I search the firelit contours of Henry’s face. I thoroughly vet him. I think about our time at the lake when we were younger; only a few months before, Henry’s earthly axis had shifted. I had chalked it up to more quotidian change. Graduating college. Living together in all but isolation. Not knowing what we were going to do with our lives and how we would make it work between us. Henry had always been someone with control issues, but they had kicked up during our time here and turned our relationship untenable. What he has told me has made sense of things. It has a ring of truth to it. I’ve always wondered if that’s the phrase because it’s like searching for a ringing phone in a strange house with a long corridor of seemingly endless rooms. You get closer, the ringing gets louder. The caller is persistent, the message urgent—they will keep trying until you pick up. I am nearer to an answer; that much I am sure is true.
Henry clears his throat roughly. “After we learned he had died,” he says, “Campbell made this comment.”
I tense, knowing it will be bad.
“?‘Two birds, one stone.’?”
My insides slop around my stomach. “Because I would come back for the funeral?”
“He asked you to speak, for added insurance.” Henry fingers a loose thread in the faded needlework on a throw pillow. Wraps it around his finger as many times as it will go, cutting off circulation and turning the top of his finger purple with trapped blood. “That night that I apologized to you. You looked so surprised. Disappointed almost. Like you expected more of a challenge. But I needed a reason to leave while your hotel room was unoccupied. Campbell wanted to drug you right there, but I thought we could sort this out without you getting hurt. My hope was that I’d get into your room, find your laptop, just, make sure you hadn’t readit and recognized anything and then delete the thing and you’d at least be one less person we had to worry about.”
The scuff marks at the base of my hotel room door. “You actually got in,” I say, astounded.
Henry says, somewhat wryly, “Not that it mattered. You were locked out of your account.” He presses the top of his finger, the one he has coiled in the pillow’s thread. It must be numb by now. It must be dead. “You keep telling me you’ve changed, but.”
“Some things still feel too hard for me to figure out,” I concede. Again I test my braided black restraints, with more curiosity than fight. They have a sharp, plasticky feel to them, like those clear heels that briefly came back into style and made my legs look a million miles long in red carpet photos. “You spoke to someone,” I remember, “the day you came to my hotel room. You said to come back later. I thought it was maybe a hotel employee.”
“Campbell,” Henry says.
“But why come back later? He must have helped you get me to the car.”
“Because he was on a very short fuse. I did not want him knowing yet that I could not access your account, that I didn’t know what you knew. He was panicked. I was panicked. I just said, okay. I’ll bring you here. I’ll figure it out. Every day, I went to shore, hoping, praying that would be the day I could recover your account. When I came back and found the window popped out, I was terrified for you, Faye. Campbell was coming undone.” He snaps the loose thread free of the pillow and I watch, with immense satisfaction, as his finger returns to its normal size and fleshy color. When I look up, I find Henry’s eyes fastened on mine. “For the record, Faye, I carried you out to the car alone. I told Campbell I didn’t need his help, because I did not want him laying a finger on you. He kept saying it would take two people and I said will you look at her?”
Jesus, you’re light, Campbell had said to me before we said goodbye at the dock. He had picked me up. He hadweighedme.
A shudder jerks my shoulders and moves to tingle the top of my scalp. I am thinking about speaking to Campbell outside the church, the way he held my bag for me and how warm that moment felt, and all the while he must have been looking at me as an impediment to blast right through. “What’s going to happen when Campbell doesn’t come home?”
“Corrine isn’t expecting him until Monday. When that doesn’t happen, I assume she will start calling around, and when no one knows where he is, they will look for him. What they find…” Henry takes a deep breath, as though envisioning their grisly discovery. “It will look like an accident.”
“Emmaknowswe’re here,” I remind him angrily. “Isn’t she going to wonder why you told her he was okay when he wasdead? What if she goes to the police?”
“She won’t.”
“How do you know?”
“Because tomorrow morning, you are going to talk to her.”
I stare at Henry, agog. “About?”
“Her future. How talented she is. How much you would like to help her, but you are going to need her to keep quiet about some things.”
I am speechless a moment. Then I hit each note in an impeccable demonstration of a guffaw—high, and higher still. “Henry,” I say. “You’ve lost it if you think I’m doing that. You need to call the police. This has gone too far to try to cover up.”
Henry does not budge. “That isn’t an option.”
“Campbell isdead. Corrine is going to push for answers when he doesn’t come home. The longer you wait, the worse things are going to get. And when Emma learns you lied about where Campbell wentthat night, don’t you think she will go to the police herself? And tell them not just about this, but Sarah too?”
“If Emma planned on going to the police,” Henry counters, “she would have done it already. It’s too late now. She had information about a crime and she used it to punish the married man she was having an affair with. She’s too involved. She’sguilty.”
I lift my chin with defiance. “Well, I am not. And the second I can, I’m going to the police.”
Henry stares at me with especially cold eyes.
“Please,” I scoff. “If you were going to kill me, you’d have done it already.”
“I don’t want to kill you, Faye.”
“Then what do youwant?”