“We ain’t got enough to hold him,” Audie said. “We’re gonna have to cut him loose.”
“I understand,” said Joan. “I’ll talk to you tomorrow.”
Joan replaced the phone in her pocket as Emma’s retching finally subsided, and Emma fell back against the pillow, her complexion the color of clay.
“That’s enough,” Kay pleaded. “Please, leave her alone.”
“Mrs. McLean, I won’t be long. I understand your concern, but believe me, I am on your side.”
“Make it quick,” said the nurse to Joan. “She’s gonna be out again in just a few minutes.”
Joan nodded and returned to her seat by the bed.
“David.” Emma was moaning. She turned her head and looked at Joan with bleary eyes. “Where’s my husband?” she asked.
“He’ll be along soon,” Joan said soothingly. Too soon, she thought.
“When?” she whispered.
“Any minute now,” she said. Any minute now, and that meant that she did not have much time left before the husband went to work on the victim, trying to convince her he had nothing to do with this. “Emma. Earlier, you seemed to hesitate when I asked if you knew someone who might be angry at you or might have threatened you. Who were you thinking of?”
Joan watched Emma’s bleary eyes, calculating the small window of lucidity she had left for questions. Emma was losing the thread of consciousness.
“It’s important, Emma, that you tell us whatever you can think of. If you can remember anyone who may have threatened you…”
Emma nodded slightly and swallowed hard. “It’s not threats. I’ve been getting…messages. Anonymous.”
Joan raised an eyebrow. “What kind of messages?”
“Like…love notes. But…a little…not normal.”
“Do you still have them?” she asked. “How many have you received? For how long? Are you receiving them at home or at work?”
Emma closed her eyes, and Joan thought for a moment that she had fallen asleep. Then she said, “At work. Maybe…two months. Four of them. And a rose. I kept them.”
“I’ll need to see those messages,” said Joan. “Do you have any idea who sent them?”
Emma shook her head. “Dunno…could be a patient.”
A patient? Joan thought. For a moment, Joan’s certainty about the husband faltered. Kay McLean had told her that her daughter was a psychologist. She worked at some kind of crisis center. Joan had once worked a case where a female patient became obsessed with her doctor and slashed the roof of his convertible when the doctor got engaged. It could be a similar thing in this case. A guy who went crazy when his shrink betrayed him by getting married. She had to explore the possibility.
“Where can I find these notes?” Joan asked.
“Ask Burke. Dr. Heisler. He’s my boss,” Emma said. “He knows about them.”
“Thank you, Emma,” said Joan as she stood up to leave. “You just concentrate on getting better.”
The door to the room opened and a handsome but haggard-looking dark-haired man walked in.
“David!” Kay exclaimed.
Joan turned and eyed him. “Mr. Webster?” she said.
“Could I possibly see my wife now?” said David bitterly.
Emma’s eyes opened at the sound of his voice. “David.”
Joan stepped out of the man’s way. She saw a worried look in Kay McLean’s eyes. “I’m staying,” Kay said firmly, though no one had asked her to leave.
David Webster walked gingerly over to Emma’s bedside, looked down at her worriedly, and leaned over to kiss her. “Hey, baby,” he whispered.
“She just got a sedative. Let her sleep,” Kay warned her new son-in-law.
Emma looked up at David with eyes full of confusion. “David. Where were you? I was so afraid….”
David sank down in the chair beside her and lifted her hand, holding her fingers in his, and pressing his lips to them. “Shhh…Rest. I’m here. We’ll talk later. You’re safe now,” he murmured. “I won’t leave you.”
Joan pulled open the hospital room door and then glanced back at the two of them. Emma closed her eyes and tears ran down the sides of her face. David wiped her tears gently away with his thumb. Joan frowned as she stepped out into the hallway.
