Page 80 of Take Your Breath Away

“Wait for your mother.”

He considered the possibilities. If Brie Mason really was alive, she’d either survived and dug herself out, or he’d killed someone else by mistake. There had to be a way to nail this down. He would need to toss a shovel into the truck and go for a drive.

And take someone along with him. Someone who might be able identify what was in that grave after all these years, if there was even anything there at all.

Maybe the client.

Maybe somebody else.

Matt was feeling something unfamiliar. He was feeling scared. And he would do whatever was necessary to make that feeling go away.

Thirty-One

Andrew

Brie had confessed to me about Norman.

I believed her when she said it had just been one time. I don’t think you can call having sex a single time with someone other than your spouse an affair. A mistake, sure. A betrayal, no doubt about it. An error in judgment, without question. But an affair? I wouldn’t say that. My transgression with Natalie Simmons fell into that category. And it also qualified as a mistake, a betrayal, and an error in judgment.

I would say, however, that to sleep with your brother-in-law, even once, is kind of fucked up.

What Brie did betrayed not only me, but her sister, Isabel, as well. Not that there wasn’t plenty of blame to go around. That son of a bitch Norman was at fault here, too.

I didn’t take it well.

Amazingly, I didn’t have to pry it out of her. But Brie, wracked with guilt, felt the need to unburden herself. Maybe she thought it was going to come out at some point anyway, and wanted to get ahead of it.

“I can only explain it one way,” she said. “Pity.”

“Pity?” I said.

She told me how it happened. Brie, while no accountant, had a head for figures and was a whiz at doing tax returns. She not only did ours, but she volunteered to do them for Albert and Dierdre, and Isabel and Norman. Brie always refused payment, no matter how much they insisted, but she—and by that, I mean we—were rewarded with numerous bottles of very drinkable, if not terribly expensive, wine.

Brie headed over to Isabel and Norman’s one evening to sit down at the kitchen table and, armed with a laptop and the most up-to-date tax software, proceeded to figure out their returns. Isabel was heading out for the evening with the kids to some school function, leaving Brie alone with Norman.

She had several questions for him, and he had gone searching for various forms and receipts that he and Isabel kept in a shoebox, then sat down at the table next to her, trying to find the information she needed.

Norman asked if Brie would like a beer, and she said yes. He decided to have one, too. There were, I guess, a couple more each after that.

At one point, Brie said she needed a break from staring at the computer, and asked Norman something innocent, along the lines of, “So how’s things?”

And Norman said, “How is it you turned out like this?”

“Turned out like what?”

“Nice,” he said.

“I like doing people’s taxes,” she said. “You’re actually doing me a favor. I love this stuff.”

“I don’t mean with the taxes,” Norman said. “I mean, how is it you turned out so nice, and your sister didn’t?”

Norman, I should point out, was a handsome-enough-looking guy, with a dry wit, and in his youth had hoped to be a filmmaker. But real life has a way of crushing creative ambition, and Norman ended up running a Firestone franchise, where the closest he got to being a filmmaker was when he made short video spots for his website advertising a sale on snow tires. When he and Isabel started dating, Brie had told me, she wasn’t quite the person she would later become. Negative, sure, but she had not yet perfected her gold-medal-worthy nitpicking skills.

Thing is, to cut her some slack, Isabel had abandoned her dreams just as Norman had. She had wanted to become a lawyer—she’d always been a fan of legal dramas; as a kid she’d watch old episodes of L.A. Law and Matlock and even the old black-and-white Perry Mason series—but had neither the resources for law school, nor marks high enough to be admitted. In my more generous moments, I felt this had a lot to do with Isabel’s unhappiness. Not that she ever confided in me, confessed her discontent, but I don’t think one could be the way she was without being disappointed with herself. However, her skills at working the system to hound me in the years after Brie’s disappearance were evidence she might have had the chops to pursue a career in the law.

But back to the night in question.

Brie tried, at first, to apologize to Norman for her sister, to argue that ultimately she meant well. That what Norman saw as haranguing was Isabel trying to make their life better.