by E. G. Scott
My relapse fantasies have kicked up with more frequency in the last month than they have in a decade. If that thought persists, I know what I need to do. I walk to the kitchen to retrieve the broom and dustpan to clean up the glass on the porch.
I reach for a sleeve of Thin Mints from the freezer. Standing over the sink, I inhale the entire sleeve in less than two minutes. As I move to fetch the broom, I think about how in my young days of using, I could never walk barefoot in my home because there was always broken glass. Broken bottles, stepped-on syringes, dropped wineglasses, and thrown dishes. If I forgot to put on shoes, which I did often, I’d cut my feet walking across the pitiful apartment I called home. Early in my sobriety, the realization that I could walk shoeless through my house unscathed brought me to grateful tears. Instead of the broom and dustpan, I reach for my phone.
Charlotte’s phone goes straight to voicemail. I try two more times, think about leaving a voicemail both times, and then hang up because I have no idea what I want to say.
The cats slink out from their respective hiding spots and inspect me now that I’m noticeably calmer and, more important, in the kitchen. Their aggressive purring concern is because my outburst has greatly delayed their being fed. They make their dissatisfaction known by alternately ramming my shins. They nip at my hands before I’ve got the spoon and can completely out of their bowl.
I pour myself a large glass of cloudy homemade kombucha from the pitcher on my counter. The pulpy mother floats to the mouth of the pitcher and then back down to the bottom like a jellyfish. The sober, health-conscious person’s tequila worm. I take three sips and pour the rest down the sink. I don’t actually like it, never have. I consider how much of the “healthy” lifestyle I’ve adopted actually brings me joy and reach for the other Thin Mints sleeve while I ponder that thought.
I sit on my couch and watch the cats feast. When they finish, they clean themselves before silently consulting each other and making their way over to me. In perfect sync, they leap from floor to lap, and I appreciate the two purring bodies on me, a warm reminder I am not alone. I got the Siamese pair because the woman who sold them to me called them “the fiercest bitches of the cat world,” a description that I think I misinterpreted, and I’ve been trying to win their love and approval every day since. Mercifully, they know when I really need some love. I shut my eyes, run my hands through their fur, and rerun the fight another ten times. I try Charlotte’s phone again and it goes straight to voicemail. This time I leave a message.
“I’m so sorry, Charlotte. Please call me.”
I was trying to protect her. I hope that in the light of tomorrow she’ll be able to see that. Since she’s not answering, I draft a text to her that I decide I won’t send tonight at the risk of seeming too obsessive. Once I finish, I read through it a few times, tweaking it until I’m satisfied, and save it.
I set the meditation timer on my phone for twenty minutes and connect my earbuds to my phone and then put them in my ears. I situate myself as the app’s chiming reverberates and blends into the trippy tones of the binaural beats, alternating in my eardrums and left and right hemispheres. I sit in my chair, back straight and bare feet placed on the parquet floor. With each deep breath in time with the metallic echo, I feel another wave of worry and regret swim through me, but I don’t open my eyes or fight through the deep discomfort I’m feeling.
I think that I hear the sound of a car pulling into my driveway over the meditation soundtrack. I take one earbud out, and the sound of a door opening and closing brings me to my feet for a look through the window. I’m shocked and ecstatic to see Charlotte’s green Prius is parked in front, and I nearly cheer.
I open the door and start to step into the enclosed porch barefoot but remember the broken sea-glass chime. “Go around to the back door!” I yell, seeing that she hasn’t reached the outer door of the porch yet. I catch sight of her shadow retreating and moving around the side of the house, stopping briefly and then continuing around. There is a tentative knock at the back door.
“Coming!” I practically sing as I sail across the open space to the back door. She has her hoodie pulled up in the chilly night air and she is turned away from the window. She is still as a statue and is focused on something in the darkness of the yard. I hesitate as a nudge of dread knocks at my rib cage from the inside out, but I ignore it and fling the door open, ready to hug her hard. I’m crying happy and relieved tears. I conjured her and she came.
Everything is going to be okay.
TWENTY-SIX
SILVESTRI
Come on, Wolcott. Pick up, pick up, pick up.
“Hey, partner.” He yawns as he speaks. “What are you bothering me for?”
“I’m on my way over to your place.”
“What?”
“Look, I’m sorry to pull you away from the missus. Can you meet me down in the driveway in five?”
“Silvestri, everything okay with—”
“Just meet me outside.”
I hang up, drop the phone on the seat beside me, and roll through a stop sign.
* * *
He swings the front door of the house open as I pull into the driveway. In his haste, he’s tossed on a raggedy overcoat and a hat with ear flaps, to combat the cold. On any other night, I’d kick things off with a Grumpy Old Men joke.
“This better be good,” he says, shaking his head as he nears my parked car.
“Well, we just figured out Charlotte Knopfler’s connection to Brooke Harmon,” I say.
His tired eyelids pop wide like a pair of window blinds being sprung open. “I must be asleep and dreaming,” he says. “Did you just—”
“You’re plenty awake.”