7
A RUSTLING sound nearby registered in her sleep, and Emma’s eyes flew open, her heart pounding as if it would leap from her chest. She blinked at a woman wearing a shower cap and dressed in polyester pants and a tunic, carrying a tray of food. “Here we go,” said the aide in a cheerful voice. “Breakfast. Better wake up, Prince Charming.”
Emma turned her head on the scratchy hospital pillow, damp from tears she had shed in her sleep, and saw her husband. David was slumped in the visitor’s chair, fast asleep, his head resting on his fist. He was unshaven and looked utterly exhausted. “David,” she said.
David opened his eyes and jerked his head upright. In his dark eyes she saw confusion and sleepiness. But something else too. His gaze met hers and his eyes looked haunted, as if he had seen a ghost. “Breakfast is served,” she said gently. She turned to the woman with the tray. “Could you put it down there?” she asked, pointing to the adjustable table on the other side of the bed.
“Okay. You be sure and eat now,” said the nurse. “You need your strength. The doctor will be in shortly to see you.”
Emma nodded and closed her eyes. “Okay,” she said, although the familiar nausea of morning sickness was unsettling her stomach.
David shook his head and rubbed his unshaven face. Then he scraped the chair across to her bedside, stood up, leaned over the bed, and kissed her on the forehead. “Baby,” he said. “How are you feeling?”
Emma took a deep breath to quell the nausea, shifted her leg, which felt as if it were on fire, and put a hand gingerly on her wounded side. “I’ve been better,” she said. “I guess I fell asleep as soon as you got here last night.”
David nodded and sat back down in the chair. “I watched you sleep for a little while. I was tempted to crawl into bed with you, but I didn’t want to jostle all those stitches. I don’t know when I passed out.” He reached out and took her hand. “Not much of a wedding night.”
Emma nodded sadly. His hand felt like the only warm thing in the whole room. “I’m glad you were here with me,” she said. “I would have been afraid if I woke up alone.”
“Emma, I don’t know what to say. I should have been with you in that cabin. I never should have left you alone there….”
Tears began to leak out of Emma’s eyes again. “It was terrible, David.”
“I know,” he said angrily. “I know it was.”
“He was behind me with the ax, and I turned around….” Her voice faltered.
He squeezed her hand so hard that she almost yelped. “Don’t,” he said. “Don’t think about it.”
“I kept praying for you to come back.”
David sighed. “I couldn’t feel any more guilty. Believe me. If I could do it over…I went walking along the riverbank. You know, I was kind of filled up with all the events of the day. I was just thinking…actually I wasn’t thinking. Just wandering, reveling in my good fortune. The sunset was so beautiful. I found this old duck blind my uncle John used to take us to. I climbed up on it to look at the water and I fell through where it was rotted. I could hear the gunshots. I was frantic to get out of there, but that only made it worse. By the time I got myself free the police had arrived. They were searching for your attacker, and instead, they found me.”
“Did you see him?” she asked.
“Who?” David frowned at her.
“Him,” she said, agitation in her voice. “The man…with the ax.”
David hung his head. “No,” he said. “I wish I had. He’d be a dead man now.”
For a moment they were both silent. Then David stood up abruptly and came around to the other side of the bed.
“Be careful of the IV,” she said.
He
ducked around the pole and adjusted the table in front of her. “What are they giving you in that?” he asked.
“I don’t know,” she said. “If they told me, I don’t remember. I was too out of it.”
“Well, here, eat something,” he said. “You need your strength.”
“I’ll try,” she said.
He ripped the paper lid off the cup of apple juice and handed it to her. Emma took it from him and had a careful sip. Her stomach started to settle. “Were you able to help the police?” she said.
David snorted with laughter. “Help them?”
Emma, who had begun to chew on a piece of dry toast, blinked at him. She felt a sudden confusion. “They said you were at the station trying to help them.”
David shook his head. “I was at the station being interrogated. Look, Emma, you have to face facts. As your husband, I’m the prime suspect.”
“You?” she cried.
