HER PERFECT SECRET a totally gripping psychological thriller

by T. J. Brearton

  Laura Bishop, a gallery in SOHO. Paul and I going in. He’s in a suit, I’m wearing a dress. We’re given flutes of champagne. Laura Bishop works the room. She’s very pretty in her black dress, dark earrings, like leaves, dangling from her perfect little ears. A far cry from the woman with frizzy hair and glassy eyes staring out from her mugshot.

  We knew them . . .

  “I’m surprised no one looked harder in the first place,” Paul now says. “We all lived in Bronxville together. It’s not a big town. One of their friends knew one of our friends, and that was it. When we all met for the first time, you were pregnant with Sean.”

  Paul suddenly nears me again and takes my hand. “Emily, listen to me. So, you took a case and it was someone you knew. So what? No big deal. But what’s not going to fly is thinking you can navigate this anymore. This kid’s mother is out, and they’re obviously up to something. He hurt Sean and doesn’t want us to know. And now he’s, what? Begging you not to go? Why? He thinks I’m lying? Why would I lie? This is all just his way of implicating me. This is him coming after us, trying to fuck us over. Don’t you see that?”

  I don’t answer.

  Paul sighs and retreats from me. He puts the truck in drive and starts pulling out onto the road.

  A vehicle blares its horn and swerves around us. It causes a car coming in the other direction to veer over to the shoulder. Everyone is blowing horns and screeching tires.

  “Paul!”

  He hits the gas and drives on. I watch in the mirrors as a vehicle gets back on the road. The people who passed us are just ahead; the driver flings a hand out the window, as if to say, what the hell?

  “Paul, you gotta ease up.”

  He doesn’t respond. We ride in silence. When we reach a stop sign, he makes a left. Now we’re on the main road between Lake Placid and Saranac Lake. Ten minutes from the hospital.

  Have I lost my mind? Is Paul right? Am I doomed in all of my efforts because we knew the Bishops? Why didn’t I consider that sooner?

  The phone vibrates. I check if Paul noticed, but he’s fixed on the road.

  It’s Mena calling.

  I let the voicemail pick it up. I’m so distraught right now I can’t imagine talking to her, or anyone. I don’t even know what I’d say. Maybe:

  I think I’m having a nervous breakdown.

  CHAPTER FIFTY-FIVE

  We arrive at the hospital. Paul stops at the main entrance. The pickup truck is idling — rattling, really, like it’s about to collapse. Paul only looks straight ahead.

  “Paul. I’m sorry.”

  “Uh-huh.” He’s unmoved. “Go on in. I’ll park and be right there.”

  “Can you look at me?”

  “No.”

  Paul accelerates, engine grumbling, and I jump back from the vehicle as the door swings closed. A nurse helping an elderly man along sees and gives me a look. I flash her a smile, but inside, I’m in knots.

  The doors slide open and I hurry into the hospital, trying not to run. I’m just sort of trotting along, but already realize I don’t have my bearings. Someone at the front desk is able to point me in the right direction. I get moving again, realizing it’s been all day since I’ve eaten. Realizing that I must look like hell.

  But it’s coming to an end. My son is coming back to me. That’s all that matters.

  How long will he have to stay in the hospital, I wonder. What was he doing that he might be eager to get back to? He told me stories, but I forget if he has a job to return to. That’s the funny thing with memory: we accept misremembering things, because it’s so common. One neuroscientist estimated that we forget 99.9% of everything that happens to us.

  It’s all stored somewhere, though. We just don’t have the means to access everything.

  Everybody expects to remember the big things. Only, that’s not the case, either. You don’t remember but one or two of your birthdays. Or one or two holidays. And that’s only if you keep thinking of them again, for some reason. Between short-term memory and long-term memory is a kind of bottle neck. In order to squeeze something through, you need to revisit it many times.

  So we assume that profound experiences — especially things we did wrong — will get stored in long-term memory. And for the most part, we’re right.

