The Perfect Couple Read online

  “No!” Thomas says.

  “One of you is lying,” the Chief says.

  “Featherleigh is lying. She’s a pathological liar, in fact. She’s being investigated for fraud in her antiques business. Did she tell your colleague that? She tried to pass off a fake George the Third gilt-wood table to what she thought was a naive client. So, clearly, she lies as a general practice.”

  “That seems like pretty specialized knowledge to have about your parents’ friend,” the Chief says.

  “My mother told me about it.”

  “Your mother? So if I ask Greer right now if she told you about Featherleigh’s fraud charges and what exactly they were, she’ll say yes.”

  Thomas nods. His expression is confident except for three tense lines high on his forehead.

  The Chief stands up. “All right. I’ll go talk to your mother.”

  “Wait,” Thomas says. He collapses against the back of the sofa. “We did have a brief fling. Me and… Ms. Dale. Featherleigh.”

  “How brief?” the Chief asks.

  Thomas throws up his hands. “Not brief, exactly. But sporadic.” He pauses. “Several years.”

  The Chief sits back down. “So you’ve been romantically involved with Ms. Dale for several years?”

  “On and off,” Thomas says. “And like she told you, I ended things in May.”

  “Did it upset you that Ms. Dale chose to attend the wedding?”

  “Of course it upset me,” Thomas says. “I want her out of my life. My wife is pregnant, I need to focus on her and on getting my career back on track. This thing with Featherleigh, well, it ran amok. She was blackmailing me.”

  “Blackmailing you?” the Chief says.

  Thomas picks up his scotch and throws half of it back. The Chief feels a mixture of triumph and shame. He has gotten people to break down and talk before and it always feels satisfying on the one hand—like cracking a safe, almost—and vaguely obscene on the other. This guy has been hiding something for years and now he’s coming clean. So many crimes, and especially murders, are committed by people with dark motivations like Thomas. Thomas likely had no intention of killing anyone; he just wanted to keep the secret of his love affair safe.

  “I hooked up with her initially after her older brother, Hamish, died. Hamish was a school friend of my father’s. I went to the funeral with my parents—this was before I met Abby—and at the reception afterward, Featherleigh and I got drunk and things happened. After that, I saw her whenever I was in London or she was in New York. Then I met Abby. I told Featherleigh I couldn’t see her anymore and she went off the deep end.”

  “How so?”

  “Abby came with my family to Virgin Gorda over the Christmas holiday the first year we were together. Featherleigh must have found out because she showed up on Virgin Gorda with a client of hers from Abu Dhabi who had a gigantic yacht. And then another time, right after I finished law school, Featherleigh made a surprise appearance at my classmate’s graduation party. She walked right into Bemelmans Bar at the Carlyle Hotel in New York and told everyone I’d invited her there.”

  “Why didn’t you just correct the misperception then?”

  “Because… well… there had been times that I’d seen Featherleigh since I’d been with Abby. And that’s where I messed up. I didn’t make a clean break. I didn’t keep Featherleigh firmly in my past. The first time I wasn’t sure if things were going to work out with Abby and me, so when Feather called and told me she had a suite at the Gramercy Park Hotel, I went. Then, after Abby had her second miscarriage—which was a really bad one—she was weepy and depressed, really difficult to be around. She felt like a failure. I felt like a failure. We started to fight. There wasn’t a conversation we could have that didn’t lead right back to the pregnancies. Sex was out of the question. It was a tough time. And Featherleigh capitalized on that. She magically appeared in New York and then in Tampa, Florida, where I was assisting on a case. She sent me a first-class plane ticket to Paris and then, a few months later, to Marrakech. Then, of course, it turned out she was charging her clients the price of my plane tickets, thinking they wouldn’t notice. But of course they did and they dragged Featherleigh to court, which killed her business and depleted her savings and caused her to do something stupid, like try to pass off a fake George the Third gilt-wood table as genuine.”

  The Chief nods. He has his guy. He can feel it. “The blackmail?” he says.

