Crossing the Lines

by Sulari Gentill

  “If I leave now, I can be there in a couple of hours, Maddie,” Leith said.

  “I can’t bring my agent to see my psychiatrist.”

  “Why not? I’m a psychologist!”

  “I don’t think Dr. McCauley will care.” Madeleine hesitated before she asked, “Leith, do you think I’m—”

  “Mad? No.” Leith’s voice softened. “I do think that you’ve been working very intensely, that this new book has taken a lot out of you. But you’re a writer…that shouldn’t be a surprise. It’s what you do.”

  “What about Hugh? The blood…?”

  “To be honest, Maddie, bringing in a forensic specialist is probably a bit unusual, but that might be because not everyone’s father knows one.”

  “But do you think—?”

  Leith was silent for a few seconds. “I don’t know, Maddie. Hugh’s story sounds plausible but you’re in a better position to know if he’s lying. You live in a small country town—would he be able to hide an affair?”

  “I haven’t really been into town much since I started writing Edward. I haven’t talked to anyone here for a while.” Madeleine remembered Lilian saying weeks ago that she was neglecting Hugh…that there were women would give anything to be married to Hugh Lamond. Was that a warning? Should she have paid more attention?

  “Are you sure you don’t want me to come?” Leith asked.

  “No. I’m fine, just tired. I’ll call you after I speak to McCauley. I might need a second opinion.” Madeleine took Edward McGinnity’s hand as she hung up the phone. She wasn’t afraid of Gerry McCauley.

  Hugh drove her to McCauley’s consulting rooms himself. He didn’t come in. Madeleine didn’t pause to consider how she would get home. She assumed Hugh would wait. That was a good sign, she supposed, that he was willing to wait for her.

  The psychiatrist asked her to go in while he had a brief word with his secretary. Madeleine took the armchair closer to the door this time. McCauley was not long. He walked in with an open file in his hand, looking up to nod at her just before he sat down. “Good morning, Madeleine. I’m so glad you decided to come in.”

  Edward stood by the desk behind McCauley, his arms folded. Madeleine smiled at him. McCauley accepted it. He started by asking after her writing, flicking back in his notes for specifics. She answered warily. “My publishers wish to see the finished manuscript next week,” she said in the end. Having the manuscript wanted by publishers, giving it a deadline, seemed to give it some external respectability—a commercial reality and with it a justification of her commitment, her immersion.

  “And has your hero…Edward, isn’t it? Has he solved the murder of this chap Vogel, yet?”

  “No. I haven’t really decided who did it yet.”

  McCauley displayed surprise and interest. “Oh, I’d always assumed mystery writers knew that sort of thing from the beginning.”

  “Some do, but I don’t really plot. Not consciously, anyway. For a while there I thought Adrian Barrington would be the murderer.”

  “Barrington!” Edward said sceptically.

  “The murder was financially lucrative for him…the ‘macabre provenance’ he spoke of. And Geoffrey Vogel’s negative review, if published, would have had the opposite effect.”

  “But the blood in my en suite,” Edward said, moving away from the desk and sitting instead on McCauley’s consulting couch.

  “I wondered if he’d sent in men to plant evidence in the house of Edward McGinnity,” Madeleine replied. “The assault was designed to ensure the police would search the house as a crime scene and find the blood in the en suite.”

  “But you don’t intend this character, Barrington, to be the culprit anymore?” McCauley prompted.

  “I don’t think he did it anymore.”

  “Then who?” McCauley leant forward, regarding her intently.

  Madeleine glanced at Edward. How could she tell him about Willow…his best friend, the woman he had loved for so long, her rival…“In the end I suppose the author is always the murderer,” she said. “We decide who’ll live, who’ll die and why. In the end, it’s us.”

  “Do you like that, Madeleine, deciding questions of life and death, having the power to take or give such things?” McCauley pressed.

  Madeleine shrugged. The conversation was taking an uncomfortably existentialist turn. “I like being a writer.”