“The husband always is,” David said. “I was at the scene. My fingerprints were on the murder weapon.”
“The ax? But you were chopping wood,” Emma protested.
David shook his head. “Didn’t Atkins ask you about me last night?”
And then it came back to her. That lady lieutenant asking her if they’d argued. If he’d ever hurt her. Emma grimaced as she remembered the questions. They seemed so irrelevant to her that she had put them out of her mind. “She asked me if I could think of anyone who would want to hurt me. I thought about those anonymous letters. The ones I got at work…I told her about those.”
David frowned and shook his head. “You shouldn’t do that, Em.”
Emma looked at him in surprise. “Do what?”
“Offer them information. My brother specifically told me not to do that.”
“Phil said that? When did you talk to Phil about this?”
“I called him last night,” David said.
“Oh, of course. I’m sure you needed to talk to your brother at a time like that,” she said.
David hesitated, chewing the inside of his mouth. “Actually, it was a little more than that. I wanted his advice as a lawyer. Phil called a friend of his, an attorney named Yunger. The guy drove down and got me out of there. From now on, Em, all our communication with the police should go through Mr. Yunger.”
Emma was silent. She set the crust of her toast back down on her plate and wiped the crumbs off her fingers, avoiding his gaze.
“What’s the matter?” he asked.
“Why do we need an attorney? We have nothing to hide.”
“Emma,” he said, taking her hand in his again. “A man was killed. We need to protect ourselves,” he said.
“From who?” she said.
“From the police.”
Emma pulled her fingers away from his. She felt a little chill. “The police are trying to find the man who attacked me. Why do we need protection from them?”
He gazed at her for a long moment without replying. “The police are looking for an easy answer. I am that easy answer.”
“That’s stupid,” she said. “We just got married. We love each other.”
“You’re rich. We have no prenup, remember?”
Suddenly, she felt almost guilty, as if her refusal to sign a prenup had led to this disastrous moment. “I didn’t want to compromise us…our future. It seemed like a lack of faith….”
“I know that,” he said. “But they don’t. They see your money as a motive.”
“David, no. That’s ridiculous. They can’t blame you.”
“Emma, don’t be naive. You read the paper. Innocent people get railroaded all the time. We have to avoid talking to the cops. Let the lawyer take care of it.”
She stared at him steadily, although she was trembling inside. “But that seems wrong to me,” she said.
David’s expression was grim. “You need to be with me on this,” he said.
The door to the room opened and a gray-haired man wearing a white lab coat over his shirt and tie came in. He frowned at Emma. “How are we doing here? Do you remember me? I’m Dr. Bell. I took care of you last night.”
Emma blinked at the doctor. “I’m…I’m afraid I don’t remember too much….”
“That’s understandable. You were heavily sedated. I thought you’d like to know that you can probably go home tomorrow.”
“Oh, that’s great,” said David. “Honey, that’s great.”
“Getting around is going to be difficult for a while,” Dr. Bell cautioned. “The lacerations were much wider than they were deep. You had over two hundred stitches, and there will probably be some residual nerve damage. You may want plastic surgery at some point to minimize the scars. You needed three transfusions for the blood loss, which is significant, but the bigger danger we faced, actually, was that your body would shut down from shock. Luckily, the EMTs arrived in time and you resisted succumbing.”
Emma shook her head. “I wasn’t…I didn’t do anything.”
“We never underestimate the power of the will,” said Dr. Bell.
“I appreciate all you did for me. And my baby,” she said.
“That’s my job,” he said, but he was smiling. “As for your recovery, the good news is that no ligaments or tendons were cut. You’re going to be in a lot of pain for a while. I’ll give you medication for that of course.”
“Is it all right to take this medication, with the pregnancy?” she asked.
“Perfectly safe,” he said. “At the recommended dosage.”
Emma nodded.
