Last Day

by Luanne Rice

  “Horrible things. Rape things,” he said.

  “Like what?”

  “Being stripped. The strangling with hands. Hands all over her body, then around her neck.”

  Reid watched Harris’s hands unconsciously flexing and unflexing, making an oval as if wrapping around a throat.

  “Did you do these ‘rape things’?” Reid asked, chilled as he watched Harris’s hands tighten and release.

  “Not to Beth.”

  “Did you see someone else do them to Beth?”

  He hesitated, started to say something, then changed his mind and shook his head.

  “It seems to me like you did,” Reid said.

  “Not really.”

  “Not really? But sort of?”

  He sighed. “I dreamed about it,” he said. “My treatment is working; it is, truly. But I can’t help what I dream.”

  Truly. “Of course you can’t,” Reid said. “So, what did you dream?”

  “I saw Pete doing it to her,” Harris said. “She was on the bed. So beautiful and dainty, wearing her nightie. Pregnant. And how lovely a woman is at that time. There is a glow—I’ve seen it many times. My own wife . . .”

  Did you want to strangle your own wife too? Reid wondered, watching sweat break out on his forehead.

  “Right. So you dreamed of Beth on her bed.”

  “And Pete, her strong husband, standing over her, very serious.”

  Wives are dainty and lovely; husbands are strong and serious, Reid thought.

  “What did Pete do?”

  “Well, he hit her, of course. That’s what the bruises are from. And he did this,” Harris said, mimicking strangulation with his hands, consciously this time. “Then he would have taken her panties, which he would have removed after he hit her—I left that out—and then he would have wrapped it around her throat, and, well, you can imagine.”

  Reid watched him in silence. During the course of most of Martin Harris’s sexual assaults, he did use ligatures. He would start to choke his victim, then stop just as she was about to pass out. He always wore a mask. He’d never strangled a woman to death; he had always stopped short.

  “I really can’t imagine, Martin,” Reid said. “You need to tell me exactly what you’re talking about.”

  “Well, after he wrapped her panties around her throat, he would pull them tight. And then, eventually, she would die.”

  “That’s what you saw Pete do?”

  “In my dream, not real life! Wasn’t I being clear?” Harris asked.

  “Not entirely,” Reid said. “What did her panties look like?”

  “Black. Lacy edge.” As he said the words, Harris tickled his own neck, then made a finger slash, as if cutting his throat. He shivered and tried to hold back a smile. “They matched her bra.”

  Reid pictured the crime scene as if he were there right now. Beth on her side; that bruised lace-imprinted line around her neck; her black panties and bra, the French lace torn to shreds, lying on the floor.

  No one who had not been in that room, or read the police reports, knew those details. Reid’s heart was slamming in his chest, and his mouth was dry.

  “You were there,” Reid said.

  “No! I told you. I just dreamed about it!”

  Reid picked up the postcard and looked at the way Harris had written Pete’s name next to his own, almost like doodling the name of a crush. Reid knew that criminals, especially those with paraphilic disorders, loved to communicate with each other, relive their crimes and share fantasies.

  “I’m really curious about why you wrote Pete’s name right next to yours. I know you say you dreamed about him, but to me it seems like more than that, Martin. To me it seems as if you and Pete did something together. Or maybe he told you about what he did.”

  “Yes!” Harris said, looking almost triumphant, as if Reid finally got it. “That’s exactly it! In the dream he told me. He showed me! I saw it all! That’s what I mean by wanting to help you solve the crime. That’s why I put his name and Beth’s with the list of, you know.”

  “The women you assaulted,” Reid said in a calm voice.

  “Well, yes. Because even though I don’t do that anymore, have no desire whatsoever to do that again, I understand people who do. That’s why I dreamed of Pete. I don’t want to sound like I admire him—honestly, I don’t. But I can get right into his skin and feel how he hurt his wife and then killed her.”

  Honestly.

  “Let’s get a written statement on that,” Reid said.

  “So you believe me?” Harris said.

