Page 70 of Take Your Breath Away

“My daughter! Tell her to come back!”

Calmly, he said, “Visiting hours were over long ago. It’s the middle of the night.”

“But she was—”

“I’ve been out there the whole time and I didn’t see anyone go by. You must have been having a dream or something. Here, let me get you tucked in.”

“But …”

“Shhh, now, you need to rest,” he said. “Get some sleep before they wake you at the crack of dawn for breakfast.”

The nurse gave her a patronizing smile before departing. “You have a good night, now.”

Sunday

Twenty-Seven

Andrew

I lay awake much of the night, rolling over and looking at the digital clock on the bedside table: 1:05, then 2:17, then 3:01, and so on until slivers of sunlight started piercing through the blinds. I kept thinking about something Greg had said to me yesterday.

He’d been talking about that time he’d found me drunk, more down and out than I’d ever been before.

“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.”

It’s all my fault.

It was pretty clear what Greg had read into those comments. I had no memory of making them, but then again, there was a lot from that time, and that day in particular, that I don’t remember very well.

I supposed it was possible I might have said those words. But they didn’t have to mean what Greg clearly believed they meant.

I might have tried to make that point with him, but that was when Detective Hardy had pulled up in front of the house. I might have told Greg that, yeah, maybe it was my fault. If Brie vanished because I’d betrayed her, I could have argued, then, yeah, that was on me.

But to interpret what I’d said to him in a drunken stupor as a confession was a leap. As I lay in bed I wondered whether I should phone and tell him that.

Then again, maybe I should call and thank him.

“Never told that detective.”

I was in debt to him for that. For sure, there was only one way Detective Hardy would have read that comment.

Speaking of her, I was also rolling around in my head something she’d said to me after I’d ended my conversation with Greg. Her assertion that I hadn’t done enough nosing about on my own to find Brie, that I never hired some private investigator to accomplish what the police could not, really rankled.

Detective Hardy had no idea how I responded to Brie’s disappearance. I supposed she wanted me to become some sort of amateur detective. The fact was that I was under so much scrutiny at the time, I could hardly go into a Dunkin’ Donuts for a coffee without being watched by the police or some local TV news crew.

Well, if that was Hardy’s expectation of me, maybe it was better late than never. Now that she was looking into the possibility that Brie was alive, I was ready to start asking a few questions on my own, and not just for appearances’ sake. My goal wasn’t to make Detective Hardy proud of me. I wanted to find out what the hell was going on.

But I had to be careful how I went about it.

I had a new life with Jayne. A good life. And now we were going to have a child together. I loved her. Jayne might view any steps I took where Brie was concerned as wanting to get back together with her.

If she was actually alive.

I appreciated her concern. She had to be thinking that if Brie was back, presumably our marriage would still be valid. Brie had not been gone long enough to be declared legally dead and I’d made no petitions to have such a declaration made.

Maybe it was time, discreetly, to go back to where this all began. Make the rounds. Talk to people I believed Detective Hardy should have paid more attention to. I’d often wondered why she hadn’t had the exterminator higher on her list of suspects.

Charlie Underwood.