  McCauley nodded. “If you don’t mind my saying, Madeleine, you look tired. Did you sleep much last night?”

  “Well, no,” Madeleine admitted. “I was working on—”

  “Do you ever worry that fatigue may be detrimental to your writing?”

  “Well, not as such—”

  “Sleep is one of those things, Madeleine. You don’t sleep, so you’re tired, so you become fatigued and a little emotional. Things seem more insurmountable than they would otherwise, so you begin to doubt yourself, and with that worry comes wakefulness and so the cycle repeats.”

  “I’m not sure what you’re saying, Dr. McCauley.”

  “I’m suggesting that we could address a lot of your current problems by simply ensuring you got a good night’s sleep.”

  “Oh.” Madeleine stopped, surprised. McCauley seemed to have finally accepted there was nothing wrong with her. She was just tired. Perhaps she had misjudged the psychiatrist.

  “What I’d like to do, Madeleine, is sort out your sleeping problem.”

  “Oh…yes. That sounds like a good idea…”

  “We’d need to observe some of your sleep patterns, monitor you. It means we’ll need to admit you to the hospital, as a voluntary patient.”

  “I don’t have the time.”

  “You could bring your work with you…I’ll organise a private room. We’ll just need to monitor you for about seventy-two hours, and then we’ll be able to figure out exactly how to ensure you’re getting the sleep you require to function with the clarity a writer needs.”

  Madeleine looked at Edward. She could see the question in his eyes. Did he doubt her motives?…Did he suspect that she was sacrificing the integrity of her narrative for him, recasting her villain to remove the woman he’d loved? Was that what she was doing? Had she decided to eliminate Willow from Edward’s heart to make way for herself? Perhaps McCauley was right…she needed to find some clarity. She was too close, too tired. “What would I have to do?”

  McCauley nodded, smiling in a display of reassurance. “Not a great deal. I have rounds at the hospital so I could take you myself. I’ll ring Hugh and tell him to meet us there. We fill in some paperwork and you take a little vacation in a private room while we monitor you.” He glanced at the satchel at her feet. “Is that your laptop?”

  “Yes.”

  “Good. You’ll have work with you, then. I’ll just tell Hugh to bring you some pyjamas and toiletries, unless there’s anything else you’d like?”

  “No…” Madeleine said, a little bewildered by how quickly his suggestion had become organised into an agreed course. But perhaps that was because she’d been so indecisive of late. Three days in a hospital, to stop life and just write. In that time, she could finish the novel…think about a sequel…a series. At the end of it, they would give her some sleeping pills, which she could use or not…but three days with nothing to think about but Edward McGinnity.

  She waited while McCauley made some phone calls and when he returned, she signed the admission papers he brought her. Edward remained. As time passed, Madeleine became settled with the idea of a recuperative retreat, and her mind began to drift to Edward’s story even as McCauley drove her to the St Aiden’s Private Hospital. She didn’t pay any significant attention to the admission procedures, or to Hugh when he arrived with her necessities. He approved, of course, promised that he and Jeeves would take care of things till she got home. Madeleine was relieved when she was finally shown to a room a
nd allowed to open her laptop.

  Edward put down his pen. He pressed the heels of his palms into his eyes. He felt sick. He wanted to warn her, to protect her. But he wanted to write her story…he couldn’t flinch now.

  He watched as Madeleine chewed her bottom lip as she stared at the screen. Twice she started to type and backspaced.

  “What’s wrong?” Edward asked, curious. He’d become accustomed to the certainty with which she wrote.

  She swallowed, gathering courage. This was her story; her choice whatever her reasons. “It’s Willow,” she said. “Willow killed Geoffrey Vogel.”

  “That doesn’t make sense,” he replied, shaking his head. “She was with me.”

  “When his body was found, not when he was killed.”

  “Even so, she was fine, worried about finding a joke for her speech, for God’s sake! How could she have just killed a man?”

