The Stranger(52)
“Suzanne Hope?”
“Who’s asking?”
“I work for the Acme Chimney Cleaning Service—”
“Not interested, take me off your list.”
Click.
Rinsky shrugged and smiled. “She’s home.”
Chapter 23
The drive took exactly twenty minutes.
Adam pulled up to one of those sad garden apartment complexes of monotonous brick that catered to young couples saving up to buy a first home and divorced dads who were broke and/or wanted to stay near the kids. He found apartment 9B and knocked on the door.
“Who is it?”
It was a woman’s voice. She hadn’t opened the door.
“Suzanne Hope?”
“What do you want?”
He actually hadn’t planned for this. For some strange reason, he had figured that she’d open the door and invite him in and then he could explain his reason for coming here, even though he still wasn’t sure what that reason was. Suzanne Hope was a potential thin thread, a tenuous connection to what had led Corinne to run off. Maybe he could gently pull on the thread and, to mix metaphors, learn something.
“My name is Adam Price,” he said to the closed door. “My wife is Corinne.”
Silence.
“Do you remember her? Corinne Price?”
“She’s not here,” the voice he assumed was Suzanne Hope’s said.
“I didn’t think she was,” he replied, though now that he thought about it, perhaps he had held out the smallest unspoken hope that finding Corinne would be that easy.
“What do you want?”
“Can we talk a second?”
“What about?”
“About Corinne.”
“This isn’t my business.”
Shouting through a door felt distant, of course, but Suzanne Hope was clearly not yet comfortable opening it. He didn’t want to push it and lose her completely. “What’s not your business?” he asked.
“You and Corinne. Whatever troubles you’re having.”
“What makes you think we’re having troubles?”
“Why else would you be here?”
Why indeed. Score one for Suzanne Hope. “Do you know where Corinne is?”
Down the concrete path and to the right, a postal worker eyed Adam with suspicion. Not surprising. He had thought about the divorced dads who show up here, but of course there were divorced moms too. Adam tried to nod at the postal worker to show him that he meant no harm, but that didn’t seem to help.
“Why would I know?” the voice asked.
“She’s missing,” Adam said. “I’m trying to find her.”
Several seconds passed. Adam took a step back and kept his hands at his sides, trying to look as unthreatening as possible. Eventually, the door opened a crack. The chain was still in place, but now he could see a sliver of Suzanne Hope’s face. He still wanted to come inside and sit down, talk to her face-to-face, engage, disarm, distract, whatever it would take. But if a chain made Suzanne Hope feel safe, then so be it.
“When was the last time you saw Corinne?” he asked her.
“A long time ago.”
“How long?”
Adam saw her eyes look up to the right. He didn’t necessarily buy the idea that you could tell lies by the way the eyes move, but he did know that when someone’s eyes look up and to the right, it usually indicated that the person was visually remembering things, as opposed to the left, which meant visually constructing things. Of course, like most generalizations, you couldn’t really count on it, and visually constructing did not mean lying. If you asked someone to think of a purple cow, that would lead to visual construction, which isn’t a lie or deception.
Either way, he didn’t think she was lying.
“Maybe two, three years ago.”
“Where?”
“It was a Starbucks.”
“So you haven’t seen her since . . .”
“Since the time she figured out I was lying about being pregnant,” she finished for him. “That’s right.”
Adam hadn’t expected that answer. “No phone calls?”
“No phone calls, no e-mails, no letters, nothing. I’m sorry I can’t help you.”
The postal worker kept moving, kept delivering the mail, kept eyeing Adam. Adam put his hands to his eyes to shade the sun. “Corinne followed your lead, you know.”
“What do you mean?” she asked.
“You know what I mean.”
Through the crack in the door, he could see Suzanne Hope nod. “She did ask me a lot of questions.”
“What kind of questions?”
“Where did I buy the prosthetic belly, how did I get the sonogram pictures, stuff like that.”
“So you directed her to Fake-A-Pregnancy.com.”