The receptionist returned with Michael’s address and handed it to Alex. We thanked Daniel Asher and quickly left his office, even though my version of the truth had done the trick. By the time we reached the elevator, I could feel Alex’s stare practically burning a hole in the side of my head.
I turned to look at him and saw him smiling at me. “Nice save back there.”
“Well, you know how it is, me and my small town thing I have going on. Sometimes it works.”
“You should know I’m impressed every day by you. This case might just be me waiting for Derek to haul me off in handcuffs if it wasn’t for you, Poppy.”
I secretly loved it when he said things like that, but I didn’t want him to know how much I adored hearing his compliments about my work as his partner. Shrugging, I waved him off. “It’s nothing. Grasshopper has learned her lessons. So where are we off to now, teacher?”
Turning away, I faced forward and saw in the shiny metal doors in front of me that he was still smiling as he looked at me and said, “We get to head out to Ellicott City.”
We pulled up to the white Cape Cod house on High Ridge Road in Ellicott City just after sunset and parked the car in front of a quintessentially suburban home. Once we got closer to it, however, it became clear that it was anything but an average house. We peeked through the windows on the front porch since none of them had any curtains or draperies and saw every room was empty. Not one piece of furniture sat in any of them.
“Did he move? This looks like the kind of house a family would live in, so do you think when he lost his job he simply packed up his wife and kids and left town?” I asked.
Alex looked around the neighborhood at the expensive homes nearby. “He might not have been able to pay the mortgage on a house in a place like this if he lost his job and didn’t have enough savings. Let’s check around back.”
“It’s getting dark. I’m not sure skulking around this guy’s house at night is a good thing.”
He chuckled and nudged me toward the front porch steps. “You’d know about that whole skulking around a man’s house in the dark thing. Just pretend it’s my house, and anyway, I’m here, so it’s not like anyone’s going to jump out of the bushes and attack you.”
“Funny. If someone does, I’m going to run behind you. Just letting you know.”
“I know my place here. I’m the muscle,” he joked as we walked down the side of the house.
The house next door had no lights on in it either, so at least we wouldn’t have to deal with a nosy neighbor wondering what we were up to. We climbed the five steps of the wood back porch and looked in through the windows of the back door that led into the kitchen since it didn’t have any curtains hanging on it either.
Inside, I saw only a stove and a refrigerator. Not even a table had been left in the kitchen. Alex gently elbowed me in the side and pointed at the window. I looked in and saw what had caught his attention.
“Is that a knife with something dried on it?” I asked as I strained to see what it could be.
“Yeah. How likely is it that it’s blood?” he asked me as he jiggled the door handle to find it locked.
“We need to get into this house, Alex. Let’s go try the front door and see if we have any luck with that.”
The two of us turned around to see a man with crazy eyes staring wildly at us with a shovel in his hands raised to beat our heads in. We froze without taking even a step, and he lowered it to point at us.
“I don’t think you want to do that. I’ve lost too much already and killing you two won’t make things much worse for me.”
Chapter Eighteen
The man’s eyes flashed a wildness I’d never before seen anywhere but in horror movies. Looking away for just a second, I saw his thin hands gripped that shovel so tightly his knuckles had turned white and appeared as if at any moment they would erupt from under his skin. His feet firmly planted in a wide stance, he appeared ready to lunge with the slightest provocation. Nothing about the man said either Alex or I was going to get off that porch safely.
I looked to my left and saw Alex staring just as intently at our would-be attacker as he was at us, but in my partner’s eyes I saw not a wild look but a calculating one. Unlike me, standing in pure terror at the possibility that Michael Thompson would at any second swing that shovel and slam it into the side of my head to crush my skull like it was a rotten cantaloupe, Alex stood calmly assessing the situation and devising plans for our escape.
At least I hoped he was and I wasn’t just letting my soon-to-be smashed in head fill with overly romantic notions of his cleverness and invincibility.
“What are you doing here? Did she send you? I told her there was nothing left to pick off my bones!” he yelled in a frantic voice that trembled when he said the word her.
Alex slowly pulled me behind him and held me there, but his worry that I’d move or try to run was unnecessary. I had no intention of attempting anything stupid like that. I liked my skull just as it was in one piece, and if he could stop this madman from trying to kill me, I was all for standing behind him and letting him take lead.
“We just came here looking to talk to you, Michael,” Alex said in a soft voice barely above a whisper. “You are Michael Thompson, right?”
“I don’t know who I am anymore. Who are you? Why are you trying to break into my house?” he shrieked.
Raising his hands in surrender, Alex continued to gently try to make him understand why we were there on his back porch, even though we looked like common criminals trying to break into his house, just as he thought.
“Michael, we mean no harm. My name is Alex and this is Poppy. We just want to talk to you.”
He narrowed his eyes to slits, like he didn’t believe what Alex had said, and then looked back and forth between us. “Poppy isn’t a real name. It’s a flower. You’re just trying to trick me.”
I’d gotten that every day of grade school from every teacher who refused to accept that I felt more comfortable with my nickname than I did my given name. I couldn’t react as petulantly now as I had at school, though, or we were sure to feel the sharp edge of that shovel against our heads.
