The Second Stranger

by J P Tompkins

  Chapter 44

  I don’t have an appointment and I don’t want to enter the building and alert him to my presence, so I stay in the parking lot, waiting for him to emerge from the glass doors and make his way to his car.

  I sit silently in my car. No music on. Nothing. I just want to think, and concentrate on what’s about to happen.

  The minutes go by slowly. Clouds gather in the sky, a late afternoon rain storm building.

  In just less than twenty minutes after I arrive, it happens. I see him first in the lobby, stopping at the front desk. I can’t make out his facial expression. I can’t tell if he’s stopped by there for business reasons or for some short pleasantries before he leaves for the day.

  He pushes one of the doors open. There’s a strap across his chest. A messenger bag rests on his left hip. I realize this is the first time I’ve seen him walk more than a few steps. It’s always just to his office door and then I’m gone.

  Now, here, I watch him smoothly stride across the parking lot as he looks at his phone, his other hand in his pants pocket.

  He’s three rows away from where I’m parked. I open the door to get out and close the door gently so as not to attract attention to myself. I weave through the parked cars and reach him just as he pulls his keys out of his pocket, presses a button on the fob, and his car’s lights blink and the horn blows.

  “Dr. Benson.”

  He turns, looks at me, then for some reason looks at the front door of the office building.

  “Is everything okay?” he asks. There’s genuine concern in his voice. I’ve heard it before.

  “I need to ask you something.” I step closer to him. We’re between two cars now. His and the one next to it. He has his back to his driver’s side door.

  He doesn’t say anything. He just raises his eyebrows. Thrown off by my appearance here.

  “Why didn’t you tell me you were treating Erin?” I ask. I almost start to cross my arms over my chest, but I stop myself. It’s defensive, it projects fear, and I have no reason for either of those things. I just want to see if he denies treating Erin.

  Dr. Benson’s expression is a departure from his characteristic cool and in-control demeanor. He presses his lips together, a forced frown.

  Then he says: “You should go home. Get some rest. I’m sure it’s been a tough day for you, and I’m sorry about that, but this is not appropriate. It wouldn’t have been appropriate to discuss another patient with you. And there was no conflict, because her issues had nothing to do with you. Not now, not here.”

  No denial.

  He gets into his car. We stare at each other for a few long seconds, then he starts the car, backs out, and drives off.

  I rush back to my car.

  Not here? I keep repeating that in my head as I get closer to my car. Not here. Not here. Then we’ll do it where he’s going.

  I stay a few car lengths behind him, close enough to keep him in sight but hopefully not so close that he’ll see me. I catch myself white-knuckling the steering wheel, anger seething in me now. I want answers.

  I run a red light when I almost lose him at an intersection.

  Main roads become secondary roads, then neighborhood streets. There are no cars between mine and his now, as we wind down a road under a heavy canopy of old oaks. Big yards. Long driveways. Houses set far back of the road, some so far that you can’t see them. Dr. Benson’s house is one of them.

  And so is Cole’s. It takes me by surprise when I see the street sign for Smokerise Trail, but we’re in Cole’s neighborhood. Just took a different entrance.

  Dr. Benson slows and makes a turn. He has to see me now, I’m traveling so close.

  A few raindrops hit my windshield as I let off the gas, just enough so that I’m coasting to a stop as I reach his driveway and see his car go around a curve, out of sight. I turn in and hit the gas. I don’t want him to pull into a garage and get into his house. I want to catch him as he’s getting out of his car.

  And I do.

  He parks just outside the garage, gets out. “Kate, I can’t talk to you about this.”

  “I’m not leaving until you tell me more. All of it.”

  He sighs, turning his head toward the house, looking at it, looking for something, probably his wife. He faces me again, his voice lower now, softer: “She came to me because of you.”

  “What?”

  “She told me you mentioned you were in therapy. Apparently you had some nice things to say about your sessions, and she wanted to speak with someone who she knew would make her comfortable.”

  I’m silent, thinking back, searching my memory, trying to remember when I told Erin that I was seeing a therapist.

  “It was before she moved in with you,” Dr. Benson says.

  I shake my head as I remember him asking more than once about my “new roommate,” not using her name. Pretending he didn’t know who she was.

  I’m about to say something about it when the memory comes back. A phone call. One of the calls leading up to the one Erin made the night she left Paul, before she confirmed it was all true. She’d been telling me about her suspicions about Paul and another woman. And she mentioned couples therapy.

  That’s when I told her. It comes back to me now. I told her it was a great idea—even though I didn’t think it was, considering my opinion of Paul—but I was trying to be encouraging, instead of another negative force in her life.

  But then she backtracked, saying she wasn’t sure if she wanted to be “that woman,” the one who drags her fiancée to counseling, and that if they needed counseling before marriage, what did that say about whether they should be married at all?

  I’m sure now that’s when I told her I’d been seeing a therapist. Again, trying to be positive, trying to do something to help remove the stigma of seeking counseling. I’d struggled with it myself. But for Neil’s insistence, I may not have gone at all.

  And now it all comes back…

  Memory: Erin surprised that I was talking to a therapist.

