The Stranger
Page 76

“Tell me the rest of it,” Adam said.
“You know the rest of it, don’t you? After you confronted her about faking the pregnancy, Corinne was furious. She’d had enough. She was going to tell what I’d done. So I told her, okay, fair enough, I’ll come forward. I said, let’s just meet at lunchtime and go over it, so we’re on the same page. She was reluctant, but hey, I can be persuasive.”
The shovel dug into the earth again. Then again.
“Where did you meet?” Adam asked.
Tripp tossed the dirt to the side. “Your place. I went in through the garage. Corinne came out and met me. She didn’t want me in the actual house, you know? Like it was a place only for her family.”
“So what did you do?”
“What do you think I did?”
Tripp looked down and smiled at the ground. Then he stepped back so Adam could see.
“I shot her.”
Adam looked past him and down to the ground. His heart crumbled into dust. There, lying in the dirt, was Corinne.
“Oh no. . . .”
His legs gave way. Adam dropped next to Corinne and started brushing the dirt off her face. “Oh no. . . .” Her eyes were closed, and she was still so damn beautiful. “No . . . Corinne . . . Oh God, please . . .”
He lost it then. He placed his cheek against her cold, lifeless one and sobbed.
A small dim part of him thought about Tripp, about him still holding the shovel and maybe attacking him. Adam looked up, gun ready.
But Tripp hadn’t moved.
He stood there with a small smile on his face.
“Are you ready to go now, Adam?”
“What?”
“Are you ready to go home?”
“What the hell are you talking about?”
“It’s like I promised back at the office. You know the truth now. It’s over. We need to bury her again.”
Adam’s head started spinning again. “Are you out of your mind?”
“No, my friend, but perhaps you are.”
“What the hell are you talking about?”
“I’m sorry about killing her. I really am. But I saw no other way out. Seriously. Like I said, we kill for our own, right? Your wife was threatening my family. What would you have done?”
“I wouldn’t have stolen the money.”
“It’s done, Adam.” His voice was like a steel gate slamming shut. “Now we both need to move on.”
“You’re insane.”
“And you haven’t thought this through.” The smile came back to his lips. “The lacrosse books are a mess. No one will ever be able to untangle them. So what will the police know? You found out Corinne tricked you by faking a pregnancy. You two had a huge fight about it. The next day, she was shot in your garage. I cleaned up the blood a bit, but so what? The police will find traces of it. I used the cleaner under your sink. I threw out the bloody rags in your garbage can. Are you starting to see, Adam?”
He looked back down at Corinne’s beautiful face.
“I put her body in the trunk of her own car. The shovel in my hand—doesn’t it look familiar? It should. I took it from your garage.”
Adam just stared down at his beautiful wife.
“And if that’s not enough, the security cameras in my office corridor will show you forcing me into my car with a gun. If any of my fibers or DNA are found on the body now, well, you forced me to dig her up. You killed her, you buried her here, you parked her car near an airport, but you stayed away from an actual airport lot because everyone knows they have a ton of security cameras. Then you bought time by sending yourself a text about her running off. Then, to confuse matters more, you probably, oh I don’t know, tossed her cell phone in the back of a delivery truck at, say, a Best Buy store. If anyone searched for it, they’d think she was driving somewhere, at least as long as the battery lasted. That would cause more confusion.”
Adam just shook his head. “They’re never going to buy that.”
“Sure they will. And if not, let’s be honest. You’re the husband. It’s a lot more logical than claiming I killed her, don’t you think?”
Adam turned back to his wife. Her lips were purple. Corinne didn’t look peaceful in death. She looked lost and scared and alone. He stroked her face with his hand. In one way, Tripp Evans was right. It was over, no matter what happened now. Corinne was dead. His life partner had been taken away from him forever. His sons, Ryan and Thomas, would never be the same. His boys—no, her boys—would never know the comfort and love of their mother again.
“What’s done is done, Adam. It’s détente now. Don’t make something bad even worse.”
And then Adam saw one more thing that broke his heart all over again.
Her earlobes.
Her earlobes . . . they were empty. He flashed back to that Forty-Seventh Street jewelry store, the Chinese restaurant, the waiter delivering them on the plate, the smile on her face, the way Corinne carefully took them off and left them on the night table before going to bed.
Tripp hadn’t just killed her. He had stolen the diamond studs off her dead body.
“And one more thing,” Tripp said.
Adam looked up at him.
“If you ever go near my family or threaten them,” he said, “well, I’ve already shown you what I will do.”
“Yes, you have.”
And then Adam lifted the gun, aimed it at the center of Tripp’s chest, and squeezed the trigger three times.
Chapter 56
SIX MONTHS LATER
The lacrosse game took place in the optimistically dubbed SuperDome, an air-inflated sports facility made from some sort of pliable material. Thomas was playing in an indoor league for the winter season. Ryan had come along too. He half watched his brother, half played catch in the corner with a couple of other kids. Ryan also kept looking over at his father. He did that a lot now, looked for his father, as though Adam might suddenly vanish into thin air. Adam got it, of course. He tried to reassure him, but what could he really say?
He didn’t want to lie to the boys. But he wanted them to feel happy and safe.
Every parent has to deal with that balance. That hadn’t changed with Corinne’s death, but maybe you learn that happiness based on untruths is, at best, fleeting.
Adam watched as Johanna Griffin pushed through the glass door. She came across the back of the goal and stood alongside him facing the field.
“Thomas is number eleven, right?”
“Right,” Adam said.