Chapter 8 - Problem Solved
Ysolde had been busy.
While I was at Rosalind's house reading the accident report, she had driven to the cousin's shop and knocked on his door.
She told me later that Dov Beckett was a nervous man with soft hands and a bad memory for names.
He remembered her, though.
Because she had been kind to him once, at a family barbecue Beckett had dragged her to, and he had never forgotten it.
She sat with him for two hours in his office and asked him about the job site.
At first he denied everything.
Then she took out her phone and played him a recording.
It was a voicemail Beckett had left her, the week before, saying, 'I fixed the problem with the logs.
Don't worry about it.'
Dov listened to it and turned white.
'He told me it was just a joke,' he said. 'I didn't know what he was going to do.'
Ysolde recorded the rest of the conversation.
Dov said Beckett had paid him five thousand dollars to remove the bolt from the guardrail on Grant's site.
He said Beckett told him it was just to slow the job down, to force Grant to renegotiate a contract.
He said he didn't know Grant would fall.
He swore he didn't know.
But he took the money.
And he kept the bolt in a coffee can in his garage, because he was afraid to throw it away.
Ysolde brought the folder to Rosalind's driveway that afternoon.
When Beckett saw her, his face went blank.
'What are you doing here?' he said.
She didn't answer him.
She handed me the folder.
Inside were three things: a written statement from Dov, signed and dated; a thumb drive with the recording; and a photocopy of the coffee can, taken with a phone.
'He'll talk to the police,' Ysolde said. 'But only if I'm there.'
Beckett looked at me, and for the first time, I saw something in his eyes I hadn't seen before.
Not anger.
Not charm.
Fear.
'You can't do this,' he said.
'I can,' I said.
Mr. Vance took everything to the district attorney's office the next morning.
The forged loan, the insurance policy, Dov's statement, the recording.
The DA's office moved faster than I expected.
Beckett was arrested at the house that same afternoon.
I wasn't there.
I was at Rosalind's, lying on the couch with a pillow under my belly, when my phone rang.
It was our neighbor, Mrs. Purdy.
She's seventy-eight and she doesn't miss anything.
'Ariella,' she said, 'the police just took your husband away in handcuffs.'
'I know,' I said.
'Good,' she said. 'Now listen.
I saw him in the garage last night.
He was hiding something in the back corner, behind the paint cans.'
'What was it?' I asked.
'I don't know,' she said. 'But it was a box.
A big cardboard box with a word on it.'
'What word?'
She paused.
'BABY,' she said.
I drove over that evening with Rosalind.
Mrs. Purdy was waiting on the porch with a flashlight.
We went into the garage together and moved the paint cans aside.
The box was there, pushed into the corner, dusty and taped shut.
I cut the tape with a kitchen knife and opened the flaps.
Inside were baby clothes.
Tiny onesies, still in their packaging.
A pair of soft yellow socks.
A sonogram photo, folded in half.
And a note, in Beckett's handwriting, on a piece of lined paper.
It said: 'If it's a girl, we try again.'
I read it twice.
Then I handed it to Rosalind.
She read it and looked at me.
'What does that mean?' she said.
I looked at the sonogram.
The date on it was from three months after our wedding.
He had known.
He had known the whole time.
And he had still told Ysolde he couldn't have children.
I put the note back in the box and closed the lid.
'It means,' I said, 'that he was planning this long before I ever walked into that nursery.'
Mrs. Purdy put her hand on my shoulder.
'You're going to be all right,' she said.
I looked at the box, and the shoes I'd dropped on the floor that day, and the ribbon with DADDY on it, and I felt something settle in me.
Not peace.
Not yet.
But something.
Something that felt a lot like knowing.