“With so many open wounds, we have to be alert to the possibility of infection. We have you on an antibiotic drip now,” he said, pointing to the IV bag, which hung on a pole beside the bed. “Once you get home, you’ll take an oral antibiotic. You have to keep your dressings clean. The nurse will show you how to change them. And you have to be careful of the sutures. No heavy lifting. No driving. Restricted activities.”
“Don’t worry, I won’t let her do anything she shouldn’t,” said David.
Dr. Bell smiled. “All things considered, you were very lucky, young lady. Once the wounds heal, there should be no lasting effects.”
Emma knew he was speaking clinically. As a physician. About her body. A lucky young lady. No lasting effects. She thought of the hooded man, swinging the ax above her head. She had to stifle the sob that rose to her throat.
8
FIRST THING Monday morning, Lieutenant Joan Atkins, dressed in a black suit and a striped turtleneck sweater appeared at the Clarenceville Police Station. She introduced herself to the local chief of police and waited while the chief summoned a young detective named Trey Marbery and assigned him to work with the state police lieutentant on the investigation of the assault on Emma Webster. Joan noticed that Trey Marbery seemed to be the youngest detective in the squad and also the only one of mixed race. She understood the chief’s choice. An older, white man would resist taking orders from a woman. Joan suppressed a sigh. Predictable, but tiresome all the same.
“What am I taking you away from, Detective?” she asked Marbery pleasantly.
The mocha-complected young man shrugged. “My biggest case is a hit-and-run. A retired professor from Lambert University who got killed last spring. The perp hit him head-on and left the old guy to die there like roadkill. I haven’t made much headway though. It’s frustrating. I could use a change of pace. I’m glad the chief assigned me to you.”
“Well, I’ll keep you busy,” said Joan, smiling briefly. “I need someone who knows his way around this town.” As she briefed Marbery, she was favorably impressed by the young man’s focused attention and intelligent questions. They walked out of the station house together.
“Where are we headed first?” Marbery asked.
“The place Emma Webster works. I want to see those anonymous notes. Do you know where the Wrightsman Youth Center is?”
“Yes, ma’am,” said Marbery.
“Good. You drive,” said Joan.
The building that
housed the Wrightsman Youth Crisis Center was a large, gray stone Colonial house that had once been the home of Noah Wrightsman, one of the richest men in Clarenceville. After his death, Wrightsman’s heirs had wanted the tax write-off more than the grand old house. They’d donated it to Lambert University, which promptly turned it into the Youth Crisis Center.
Marbery parked in the gravel parking lot beside the center, and the two officers went around to the front door. Marbery pressed the bell. As they stood waiting, he observed, “I was here a few months ago.”
“Really?” Joan asked. “What for?”
“Dr. Heisler’s wife died. She took a header off the bridge into the river.”
“Was it suspicious?”
Marbery shook his head. “Well, you always have to look at a suicide as a possible homicide. But she was a poet. Very…artsy and high-strung. Even though she’d just won some big literary award, she got into a depressive spiral, according to the people we interviewed. Still, she didn’t wash up right away, so we were keeping the pressure on the husband. But when they found her, it was a suicide all right.”
“What did the coroner say?”
“He said she actually died from the impact of the fall from the bridge.”
“Sounds pretty straightforward,” said Joan.
Trey nodded as a round-faced Hispanic woman answered the bell and said that Dr. Heisler was expecting them. “I’ll take you to his office,” she said.
Joan glanced into some of the rooms she passed in the hallways. There were teenagers watching TV or working on computers in the common rooms. The house was as silent as a library. “I expected this place to be noisy,” she said to the woman who was leading them down the hallway.
Sarita Ruiz laughed. “You caught them early. A lot of them just took their medications. Give them a few hours.”
They arrived at Dr. Heisler’s door, and the woman indicated that they should go in. Burke Heisler was waiting for them, standing nervously in front of his desk. Joan was immediately struck by the contrast between the man’s rough-hewn face and his well-cut suit. “Detective Marbery,” Burke said grimly. “We meet again.”
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