“Sweet. Passive. Actually, she became even submissive as the years went by. We used to have a glass of wine every now and then. One time she came over and said she’d prefer mineral water. The second time she did that I asked if she was pregnant or maybe had been drinking too much and wanted to cut back.”

“What did she say?”

“Get this. She said she stopped drinking because Hudson said so.”

I bristle inside, but don’t show it. “Like forbid it?”

“Exactly. Her words were, ‘Hudson said that I shouldn’t debase my body with wine anymore. He’s the leader of our family’.”

Leader? She sees disdain in my eyes.

Damn. She stops talking, like she’s said too much.

I encourage her to continue. “What did you make of that?”

“First,” Chantelle says, “I thought that I didn’t even know this girl anymore. I knew that they homeschooled Ellie and that they went to a fundamentalist church somewhere on the eastside. Second, I felt sorry for her. I wanted to say something, ask her how she really felt. I just couldn’t go there. I knew that my asking her anything would only make things worse.”

“Do you know anything about the Whitcombs?”

“Do I know Troy and Tyra are liars? Yes.”

“What do you mean, liars?”

“I saw Susan Whitcomb two weeks ago.”

I’m confused. And I look it.

“She didn’t die in any accident. Her husband and daughter made that up after she’d been discovered having an affair. I don’t know why they made up the story. Sympathy for the two of them, I guess. Joy in getting rid of her. She went along with it. Susan’s like that. Weak. I’d have taken him for everything he had.”

“I’m actually stunned,” I admit. “Now I know why there hasn’t been anything filed about her death. Nothing in the papers either.”

“Right. To hear those two talk about it they couldn’t be happier if she actually were dead.”

We talk some more. I look at my phone. I ask her if we can speak again and she gives me her number.

“Detective,” she says as I turn to leave, “I wish I could tell you more, but really…” She looks over at the fence that separates her house from the Burbank place. “After Hudson became the leader, or whatever, of the family, we no longer needed a fence. He’d fashioned an invisible forcefield between all of us.”

Thirty-Five

Troy Whitcomb answers the gleaming mahogany front door before I knock. That quick. He’s older than he sounded on the phone, around sixty, I think. His hair is nearly gone, just a gray halo of duck-down-like hairs on his crown. He’s crumpled, worn out. The bags under his eyes could hold the contents of a family’s trip to the beach.