by Keith Ablow
/ am. Her use of the present tense felt like an assault. My hope that Julia would explain everything away evaporated. My back started to ache again. "Who was…" I stopped myself. "Who is he?" I said.
"She" Julia said pointedly.
It took me a moment to convince myself I had heard her correctly. "You're… seeing a woman?" I said.
"Does that shock you?"
"Well, yes. I mean, not that she's a woman." Now, I had lied. "That you have someone else in your life. And it doesn't sound like something casual or meaningless to you."
"Not at all," she said. "She's sustains me. Like the letter says: From the day I first saw her."
"When did it start?"
"Six or seven months ago."
"And it's still going on?"
"Yes."
"Why didn't you tell me?" I asked. "Is she from the island?"
"She lives in Manhattan. I fly to see her once a week during the summer, when I can." Julia smiled. "Otherwise, we talk by phone, for fifty minutes."
"For fifty…" I stopped short.
Julia shook her head and looked at me as if I was being foolish. "She's my therapist," she said. "Marion Eisenstadt. That's who I wrote the letter to. I never sent it because I thought it was… well… inappropriate, and a little morbid."
I was stuck back on the punch line. "The letter was to your therapist?" I said skeptically.
"I can give you her number if you want to check it out," she said. "I've written to her before."
Could it be? I wondered. Might Julia simply have been reaching out to anyone she could, including North and her therapist? Was it possible that she really had chosen me for a different and much more complete role in her life, the same way I had chosen her? I desperately wanted it all to be true. "I don't need her number," I said.
She read over the letter, then looked up at me. "I was feeling really down that day," she said.
That comment gave me a nice bridge to the second half of my concern. "The verse you wrote at the end makes it sound like you might have been dwelling on death," I led.
"Is that an elegant way of asking me if I was thinking about killing my daughter?" she asked.
"Please understand. I need to ask these…"
"I felt like my life was over, Frank. I felt like I had sold myself to Darwin. Does that answer your question? I didn't know how much worse things could get-until…" She was fighting back tears. "Until I lost Brooke," she said, choking on the words.
"We can talk about this later," I said.
She cleared her throat. "Maybe I asked for this," she went on. "Maybe God is trying to teach me a lesson. All I had to do was leave. But I was weak. Pathetic. And I cared about the goddamn house and the art and all that garbage."
"And you've learned what matters," I said. "You got further than most people get in their lives." I marveled at how quickly I had started taking care of her again.
"If I've already lost you, you should tell me now," she said.
That felt like an ultimatum. Or maybe Julia was simply putting me on notice that she couldn't cope with uncertainty from me. She had lost Brooke. Her marriage was over. Billy might be imprisoned forever. Tess's health was fragile. Wasn't it understandable that she needed to know if she could count on me? Why should I be coy when my heart had an answer for her? "You haven't lost me," I said.
She moved into my arms, running her fingers gently over my back, holding me in a way no other woman ever had, something on the razor edge of raw sexuality and pure nurturance. Each force spoke to a deep and equal need in me. "Stay with me tonight?" I asked.
She glanced at Tess. "I want to stay here a while longer," she said. "I'll grab a cab later and meet you in Chelsea."
"I'll see you later, then," I said.
I was dead tired, but decided I should visit Lilly before leaving the hospital. I planned to be on Nantucket the next day and, with the progress Lilly had already made, I wasn't sure how long she would be an inpatient.
I found her seated in an armchair by her bed, staring out the window. Her blond, curly hair was tied back with a little black bow. I knocked at the door to her room. She glanced at me, then resumed her vigil.
"Mind if I come in?" I asked.
She shrugged dismissively.
I felt as though I might have done something wrong, something to shake Lilly's trust in me. But I couldn't imagine what that might have been. I hadn't breached her confidence by talking to her family members. I hadn't even shared detailed clinical impressions of her with her internist or surgeon. I'd shown up every time I had said I would. Was she still upset I hadn't agreed to continue seeing her as an outpatient?
