Cause of Death

by Laura Dembowski

  I start to say something, but she interrupts.

  “Of course you don’t. You haven’t lost a child, have you, Detective?”

  I sit down in the chair across from her. “I haven’t, and I am truly sorry for your loss, but if you are as upset as you say, you should want us to find the truth.”

  She nods.

  “You mention Lana’s friends were there, but Dave said Lana was isolated.”

  “Have you not heard a word I said? He needs rehab. Isolated is such a strong word. Did I forget to mention he’s been doing drugs, too? I mean, he tries to hide it from me, but I swear I saw him snorting something.”

  “What about you? Have you used anything to cope with Lana’s death? Do we need to do a breathalyzer or blood test on you?”

  I don’t smell alcohol on her either, but now I’m not sure what’s running through either of their bloodstreams.

  “A little Xanax, some Ambien, but you show me a parent burying their child who doesn’t need those things.”

  “And I should just take your word on all of this?” I ask, leading her right to the place I need her to go.

  “I wouldn’t. My arm’s all yours. Talk to Dave’s coworkers. Our family. Do what you have to do. I just want this to end, so we can all find some peace. Lana. Dave. Me.”

  I didn’t need her advice to question her friends and family or to run blood tests, but even with this conversation, it’s going to be hard to convince Sarge to let me do any of it. Just like Margaret said—they are grieving parents, in search of peace.

  Chapter 7

  Ryan

  “Of course I was at Lana’s funeral,” Beth Cambridge is telling me as Kate stands, looking at the photos on the fireplace mantel of her great room.

  Great is definitely the right word to describe this room; the whole house, actually. It’s larger than the Moores’ house, and better decorated. Beth’s young twins run around the house, occasionally venturing into the room, dressed in similar floral-print dresses, their hair in pigtails, but she never loses focus answering my questions.

  “How many other people would you say were there?”

  “Not very many, unfortunately. I was there all day with my sister and brother-in-law. A couple of Dave’s coworkers were there for a bit, but it was actually eerie how empty and quiet the funeral home was. My husband came for a couple hours in the evening, after work. I hired a babysitter because I didn’t want my twins to have to sit there all day. Guess I should have saved my money; they wouldn’t have bothered anyone.”

  Beth Cambridge has worked herself up into a frenzy. I believe her. She doesn’t seem like the kind of person who would lie to the police. She’s got everything going for her. The house. The husband. The kids. The looks. Why would she lie?

  “Do you have any proof you were there?” Kate chimes in.

  “I wasn’t taking selfies at a funeral, if that’s what you’re asking.”

  “No, of course not, ma’am. I didn’t mean to offend you,” Kate replies.

  “Could we speak with your husband?” I ask.

  “Sure,” she says. “He’s at work right now.”

  “Maybe you could get him on the phone for us,” I say. “That way we won’t have to take up too much of his valuable time.”

  She does just that, staying in the room without us having to ask her to do so.

  “Hi, honey,” she says. “Two detectives are here with questions about Lana’s death . . . Yeah . . . I know . . . That’s what I thought, too. . . . Could you just talk to them for a couple minutes?”

  She holds the phone out to me. “He was in a meeting, so try not to keep him too long.”

  “It will only take a minute,” I say, putting the phone to my ear. “Mr. Cambridge, I don’t want to inconvenience you, but I just need to make sure that your wife was at Lana Moore’s funeral.”

  “Of course she was,” he says, angrily, “Where else would she have been? Getting her fucking nails done? Jesus Christ, don’t you people have anything better to do with your time than investigate a suicide?”

  “We aren’t sure this is a suicide, sir.”

  “What?” Beth says breathlessly.

  Her husband has the same reaction over the phone.

  “We need to make sure this wasn’t a homicide,” I say.

  “Anything I can do to help,” Mr. Cambridge says. “But I will tell you that without a doubt, Beth and I were both at that funeral. Lana was a sweet girl, and all of this . . . well, it’s just terrible.”

  “It is terrible,” I say. “Thank you for your time, Mr. Cambridge. I’ll be in touch if I need any more information.”

  When I turn to hand the phone back to Beth, she is sitting on the sofa, looking down, tears welling in her eyes. She is shaking, growing pale.

  Kate walks over and sits down on the sofa next to her.

  “Mrs. Cambridge, are you okay?” she asks.

  “You think someone may have killed Lana?”

  “We don’t know that for sure,” I hear Kate say as I find my way to the kitchen for a glass of water for Mrs. Cambridge. “But it’s important that we investigate.”

  “But who would want to kill her?” she asks, clearly in shock.

  “We don’t know, but if this was a homicide, we’re going to find out,” I say. “Can you tell us why you think Lana moved home after living in New York?”

  Beth hesitates. “I don’t know the whole story, maybe not even the real reason. Margaret said it was because Lana was having some issues, but there’s always been talk in the family that it was Margaret having the issues. I didn’t press things. Family gatherings can be stressful enough without looking at your sister and asking questions like that.”

  We leave shortly thereafter, once we make sure Beth is okay. She actually seems like a nice woman, and I would hate for anything to happen to her. I figure I might check up on her in a few days, just to be certain she is hanging in there and doesn’t have any more information that may help us.

