And what about Amy Masters? She was a supervisor— my supervisor— and not a clinician, she didn't have her own patients to follow on the unit, and her involvement during off hours was rarely required. Many weekends went by when she didn't show her face on Eight East at all. I tried to recall whether she typically attended Monday-morning Community Meetings. I thought not, but I wasn't sure.
I decided it was possible that Corey Rand had never met either Matthew Trimble or Amy Masters.
Could I also convince myself that Rand had met all the other victims?
Susan Oliphant? Easy enough. I recalled the interaction between her and Corey as she directed that Monday morning Community Meeting, she was definitely there and was definitely involved in the decision to release him from the unit.
What about Wendy Asimoto? Sheldon Salgado had told me that Wendy was originally supposed to be Corey's psychiatrist, so she must have been at the hospital that weekend. It was even possible that Corey and Wendy had met in the ER before Arnie took over Corey's inpatient care.
Lorna Pope? In my mind, there was no doubt that if Lorna wasn't away for the holiday, she would have met Rand. Lorna, the unit social worker, would have been all over Corey and his family first thing Monday morning, assembling family history, arranging family meetings, and preparing initial reports.
Sheldon Salgado? No doubt Corey Rand and he had crossed paths in the psych ER. I'd spoken with Sheldon myself and he had the notes of his contacts with Rand in his consultation log.
Sawyer and I? Yes, we met Corey at Community Meeting.
Perhaps A. J. Simes's new theory had some merit, maybe Corey Rand, if he was the killer, was a little more selective than we had given him credit for.
The only problem I had with the new hypothesis was that Corey Rand had been dead when Arnie Dresser and Lorna Pope were killed, and Corey Rand had been dead when someone sabotaged Sawyer's plane, killed Sheldon Salgado and his family, and poisoned my wife and dog.
What were we missing?
• • •
Sawyer showed up in the restaurant as I was asking the waitress for the check. I stood to greet her and found myself welcoming her embrace more than I should have.
She held me for longer than she needed to, rubbing my shoulder blades with her open hands. I was aware of her breasts pressing against my rib cage.
"They're really all right? Lauren and your dog?"
"They seem okay. No one's one hundred percent sure. But it certainly looks better today than it did yesterday. Emily will stay at the vet hospital for a couple of days of observation."
She sat opposite me and leaned back in her chair. "I'm so happy for you. I was so scared yesterday at your house." Her eyes appeared rueful as she continued. "We've sure been dodging a lot of bullets lately, haven't we? You and me?"
I nodded. I couldn't believe how tired I was. I should have had coffee with my sandwich, not beer. "You were just out with Milt? Were you two working on something?"
"Hardly, he wanted to show me that bookstore he found. But mostly he wanted to talk about A. J, we sat on a bench on the Mall, he wanted romantic advice, he thinks A. J, is interested but he can't seem to get her to respond. Milt's wife died in a car accident four months after he retired. Can you believe it?"
Of course I could believe it. "And you provided the advice?"
She raised an eyebrow. "I'm not exactly proud to admit it, but I recognize a kindred spirit in A. J. Simes.
She's afraid of Milt and what he has to offer her. Like I was afraid of you."
"You were afraid of me?" I tried not to sound as surprised as I was.
She flagged down the waitress and asked what the soup of the day was. Cream of pumpkin, she ordered tea and soup before she responded. "Yes. I was afraid of you, alan."
"Why?"
"I was married, remember?"
"You thought I was a threat to your marriage?"
She smiled playfully and said. "Were you always this thick? Did I miss something back then?" She rearranged her silverware into perfect alignment before she said. "No. You weren't a threat to my marriage."
"What then?"
She refolded her napkin on her lap. "I need to tell you what happened.., to me .., before ... I came to Colorado .., before ... I met you, with my first husband. You can't understand what I'm talking about unless I do."
"Okay," I said, and settled back on my chair. I hoped I was about to learn what I'd been trying to discover for so many years.
