The Daylight Marriage by Heidi Pitlor Page A

who’d just moved there. Anything at all you can think of that might help us here?” he asked. “Oh, and we got the match this morning. So yes, the fingernail marks were hers.”
    â€œBut—oh.” Lovell took a seat. She could have been trying to etch her initials into the pier. It was just the sort of thing she would do.
    â€œYou can’t think of anything?” Duncan said, incredulous. “Why do you think she went all the way into Boston when she had to go to work that morning?”
    â€œCould she have been carjacked or kidnapped or something?”
    â€œWe don’t know yet. We haven’t found her car. But she did make that phone call to the girl at the flower store. The call was traced to Boston. The girl said Hannah didn’t sound strange or anything, that she was convincing when she said that your daughter was home sick. My guess is that Hannah drove in and that no one took her to Boston.”
    â€œOk.”
    â€œBut if there was some reason for her to go there, if there’s even the smallest thing you can think of—and it might seem like nothing to you—we need anything we can get at this point. Somewhere she meant to be going, someone who might have seen her.”
    â€œI don’t have a clue about why she would have gone there specifically,” Lovell said. He assumed that by now Duncan knew about Doug Bowen and his proposal on Carson Beach. Lovell considered the possibility that Duncan already knew about the fight the evening before, that Janine or someone else, maybe Sophie, had told him. And that the man was testing him right now. Duncan had wanted to get him here in person, to give him the news about the fingernail marks so that he could see the reaction on Lovell’s face. Lovell had no choice but to tell him everything. His stomach lurched as he began.
    â€œOK, hold on,” Duncan said. “Have you told anyone else about this yet?”
    â€œNo,” Lovell said. “I should have. I knew it wouldn’t look good, that it, I mean, it might be taken a certain way, but now that all this is happening, I guess I figured she’d be back now and that it wouldn’t matter so much. I could take a lie-detector test.”
    â€œThey’re nightmares in court. Judges don’t like them. But wait—slow down. Let me ask you some things. Did you threaten her?” Duncan asked. “Did it get physical?”
    â€œI didn’t hit her or anything.”
    â€œOK. Any reason she would have felt unsafe?”
    â€œWell, infinitely pissed off at me. It wasn’t my best night,” he said. “But I don’t think, I mean, probably not unsafe. ” Maybe Duncan had not, in fact, known.
    â€œYou ever hit her? You ever push her around or anything else like that? Get a little too rough?”
    â€œNo,” Lovell said, relieved to be able to answer this question clearly.
    â€œShe ever disappear before?”
    â€œOnce, just for the night,” Lovell explained, but he told the detective that she had returned early the next morning.
    And finally: “You think she was depressed?”
    â€œPossibly.”
    â€œAll right. These are standard questions that I have to ask.” The detective cleared his throat. “Could she have been suicidal?”
    â€œNo, I don’t think so,” Lovell said. “I mean, I guess I can’t say for sure. She wasn’t happy.”
    â€œDid she ever talk about hurting herself?”
    â€œNo.”
    â€œYou sure?”
    â€œSometimes she took Sominex to help her sleep. A year ago, she couldn’t sleep for weeks, and one night she took maybe four or five.”
    â€œYou’d need to take more than that to do any harm.”
    â€œThat last night she was miserable.” Lovell wrapped one hand around his other. “But I think she just, that she couldn’t, you know, stand me. ”
    â€œAll right,” Duncan said.
    â€œAll