“You’ve got my attention,” he says, leaning against the hood of my car. He flinches from the residual heat and slides his hand toward the fender.
“I just got back from Charlotte’s place,” I say. “We had a very enlightening discussion.”
“Partner, what sort of off-the-clock shit are you getting yourself—”
“Don’t start that again, Wolcott. Look, I got a distressed text from her and thought I’d check it out.”
He runs his tongue over his lower lip, then bores his stare into me. “She’s a person of interest in a murder investigation, for Christ’s sake!”
“Yeah, well, we may be a step closer to figuring that one out.”
There’s not a trace of patience in his expression. “Walk me through this.”
“So, I get over to her place, and she’s obviously been drinking. Not blotto, but a few in. She lets me into the house and sits me down. Shows me a package that she says had been left on her front porch.” I reach through the window and pull out an evidence bag with the photo inside. “Look at this.”
He takes in the image, then returns his eyes to me. “No shit?”
“Right? She starts to fill me in on the significance of the photo. She’s rambling a bit, courtesy of the sauce, but I’m more or less able to follow. Turns out that before Charlotte Knopfler graduated to acupuncture, she was on track to become a brain surgeon. But she was discharged from her residency after a patient died on her table.”
Wolcott’s shaken off his fatigue. “Brooke Harmon’s sister,” he realizes.
“Correctamundo.” I nod. “She claims to have not made the connection because they never actually met. It was this that tipped her off.”
“Got it.” Now he’s grinding. “Okay, but why in the hell would the sister of a victim of a botched surgery have the perpetrator as her emergency contact?” He kicks this around for a moment before a thought hits him. “Wait, what if Charlotte hasn’t been telling us everything? What if they’d been in contact? What if Brooke was afraid of Charlotte? Had her info written down to implicate her in case something like this happened?”
“Could be,” I say, even though the theory doesn’t sit well
. “Or we’ve been looking at this thing backward.”
“How so?” he asks.
“We’ve been assuming that this was murder all along. But what if it was a suicide? What if Brooke Harmon blamed Charlotte Knopfler for her sister’s death?”
I watch the tumblers click into place. “And instead of going after Charlotte,” he says, “she turned the pain in on herself.”
“Put the person she held responsible down as her emergency contact . . .”
“Knowing that it would get back to Charlotte.”
“One final twist of the knife,” I add. “And it would make sense that Brooke mailed the photo, no?”
“That’s gotta be . . . Wait, though.” He shakes his head. “We’ve still got the business with the postmortem flower arrangement.”
“And our guy from the phone company confirmed the time, right?”
“He did.”
“That’s . . . I don’t know.”
“I hear you,” he says. “And I put in a call to her cellular provider, to try to get a bead on the phone. No dice.”
“Fuck.”
“Listen, let’s get ahold of any medical and psychiatric records for Brooke Harmon. See if the suicide angle checks out.”
“Right,” I say. “And I’ll put a call in to Fisk. See if she can shed any further light on our theory. And let’s not forget about the surgery; we’ve now got an operating room full of people that we’re gonna want to talk to.”
“Yeah.” I eye my partner, who wears the unfortunate expression of a man who’s simultaneously exhausted and wired with energy. I’ve seen this look before, often while brushing my teeth. “Also, let’s drop by Brooke Harmon’s place tomorrow. See if we can’t turn up some answers there.”
“Right. Now, go inside and get some sleep, gorgeous.”
“Uh-huh.” He manages a weak chuckle. “Coffee’s on you in the morning.”
TWENTY-SEVEN
CHARLOTTE
Peter Stanton
+6466900469
I was very sorry to receive your text. I’ve just returned home from a very traumatic and nearly fatal mission.
The belief of being with you kept me going.
I thought your childish insecurities were a thing of the past, but evidently not. How utterly disappointing.
I wish you could see yourself the way I do, but you can’t seem to get out of your own way.
I don’t want to believe that this is how we end, but perhaps this is for the best.
Goodbye. P
TWENTY-EIGHT
WOLCOTT
“You two aren’t going to believe this!”
Fisk is barreling toward us as we enter the ME’s office. There’s a pointed fascination in her expression. It might be the most animated I’ve ever seen her.
“Easy, Fiskers.” Silvestri shifts to his back foot to let her forge between us. As she does, she grabs each of us by a wrist, dragging us in the direction of the autopsy space.
“No, you guys really have to see this!” She flings the door open, and we approach a metal table with a brain sitting atop it. Skipping the preamble, she jumps right in. “I just finished my reexamination. You guys were dead wrong.”
“How so?” I ask.
She eyes us, then the spread on the table. Realizing her haste, she rewinds. “Okay, after your call, I went back in to check over your body.” I realize that she’s referring to Brooke Harmon. Fisk nods in the direction of the brain to indicate the correlation of the organ to its former owner. “No chance this was a suicide,” she says with a satisfied grin.
“How’d you come around to that?” asks Silvestri.
“Look,” she says, picking up a set of forceps. She uses them to retrieve a tiny object from a petri dish and hold it up for our consideration. Upon inspection, the object resembles a small coffee bean.
“Yeah?” I ask.
