The Winner, page 19
Catherine’s phone wasn’t connecting to John’s router extender. They’d never know she’d been to his cabin.
He could chuck it now. But if he did, it would be only a day or two until Emily or someone else on the neck tried to reach out and found their calls going straight to voice mail. If her scent lingered within and around his cabin, a police search with dogs would lead them to it, and they’d be able to detect any DNA she’d left behind.
His forearm throbbed. The bite. Her upper and lower teeth had left distinct crenellations in the skin. He’d never been bitten before like this, but he imagined it would bruise and take at least a week to heal and fade.
He had to buy as much time as possible before anyone noticed she was gone.
Chapter 20
Before leaving his cabin, he opened all his windows to air out Catherine’s scent—her body’s and her perfume’s—and patched the bite marks with one of the bandages she’d given him that time he’d cut his finger.
He brought Catherine’s phone with him, leaving his at home, and raced along the shoreline path to her house, entering through the patio door, which he opened with the hem of his T-shirt.
He went up to the bedroom, careful not to touch anything with his hands, and plugged her phone into the charger, still using his shirt as a glove. If she received any calls, at least the phone would now ring before sending them to voice mail.
As far as the police would know from her phone data, Catherine had left her house that evening for the party on the neck (which others would corroborate) and had now safely returned. And if they ever sought out his phone, it would show him as having been at his cabin the entire time.
He thought he heard someone coming into the house, but it was just his own feet on the floorboards. The momentary alarm jarred him. If someone saw him doing anything he shouldn’t, or simply his being in an unexpected place, he was done for.
He couldn’t let himself agonize over these outcomes. He had to anticipate, strategize, remain in motion.
Catherine was last seen alive at the party over an hour earlier. He needed to establish an alibi immediately.
CONOR RAN ALONG THE SHORE BACK TO HIS CABIN AND RETRIEVED HIS phone. As he passed the yacht club on the way to Emily’s cottage, distant laughter sailed up to him. He strolled down the gravel driveway. A bunch of the cousins were hanging out by the tennis court, drinking beer around a cooler. Bobby Nuke was among them.
“Hey, Bobby,” Conor said.
“Hey,” said Bobby. He probably didn’t remember his name.
“Mind if I join you for a beer? I’ve been working all night and could use a break.”
Bobby handed him a sweaty can. “Hey, everyone,” Conor said. “We met a while ago. I’m Conor. The tennis pro.”
There were six of them. Six witnesses.
He sat next to Bobby, pretending to drink his beer, as the others discussed an upcoming pickleball tournament on Cutters.
“I’m the worst at volleys,” one of the girls said. “When someone hits it right at me, I’m like, ahh!”
He would have to wipe down his racquet handle to remove her fingerprints. He’d get rid of the stringing machine as soon as he could. He hadn’t had sex in her bed since July; nothing from him would show up there. He’d go through her phone more carefully the next day in case she’d ever mentioned him to anyone, though he doubted she would have. If he accounted for absolutely everything, if he covered or erased every track, he could make it through this. No one would have any reason to believe the tennis pro studying for the bar had anything to do with the disappearance of Catherine Havemeyer.
“If they make me play Oscar, I’m demanding an umpire,” said a boy. “His cheating is next level.”
Conor had lost a match in tenth grade to a boy who’d called every close shot out, even some that were half a foot within the lines. There weren’t enough adults present for him to request a line judge, so Conor had had no recourse other than to call the kid’s shots out, too, though he wasn’t shameless enough to do it unless it really was questionable; he was an inveterate stickler who always gave his opponent the benefit of the doubt. When he told Richard about it later, he’d been surprised by the vigor of his mentor’s response.
“You never cheat,” he nearly shouted, perhaps the only time he’d showed anger to Conor. “I don’t care if your opponent’s doing it. You don’t stoop to his behavior. And he’s cheating himself most of all, because now he knows he’s not a real winner—he’s a cheater.”
The lecture made its intended impact: Conor had never again done it, not even when his opponent was taking advantage of him.
Richard would say he shouldn’t have stooped to Catherine’s level, that if she was going to expose him to Emily, then he should’ve let her and faced the music. And there was no question what he’d say about the stringing machine. Or the ocean.
But Richard was a small-time real estate lawyer who’d handled disputes over breaches of contract, about who owned a tree with roots and branches on opposite sides of a fence. His ironclad code of ethics didn’t apply to this, an area of the deepest gray. Catherine had threatened him, bitten him, hit him with a hard object that could have seriously injured him. Conor had done what he had to do to protect himself, first physically, then legally. It was human instinct. Richard would’ve done the same exact thing. That was how things worked in the real world.
These rich college kids without a care in the world, laughing about a pickleball tournament, and less than an hour earlier he’d been chasing her in the ocean, holding her down—
“Did I do the thumb trick yet this summer?” Bobby asked the group as he held up an unopened can in Conor’s field of vision. The rest of the crew said he hadn’t and egged him on.