  “And you talked to Dave’s friends?” Sarge asks us.

  “Yeah, they were all there,” I say.

  “One even saw Beth,” Kate adds.

  “Really?” Sarge asks, sitting up a little straighter.

  It’s better in the station today since they’ve finally fixed the air-conditioning. It only took them a week this time. I’m sure it’s just a Band-Aid, though, and it’ll be broken again before long. Heaven forbid they invest in a new unit.

  Summer is an odd time of year for police work. The hot weather brings out a different, unexpected side of people that keeps us on our toes. We never quite know what people are going to do. I suppose the Moore family is a good example.

  “So what do we do next?” I ask. I have an answer in my head, but I don’t want to be the one to say it.

  “Well, the autopsy should be in soon. We’ll wait for that,” Kate says matter-of-factly.

  She’s right. That’s the next logical thing to do.

  Kate and I return to our desks and compare notes from our interrogations. After questioning the Moores and Cambridges, as well as Beth and Dave’s colleagues, the most obvious thing is that nothing is adding up. Margaret and Dave contradict each other on the funeral, Lana’s return, her social life, and the state of their health. So far we have no real way to know which one is telling the truth, save for the reports on the funeral, where it looks like Dave has been honest.

  Something is wrong here. I find myself hoping the autopsy comes back as a suicide, because then we can chalk it up to family drama and let them work it out themselves.

  I go back to the Moores’ house the next day. I know I shouldn’t. Sarge tells me so; Kate too, but I can’t help it. I need to go back, talk to them, see if I can catch them off guard. Somehow I can’t move on from this case yet. Maybe having another conversation with the parents w
ill help.

  That’s a lie; I don’t think it will help. The only thing that will help is getting the autopsy back, having it certified a suicide, and closing this case once and for all. Until then, this will have to tide me over.

  I look around the neighborhood again. It’s nice—peaceful. I can see why Tracy thinks streets like this exemplify the American dream. That doesn’t mean I’ll be able to afford living in a place like this without taking on the kind of debt that goes along with fulfilling the dream.

  But I get it. I want it.

  I ring the doorbell.

  No one’s answering the door, which is odd. When we were here just a week ago, Dave seemed unable to even put his own pants on, so for both of them to be out of the house seems like a stretch.

  I knock forcefully on the door, in case the bell is broken, though I’m pretty sure I heard it reverberate through the house in the eerie quiet of the perfect neighborhood. I wish Kate was here. I don’t like police business as a one-man show.

  I notice a neighbor across the street working in her garden while her kids run through a sprinkler on the other side of the yard. I wave. She waves back. I walk over to her.

  “Hi, there. My name is Detective Ryan Kirkpatrick,” I say, flashing my badge. I don’t get to do that often enough. I find it’s a really satisfying gesture. “How are you today?” I add.

  “I’m fine, Officer. You looking for the Moores? I noticed you poking around their house.”

  “Yes,” I say.

  “They’re out of town.”

  My jaw drops. Of all the places I thought the Moores might have been, all the possibilities that ran through my mind, this was not one of them.

  They aren’t officially suspects. They aren’t even unofficially suspects. But fleeing the scene makes me take pause. Parents who lost a child a week ago don’t leave town. They just don’t.

  “You wouldn’t happen to know where they went, would you?” I ask in a friendly, curious tone.

  The woman thinks for a minute. “I don’t know; some tropical island or something. You know, very fancy and expensive-sounding. They haven’t been on a trip in years, so I guess they’ve saved a lot of money.” She pauses and brushes her hair out of her face. She takes off her gloves and walks over to me. “Seems like an odd time to go on a trip, though.” She lowers her voice. “If one of my kids died, the last thing on my mind would be a vacation. But to each his own,” she says with a wave of her hand, returning to her garden.

  I thank her for her time and head back to the squad car, glad I followed my instincts to head over here. I can’t wait to get back to the station to tell Kate and Sarge.

  Chapter 8

  Margaret

  I don’t know how, but I convinced Dave to come to Turks and Caicos with me. I say it that way because I would have gone without him. In fact, I probably would have preferred this be a solo trip, but that would have looked bad. To abandon my barely functional, grieving husband for a tropical vacay. Going on a vacation at all looks bad enough, especially now that the police seem interested in us for whatever insane reason. It’s like kicking a dead horse to investigate a family that is dealing with a suicide.

  I had to get out of that house. Every time I go up the stairs I flash back to running up to find Lana hanging there. It makes my heart skip a beat. It takes my breath away. A knife stabs me in the heart each time I walk past her room. We need to move, but Dave’s not ready for that. Dave’s barely ready to eat a meal without a vodka chaser, although to his credit, he was sober most of the day yesterday. And now that he’s in an all-inclusive tropical paradise, he can down all the drinks he wants. I’m trying not to say too much about it.

  I kept my mouth shut most of last night. We watched the sunset hand in hand, sitting on the terrace of our suite. I would have liked a mai tai in my hand, but I knew the mere mention of it would make Dave crave something similar; you know, just without any of the fruity additions.

  “Lana loved watching the sunset,” he said.

