A Fatal Debt

by John Gapper

  All I could think of was to keep going, to reach the woods. Maybe I’d lose him in the forest, where his size would give him trouble. I coughed and choked as I scrambled to make cover, but it was useless. He tackled me five yards from the trees. I felt his weight on me, as I had in Central Park, and we toppled into the undergrowth. He grabbed me in a headlock and dragged me roughly across the ground. The pressure on my neck was brutal; I thrashed wildly to force myself free.

  He was hauling me into the forest, out of reach of rescue. I tried to shout, but only gurgles emerged from my mouth. Then we were in the trees and I felt one of my feet catch in a root. It only made him yank my shoulders harder, and I felt a shooting pain in my ankle as my foot sprang free. He dragged me ten yards into a clearing covered in leaves and twigs, and I felt the pressure slacken on my neck as he let me drop to the ground. I bent over, reaching for my neck, and as I did so, he kicked me in the ribs, as if finishing his assault. I shuddered with the pain of it and looked up at my assailant.

  The last time I’d come across him, it had been dark and I hadn’t caught sight of his face. Now I saw him. He had blue eyes and a lean face with his mother’s nose. His blond hair was streaked and tousled as if he didn’t bother to keep it trimmed. He and Anna would have made a nice couple, I thought as he stood above me, panting with the effort he had put into pummeling me. It had come to me the night before, as I’d read about the Greene family. Their son, who worked at a hedge fund in New York after being shunted through the Ivy League, was called Nathan. It was just uncommon enough a name that I could remember the last time I’d heard it-from Anna, as she’d talked of her old boyfriend.

  He was borderline, my therapist reckoned. He hooked me, and then made me suffer for loving him, she’d said.

  Having witnessed the intimacy between her and Margaret Greene, I knew that was who it was. It had to be. Who else would have followed me after my meeting with Anna and trashed my apartment? It had to be someone with a grudge, and Nathan Greene had several. He had not only seen his old girlfriend kissing me, but he knew me as the psych who’d let Harry out of the hospital to kill his father. I’d remembered Rebecca’s old dress, slashed through from shoulders to waist. He must have believed it was Anna’s.

  I had just enough time for the thoughts to pass through my head before Nathan dropped onto me, his knees pinning my shoulders to the ground and his body knocking away my breath. He put his hands around my neck in a throttle grip and squeezed. I was immobilized-his weight was enough to eliminate any thought of being able to struggle free-and I strained for breath.

  “Murderer!” he shouted.

  On his tortured face, I saw something that gave me hope. He was weeping. Tears were running out of his eyes and down his nose, and a couple dripped on the ground. He doesn’t want to kill me, I thought. He doesn’t know what he’s doing. I was only barely conscious, and I knew I didn’t have much time left. I summoned what energy I had and thrust my head sharply to one side while pushing up with my shoulders to release his grip.

  “Nathan!” I cried weakly. “Nathan. Stop.”

  He reached forward and reengaged his grip on my throat. He started to squeeze again, but then his hands went slack and he seemed to pull back. He was still sitting on me, but as I turned my face upward, his hands were covering his face and he was shuddering with emotion, the hostility leaking out of him like his tears.

  “I’m sorry, Nathan,” I said, spluttering and trying to spit a piece of twig out of my mouth. “I didn’t kill your father. I’m sorry.”

  He cuffed my head with one hand, but there was no force in the blow-the assault was over. Then I felt his weight lift off me and he sat on the forest floor with his knees up and his arms wrapped around his legs and sobbed to himself without speaking. I got my breath back and then sat up myself. My ankle still hurt badly and my throat felt sore, but I was otherwise all right. We stayed like that in those woods, the two of us, for fifteen minutes, not talking, letting the panic subside, and then we walked to his car-me limping on my damaged ankle.

