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gone, but he’d keep his mouth shut because Kevin knew he was
having an affair with his underage babysitter. Kevin felt dirty
whenever he had to talk to him because the guy was a pervert and
he belonged in prison, since the Bible says Let there be no sexual
immorality among you. But right now, Kevin needed him so that he
could find Erin and bring her home. Man and wife were supposed
to stay together because they’d made their vows in front of God
and family.
He’d known he would find her in March; he’d felt sure she would
turn up in April. He was certain that her name would surface in
May, but the house stayed empty. Now it was June and his
thoughts were often scattered and sometimes it was all he could
do to go through the motions. It was hard to concentrate and the
vodka didn’t seem to help and he had to lie to Coffey and Ramirez
and walk away while they gossiped.
This he knew: she wasn’t running any longer. She wouldn’t move
from place to place or job to job forever. It wasn’t like her. She
liked nice things and wanted to have them around her. Which
meant she had to be using someone else’s identity. Unless she was
willing to live a life continually on the run, she needed a real birth
certificate and a real social security number. These days,
employers required identification, but where and how would she
have assumed another’s identity? He knew the most common way
was to find someone of a similar age who’d recently died, and
then to take on the identity of the deceased. The first part of that
was conceivable, if only because of Erin’s frequent visits to the
library. He could imagine her scanning the obituaries on
microfiche, looking for a name to steal. She schemed and planned
in the library while pretending to peruse the bookshelves, and
she’d done those things after he’d taken time out of his busy day
to drive her there. He showed her kindness and she repaid him
with treachery, and it infuriated him to think of the way she must
have laughed while she did it. It made him so angry to imagine
those things, and with a hammer he smashed the set of china
they’d been given for their wedding. Having let off steam, he was