"When I met you that day at the party at Mona's condo, after you left me that note in my New York Times, I was a widow."
A widow? I felt stupid. Beyond stupid. "I'm so sorry. I’ve been— Jesus. I didn't know."
She shook her head forcefully, dismissing my protest. "How could you know? I didn't want you to know about any of that. No one knew at the school but my clinical supervisors and my therapist. I didn't trust anyone with what happened. I thought if the school knew what I was going through, they would judge me to be too fragile for the residency."
"It was recent? His death?"
"Sometimes it still feels recent, the second year of the residency started on July first, he.., my husband.., died.., the previous January."
"God: I'm sorry."
The waitress delivered Sawyer's tea, and she started the elaborate ritual of preparation, she chanced a quick glance my way and read something in my eyes. Through tight lips, she cautioned. "I haven't told you much, yet." She was warning me not to jump to any conclusions. I decided to allow her to proceed without any more of my promptings or inane attempts at comfort.
"It wasn't just that he died. What happened was .., my husband killed himself." She looked up from her tea again, but away from me, out the window. "I had told him in November, the fifteenth to be precise, I had told him that I wanted a divorce, and..."
Her words were halting and seemed to sweat thick beads of anguish. "He didn't take it well, he said he would change however I wanted him to, he, um, he told me he would do anything to keep me, that he couldn't live without me. I didn't take him at his word, though. No. I thought it was just his insecurity talking, and his insecurity was why I had already decided to leave him."
I was confused. How could her friends in Colorado not know about her husband? "Were you already in Denver?"
"No. I did my first year and a half of residency in Chapel Hill. In North Carolina. I thought you knew that, a supervisor there, a friend, arranged for me to repeat the second year in Colorado after.., after..."
"Your husband's suicide?"
She nodded. "And after my baby died."
Her baby died? She said the words so quickly I wondered if I had heard her correctly.
Sawyer was staring at the reflections of the light waltzing off the tea in her cup. "Your baby died?" I wondered aloud, my voice as soft as her infant's skin.
She closed her eyes and swallowed, her shoulders jumped up suddenly and then collapsed, she looked sallow and lifeless. I didn't speak. Neither did she, the sounds of the restaurant seemed to roar in my ears. I reached across the table and took her hand, gently pryina it from the handle of her teacup.
She pulled it back.
"I had a baby once, a beautiful baby," she whispered in a tone that told me everything, that said. "I once had a life, a real life."
I guessed that I could jump to the end of the story she was telling, and because I could, my impulse was to close the book and walk away. I was in a mood for nothing but happy endings. But instead I waited.
"My baby was a little round bundle of love." She almost smiled. "He, um, he had her— her name was, um, her name was Simone, and.., and she was so sweet and she was so pretty.., and he had her for a couple of days while I was on call, that was what we'd worked out after I moved out, that he would watch her when I was on call, and.., he, um, he killed her, he killed my little baby at the same time that he killed himself, he killed her so that I couldn't have her, and so that she couldn't have me, he wanted me to know what it was like to
have something so essential ripped from his life."
The chair next to her was vacant. I moved across the table and sat on it before I slowly eased her against me, she seemed small in my arms. I waited for convulsions to rack her bones and tears to flow from her eyes, but they never came. I thought of her the day before, after Lauren and Emily were poisoned, when she was sitting against tha bumper of my Land Cruiser, in anguish that I couldn't understand.
And now I could.
"When I met you, you terrified me,” she said, her words so soft they were almost lost in the din of the restaurant. "You were gallant and handsome and.., romantic. But you needed me, alan. I could feel it. I could just.., feel your insecurity at times, and I couldn't let that happen again. I let him need me— my husband— and look at what happened, he wouldn't let me go, and then he took my baby, he took Simone from me. I couldn't let you need me. I couldn't. It was too dangerous, and too soon."
She sat up straight, releasing herself from my embrace, turning toward me on her chair.
