Page 106 of Haunted

And we say it at the same time, in the same words, because he said them to me in a closet four days ago.

“You don’t put stuff in a car that’s going nowhere.”

I look at him. “You take it out.”

“Just like I did with your car.”

The room goes very quiet.

“He knew her car wasn’t going anywhere,” I say slowly. “Half an hour before that fire came over the ridge, he already knew she wasn’t driving out of there.”

“Maybe there was a problem with the car like there was with mine.” I pause. “Wait. I remember this now. I remember in my car, trying to start it, and I looked over and saw her car there with the trunk still open, and I realized that I would have to abandon it, too.”

“If that’s the case, why isn’t he in more panic to get everything? Why is he standing in the driveway shouting at her to hurry up?” Lance asks.

He scrubs the video back and plays it again, and this time neither of us is looking at Henry’s hands.

“Suzannah, for God’s sakes, you don’t need it! Would you please get moving?” he shouts into the house.

“Huh.” He plays it again, this time with the sound turned up a little bit more. “Do you hear anything?”

“The microphone probably didn’t pick her up. This was technology from ten years ago.”

He turns the sound all the way up and plays it.

Nothing. No answer. No voice, no movement, no shape behind him in that hallway. He shouts twice into an open door and nobody in that house says one single word back to him.

“She doesn’t answer,” Lance says. “But he’s talking to her like she was. You were maybe fifteen feet away. Did you hear her?”

“I can’t remember.” I close my eyes. “I mean, you saw the video. People were calling to each other and packing. It was so busy and loud. I thought I…” I shake my head. “I don’t know. But I would have. Suzannah wasn’t quiet. My bedroom faced the road, so when she would pull into her driveway, if she was on the phone, I would hear her very clearly. She had that kind of voice. I remember that now.”

“One more time,” he says, and this time, we play it with the volume all the way up, so loud that we can hear neighbors three doors down asking each other if they locked the front door.

I look at Lance. “They found her in the living room. It was in the paper. Lying on her side with one arm stretched out toward the hall door, and I remember reading it and thinking she must have been trying to crawl out when the smoke got her. I was seventeen and I thought about that for weeks.”

He plays it a fourth time. We are both leaning into the screen now like a pair of idiots.

“There.” He stops it and puts his finger on the screen. “On the hall floor, coming through from the lounge. Just at the edge of the door frame.”

It could be anything. It could be a shoe, or a bag, or a fold in a rug. It is a pale shape on a dark floor for about two seconds of a phone video shot ten years ago by a woman who was not looking at it.

And then Henry walks over and stands in front of it.

Neither of us says anything for a while.

“That can’t be right,” I say. “The fire wasn’t even on that side of the ridge yet. There was no smoke on our street. How could she be—”

I stop.

“Hear me out,” Lance says. “If she was already dead before that fire got anywhere near Denning Court, then it wasn’t the fire that did it.”

“You think Henry killed his wife?”

“I think a man stood in a doorway and shouted at somebody who wasn’t answering, in front of a witness with a camera, and then blocked the view.” He says it very evenly. “And I think most women who are killed are killed by somebody they know.”

“But he loved her.” I hear how stupid it sounds coming out. “He talks about her at every meeting. He got a park named after her.”

“Yes,” Lance says. “He did.”