by C. J. Zahner
“Yes,” she said, nodding. “He’s a client of mine. Or rather he was a client of mine.”
“Do you remember his name?”
“Charles Brown,” she uttered. “His name is Charles Brown.”
A second officer came toward them.
“Doctor Kerr, do you have a security system?”
“No,” she responded, still staring at Charles in disbelief. “We never had one installed.”
“We?”
“My ex-husband and me.”
The officer was quiet for a moment, then responded. “Doctor Kerr, there’s a camera out back and one on each side of your house. Somewhere there’s a monitor for these cameras.”
“Cameras?”
“Yes, Ma’am. They’re high tech. Night vision, motion detection. Someone’s been watching your house. Could it be your ex?”
“No,” she said. “I’m sure it’s not him.”
She knew right away Charles hadn’t set those cameras up either. It was Matt. A thousand thoughts sped through her mind and somehow—like minds—her thoughts halted on the car Matt mentioned. She knew he would have remedied the problem of the police finding the cameras he’d installed. He’d be one step ahead of investigators.
Had ten minutes passed? Yes, more than ten minutes.
“The man who helped me,” she said, “told me there is a car around the corner. On Fifth Street. Blue. I don’t remember the make. Toyota, maybe?”
She guessed police would find evidence in that car to insinuate Charles installed those cameras.
“Is there someone you can call, Ma’am? A friend or relative?”
“Yes,” she responded. “I can call someone.”
She moved inside with the officer’s assistance. Gloved officers lingered throughout her home, peering past windows, dusting sills, picking items up and setting them back down. She ambled to the dining room, sat down slowly, and tapped numbers into her cell.
When she heard a voice at the other end of the phone, she became confused.
“Emma? What’s wrong?” the voice said. “It’s three in the morning. Are you all right?”
The voice sounded familiar but different from Giff’s.
“What is that noise in the background?”
She pulled the phone away from her ear and gazed at the name on the screen.
“Emma! Answer me. Are you all right? I’m coming over.”
It was Josh. She had dialed his number by mistake.
Chapter 45
Thursday, August 6, 2015
Move.
Life slowed for no one. Today was moving day.
She had spent the first week of August packing clothes, dividing sentimental items, separating bank accounts, and sorting through IRA, insurance, and various club membership papers. These tasks forced her to stop thinking about Charles Brown.
And Matt McKinney.
She kept the incident out of the paper by contacting a friend on staff at the Erie newspaper. Skirting the press—she thought of a birth and death certificate that never made print—proved easier than she once thought.
With her house selling fast, she had little time to digest the love letters police found inside the trunk of Charles Brown’s car. That he had fallen in love with his psychiatrist was not for public knowledge. Someday, she would sit and read them, try to decipher what went wrong. Just as someday, Charles would recover from the brutal beating; however, he would be confined to a mental health facility until a judge declared him incompetent to stand trial. Whether the incompetency would be due to his mental health or damage from the beating, no one would determine.
That beating was now the buzz of neighborhood discussions. Judy made Emma’s protector out to be a hero, and neighbors wanted to know if she knew him. She said no. Everyone but Giff believed her.
“It was him, wasn’t it?” Giff asked her the first time they were alone after the incident.
“Who?”
“Matt,” he said. “It was Matt McKinney. He beat that guy to a pulp.”
She said nothing, merely shuffled away to pack, and Giff never mentioned his suspicions again.
Rebekka relieved Emma of her clients for the week, so she had time to deal with both the break-in and the move. Her days off yielded valuable sorting time, both physical and mental. Unfortunately, moving required her to see too much of Josh
“Was it all bad?” he’d asked one day.
“No, of course not,” Emma conceded. “Not all bad. There were good times.”
“Then please—” He had taken a step toward her and before she could react, he buried his head in the crook of her neck. “I don’t want to end our marriage. I was a fool. I know the house is gone, but I don’t want to lose you, too. I’m begging you, please don’t do this to us.”
She had stood dumbstruck for a minute, then hoisted him off her and backed away, “You started this, Josh. You filed for the divorce, not me.”
He had sat down at the dining room table and cried. She couldn’t bear his tears. She grabbed her purse by one strap and her lipstick, cell, and wallet fought to stay inside as she ran for the door. She hurried out into the fresh air and tires squealed as she drove away. She didn’t know they were hers.
She sped across town, then, to Giff’s office just to be sure, to know she was making the right decision. She questioned it daily. Practicing for depositions, constantly talking litigation or settlements, was wearing on her. He was different at work.
But when she walked in that day, she found the old Giff. The one she had been falling in love with before Mary McKinney’s funeral, before Charlie Brown’s intrusion, before Matt McKinney saved her life.
He stood from his desk, rather sheepishly, and said, “Hey, I bought you a gift. For your new apartment.”
He pulled a bag from behind his desk, unaware she was wiping away tears, and held it out proudly with both hands. The bag flaunted “Campbell Pottery” in bold black letters.
“Do you know what it is?”
She did, before she looked inside. The pottery was a replica of her favorite piece, a blue and white serving bowl that Josh had broken during a tantrum. Her mother had bought that piece for her during a trip to the artistic little pottery outside of town. Emma couldn’t toss its remnants away. They reminded her of the Heidi before the Alzheimer’s.
