Tessa Leoni: Crash And Burn Part 14

He doesn't say anything right away. Just makes his approach, eyes upon my face.

"I'm testing it out," I offer.

"And?"

"It feels familiar."

"It should. You used to sleep there." He doesn't come directly to me, but instead loops around the bed. I feel a faint pressure on the mattress as he takes his position. In contrast to my rigidity, he tucks his hands behind his head, crosses his legs at his ankles. I turn my head to study him. It's his bed, his room; he looks as if he belongs here.

"Why did I move out?"

He rolls onto his side.

"Come here," he says.

I don't immediately move.

"More testing," he says, and gestures to the s.p.a.ce beside him. I know what he wants; I just can't do it. Then I don't have to. He comes to me, closing the s.p.a.ce between us. Until the heat of his body is pressed next to mine. I can smell sawdust, sweat, the residual soap from his morning shower. I hold my breath, not sure what to expect, not sure what I want to happen next.

He reaches out and feathers back my long hair. The pad of his thumb is rough. I feel it trace gently around the first line of st.i.tches, then the second, the third. I flinch, but not because he's hurting me.

"Do you wonder if we have s.e.x?" he asks. "Two decades later, does our marriage still involve intimacy?"

I can't speak. I'm too aware of him, touch, sound, smell. I understand immediately, instinctively, that none of this is new or unfamiliar. I like his touch. Crave it, even. The feel of his body over mine. The intense look on his face as he first thrusts into me. The sound of his heart, pounding wildly in my ear.

"You still want me," he continues. "I still want you. Sometimes, I think it's the only way we still connect. In here, lights out, we find each other again. And I know you need me, want me, love me, even if you remain too quiet the rest of the day."

"Why did I move out?" I whisper. His fingers are still dancing across my face, working the edge of my hairline. Is he trying to distract me? Do I care?

"You have night terrors. Always have. But lately, after your fall down the bas.e.m.e.nt steps, they've become worse. You wake up screaming, nearly out of your mind, sweat pouring down your face. If I try to touch you in any way, reach out, offer a soothing hand, you get worse."

"I hit you."

"Sometimes."

"I smashed your head with a lamp."

"That hurt."

"Then I cried. Because I didn't mean it, I really didn't, and you had blood pouring down your face."

"You thought it was best if you slept alone."

"So I couldn't hurt you."

"You think leaving our bed didn't hurt me?"

My gaze falls. I can't look at him and the vulnerability on his face. I find myself touching his chest, my palm flat, my fingers splayed. I can feel his heartbeat. It's surprisingly steady, given how fast I know my own is racing.

"Do you love me?" I hear myself ask.

"Yes."

"Why?"

He smiles; I can feel the movement of his lips against my hair. I inhale again, the scent of his skin.

"In the beginning," he murmurs, "you were so sad. It was like a tangible presence, all around you. And I thought . . . I wanted to see you smile for real. I wanted to be the man who made you happy."

"Is that love?" I asked him. "Or is that a hero complex?"

"I don't know anymore," he tells me, and I know he's being honest. "Maybe it's something in between. But when I finally did get you to smile, it all seemed worth it. And I just wanted to do it again and again. I figure there are worse ways to spend a life than making the woman I love happy."

"But I'm not happy."

"You were. At least, in the beginning. When we first left New Orleans, we went to Austin. You loved the warm weather, the great music, the dogs frolicking in Zilker Park. But then you got restless. More bad days, fewer good days, so we tried San Francisco. Then Phoenix. And Boulder, and Seattle, and Portland, and Chicago, and Knoxville and Raleigh and Fort Lauderdale and, and, and . . . You would be happy. Then you would be sad. So we would move again. Because to this day, all I want is to make you smile."

I don't speak.

"But you're right: I can't make you happy anymore," Thomas says quietly. "You wear your sadness again, and when I try to ask you questions, you refuse to answer. What do you need, how can I make you happy? Just tell me what you want. But you don't talk to me anymore, Nicky. h.e.l.l, I couldn't even get you to come clean about that d.a.m.n yellow quilt."

"It's mine," I hear myself say. Immediate. Defensive.

"You ordered it on eBay three years ago. Day it came, you locked yourself in the bedroom with it and cried all day. I asked, I waited, I begged. But you've never told me why you need it so badly, what makes it so special. Most of my life I have loved you. And still, there are moments when I'm sure I don't know you at all."

"You have secrets, too," I say, conscious of the worn envelope pressed against the small of my back.

"Silence breeds silence," my husband says.

"Why do you stay with me? It sounds like I'm nothing but trouble."

"Because I haven't given up hope."

"Hope of what?"

"That someday, I can make you smile again."

He rolls away from me. I feel his absence more acutely than I would like. The air is cold, the bed empty, and for a second, my hand actually reaches out, as if I would call him back. It comes to me, what I thought the first moment I saw him. He was looking right at me, smiling right at me. And my first impression was I wished he would just go away.

But then, once he left, I wished he'd come back, because no one had ever smiled at me like that before.

I love him. I fear him. I need him. I resent him. I pull him close. I push him away.

And I have a feeling that it has nothing to do with him and everything to do with me.

"You can stay," Thomas says, rising to his feet. "Rest as long as you'd like. I'll go down, start dinner. Grilled cheese, tomato soup, sound good?"

I nod, not trusting myself to speak.

"We'll get through this," he says. Rea.s.suring me? Rea.s.suring himself? Maybe it's all the same. My husband leaves the room.

I wait until I hear his footsteps descend all the way down the stairs, followed by an echo from the kitchen below. Then, and only then, do I roll gingerly onto my side and pull the envelope from my back. My fingers are shaking. I set the small parcel on the bed, noting the way the edges are yellow, the paper darkened in places from old stains, perhaps the oil from a workingman's fingerprints.