  Except for when something is so troubling that we seek to block it out. Like Michael, perhaps, having witnessed his father’s murder. Making him malleable, susceptible to outside influence, planting a false memory. Such as seeing his mother do it. Why not? She was acting strangely that night and had been for weeks. Even young Tom himself said it was like she was an imposter at times.

  I want my mommy back . . .

  I push through a set of double doors and round a bend. Now I’m running, and I don’t care how it looks. A doctor sees me and opens his mouth as if to warn me to slow down, but I run right past. One more turn and I’m in familiar territory. This is the hall Sean is on.

  I see his door, the number on it — 312 — and push open.

  “Ma’am,” someone says behind me. “Did you sign in?”

  I step into the room. My son is in the bed. The lighting is dim. The machines are breathing, whirring, making their noise.

  His eyes are closed.

  I step beside him, trembling, letting the tears fall.

  “Sean?”

  “Ma’am.” The doctor is in the doorway.

  Someone else joins him. “That’s the mother,” she says.

  “Seanie?” I squeeze my son’s hand. I pat it. “Sean, honey. Mommy’s here.”

  Sean makes no response.

  I look up. The doctor and nurse are watching me. “When did he . . . Is he just sleeping?”

  They trade concerned glances. “Mrs. Lindman . . .” The nurse walks closer. “Your son is in a coma.”

  “I know. He was. But he woke up.” His hand feels limp in my grip. “Didn’t he?”

  Another look passes between them. The nurse mouths something silently to the doctor, who nods and leaves. The nurse then turns to me, her face filled with compassion. “Mrs. Lindman, this is a difficult time. But Sean is stable. His condition is stable. Okay? We’re doing all that we can.”

  “He didn’t wake up?”

  “Ma’am, I’m sorry, but no.”

  I give Sean one last look. The tears dry in my face as deep, hot fear winds through my nervous system. My head tingles, like a mild electric current. I kiss Sean’s hand. I whisper into his ear: “Mommy loves you.”

  The nurse reaches for me as I hurry past. She’s calling me as I run down the corridor.

  “Mrs. Lindman!”

  But I can’t stop. I think my husband is about to kill someone.

  CHAPTER FIFTY-SIX

  I make it all the way outside to the parking lot before I realize one crucial fact: I don’t have transportation. Paul dropped me off.

  And as I swipe through my phone to call him, I notice my battery life is at just under 20 percent. In all the running around I’ve been doing, I’ve forgotten to charge it. Searching for a signal, as the phone was likely doing while in the woods, also drains the battery.

  Paul’s line rings until his voicemail answers. In his usual upbeat, affable-sounding voice, my husband says, “Hi, you’ve reached Paul Lindman. I’m actually on vacation right now, if you can believe that. I’ll be back in the office August 26. If it’s an emergency, call my office . . .”

  I wait through the rest of it. Then, “He isn’t awake, Paul. Whatever it is you think you’re doing . . .”

  It’s impossible to know where to even take this. My brain is stuck on the craziest fact of all: Did my husband actually just lie to me about our son waking up? It’s such a low blow, such a horrible thing to do in order to get me away from Michael.

  The midday sun is hammering down. It’s hot out here in the parking lot and I’m feeling heavy on my feet. So much so that I almost lose consciousness. I walk to the edge of the parking lot, where some trees provide shade. My whole body is vib
rating, like I’m in shock.

  I try Joni next, but her phone goes straight to voicemail — it seems she’s lost service.

  Does that mean she finished her hike and is back at the yurt? Would Paul do anything to Michael with our daughter there? Or does he have some plan to get rid of her too? Lie to her about something, drive her a convenient distance away? What about her friends?

  Dear God.

  This is my life.

  An unraveling nightmare.

  My next call has to be to 911. There’s no other way. I mean, I don’t even know the address of Madison and Hunter’s place — it’s a yurt in the middle of the woods, for God’s sake — but I know the vicinity. And the police will likely have them in the system.

  Get real.

  You haven’t done it yet, and you’re not doing it now.

  It’s true. I hesitated in the past in order to gather more information. To find out what Michael saw. But even if he said it was Doug Wiseman, no one is going to believe how he arrived at that conclusion. Not when the woman who led him to it lied about knowing his family fifteen years ago. Paul is right.

