Clara looked once more toward Paul’s house, which remained still. So much had happened this week that she’d completely forgotten Hallie’s idea for the paper. But this was the last thing she wanted to think about right now.
“I’ve decided Monday’s the big day,” Hallie announced. “Sunday’s already covered. But the start of the week, that’s when people will be most receptacle.”
“Receptive,” Clara said automatically.
“See? This is why I need an editorial adviser!”
Thomas dragged his feet in the dirt to slow the swing. “Is it snack time?”
Clara led the kids inside and let Thomas plant himself in front of a cartoon as she doled out tubes of frozen strawberry yogurt. It was nothing. It was probably nothing. Detective Bryant was just trying to keep Paul on his toes, and to dot his i’s and cross his t’s. That didn’t mean he really suspected that the window was evidence of something. Only that he was good at his job.
Or not so good at it. She thought of his own parting words: Getting sloppy … won’t happen again. He’d only been chiding Paul—right?
Hallie hopped onto a counter stool. “I’ve got real front-page breaking news. Like, when people used to yell, ‘Extra, extra, read all about it’? They might start doing that again.”
Clara swallowed a smile and let herself relax a little. She had to admit, the kid had enthusiasm on her side. Maybe Hallie would be a welcome distraction after all. “What’s the scoop?”
“The real inside story behind the police investigation next door!” Hallie squealed.
Clara froze. “Hallie,” she said carefully, “breaking news is something that hasn’t been reported yet. You should probably—”
“But this hasn’t been reported yet!” She flipped her notebook open on the counter between them. In it was a not-bad pencil sketch of a windowpane with flowers on the sill. Fragments of notes were scribbled in the margins, underlined and circled with question marks that looked like little curly q’s. “Internet search?” “Harassment?” “Not a suspect?”
So much for a welcome distraction.
“What is this?” Clara asked uneasily.
“I was kind of hanging out in Kristin and Paul’s yard yesterday, when the police came back, and—”
“Wait a sec. You were ‘kind of hanging out’ in their yard?”
“Well, yeah. I was on a stakeout.”
“Hallie, reporters don’t go on stakeouts. That’s cops.”
“Whatever. I was just kind of lying low, but then the police showed up. And the window was open. And I got the whole thing on my phone!”
“You what?”
Hallie pulled a turquoise smartphone out of her denim jacket pocket and started swiping at the screen. “I found this amazing voice recorder app. You wouldn’t believe how well it picks stuff up.”
Before Clara could say another word, Hallie tapped the screen, and Detective Bryant’s distant but clear voice filled the room. “We did try those leads—nothing has panned out yet. But we have just a few more questions, if you don’t mind?”
“Of course,” Paul’s voice said. “Anything to help.”
Her mind racing, Clara motioned for Hallie to turn it off. She complied, grinning.
“Hallie, this is illegal. Recording police conversations without anyone’s knowledge—”
“But I was in a public place!”
“Wrong. You were on private property.”
Hallie stuck out her lip in a pout not unlike Maddie’s. “I could’ve been at the edge of your yard, and I would have heard it anyway! No one needs to know where I was.”
Clara shook her head. “No, I’m going to stop you right there. This is wrong. This isn’t how it’s done. Whatever is on that recording, you absolutely cannot use. For anything.”
“I think you might change your mind if you knew what was on it.” Hallie’s voice was a singsong, a taunt. Clara tried to let her brain catch up to her escalating heart rate. Of course she wouldn’t feel differently once she’d heard the recording, but she did desperately want to know what it said. Especially after what she’d just witnessed outside. First the questions about the fire pit, and now the window … What did the police think they were on to?
There was no telling what Hallie had heard or how she had taken it. If it was serious, and from the look on Hallie’s face she certainly seemed to think so, then the girl might need an adult to explain, to sort it out. Clara knew it was irresponsible to do anything other than delete the file, but wasn’t it equally irresponsible not to find out exactly what Hallie had heard, so she could help prevent her from jumping to wrong conclusions, or blowing things out of proportion?
Clara knew too well that witnessing something meant you felt involved, whether you were supposed to have seen it or not.
She knew she was rationalizing, but when Hallie tapped the screen again, she didn’t stop her.
There was a minute of small talk between Detectives Bryant and Marks and Paul, who offered coffee and invited them to sit. The screeching of chairs on the kitchen floor, the clearing of throats.
“So, Doctor—”
“Like I said, please just call me Paul.”
“Paul, we appreciate you letting us take your wife’s phone and the laptop. We were hoping to find some sign of where she’d gone—a route she’d looked up, maybe, or a flight she’d priced, or a hotel, a car rental—”
“And did you?”
“Nothing like that. But we did find a solid two hours of frenzied Internet searching from the very early hours of Sunday morning.”
“What was she searching for?”
Papers rustled as Detective Bryant began to read. “‘Domestic violence support.’ ‘Domestic violence assistance.’ ‘Domestic violence shelter, Dayton.’ ‘Domestic violence safe housing, Dayton.’ ‘Ending an abusive relationship.’ ‘Escaping an abuser.’”
Clara’s hand flew to her mouth before she could stop herself.
“I know, right?” Hallie said quietly, filling the stunned silence that had evidently fallen over Paul’s kitchen at that moment as well. “I had to look it up, but it means—”
Clara raised a finger, and Hallie fell silent.
It was Detective Marks’s voice that chimed in next. “Do you have any idea why she might have been searching for those kinds of resources, Doctor … Paul?”
“I really don’t. It must have been … well, this was after she got home from the girls’ night at our neighbor’s?”
“Correct. Not long after.”
“One of them must be in trouble. She must’ve been trying to see how she could help.”
“That’s one explanation,” Detective Marks said.
“You’re not suggesting I ever laid a finger on her? That’s ridiculous.”
“We’re not suggesting it, no,” Detective Bryant said quickly. “Would you say she knows these neighbor women very well? They’re close friends?”
“She’s closest to Clara Tiffin, next door.” Clara stiffened. “They’re pretty good friends, I guess—I don’t know if I’d say close. The rest, I don’t think she knows them all that well.”
“So it would be very caring of her to stay up until three A.M. frantically searching the Internet out of concern for one of them.”
“Maybe she was looking on behalf of someone else she knows. Someone at work, or the school … Maybe she couldn’t sleep. Maybe she got the idea to write a novel about a domestic violence survivor. How should I know? We’ve been separated for months.”
“Does your wife aspire to write fiction?”
“You tell me. You seem to know more about her than I do.”
“Well, her computer history is wiped mostly clean, which seems a bit odd.” Detective Bryant coughed. “Antioch was nice enough to let us have access to her work machine, and interestingly, it looks like most of her personal activity was done there. Personal emails, online shopping, the occasional guest blog post for the school … Can you think of a reason for that?”
“She was bored at work?”
“That’s one explanation,” Detective Marks repeated.
“Back when you were living here, did you do a lot of checking up on your wife’s Internet usage? Look at the history, see where she’d been, anything like that?”
“I might have happened to see it sometimes, but I wouldn’t say I checked up on her.”