Chapter 4 - What Ellen Said on the Patio
Chapter 4 - What Ellen Said on the Patio
The next morning I called the party planner before I'd even started coffee.
Her name is Marisol and she's done every birthday we've had since Ellie turned one, and I trust her with the guest book the way I trust Deb with everything else.
I asked her one question.
Is there a Marsh anywhere on the print list.
"No," she said.
"Forty-two printed invitations, no plus-ones, that's what you asked for.
Nobody named Marsh ever got one from me."
So I knew before I ever opened my mouth to my husband that the blonde woman in the tan top had walked into my daughter's party without an invitation, on Nick's side of the yard, and stood there for four hours like she belonged to us.
I got my answer from him that afternoon, right after he got home from the lot.
"Ellen?"
I said.
"Who is she, Nick."
"Someone from work," he said.
He didn't even stop walking.
He said it over his shoulder, walking toward the fridge.
"From work," I said.
"Yeah.
From work."
"Who was never on the guest list."
"I invited her personally.
At the last minute."
He pulled a bottle of water out, closed the door, and looked at me for the first time.
"What is this, an interrogation?"
"It's a question."
"It's an interrogation," he said, and he walked past me down the hall, and I heard the bedroom door, and I didn't follow him, because I had already decided I wasn't going to get the truth out of Nick Whitfield in my own kitchen.
I got it on the patio instead, the next Saturday, at his mother's lake house, at the makeup party for the relatives who missed the first one.
That was Nick's idea.
He wanted everybody back out to the lake, one more time, before the summer ended.
Ellen came again.
She was out on the back patio alone around four in the afternoon, standing at the railing, looking at the water, and I walked out and closed the screen door behind me so nobody inside could hear us.
"Ellen," I said.
She turned around slow, and I got a good look at her up close for the first time.
Blonde hair slicked back off her face, gold chain necklace, gold earrings, tan top.
Calm.
Calmer than me and I could feel how much calmer she was, and it made me angry.
"How do you know my husband," I said.
She took a sip of whatever was in her cup and set it on the railing.
"Longer than you have," she said.
I felt it in my chest, like a hand pressed flat against me.
"What is that supposed to mean."
"It means what it means," she said.
"I'm not going to stand on this patio and explain myself to you while your daughter is inside opening presents.
That's not how this goes."
"Then how does it go."
She looked at me a long time.
"You'll find out," she said.
"You're already looking.
I can tell."
She picked up her cup and walked past me and back inside, and I stood on that patio by myself for another two or three minutes before I could make my face work again.
When I walked back into that house, I went through the living room, through the kitchen, checking every face.
My mother was there.
Deb was there.
Ty was there with his plate.
Ellie's little chair was empty by the coffee table where a half-open present sat with its paper hanging off.
I went upstairs.
The loft above the garage is where Nick always takes her when she needs to lie down, and I put my hand on the door handle.
The door was locked.
I knocked and I called through it, and Nick called back in a voice I don't hear very often, the kind he uses when he's talking to somebody else and I'm just supposed to hear the message.
"She's resting, Karen.
Give her ten minutes."
I stood on the landing outside that locked door with the sound of the party going on downstairs behind me, and I made a decision I didn't tell anybody about for two more weeks.
I went back to the office, that's what I said.
May you like
I was going back to the office to grab something.
I grabbed the driveway camera footage off my phone that night while he was still out on the lake with his brothers, and the first sixteen minutes of it are a thing I have never been able to unsee.
