27
NOW
After seeing the detective out, Aimee retreats to her kitchen and begins to load the breakfast dishes into the dishwasher. She tries to process what Salazar told her. There can be no mistaking his meaning: he thinks that Scott is involved in Anton’s death. And now that Scott is missing, it’s becoming harder for her to maintain her faith in him. She wants to. She wants to give him the benefit of the doubt, to believe everything can be explained away, but it’s nearly impossible to keep her thoughts from racing to the worst possible conclusion.
That Scott has fled.
Jittery and distracted, she goes upstairs to strip the beds. She keeps Tuesday mornings free for laundry and maintenance of her business website—updating seasonal sales, spotlighting different plants each week. This week she’ll put up a picture of a New York ironweed, a native plant with purple flowers that bloom in early fall and can grow as tall as seven feet. She’ll reach out to her dad and see how many ironweeds he has in stock, because if she puts it on her website, people will ask for it. It always works like that—people like to buy plants when they are in bloom.
Life has to go on, even if Scott isn’t here. She can’t just sit here in the house and wait for something to happen. She’s always been a doer. She made it through the grief of losing her mother by throwing herself into activity. She played softball and soccer and worked at her dad’s nursery. Later, in college, whenever she felt the darkness rise in her, she would go to the gym or for a run. She needs to be physically exhausted by the end of the dayto be able to sleep. Exercise is her antidepressant and sleep aid rolled into one.
In the boys’ room, she quickly strips the sheets. Finding several socks and shorts on the floor, she tosses them into a laundry basket. As she remakes the beds, she wonders if she should have said something to Salazar about the one hundred thousand dollars. She didn’t want to make it look like Scott took the money and ran—Aimee is sure this can’t be what happened. He was going to tell her everything last night; he was going to explain it all. And she still believes him.
Even if he never came home.
The only possible answer is that hecan’tget home. But why that would be eludes her. He could be injured. Perhaps his car crashed and he’s on the side of the road, but that seems far-fetched. They don’t live in a rural area. The road he would have driven on to get to Cathy’s was well-traveled and someone would have spotted his car had it crashed. That leaves the disturbing possibility that someone is keeping him from coming home.
But who? It has to be connected to the money. Maybe Scott had gotten mixed up with the wrong people. She knows how hard it can be to run your own business. Not just from her personal experience, but from watching her dad. There was a late, hard freeze her sophomore year in college, stunting and killing many of the plants the nursery grew. He couldn’t meet buyer expectations and had to take out a second mortgage on the house to keep the business going. He told her all of this years later, when she was going through a rough patch and he offered her a loan. He said that when his business almost failed, he had been tempted to borrow money from moneylenders.People who don’t play around if you can’t pay them back. Don’t ever do that. Come to me.It was the most honest and most vulnerable thing he ever told her.
Noa’s room is more chaotic, even though she’s older andeveryone says that girls are neater. Not in Noa’s case. Clothes are strewn everywhere, and Noa has pulled the pillowcase off her pillow and used it to store My Little Pony figurines. As Aimee straightens up, she wonders if Scott might have become mixed up with shady people. Was he paying someone back, someone he had borrowed money from? She knew how much was riding on this software launch. He took a buyout from a biotech company a few years back, and instead of looking for new employment, he put together a team to pursue this dream. Was some of that funding less than legit? No, it’s impossible. She has ridden with Scott when they drove all the way back to the grocery store to pay for the case of La Croix that they had forgotten to pay for. He is honest to a fault, a rule follower.
She’s tucking a fresh sheet into Noa’s mattress when she spots something under the bed. It’s a shoebox, and her stomach clenches at the jangling noise it makes as she drags it out. She pulls off the lid and is saddened but not surprised to see a collection of items she knows don’t belong to Noa.
“Damn.” She picks up a small jade heart, trying to remember where she might have seen it, and she realizes it was in a bowl in Cathy’s kitchen with several other stone hearts. She carries the shoebox into her bedroom. She’ll talk to Noa about it later, try to establish where everything came from and how to get it all back to the rightful owners. Suddenly, exhaustion hits her. She sits on the edge of her bed and bursts into tears. It’s all too much, worrying about Scott, about Noa, trying to keep it together when she has no idea what’s going on. After letting herself really cry for several minutes, she goes into the bathroom to wash her face.
In the mirror she stares at the puffy bags beneath her eyes and scowls. “You can handle this,” she tells herself. She won’t be a victim. She won’t sit around here feeling sorry for herself.
Aimee heads down to the mudroom and digs through the pockets of the jacket she was wearing on Sunday when she followed Scott to the coffee shop. She finds Jon Block’s card and dials his number.
“This is Aimee Stern, Scott Crowder’s wife,” she says when he answers with a gruff hello. “We met at Tatte the other day.”
“Listen,” he says tersely. “Like I told you before, I really shouldn’t be talking to—”
“Wait, don’t hang up. Scott is missing; he didn’t come home last night.” The words come rushing out. “I need your help.”
He exhales loudly. “Fine. I’m only going to be in my office for another twenty minutes. If you make it here in time, great. If not…” He doesn’t finish the sentence.
“I’ll make it.”
Aimee rushes out the door, and as soon as she does, she sees Lisa come out of her house and start walking over. She must have been watching at the window, waiting for Aimee to leave.
“Aimee!” Lisa calls and waves. “Hold on.”
“Not now,” Aimee yells back as she climbs into her truck. She guns it, driving past a stunned Lisa and almost hitting a marked police car that is turning onto their street. She watches in her rearview mirror as it pulls up between her and Gwen’s houses. A lump forms in her throat. What could it be doing there? She wonders if they are coming to her house with news about Scott, or if they are going to Gwen’s. At the next light, she pauses when it turns green, debating whether she should go back to see. Instead, she calls Lisa.
“Hey, sorry I ran off like that,” she says by way of a greeting.
“That’s okay. Is everything all right?”
“Not exactly. Scott didn’t come home last night. He’s missing.”
“Missing? Oh my gosh, Aimee. That’s terrible. Did you check the hospitals?”
“Yes, several times. But I had to run out to meet someone, and as I was leaving I saw a police car pull onto our block. Can youdo me a favor and see if they are going to my house? I thought maybe they had some news and were coming to tell me.”
“You got it. I am walking out the door now.” Aimee hears the creak of the door opening and then a screen door slam shut. “Let’s see. Nope, they’re not at your house. There are two officers on Gwen’s front stoop.”
Aimee lets out a deep breath. The worst has not come to pass. No one has come to her house to tell her they’ve found Scott somewhere hurt, or dead.