by David Bell
“Right, right. I can see that. Your character in here, Lilly, the younger woman in the story, she had the loss of her father when she was young. And then her friend Sarah gets murdered. A lot of loss.” She taps her fingers against the book cover. Long, slender fingers I remembered from when Madeline disappeared. Fingers that would play the piano. Tap tap tap. “Do you ever use details from real murder cases in your writing?”
“Not directly. No.”
Tap tap tap.
“I’m asking because . . . Well, do you remember Sophia Greenfield?”
“Sophia Greenfield? Is she a writer?”
Bowman smiles, but it doesn’t reach her eyes. She shifts her weight on the couch, scooting forward. She holds the book in her right hand and points at it with her left. “Sophia Greenfield lived here in Gatewood, over off of Oak Tree Parkway. A woman in her late twenties. She was murdered in the parking lot of her office about two and a half years ago. She worked for a local nonprofit that promotes literacy, and she’d been at the office late, planning a fund-raiser. She told her husband she had a meeting, but nothing was listed on her calendar or her computer. No one seems to know who the meeting was with. Her husband told us she’d been pretty agitated and distracted in the days leading up to her death, like something was on her mind. But she never said what. This doesn’t sound familiar?”
“No,” I say. And I mean it. “You have to understand something, Detective. When my wife and son died, I was in a pretty heavy fog. For a long time. I didn’t follow the news. I didn’t socialize. There was an election for president, and I didn’t vote. I didn’t even pay attention to who won. I mean . . . I was deep in the depths of despair. A lot went on I didn’t notice. I’m sorry.”
“No reason to apologize. And I’m sorry for bringing up bad memories.” But she really doesn’t sound that sorry. “But Sophia Greenfield . . . You see, the details in your book and the real details of Sophia’s murder are a lot alike. Strikingly so. In fact . . . it’s almost like you were there when she was killed.”
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
I’m still wearing my coat. Bowman wears a white shirt, a gray suit, and crisply cleaned brown shoes. A gold watch and a wedding band. She looks like she plans to stay a while.
My coat feels tight and heavy. The heat blows out of the register across the room, making a low rattling noise. It shakes the fake plant that’s been sitting on the floor for years, gathering dust on its plastic leaves. I unbutton my coat and slip it off, feeling a little relief.
“You’re asking me if I based the book on this woman’s murder,” I say. “This . . . Sophia . . . ?”
“Greenfield. I guess I’m not asking you that anymore, since you just said you’ve never heard of the case. Although it seems hard to believe. We don’t have many murders in Gatewood, so the case got a fair amount of attention. Were you really in that much of a fog?”
“I almost lost my job, I was so out of it. I was lucky I held on. To anything.” I hate thinking of that time.
“You were lucky not to have noticed who won that election. I’ll say that. I still keep trying to pretend I don’t know the results.” She smiles at her own joke, but it looks forced. She clears her throat and taps the book with a long index finger. “In the book, you have a character named Sarah Redmond. And she gets murdered in her car in a parking lot. It’s outside her health club in the book, but still . . . Sophia Greenfield. Sarah Redmond. ‘Red’ instead of ‘Green.’ See? And they’re the same age. Twenty-seven. Right?”
“That’s just a random number. A lot of people die when they’re twenty-seven. Detective, I’m really not sure where this conversation is going, but I—”
She goes on like I haven’t spoken. “Sure,” Bowman says. “Like the Twenty-seven Club in rock and roll. Janis Joplin. Jimi Hendrix. Kurt Cobain. Maybe the age is just a coincidence. Maybe it all is. But Sophia’s body was discovered in her car by her husband when he went looking for her. In the book, Sarah’s body is found by her husband when he decides to go looking for her. Admittedly, the real Sophia had blond hair, and the fictional one has red hair. But they both have green eyes. Both tall. Athletic. Kentucky girls who like bourbon and yoga. Sophia’s husband became the prime suspect. Sarah’s husband did too.”
“The boyfriend or the husband is always the prime suspect,” I say. “That’s true in real life and in every thriller. I don’t know why you’re here—”
“Of course,” Bowman says. “You men haven’t done very well by your partners over the years. Suspicion always lands on them, and for good reason. Sophia was found murdered in her car. She worked late and didn’t come home when she was supposed to. Of course, her husband’s fingerprints and DNA were all over the vehicle. He drove it a lot. And there were unidentified prints and other DNA in there—hairs, fibers—but they didn’t match anyone in the system. So our killer, if it isn’t the husband, is out there somewhere, and if we find him, we can match it. There’s some evidence she may have been taken by surprise. Possibly there were two assailants. There are a variety of theories we’ve explored about the crime, but we’ve pretty much reached a dead end.”
“Detective, it’s possible I read about the case and didn’t consciously remember it. Or maybe I heard someone talking about it. In the store or the barbershop. I once published a short story, in my first book, and I gave a German shepherd the name Hogan. A few months later I got an e-mail from someone I went to grade school with, and she asked me if I remembered that her dog when we were kids was called Hogan. I didn’t remember until she said it. That detail was lodged in my brain somewhere, and I pulled it out subconsciously, completely unaware. It happens.”