  For a moment Madeleine faltered, struggled. She clutched at Willow’s nervousness to find a foreshadowing. “Perhaps it wasn’t the speech that was unsettling her; perhaps it was the fact that she’d pushed a man down the stairs.”

  “That’s thin, Maddie, and you know it. You’re a better writer than this.”

  Madeleine flinched, but she set her mind. “It’s what happened.”

  Still he tried to reason with her. “Willow helped me get the security footage and she definitely didn’t beat me up.”

  Madeleine fought. “Of course she did. She knew there was nothing on the footage—the security guard had already shown her. And Elliot organised his mates from the gym to attack you…and to plant Vogel’s blood. It must have been them in the SUV that tried to run you off the road.”

  “Why would Kaufman do that?”

  “Because he loves Willow and he knows that she did it.”

  “Maddie, be sensible. Where would Kaufman get Vogel’s blood?”

  “He was there, remember? Watching Willow. Maybe he found the body first. Perhaps he got blood on himself then, and later used it to implicate you.”

  Edward shook his head. “No. Will wouldn’t…”

  “She did. She might not have intended for suspicion to fall on you, she might not have intended to kill Vogel, but she knows it wasn’t you…she must know.”

  Edward’s voice became strained. He stood and paced. “Willow’s been my best friend for years, Maddie. She didn’t do this. You’re wrong.”

  “She said you stabbed Elliot. Ned, it fits. Why else would she lie? It’s not obvious, but it makes sense.”

  “Not to me,” he said. “You can’t think this, you can’t.”

  There was a gentle knock on the door. “Maddie?” Hugh Lamond peered into the room. “You’re still awake.”

  She nodded. “It’s only just past ten.”

  “You’re here to get some rest.”

  “I’ve been lying about all day. If I was any more rested, I’d be dead.”

  Hugh pulled up a chair beside the bed. “You’re supposed to be getting some sleep.” He tapped the cover of her laptop. “Perhaps you should turn this off for a while. Concentrate on getting better.”

  Madeleine glanced at Edward. He shook his head. She closed the computer.

  Hugh smiled. “I feel like that screen’s been between us for weeks.”

  “That’s not what’s come between us, Hugh.”

  He sighed. “No, I guess it isn’t. You stopped trusting me.”

  “You started lying to me.”

  “Oh, Maddie. You were fragile. I was trying not to upset you.”

  “Fragile?” Madeleine could feel her body tensing to recoil.

  Hugh spoke calmly. “Darling, I know you want to pretend you’re fine, that you’re not sad, but it’s just not true. You’ve been struggling for a while.”

  “Struggling with what?”

  “With reality. I don’t blame you for not wanting to deal with the miscarriages—for retreating into that wonderful, crazy, brilliant imagination of yours. Infertility is a difficult thing to accept.”

  “I’m not infertile.” An old panic clutched cold at her breast. “You don’t know that I’m infertile.”

  “Dammit, Maddie! Despite everything that’s happened you, won’t even consider the possibility, let alone talk about it. You’d rather talk about God-knows-what with some bloke you made up.”

  “I’m not crazy, either, Hugh, or depressed, or whatever else you want to diagnose me with to salve your own conscience.”

  “I’m not trying to salve anything, Maddie. Darlin’, can’t you bring yourself to admit that he isn’t real?”

  “I’m not the one that needs to admit to anything!” Madeleine brushed the tears away with the sleeve of her pyjamas.

  Hugh’s face softened. “Maddie, even if I were having an affair, don’t you see that retreating into an imaginary world is not a normal or healthy way to deal with it?”

  “Hugh, I’m a writer. Stories are how I understand the world.”

  “You’re using stories to hide from the world, Maddie. You have to stop.”

  “You want me to stop writing?”

  “I think—no, I know—it’s the only way you’ll get better. For all our sakes, you have to.”

  For a moment Madeleine simply stared. Hugh’s face seemed less familiar somehow. His eyes were different. She looked into them, searching, and then her gaze moved past him.

