Page 65 of The Wives of Hawthorne Lane

Georgina

Hawthorne Lane

Georgina’s hands shake nervously in her lap, and she clasps them together, willing herself still.

She’s been at the police station for ages.

Or at least she thinks she has. Time seems to follow a different set of rules here; minutes languish into hours.

Surely it can’t be much longer…can it? Georgina doesn’t have the faintest clue how long it takes to conduct a search of a crime scene (her house, a crime scene !), but she’s certain they’ll find what they’re looking for. She hadn’t exactly made it difficult.

That is, of course, unless Colin has already woken up and destroyed all the evidence she’d carefully laid out like breadcrumbs before the police arrived.

The idea makes her dizzy. If he figures out what she’s done…

Georgina shakes off the thought. No. That won’t happen.

She’s almost certain that Colin took one of his sleeping pills last night.

She’d seen the familiar orange bottle on his nightstand when she crept in with his jacket, stained red with Dean’s blood, and the Maglite that had been used to kill him.

It would explain why Colin fell asleep so quickly after their altercation and why he stayed asleep as Georgina used the discarded T-shirt he’d been wearing earlier that day to wipe away Christina’s fingerprints on the handle of the flashlight, then gently touched Colin’s fingers into the thick, congealing blood.

He didn’t even wake as he turned over in his sleep, smearing streaks of blood on their starched white sheets.

It would explain why he hadn’t heard her sneak into the garage to drop the bloodied jacket and the offending flashlight onto the concrete floor, and it would explain why he’d still been asleep when she got in the car and headed out before dawn to file her police report, an attempt to drive the final nail into his coffin.

What could possibly be taking so long? Georgina looks up at the one-way mirror, startled again by her own reflection, the swelling at her cheekbone blooming into a mottled tangle of bruises, her hair unbrushed and wild.

She runs her fingers through the knotted locks.

She’s going to cut it, she decides. As soon as it’s appropriate, given the circumstances.

She imagines walking out of the salon, how light and free she’ll feel, the autumn breeze on her neck.

Then she remembers herself, remembers that the mirror isn’t actually just a mirror but a window.

She wonders if Detective Olsen is watching her on the other side of the glass, studying her movements the way they always do on television.

Georgina drops her hand and straightens her posture, sitting taller in her chair, just in case.

She’d found it hard to get a read on Detective Olsen during her interview.

He’d listened intently as she spoke, jotted down notes here and there, but mostly he’d watched her with the sort of analytical detachment one might expect of a therapist. It made Georgina feel uneasy.

Was it possible that Detective Olsen could see right through her?

Had he somehow pieced together what she’d done?

The plan wasn’t perfect. Far from it. Everyone involved—Georgina, Libby, Audrey, and even Christina—had a motive to lie, obvious reasons for wanting Colin to take the fall for what happened to Dean.

But there was nothing that could be done about that.

Audrey couldn’t hide the evidence of her affair with Colin any more than Georgina could hide the abuse she’d suffered at his hands, and there had been dozens of witnesses who saw Colin assaulting Libby’s son.

For that reason, they’d had to stick as close to the truth as possible in giving their statements, bending it only where they needed to in order to make the pieces of the new narrative fit. She just has to hope that it’s enough.

It had been difficult to convince Christina to go along with the story Georgina crafted at first. She was hysterical when Georgina collected her from Libby’s house on her way to the police station, when she’d had to tell her that her father had gone out looking for the man who’d attacked her and Georgina feared he’d taken matters into his own hands.

It took a rather long time to get Christina to understand that she needed to leave the part about the flashlight out of her statement to the police—it would only complicate things and she couldn’t throw away her future over something her father had done; that wasn’t what any of them wanted for her.

The sound of a door slamming in the distance pulls Georgina’s attention.

Is Detective Olsen finally coming back with news?

She stands, her metal chair scraping along the linoleum floor as it’s pushed back from the table, and walks to the closed interview room door.

She wonders if she’s allowed to open it.

She came here voluntarily; she should be able to come and go as she pleases, shouldn’t she?

And yet she hesitates, her hand on the knob, until she hears Colin’s venomous, muffled voice seeping through the door.

He’s angry, Georgina can tell, screaming that there’s been a mistake.

She cracks open the door to the interview room, peers cautiously into the hallway of the police station. She can hear Colin yelling more loudly now, bellowing with indignation.

“I don’t need a lawyer, I am a fucking lawyer, and I’m telling you that I have no idea what you’re talking about! I didn’t do anything!”

“Please calm down, sir,” a male officer says gruffly as he helps escort Colin through the station, his hands pinned behind his back with a pair of silver cuffs.

Colin tries to pull free, but the pair of officers flanking his sides tighten their grips on his arms. “You’re making a big mistake,” Colin spits. “I’ll sue this whole fucking department. You’ll see!”

“I’m sure you will, sir,” the same officer replies drolly.

Colin looks around, his cold blue eyes wild with alarm, and then he sees her. His eyes meet Georgina’s and he tries to dart toward her. “I was home all night last night, asleep in bed! Just ask my wife, she’ll tell you!”

“We already have,” Detective Olsen says, stepping out of one of the other interview rooms so that he’s face-to-face with Colin. “And it turns out she had a lot to say.”

At first Colin seems confused; his lips move but no sound comes out of his mouth.

And then realization dawns on him—Georgina can see it like the sun cresting over the horizon.

She watches the transformation she’s seen so many times before, Colin’s loosely held pretense of humanity slipping away from him, giving way to a primal rage.

“You!” he shouts. “You fucking bitch! What have you done?”

Georgina pushes the door to the interview room fully open now and stands tall, her head held defiantly high. “All I did was tell the truth. Something I should have done a long time ago.”

“I’ll kill you!” Colin spits, struggling against the officers keeping him at bay. He reminds Georgina of a rabid dog yanking uselessly at the end of its chain. “I’ll fucking kill you!”

“I think we’ve heard enough,” Detective Olsen remarks coolly. He nods to the uniformed officers, who shove Colin, still spitting and raving, forward. “Are you all right, ma’am?” Olsen asks, turning his attention to Georgina.

Georgina’s eyes track her husband as he’s dragged through the police station. “I will be.”