  “The blackmail,” Thomas says. He throws back the rest of his scotch and the Chief wishes for the bottle, anything to keep him talking. “It started back in January of this year. I wanted to break things off. And Feather told me if I did, she would tell Abby what we’d been doing. So I had to keep on.” Thomas presses his fingers into his eye sockets. “I started failing at work. I was trying to get Abby pregnant and trying to keep Featherleigh from running her mouth. Then, in May, Abby got pregnant and the pregnancy seemed strong and viable and I just made a decision that I wasn’t going to let Featherleigh Dale control me any longer. The fraud charges helped because I figured even if she did contact Abby, she would have zero credibility.”

  “But even so, you must have been upset that Ms. Dale was attending your brother’s wedding.”

  “I asked her not to come,” Thomas says. “I pleaded and begged.”

  “And threatened,” the Chief says. “Ms. Dale said that you said if she showed her face on Nantucket, you would kill her. Did you say that?”

  Thomas nods. “Yes. Yes, I did.”

  “Did you drop one of your mother’s sleeping pills into the glass of water Featherleigh brought to the table, thinking she would be the one to drink it? Did you think she might take a swim and drown or get behind the wheel of a car and have an accident? Did you do that, Thomas? Because after what you’ve told me, I would understand if you did.”

  Thomas starts to cry. “I’ve made such a mess of things.”

  The Chief breathes all the way out, maybe for the first time since he woke up this morning. “I’ll need you to come down to the station and sign a statement. You have the right to an attorney.”

  Thomas sniffs, shakes his head. “I think you’ve misunderstood. I’ve made a mess of things but I didn’t drug anyone. I didn’t see my mother’s pills. I didn’t touch the glass of water. And you’ll forgive me, but it would take a hell of a lot more than a measly sleeping pill to kill Featherleigh Dale.”

  “So you…” the Chief says. “You didn’t…”

  Thomas shakes his head again. “I wanted Featherleigh to disappear. But I didn’t put anything in anyone’s water. I didn’t see or touch my mother’s sleeping pills and Featherleigh is still very much a threat to me.” Thomas offers the Chief a sad smile. “That is the truth.”

  The Chief calls Andrea and tells her he’s on his way home.

  “Did you figure out what happened?” Andrea says.

  “Not quite,” the Chief says. “We uncovered a bunch of ugly secrets, don’t get me wrong, but we can’t quite link any of them to the death of the young woman.” He thinks of Jordan Randolph at the Nantucket Standard. He’s going to have questions. Everyone is going to have questions. “How’s Chloe?”

  “She’s upset,” Andrea says. “She told me she bonded with the maid of honor at the rehearsal dinner.”

  “Bonded?” the Chief says. “What does that mean?”

  “I tried to get more out of her but she said she wanted to talk to you. I told her you were very busy—”

  “No, no, it’s fine,” the Chief says. He wonders if the answers he’s been looking for are under his own roof. “I’ll be there in a few minutes.”

  The Chief knocks on Chloe’s bedroom door.

  “Come in,” she says.

  She’s lying on her bed reading a book about turtles. Is that right? Turtles All the Way Down, the cover says. The Chief has no idea what that means but he’s glad she’s reading. Her phone is plugged in on the nightstand and it buzzes and blinks with incoming messages—Instagram
s, he supposes, or Snapchats, or whatever has replaced Instagram and Snapchat. Nick would probably know.

  “Hey,” he says with what remains of his good humor. He closes the door behind him and takes a seat on her bright blue fuzzy chair. The chair reminds the Chief of Grover from Sesame Street, but at least it’s comfortable. “Auntie said you wanted to talk?”

  Chloe nods, sets the book down, sits up. She isn’t wearing any makeup, which is unusual. Her face is maturing into beauty, a beauty she inherited from her mother. Tess wasn’t much older than Chloe is now when the Chief first met her, Andrea’s beloved younger cousin, a cousin as close as a sister.

  “There are two things I want to tell you,” Chloe says. “About last night.”

  “Go ahead,” the Chief says.

  “I was eavesdropping during the party,” Chloe says. “I overheard a conversation between the maid of honor and the father of the groom. I think they were… involved. I know they were. She was pregnant with his baby. He wanted her to get rid of it. He said he would write her a check. She said she wanted to keep the baby because it was a link to him. She said she would tell Greer. Greer is his wife.”