He has handled this often over the years. Obviously revisited it again and again.

I find myself hesitating. A turning point. Do I really want to know? Maybe all couples need their secrets. Apparently, I still h.o.a.rd mine, from a yellow quilt to a stash of scotch.

But I can't let it go. Having discovered the envelope, I need to know what it contains. So I delicately ease it open, pull out a single item: an old photograph in about as great shape as the envelope.

Faded out, yellow toned, smudged; I still know immediately what I'm looking at. A summer's day. A ten-year-old girl wearing a familiar floral dress and a small, uncertain smile.

I stifle a gasp. Reflexively clutch the picture.

Vero.

I am holding a photo of Vero.

Which my husband had hidden from me.

Chapter 15.

WYATT HATED SECURITY camera footage. On TV crime shows, the quality was always highest resolution. You could blow it up, freeze it frame by frame, zoom in here, zoom out there, read the expiration date on the bread shelved just behind the evil perpetrator.

In reality, gas stations, convenience stores, mom-and-pop shops, were stressed-out businesses with little leftover profit to invest in things like state-of-the-art security systems. They had a tendency to go with the cheapest cameras available, weren't above purchasing used and/or out-of-date technology and reusing the same discs over and over until the results were filled with ghosts of recordings past.

Wyatt and Kevin had wanted one week's worth of security footage. The harried clerk informed them he had three days, which was all they kept in rotation. Wyatt and Kevin had hoped for decent-quality images. They got dark, blurry footage of endless cars turning in and out of the gas station. As for cars driving by, the cameras were too far away, while the road lacked adequate lighting. They could track twin beams of approaching headlights sweeping by; that was it.

As Kevin pointed out, at least Nicky's Audi had xenon headlights, with their particular crystalline-blue beam, meaning the vehicle that swept by at 4:39 A.M. Thursday morning could very well have been Nicole's car. But could they capture a license plate? No. An image of the driver? Not a chance. A paint color, defining dent, hint of make and model, or anything else that might help them in a court of law? s.h.i.t out of luck.

Not like the clerk cared. He'd left them alone in a narrow storage room to sort it all out. From his perspective, security cameras existed to catch the guy who entered the store and placed a gun to his head. Cars idling outside, vehicles pa.s.sing by on the main road, not his problem.

"Well, at least it tells us what didn't happen," Wyatt said at last.

"What didn't happen?" Kevin asked.

"Nicole Frank didn't fuel up here. Thomas Frank didn't stop in for an energy drink to perk him up while preparing to crash his wife's car. That's something."

"And no women, beautiful or otherwise, hung out after one A.M."

"Meaning if Thomas Frank did have a lover waiting to pick him up, she didn't wait around here," Wyatt said.

Kevin agreed. "That certainly narrows things down. I can see why you're so happy with this case."

"I like your idea to check his clothes," Wyatt said after a moment. Because when one door closed, another inevitably opened.

"We don't have probable cause," Kevin reminded him. "We'd need a witness who could place Thomas Frank at the scene or, better yet, Thomas Frank personally appearing on one of these video cameras. Without that . . . We can't tell a judge we suspect him solely on the grounds that he's her husband and everyone knows it's always the husband who did it."

"Policing 101: What do we do when we don't have probable cause?" Wyatt asked.

"Stir the pot until we do."

"Exactly. I say we return to the Franks' home. We request a look at his jackets and shoes, and we do it in front of his wife."

"Makes it harder for him to say no," Kevin acknowledged. "He won't want to look guilty."

"And maybe we get lucky, find something then and there."

"Sediment on the soles of his boots," Kevin deadpanned, "that matches the exact ratio of dirt, sand, minerals, present in the two-foot stretch of road where Nicole Frank's car plunged to its doom."

Both men rolled their eyes. Such CSI matches never occurred in real life. Best you could do in New Hampshire was compare road mixes. As in the newly paved two-mile stretch of road in Albany used a rough patch mix versus the more expensive repaving completed in North Conway. But that narrowed you down to miles, or maybe helped place a guy in a particular town. Still hardly a forensic smoking gun.

Of course, one advantage of TV: people watched the impossible enough times, they honestly thought it could be done. And there was nothing illegal about playing to those expectations. Why, sir, I see there's sand on your shoes. Very interesting, this sand. We'll definitely be taking a sample. Yep, that's pretty important sand.

While the sample itself might be bogus, when your suspect chooses to toss the shoes in his burn barrel the second two officers leave his house . . . Even judges grew suspicious of such behavior.

"What if Thomas has already washed his clothes?" Kevin was asking now.

Wyatt smiled. "Perfect. Gives us an excuse to check out the laundry room, scene of his wife's first accident."

"Oh, I like the way you think."

"I'd like it even better if my thinking told us what was going on with Nicole Frank."

"Give it time, my friend. Give it time."

THOMAS FRANK ANSWERED the door after the first ring. Less hesitation this time. Clearly a man growing resigned to his fate.

He looked tired, Wyatt thought. Stressed out. From the strain of caring for a concussed wife, or from the stress of covering his tracks? Either way, Wyatt smelled grilled cheese and tomato soup. He loved grilled cheese and tomato soup.

"Are we interrupting dinner?" Wyatt asked.

"As a matter of fact . . ."

"Then we'll keep it quick. Nicole around?"

Nicky appeared down the hall, by the family room, wearing the same yoga pants and oversize sweater from the morning. Her long brown hair appeared rumpled-maybe she'd been resting-while her face remained a quilted mess of bruises and lacerations.

"Mrs. Frank," Wyatt acknowledged.