  It took a little while for him to start talking about why he’d fixated on me as the cause of everything that had gone wrong in his life. When he did, the truth spilled out unchecked for over an hour. I sat there listening as I’d been trained to do, interjecting occasionally to try to convince him I was innocent-although I wasn’t sure I was. He was only a few years younger than me, but he seemed like a child. I felt sorry for him. He’d been exploited to hide the truth about Greene’s death. I almost liked him, although he had inherited his father’s arrogance. He needed therapy, but I wasn’t going to volunteer. The best I could offer was to forget about his twin assaults and having trashed my apartment.

  It was quiet there-there wasn’t anybody around. Once I heard the sound of an engine from the airfield, and I looked over to see a small plane landing in the distance. Otherwise, we were by ourselves. If he’d really meant to kill me, I’d taken him to a perfect spot.

  After we’d finished, I made him promise to drive back to the city and wait for my call. The resistance had gone out of him, and I trusted him to do what I advised. My ankle was hurting and he drove me to where my car was parked, still alone in the lot. I steered it down through the woods to the highway and headed toward the woman who’d made me his target.

  27

  When I reached the entrance to the lane, I halted the car and got out, standing where Bruce Bradley had stood that day. To my left was the road to the sea, with surf now being blown from green waves. The beach was empty, as usual. The hedges and flowers along the lane were verdant, and blossoms had cascaded from a sculpted tree in the front yard of a home nearby, carpeting the lawn and drive.

  Halfway along the lane, a line of contractors’ vehicles were parked outside a house at which someone was having work done. Mostly, there was silence-interrupted only by the wind whistling in the telephone wires and the distant roar of the sea. I squinted along the lane at the Shapiros’ house but couldn’t see any sign of life. I tried to imagine the view as it would have been that Sunday, the lane jammed with police vehicles. Pagonis and Hodge would be picking up Harry to take him to Yaphank.

  I thought of what Nathan had just told me and tried to piece it together with the rest of what I’d learned. I’d taken it on trust for so long that Harry had killed Greene-everyone had. He’d confessed to the crime, not just to the police but also to my face. But what if he’d been lying? Anna’s complaint about psychs not checking on whether their patients were telling the truth had stuck with me since she’d said it. To us, truth is something to be found inside a patient, and only he can dig it out from his subconscious. We assume they are trying to be truthful, apart from the things they don’t even know about themselves. That was why they have paid us money to talk.

  Yet most of what I’d found since I’d met Harry were half truths and deceptions-not the distortions with which people comfort themselves, but blatant lies. I’d found that out only when I’d broken my profession’s rules. The biggest deception of all was the one thing I’d never thought to doubt-that Harry was the boss. He had been the CEO, the banker who’d ruled Wall Street. Those around him were, as Felix had insisted, helpers and servants. I hadn’t realized that one of them was in charge.

  I got back in the car and drove down the lane, on alert for any human presence, but the white gates and the trees did their work, screening the lawns and houses from scrutiny. At the foot of the Shapiros’ drive, I halted the car and looked from my side window at the property. Still nothing. I eased the car up the drive, this time taking the slope at a steady speed, and halted on the square of gravel by the house. A few yards past the service sign, I tapped on the kitchen door and put up my hand to shelter my eyes from the glare coming off the sea, peering through the glass into the empty room. Then I stepped onto the lawn at the rear to gaze through the conservatory windows at the living room. The contractors had done their work well, and the scene of the death shone in fresh colors, like a frosted cake.


  I heard a whirring sound behind and turned sharply, but it was only a bird washing itself in the pool and shaking off the water in a spray. My ankle was bothering me and I limped around the house, emerging next to my car. I rested a hand on its roof and gazed down at the gravel beneath my feet, as if I might see all past tire marks if I looked hard enough.

  Squatting, I passed a hand over the surface, feeling a prickle from the sharp stones as they rubbed across my palm. I looked down the slope toward a row of flowers. As I did it, I noticed from the corner of my eye the curtains move in a window of the single-story house across the lane: the Shapiros’ guesthouse. When I looked again, the fabric was still, but I knew I hadn’t been mistaken. I made my way slowly down the drive, leaving my car behind and gazing at the window. At the bottom, I crossed the lane and opened the small wooden gate guarding the entrance. It was a white clapboard cottage, not as intricate as their house but pretty all the same. The lawn was neatly trimmed and rhododendron bushes were set into oval beds, wood chips scattered around their roots.

