Page 57 of I Will Ruin You

“So, in light of that, and I hate to ask, but I wonder if you’d be willing to cancel the deal.”

“Of course. It’s not a problem.”

“I’m really, really sorry about this.”

“I’m the one who should feel badly. That maybe I was taking advantage of him in a weak moment. That was never my intention. But it seemed like he’d already made up his mind to sell.” He patted the cash again. “Maybe we’ll go out for dinner.”

That made Bonnie laugh. “I know a great little café on the Champs-Élysées.”

“You have a wonderful evening,” Jack said, and continued on into the house.

Bonnie gave him one last wave, waited until he was inside, then continued on to the sitter’s.

It was the right thing to do, she told herself. And she was betting that once she told Richard what she’d done, that he didn’t need the money for his legal defense, that he could keep his boat, he’d be happy.

Twenty-Six

Richard

On my way to the Sycamore Drive address Belinda had given, I thought about what Grace Reynolds had revealed to me.

Her husband Anson had been depressed for some time. He’d been good, she said, at not showing it at work, but outside of school he was a man tormented by private demons. She’d urged him to seek help, to talk to someone, anyone, but he said he couldn’t bring himself to do that.

“You’ve no idea what was troubling him?” I asked.

She had shaken her head sadly. “You read stories all the time about people, like these big celebrities who you think have everything, but they’re miserable. There doesn’t have to be a reason.”

Unless there was.

When Grace wasn’t home, he’d started up the car in the garage with the doors closed, and sat behind the wheel until he’d accomplished what he’d set out to do. Before dying, he’d paid off the monthly bills, changed the batteries in all the smoke detectors, and fixed a plugged drain in the kitchen that he’d been meaning to get to. He hadn’t, Grace said, wanted her to have to deal with any of the everyday stuff in the days and weeks after his passing.

She hadn’t wanted the world to know how he’d gone, and the various authorities acceded to her request to say he had passed of “heart failure.” She didn’t even think Trent knew how he had actually died.

I thanked her for her time and the coffee, told her I would think about whether I had the time to come back and search through those boxes in the second bedroom for Anson’s lesson plans, and caught a glimpse of her knocking back that drink as I was showing myself out.

And now I was on Sycamore. The Finster house.

It was a modest bungalow with an attached garage. As I did a slow drive-by, I saw that all the drapes were drawn, the grass needed cutting, and there was a for sale sign on the lawn. There were some flyers sticking out of a jammed mailbox by the front door.

The place did not look lived-in at all.

I went to the end of the street, turned around, drove past the house once more, then pulled over to the shoulder and parked. I got out and walked up to the house one door over from the Finster house and rang the bell.

A harried-looking woman in her twenties, balancing a baby on her hip, appeared after about thirty seconds. “Yes?” she said, opening the screen a foot.

“I was looking for the Finsters,” I said. “Is that their place next door? Up for sale?”

“Yeah, well, it was,” she said, shifting the baby to her other hip. “First Mr. Finster died about three years back, then Mrs. Finster. But they didn’t own the house, they rented. Owner had it on the market awhile, hasn’t rented it out to anyone else.”

“I was looking for Billy,” I said.

“Billy?” she said, and blushed. “Him and me actually went out for a while there, back in the day, but he got married to someone used to be a friend of mine.” The emphasis on “used to be” suggested this friend might have had something to do with her breaking up with Billy.

“You know where they live now?”

“Yeah, sure.”

Finster’s house was a small one-story on Wooster, a few blocks from the Housatonic River. Gray siding, black shutters, a separate garage toward the back of the property at the end of the driveway. A small silver Kia was parked on the driveway, closer to the street. As I passed, I held up my phone and fired off a few shots. When I reached the top of the street I made a right onto Windy Hill Road, pulled over, and stopped. I wanted to check the pictures I’d taken, making sure I’d captured decent images of the house and the car and its license plate. I didn’t know that I had a use for them, but if I came up with one, I was ahead of the game.