“Take a video,” he said to a girl. Others illuminated him with their phone flashlights as he pressed his thumb hard against the side of the can near the base until he punctured the aluminum, generating a geyser of beer to rowdy cheers. Conor leaned into the frame of the video, cheering along with them, as Bobby chugged it, the foam bearding him.
That time after the first lesson when Catherine had streaked water from a bottle onto her neck and chest.
He had to shut out these thoughts.
“Send it to the cousin text,” someone told the girl.
“Could you send me that video, too?” Conor asked Bobby when he was done with the beer. “I want to show my friends in New York.”
Bobby beamed with pride as he texted him the video. When no one was looking, Conor dumped out his beer. “I gotta get to sleep,” he said. “Thanks for the beer.”
He went back up the driveway and reviewed the video on his phone. He was visible, for a few seconds, at the end.
HE NEARED EMILY’S COTTAGE AS IF UNDER THE INFLUENCE OF MAGNETIC repulsion. He couldn’t go in, couldn’t face her and act like nothing had happened, like this was just another normal day in their normal summer.
But he—and his phone, connecting to her Wi-Fi—needed to be there, to be able to document that he’d spent the entire night with her the evening her mother was last seen.
“I thought you were coming over at nine,” she said through a yawn when she greeted him at the door.
“Sorry,” he said. “Your cousins were drinking at the yacht club. I stopped by and had a beer with them.”
“You hung out . . . with my cousins? Why?”
“Desperation, I guess,” he said as he plopped onto her couch. “I was working nonstop all night.”
Emily hummed a tune as she busied herself in the kitchen.
The way he’d rationalized it before, that this was preferable to her learning the truth—he’d been deluding himself. He was right. She should have stayed away from him.
What kind of a person are you to do this to someone?
He was a damaged person. A damaged person who damaged other people.
“You okay?” Emily asked. She was holding out a beer for him, which he hadn’t noticed.
“Just wiped out from studying,” he said.
“What happened to your arm?” She pointed at the bandage.
He put a hand over his forearm from her even though the wound was covered. “Scraped it on something. It’s fine.”
Emily sniffed him. “You smell like the ocean. You went swimming?”
“No,” he said. “A while ago, I mean. Before dinner. I didn’t shower after.”
“You want to watch something before bed?” she asked.
“I’m pretty tired,” he said. “Maybe let’s just go to sleep.”
With nothing to occupy him in the dark, his mind compulsively replayed the night’s events. The collision of the stringing machine with Catherine’s head, the solidity of the blow. Crumpling to the floor like a knocked-out boxer. Her underwater fight. Hunting her down in the ocean. Then that death rattle for oxygen before he’d pushed her below one final time and flooded her lungs.
Why had he even gone for her phone when she’d tried to call the police? If he’d succeeded in stopping her, she only would’ve called later. He should’ve just allowed her to summon them, told his side of the story. He was studying for the bar at his home while sober; Catherine had visited him inebriated and uninvited. She probably wouldn’t have pressed charges in the end. Maybe she was willing to burn bridges with her daughter over Conor—or, as she’d claimed at the end, to save her from him—but evidence or even rumors of a dalliance with him would have embarrassed her far more than him. And if she did take him to court over a piddling elbow to her lip from a tussle, a jury would have found a diligent law school graduate who’d pulled himself up by his bootstraps more sympathetic than a multimillionaire heiress with a drinking problem; he’d have been acquitted. It would have terminated his relationship with Emily, but this wouldn’t have happened.
It won’t hurt, will it? Catherine had asked him that time in the car, playing a freshman. You won’t hurt me, will you?
He had, in ways she never could have anticipated, in ways he hadn’t thought he’d ever be capable of. But she’d tried to hurt him, physically and emotionally, and Emily, too. And once he’d involuntarily defended himself the way any person would, she was going to die anyway. She’d hurt herself.
He hadn’t been the greedy one, or at least the greediest one. She was, trying to keep him all for herself—her concern for Emily was disingenuous—and if she couldn’t get what she wanted, no one could.
In his haste to return the phone to Catherine’s house, he’d overlooked something obvious: if he kept it by her bed for the coming week, the continuous hits to the internet router would make it look as though she never left the house. She’d also receive calls and texts that would go unanswered. The calls he couldn’t do anything about, but he could reenter the house surreptitiously, respond to any important texts as Catherine would, then take her phone outside for a little while, away from her internet router, before returning the device to her bedroom; simply turning it off in the house wouldn’t simulate normal activity, and although he could deactivate the Wi-Fi and stay put, he shouldn’t remain in her house any longer than he had to.
He could do this every day until his bite marks faded. Eventually he’d bring her phone out at night with a bottle of wine to the private pier by her house, making it appear she’d drowned while drunkenly swimming.
It was good, once again, to be consumed with logistics.
Chapter 21
He awoke for his tennis lesson with John after barely any sleep, under the black cloud of having escaped the narrative of a nightmare but not its lingering disquietude.
Except he couldn’t remember any dreams, only the macabre facts of the previous night. What had happened was real, it was still there, and it would always be there. He couldn’t erase or undo it.