  As I paused, with the top of the gate still in my hand, the cottage door opened and Anna stood there. She was wearing a pink dress, with mother-of-pearl buttons on scalloped material running to the waist between her breasts, and the same black flip-flops in which I’d met her. There were five yards between us and we both stood in place, looking at each other. Her neck and cheeks were flushed and she twisted the strap of one flip-flop between the toes of one red-nailed foot.

  “Why are you limping?” she said.

  “Your boyfriend caught up with me. He talked to me, after he stopped throttling me. He told me a lot of things.”

  “That bastard,” she said. “Don’t believe a word he says.”

  We both stayed where we were, still frozen.

  “Why did you run away?” I said.

  “I was scared.” Her lip trembled and she pinched one side between her teeth, the top ones shining white in the light.

  “You told me to work it out myself. I’ve done that.”

  I walked along the path toward her. She was only five or six paces away, but they went very slowly and the gap hardly seemed to close until I was right by her. I took in her scent and felt the warmth of her body under the thin cotton. I reached through her dense hair, my fingers searching for the back of her head, and as I pulled her toward me, she stood on her toes so that our lips touched. Her tongue brushed against mine and I felt the softness of her mouth. We stayed together for several seconds and then she pulled back, looking up at me.

  “This isn’t very professional,” she said.

  “Fuck my profession,” I said.

  I pulled her to me, and as we kissed again, I could feel her draw back. She kept her arms slung around my shoulders as she moved, leading me back toward the open door. I walked along with her and caught her by the small of her back as she almost stumbled passing over the threshold. She pulled me to my right, her back against the hallway wall, as we got inside and reached under my arm to push the door closed. It swung toward the latch but failed to click and I kicked backward with my heel. My foot missed, tipping me to one side and making her giggle. She ducked under my arm and shoved the door with both hands, ramming it closed, then turned to face me again.

  I took her face in my hands and kissed her slowly, and then I reached down to the top of her dress and felt for the first of the mother-of-pearl buttons. It was small and thick and I could not catch it at first, wrapped against a scallop of cloth. Then I pushed at it with my thumb and felt it slip through the buttonhole. The next five went faster, and as I got to the last, she pulled away from me, glancing down.

  “Keep going,” she said.

  “Shut up,” I said.

  I pushed her dress off one shoulder and then slipped one bra strap after it and bent my head to kiss her shoulder. Squeezing her body between my hips and the door, I reached down to gather her dress up her legs. I could feel the tiny hairs on her thigh brush past my palm as she wriggled to free herself from the fabric.

  She gazed at me, her eyes alight. “Don’t stop,” she said, and I pushed myself into her, hoisting her up the door. She raised one leg to hook it around my hips and moved with me until I came, feeling her quiver and, as she did, all of my pent-up bitterness and sorrow evaporated. We stayed like that, not moving, for a minute and then she lifted her other leg off the ground with a screech, toppling us over. We slid together down the crevice of door and wall and landed in a heap on the floorboards, banging my bad ankle.

  “Oww. Why’d you do that?” I said.

  “Didn’t want to let you go.”

  After a few minutes, we gathered ourselves together and shuffled to a bedroom at the back of the house, dragging our discarded clothes with us. Anna stretched out on the bed and I lay next to her-she was so beautiful, I couldn’t keep my eyes from her. She looked at me, both amused and affectionate, as I ran my fingertips down the slope of her body. There was a lot to be said between us, but in the aftershock of our coupling, it could wait.

  The room was sparsely furnished, like a ship’s cabin, with a glass full of white seashells on a table next to the bed and a tapestry hung on a wall. Her yoga mat was unrolled at the foot of the bed, and some of her clothes were gathered in a neat pile on a chest. Through the window, I could see a field of rushes bordering a pond that stretched out to the bay side of the lane. The sky glowed as the sun faded over the water, purples and reds mixing with the dark blue of dusk. I wanted never to move.