  The Chief nods and tries not to let any emotion show on his face. He’s appalled that this particular storyline managed to make its way to Chloe.

  “You haven’t told anyone that, I hope,” the Chief says. “That’s volatile information.”

  “I haven’t told a soul,” Chloe says softly. “I was waiting for you to get home.”

  After dealing with one liar after another all day long, the Chief is heartened to know he recognizes the truth when he hears it.

  He takes a deep breath. “What’s the other thing?”

  “The other thing happened when I was clearing,” Chloe says. “It was after the dessert, after the toasts, and I had a tray of champagne flutes I was taking back to the kitchen. I wasn’t watching where I was going and I tripped and fell and the glasses all broke.”

  Broken glass, the Chief thinks. “Where did this happen?” he asks.

  “At the place where the beach meets the lawn. Over by the left side of the house if you’re standing with your back to the water.”

  The Chief writes this down.

  “The maid of honor helped me clean up,” Chloe says. “And she was really cool. She asked my name and where I was from, and when I told her I was from Nantucket, she said I was the luckiest girl in the world.” Chloe’s voice gets thick and she wipes at her eyes. “I can’t believe she’s dead. She was a person I talked to last night.”

  “Sometimes things happen that way,” the Chief says. “There’s a good chance she took pills, maybe drank too much—”

  “She wasn’t drunk,” Chloe says. “Not even a little bit. She seemed like the most sober person at the party.”

  “I just want you to realize, Chloe, that every single decision you make—who your friends are, who you date, whether you decide to smoke or drink—has a consequence. I think that Merritt, ultimately, was the victim of her own poor choices.”

  Chloe stares at the Chief for a second and he can see she resents his using Merritt’s death as a public service announcement—but this is nothing if not a teachable moment. Chloe reaches for her phone and the Chief knows he’s lost her. Andrea is better at dealing with Chloe; he always ends up sounding like the gruff uncle who also happens to be the chief of police.

  “One other question, Chloe,” he says, though he’s sure she wants nothing more than to be rid of him. “Did Merritt cut herself when she was helping you clean up the glass?”

  “Cut herself?” Chloe says. She looks up from her phone. “No. Why?”

  “Just wondering,” the Chief says. “Are you sure the two of you picked up every bit of glass?”

  “It was dark,” Chloe says. “We did the best we could. I was worried, actually, that Greer would find a piece of glass we missed and I would get in trouble for it today. But I guess they had bigger things to worry about.”

  The Chief stands up.

  “Wait, can I show you one more thing?” Chloe says. She holds her phone up and scoots to the edge of the bed. The Chief takes a seat next to her. “Merritt is an influencer, so I started following her on Instagram last night when I got home. This was her last post.”

  The Chief accepts the phone from Chloe and puts on his reading glasses. He has never looked at Instagram before, and he sees it’s nothing more than a photograph with a caption. In this instance, the photo is of two young women posing on the bow of the Hy-Line fast ferry. Their hair is windblown, and Nantucket is visible behind them in the background—the harbor, the sailboats, the gray-shingled fisherman cottages of the wharves, the steeples of the Unitarian and Congregational churches. The blond—Celeste, the bride, the Chief realizes—looks nervous; there’s a hesitation in her smile. The brunette, Merritt, however, is beaming; she is luminous, giving the moment everything she has. She’s a good actress, the Chief thinks. There’s no hint or clue that she was pregnant with the baby of a married man and that he wanted nothing to do with her. The caption of the photo reads: Goin’ to the chapel… wedding weekend with the BEST FRIEND a woman could ask for. #maidofhonor #bridesmaid #happilyeverafter.

  “Hashtag happily ever after,” Chloe says. “That’s the part that kills me. Isn’t that the saddest thing you’ve ever seen?”

  “Just about,” the Chief says, handing the phone back to Chloe. “Just about.”

  The Chief changes into casual clothes and looks longingly at the cold blue cans of Cisco beer in his fridge—but he can’t relax yet. He has arranged to meet Nick back at the station to go over everything one last time.

