Kayla pointed at the detective. “You have no right to talk to me like that.”
“So you’re going on record saying that you did not remove evidence from a crime scene?”
Kayla nudged her purse with her foot and then she pulled out the sandwich bag. She waved it in the detective’s face—the pregnancy test jiggled inside— and set it down on the table. He snatched it up.
“Do I need a lawyer?” she said.
“We believe it was your son who ransacked Ms. Riley’s cottage,” the detective said. “We could charge him with B and E right now. What you need is to start telling us the truth.”
“Paul?” she said.
“Would you like to call a lawyer?” Paul asked. “It might not be a bad idea.”
Kayla dropped her face in her hands. “Val is my lawyer.”
“Well, in that case you’re going to want to get another lawyer,” the detective said. “I guarantee it.”
The interrogation room was air-conditioned, and Kayla was chilly in her sundress. She rubbed her arms. Val was in trouble, then, and that was why she’d acted so strangely. “You have the pregnancy test,” Kayla said. “Are there any other questions?”
“Let’s get back to the events of last night,” Paul said. “Tell us again about Night Swimmers. What kind of group is this, exactly?”
“It’s not a
group,”
Kayla said. “It’s just three women. Myself, Val, and Antoinette. It’s a tradition we have, swimming at Great Point on the Friday of Labor Day weekend.”
“You drink champagne and swim in the nude,” the detective said. “You understand that’s a bit unusual? Why not wear bathing suits like other people? Does this…
Night Swimmers
group include any rituals of a sexual nature? Perhaps you’re more than just old friends?”
Paul Henry cleared his throat and turned away. Kayla sneered at the detective, although she wasn’t surprised. Men would always think what they wanted about what women did when they were alone.
“We drink a little champagne, we eat lobsters, and we
swim. That’s all there is to it. And last night, at some point, Antoinette went
into the water and didn’t surface. I called the police from the Wauwinet gatehouse, and you responded. That’s the whole story.”
“Let’s talk about when you called the police,” Paul Henry said. “You reached the pay phone and you called 911 right away? First thing?”
“Yes.” As soon as Kayla said this she remembered that she’d called Raoul
first. Before she could correct herself, the detective stood up.
“You’re lying again,” he said. “We checked that pay phone this morning. There were three phone calls placed successively to your house before you called 911.”
“That’s right,” she said. “I called my house first.”
“You called three times,” the detective said.
“I wanted to reach my husband.”
“You wanted to reach your husband even though your best friend was drowning?” the detective said. “Why not call 911 first and then call your husband? That’s the order that makes sense to me.”
“I was scared. I panicked. I wanted to talk to Raoul.”
“Those minutes you wasted could have cost Ms. Riley her life.”
“It wasn’t very long,” Kayla said.
The detective shuffled through his papers. “Four minutes. Might not seem like a lot of time to you, but I assure you it was a long time for Ms. Riley.”
“I’m sorry,” Kayla said. “I was under a lot of stress, I’d been drinking, and I did what I did. I don’t know what else I can tell you. My intention was to get help for Antoinette.”
Both Paul Henry and the detective were quiet. The detective sat back down.
“At what point did you throw the champagne glasses into the water?” he asked.
“Oh, God,” Kayla said. “I see where this is headed—”
“Where is it headed, Ms. Montero?” the detective said.
“Why are you badgering me?” Kayla said. “Why are you making it seem like I am somehow to
blame?
What did John Gluckstern tell you? He has it in for us, you know. He’s angry at his wife and so whatever he told you has a very unfair slant. But why would you believe him? He wasn’t even there. If I were you, I’d forget everything John Gluckstern told you. It was all lies.”
“What John told us is none of your business,” Paul said. “It’s our business, which we will check out in due course.”
“Ms. Riley was sleeping with your son,” the detective said. “I would guess that upset you pretty badly.”
“It would have upset me had I known. But I didn’t find out about Antoinette and Theo until today.”
“Kayla, please,” Paul Henry said.
“What?”
“You’re going on record saying that you had no idea—no hint or clue—that your son was having a relationship with Ms. Riley until today,” the detective said.
“That’s right.”
“And today, when you found out, who told you?”
“Theo told me.”
“Your son Theo told you?”
“Yes, he did.”