“This,” she says. “I found it in her ear canal, tucked in there against the drum. Nice and deep. Missed it the first time.”
“What the hell is it?” My partner shrugs.
She drops it back into the petri dish, and the object makes a pinging sound as it lands. “Foreign object.”
“How would something like that become lodged—”
“It went in the same way it came out,” she says, snapping the forceps together twice in quick succession.
“Manually?” gapes Silvestri. “Fuck.”
I look back at the object in the petri dish. “What is that thing, anyway?” I ask.
My partner, leaning in closely to the dish, beats our ME to the punch. “Looks like the seed of a plant.”
* * *
“If it’s not here, then where is it?”
We’re standing in Brooke Harmon’s empty driveway. “Good question,” I say. “I’ll hit up the DMV for the make and plates and put out an APB.” We cross the lawn and approach the front porch. “Now, let’s see what we can see, partner.”
I close the door behind me and survey the scene. Silvestri joins me in snapping on a pair of nitrile gloves as we begin to take in the space around us. A modest-size kitchen sits to our right. There’s a cherry dining table just to our left, with four matching chairs.
The makeshift dining area flows directly into a living room space, delineated by an enormous woven rug. The midmorning light spills through the east-facing windows and washes over the hardwood floors peeking out from beneath the rug. The place is spotless, everything organized and stacked neatly. It would feel like an open house, if not for the morbid context.
We enter the living room. A sofa sits along the right side of the rug, creating a walkway between its back and the foundation wall. Flanking the sofa are two side tables, each with a lamp atop it. A hutch stands against the wall in front of the sofa, between the two windows. Dozens of framed photographs sit on the shelves of the hutch.
We move closer to examine the photos. The frames in the center feature Brooke Harmon with her grandparents and her sister, Michelle. The images span decades, starting from infancy up until just before the tragedy. There are a handful of the sisters alone, all of them suggesting a happy, loving sibling bond. Mom and Dad are conspicuously absent from the pictures.
“Wolcott, check it out,” he says, pointing. There’s a noticeably empty space amid the array of photographs. A thin strip of dust-free shelf suggests that a frame was recently removed from the spot. “I can take a guess where the photo that showed up at Charlotte’s place came from.”
Other photos sit on the periphery of the family shots. Brooke smiles a radiant smile in the company of friends in graduation gowns, Halloween costumes, and impromptu moments. A mix of men and women in her age range, some connections appearing more intimate than others. Each of the photos is thoughtfully, tastefully framed.
“A woman after my own heart,” says Silvestri. I look over to the corner of the room and see him admiring the record collection on the shelf below a turntable and amplifier setup.
“You a vinyl hound?”
“No better way to hear the music, Wolcott.”
“I’m with you on that,” I say. “What’s the reading list looking like?” I ask, nodding in the direction of the bookshelf next to the stereo.
He sidesteps to the shelf and begins to browse the titles. “Hmm. We’ve got a number of gardening books. Lots of literature: Didion, Zadie Smith, Lydia Davis, Henry Miller, Erica Jong, Twain, McCarthy, Alice Munro. Bunch of thrillers, some relationship how-tos. Couple of cookbooks.”
“Pretty well-read.”
“That’s right.”
We cross along the wall and through the doorway into the bedroom. We approach the queen bed, situated at the far end of the room. The comforter is pulled down on the right side, the only thing visibly amiss in the entire house. I approach on that side, Silvestri on the left. Light streams into the room through the skylight in th
e ceiling. There’s an indentation in the pillow on the side I’m standing on. I lean closer and find a few stray hairs atop the pillow. The other side of the bed appears undisturbed. “Looks like she’d been sleeping alone,” I say.
“Hmm. Real creature of habit, on the one side and all.”
“Well, most people are.”
“Yeah? I usually fall asleep on one side and wake up on the other.”
“Well, you’re you.”
“What?” he says. “That’s weird?”
“I don’t know, partner. Abby has her side of the bed. I mean, her side. The left, always. People are particular with their rituals.”
He nods, cocking an eyebrow. “You guys never switch it up?”
“When she visits her sister, I sleep on her side.”
“Aww,” he coos. “That’s adorable, Terrence.”
“Uh-huh.”
“Also, you shouldn’t have told me that. I’m never going to let you live that one down. You know that, right?”
“Oh, what?” I retort. “You don’t think I’ve got dirt on you?”
He sucks his teeth and looks off. “Fair enough.”
We cross to the desk in the corner of the room. An ergonomic office chair sits in front of it, and a corkboard is attached to the wall behind it. I peruse the board, which has a few notes and photos tacked to it. I read a printed schedule for shifts at the community garden where Brooke Harmon volunteered.
A laptop computer sits open atop the desk, the power cord plugged into the wall. I hit the RETURN key, and the screen lights up. The page opens to her Hulu account, on a freeze-frame of Stana Katic in an episode of Absentia. There’s a second open tab for a Yelp account. I close the laptop, unplug it, and slip it into the large evidence bag that my partner holds open. “Let’s get this down to Clarence. Maybe he can help get us some answers here.”