  “Don’t worry about dinner,” he tells Andrea. “I’ll have Keira order us something.”

  “I hate murder investigations,” Andrea says, lifting her face for a kiss. “But I love you.”

  “And I love you,” he says. He gives his wife a kiss, a second kiss, a third kiss. He thinks about letting Nick wait.

  The Chief and Nick meet in an interview room back at the station. Keira, the Chief’s assistant, has ordered a kale Caesar and a couple of artisanal pizzas from Station 21 so they can have a little dinner.

  Nick takes a lusty bite of the shrimp and pancetta pizza. “This isn’t bad,” he says. “Normally I stay away from anything called ‘artisanal.’ I like my food real.”

  “Chloe said Merritt didn’t cut herself when she helped clean up,” the Chief says. “But she may have cut herself after the kayak ride. The place Chloe said she dropped the tray is right near the path Merritt would have taken to get back to her cottage.”

  “That could explain why Merritt went in the water,” Nick says. “I mean, you’d rinse a cut at the water’s edge, but you wouldn’t go all the way in.”

  “Unless the water felt nice,” the Chief says. “It was a hot night.”

  “And I’m guessing the maid of honor didn’t care for the heat,” Nick says. “The A/C in her bedroom was cranked to ten. It was practically snowing in there.”

  “But that doesn’t tell us who slipped her the sleeping pill,” the Chief says.

  “She might have taken one herself,” Nick says. “After all, we know she was upset.”

  “Doesn’t that seem reckless?” the Chief asks. “Taking a sleeping pill when she’s pregnant?”

  “The father said she jumped off the kayak way out in the middle of the harbor, right? That’s the definition of reckless. Her frame of mind was reckless, sounds like.”

  The Chief stabs a piece of kale in the round foil container in front of them. “I’m not liking this as an accident. There are two people who wanted Merritt to go away—Tag Winbury and Greer Garrison. And one person who wanted Featherleigh Dale to go away—Thomas Winbury.”

  “Calling it an accident would be easier on Merritt’s family,” Nick says. “And the bride.”

  “We don’t work for her family,” the Chief says. “We work for the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. And beyond that, we work in the name of justice fo
r the citizens of this great country. Do you think it was an accident? Really?”

  “No,” Nick says. “I like the mother.”

  The Chief munches a crouton. “Funny. I like the father. Tag Winbury sees his wife’s sleeping pills, drops one in Merritt’s water glass. He then takes her out in the kayak and eliminates both his problems—no mistress, no baby. What’s your angle?”

  “Greer finds out about the affair and the baby and she drops a sleeping pill in the water, hoping Merritt will drink it and that Tag will take Merritt out in the kayak. Or maybe, maybe, Greer is trying to kill her husband. Maybe Greer slips him a mickey hoping he’ll go out in the kayak and never return.” Nick picks up a piece of the sausage pizza. “Yes, I do realize how far-fetched that sounds.”

  “It would be different, maybe, if we had that water glass,” the Chief says.

  Nick cocks his head. “Does it seem odd to you that the water glass was cleared from the table but the shot glasses remained? Someone took only the water glass inside. Or someone came out and cleared only the water glass.”

  The Chief shakes his head and picks up his own piece of pizza. He can’t believe that Chloe is the one who dropped the tray of glasses. Shard of glass on the lawn, cut foot, maid of honor goes into the ocean to wash it off, dead maid of honor. It’s not Chloe’s fault; no one on earth would think that. But if Chloe hadn’t dropped the tray, would Merritt still be alive? Yes, if she hadn’t taken a sleeping pill or been slipped a sleeping pill and then gone into the water, she would be alive. Limping down the aisle of the church, maybe. But alive.

  “The fact is, we don’t have enough evidence to charge anyone,” Nick says.

  The Chief knows Nick is right. “Tomorrow we’ll call the brother back and tell him we concluded it was an accident. She took a sleeping pill, she went for a nighttime swim, she drowned.”

  “There were so many secrets in that house,” Nick says. “I can’t believe one of them didn’t cause this.”