and, figuring it might be the police, beat it the hell out of there.

Even before that lady cop showed up at the house, he’d been worrying that he was going to get caught. Maybe there were surveillance cameras at the cemetery. Or, if not actually on the property, they might have been caught on some security video from a nearby business.

So when it turned out the detective wasn’t there about that, Tyler was mostly relieved, although he wondered if it was possible that she was there about his aunt Clara. But that had all been sorted out. The police got called but she didn’t press charges and that was the end of it. Tyler left the kitchen reasonably sure that the cop being in the kitchen had nothing to do with him.

But that didn’t mean he wasn’t curious.

So he went back upstairs to his bedroom, which was located directly over the kitchen, and if you put your ear close to the radiator grille on the floor, you could hear conversations down there pretty clearly.

When Andrew and his sister were down there, he’d hear the soft murmuring of their voices when he was sitting at the desk in his room, but what they had to say didn’t usually interest Tyler. Just boring shit, like who was going to pick up what at the store or how work was going, or what they might watch that night on Netflix. Stuff Tyler couldn’t give a rat’s ass about.

But this was different. It wasn’t every day you had a police detective in the house.

So Tyler closed his bedroom door and stretched out on the floor, on his back, his right ear near the floor heating vent, and looked at the ceiling.

What a fucking eye-opener.

Andrew Carville was actually Andrew Mason, and he was married to a woman named Brie, and this Brie chick had gone missing six years ago.

After the cop left, Tyler grabbed his laptop and entered several key words into the browser’s search field. Words like missing and Brie and Andrew Mason.

All sorts of stories came up, and not just newspaper accounts, but video from various TV stations. Most of the results were from more than five years ago. There were only a few more recent stories, whatever-happened-to kinds of pieces.

Tyler couldn’t find any story to suggest Andrew had been charged with anything. Brie’s disappearance remained a mystery. A cold case.

Whoa.

He was still reading stories when he heard Andrew come home from wherever he had been. Tyler got back into position, listening to the conversation between Andrew and Jayne.

Man oh man oh man.

He told her everything. Well, at least it sounded like he’d told her everything. Tyler kept trying to send his sister a telepathic message: “Ask him if he killed her!”

But Jayne never asked him a direct question like that and Tyler figured that was because it never even occurred to her that he might be guilty. Either that, or she was scared shitless about what he might say.

Tyler wasn’t sure how he felt. If the police had the goods on the guy, they’d have arrested him, right? Then again, if they couldn’t find a body, maybe they couldn’t prove it.

But all that went out the window if Brie had actually returned. Tyler had seen plenty of photos of Brie while he did his research, and he had to admit there was more than a passing resemblance between her and the woman he had seen in the photo on the detective’s phone. So if she was back, then Andrew wasn’t some bad guy, right? And that would be a good thing, because you didn’t want your knocked-up sister falling in love with some dude who’d killed his wife.