“When did he tell you?”
“This afternoon, at about two o’clock.”
“And that was the first you’d heard of it?”
“Yes.”
The detective removed his glasses and rubbed the bridge of his nose. “At what point did you throw the champagne glasses into the water?”
“When I got back from using the phone.”
“And why did you throw them in the water?”
“I already said I was scared. I panicked.”
“Is it true that when Ms. Gluckstern asked why you threw the glasses you said you were “destroying the evidence’?”
“I can’t remember what I said.”
“Ms. Gluckstern told us that you said you were “destroying the evidence.’ I wonder what you meant by that.”
“I didn’t mean anything by it. I was nervous that we’d been drinking.”
“Yes,” the detective said. “Judging from that bottle of champagne, it would seem the three of you drank quite a lot. How much would you say Ms. Riley had before she went swimming?”
“Two glasses.”
“Two glasses? A huge bottle like that, and she only had two glasses?”
“That’s right.”
“Ms. Gluckstern suggested that it might have been more like four or five glasses.”
“Well, maybe. I wasn’t counting.”
“Who poured the champagne?”
Kayla shifted in her seat. She hated the interrogation room. The atmosphere was stifling, and she couldn’t think. There was nothing to focus on except for the poster of the Beetle Cat, and the water cooler, which had those cone-shaped paper cups that looked like little dunce caps.
“May I have some water?” she said.
Paul Henry nodded; the detective huffed with impatience. Kayla filled one cup, drank it down, filled it again and drank it more slowly while she stared at the poster of the Beetle Cat. Who had poured the champagne? She tried to jump a step ahead of them. Why were they asking? Her eyelids felt heavy. By now Raoul would have done something about dinner, ordered a pizza or something. She wondered if he would wake Theo. She wondered if Theo would ever be able to sit and eat dinner with their family again. She crumpled the cup and returned to her seat.
“Val and I poured the champagne,” she said. “Antoinette may have poured some for herself, I guess. We all poured it. And there was a lot of spillage, too. I mean, we didn’t come close to consuming that whole bottle. We’re only three people.”
The detective looked at her. “So you poured Ms. Riley’s champagne?”
“Some of it.”
The detective scribbled something down on his legal pad and ended his sentence with two exclamation points, which he wrote with a flourish—dash, dot, dash, dot. Then he stood up.
“I’ll be right back,” he said. He left the interrogation room, closing the door behind him.
Kayla leaned back in the folding chair. “Paul, what’s going on?”
Paul Henry pinched his lips together and shook his head. Then he drew a breath as if he were going to explain all the secrets of the world to her, but he let the breath go and said, “You need to do a better job picking your friends, Kayla.”
It was a strange thing to say. Stranger still because what Kayla couldn’t possibly explain to Paul Henry was that she had never picked Val and Antoinette as friends; rather, they’d been brought together in the house on Hooper Farm Road by some larger force— God, fate, the powers that ruled. And Kayla knew from the very first Night Swimmers that she and Val and Antoinette would be lifelong friends. She knew it the way some people knew about love. “I’m furious at Antoinette, Paul, don’t get me wrong. But I didn’t have anything to do with her disappearance. And neither did Val. I feel like this clown—” she nodded at the door “—wants to hold us responsible.”
“John Gluckstern…” he said.
“I can’t believe you’re listening to John Gluckstern,” Kayla said. “He’s waging a vendetta against his wife. But that’s between John and Val. It has nothing to do with me.”
“We’ve received conflicting information,” Paul said.
“Because John is lying,” Kayla said.
Before Paul could respond, the door swung open and the detective was back. He looked between Paul Henry and Kayla, frowning. Then he chuckled under his breath like a frat boy about to pull a prank. Kayla wanted to slap him. He sat back down across from her, and with the slow, deliberate movements of a magician, he produced a brown pill bottle from his shirt pocket. Kayla thought immediately of the pills in Antoinette’s medicine cabinet until he said, “Tell me, do these belong to you?” He pushed the bottle toward her. Her Ativan.
“Where did you get these?” she said. She looked down at her feet where her purse lay. The pregnancy test had been in there, and so, she assumed, was the Ativan. Or in her car. Had he gone out to her car?