She touched the side of my face with one hand and then reached up with the other, she flattened both palms against my cheeks. "And now? Now I think I may have read you wrong back then. Don't you love irony?"
"What do you mean?"
"I don't know," she said. "It's all come full circle for us. Before, back then. I thought you would drag me under, drown me even. But today? Today we need each other just to stay alive. How is that for the ultimate insecurity? The ultimate dependency."
My instincts told me that something crucial had been omitted from Sawyer's story. My mind flew back to her anguish at the cemetery the day before. "What was his name? Your husband?"
She looked at me oddly and said. "Kenneth Sackett. Kennv, he was a, um, banker. His family has a bank. Had a bank, they sold it to NationsBank a while back. I made a lot of monev on the stock he left me. Even more ironv, huh?" She nodded to herself as though she was acknowledging that she'd actually answered the question correctly.
"How did he do it? How did he kill himself.., and your baby?"
Her hand jumped to her mouth as though some invisible string yanked it there, she blurted. "You already know, don't you? How do you know?"
I didn't know how I knew. I shrugged.
The waitress chose that moment to deliver Sawyer's soup. Its color was the hue of a fall sunset, the waitress's name was Kim, and she asked, of course, if everything was all right.
I answered that everything was fine. Sawyer actually giggled at the lunacy of the exchange.
When Kim had retreated out of earshot I said. "Yesterday. Sawyer. It must have ..."
"Yes,” she acknowledged. "Yes. It certainly did."
"I'm sorry."
"Just like with you, yesterday; I found them myself. I came home from work and found them. Kenneth and Simone."
"But the outcome wasn't as happy for you then as it was for me today."
"No, that's been my life. No happy endings."
She spoke with such finality I thought she was done with her story. But instead, she was just steeling herself for what came next.
"I had stopped by the house— his house, the one where we'd lived while we were married— to pick up Simone after I left the hospital at around. I don't know, seven-thirty in the evening. Nobody answered the door, but it was unlocked. I wandered around inside looking for them, cursing him for not being home. I figured he'd gone out somewhere and had dropped Simone off at her grandmother's house. Finally; I checked her room. In her crib, lying across her favorite teddy bear, there was a note that said. 'We're down in the garage.'
"That very second. I knew. I flew down the stairs and through the kitchen and yanked open the door to the garage andl..."
Her voice faded and she tempered her breathing, she was trying to find the strength to finish this story.
"Kenny loved his car, just loved it. It was this red Pontiac Firebird he'd had since high school. When I went in the garage, it was there, the engine was off but the whole garage smelled like exhaust, he was in the front seat, on the passenger side, slumped over, vomit all over the place.
"He had put Simone in the backseat, the garden hose from the exhaust came into the car right next to her, she was strapped in her car seat, surrounded by her toys, he'd, um.., the shithead.., he'd, um, taped a wedding picture of us on the dashboard in front of the driver's seat, and he'd.., hung a picture of me over the back of the seat so that when Simone looked up before she died, she would see me. I would be the last image she ever had."
She was silent for a full minute or more, but I was sure she wasn't done, she didn't turn to face me as she resumed her story. "What, um, what galled me the most was that he left her alone to die in the backseat, he couldn't see past himself enough to even comfort her as she lay there dying. I'll never forgive him for that.
"Never."
THIRTY-FOUR
Sam Purdy walked into the restaurant, paused, and started to look around. Sawyer waved him over to our table.
She greeted him and invited him to join us as though she was delighted he was there and his presence would interfere with nothing of significance. I couldn't think of a thing to say in protest, they immediately started chatting about a cold front that was approaching Colorado after freezing cats in Montana. To my amazement. Sawyer had moved from revealing the pathos of her daughter's murder to participating in a mundane discussion about the weather with an ease that to me felt pornographic. I was tempted to ask Sam to leave us alone so that she and I could talk some more and come to something that felt like closure. But Sawyer had obviously talked enough. Or at least as much as she intended to.
