Vanished in the Dunes (28 page)

He freezes. The chain drops to the carpet, but his hands cannot move. There is no question where it came from. His image of Heidi is real. She stands near the stairs and fingers the necklace while she tells him it was a gift from Stern. He sees her chest heave and her lips swell and part. It's all so real.

“Ahhhh!” The sound flies wildly from his mouth.

“You okay in there?” One of the movers asks. He mumbles an answer.

“Yes. Okay.” That's all he can summon.

He reaches down and lifts the necklace. He fondles the
H
as Heidi
once did. A deep breath barely helps, but the hammering in his heart eases. He closes his eyes.

“You were here, weren't you?”

He speaks as if Sara is still in the room. Putting away laundry or combing her hair in front of the dresser mirror.

“It wasn't Stern. It was you. You came home early. While I was out looking for my wallet. Maybe you were planning to get here early all along to check out whether I was with someone. Maybe there never was a meeting with a client here on Long Island, but you did have a rented car. That's how you got here. And when you found her here you thought you were right all along, didn't you? Thought I was screwing someone while you were in the city.”

He stops and opens his eyes, but she's not there. He can't explain. She can't explain. He closes his eyes again.

“Did you fight? Did you push her? Maybe she started to fall and you reached out to help.

“Maybe you grabbed onto the necklace and it came away as she fell.”

He unclasps his hand and looks down. The chain is broken in the rear clasp where it was torn from her neck.

“I can see it.”

And for a moment he can. He watches as Heidi falls down the stairs in a grotesque dive as death swallows her scream.

“You tried to save her and she fell away. Right away you thought she was dead so you left. Maybe you didn't even know you were holding the necklace until you'd driven off. Is that how it happened? Answer me, dammit! And when were you going to say something? Were you waiting for the cops to come calling? Or were waiting for me to confess it all? That we had a thing going, but I never did because nothing ever happened. Nothing.”

His eyes begin to glisten. He turns his head and looks through the bedroom window, but the view is limited to the oldest house on
the block, a weather-beaten cottage across the street on nearly an acre. There is no ocean view out there to lose himself in while he tries to make sense of it all.

“But she might also have fallen while I was out and before you came home. I mean the stairs were newly refinished, weren't they?”

The thought brings him a moment's reprieve from his first instinct, but the idea loses steam almost as quickly.

“If that's what happened, then why would you take the necklace if you came in and found Heidi dead? No way. And even if you thought I'd killed her and then gone out for something to help cover it up, you never would have just bent over and pulled the necklace away. No. You had to have struggled. That's the only way it could have happened.”

A knock on the door brings him back.

“Mr. Posner.”

Another knock.

“Mr. Posner. You all right?”

“Yeah.”

“We're almost finished out here. Anything else that needs to be done before we get to the bedroom?”

Posner cannot speak.

“Sir. Anything else?”

“Just one thing. I'll be a minute.”

Footsteps move away from the door. Posner stands and walks around to the other side of the bed. He looks down at the night table, on which rests a lamp, clock radio, and phone. One hand still grasps the necklace. He spreads the necklace out on the table and smoothes out the chain.

“And the night just after it happened. The night I planned to meet you at the airport and you cancelled and said we needed a separation. I thought it was just more of your growing jealousy and looking for you in the terminal, I couldn't think of anything else. It all
made a kind of mad sense at the time. Your suspicions had been developing for months. And when you saw Heidi at the house, it all came together. You thought you knew it all about Heidi and me. And you never let on. Not a word. So we spent all those days and nights afterwards either not speaking at all, or when we did, never daring to share our secrets. God, you must have hated me then, yet somehow time allowed you to change enough to forgive me in spite of everything you thought I did. Maybe you forgave me because it was the only way you could forgive yourself for what happened to Heidi.”

He blinks his eyes a few times, but there are no more tears.

“Just one thing,” he repeats to the empty room, but it's not really empty. Sara's here.

Wherever he looks she's here.

He pulls out his wallet and fishes out a card. He sits on the bed, picks up the phone, and punches in Peter Wisdom's direct line.