“Ms. Gluckstern gave them to us. She said she found them on the beach up at Great Point last night. Your prescription for Ativan, a heavy-duty sedative.” The detective put his hands on the back of his folding chair and leaned toward her. “Ms. Gluckstern gave us reason to believe that you slipped one of the sedatives into Ms. Riley’s champagne. She said
you
were pouring the champagne. She said you threw the glasses in the water to
destroy the evidence.
She also told us that you mentioned fleeing the island this evening instead of coming to talk to us. And she pointed out that you have a strong motive—your son’s relationship with Ms. Riley. I don’t know how much more plainly I can put it, Mrs. Montero. We suspect foul play on your part.”
“Foul play on
my
part?” Kayla tried to get her mind around what this wicked man was telling her. Val had given her pills to the police? She’d twisted the facts so that Kayla looked like a suspect?
“Let’s not forget that you put off calling 911,” the detective said. “Why not allow a few extra minutes to be sure that Ms. Riley was swept out to sea?”
Kayla couldn’t believe what she was hearing.
“Kayla?” Paul Henry said.
Kayla closed her eyes.
You need to do a better job picking your friends.
First Antoinette, and now Val.
“Val lied to you,” Kayla said. “She knows I only found out about my son and Antoinette today.”
“She said you made a comment just before Ms. Riley entered the water. Accusing Ms. Riley of an affair. And Lindsey Allerton’s statement corroborated this. She said you told her that you’d accused her mother of an affair.”
Kayla wasn’t sure how to proceed. Half of her wanted to deny everything. But this was so unfair, so twisted, that she wanted to set the record straight. “I accused Antoinette of having an affair with my husband, not my son.”
“You accused her of sleeping with Raoul?” Paul asked.
“Accuse
is a strong word,” Kayla said.
“So now we have a husband and a son sleeping with the same woman,” the detective said. “This is better than I thought.”
“Sorry to disappoint you, Detective,” Kayla said venomously. “But there’s nothing going on between Raoul and Antoinette.”
“Then why did you accuse her?” Paul asked.
“I was drinking,” Kayla said. She could have gone on to explain that she sensed something wrong when she’d looked at Antoinette. But she’d said Raoul’s name—well, because that was what came to mind. Not Theo. Never Theo. She drilled her finger into the table. “I had nothing to do with Antoinette disappearing. Val is trying to deflect blame off herself because she’s afraid you’ll believe whatever her husband told you. She’s lying.”
“Now everyone’s lying,” the detective said. “You already lied to us about the pregnancy test and the phone calls. There’s no reason for me to believe you over Ms. Gluckstern. She was very up front with us. Cooperative.”
“Cooperative about framing me,” Kayla said. “I can’t believe this. Am I under arrest?”
“Did you put a sedative in Ms. Riley’s champagne?” the detective said.
“No,” she said. “I had them out because I needed one. I took one. I must have left them lying around.”
“I don’t believe you,” he said.
“I don’t care if you believe me,” Kayla said. “It’s the truth. I had nothing to do with Antoinette disappearing.” An anger grew in her that was so vile and so dangerous that she felt capable of killing Antoinette, Valerie, and the detective. “Am I under arrest?”
“No,” Paul Henry said. “We’re not sure what to think. The detective believes Ms. Riley is in that water, although I’m not convinced. But we have to consider every possibility.”
The detective rapped the bottle of Ativan on the table. “And one possibility is that you took advantage of this yearly nude champagne-drinking, lobster-eating adventure of yours to make your friend disappear. After all, she was sleeping with your son! You knew Ms. Riley would be drinking, you knew she would be swimming in risky waters in the dark. You knew everyone would believe that she simply got swept away. But some of us are on to you, Mrs. Montero. Your friend Ms. Gluckstern is on to you, and I am on to you.” He smiled. “If we do find Ms. Riley’s body in that water, we’ll come after you first. And since she was pregnant, well, then there’s that life to consider as well.”
That life. The baby’s life.
Paul Henry guided Kayla down the dim hallway by the arm, and Kayla thought for a minute that he was going to throw her into the holding cell, but instead, he led her to the waiting room, which glowed like a laboratory under the fluorescent lights. Kayla was dizzy with the accusations; her vision was splotchy. She had to go to the bathroom.