Giving him my sweetest smile, I said, “Hi, Michael. Everyone calls me Poppy ever since I was a little girl, but you can call me by my given name, if you want. It’s Elizabeth.”
His expression softened, and he repeated my name like he couldn’t believe it. “Elizabeth?”
“Yes. It was my grandmother’s name, and I’ve always loved it,” I lied in the most sincere way I knew how. I had been named after my father’s mother, but I’d never liked the name as much as my nickname. My paternal grandmother never found anything nice to say about a single person in all the time I spent around her. At her death when I was six, I had no tears, as much as I wished I could have cried at her passing for my father.
“She took my two kids and one day when I was at work, she cleaned out the house. I came home to nothing. I know I made mistakes, but she took everything I had.”
Alex and I looked at each other as Michael Thompson began to unravel right there in front of us. Whatever fear I’d had of him and his shovel faded away, replaced by sympathy for the obvious pain he was in.
I mouthed the words, “Let me talk to him a little more,” and slowly crept out from behind Alex to see if I could at least make Thompson see we didn’t want to hurt him. He stood at the edge of the porch with his head hung, and when I looked more closely, I saw tears rolling down his cheeks.
Reaching out my hand toward him, I smiled and said, “I know how bad things can seem, but you’re going to be okay, Michael. Do you want to talk? I’d love to talk to you.”
He looked up and began sobbing loudly as he nodded. “I would. I don’t have anyone to talk to anymore. I don’t have anything anymore. It’s all gone.”
I took his hand in mine and led him to a wooden bench at the far end of the porch. Behind me, Alex moved to where Michael had stood on the edge of the porch nea
r the stairs. I didn’t know what I would say, but I let my heart lead the way instead of my head. He didn’t need to be interrogated now. He needed a shoulder to cry on and someone to lend their ear for a while so he didn’t think he was all alone in the world.
Still holding the shovel, he sat down and cried like a baby as I held his hand. I didn’t know him and he didn’t know me, and it was quite likely he had murdered my friend, but at that moment I felt so much sympathy for him that I had to help.
“It’s going to be okay. I know it doesn’t seem like it will, but I promise no matter how bad you feel, once you let it all out, then you can start to feel better. Just let everything you’re feeling come out.”
I hoped what he was feeling was simply distraught and not full of rage that would turn on me at any second. He stopped crying and lifted his free hand to wipe his eyes, but the shovel got in the way.
Quickly, I said, “Here, let me take that so you don’t hurt yourself with that.”
He didn’t fight me, and once he released it into my hold, I held it out for Alex to take. Without a weapon, I saw Michael Thompson not as the terrifying madman who I was afraid would crush my skull but as the broken person he truly was.
“I never wanted anyone to get hurt. I didn’t mean to do all those things to my wife,” he said quietly as he wiped the tears from his cheeks.
I wasn’t sure what he meant by that. Had he hurt his wife at some point other than cheating on her? Part of me didn’t know if I should ask what he’d done, but I knew if I didn’t Alex would and I had a feeling Michael would be far more receptive to my questions.
Gently stroking the top of his hand, I tentatively asked, “What happened that they got hurt, Michael? Maybe we can help them get better.”
He shook his head and began sobbing again. “No, no. She says nothing will ever make things better. She says I made my bed, so now I have to lie in it. She doesn’t understand that I’d do anything to fix my mistake.”
I looked over at Alex, who didn’t look nearly as affected by Michael’s breakdown as I was. That didn’t surprise me, though. He was a cop down to his marrow, hardened over after years of the job and everything he’d gone through in his own life. I’d seen my fair share of heartbreak, but it hadn’t made me retreat into my shell like him, so I empathized with what my father liked to call “the hard luck stories that tug at the heartstrings.”
“Would you like to go inside and talk where I’m sure it’s warmer?” I asked Michael, instantly knowing I’d made a mistake asking that when he ripped his hand from my hold.
“No!” he screamed at me. “We can’t go in there!”
Alex rushed over to my side to stop him from grabbing me, but I had the sense he just didn’t want to talk about the house, so I wouldn’t ask again. Holding my hand up so Alex wouldn’t move close to him, I lightly touched his sleeve and smiled.
“Okay, we can stay here if you want. Is that okay?”
Strangely calm after lashing out just a few seconds ago, he nodded and repeated my words. “We can stay here. That’s what I want.”
“Okay. I like it here too, so we’ll stay. Do you need anything, Michael? Food? Medicine? Because if you do, we can get it for you. We’re happy to help.”
He shook his head so fast his dark hair fell down onto his forehead and began rambling, “I want to stay here. This is my house. That’s what I want. All I need is my house and my family. I need them back here.” Turning to face me, he stared into my eyes and asked, “Can you bring them here? I need them here.”
“They’re not hurt, are they, Michael?”
His body sagged, and he hung his head. “She says I hurt them, but I would never do that. I love them. I just didn’t think when I did it.”
I looked up at Alex and saw his mouth open to ask the obvious question of what it referred to, but I stopped him and asked myself. “What did you do, Michael? Will you tell me?”
