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Chapter 56
56
Despite having her attorney beside her as she enters the police station the next morning, Jenna is uncharacteristically nervous. She’s furious at Jake for betraying her. He’s nothing but a coward. At least she won’t have to pay him anything to keep him quiet. He has nothing to hold over her now; he’s told them everything he knows. Perhaps he will come to regret his decision when he can’t make his rent. That gives her some small satisfaction. Maybe it’s all for the best. It’s not like she really has anything to worry about.
They settle in the interview room, Jenna and her lawyer beside her on one side of the table, and Reyes and Barr on the other. Jenna composes herself while the introductions are going on for the tape, before the questions start.
Reyes begins. “Your boyfriend has sold you out.”
“He’s not my boyfriend anymore,” she says, with a small, tight smile.
“He says he wasn’t with you the night of the murders, that you asked him to lie for you,” the detective says.
She glances at her lawyer, and then looks back at Reyes. “That’s true. I did ask him to cover for me. But I didn’t kill my parents. I drove him to the train station after dinner, then went back to my place alone.”
“Why did you lie?”
“Why do you think? So you wouldn’t think it was me. Same reason my brother and sister lied.”
“You’re all going to be millionaires,” Reyes says.
“Exactly. We all knew we’d be suspects.”
“Jake told us about the argument you had with your father that night. I understand it was very heated. He told you he was planning to leave half of his wealth to his sister, Audrey.”
“We had an argument,” Jenna admits. “He might have said that. But my father always said things like that when he was angry. I didn’t take it seriously. It probably looked worse to Jake than it was.”
“Right now, you’re the only one we know for certain knew about your father’s intention.”
She shrugs. “I wouldn’t be so sure. If he really meant to do that, Mom must have told Catherine. She would have told her if she knew.”
“Why Catherine, particularly?”
“She told Catherine everything. She was the favorite. Our mother never told me and Dan anything.”
“Are you aware that your aunt Audrey has been poisoned?” Reyes asks.
“I heard. I wonder who she pissed off this time.”
“She’s fine, by the way,” Reyes says.
• • •ellen cutter is downtown running a few errands when she spots Janet Shewcuk on the sidewalk heading toward her. She’s walking with her head down and doesn’t see her. But Ellen recognizes her daughter’s friend from law school, the one who got a job at a fancy law firm in Aylesford when her daughter didn’t. She decides to give her a wide berth, keenly aware that it will soon be known far and wide that Rose has defrauded a client and broken the law. She’s about to veer around her when Janet happens to look up and stops dead, her face frozen as she recognizes Ellen. Ellen moves to go around her, but Janet reaches out and puts her hand on her arm. “Mrs. Cutter.”
She’s stuck now; she can’t pretend she doesn’t know her.
And then it gets worse. Janet looks at her, eyes filling up with tears, and whispers, “I’m so sorry.”
Ellen looks back at her in confusion. Does she already know what Rose has done? Has Rose told her? She doesn’t want her pity. Before she can wrench her arm away and walk on, Janet speaks again.
“I know Rose is in trouble, and it’s all my fault. I never should have told her she was in Fred Merton’s will.”
Ellen feels her knees start to buckle, but she has to hear it all.
• • •later that day, Reyes and Barr and the forensics team, armed with a search warrant, head to the small house Jenna Merton rents on the outskirts of Aylesford. It’s a rural property, a wood-frame house that needs painting. It’s out in the middle of nowhere. No immediate neighbors. No one to notice her come and go. She’s not surprised to see them.
Reyes isn’t sure what he was expecting—a mess inside with ashtrays and bongs and detritus from a dissolute artist’s life—but what he sees surprises him. Inside, the rooms are bright and well kept. The walls have been freshly painted white, and there are bright canvases on the walls—he wonders if they are from her boyfriend, Jake. But then he thinks, if they were they’d probably have been taken down and shredded by now. They’re modern, abstract, but somehow pleasing. Behind the living room is a sunny back room she has turned into a studio that looks out onto the fields. There are various pieces of sculpture in the studio, and he studies them with interest. He sees an entire row of female torsos without heads, just breasts of all shapes and sizes.
“My busts,” she says sardonically.
Some of the pieces are recognizable as female genitalia but others are more conventional. Perhaps she’s branching out. They are certainly experimental. One appears to be the head and shoulders of a man that she’s been working on in clay. It’s unfinished. Or maybe it is finished—he can’t tell. He has no understanding of modern art.
“Do you like art?” Jenna asks him, as if reading his mind. She doesn’t seem perturbed by them being there.
“I don’t know. I’ve never really thought about it,” he admits.
She shakes her head at him as if he is a philistine. Perhaps he is. But she may be a killer, and she’s in no position to judge him, Reyes thinks. He focuses on the task at hand.
He knows she’s smart. If she killed her parents, they’re not likely to find anything. They go through the entire house. No sign of blood anywhere. None of her mother’s jewelry is there. But then, Jenna has entirely different taste.
Her Mini Cooper has been taken away for examination; a rental car is already parked to the left of the house. As they go outside, Reyes recognizes a familiar figure sitting in a car on the dirt road in front of the house. It’s Audrey Stancik. Jenna steps out from behind Reyes when she sees her father’s sister. She strides over angrily. “What the fuck are you doing here?” Jenna asks.
“It’s a free country,” Audrey replies, smiling nastily at her niece.
“Fuck off,” Jenna snaps. She turns back to Reyes and calls, “Can’t you get rid of her?”
“Never mind,” Audrey says. “I’m leaving.” She starts her car and drives off.
Reyes and Barr follow the tech team to the backyard. There, they immediately become interested in the fire pit.
The detectives come closer and watch as the team collects every last bit of ash and debris from the fire pit to take back for study at the lab. Reyes feels Jenna come up beside him and turns to look at her.
“It’s a fire pit,” she says. “So what?” He turns his attention back to the blackened circle at his feet. “You’re not going to find anything there,” Jenna says.
• • •the next day is saturday, and Audrey is at home, feeling lonely and frustrated. She misses Ellen.
What’s wrong with those detectives?she thinks. Obviously one of the kids murdered her brother and his wife, but they can’t seem to figure out which one. And one of them has tried to kill her, as well—who’s to say they won’t try again?
She wishes she still had Ellen to talk to. Ellen is so steady, so calming. But Audrey is still angry at her—how could Ellen not tell her, all these years, that Rose is Fred’s daughter? Audrey has trusted Ellen with her darkest secret. Perhaps that was a mistake. And Ellen’s own daughter may be the murderer.
She’s not going to let her brother’s killer get away with this. She’s obsessed with finding the answer. As she broods, she realizes that, besides the killer, there’s one person who might know the truth.
• • •ellen sits at her kitchen table and stares into space. She knows everything now, and it isn’t her daughter who’s told her. Ellen has been practically catatonic since she ran into Janet the day before and learned the awful truth. She can’t bring herself to call Rose.
She puts her face in her hands and weeps as if she is broken, her heart seizing in fear. Rose had lied to her repeatedly, and she’d had no idea. She couldn’t tell. That either makes her daughter an extremely good liar or makes Ellen extremely stupid. She’d always thought her daughter was honest and openhearted. She never would have thought her capable of stealing that much money. She didn’t know her at all. And Rose had lied to her face when she said she didn’t know she was in Fred’s will, when the truth is, she’d known for months. What else does she not know about her daughter?
Audrey has put a terrible fear into Ellen’s heart, with her stories about Fred and what he did. She is afraid there is an unknowable darkness at the center of her daughter. She doesn’t know if she will ever be able to look at her in the same way again.
