No One You Know by Michelle Richmond Page B

him. He had done such enormous damage to my family, had taken on such absurd proportions in my mind, that no one could make me feel the depth of emotion he elicited. It was hatred I felt for him, and when hatred goes deep enough, no affection can compare. For love to take hold there must be available space in the mind and heart; I was so eaten up with anger toward him, I could not make room.
    “Why did you do it?” I said quietly. This was the question I had been asking myself for almost half of my life. I had long since given up hope that I might find the answer. It didn’t occur to me, at that moment, to believe his claim of innocence. I had believed far too long in his guilt to simply let that conviction slip away.
    I waited. He sat there staring alternately at his hands, and at me. Maria emerged from the kitchen, carrying a jar filled with insects. She went over to the windowsill, where her Venus flytraps sat, opened the jar, and shook it gently over the plants. Finally, McConnell said, “That’s what I’m trying to tell you. It wasn’t me.”

Eight

    S TRANGE THINGS WERE RUMORED TO HAPPEN all the time in Diriomo—ghosts dancing in the churchyard, candles spontaneously igniting, music from unknown quarters drifting through deserted streets—but until that night, they had never happened to me.
    “I don’t deny that I was the most likely suspect,” McConnell said, looking directly into my eyes. “But that doesn’t make me guilty.” He didn’t flinch, didn’t glance away.
    “You were having an affair with my sister.”
    “Yes, I admitted that to the police.”
    “Only after they already knew. Only after the book was published. In the beginning, you told them nothing.”
    “It was on Margaret’s bidding that I decided not to say anything. As angry as she was about the affair, she was terrified of what would happen if the suspicion was cast on me. In hindsight, of course, I knew how stupid my decision was. But under the circumstances, I didn’t think I had the right to deny Margaret anything.”
    “You had dinner with Lila the night she disappeared,” I said. “After the book was published, a hostess came forward who placed you at Sam’s Grill together.”
    “I don’t deny that.”
    “And you left the restaurant together.”
    “We did.”
    “You walked her to the Muni station at ten p.m.”
    He nodded.
    “That makes you the last person to see her. And the hostess said that she looked upset when you left the restaurant. That morning, before she left home, she’d been crying.”
    McConnell nodded again.
    “Well?” I felt the old anger simmering up again. “Everything was going well in her life. She’d just gotten all that attention for the paper she presented at Columbia. She was a shoo-in for the Hilbert Prize at Stanford. Everyone knew she was on her way. You were obviously the source of her distress—it couldn’t have been anything else.”
    “Do you remember what Thorpe proposed as my motive?” McConnell asked.
    “He said you were breaking up with Lila that night at the restaurant, and she threatened to tell your wife about the two of you.”
    He looked at me in silence.
    “What?” I said.
    “Tell me, does that sound like something Lila would do?”
    He was right. Although I wasn’t about to confess this to McConnell, that part of Thorpe’s argument had always nagged at me. It simply wasn’t in Lila’s character. She would never have told McConnell’s wife, nor would she have threatened to do so. Over the years, I’d tried to sweep my discomfort with this detail away by telling myself that I didn’t really know Lila as well as I thought I did.
    “Were you breaking up with her?”
    “Quite the contrary. A few days before, I had come clean with my wife.”
    Maria emerged from the kitchen and pointed at a clock on the wall. It was two a.m. “Cerrado,” she said.
    “Just a few more minutes,” I pleaded. I wasn’t ready for this conversation to end. There was so much