  Memory: Erin’s voice suddenly filled with an eagerness to know more, so I shared all I felt like sharing, but I never used his name and she never asked. I just assumed she had made the smart move and dropped the idea.

  It feels like I’ve been standing here in front of Dr. Benson for minutes, but all of that happens in seconds. Still, it’s long enough so that he knows what’s happening.

  “You remember telling her about me?” he asks.

  “But I didn’t tell her your name.”

  The clouds open up. Rain pours down hard.

  Dr. Benson motions toward the house. “Come on, get out of the rain.”

  We step into the garage, just a few feet in, just enough to stay dry.

  “Her first appointment,” he says, “she told me she didn’t want you to know she was seeing me for therapy. She said she found one of my business cards in a drawer in your kitchen. That’s how she knew.”

  It occurs to me that this conversation has become all about something I did or said, about how Erin wouldn’t have been here if it weren’t for me.

  “You misled me,” I say.

  Dr. Benson shakes his head. “Kate—”

  “All those visits where we talked about her. And we talked about Paul. You knew everything.”

  He looks away from me for a few seconds. I can see he’s gauging what, if anything, he should tell me.

  “Who was the father?” I demand, my voice louder now. “Tell me.”

  “I’ve talked to the police,” he says.

  “Who was the father?”

  “She never used his name. She said it didn’t matter, so I didn’t press her on it.”

  He looks away from me when he says it, out the open garage door, out at the hard rain falling, and I know he’s lying.

  “And something else you might not know,” he says, before I can call him on his lie. “Paul knew she was pregnant three weeks before she was killed.”

  I feel myself stop bre
athing when he says it. If this were a session, instead of a confrontation in his garage, Dr. Benson would remind me to breathe. He doesn’t, but I do. I take a slow, long, deep breath as my mind races, the words Dr. Benson just told me mixing with the memories of Paul’s reaction to Erin being pregnant. The fake shock, phony outrage, it was all there. And I believed it. Everyone did. Including Hogle and Roark.

  Hogle and Roark…

  “Did you tell the investigators?” I ask.

  “I did,” he says. “They know everything she told me. I don’t know how much Erin told you about Paul, but things got very bad the last few months they were together.”

  I think back to the interrogation video of Paul. Hogle and Roark confronting him about violence in the relationship, Paul emphatically denying it.

  “The medical reports,” I say.

  He slowly closes his eyes and nods. “How much do you know about that?”

  “I…nothing, really. I didn’t see them.”

  “There were no broken bones, no black eyes, nothing like that. Lots of grabbing, shoving up against walls, throwing things, breaking things. Threats to do more, but he never did. Until that night at your house.”

  I say nothing. I just stand there, thinking, running it all through my mind.

  “So I shared everything I needed to with the investigators,” Dr. Benson says, his voice now soft and reassuring, like it always is during our sessions, even though we’re not in his office. “Look, I thought I could continue to help you. That’s why I didn’t mention any of this. And that’s why I continued to see you. I think we made some good progress.”

  There’s silence and again I say nothing. It seems like it should all be coming in clearly now. But there’s an incomplete picture filling in before my eyes. Maybe Paul did it, but maybe he didn’t.

  “But after this…” Dr. Benson stops, drawing it out, looking over his shoulder to the door that leads inside, then looking back at me. “I’m going to have to refer you to someone else.”

  “I don’t believe you,” I say. “Tell me who the father is.”

  He starts to move toward the door.

  He ignores me, moving toward the door, trying to get inside, away from me. But it opens before he gets there.

  His wife is in the doorway now.

  She looks at her husband. “She’s going to figure it out.”

  Chapter 45

  “Go back inside,” Dr. Benson says.

  But she doesn’t. She steps out from the house and into the garage, wordlessly, leaving the door open behind her.

  She has the same auburn-colored pixie cut she has in that picture in Dr. Benson’s office, but she looks a little different now. Her face looks thinner. And the expression on her face is not one you’d have in a vacation picture, certainly not one your husband would have framed and on display in his office. Her mouth is slightly open, her eyes wide with a mixture of fear and anger. Her face turns red and tightens up as she fights off tears and raises her left hand, covering the lower third of her face with the back of it.

  Dr. Benson backs up a few steps because his wife is moving toward him now, her right hand raised, finger extended, pointing at him. “I told you she was going to figure it out.”

  “Elisabeth,” he says, and that’s all he says, just her name. His tone isn’t stern, isn’t angry. It’s pleading.

  She says nothing. She looks at me. I stare back, trying to put all of this together.

  She’s going to figure it out…

  I am going to figure it out. Right here. Right now. With everything I need in front of me.

  It’s Dr. Benson. He’s the father.

  All the things he said in our sessions about Erin, about the investigation, about Paul. All lies. An effort to lead me, influence my thinking, shape my theories of what happened to Erin. All lies. Everything.

  Elisabeth looks at her husband. “She knows.”

  “Just calm down,” he says.