  But . . .

  There could be one thing. One way through this.

  Because this has to end.

  My hand slips into my pants pocket. I feel the stiff card, press my thumb against its straight edge.

  I pull it out and stare at the name. The number. Then I key it into my phone.

  Starzyk answers on the second ring. “Hey, Doc. I was hoping you’d call.”

  * * *

  The state investigator pulls into the hospital parking lot just ten minutes later. He leans over and pushes the door open wide. “Get in.”

  Seconds later, we’re speeding along, taking the same route I took earlier in the day, skirting along the edge of town. “Talk to me,” Starzyk says.

  “Like I told you on the phone, I think Paul could hurt Michael.”

  “Because your husband thinks Michael hurt Sean. On the boat.”

  “Maybe.”

  Starzyk waits. “You’re not telling me everything.”

  No, I’m not. But first, I need to level the playing field. “Mooney says mistakes were made. Do you admit that?”

  He sniffs, delaying a response. “I wouldn’t be here if mistakes hadn’t been made. You know that.”

  “Tell me, please; just tell me. You said Doug Wiseman wasn’t a suspect. That he came later. But there was someone else there. You have to know who. If it wasn’t Wiseman, then who?”

  Starzyk takes a deep breath. “Yeah, we knew there was someone else there. We had the witnesses, the car in the street, the cigarette butts — you’ve heard all that. Crime scene made mistakes. We made mistakes. We allowed the kid in the room when we first questioned Laura Bishop, for one thing. We shouldn’t have done that — it contaminated her statement and his. But we went through everybody. We talked to all of David Bishop’s work contacts.”

  I’m just quiet, listening, waiting for the point when he tells me he knows about me and the Bishops.

  “We had half a dozen theories about someone else being there. Someone David owed money, maybe. Or someone who was screwing his wife. That was the other big one. We even had a witness, a friend of David’s, tell us he suspected an affair. But we couldn’t stick that to Doug Wiseman, because there was no Doug Wiseman at that time. He literally did not exist in Laura Bishop’s life. He came later, this older guy who got kind of obsessed with her, I think, wanted to save her from the whole thing, move her away. It never happened. We got her before she could run off.”

  Starzyk has driven us through the residential area, and we merge onto a highway that takes us through the trees, between Saranac Lake and Lake Placid.

  He looks over at me. I feel those reflective bug eyes on me again, but I don’t look at the investigator. I’m facing the window, marshaling the will to do what comes next.

  “There’s something else,” I say to Starzyk.

  “What?”

  “I knew the Bishops. We did. Paul and I.”

  He drives in silence a moment.

  “How? We looked at everything and—”

  “Just socially. It’s not a big place. 6,400 people. Not everyone intermingles — it’s the uptight suburbs — but we did. We went to their place for at least a party or two. Maybe even had them over. It’s a hazy time in my life. Paul and I were going through a difficult patch. There was lots of drinking.”

  I stop there, not wanting to go any further. Afraid to go any further.

  But I have to. I’m so deep in an ethical breach I don’t know if I can ever crawl out anyway.

  “I knew the Bishops when I agreed to evaluate their son.”

  “Why would you do that?”

  My lips feel numb. Maybe I’m in someone else’s body. Maybe I’m asleep.

  “I’m not proud of it,” I say. A single tear slips down my cheek. I make a vow that it’s the last. “But I think I just wanted to be a part of it. I didn’t want to read about it in the paper. And I wanted to help.”

  “Jesus,” Starzyk says.

  I place my hands on the sides of my head again. I feel like I’m going to be sick. “Can you pull over?”

  “We’re almost there.”

  I try to breathe through it. “Why are you even here? You’re here because you’re covering your own self. For coercing Tom.”