  Edward reached for her. “I love you, Maddie.” He made the declaration impulsively, almost as surprised by the sound of the words as by the truth of them.

  She turned away from him and spoke to her husband. “I can’t. I can’t stop.”

  ***

  The cabin lights dimmed. Edward looked up. A red warning light had come on above the door—the batteries were low. He cursed, pulling away from his thoughts, from Madeleine, to address the impending darkness. He couldn’t write without light.

  It had been about five years since Edward had last spent any time on The Lady Galadriel. Andy Finlay had been hosting some international clients and so Edward had overseen the day-to-day practicalities of pleasure cruising whilst his lawyer drank champagne, ate seafood, and secured several million dollars in business. Edward vaguely recalled that the engine needed to be run to recharge the batteries.

  He stepped out onto the deck and scanned the boats alongside for signs of habitation. They were both completely dark. He decided to risk the less-than-considerate or neighbourly action of running the engine on idle at that hour.

  The lights brightened immediately as the engines turned over. Edward’s face relaxed as the motor settled into a familiar throb. Perhaps he’d take Galadriel out when life had calmed down and he was able to think of normal things again. It was possibly the hum of the engine that masked the noise and left him oblivious until the door to the cabin was forced.

  Edward wasn’t sure why he fought. Perhaps it was instinct or some memory of the last attack. He didn’t pause to register the police uniform, he didn’t hear the shouted identification. He felled the first officer with a punch but the second and third brought him down, slamming him bodily to the timber floor. The salty metallic taste of blood in his mouth. The air pounded out of his lungs. His hands were cuffed behind his back whilst he was pinned with a knee against his spine. Then Bourke was there to make the arrest.

  “You weren’t thinking of leaving were you, McGinnity?”

  “I was just recharging the batteries.”

  But Bourke had made up his mind that this was some attempt to flee by boat. Edward’s passport was discovered in the zippered pocket of his duffel bag. He tried to explain that he’d not taken it out after returning from a holiday in London months ago, that he’d simply forgotten it was there.

  Bourke was uninterested. He informed Edward that Elliot Kaufman had regained consciousness to support his wife’s version of events. T
hat the security footage had not picked up enough to clear him or contradict the witnesses’ accounts. Edward McGinnity was being charged with the attempted murder of Kaufman and the murder of Geoffrey Vogel, as well as the attempted theft of The Lady Galadriel. “I’d like to see your fancy brief get you out this time,” Bourke snarled once Edward had been read his rights.

  Madeleine typed steadily. This was it—the point of despair, when the protagonist was faced with annihilation, when he showed his mettle by fighting on. The natural structure of crime fiction; it was comforting to find it. This was what she knew. As much as all seemed lost now, Edward would prevail, Madeleine would write him out of destruction.

  She glanced at the clock. Hugh would be here soon to pick her up. Madeleine had decided to go home early. There was nothing wrong with her. Dr. McCauley had talked her into this when the knowledge of Hugh’s betrayal was still so new that she would do anything to deny it, as Edward had denied Willow’s. But she knew now. As much as the realisation made her feel flayed, as much as every nerve screamed with the agony of it, she knew. She was not mad, just in pain and wiser.

  Hugh Lamond came in with McCauley.

  “Hello,” Madeleine smiled brightly, so there was no question of depression. She gestured towards the small bag on her bed. “I’m ready.”

  “I had hoped you’d agree to stay a little longer, Madeleine.”

  “I really must get home, Dr. McCauley. I’m fine now, and I slept very well last night.”

  “Hugh and I have been discussing your progress, Madeleine,” McCauley said evenly. “We’ve decided it would be in your best interests to stay here for a little while, until we can address some of your problems.”

  “What problems?” Madeleine asked, startled.

  “You talk to imaginary people, Maddie,” Hugh replied. “You’re imagining murders and conspiracies and God-knows-what! And you don’t even want to stop.”