He lied to you.
But why? Maybe there’s a good reason? Are there things he may be genuinely in the dark about? He might know he’s Tom Bishop, but he might be seeking answers to genuine questions.
No. He’s been messing with you this whole time.
It occurs to me that the simplest solution is usually the best. Occam’s razor. I consider it: Either Michael fabricated an entire life, complete with a college experience that enabled him to meet and woo my daughter, so that he could come here to our lake house to beguile and disturb us — and then to nearly kill his fiancée’s brother — or he’s a lost soul with a hazy, troubled past. Between his subconscious leading him in certain directions and a dash of fate, he’s here.
Which seems more likely?
Unable to answer, I finally fall into a troubled sleep.
* * *
When the phone rings, morning sunlight is streaming through the southeast-facing windows overlooking the lake. My mouth feels cottony, my head wrapped in wet gauze. Almost like the old days. When Paul and I still cut a rug.
What day is it?
Monday.
What time?
8:23 a.m. Laura Bishop is officially out of prison.
The thought then goes right out of my head when I finally realize who is calling.
I sit bolt upright, wipe my eyes and answer. “Sarah?”
“Emily . . .” Her voice is soft, weathered. Exuding concern. “Are you okay?”
“I’m okay. Thank you for calling. How are you? It’s been so long.”
“I’m well, thank you. Emily, how can I help? Your message was . . . urgent.”
A laugh escapes me that sounds more manic than I’d prefer. I’m up off the couch and headed for the door to check the driveway for Joni’s car. “I know, I just unloaded on you. And I’m sorry.”
“No, it’s all right. It’s fine. I want to talk to you . . . How are you?”
I reach the door and push aside the curtain. Both the rental car and Sean’s car are there. But not Joni’s Subaru. The disappointment feels like a weight. I turn and sag against the door, pinching my temples. Shutting my eyes. “Well, Sarah . . . Joni is . . . She took off last night.”
“You said in your message. And I’m so sorry about Sean. What an absolute tragedy. Oh, my . . . how is he? What are they saying?”
We talk a little bit about his condition, his prognosis, and about the accident. Sarah listens. She absorbs it all quietly, with the occasional tsk or sigh. When I’m finished, she asks, “And Joni hasn’t come back?”
“No. She hasn’t.” I move into the kitchen and take down a glass, run the tap. “She’s angry with me. So angry.”
Sarah is quiet.
I force some water down. “Do you remember? I was still seeing you sometimes. And Joni would disappear. She’d just take off.”
That soft voice: “I remember.”
“She didn’t even have a phone then. When she first ran away. She was twelve. And then when she did have a phone, she just ignored us. I’d be up until four in the morning, waiting for her to come home. We were so helpless.”
“It was a difficult time for you.”
I shrug off the bad memories. I need to get moving. Take a quick shower to clear my head. Maybe some coffee. Then I need to get to the hospital, see my son. Maybe find out if Paul knows who brought our sailboat home. It seems like a small thing, but now I need to know. Maybe Paul has the phone number of the Good Samaritan who helped.
“Emily?”
“I’m sorry. Sarah, can I ask you a hypothetical?”
“Hypotheticals are my favorite. Metaphors, too.”
“I remember that.” I’m transported to her home office, looking at her kindly face, the large earrings catching the afternoon light. “I wonder if someone might . . . Well, I’m wondering about your experience with severe repression. Someone pushing something down so far that it becomes unconscious. But then it . . .”
“What?”
“Comes out in other ways.”
Sarah is silent for a moment. “Freud warned that something like that would always come out. And the longer a person waited, the worse it would be.”
“Wasn’t he talking about something you knew? Suppressed consciously, not repressed.”
“They’re not very different, in the end.”
I think about it for a moment.
“May I ask you a question, Emily?”
“Of course.”
“Do you remember your reason for first coming to me?”