"Just because you feel she's lost trust," the voice at the back of my mind said, "doesn't necessarily mean she's lost trust in you."
That was true. Even during the briefest psychotherapy, the psychiatrist is a blank screen onto which a patient will project feelings he or she harbors for other important figures in their lives. Lilly's silence and standoffish body language might be meant for me, but might be a reflection of her anger toward someone else, like her husband or grandfather.
I walked in. I saw that Lilly was connected to just two IV bottles. Her leg was still wrapped in gauze, but it looked less swollen. She was less pale. She was getting better.
Without turning her gaze from the window she took a deep breath, let it out. Her sky-blue eyes thinned in a way that hinted at stormy thoughts. "That fucking bastard," she said. "All those years. He really screwed me up."
I sat down in the armchair next to her. "Who are you thinking about?" I asked, already pretty sure of the answer: Lilly's mind had begun to channel her self-loathing into rage at her grandfather.
She shook her head. What looked like a wave of nausea swept over her beautiful face. She swallowed hard. "I was a little girl," she said. "He was getting his rocks off manipulating a child."
"You've been remembering your grandfather," I said.
"His stupid comments," she said, still looking straight ahead. "The way he checked me out."
I waited to see if she would share her memories.
She looked at me. Several seconds passed without a word.
I didn't break the silence. I wanted her to know she was the one in control of what she revealed and what she kept private.
"My friend Betsy was turning nine," Lilly said finally. "I was nine, too. I remember getting dressed for her birthday party. It was summer, and my mother helped me put on a pale yellow, blowzy dress. It had little butterflies embroidered on it in white thread. I guess you could see my underwear through it. Pink cotton underwear." She rolled her eyes. "I remember my grandfather looking at me, some stupid smile on his face." Her hands closed into fists. "And then he said, 'Keep wearing dresses that show your panties, and all the boys will be staring at you. I know I would be.'"
He would be. He would be staring at his granddaughter's panties. "Do you remember how you felt at the time?" I asked.
"I've been trying to bring it all back," she said. "Because you told me to run into the images, not away from them." She paused to collect her thoughts. "Partly, I think I felt foolish, because I didn't really understand what the hell he was talking about. Why would anyone care about my underwear? But the way he looked at me, I knew I was doing something he liked, or at least something that got his attention. And I was sort of proud of it, but embarrassed, too." She shook her head again, in disgust. "The way he said panties. I remember that. He lingered on the word, like he was… tasting it."
I wanted Lilly to keep her disgust flowing, to keep her emotional wound open and let her infection drain. "He liked saying it," I said. "It excited him."
She closed her eyes. Instead of growing angrier, she blushed. "Here's something weird: It's one of the things that my husband likes, too, I guess. On the honeymoon, he asked me to let him look at me in… my panties."
"Did you let him?" I asked.
She nodded bashfully.
"He just wanted to look at you dre
ssed that way?" I said, inviting her to divulge more.
Her cheeks turned crimson. "While I touched myself," she said quickly.
I felt as though we were only halfway to the core of the problem. Lilly hadn't attacked her husband for admiring her body. She had assaulted herself, injecting herself with dirt. The trigger for her pathology was her shame. "How about you?" I asked. "Did you like it when he watched you that way? When you were touching yourself?"
"I guess I did. I mean I…" She stopped herself mid-sentence. "You know."
"You had an orgasm," I said.
"But then, like a minute later, I felt so disgusting," she said.
"Right," I said. Lilly's trouble was in separating her adult sexuality from the confused, frightened, disgusting sexual intimacies shared by word and glance with her grandfather. "It's going to take time to get enough distance on your past experiences with your grandfather to feel good enjoying the present with your husband. You've got to expect a lot of conflicted emotions. And you've got to give yourself the time to feel them and to get over them."
"But I will?" she asked. "I will get over them?"
"Yes," I said.
