Influenced Eva Robinson (polar express read aloud .TXT) 📖

he couldn’t stop himself. When you found a simple way to manage the epinephrine pumped out by your amygdala, you used it.

Sixteen swirls of his spoon in his morning tea, sixteen taps of his toe before he entered a house.

He started tapping the door again, counting out loud this time. When he’d got it right, he opened the door, perfectly composed. “Just clearing my head.”

They started across the narrow street toward the house. It looked like an old American Colonial—yellow with green shutters, and an actual white picket fence around the lawn. A three-car garage stood at the back of the driveway.

“Nice place. Guess he got some of his parents’ money.” As she leaned into him to whisper, he got the faintest scent of mint.

And that was when it struck him—she made him deeply uneasy because he needed to feast on her life story in particular, because she was bloody strange. He wanted to know every weird detail about her—what her birthdays were like, what kind of person she was in high school. But he had a feeling that Ciara wouldn’t give up those secrets easily.

They crossed through the gate and walked up the stone path to the wood door, painted a dark green.

Michael knocked on the door. The sound of a barking dog punctured the silence, and a moment later, the door swung open.

Arabella’s husband, Adam, stood in the doorway. He was bending down, holding on to the collar of a golden retriever who was desperate to bound out the doorway. “Sorry. Penny, sit. Sit, Penny.”

With the thorny tattoos around his forearms, he didn’t look how Michael had imagined a chemistry professor would look. His hair was shorn down in a buzzcut, and he wore a tight black Henry Rollins T-shirt. The only things professor-ish about him were his thick-rimmed glasses.

“Come on in, please.”

“Thank you, Mr. Green.”

He led them into the hall, then into a kitchen of rosy wood and granite countertops. Dirty dishes littered every surface, and it smelled faintly of rotten food. Either Adam had fallen apart in the past few days, or Arabella had been the one to do all the tidying.

He sat down at the kitchen table, rubbing his eyes. He looked tired, but not particularly distressed. He didn’t give the impression that he’d been crying.

“Do you want tea?” asked Adam. “Sorry, I don’t know… how this usually happens.”

“We’re fine, thank you.” Ciara pulled out a chair at the round table and sat across from him. “We just have a few questions for you.”

“What did the autopsy find?” asked Adam.

Adam, it appeared, was used to being in control of the dialogue.

“Nothing conclusive,” said Michael.

Adam ran a hand across his buzzed hair. “Yeah, she was… She wasn’t making a lot of sense. She seemed hysterical. She said her computer was stolen, and that she thought someone was after her. Or a group of people. Like a conspiracy.” He used air quotes on the last word.

He did seem very eager to get this point across.

“Can you remember her exact phrasing?” asked Michael. It was an unrealistic request, because memories of speech weren’t stored verbatim—it was the meaning that was stored, not the exact words. Still, he wanted to push Adam to be a little bit more specific.

Adam stared at the kitchen table. “She said her computer was stolen, and she knew who took it. She said ‘they were after her.’” More air quotes. “And it was because she’d uncovered the truth, and she was going to expose it. She said they’d come for her next. It just sounded like…” He searched for a word, then shrugged. “Like tinfoil hat stuff.”

“And yet it seems she was right,” said Ciara sharply. “Given that Arabella’s actually dead now. Someone was after her.”

Sixteen

Michael resisted the urge to jot down the word wanker in large letters across his notebook.

“And she seemed hysterical?” Ciara asked, repeating Adam’s word.

“Yes, so I told her to calm down, and I suggested this was all irrational.” Adam rubbed his eyes again. “But she hated it when I said she was irrational.”

“Weird.” Ciara failed to hide the sarcasm in her tone.

“So I said, ‘Let’s think this through logically. Rationally. Who do you think is after you, Bella?’ But she just said something like ‘How do I know you’re not part of it?’ Which is— I don’t even know where that came from. She wouldn’t tell me who, or what it was about. It seemed like a nervous breakdown, really. That she was maybe just paranoid for no reason. She said that she’d been observing things, and she’d drawn her own conclusions. But her conclusions were often…”

“Yes?” asked Ciara.

“Well, psychology is a soft science at the best of times, and she tended to get excited about correlations that weren’t really meaningful. She saw meaning where none existed.”

Clearly, Adam was a first-rate bell-end.

But it didn’t mean he’d murdered his wife. The world was full of bell-ends, in fact.

Ciara leaned in, pinning Adam with her stare. “She looked very pretty in her photos with Rowan Harris.”

A faint pinkness rose in Adam’s cheeks. “Did she?”

“You didn’t see them?” asked Ciara.

Adam shrugged. “I don’t use social media very much. It’s all about showing off, you know?”

Ciara pulled out her phone and started flicking through it. “But you do. You like every single one of Rowan’s photos. Even this nude, posted after Arabella died. I suppose beauty is always a comfort in time of distress. And there’s a nice little poetry quote, about being terrible.”

His jaw hung open, then he rubbed the back of his neck. “Okay. I see why you’re asking about Rowan. Is this about the party?”

“We have heard about the party, yes.” Michael had literally no idea what he was talking about.

“Arabella misinterpreted things.” Adam was staring at the table again, now rubbing the surface with the edge of his thumb. “She blew things out of proportion sometimes.”

Michael nodded. “She was irrational.”

“Exactly,” said Adam. “That was the first and last time we went to a party at Stella’s house. Those