It takes me a moment. I’m partly aware that I’ve drifted back into the living room. The sun is shining hard on the lake, jeweling the small waves with a million scattered diamonds. “It was my father. Well, it was Paul. It was . . . I’d hit him. I felt like I was going to be . . . My temper was going to be a problem.”
“You were very concerned.”
“Is that what you wanted to know?” I sit down on the couch to await her response.
Sarah is silent a moment. I can hear a white noise background, like ocean waves. “You’d had your rock bottom, you said. You’d struggled with your guilt to the point you’d considered suicide.”
“Yes.” I’m getting that floaty sensation again. Five hours was not enough sleep, apparently. I lie down on the couch.
“But then you picked yourself back up. We worked on it. You processed your emotions about your father — he’d died in his forties, isn’t that right?”
“Forty-nine.”
Something clicks in the back of my mind, like pieces coming together. Wasn’t David Bishop forty-nine? I’ll have to check my case notes.
Sarah says, “You got yourself going in the right direction again. You married Paul. You went back to school and studied to be a therapist yourself.”
“That’s right,” I say, sensing that Sarah is leading me somewhere. Her voice is comforting. My eyes feel heavy.
“But we might’ve been too hasty to reduce our sessions. Do you think?”
My eyelids pull open. “What do you mean?”
But I can sense it, hear it, smell it — people crowded in a room, laughing. The sweet scent of alcohol, thick and pervasive. The heat of bodies. Outside, smokers under a cloud of nicotine. In the bathroom, a few furtive lines of cocaine.
“I mean that when we think we have it all together, we have to be careful. We have to stay on guard. Especially when we have destructive tendencies.”
I sit up again, the comforting spell having been pierced by anxiety. Guilt. Was there a young face somewhere in that crowd of people? A young girl?
“Sarah, what are you saying?”
“I’m saying that you had pressures. You weren’t seeing me as much, but you had pressures. From work, from parenting, from your social life.” She takes a breath. “And then there was the affair.”
The affair.
Of course there was the affair. It’s not like I’ve forgotten that. We were young, the kids were young; we’d built up a lot of pressure, like Sarah is saying. Paul worked long hours in the city, while I listened to people’s problems all day. When he came home, I was often tired, grouchy. I was at my limit and didn’t have the mental bandwidth to listen to his woes too.
Eventually, Paul sought comfort elsewhere. It’s not that I blame myself, but I had a role to play. Paul’s affair was brief, and we worked it out. Without a doubt, divorce was on my mind for some time. But we stayed together. For the kids. Until, eventually, we found each other again.
“I should’ve seen you more,” I confess to Sarah. “I know that. It probably would’ve made things easier.”
“I’m not saying anything is your fault,” Sarah says. “But I think it’s important to remember these things. To have someone else help you. When we remember, we’re not actually going back to the same event each time in our minds. We’re remembering the last time we remembered. And so things can get distorted over time. Bent one way or the other, toward our preference.” She adds, “All we really have is the
present.”
“Of course.” I’m up again, ascending the stairs, resolved to get my day started. “But if we fail to remember the past . . .”
“We’re doomed to repeat it.” She laughs. A light, papery sound. “It’s a conundrum. Which is why I brought it up. I think what you’re going through now . . . It’s important to have your memories at full avail. This is as much about you as it is anyone else.”
That stops me. “Joni, you mean? The parties we had when she and Sean were little . . . ?”
“Well, that. You didn’t tell me everything, of course, but I think the affair took a lot out of you. Putting your marriage back together.”
“We always put the kids first.”
“Kids know.”
I tighten up in defense. “Well, yes . . . kids know. They know they’re loved.”
“Of course . . .”
“Sarah . . . thank you. Your calling me back is so appreciated. It means so much. But I might need to go now.”
She hesitates. “Of course. Call me anytime.”
“Let’s talk again very soon.”
She doesn’t respond.
“Sarah?”
“You were very good at closing things off,” Sarah says.
The words unnerve me. Tickle the back of my neck. Like electricity. “What do you mean?”
