by E. G. Scott
“I didn’t kill anyone. I didn’t have any reason to!” My voice is shrill.
“Okay. Let’s back up. You have a background in science. You understand and appreciate rational thinking better than anyone. Put yourself in Wolcott’s and my positions.” He pauses. “Let me break it down for you from our perspective, and maybe you can help explain where we might have it wrong?”
I nod obediently.
“It seems like this was a deadly chain reaction. Once you committed the first murder, the second was put in motion. With planning and premeditation, you killed Brooke because of the guilt you felt about Michelle’s death, felt threatened and provoked by her relentless bullying from afar, and were ultimately losing a grip on your job, your financial security—”
“But I would never—I didn’t know it was Brooke who was bullying—”
“My bet is that you killed Rachel out of necessity because she realized your part in Brooke’s death and was unwilling to protect your secret. After the blowup at your house, where we imagine she may have threatened to turn you in, you killed her in her home, attempting to make it look like a suicide, to keep her from exposing you. Her murder had more of a compassionate air to it, suggesting you were conflicted. You killed her with something you knew would make her feel good on the way out. And then you couldn’t leave her alone after you did it.” He stops for a minute, and I notice veins in his forehead and neck pulsating. His eyes have darkened, and I can see that he is struggling to compose himself as well.
“And you used me for an alibi. I’m not going to begin to tell you all of the ways in which this was a terrible decision. But that is the kind of thing that doesn’t just make Wolcott and me consider that you are capable of murder, but also whether your role in Michelle’s death was actually accidental.”
I feel like he’s punched me in the face. My knuckles are white as I try to keep hold of myself. I’m not sure if the pause is a cue for me to respond, but I remain quiet.
“Charlotte, can you see how you are the most likely suspect? Everyone else with any possible motive has an alibi. And all I’ve recounted are just the basic facts. I haven’t scratched the surface on the MO of the murders, which overwhelmingly implicate you, given your areas of expertise.”
He leaves this utterly perplexing comment dangling, I assume, to see if I’ll give something away in my subconscious movements. I can only offer absolute bafflement.
“Have I missed anything?” His face is neutral.
“Everything you’ve said is completely wrong,” I spew desperately.
“Okay, then, please tell me. Where are we wrong in all of this? You are a brilliant woman with a deep understanding of the human brain. This all seems pretty logical, doesn’t it? I would love for you to give us another plausible scenario that exonerates you.”
My racing thoughts are jumbled and I am grasping at the most salient one to talk myself out of this. He’s right—it absolutely looks like I could have done these terrible things. And restating that I’m not capable of killing anyone clearly doesn’t mean anything, even if the only life I’ve actually taken was taken accidentally. I cannot become openly enraged unless I want that to be used against me down the line.
“Detective Silvestri, I can see how the puzzle pieces all come together, and why it appears that I’m your person. But the motives don’t add up, because I had no reason to kill Brooke, and didn’t kill her, so the incentive to kill Rachel would be nonexistent.”
“How can you explain the happenstance of Brooke moving to Port Jefferson? A couple of towns over from the one that the woman who accidentally killed her sister resides in.”
“I had no idea she was here. I haven’t been in contact with her! I’ve never even been in the same room as her.” I see impatience in Silvestri’s face. This isn’t good enough; my word means nothing to him.
He pauses for a sip of water and pulls his phone out of his back pocket and places it facedown on the table between us before continuing. “Based on what we know about your connection to her, and your interactions with her, it seems like you are not only the sole person who would have a possible motive, but there is ample evidence that you also engaged in a lengthy process of manipulation before taking her life.” Silvestri stops and reclasps his hands together in front of him, waiting.
“I don’t understand. Manipulation?” My heart is racing.
“It is interesting that you used the phrase ‘in the same room,’ Charlotte.”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, you have been in the same room with Brooke more than twice, haven’t you?”
I shake my head vigorously. Silvestri looks unmoved.
“What are you talking about?”
Calmly, he puts his palms on the table and locks eyes with me. “Okay, Charlotte. Let’s say, for argument’s sake, you’ve never physically been in the same room as her.” He passes the bottle of water back and forth between his hands. I’m trying to keep focus on him and not this distracting action. He’s toying with me. Wearing me down and trying to make me admit something I didn’t do. I’m starting to feel crazy.
“But you were in a virtual room with her, weren’t you?”
“I don’t even know what that means.”
“You are an active member in an online trauma survivors chat room, correct?” he asks.
I’m stunned. “Yes, I am.”
“And you created the group to lure Brooke Harmon into joining, and groomed her under the guise of being a support system for her?” Every last hair on my body stands on end.
“No. I didn’t start the group. I joined it. And there were already active members in it when I did.”
“Members that eventually included Brooke Harmon. That seems like a remarkable coincidence.”
I feel all of the color drain from my face as my blood pressure drops. “I had no idea Brooke was one of the members. We were anonymous.” Silvestri is watching me closely as I’m turning over the news that I’ve been chatting with Brooke unaware. “Detective Silvestri, you have to believe me. I did not start this group. I had no idea that Brooke was one of the members. I swear to you.”