  “Is this your Goldilocks bed?” I said.

  “This is the one.” She reached to brush a strand of hair from my forehead.

  “Let’s just stay here.”

  We had to get up eventually to wash, to eat. It was night when we did, and Anna took a bath while I hunted around the kitchen for food. I found some spaghetti and chopped up onions and garlic for the base of a tomato sauce while I listened to her soap herself. I found candles in one cupboard and I took one to the bathroom and set it beside her. In the kitchen, I placed others on the table and dimmed the lights so that they glowed next to the plates and glasses. I kept the curtains facing the main house closed but raised a blind on a window at the end of the room to let in a square of night sky. The stars glittered and I could see the wash of the Milky Way.

  When Anna came out of the bathroom, she was wearing a silk robe and her hair was bundled in a twisted towel above her head, like a turban. She walked over to the saucepan and tasted the sauce.

  “Mmm,” she said. “You can move in.”

  She sat and I served the food, looping the pasta into a bowl and pouring some wine. Then I sat opposite her and we ate happily. I was reaching for the wine bottle to refill her glass when I saw a light shining over her shoulder through the open blind. It was far away in the distance, and at first I thought it might be the reflection of the moon from a house. But as I watched the beam snaking from side to side, I saw it was a car’s headlights tracing the road along the coast. Anna kept on eating, her back to it, so I followed its progress alone, waiting for it to turn down a side road and leave us in peace. But it didn’t. It kept on coming until it disappeared for ten seconds behind a house and reemerged, this time near enough that the single light had split into two, driving straight toward us along the lane.

  “Anna,” I said.

  “What?” she said, looking up with a smear of sauce on her chin, then seeing my face and turning around.

  I pinched out the candles between my finger and thumb, darkening the room so the driver would not see us. Then we stared from the window in dumb amazement, trapped at the end of this cul-de-sac far from the safety of the city. Anna rose without speaking and walked to the far side of the room, as if she could evade it by hiding, while I sat frozen, watching its movement like that of an arrow with the two of us as its target. As I got to my feet, it went over a bump and the headlights jumped upward, shining into the room and illuminating me. I ducked, but it was too late.

  The lights went past the open window
and we heard the sound of the vehicle for the first time as it came to a halt by the foot of the Shapiros’ lane, the hum of its engine idling. I reached for Anna’s hand and she held mine as we stood there half-naked. The glow penetrated the gap in the curtains near us and shone across the room. Then it faded and turned a fainter red as the car moved again, turning left up the drive to the Shapiros’ house. I could hear it take the hill rapidly and the crunch of the gravel spurted out from its tires, as if the driver weren’t familiar with the slope. My car, I thought. I left it by the house. We walked to the room adjoining the kitchen at the front. There was a sofa by the window and we knelt on it, her robe slithering with a silken hiss.

  I reached to part the curtains for us to peer through, hearing her soft breath and feeling her warmth next to my face. She was panting slightly-now out of fear rather than desire. She placed her face beneath mine to look through the parting and we gazed up along the drive, past the split-rail fence and the weeping trees. The car had halted next to mine and the driver was climbing out. I still half wondered if it might be Nathan, having ignored our agreement for him to return to the city. What if he catches us together like this? I thought. He’s going to strangle me properly this time. I didn’t believe it, though. I knew it hadn’t been a man behind the wheel of the car. It was a woman-the one who’d controlled this affair all along and who had fooled everyone but Harry.

  As she extinguished the headlights and stepped out of the car, her face was shrouded by dark. A cloud covered the moon and only her outline was visible against the still-glowing sky. She stood by her car, then walked to mine and stepped around it at a slow, deliberate pace, as if inspecting it for damage. She bent to look through one window, then straightened and stepped onto the lawn, disappearing from sight.

  “Where’s she going?” Anna whispered.