  Reid stared at him. He believed that Martin Harris had either killed Beth or spoken to the killer, who had given him very specific details. He saw the hopefulness in Harris’s eyes. Reid was happy to dash it.

  “The problem, Martin, is that I don’t believe in dreams,” Reid said. And he left the interview room, the Black Hall postcard in his hand.

  29

  Her phone buzzed, and Kate glanced at the screen. It was Lulu, calling for the third time since Kate had left the soup kitchen. Scotty had obviously raised the alarm. Again, Kate let it go to voice mail. In the midday sun, she walked from downtown New London past Fort Trumbull to Pequot Avenue.

  Nothing revealed a person’s character like the poetics of loss. Beth’s death had revealed the dark sides of people she’d loved and trusted. Kate had felt guilty for not telling Lulu about the sketch, but the way she and Scotty had known everything and kept Beth’s secret felt like a much worse betrayal. Even deeper than that, Beth herself had chosen to keep it from Kate.

  When Kate got to Monte Cristo Cottage, the boyhood home of Eugene O’Neill, she slowed down. The Victorian house was up a slight rise from the street, and she sat on the wall along the sidewalk and faced the harbor. There was barely a breeze; two boats with sails futilely raised motored toward the Sound, looking for wind. She felt a presence behind her—not a person, but the cottage itself. O’Neill’s father had been an actor, the house named for his most famous role, the Count of Monte Cristo. It had been the setting for O’Neill’s play Long Day’s Journey into Night.

  When Kate was a senior in high school, Mathilda had taken her and Beth to see the brilliant production in New York at the Plymouth Theater, with Vanessa Redgrave and Brian Dennehy starring as Mary and James Tyrone, Philip Seymour Hoffman as Jamie, and Robert Sean Leonard as Edmund—O’Neill’s autobiographical character.

  The play had hit Kate hard. It was about a Connecticut family so full of love for each other yet tormented with addiction and sinking with secrets. Mary was a morphine addict, James a liar, Jamie an alcoholic, Edmund dying of consumption. She’d thought of her own family, of how happy she had thought they were. In some ways, they were completely different from the Tyrones. Her family didn’t suffer from addiction or alcoholism. No one had a fatal disease. Instead of two sons, there were two daughters.

  Her father had not been a drunk, but he had been a liar and a cheat. He had acted the role of good husband and father but was actually a different person entirely.

  When they saw the play, her mother had been dead barely a year. It was only in retrospect, after her mother’s death and father’s imprisonment, after Beth’s retreat from closeness, and after Kate’s own heart became concretized, that she realized how her father’s secrets had destroyed them. He had had a private life unknown to the family.

  He was so charming. Even Kate was charmed by him, only back then she had called it love. She had adored her dad—he could do no wrong. Even though he stayed out lots of nights, and her mother seemed upset about it, Kate figured he deserved to have fun. He worked hard at the gallery that had belonged to her mother and grandmother, built it into an even more successful business because of all the collectors he befriended. Everyone wanted him to like them.

  He loved to gamble. Even on family vacations, they would often go to places that had casinos—like the trip to Monte Carlo the summer Kate was thirteen. The excuse had been to visit the Jean Cocteau
murals in Villefranche-sur-Mer, to stay in Saint Paul de Vence, the medieval village above Nice, and to dine at La Colombe d’Or. Legend had it that artists had paid for their meals with paintings. The walls were hung with art by Matisse, Léger, Picasso, Chagall. But the way her father had driven them back to the auberge; kissed them all good night, saying it was “for luck”; and left for the rest of the night, Kate knew he was speeding back to the casino.

  “What’s he doing there?” Kate asked her mother.

  “He enjoys games,” her mother said.

  “What kind of games?” Kate asked.

  Her mother laughed. “Why don’t you ask him that?”

  So Kate did when he returned late the next morning. “Why would you rather play roulette than stay at the hotel with us?”

  Her father chuckled. “Wait till you’re older. You’ll see James Bond movies and get it.” Then, just as the rest of the family was heading to Èze for lunch, he went to bed to sleep through the day.