“I’m sure it does,” Bowman says, tapping the book again. “I would imagine when a writer writes a book like this, there are so many details they have to choose. What characters look like. Where they work. What color their eyes are. Inevitably you have to draw on some things that are familiar to you.”
“Maybe you should write a book, Detective,” I say. “You must see a lot of interesting things in your work.”
“I could never write a book. That takes a lot of discipline. And time. As I know you know.”
I don’t say anything. She’s right—I do know what it takes to write a book. I know because I’ve tried and failed, many times, and nothing teaches you how hard it is to do something like failing at it.
But I can’t tell her that.
Bowman scratches her chin. “We, of course, checked all the calls she made and e-mails she sent. Sophia made a few calls to the English Department. To the main line. Do you know why she might have called there?”
“I have no idea.”
“She didn’t talk to you?” Bowman asks.
“I don’t know who she is. I have my own direct line to my office. Every faculty member does.”
“True enough. Sophia called the main office, but then if it got transferred somewhere else, we can’t see that on the records. So you don’t know why she was calling the English Department?”
“I have no idea. What was this nonprofit she worked for?”
“It promotes literacy among at-risk youth. Reading programs, workshops, the like.”
“Maybe she wanted help from the English Department. It seems like a natural match if she cared about literacy.”
“That’s what her husband said. I guess maybe a few English majors have worked there as interns over the years.”
“That’s possible. I don’t know where every student works as an intern.”
“And who handles the internship program?” Bowman asks. “Do you know?”
“My colleague Carrie Richter does.”
“Yeah, we talked to her at the time of the murder. She and Sophia exchanged e-mails about the program.”
“Okay, then.”
“But you didn’t talk to Sophia?”
“I didn’t, Detective. She didn’t
call me.”
“I thought I’d ask because you work in the English Department. But what stood out to me about your book, Dr. Nye, and this will be the last thing I ask you about because I know you have to get to campus. But what stood out to me was the way Sarah was killed in the book. When we investigate a serious crime like this, sometimes we choose to withhold certain details from the public. You’d be surprised at the number of people who want to call in to a police station and either confess or else turn in someone they know. We get unhappy wives who call in and say their perverted, cheating husbands must have murdered the young woman. Or we get unhappy husbands calling in and saying their pain-in-the-ass wives must have murdered the young woman out of jealousy. We’d spend all our time talking to these crazy people, time we should be spending on finding the real killer. So we hold something back, something only a few people know. And in the case of Sophia Greenfield, we never told the public how she was murdered. We said she died by strangulation, which she did, but we didn’t say whether it was manual. Or with a ligature. You see where I’m going with this?”
“Is this a joke of some kind?”
“I wish it was.”
“So a character in my book, Sarah Redmond, was killed with a scarf,” I say. “A ligature, as you said. So what?”
“It’s funny,” Bowman says, but she doesn’t look like she’s amused. She looks like she just stepped on a tack. “Sophia Greenfield died in exactly the same way. Strangled by a scarf her grandmother gave her. And that’s the detail that’s never been made public before.”
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
I could end the whole thing right now. Five words would do it:
Madeline O’Brien wrote the book.
I could tell Bowman that Madeline was alive, that she’d been here. She’d threatened me and promised to come back. Bowman could then focus her attention on Madeline, hunt her down, and find out what she knows about Sophia Greenfield’s murder. I could forget about a home equity loan or a credit card advance or any other form of blackmail payment.
Five words that flash in my head like a neon sign: Madeline O’Brien wrote the book.
But I don’t say them.
To say them would give everything away. The book, tenure, my job. Any stability I’d clawed to get back over the last five years. No, I couldn’t lose all that.
“It’s not such a big leap to imagine someone being strangled with a scarf, Detective,” I say. “When I was a kid, I saw that Alfred Hitchcock movie. Which one was it? Torn Curtain? No. The one where the guy murders women with his neckties.”
“Frenzy.”
“Yes, see, that’s it. Frenzy. You see, maybe that movie was lodged in my subconscious, and I needed a way for this character to die, and there it was. A scarf instead of a tie.”
“Yes, but her grandmother’s vintage scarf? You just happened to think of that? And the book describes the color and pattern of the scarf pretty accurately.”
“There are only so many ways to kill people in a book. Or in real life.”
Bowman points at me. “I think you’re reaching. But maybe you learned this detail another way. Maybe you wanted to do some research—I love it when writers do a lot of research—and you talked to someone who worked on the case. If that’s so, then I want to know who that person is who was blabbing sensitive information around town that could jeopardize our ability to prosecute someday. That way I can terminate their employment with the police department. Is that what happened?”
“I didn’t talk to any police officers,” I say.
“Then there’s another option.” Bowman scoots forward more, until it looks like her butt is going to slide right off the front of the couch and onto my living room floor. I see crumbs on the floor by her feet. A stain on the upholstery. I need to clean more. “Maybe you know someone who told you this detail. Maybe that person knew something they shouldn’t know.”
Madeline O’Brien wrote the book.