“She says I broke my vows. I guess I did,” he said in a faraway voice as he buried his head in his hands. “I couldn’t help myself. She was just too beautiful and she said she cared about me.”
“Who was she? Can we call her so she can come over and be with you?”
Michael began sobbing and shaking his head violently back and forth. “She won’t! She doesn’t love me anymore. She said she’d love me forever, but she lied. She lied to me!”
His words echoed in my ears, and I leaned back against Alex in fear that Michael was about to lash out at me this time. The she he was talking about was Bethany by the way he’d talked to her in those letters.
“Why aren’t you at work?” Alex asked.
Looking up at him, Michael’s lip quivered as he answered. “When she left me, I didn’t know what to do. This whole house seemed like it was against me. My alarm didn’t work, and I began missing days. Then an account I’d been working on was taken away from me because one of my co-workers complained about me always missing work.”
“You lost your job,” I said sadly as he nodded in tears.
“I lost everything because of that bitch! She told me she would love me forever, but that was a lie. It was all a lie!”
I didn’t have to hear any more. The story was all together clear and too familiar. Michael had cheated on his wife with Bethany, and when his wife found out, she left him and took the kids. Now he was all alone and in the middle of an emotional breakdown.
The question was why was he breaking down now? Was it because two nights ago he killed the woman who he thought had ruined his life and now guilt tortured his madness addled mind?
Alex tapped me on the shoulder while Michael sobbed into his hands again. Leaning down, he whispered into my ear, “We need to get into that house.”
“I know, but he freaked out when I asked him the last time.”
“I can ask this time. Maybe he won’t freak out. I’m a guy, so it might not upset him as much.”
Mouthing okay, I turned back toward Michael and rubbed his back as he cried. Behind me, Alex cleared his throat and then in his softest voice asked, “Michael, why don’t we go inside so we can get you warmed up?”
“I can make you tea,” I offered enthusiastically before remembering his wife likely had turned off the electricity which had made his alarm stop working.
He dropped his hands, and for the first time, he smiled at me. “I love tea. I want you to make me some tea. That would make me happy again.”
I didn’t have the heart to remind him that without a working stove or microwave he wouldn’t be able to have tea. Necessity was the mother of invention, so if I had to run next door to his neighbor’s house and beg for hot water and a tea bag, I’d do that. Anything to give him something to be happy about because the man looked like he didn’t have a shred of goodness left in his life.
“Then I’ll make you tea, Michael. We can go inside and make tea and talk about things, okay?”
Smiling broadly, he nodded. “Okay. I’d like that.”
He and I stood to go into the house, but when he saw Alex standing next to me, he gritted his teeth and his eyes flashed the anger I’d seen in them a short time earlier. I tried to remind him of the tea I’d make him, but he didn’t want to hear about it.
“You’re just like her! You’re with him, aren’t you?” he shrieked, taking a step back toward the kitchen door and pointing at me. “You never cared, just like her!”
“I do, Michael. We can make tea and talk, right?” I said, but whatever calm he’d felt only seconds before had disappeared. Now he was just that crazed man who had wanted to beat us with a shovel.
“No! I won’t let you trick me. All you women do is trick me and I won’t let you,” he answered before launching into a barely intelligible tirade about how all women lie and cheat.
With each flail of his hands, he descended further and further into whatever madness afflicted him. Alex wrapped his arms around me to protect me, but I wasn’t sure Michael could even comprehend hurting anyone. All he wanted was the hurt
inside him to stop.
“He’s not going to give us anything more,” I admitted sadly and stepped toward the stairs to leave. “We better go.”
“Not yet. I want to ask him something first,” Alex said as I moved away from him. “Michael, that knife on the counter in your kitchen there. What did you use it for?”
Startled by the question, Michael stopped his ranting and grabbed hold of the screen door. “You need to go now. I can’t talk to you anymore.”
Alex took a step toward him to stop him from running inside the house, but he slipped away and slammed the kitchen door closed in his face. Peering out through one of the windows, he stared at him and screamed, “Go away! I don’t want to talk to you anymore.”
I rushed to Alex’s side to look in through the window and saw Michael grab the knife. He ran away into the living room and waved it around in front of him before taking off up the stairs with it. Stunned, I looked at my partner, not quite sure what we’d just seen.
“What happened there?”
“He’s crazy. Something inside him snapped. What we need to know is did it make him kill Bethany?”
I took one last look inside Michael Thompson’s empty house and sighed. “Did you notice he never said her name not even once?”
“He never said his wife’s either, Poppy. I wouldn’t be surprised if he can’t remember they had names. He just sees them as the reasons he’s so unhappy.”
Alex tugged me by the arm away from the back door, and even though I didn’t feel right leaving Michael there all alone with the demons in his head and that knife as his only company, I left and followed him to the car.
“Should we tell someone he needs help, Alex? I’m worried he might do something to himself.”
“I’ll call county services, but I doubt they’re going to be much help. They can’t force him to go with them. They can’t even force him to answer the door. I think we’ll have better luck getting back to Sunset Ridge and telling Derek so he can get a warrant for him. That way he has no choice but to let people in.”
The Darkest Hour Page 16