  One late night during school vacation, Dr. No was on TV, and Kate made Lulu stay over and watch it with her. James was playing baccarat at a casino. He wore a dinner jacket and looked handsome, just like her father. Kate tried to imagine what her father had been trying to say, but to her, hanging out in a casino seemed boring.

  Living in Connecticut, temptation was close for him—Foxwoods and Mohegan Sun casinos were not far from Black Hall. But instead of just being away from dinner till dawn, he had started not coming home for days at a time. One day he came home just before she left for school. He hugged her, and she smelled perfume. She was only fifteen at the time, but she knew right then that he was having an affair.

  She wanted to tell Beth, but Kate took her position as older sister seriously and had to protect her. She watched her mother, to see how she reacted. For the longest time, her mother seemed fine. But once in a while, her father would talk on the phone in a low voice, then leave the house. Kate would see her mother hitting redial after her father left.

  Kate figured her mother must have smelled the perfume too.

  Walking down Pequot Avenue, Kate had intended to keep going to the lighthouse. But when she stopped to sit on the wall outside Monte Cristo Cottage, she realized this was where she had wanted to come all along. She needed to visit this house, to feel Eugene O’Neill’s spirit and bring back a moment in her life when she had sat with Beth and Mathilda in the theater, when a certain truth about her father had clicked in her mind.

  Her phone rang again. This time she answered without even looking at the screen.

  “You didn’t even text me back. You couldn’t bring yourself to tell me,” Kate said.

  “You have no idea how much I wanted to,” Lulu said.

  “But Beth made you promise not to?”

  “No, she never said that. I can’t even figure it out, why I didn’t. At first I thought that, yes—that if she’d wanted you to know, she’d have told you herself.”

  “Am I that terrible?” she asked. “That judgmental?”

  Lulu studiously avoided answering the question. “Kate, I want to see you. We need to talk in person.”

  Kate’s jaw was so tight she could barely speak.

  “Where is Jed Hilliard now?” she finally asked.

  “I don’t know.”

  “If you had to guess.”

  “Kate, we weren’t friends. I only met him once—accidentally.”

  “Where?”

  “On the Block Island Ferry. It was late last winter; the boat was practically empty. I had a few days off and was heading out to clear my head. I spotted Beth standing on deck—I was in the cabin; it was so cold. I remember there was ice on the lines, and it was starting to snow. I was so surprised to see her there at all—I started to go outside, when a guy walked up to her, handed her a cup of something hot—coffee, I guess. I tried to hang back, but she saw me, so I couldn’t avoid going over to talk. She introduced him as an artist friend, said they were going to go to Mohegan Bluffs to take photos of the cliffs in the snow so they could paint the scene later.”

  “Maybe they were just friends.”

  “I saw him kiss her when he handed her the cup,” Lulu said. “It was a real kiss.”

  Kate stared out at the water, picturing her sister on the ferry, kissing a stranger. So Scotty had been wrong—they were more than just friends. And the baby? Could he have been Jed’s? She closed her eyes and tried to imagine how Beth must have felt. It must have been exciting. She must have been happy. Kate kept the small fat key in her pocket, and her hand closed around it now.

  “Whose baby was it?” Kate asked.

  “Where are you?” Lulu asked.

  “New London.”

  “At home?”

  “On Pequot.”

  “Stay there,” Lulu said. “I’m coming to get you.”

  30

  Kate had already decided what to do next. When Lulu picked her up, Kate asked her to drive her home. She needed to be behind the wheel of her own car, regain a feeling of power and control. “I need to get my car,” she said.

  “To go where?” Lulu asked.

  “Ainsworth.”

  “Holy shit.”

  “You can come if you want.”

  So Lulu parked her Range Rover in Kate’s spot behind the loft building, and they took off in Kate’s Porsche. Kate had sworn she would never see her father again, but he was going to explain this to her—how he’d introduced Beth to a fellow inmate. Kate drove north on Route 9, following directions to the Ainsworth Correctional Institute.