"I called Dr. James's office," she said. "We have an appointment in a week."
"I'm glad." I felt gratified that she had followed up with Ted. I also felt a pang of regret that I hadn't continued seeing him myself. I missed him-his clear thinking and steady hand. I would have liked his advice on Julia. "He can help you as you remember more. You can trust him completely."
"I'll try to," she said. She looked at me in a way that showed she was still very needy and very vulnerable. "Will you stop by before I leave?" she asked. "They told me I'll be here a few more days. It would just help to know I'm not on autopilot until discharge."
"You'll handle the controls better and better," I said. "But, yes. I'll see you before you leave."
17
I grabbed a cab back to Chelsea and walked through the door of my loft at 9:17 p.m. By 9:22 I had already gotten the number for Dr. Marion Eisenstadt from Manhattan Directory Assistance, dialed her up, and convinced the woman at her answering service to page her. I hung on for her more than five minutes.
"Dr. Eisenstadt," she said finally. Her voice was younger than I had expected.
"This is Dr. Frank Clevenger, in Boston," I said. "I'm a psychiatrist working with the Bishop family, on Nantucket."
"Yes?" she said.
"I'm calling to…"
"You're a forensic psychiatrist," she said. "Is this a police matter?"
Having a reputation isn't always an advantage. "Not formally," I said. "The Bishops allowed me to evaluate their son, Billy. Now I'm learning as much as I can about the entire family, so I have a complete picture of him when I testify at his trial."
"Okay," Eisenstadt said tentatively.
"And Julia Bishop told me you've treated her. She suggested I call you."
A few moments went by. "I don't think I can tell you much without a release of information from Ms. Bishop."
I felt as though a weight had been lifted from my soul. First of all, Eisenstadt actually existed. Secondly, Julia was clearly her patient. "I completely understand," I said. "We haven't had time to dot our i's or cross our t's. You probably know Billy is still at large. I've had contact with him by phone. Anything you can share with me could help me-either to reach out to him now, or to help him in court later."
"Such as…" she said.
"Such as where you think he fits, in terms of family dynamics," I said, as a throwaway line. "Have you treated Ms. Bishop a long time?"
"Sporadically," Eisenstadt said, still sounding cautious.
"She summers on Nantucket, of course," I said.
Several more seconds passed. "More sporadically than that would explain. I think we've met four, possibly five times, in total. But that's really all I can say."
My confidence in Julia's story plummeted and all that weightiness settled right back inside me. I sat down. "I didn't know it was that infrequent," I said. "Perhaps you still feel you know her well enough to-"
"If you do get that release, I'd be happy to share the file."
"Would that include her letters?" I asked, reaching.
Eisenstadt was silent.
"Ms. Bishop mentioned she's written you, from time to time," I said. I could hear my tone of voice drift toward an investigator's, and I knew Eisenstadt would hear it, too.
"Without a client's written permission, I can't confirm or deny the existence of any specific item in the medical record," she said flatly. "That's the law. I'm sure you're familiar with it."
"I understand," I said. I tried taking another tact. "Shall I have Ms. Bishop specifically authorize release of the letters, or would a general release of information suffice?"
"I can't say any more," she said, coldly this time.
"Of course. Thank you for your time. I'll be in touch."
"Not at all. I'll be happy to talk with you again." She hung up.
I stood there, holding the phone in one hand, rubbing my eyes with the other. It seemed beyond the realm of possibility to think that Julia could have bonded so closely with Eisenstadt in four or five hours as to have written that Eisenstadt "sustained" her, that she meditated "constantly" on their time together, and that she had the will to live only when "I think of seeing you." Eisenstadt was female, after all-the wrong gender to inspire that kind of intimacy from Julia.
Julia had another lover. I didn't know whether that fact itself, or her lying about it, troubled me more. In any case, the investigation had missed a critical beat: Interviewing whoever she had been sleeping with at the time of Brooke's murder.
