by Ann Gosslin
Except it wasn’t. At least not to someone like her, pervaded by a floating sense of dread, and the sensation of ‘what if?’ woven into her bones. She circled the room, paging through Tim’s file. But little in those old records had any bearing on his current mental state. Agonising over old police reports and digging for clues would not give her the answer she wanted: what had made Tim snap? Were there drugs involved? Had he argued with his father – or mother – one too many times? Or was it simply a case of garden-variety psychosis, a break from reality with no inciting event, and no real answer? Her only task now was to write up her report and send it to the review board. She wouldn’t go to bed until it was done.
She brewed a pot of coffee and switched on her laptop. In dispassionate, formal prose, she filled fifteen pages with information on Tim’s history and mental state, the results from her assessments, and her opinion regarding his fitness for release. With each word and every paragraph, she tried to confer her professional opinion in a clear and concise manner, with just enough supposition to leave room for interpretation.
Before typing the final line, she paused a moment before plunging on.
In my professional judgement, Timothy Warren Stern, Jnr, is not a danger to himself or to others. Having completed the full complement of assessments required by the State of New York, and having met with and interviewed the patient on several occasions over the course of eight weeks, to the best of my knowledge, he is fit for release into the community, where he will reside in the home of his father, Timothy Warren Stern, Snr, at 160 White Valley Road, Matlock, Vermont.
When she hit Print, it was two in the morning. At the bottom of the last page, she scrawled her signature with a blue biro, initialled the other pages and sealed the report in an envelope. Resting her head on her arms, she closed her eyes. It was done.
First thing in the morning she would send it by express courier to the review board. The 30th June court date, when the petition for release would be decided by a judge in Albany, was the final hurdle. After that, if all went well, Tim Stern would walk out of Greenlake Psychiatric Facility, a free man.
29
Manhattan, New York
May, Present Day
Saturday night, and Casa Habana was buzzing. A woman in an ivory silk blouse smiled at Ray, as he chatted with the maître d’ in rapid Spanish, while slipping a folded bill into the man’s hand. Erin tried to avoid the crush by standing against a wall, until a dark-eyed woman in a swishy red dress and gold hoop earrings whisked them upstairs to a table by the window. A bottle of Rioja appeared, followed by a platter of green and black olives, rounds of goat’s cheese and crisply toasted bread.
Ray poured out the wine and raised his glass. ‘Salud. Qué vivas durante todos los días de tu vida.’ May you live every day of your life.
‘Gracias, igualmente.’ Thanks, same to you.
‘You speak Spanish?’ His eyes lit up.
She smiled over the rim of her glass. ‘Un poco.’ Was this flirting? If so, she was out of practice. Her last time out with a man must have been, what, two years ago? Not since Sebastian, a moody Dane with a penchant for secrets, disappeared from her life in a puff of smoke. On a rainy Friday in March, she’d arrived home to their shared flat to find his things gone and a note on the table. Sorry. Take care, S. It had taken months for the sting of his brush-off to fade. After that, she’d sworn off men.
Light-hearted dinner conversation was not her strong suit, so she let Ray do the talking. At the moment, he was singing the praises of the chef, a personal friend of his, before segueing into an animated description of a recent fundraiser his non-profit had organised in support of immigrant engagement.
‘Education and job training, mainly,’ he said when she asked him what his organisation did. ‘Family outreach, integration, community support.’ He gestured at the room. ‘Half the people who work here have come through one of our programmes.’
Having sent her report to the review board at Greenlake, Erin was more than ready to put Timothy Stern’s case to rest. But some things still troubled her. A heap of unanswered questions that kept her up at night.
She hadn’t expected to see Ray again, and was surprised he’d responded at all to her rather curt text, Something’s bugging me, re: Tim. Shall we meet for dinner? But here they were, awash with food and wine, candlelight flickering between them. There was no sign he’d overheard her say her real name and title, that time in his flat, and he seemed to be having a good time.
A uniformed waiter, elegant as a toreador, set more food on the table. Grilled prawns, red snapper, spicy black beans and saffron rice. As she sucked the juice from a prawn, Erin plotted how to steer the conversation to Tim without spoiling the mood. But Ray seemed to have forgotten the pretext for their dinner. Their talk ranged from books and films to food and travel. His eyes shone as he regaled her with tales of Galicia, the beguiling, but little-known, province in the north-west of Spain. Windswept beaches. Old men with craggy faces, herding their goats into the mountains. The bustling markets with their sun-warm tomatoes, fresh cheeses, oranges, and cured hams, piled high on trestle tables.