  “Why are we doing this?” Lulu asked. “I should be buying you martinis at the Ocean House and begging you to forgive me and understand why I didn’t tell you.”

  “Yes, you should. But I want to find Jed.”

  “Tell the detective. He’ll find him.”

  “I plan to,” Kate said. “But this part’s on me. I want to know if my father introduced Beth to her killer. Do you think Jed did it, not Pete?”

  “Well, he wasn’t happy with her.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  Lulu exhaled hard. “She was married. He wanted her not to be. They fought about it.”

  “Was he the father?” Kate asked.

  “I’d say it’s a distinct possibility.”

  “Did you ask her?”

  “She didn’t tell me everything, Kate.”

  “And she didn’t tell me anything.”

  “What the hell are we doing?” Lulu said. “Get the detective on this so you don’t have to see your father for the first time since . . .”

  “He paid to have us tied up in the cellar,” Kate said, finishing the sentence.

  Lulu had a point. Kate was so good at blocking out feelings she’d made herself dead from the brain down. This was tricky. Her father, her dad. She had loved him like crazy when she was little. They used to go on expeditions in the backyard, with him carrying her on his shoulders. They’d see their shadow cast by the house lights.

  “A two-headed giant,” he’d say.

  “Don’t scare me,” she’d say.

  “Never,” he’d say. “What are we?”

  “Sweethearts and partners,” she’d reply.

  “That’s right,” he’d say, bouncing her up and down, tossing her up to the stars and catching her as she fell.

  She sped along, the Connecticut River on their right, through Hartford. She and her father used to go to the Wadsworth Atheneum, and she felt her old daughterly love flooding back. She had been close to her father. Whenever they had stopped at the Atheneum, they had visited Andrew Wyeth’s Chambered Nautilus, a painting of a young girl in her gauze-canopied bed, looking out the window with unbridled longing, a luminous seashell on the hope chest at the foot of the bed.

  “Why do you think it’s a hope chest?” her father had asked one time.

  Kate stared, reddening as if he had caught her having a fantasy. “Because the girl wants to get married,” she said quietly.

  “That’s her
greatest wish?” he asked.

  Kate stared at the painting, haunting in shades of white, wheat, and gray. The girl in the bed reminded her of herself: thin with long brown hair, filled with constant yearning. She could never have expressed that to her father or anyone. No one thought of her as a girl in bed; she was an athlete, always on a tennis court, a sailboat, or skis. She laughed; she didn’t moon. At least those were the things she showed the world.

  “Kate?” her father prodded. He stood beside her, tall and lean, the handsomest man she knew. He wore a navy-and-black houndstooth jacket from Allen Collins, gray flannels, and loafers without socks. He had a narrow face with a crooked nose and deeply sensitive hazel eyes always ready to smile. His hair was short and full, brown with white starting to come in. Silver threads among the gold, he would joke.

  “Her fondest wish is to get out of the bed and run,” Kate said. “And do something exciting.”

  “That’s my girl,” he said. “You still think it’s a hope chest?”

  “It’s a blanket chest. For when the nights get cold. When it’s winter.”

  “That’s what I think too,” he said.

  They always had lunch at the Hartford Club, with its brick facade and arched windows, just across Prospect Street from the Atheneum. He seemed proud to show her off—she’d wear a dress, and he’d ask people if they didn’t think she had long legs like a thoroughbred. She had often been conscious of thinking she had been lucky to be there alone with him, that he’d taken her and not their mother or Beth, but it had made her feel guilty at the same time.

  Speeding past the Colt Armory with its dark-blue star-dazzled dome and the ghosts of makers of firearms, she couldn’t help glancing at the Hartford skyline, trying in a split second to locate the museum and the club. Memories flooded into her just like the dam her dad had told her about that had broken in 1936, nearly washed away Hartford and his parents’ home, drowned an aunt he’d never meet. He had grown up with the family’s legacy and fear and hatred of that flood and all it had taken.

  “We’re getting closer,” Kate said to Lulu.

  “Are you okay?” Lulu asked.