  And she explodes: “Don’t you fucking say that to me.” She burns with an anger I don’t think I’ve seen in anyone, ever. She grits her teeth, shakes her head, as she says to him: “You fuck your patients and think you’ll always get away with it.”

  Patients. Plural.

  She starts to walk toward me. I stand in place, not moving, not flinching. As unhinged as she is, she could be capable of anything, but I’m not giving in. This is where the story will come out, the truth, all of it. Finally.

  “You know what he did, don’t you?” she demands.

  I say nothing.

  I can see her eyes welling up. These are not tears of sadness, but of rage.

  “Don’t you?” she says again, but doesn’t give me time to respond. “This isn’t the first time he’s slept with a patient. But the first one… She just went away.”

  Two patients. Dr. Benson slept with two patients.

  “But that was easy,” she continues. “There was no baby.” She turns to her husband and yells the words a baby at him, then faces me again. “I didn’t know about the first one for a while. But this one, I knew right away. And then he got himself into a situation that wasn’t easy to get out of.” She raises both hands to her face, wiping tears from each eye with her thumbs. “And the only solution was to kill her.”

  “I’m sorry,” he says, first to his wife, and the he turns and says it again to me.

  “Sorry to her?” Elisabeth says, her face red, the tendons in her neck straining, exposed, and she’s pointing at me. She steps around her husband toward me.

  Dr. Benson shouts his wife’s name, reaches for her, trying to stop her.

  She ignores him.

  He moves quickly, catching her, his hand gripping her upper arm.

  She flails. He holds on. She twists, turns, her back to me now.

  She swings her other arm, her open palm slapping the side of his head. Dr. Benson winces, his face going hard with his own anger now.

  She kicks, connecting with his groin, and he doubles over.

  She takes one step to get close enough to the wall to grab something. She does it so quickly, I barely register what she’s doing and I don’t have time to react. She has the shovel off the wall now, holding it with both hands, raising it over her head and she brings it down.

  There’s a soft, sickening thud sound as it makes contact with Dr. Benson’s head. I see the blow of the impact separate his hair, slamming into his skull, the shovel oddly ringing like a bell.

  His body goes slack, his shoulders hunch forward and he falls that way, face-first onto the cement floor.

  I’m frozen. So is Elisabeth.

  But then she moves, dropping the shovel and it clangs onto the cement floor. She’s moving with long strides. Not to her husband’s slumped body, but to the door that leads into the house.

  I remain where I am, unable to move, unable to process what I’ve just witnessed. It feels like minutes, but it’s only seconds. Maybe five or so.

  And then I hear the sounds from inside the house. There’s running up the stairs. Or is it down? The sound of a door closing. A closet? A scream. Elisabeth Benson’s awful, angry scream.

  She’s looking for something, I think. She’s getting something. A knife? A gun?

  I look down at Dr. Benson again. He’s still not moving and blood is pooling around his head.

  I run from the garage, not even looking over my shoulder, knowing that would slow me down. I only look when I reach my car, yank the door open, and get in.

  The keys are still in the ignition. I start the car, consider putting it in reverse to go down the driveway. But that’s too slow. I turn the wheel, hit the gas, and I’m on their lawn, turning around. Back on the driveway now and then I’m out of there in seconds.

  It’s not far to Cole’s house.

  Chapter 46

  The rain is coming down harder now, wipers slapping across the windshield. I keep glancing in the rearview mirror, expecting to see Elisabeth behind me, following me, with whatever it was she went back inside f
or. But maybe it wasn’t a gun or a knife. Maybe she went to call for help. But maybe not.

  So I do.

  The 911 operator asks for the address.

  “6287,” I say. “Or 6827.” Shit. I only glanced at the mailbox when I arrived. I explain to the operator what happened, that it was my first time there. “I’m pretty sure it’s 6287. The home of Dr. Craig Benson. His wife’s name is Elisabeth. She attacked him.”

  “I’m looking up the address,” she says. “And you say his wife attacked him?”

  “Yes.”

  “And you saw this happen?”

  “I was right there when she did it. In their garage.”

  “And where are you now?” she asks.

  “I left. I’m in my car. Not too far away, though.”

  “Are you in danger?”

  I look in the rearview again. “I…no. She’s not following me.”

  “I’m dispatching police to the address now,” she says. “6287 is correct. How did his wife attack him?”

  I tell her, briefly, what happened and how.

  She asks about Dr. Benson’s condition.

  “I don’t know. He’s… I don’t know if he’s alive. He was bleeding everywhere. I left. I just ran. She went back into the house. I didn’t know if she was getting a weapon or something.”

  “It’s okay, ma’am. You did the right thing. And you’re still driving?”

  “Yes.”

  “If you feel that you’re far enough away, I would ask you to pull over to the side of the road, okay? Just wait on the line with me here. I’ll let you know when the police have arrived. They’ll need a statement from you, so you’ll need to go back when I tell you.”

  “I’m almost to a friend’s house,” I say. “Can you just call me back?”

  She confirms the number before disconnecting.

  I get to Cole’s driveway, slow down just enough to make the turn, park, and then run up to his front door. I ring the bell, pull the glass storm door open, and use the iron knocker.