“I shouldn’t have said that. Listen, Emily, you can call me back if you need to. I’ll be here.”
“Thank you, Sarah. I will.”
I toss the phone onto the bed. Kids know. What is that supposed to mean? Of course kids know. But we loved our two children. We raised them right, and they never wanted for anything. I can’t go around blaming myself for Joni’s recalcitrance as a teenager. Without question, our home life factors in, but Joni is an individual. She made her choices; she makes them still.
I can’t be held responsible for every one of them, can I?
But it gets me thinking. Thinking about affairs. I sit down at the laptop and pull up my email, then find the last email from Frank Mills.
Frank is good at what he does. Not only does he have Doug Wiseman’s info, he’s got pictures. Both candid photos, like you’d see on social media. One of them is from a few decades ago, Wiseman looking younger. In that one, he’s on a boat, wearing a white-and-blue polo shirt. His hair is curly and a bit unruly. In the second photo, he’s sitting at an outdoor table, laughing. His hair is shorter. He’s holding a beer in his hand. It looks imported.
I study the first photo more closely. In it, he’s got a cigarette pinched between his fingers.
I wonder what brand Wiseman smoked. Did the cops ever question him? They say he didn’t factor in until later. But if Laura was having an affair? If there was a man outside the night her husband was killed?
It makes so much sense it gives me chills. It feels like I’m on the verge of solving a criminal case the investigators got wrong. If I can just convince the people who need convincing, this whole thing will be over.
* * *
The shower feels good and helps me straighten out my priorities. Joni is a grown woman, and I can’t go chasing after her. And whether Michael has been in touch with his mother this whole time — I can’t control any of that. What I can do is talk to the state police professional standards bureau and give them everything I’ve got, but after I do one thing first.
I’m going to visit my son. Spend some time with him. Be with him in the present, in the now, just like Sarah said. I’ll even read to him.
The rest of it all can wait a few hours. Sean needs me.
I dress casually but comfortably. Denim shorts. My good sandals. A blouse from one of my aunts — white with a charming pattern, like beaded necklaces surrounding the wide neck. It’s a fine temperature in the house, warm outside, but the hospital can get cool, I’m guessing. I haven’t spent much time in one. I’m lucky. Besides my two pregnancies, the only lengthy stay at a hospital was when my father had his heart attack. At any rate, I grab a sweatshirt to bring and stuff it in a tote bag.
I seek out a book to bring, something to read to Sean. And I should bring my husband something to eat, I suppose.
I’ll make him a sandwich. And I’ll bring it to him at the hospital where he watches over our injured son.
This is my life.
Do I resent it? Or is it what I deserve?
I’m about to answer myself that question when a fast shape on the lake catches my eye.
The boat is cruising along, a nice motorboat, the kind you see water skiers behind, and it’s headed into our cove.
As I watch, it steers toward the dock, then slows, splitting the water in frothy waves.
There’s a lone man behind the wheel.
CHAPTER FORTY-EIGHT
I almost don’t venture down. I nearly hurry to the rental car and leave. Because one more thing and I might have a nervous breakdown.
But I can't help but think this is quite likely the tourist who helped Sean and Michael. I can see it in his face, in the pity and concern beaming at me over the distance.
Once I wave, and he waves, his worried look transforms into a smile of relief. He’s bearded, in his late forties or early fifties. Fit for his age. I see diving equipment on the boat as he putters up to the dock.
“Can I help you?” I ask.
“Hello — so sorry to just stop by like this.” He speaks with a heavy French-Canadian accent.
“It’s okay. Toss me your line.”
He throws me a thick short rope attached to his bow, and I give it a couple of wraps around the dock cleat. But I’ll have to make this short — Sean is waiting.
The man hops onto the dock and ties off the back end in the same way. He’s wearing beige shorts and brown sandals. His white T-shirt is well worn, the neck wide, gray chest hairs curling out. I can smell the suntan lotion. “I’m Luca,” he says. “Luca Marceau. You must be Mrs. Lindman.”