Sam explained his presence. "We just decided— Milt and I, upstairs— that somebody should be with each of you all the time until this .., thing is concluded. So I'm here to keep you company." The waitress. Kim, brought him a menu. Before he opened it, he asked me. "Should I bother? Is there anything in this place that your little doctor friend is going to let me eat?"
Sawyer said the soup was great, he looked at it and seemed to draw away physically from the creamy mixture the way a vampire might be repulsed by a bowl of roasted garlic.
I said I thought he could find something that was on his diet, as he lowered his eyes to the pages. I stared at Sawyer, who wouldn't look back at me.
I wanted to know more about Simone.
I wanted to know why she couldn't trust anyone.
I wanted to know why she couldn't trust me.
Sam ordered an egg-white omelet and dry wheat toast. Sawyer asked for a fresh pot of tea.
I thought about things for a moment longer and announced that I was going for a walk, or something.
Sam made a face that communicated precisely how childish he thought my departure was in light of the fact that he had just volunteered to be my bodyguard. But he let me go without verbalizing a protest. I stopped in the lobby and used a pay phone to call Lauren, her phone rang through to the nursing station, where a nurse informed me that Lauren was resting.
"How is she doing?"
"Well, she's tired. I imagine that's why she's resting."
"How was she doing before she started resting?"
"I think she was tired then, too, That's why she decided to rest."
I gave up and offered my tempered gratitude.
The woman who answered the phone at the veterinary hospital was much more forthcoming about Emily, who she said was doing "Great, she's my favorite. Is she always this much fun?"
I thought, No, she isn't. But I didn't say anything to dispel whatever transference was at work.
I stepped outside onto the flagstone steps of the hotel and felt the distinctive chill of autumn, that cold front that had so fascinated Sam and Sawyer was no longer approaching us from Montana; it had definitely arrived. Crisp gusts of wind were cutting through the canyons, whipping leaves from the trees, and knifing through my clothing as though I were dressed in rags. I examined the eastern sky and saw blues and blacks. When I turned to attend to
the western sky; I saw strings of clouds the color of Sawyer's pumpkin soup.
Before I checked my watch, I guessed it was almost seven o'clock. But it was only 6:40.
I needed to find a place to sleep for the night. I had a plethora of bad options. One of my two available residences was a major construction zone, the other didn't have an operable furnace. Sam would offer the sofa bed at his place, a hotel probably made the most sense. First, though. I needed some clean clothes.
I found my car on Spruce Street and drove across downtown, over the creek, and up to the Hill. I parked outside for a few moments with the engine running, listening to the last few minutes of Fresh Air on NPR. Terry Gross was interviewing Scott Turow, her interviewing style perplexed me, as it always did. If she were heading from L.A, to New York, she'd just as soon detour through Sao Paulo. But she somehow always got to her destination, and I was usually fascinated and grateful I'd gone along for the ride.
I climbed down from the Land Cruiser and made a quick tour of the exterior of Lauren's house. I unlocked the front door and stepped inside, immediately noting that the air inside was no warmer than the air outside. I prayed that this particular cold front wasn't quite cold enough to freeze plumbing and then decided not to worry about it. If the pipes froze, so be it. It wouldn't kill anyone.
The new furnace I had ordered wasn't downstairs where I expected it to be. It was sitting in a box at the top of the basement stairs. I was no mechanical genius, but I figured that the furnace had a ways to go, geographically speaking, before it was capable of generating any environmentally friendly, fuel-efficient heat for this little house, the contractor had said he'd have it up and runnina on Tuesday. I was now guessing Wednesday and wouldn't have been surprised by Thursday.
I avoided the bedroom for as long as I could. I swept up the dirt the rescue folks had dragged inside. I walked downstairs to the basement and found myself trying to remember what Sam had said about there having been two carbon monoxide detectors in the basement. One was made to operate on house current, but it had been unplugged, the other was operated by batteries, but it had fallen down behind the furnace.
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