“I know it’ll never be the same, but I took that cracked bowl back to Campbell’s, and they replicated the original piece as best they could,” he said. “Your mom won’t know it’s a different one. And—”
He held out a second, smaller bag and motioned for her to reach inside. She felt between the layers of tissue paper and found a tiny matching dish of the same design—a dainty little bowl.
“I bought that for your mom to set her ring in. The pinky ring you gave her when you were little. She takes it off every night and sets it on the nightstand, because it’s big on her finger.”
“How did you know that?”
“I was there one morning visiting my mother, and I saw her on her hands and knees struggling to find it.” He shrugged one shoulder. “I thought a matching ring dish might give this bowl a new connection to your mom. It was the best I could do.”
She had wound her fingers around the ring holder and moved toward him until she could feel the muscles of his chest against her weak frame. He wrapped his arms around her and didn’t let go until long after she stopped crying.
There in his arms, she was sure she’d made the right decision.
But now, sitting on the floor in the empty living room of her dream home, where she thought she’d spend the rest of her life, where her privacy had been invaded, and where Matt McKinney had fortuitously come to her rescue, indecisiveness visited her once again.
Nothing about the day seemed right. It was sticky hot. The thermometer suctioned to the outside of the dining room window had shot above the ninety-degree line before noon. After carting the small items to her new apartment all morning, Emma was exhausted. She wiped sweat from th
e back of her neck, wishing she hadn’t turned the central air off and opened the windows. It had seemed like a good idea at six a.m., allowing the pine tree and lilac scents in one last time.
She wished for more time. Moving from a nineteen-hundred-square-foot home to a one-thousand-square-foot apartment had its drawbacks. Yes, she would be safer in the gated apartment complex, but her sorting and salvaging had been forced into tossing and donating.
The house sold ten days after it went on the market. It had barely been advertised when a darling couple showed up, baby in tow, and five days later Emma received an offer for a thousand dollars over the listing price. A second couple had roused a bidding war. Both wives fell in love with the quaint English Tudor, its alcove in the kitchen, built-in corner cabinets in the dining room, big old windows, French doors, and the deep green and cranberry border that hugged the ceiling, Emma’s finest touch.
Emma had trimmed the entire first floor with that border, cut the bottom off that scalloped design by hand—took her twenty-some hours. The paisley print brought out the color of the cherry staircase and woodwork, and complemented the white-brick fireplace—which, sadly, never saw a fire while she lived there.
Now it was gone.
She stood up and moved through the house one last time. She passed through the L-shaped kitchen, cabinet-lined dining room, grand living room, and stepped into the bright sunroom. There, she peeked past the French doors out to the red-and-brown brick side porch.
She stood staring for a long time. Didn’t wipe her tears away until she heard the tires of Josh’s car clicking over the driveway’s uneven pavers. They’d planned to replace those when they got a little extra cash. Now it was the new owner’s chore. That and the washing away of the bad memory on the blood-stained deck. She retrieved a pile of paperwork for him and met him at the front door.
“I sorted these documents for you. There are a few more things upstairs I think you’ll want,” she said, “and some papers in the dining room you need to sign. You got the rest yesterday.”
“Thanks, Emma,” he said. “I have everything I want. Well, almost everything.”
She ignored the innuendo, turned, and moved quickly up the stairs. Helped him pack his last items and watched as he stacked the final boxes into his impeccably packed trunk. Like the methodically arranged boxes, Josh was tailored to a fault, his wrinkle-free, tucked-in shirt held in place by a designer leather belt. His preppy shorts creased to perfection. His forty-five dollar haircut curved into a perfect half-moon on the nape of his neck, and his ninety-five dollar after-shave seeped from his pores. He wasn’t even sweating.
He would be a good husband for someone. He was striking. His toned physique made people ask if he was a runner when they first met him. His natural cyclist frame and genetically thin form beneath designer jeans reeked yuppie. Always. Even when he slept. No boxers for him, she smiled subconsciously, only form-fitting briefs hugging long, thin muscles like a glove at night.
“I never felt comfortable beside you,” she said without thinking.
She glanced at their reflection in the wall mirror propped up against his car waiting to be loaded into his back seat. Josh followed the direction of her eyes and looked, too.
“I bet people thought we were an odd couple,” she said. “We don’t match.”
“You must be seeing something I don’t see.” He squinted, studied the images in the mirror.
“I look rumpled next to you, blue-collarish,” she said, remembering Ally’s comment of long ago. A blue-collar psychiatrist.
“Are you kidding?” He took a step back, his face wrinkled in surprise.
“Well, it doesn’t matter anymore.” She stepped to the side, so she couldn’t see herself in the mirror, then she climbed the stairs and entered the house, one last time, while Josh loaded the mirror. He followed her in when he was done.
“Emma.” He reached for her arm. “It shouldn’t have been so important to me.”
She turned toward him but didn’t speak.
“Having children.” He shrugged one shoulder. “You were right when you said you don’t know what you have until it’s gone. I’m sorry…for everything.”