But he could, gradually, cover it under enough layers of sedimentary rock that it never poked through the surface. He was capable of this. Mental toughness. He hadn’t told a soul about his father for fourteen years, hadn’t even talked about it with his own mom, and, over that time, he’d thought about him less and less, until both his life and death had narrowed to a pinhole in his mind. That parable about the oak and the reed was bullshit, truly a fable. If you had a strong foundation and thick bark, you could weather any storm.
He left the cottage before Emily was up, saving himself from conversation with her. He and John rallied without much talk. Conor played with the racquet Catherine had used, to cover her prints. When it was over, John asked, “All set for your interrogation?”
Conor stopped picking up balls. “What?”
“The interview’s this week, isn’t it?”
“Right,” Conor said. “Yes. Monday.”
“Little nervous?”
“A little, I guess.”
“Whenever I get nervous before something big,” John said, “I think, ‘What’s the absolute worst thing that can happen to me if I screw this up and everything goes wrong?’ And it’s never really that bad.”
Only a guy with the kind of money John had could think that way. Conor couldn’t afford any complacency. He had to conceive of worst-case scenarios, to imagine it all going wrong, and to counter them preemptively. He’d have to consider and account for any vulnerabilities based on what had happened earlier in the summer, in the days before, the night of, and now everything he did in the aftermath.
“So what do you think?” John asked.
“About what?”
“The cocktail cruise. You want to come tonight, take your mind off the interview?”
“Oh. Sorry, I didn’t hear you.”
His imagination reformulated the ingredients of the two of them alone on a boat in the ocean into his garroting John with string from his machine, anchoring him to it, and dumping him into a marsh.
“Thank you, but I think it’s better if I stay in tonight and prepare,” he said.
When he returned home, his first order of business was disappearing the stringing machine. Not the murder weapon, by definition, but a weapon nonetheless. He carried it in a trash bag to the neck’s dump, concealing it under garbage in one of the dumpsters, and did the same with the clothes he’d worn in the ocean and the glass Catherine had drunk from.
Back in his cabin, he turned off his phone to circumvent any interference from Emily, donned a pair of dishwashing gloves, took the shoreline route, and entered Catherine’s house through the patio. Her phone was where he’d left it. She’d received a call from an 800 number and one text from a friend in New York: a selfie in a mask and an evening gown. The woman and Catherine texted frequently enough that he’d have to respond in some form. The fewer words he impersonated her with the better, so he combed through their old messages to see whether Catherine ever “liked” texts in response, and if not, what her texting style looked like. As he scrolled back into the archive, an exchange stood out.
“Thank you for talking to Margo about her miscarriage,” the woman wrote. “She told me it helped a lot.”
“Anything for my beloved goddaughter,” Catherine had replied, with a heart emoji.
He wished he hadn’t read that.
She’d given a thumbs-up to several other texts, so he added one for the selfie, left the house with the phone, and walked back along the shoreline, eyeing the ocean and the shoreline for the body. He was afraid to search for his name in her texts and emails, lest a future forensic data analysis reveal he’d done it, so he instead did quick visual scans for it in a few recent text threads and some emails. There was nothing about him or her romantic life. He considered deleting all her texts, but if she’d mentioned him to a friend, the person would have the messages anyway, and it would mean he wouldn’t be able to study her verbal mannerisms again. When he neared the path to John’s house he doubled back and plugged the phone in by her bedside table, wiping it down with a hand towel first.
That wasn’t too hard.
IN HIS CABIN, HE EXAMINED THE HARDWOOD FLOOR OF THE LIVING AREA more carefully with the assistance of his phone’s flashlight. Even if the stringing machine hadn’t gashed her head, his elbow had bloodied her lip.
He didn’t see anything in the dark wood and was about to stop when his eye caught three spots of what had to have been blood clustered near one another. He wiped the area with cleaning spray, but no matter how hard he scrubbed, he couldn’t get rid of the stain; the wood had absorbed it overnight. He feared that using bleach would discolor the floor and draw more attention to any blood that remained. In an evidence class, his professor had told them about a case in which a man was convicted of murdering his mistress in part because an application of the chemical over blood spatter hadn’t degraded the victim’s DNA as much as expected. He could buy sandpaper and try to strip the wood in that area, but his tampering would be conspicuous and still potentially leave behind traces of DNA he couldn’t see.
The absolute worst thing that could happen to him would be if a crime scene search were ever conducted there. An investigation with the chemical luminol would certainly detect it, lighting up the faintest splatter like bioluminescence, and they’d match Catherine’s DNA with Emily’s.
It was midmorning, and he hadn’t eaten yet. He cracked two eggs in a bowl, whisking them with a splash of milk until he had a smooth blend, which he poured into the hot skillet and scrambled.
He set down his spatula and texted Emily to come over that night.
AFTER GRABBING A BEER IN HIS CABIN AND PLAYING MUSIC ON CONOR’S new laptop, Emily talked animatedly about a spat she’d had that day with her friend Olivia. He nodded along affirmatively.
One time, before they’d shifted their meetings to his cabin, they’d fucked in her jetted tub. Another time she’d sat on his face as they’d sixty-nined, ground down on him hard, and stroked him off as he nearly suffocated.