“You expect me to believe that you wouldn’t connect Brooke to her story in a confessional online support group, or she to yours? I have to assume that the trauma of her sister dying during surgery came up once or twice. From one or both of you? It is a pretty significant and unique event to have in common.”
“I never talked about Michelle’s death in detail in the room. I mostly talked in general terms, and more about my childhood than my residency. And none of the other members ever mentioned their sister dying during a brain surgery. I would have remembered that!” I mentally scan the members of the group. Harmnoone. Her sister was murdered. I feel feverish.
“I didn’t do this! You have to believe me,” I beg.
He’s unaffected. “What happened? Did Brooke discover who you really were, and you had to kill her?”
“None of this is true.” I throw my shackled hands up as far as I can move them. The knots of this story are getting more tangled and I’m losing the resolve in my innocence the more he says.
“Well, we haven’t been able to recover all of the chat room archives yet, Charlotte. But I’m confident that when we do, we’ll be able to fill in the blanks.”
“Have you questioned the other members of the group? They’ll be able to confirm that I joined before Brooke, but after they did.”
“Well, that’s the tricky part, isn’t it, Charlotte?”
“I don’t understand.”
“I’m questioning all of the members of the chat room, minus Brooke, right now, aren’t I?” An indecipherable smile crosses his face.
“I’m sorry, I’m not trying to be difficult. I’m really not following,” I say.
“Charlotte, the IP addresses for the other members of the group trace ba
ck to a single server. They originated from the same computer. All of the supposed traumatized members of the group were actually you, alone. Isn’t that correct?”
“What?” I feel sick. My blood pressure plummets and I start to feel a cold clamminess creeping up the back of my neck and around the sides of my face. “That is insane! I didn’t create the group. I wouldn’t know how, even if I wanted to. The members are not all me. How would that even be possible?” I feel a small sense of relief amid my befuddlement and fear. This is all so far-fetched, unbelievable, and untrue, they’ll have to believe me.
Silvestri’s phone chirps and he flips it over and quickly glances at the screen. “I’m going to need to take this. But I’ll be back shortly. Why don’t you take the time to dig back into your memory and see if you can suddenly recall how this all started. I imagine there is an amazing story waiting to be told.”
I barely look at him as he exits the room.
FIFTY-FOUR
WOLCOTT
When I arrive at the Suffolk County Jail, Silvestri’s waiting for me. After I show my credentials and sign in, a guard escorts us down the main hallway in the direction of the holding cells. My partner is raring to go.
“So, let’s run through everything,” he says. “We’ve got the direct connection to the dead women. There’s her easy access to the poisons in both cases.”
“The motive with Brooke Harmon, with Charlotte’s business taking a hit with the bad Yelp reviews, and the continued harassment,” I add. “Not so clear with Rachel Sherman, but we don’t know what that fight was about.”
“Right. Then the neighbor places Charlotte at Rachel’s house around the time of the murder. She lies about having been there during our conversation later that night.”
“And don’t forget about her use of the chat room to lure Brooke Harmon.”
“Seems like we’ve got enough to bring this thing home,” he says. “Let’s get back in there.”
“Back in there?” I ask. “You already went a round with her?”
“Just warming the room up for you.”
FIFTY-FIVE
CHARLOTTE
Alone again, I find a focal point on the wall across from me in a cluster of chipped paint. I focus on the point to calm my hysterical nervous system and let my gaze become blurry. I try to clear my mind, but I keep thinking about Rachel.
“I wish you were here. I don’t know what to do,” I say out loud to the empty chair across from me. Of course, my plea is met with silence. But the hair on the back of my neck rises when I feel a distinct crackle of energy around me. “Please help me.”
I close my eyes and imagine we are sitting in the backyard, but the once peaceful and comforting vision is now tainted by my nightmare. I open my eyes and shiver. I feel a sharp pain in my left big toe like I’ve been stung, and the jolt brings with it a conversation that she and I had early on in our friendship. It was when she was practicing reflexology on me in school.
“What’s that point you are working on?” She’d been pressing hard on the upper part of my big toe, and I could feel the current of energy traveling up through my foot along my spine and into my cranial field.
She laughed. “Of course that is the one you’d ask about. This is the brain acupoint.”
I’d recently confided in her about my past life as a surgeon. I didn’t want anyone else in the program to find out and google my name. She’d been appropriately surprised and, I sensed, a little judgmental.
When she moved to my other foot and began working on the same point, she’d asked, “So, what made you interested in cutting into human brains?”
I’d given her my usual canned response, which always felt like a lie. “I always found surgery really fascinating, I guess. And brains were the organ with the most mystery about them, in my opinion.”
“I always felt that way about the heart,” she’d replied.
“But you didn’t end up cutting into them,” I’d countered.