  I’m not sure if that’s really true. Sure, Lana sometimes remarked about looking out the window and seeing a beautiful sunset, and that we should come look at it, too. But as far as Lana going out of her way to go outside and sit on the deck to watch the sunset for the better part of an hour, I don’t remember that.

  Perhaps Dave has a better memory than me, so I let him have this victory, and convince myself he’s right. But then he got all wistful and couldn’t handle it, so he gave up on watching the sunset and went in to order a drink, or five, from room service. A nice wife would have gone inside with him to talk, or simply to sit in silence, trying to comfort him, but I didn’t. At least I didn’t dump his drinks down the drain; in fact, I even helped him to bed when he was too out of it to make it there on his own.

  He’s kind of bringing down my vacation. It’s not that I’m over Lana’s death, but I feel like this is a great way to heal. No one knows me or Dave, or that Lana is dead, save for the people Dave has told, which was pretty much everyone we ran into for the first day or two. But then I told Dave to grow up and keep some of this secret, unless he wanted everyone looking at us like poor, sad parents who just buried their child. He actually listened. Maybe I should have let him go on, though; it was getting us a fair amount of free stuff. Not a bad way to recoup some of the fortune we spent on Lana’s funeral.

  A single-gal vacation, flirting with the guys at the bar—not that I would actually do anything, of course—would have been nice. Maybe in a couple months.

  I have my own bank account. I saved some money when I was working, and I’ve skimmed just a little of Dave’s paycheck each month. He’s never noticed. He never pays a single bill, so I don’t really feel that guilty about it. He’s too busy to keep track of his own money—how sad is that? The funeral expenses didn’t cut into this account, so when Dave is fired from his job for substance abuse, I’ll have my rainy-day fund to sustain me, and maybe I’ll keep an eye out for Dave, too.

  Sitting there, staring at the stars in the sky now that Dave is passed out in the middle of the bed, leaving no space for me, it suddenly hits me how bad it looks that we went on a vacation. No doubt about it. But why should I give a fuck about what other people think? No one has ever truly cared what I think, not even my husband or my daughter.

  I wasn’t able to stop crying back in our house, but here, the ocean air has dried my tears.

  Dave’s out swimming in the ocean. Swimming is a bit of stretch, perhaps. He’s more wading or splashing. Or trying not to drown. He’d better not drown, because I’m not going in after him. Mostly because I can’t swim. Partly because, well, I don’t want to.

  He spent the better part of the past couple of days talking about how the ocean looked so nice and how he’d like to take a dip. He said he’d never been in the ocean. Did I know that? No, I didn’t. I racked my brain to try and recall whether I’ve ever been in the ocean, and I don’t think I have. Maybe I’ll go in tomorrow. I’ll make sure Dave is still alive and well and not deathly ill with some parasite. Once I know it’s safe—as safe as the ocean can be, anyway—I may check it out.

  It’s nice that he went in the ocean, did something he wanted to do, something for himself. Neither of us have done too much of that since Lana was born. He’d never admit this, of course, and he has done more than me, since he gets to leave the house on a regular basis, but she still had a huge impact on both of our lives.

  I wonder if he’s had an affair. I bet he has. I kind of hope he has, for his sake. Then again, maybe he’s not ambitious enough to search a woman out, woo her, and cover his tracks.

  I’m kind of proud of Dave for being brave and going into the ocean, as long as he doesn’t get brave enough to kill himself.

  The first moment we walked into the room, he walked over to the window to stare out at the ocean. I couldn’t help but wonder if he was admiring its beauty or thinking i
t would be an awfully good way to kill himself. It would be a great way to die. At one with the water.

  He’s walking back to his beach chair now. It’s early yet; not many people are out. Apparently sleeping in on vacation is a thing.

  I’ve been unable to get a good night’s sleep since Lana’s death. It turns out that it’s hard to sleep in a house where someone has died. A melancholy cast hangs over the house, and her dark presence looms in the air. I am perpetually tired, and don’t see that changing anytime soon. I will have to learn to embrace it like the twitch in my eye that has come and gone as it pleases for the past week.

  I watch Dave grab a towel and then come back into the room.

  “Have a nice swim?” I ask.

  “I did, actually. Gave me a lot of clarity.”

  “On what?”

  “For one, I need to snap out of this funk. I can’t do anything about Lana’s death except find her killer, and if I’m drunk, I’m not going to be very good at that.”

  I’m glad he’s going to stop drinking, or at least, slow down.

  Wait a minute. Did he just say Lana’s killer?

  “Now, honey,” I say, not moving from my chair. “You don’t really believe those detectives, do you?”

  I try to get up, but it’s like my legs won’t work. The thought that someone killed Lana tears me up so much more than the belief that she killed herself. To think that someone came into our house and killed our baby. It sends a chill up my spine. The idea that Dave believes someone killed Lana paralyzes me.

  “Well, the more I think about it, the more it makes sense. She didn’t even leave a suicide note, Maggie. She was too thorough a person not to leave a suicide note. She would have wanted to explain, to tell us why she was leaving us.”

  “If she hated everyone and everything so much that she would kill herself, maybe she didn’t want to explain,” I say.