“It’s fine, Josh. There’s no use beating ourselves up about it,” she told him and then went up on her toes and kissed his cheek, like she used to do when he was leaving for work. When she knew they’d meet back there in the evening and spend the last hour of the hectic day snuggled on the couch in pajamas, trying to stay awake for the eleven o’clock news.
He clutched her arms and drew her close to him. He didn’t say anything, and she didn’t try to move away. His tears fell to her shoulders, and his hands hung on with the still, firm touch of a man afraid to let go. The hot house creaked around them.
He didn’t beg her again. When he released his grip, he didn’t look at her. He backed away, closed the door gently, walked to his car, and cried hard for five minutes, his head and arms slumped over the steering wheel. When he composed himself, he drove away slowly.
She stood watching, thinking, long after his car had slipped from view.
Chapter 46
Friday, August 14, 2015
Catholicism.
She went to confession for the first time in two years. St. Luke’s pastor offered parishioners, as well as visitors, the sacrament of penance every Friday morning before Mass. The schedule had been that way since her childhood.
She stood still momentarily, soaking in straight colored lines falling from the stained glass windows that stretched upward toward the lofty ceiling. The silence of the empty church rang in her ears. She could almost hear the candles flickering.
During school months, students shifted their weight and bit nails while waiting in confessional lines that hugged the back wall and stretched down the aisles, but in July and August not a soul queued up to beg pardon. Emma walked straight into the confessional with the little light above it, sat down, looked the priest in the eye, and told him she was about to sign divorce papers.
Then she realized who she was speaking to and near about broke into a laugh. It was Father Simon, on loan from St. Joe’s. She recalled Mary McKinney’s words. Miserable son of a bitch.
He advised her to seek counseling and said even though the marriage had not originally been blessed by the church, he couldn’t, in good conscience, condone her divorce. He wouldn’t absolve her sins. Said she was breaking the seventh commandment. She responded curtly, “I’m not divorced yet.” Then she defiantly went to communion during the Mass. He hesitated before placing the host in her hand.
She took the wafer, said a prayer, and exited the church with the intention of never returning. She took the long route to work and arrived precisely at nine, determined to compose herself for her deposition. Her eyes were still red and swollen, but she walked in confidently. Sharon and Giff sat waiting for her.
“Hey,” she said to Giff, “you’re early.”
“And you’re on time for a change,” he said, smiling only remotely.
“Well, this is it, showtime, right?”
The exchange was uncomfortable. They had been arguing all week after a big brawl last weekend. They’d fought over Matt McKinney, Josh, everything. Yesterday, they hadn’t spoken at all.
“Emma,” he said, “we have something to show you.”
“Oh, no.” Her arms went limp, and her purse strap fell from her shoulder to her wrist. “What’s wrong now?”
“Nothing!” Sharon chirped. “I came in early this morning to get extra work done. When I got here, I found a paper on the floor. Someone slipped it through the mail slot.”
“What is it?” Emma tugged her purse strap back onto her shoulder, stepped toward them.
“See for yourself.” Sharon motioned toward Giff. “I had to ask myself if I was crazy. Did a double take, and then a triple. Then I texted Giff.”
Giff stood, paper in hand, his tall frame leaned away from Emma as she approached and Emma knew why. Wednesday had been rough. He h
ad asked why she hadn’t signed her divorce papers, and the question tripped her into a screaming scene.
He handed her the paper.
“Mary McKinney?” She read the top of the page before realizing the form was her boilerplate medication waiver. It took her a moment to digest the words…I Mary McKinney…Emma’s gaze shot to the bottom of the page.
“I don’t believe it.” She looked toward Giff. “It’s signed.”
“The signature is an original.” Sharon leaned over the paper and pointed to Mary’s name. “Giff has a friend at Copy Quix, Amy Cohen, remember her? We used her one time to verify a client forged your signature on a prescription.”
“What does she have to do with—?”
“Giff wanted the handwriting verified before giving the waiver to Minnie’s attorney,” Sharon interrupted, her face beaming with triumph.
“But it can’t be her signature,” Emma said.
“Well, Amy thinks so.” Sharon smiled smugly and folded her arms.
Emma raised her eyebrows toward Giff.
“Amy does the verifications for court cases. She’s good.” He adjusted his glasses. “But the person who did this is better.”
“You think Matt did it?”
“I don’t,” Sharon said. “I think you must have given Mary two copies. Pixels don’t lie. I pulled Mary’s signature on her other forms. They match. Perfectly.”
“Will this help my case?” Emma asked Giff.
“It will,” he said. “It has. I sent a digital copy to your insurance carrier and one to Minnie’s attorney. There’s something else.”
“What?”
“Carol McKinney passed away last night.”
Emma was unsure how to react. How could she be happy for someone’s death—even someone who was suing her?
“Minnie’s attorney is going to ask her to drop the case.” Sharon’s tone hid any sympathy.
“They called in two more psychiatrists, Emma,” Giff said. “They agreed you’d given standard care. This morning when I told her attorney we located the signed medical waiver, he sighed, and said he hoped to get back to us later today.”
“So we wait?”