  “Hey — we made mistakes, we let a guy get away, but I didn’t coerce anybody. I don’t know why the kid named his mother. And it doesn’t matter — she pled guilty. Case closed. I’m here because I could never let it go. Who was the guy we all knew had been there? That’s the same question you’re asking. The medical examiner looked at all the wounds inflicted on David Bishop. He looked at Laura, her size, her reach, and he said, no way. This was done by someone much bigger than her. David Bishop struggled with this guy.”

  Bad fighting.

  Starzyk makes a turn onto a secondary road. “All right. Now you got to tell me where it is.”

  “Just up ahead. It’s a dirt road. I’ll show you.”

  My head is buzzing. It’s hard to ground myself, to really make sense of anything. What are we going to find halfway up this mountain? How can anything go back to normal after this? Can I find my way out, or is this the end of everything?

  It all started with that fucking affair. Paul and his lover. It took forever for us to get over it. There was lots of shouting and crying and drinking — not the best chapter in my life.

  To have an affair, you have to have some sort of duality in you. You have to be able to live a separate life. To keep those emotions completely walled off. It’s not an easy thing to do. If you’ve had trauma, certain things can get buried at the back of your mind. But it’s unintentional. When you’re sleeping around and hiding it, that kind of compartmentalization seems more sinister. And Paul was capable of that.

  Maybe I’m a therapist who’s been living with troubled men her whole life. Maybe I’ve married my father without realizing it. Knowing psychology doesn’t protect you from making your own terrible mistakes. That’s the big joke. You can’t escape what life has in store for you.

  “There it is.” I point to the dirt road up ahead.

  Starzyk slows and makes the turn. He starts up the bumpy road. As he does, he reaches between his legs. He pulls out a gun.

  “Oh God,” I say. “What is happening?”

  I want to jump out and run. Just run. Back to a time and a place when things made sense.

  A time of a blissfully forgotten past.

  CHAPTER FIFTY-SEVEN

  “Aren’t you going to call some backup?” The closer we get, the higher my anxiety becomes.

  “I want to know what this is first,” Starzyk says.

  I can only hang on for the bumpy ride until it comes into view. Madison and Hunter’s pretty little off-grid property. Where no one can hear you scream.

  Starzyk gives me one of his looks. “You all right?”

  I realize I’m laugh
ing.

  “No, I’m not all right.” I think I’ve left sanity back at the hospital with my son.

  The pickup is parked off to one side of the clearing. The rental car is still there, and so are the Escalade belonging to my daughter’s friends and Joni’s Subaru. Things are getting crowded.

  Starzyk puts his truck in park. “Stay here.”

  He gets out, gun in hand, and moves toward the yurt like the cops in TV shows. I see no one. The chickens are softly clucking. The wind rustles the tops of the trees. It’s getting later in the day; my phone says five thirty. The battery is down to fifteen percent. No signal.

  Of all things, my stomach growls.

  “Hello?” Starzyk is at the front of the yurt, standing to one side of the door. “Anyone home?”

  He glances at me, then starts to circle the building. Once he’s out of sight, I exit the truck. Stay put? If I sit there another second, I’ll lose my mind.

  “Michael?”

  No response. I start for the yurt, picking my way past a stack of lumber, a battery-powered drill sitting on top. “Hello? Anyone?”

  I’m sure Starzyk is cringing right now at the sound of my voice. But we never had the element of surprise — anyone here would’ve heard us drive up. I open the front door. Before I even step through, an odor hits me.

  Sticky, coppery. A sickly sweet smell.

  My breath catches in my throat. My hand doesn’t leave the door knob. I am frozen in the threshold, looking at the two bodies on the floor. Madison, Joni’s childhood friend. Her boyfriend, Hunter, someone I’ve never even met.

  It looks like they’ve been beaten to death with a hammer.

  * * *

  The two dead people are sort of flopped over one another, arms and legs akimbo. Blood has splattered everywhere. A violent, messy death. The urge to vomit hits me. I turn from the scene and step down to the ground and puke into the dirt and weeds.

  I’m vaguely aware of footsteps behind me, coming fast. “The fuck are you—?” Starzyk stops when he sees me, when he sees the open door. He takes the three wooden steps and looks in. “Ah, God. Ah, shit . . .”