“I am. Are you the, um . . . ?” It’s hard to finish the question.
I don’t have to. Luca Marceau gets a somber look and nods his head. He rubs his calloused hands together, as if nervous. “Yes. I was the one to take your son and his friend to the boat launch.”
“Thank you for what you did. Mr. Marceau. I am just so grateful . . .”
“How is he . . . is the boy who . . . ?”
“He’s hanging in there. Right now, he’s still unconscious.”
The sorrow in Marceau’s eyes threatens to spill over. Seeing this stranger about to burst into tears on my dock is almost too much to bear. He covers his mouth. “I’m so sorry.”
“It’s okay. Just . . . I can’t tell you how appreciative I am for what you did.”
“Anyone would have. I was just there.”
“My husband and I would like to properly thank you. Are you going to be around the area for long?”
“Only until tomorrow. Then we return. We are from Quebec.” His fluency in English seems to waver with his emotion.
I nod and sort of shake my head in disbelief at the same time. “We’re so grateful, Mr. Marceau. I was going to try and track you down. Did you bring the sailboat back as well?”
He’s nodding. “Yes. I hope this is okay.”
“It’s very okay.” I bite my lip, running my next questions past my internal censor. But I have to know. “Mr. Marceau . . .”
“Luca.”
“Luca. Can I ask you what you saw?”
He regards me silently for a moment with his dark eyes. Then, “I didn’t see. My family was in the boat. My daughter, she pointed — she said, ‘Daddy, there’s two men in the water.’”
“Okay.”
“They were several meters from the boat. The sailboat. I look and I see, clearly, the men are struggling.”
He must see the question in my eyes because he clarifies.
“One man is swimming, holding the other. Pulling him through the water, like this.” Marceau demonstrates holding someone around the chest.
I nod some more. It’s ha
rd to continue this line of questioning — we’re all programmed for social cohesion — but I have to know. “And your daughter, did she see what caused the two men to go into the water?”
“No, I don’t think she did. We’re divers. We like to scuba. The lake here is deep, one of the deepest. I take them; I show them where the Lady in the Lake was found.”
The Lady in the Lake. The murdered woman sunk in the water and discovered decades later. Preserved by the frigid temperature of its depths. A bizarre and macabre activity for a family, but to each his own.
Marceau continues, “We had just surfaced. We were heading back, everyone talking, laughing, you know. Having some snacks. And my daughter, she look over—”
“Who else was with you?”
He seems surprised by my interruption. Or, perhaps more accurately, he is starting to wonder at my questions. If I suspect something.
“My wife, too,” he begins slowly. “Our son. He’s eleven. And our son’s friend, who we brought for the trip.”
“So the five of you.”
“Oui. Yes.”
I give it just a few beats, but if anyone saw anything untoward — and as a family, they surely would have discussed it — Luca isn’t offering. I thank him again and ask him to please leave me his number.
“You don’t have to do this for me. Dinner and so on.”
I don’t have anything to write on, but I have my phone. “Please,” I say.
“Okay.” Marceau gives me the number and I input it into my phone. When I finish, we stand there a moment and then he gets moving, untying the lines.
“Luca?”
He’s been waiting for my question. “Yes?”
“How did he seem? The young man who was helping my son.”
Marceau blinks several times. Then he asks, “Your son was swimming with the boy in the water, yes?”
“Well, my son was sailing. They weren’t swimming, they were sailing.”
“Yes, sailing . . .”
Marceau appears confused, and I wonder if something got lost in translation.
“What I mean is, the young man helping my son, what was his demeanor? I’m sure he was shocked. Did he seem . . . ? What is it?”
“I’m sorry,” Marceau says. He offers an embarrassed smile and shakes his head. “I think I don’t understand. Your son helped the man who was drowning . . .”
HER PERFECT SECRET a totally gripping psychological thriller Page 21