Chapter 4
He came into the room trying to be brave and failed immediately.
“Mom.”
Lauren opened both arms.
Noah climbed onto the bed carefully, then stopped halfway as though afraid of hurting her.
She pulled him the rest of the distance.
“I heard you,” he said into her shoulder.
“I know.”
“I got Dad.”
“I know, baby.”
“He didn’t believe me first.”
Lauren looked at Ethan over Noah’s head.
Ethan did not defend himself.
“Then he did,” Noah added.
Lauren closed her eyes.
“Good.”
The police interview began later that afternoon and stopped twice because Lauren became exhausted.
Ethan was not allowed to sit in for all of it. He waited in the corridor with Noah and discovered that hospitals were full of people eating vending-machine crackers during the worst days of their lives.
A detective named Maya Reynolds eventually asked him to step into a consultation room.
She wore a navy blazer over a pale shirt and carried a legal pad with so many notes that Ethan hated it immediately. His wife’s disappearance had become handwriting.
“Mrs. Blake gave us a preliminary account,” Reynolds said. “I need to ask you about the days before she disappeared.”
“She disappeared Monday night.”
“Yes.”
“I was told she died Monday night.”
“I understand.”
“No. I mean I need to start saying it correctly.”
Reynolds watched him for a moment.
“Monday night she disappeared.”
“Okay.”
Ethan rubbed his hands together.
“We argued.”
“About what?”
“Us.”
“More specifically?”
He stared at the table.
Lauren had been asking him for months to stop treating their marriage like a badly managed project. Ethan worked in commercial construction. He scheduled delays, budgeted overruns, wrote follow-up emails, and believed most problems became manageable when converted into lists.
Lauren hated lists when she was angry.
Especially numbered ones.
They had fought Sunday evening because Ethan had missed Noah’s school science presentation after promising he would attend. A subcontractor had caused a water leak at a job site. Ethan stayed.
Lauren said the leak was always going to win.
He told her that was unfair.
She told him it was accurate.
Monday morning, Ethan packed two shirts and slept at a hotel near work because he needed, in his words, “forty-eight hours without fighting.”
It sounded much worse when spoken to a detective.
“Did she call you Monday night?” Reynolds asked.
Ethan looked at his hands.
“Yes.”
“How many times?”
“Three.”
“Did you answer?”
“No.”
“Why?”
“I was angry.”
“What time?”
“The last one was maybe eleven-fifteen.”
Reynolds checked something in her notes.
“Eleven thirteen.”
Ethan looked up.
“You have her phone?”
“We recovered a phone from the basement.”
He swallowed.
“There was a voicemail?”
“She attempted to leave one. It lasts six seconds. Mostly noise.”
He nodded.
Reynolds leaned back slightly.
“Mr. Blake, your wife told us she discovered something involving her sister on Monday afternoon.”
“What?”
“She’s not ready to give us the full account yet. Some of what she remembers is fragmented.”
“Claire did this because Lauren discovered something?”
“That is one possibility we’re investigating.”
“What was in the coffin?”
Reynolds paused.
“I was going to get to that.”
“Please get to it now.”
“There was a body.”
Ethan gripped the edge of the table.
“Who?”
“We don’t know yet.”
He stared at her.
“You buried some other woman in my wife’s coffin?”
“We did not bury anyone.”
“You know what I mean.”
“Yes.”
Reynolds let the anger pass.
“The body had paperwork identifying her as Lauren Blake. That paperwork is now being examined. The funeral home has been secured. We’re speaking with employees.”
Ethan thought of the white lilies.
He had chosen none of them.
Claire had.
“Did Claire kill that woman?”
“We don’t know.”
“Is Claire arrested?”
“She is in custody.”
“For what?”
“At the moment, I’m not going to discuss charging decisions with you.”
Ethan stood.
Reynolds did not tell him to sit.
He went to the door, then stopped.
“There’s something else.”
She waited.
“Claire told me she identified Lauren.”
“Yes.”
“She said the body was too badly injured for me to see.”
Reynolds’s expression remained neutral.
“She said there’d been an accident.”
“Yes.”
“She told me a deputy had found Lauren’s wallet in the car.”
“We’re checking every part of what you were told against original records.”
Ethan turned around.
“Was there even an accident?”
“There was.”
That somehow made it worse.
“Where?”
“County Road Twelve, near Westbridge.”
He knew it. Twenty miles north.
“A vehicle burned after leaving the road. A woman died.”
“And somebody decided she was Lauren.”
“A driver’s license belonging to your wife was recovered near the remains.”
“Lauren had her license in the basement?”
“Her wallet has not been located there.”
Ethan sat again.
The shape of the lie began to emerge, but every edge created another question.
“Did Claire cause the accident?”
“We don’t know yet.”
“Did Lauren?”
“No.”
The answer came quickly.
“She says Claire picked her up Monday evening. They drove north to talk privately. Lauren remembers an argument. She remembers Claire pulling onto a gravel turnout. After that, her memory is incomplete. She may have been drugged.”
Ethan shut his eyes.
“She called me.”
“Yes.”
“And I didn’t answer.”
Reynolds said nothing.
He opened his eyes.
“Please don’t tell me not to blame myself.”
“I wasn’t going to.”
“Everybody keeps doing that.”
“I don’t think telling you how to feel is useful.”
For the first time all day, Ethan liked someone.
Reynolds closed the legal pad.
“What may be useful is this: your failure to answer three calls did not lock your wife in a basement. We still need to understand what happened, and your choices may matter to your relationship. But they are not interchangeable with someone else’s actions.”
He stared at the table.
That was not absolution.
It was better.
May you like
Lauren remained overnight.
Noah refused to leave the hospital until she promised he could sleep on a chair beside her bed. The nurse said no. Lauren promised he could sleep at Uncle Ben’s house and come back before breakfast. Noah negotiated down to six-thirty.
