Conversation flowed easily, and unlike a lot of the men I dated, he struck a nice balance between awkwardly quiet and excessively talkative. He laughed frequently and had a smile that reached his eyes, crinkling them at the corners. When he walked me back to my room at two in the morning, I was drunk and head over heels. When his mouth opened to mine, I knew I never wanted to kiss another man for the rest of my life. And when he invited me back to his deluxe suite, I never hesitated.
Later, I couldn’t remember the subject matter from the other two days of class. More than once, he stumbled over his words or lost his place in the lecture, not so coincidentally after we made eye contact. That told me I had the same effect on him that he had on me. We spent the remaining two nights after class together, and poor Sarah’s minication was mostly spent alone in a hotel room. She never complained.
The morning we left, I couldn’t find Greg to tell him goodbye, but Sarah and I spent the entire ride home analyzing my new love interest. I was giddy on hope, and with a little prompting, I looked up Greg’s number in the company directory and called his office the day after we got home.
Until recently, I couldn’t be sure that we’d gone a day without speaking in ten years.
Chapter 5
“I’m Detective Matt Reynolds.” The man stood on my porch, wearing a wrinkled button-down shirt and a pair of equally wrinkled khakis. He held his credentials with the badge out for me to see.
When I made no move to look, he shifted his weight from one foot to the other, and wordlessly, I opened the door.
He stepped over the threshold. “I’m from the Hunterdon County Missing Persons Unit. I wanted to stop by to follow up with a status update.”
What status update? Here’s the status: Greg isn’t home yet.
“Do you want something to drink?” I asked, turning to walk to the kitchen.
He followed me down the hallway. “Uh… no, thank you, Mrs. Barnes.”
I detoured into the living room. “Please, call me Claire.” I motioned for him to sit on the couch, while I sat in Greg’s easy chair.
He lowered himself onto the middle cushion. “I’m going to be the lead investigator, and I promise you we will do everything we can to find your husband. Right now, we have no reason to believe he’s dead. We queried all the morgues within a twenty-mile radius of Rochester for a John Doe matching his description. So far, there’s no one. I’m leaving this afternoon for Rochester to discuss some of the details of the case with the local authorities there. We’ve had phone conversations with personnel at the hotel and the airline, and we’ve confirmed what you told us earlier. We do believe he landed in Rochester and checked into his hotel, but we don’t think he ever stayed in his room. In addition, we can’t locate his luggage.”
He pulled a pen and a small notebook out of his shirt pocket. He clicked the pen once, twice, and seemed to be waiting for me. I nodded for him to continue.
“This is all we know right now. But I do have a few follow-up questions, if you feel up to it.”
“Yes, of course. Anything.” All the talking seemed superfluous, taking up precious time. I couldn’t understand how talking to me would help them find Greg. I wanted to push him out the door, out into the real world where the clues would be.
“Mrs. Barnes… Claire, I need to ask you some tough questions, regarding your marriage, your life, things that may feel very personal. I don’t believe you had anything to do with Greg’s disappearance, but you may be able to tell me something about who did. And you might not even know it yourself, so it’s very important that you don’t hold back on me. Do you understand?”
I nodded again, frustrated at his careful pace. “Yes.”
“I need to understand the state of your marriage.”
Even though he had warned me, I was surprised at the candid statement, the abruptness of it. I inhaled deeply and closed my eyes, thinking about how to put into words what I avoided thinking about. How did I explain? We were like ships passing in the night. He went about his day, I went about mine, and if our days overlapped and we connected, great. But in the past three months, more often than not, we hadn’t.
“Greg and I have a marriage. We have highs and lows, but we don’t fight regularly.” I paused, searching for words. “But we don’t really… talk regularly either.”
“Is this a recent development?”
“He was up late at night. Working, he said, and sometimes I would hear him on the phone. When I pressed him on it, he got frustrated, frequently telling me not to worry about it. I needed to understand him. He needed me to not need that.” I stopped, staring at my hands, which were clenched in my lap. I took a deep breath, consciously relaxing them. “I don’t even know if everything I’m saying is making sense.”
Matt smiled. He had a kind smile and soft green eyes. I could see why he had become a detective. I instinctively wanted to tell him everything about my life, and I was quite sure he took a lot of confessions. I would have bet even hardened criminals trusted him.