“What trauma inspired you to spend half of your life in medical school studying other people’s?” she’d asked knowingly
I’d had to think about it. I couldn’t really remember a time when my becoming a doctor wasn’t just part of my personal narrative. My mother had been reinforcing it for as long as I could remember. But that day, lying on my back with my new friend pushing into my foot and feeling a very clear sense of healing energy moving through my body, I tried to recall what I remembered, not what I’d been told.
“Honestly, I can’t recall.” I’d tried to imagine that early thought process, or an experience that made me want to devote my life to helping people with PTSD, but there was just a blank space.
She’d stopped pressing on my toe and come around to the top of the table.
“Have you ever been hypnotized?” Her eyes were lit up.
“No. But I read a lot about it in med school. There was some good controlled-study research for quitting smoking.”
“And also for recovering memories. I’m surprised you didn’t come across that in brain school.” She’d been playful, but I remember feeling vaguely offended.
“Sure I did. There is a lot about repressed memory recovery. But also a lot of skepticism around hypnosis.”
“Well, then. Let me teach you how to self-hypnotize. Maybe we can solve the mystery of why you wanted to become a brain doc.”
It hadn’t worked ultimately, but it was a big day for our friendship, when our bonding really began. “You are probably just one of those people who aren’t highly suggestible,” she’d said. “Probably a good thing.” Now I wonder.
Back in the room, I will a wave of calm over me as I close my eyes and picture the number ten. It takes many repeated attempts, but sometimes extreme cortisol floods can help in self-hypnosis, if you know how to harness them. I’m able to visualize the number ten clearly after a few times. While it disappears from my mind’s eye, I open and close my eyes quickly and picture the number nine, while I reach for another wave of calm. I open and close my eyes quickly once the nine fades. I repeat this until I get to number one, praying that I can successfully get my disjointed neural pathways to make contact and jog something in my brain that can help me. The familiar feeling of tingling and detachment courses through me. Entranced, I imagine myself in a movie theater, sitting in the front row and following a scene of myself on-screen.
I am walking the hallways of Stony Brook Memorial Hospital, newly hired as a rotational GP six months after moving back to Stony Brook and again living with my mother following my breakdown. I see my hopeless, beaten-down self going through the motions of someone half-asleep. I watch myself standing in front of the locked pharmaceutical room, silently deliberating over which fast-acting chemical exit I would use. It is the lowest point in my life.
I follow myself going from the hospital with a purse full of ill-gotten Dilaudid, opening my laptop to compose an email of apology to my few remaining loved ones, and being sidetracked by the rare nonspam email at the top of my inbox. It was from a friend of a psych nurse at Bellevue whom I hadn’t remembered giving my info to, but I had been on a lot of Thorazine and didn’t question it. Her message was saying she’d started an online support group for trauma survivors a few months earlier and our mutual “friend” had thought I might be interested in joining.
I clicked on the link in the email and was transported to the first safe and supportive place I’d been in since Michelle’s death. There were people like me waiting to support and relate with, living with their guilt and shame, talking anonymously and openly about their worst moments and thoughts. In the safety of their virtual room, from the semi-safety of my actual room, I was able to share and be heard nonjudgmentally. I’d started tentatively, but quickly came to need the room to get through the day, and to sleep at night. I was able to laugh and cry with people who understood. They saved my life.
I engaged with them dai
ly over the year and a half it took to get my head together. I confessed to them about not wanting to be a doctor any longer but still wanting to heal people. They cheered for me when I made a friend my first day studying acupuncture at the Center for Healing and moved into my new home, all in the same month.
In my hypnotic trance, I watch myself getting stronger and happier as I settle into my new life, opening my practice and changing my entire lifestyle. I start to feel the possibility of being in love again, and the group encouraging me to date. I become excited about a new member of the group, with whom I find myself sharing the same middle-of-the-night hours and chatting one-on-one when everyone else is asleep. We completely click. She and I couldn’t be more alike.
Eventually she confides that he is actually a man posing as a woman in our support group, because he was unable to find a men’s group online that he felt he could really open up in.
I am surprised about how undisturbed I am by this revelation. Part of me is even excited. He and I have already connected over our crazy mothers and keep finding the most random parallel things in common. I see myself crushingly disappointed when he doesn’t come back to the group and no longer reaches out to me. I miss him deeply. I watch myself send a private message confiding as much, and to my delight, him responding, admitting he missed me too and how relieved he is that I don’t hate him for lying, and how grateful that I kept his secret. He tells me that this is very important to him, “someone who he can trust to keep his secrets.”
And then I relive our regular connecting on text and then by phone. First a couple of times a week and then every day. My life becomes completely centered on when I’ll hear from him next. I let the images and revelations trickle through me calmly. I observe myself rapidly falling in love with this person I never meet. Someone I feel so thoroughly understands me and doesn’t judge me for the pain I’ve caused and the terrible mistakes I’ve made. Someone who went from being a screen name I was so excited to see appear—Openhearted2—to a person with an actual name—Peter—whose words and voice became something I came to depend on more than anything else in the world. And when I felt myself completely dependent and desperate to meet him in real life, he started to disappear and pull away.