Bowman holds my gaze, like a snake charmer. The moment hangs in the balance like her body on the edge of the couch. Will everything stay up or crash down?
“I made it up, Detective,” I say. “I really did. I’m not sure what else to say, except I’m sorry anyone got hurt.”
“I appreciate you saying that,” she says. “But it wasn’t just the scarf we kept from the public. In the book—your book—you provide a pretty detailed description of the position Sarah’s body is in after she is murdered. Do you remember that?”
“Of course.”
“You wrote that she was slumped over, her head resting against the right side of the steering wheel.”
“Well, but that—”
“And her right hand was resting on the seat. Palm up. And her left hand was hanging limply at her side. The middle nail on her left hand broken from a defensive wound.”
“Naturally she’d have defensive wounds—”
“All of those details were, pardon the pun, deadly accurate. Almost like you’d seen the crime scene.”
My mouth is desert dry. My tongue is mummified.
“I . . . I don’t . . .”
“Of course she’d have defensive wounds,” Bowman says. “Anyone could guess that. But you gave her a very specific defensive wound. On the middle finger of her left hand. Just like the real Sophia. Who you say you don’t know.”
“I don’t.”
Bowman rubs her nearly flawless chin. She maintains her delicate perch for another few moments and then deftly rises off the couch and reaches for her coat.
“I’m sorry I bothered you so early in the morning,” she says while she pulls one sleeve and then the other on. “I hope I haven’t made you late for class.”
I stand up too. So does Grendel, although he doesn’t have anyplace to go.
“It’s okay,” I say, pulling on my coat. “I’ll be fine.”
Bowman holds up the book. “At least I got this signed. Thanks for that.”
“Thank you for reading it,” I say.
“Are you going to be in town?” Bowman asks when we reach the door. “Are you going off on a book tour or something?”
“No,” I say. “My publisher isn’t sending me out like that. I used to think I’d get to go on a big book tour, but it’s my understanding they usually only do that for bigger-name authors. I’m doing some smaller events around the state, but nothing too elaborate.”
“So you’ll be in town?”
“I will. I have a day job. I have a lot of bills.”
“Do me a favor. If you do head out anywhere, can you let me know? I want to be able to follow up with you about this if I learn anything else.”
I can’t stop my cheeks from flushing. And I’m sure Bowman sees what I can feel. “Sure. I guess so.”
“Great.” She puts her hand on the knob but doesn’t turn it. “Say, Dr. Nye?” She lets go of the knob and straightens up. “It’s interesting. When Madeline O’Brien disappeared, we did look into whether or not she and Sophia Greenfield knew each other. Sophia’s murder and Madeline’s disappearance happened about six months apart. It turns out they went to the same yoga studio. They were friends who talked from time to time.”
“Curious.”
“Did you ever go to Yoga for Life! here in town? Are you a yoga guy?”
“I can’t even touch my toes anymore.”
“I love yoga,” she says. “But I go to the studio called Imagine on High Street. Jenn knows the owner there. It’s good for you.”
“I’m sure it is.”
“You haven’t had any other thoughts about Madeline’s disappearance, have you? I know it’s been two years, but you were pretty foggy about that last night you saw her. The last night anyone saw her, as far as we know. Anything on that?”
Bowman must now see my flushed cheeks. It feels to me like she must be able to hear my heart beating, as much as it�
�s thumping inside my chest. Like a fist punching the inside of my rib cage, trying to break out.
“Nothing,” I say through a mouth still dried by last night’s alcohol and this morning’s fear.
“Maybe that’s another book,” Bowman says. “I hear true crime is big right now.”
Before I can say anything, she pulls the door open and leaves, letting in another blast of cold air against my burning cheeks.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Sartre said hell is other people.
But he never tried to park on the campus of Commonwealth University.
On a weekday morning after eight o’clock.
On days I ran late—and there were a lot of them—Emily used to drop me off before she went back to work. Those ten or fifteen minutes we spent together in the car, alone, were some of the best of our marriage. We developed the habit of finding a song on the radio to sing along to, and then we’d belt it out as loud as we could. Neither one of us could sing, but we let it rip anyway. Sometimes we’d pull up next to my students at a stoplight, and they’d stare with puzzled looks on their faces as we screamed “Livin’ on a Prayer” or “Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go.” Most of the time we laughed more than we sang.
Now I know exactly when I have to leave my house in order to make it to campus in time to get a parking spot close to Goodlaw Hall, which houses the English Department. Bowman’s visit—and pointed questions—threw everything off. And I end up in the overflow lot at the bottom of the hill, which means I have to schlep about a half a mile in the biting wind, carrying my ancient university-issued laptop and a stack of student papers. The cupola bell tower on top of Goodlaw looks like it’s in another county when I start walking, and by the time I reach the building, I’m winded like a man who just ran ten miles. I’m sweating under my clothes, and I can’t wait to peel off my winter coat and drop my bag in my office.
And I’m almost convinced Madeline has already been here, telling Preston or the dean or anybody who would listen that I stole her book, that I need to be fired, that I’m the lowest form of life to ever live—