There was no telling what such an interview would yield. What if Julia and her lover had plans to run off together-plans her lover abandoned when she became pregnant with the twins? What if Julia had come to see Brooke and Tess as the only barrier between her and a fresh start with another man?
Conversely, what if her lover had come to see the twins as an obstacle? A man might do anything to have Julia.
A dull headache had cropped up at the base of my skull. I needed better news. A little relief. Ballast. I dialed State Police headquarters and asked for Art Fields, feeling like I was pulling the lever on a one-armed bandit that had just swallowed my last coin. He picked up a minute later. "Frank Clevenger calling," I said.
"Glad you called."
"Do we know whose prints are on that negative yet?" I asked.
"Just one person's," Fields said tentatively. " Darwin Bishop's."
I felt like I had hit the jackpot. But Fields's voice didn't have celebration in it. "You don't sound satisfied with that," I said.
"There aren't any other prints," he said. "Not Billy Bishop's. Not anyone's. I would have liked to see one unidentified stray-from whoever processed the roll, some clerk in a store, whoever shot the film for Bishop and turned it over to him. Somebody."
"Wouldn't those people be trained to hold the negatives without touching the surfaces?" I asked. "Don't some of them wear gloves?"
"But a lot of them screw up, don't care, or whatever," Fields said. "So you have to wonder whether someone went to the trouble to keep the negative extra clean before it made its way to Bishop. And you have to wonder why."
"Unless it's a coincidence," I said. "I mean, one of Darwin 's security guards could shoot the film, turn it over to a lab for processing, and bring the negatives back neatly tucked in an envelope, with no one ever touching their surfaces."
"Sure. That's possible. Sometimes you get perfect pitch out of a choir, too. I just would have been reassured by a little background noise."
"Agreed," I said. "Did you call in the results to Captain Anderson?" I said.
"Should I?" he asked.
That question had to be about whether Anderson was to be trusted, given what Fields had seen in the photograph. And the question helped me see that I still had faith in Anderson. I believed his story about having been magnetically drawn to Julia
and having lost his bearings in the relationship. She had that power. That was more obvious to me than ever. "Yes," I said immediately. "He's the one to funnel all the information through."
"Will do then," Fields said.
"I appreciate it. Thanks for your help."
"No problem," he said. "I do the work for whoever comes through the door with credentials, but I actually like doing it for people who want to hear the truth. Take care." He hung up.
I agreed that the photographic negative would have been an even more convincing piece of evidence had it been a little dirtier. But the portrait of Darwin Bishop as the killer was compelling, nonetheless. His were the only fingerprints on that negative. He had lobbied Julia to abort the twins. He had taken out life insurance on them, had a history of domestic violence, and had asked Julia for her bottle of nortriptyline.
It was just past 10:00 p.m. Julia would probably be arriving soon. I needed to sleep, even for half an hour. I dropped into a tapestried armchair that looked out at the Tobin Bridge, enjoying the silent, firefly traffic arching through the night, then closed my eyes and actually drifted off.
Ten minutes later, my phone rang again. I glanced at the caller ID and saw North Anderson 's mobile phone number. I figured he was calling to touch base after Fields shared the news about Bishop's prints with him. Part of me wanted to let it ring. But I knew that avoiding Anderson wouldn't solve anything. I grabbed the receiver. "It's Frank," I said.
"How are you doing?" he said.
"Okay," I said, a little more stiffly than I wanted to. "You?"
He skipped the question. "They picked Billy up," he said. "He wants to see you."
"Picked him up?" I said. "Is he all right?"
"Other than being worn out, from what I hear. He hadn't eaten or slept much."
"Where did they find him?" I asked.
" Queens. LaGuardia Airport," Anderson said. "He was ready to board a flight to Miami."
"How did he manage to get off the island without the police stopping him?"
"He probably made a run for it right after the break-in."
"I'll fly to New York on the first shuttle," I said.