It occurred to her that he might have assumed her text was a ruse for asking him out. Charming though he was, she wasn’t ready for a relationship. So rather than confess her own experience of living and travelling in Spain, she kept mum. Talking about herself might lead to the locked door of her past she had no intention of opening.
He popped a glistening prawn in his mouth. ‘So, what’s the verdict on the food?’
‘Perfect.’ She wiped her buttery fingers on a napkin and rehearsed the words in her head. So, about Tim…
‘Best kept secret on the West Side.’ As he leaned forward to refill her glass, the candle flame shone in his eyes. ‘Though there was a time, soon after I moved here, that I couldn’t stand the sight of seafood. Can you imagine? Here I was, surrounded by a mob of Manhattanites clamouring for lobster airlifted from Maine, and I couldn’t even look at it, much less eat it.’ He grinned. ‘Too many summers shucking clams and gutting fish.’
He piled more saffron rice on her plate. ‘Funny thing, when I got your text, I was just about to call you. Last week, in the middle of a meeting at work, something about the Sterns popped into my head. Completely out of nowhere.’ He motioned to the waiter for a bottle of water. ‘Not about Tim, but his folks. I must have blocked it out before, because… you know, the fish thing.’ He waggled his brows in a weak imitation of Groucho Marx. ‘There was this one summer I bussed tables at the yacht club. Saturday nights, the Sterns would show up for dinner.’
Goosebumps rose on her bare arms. This was more than she expected. During their earlier encounter, Ray had said he’d never met the man. ‘Was Tim ever with them?’
‘At the yacht club? I don’t think so. Just their own friends. It was usually a table for four, sometimes six. I remember this one woman with a tinkly laugh. Used to drive me up the wall. Skinny lady. Blonde bouffant. Always wore this choker of white plastic beads and big sunglasses like Jackie O. I remember feeling sorry for her husband. He didn’t say much. I had the idea he might be foreign because he ate like a European. You know, with the fork in his left hand? I remember thinking that was really cool. But she would hiss at him to sit up straight and not eat so fast. How could I have forgotten? The tinkly laugh, the hissing.’
The ghost of a memory flickered, and Erin briefly closed her eyes. The laugh didn’t sound right, but the foreign-seeming husband? It could have been them. Or not. With her memories of those years shattered by the drugs she’d been forced to take at Danfield, there were a million ways she could reshuffle the actors from her past.
An attractive woman in a backless dress brushed by their table, trailing a cloud of perfume. Ray didn’t give her a glance.
‘I remember one night when Stern snapped his fingers at me to bring him some notepaper. He and his friend had just come up with the “greatest idea ever” and wanted to write it down. So, the two star
ted scribbling away, with Stern calling out for another round of cocktails.’
She studied his face, puzzled by the flood of details he so fluently recalled. ‘What was the great idea?’
‘Beats me.’ He gave her a sheepish grin. ‘I was something of a stoner in those days. Before going off to work, I’d take a couple of bong hits to get through the evening. The things I can’t remember from that time would fill a black hole.’
A stoner? She wouldn’t have guessed that, but at least a few details had filtered through the weed-induced fog. Tinkly laugh, blonde bouffant. She jammed her thumbnail into her wrist, hoping the pain would silence the alarm bells in her head. There were no photos from those days. All were lost, or so she was told. After her father died, and they moved to Concord. That photo she saw at Stern’s house. Was it the same couple? The woman with the annoying laugh and the man who ate with the fork in his left hand? Impossible to return to the house for another look, but Lydia had taken some snapshots of the rooms. There might be something she could work with.
‘Before I forget, I brought you this.’ She reached into her bag for the Belle River High School yearbook Ray had pressed into her hands before leaving his flat. She’d been planning to send it by post but changed her mind after he’d agreed to meet her for dinner.
His eyebrows shot up. ‘Wow, okay. I totally forgot I’d given that to you.’
An awkward silence grew between them. Erin was worried she’d spoiled the mood. But that was the reason she’d contacted him, for information on Tim, not for a date, however pleasant this evening was turning out to be. In for a penny, in for a pound. Ever since their first encounter at his flat, she was curious to know if Ray had known her brother.
‘Speaking of high school…’ She nodded at the yearbook. ‘I was going through the pictures and jotted down some names.’ Erin made a pretence of looking in her bag. ‘I must have left the list at home. Anyway, during my research on the Stern murders, this one name kept popping up.’ She sought his eyes. ‘Do you remember someone named Graham Marston?’
They had long-since finished their caramel flan, and Ray rose from his chair to signal for the bill. When their waitress arrived, he flipped open his wallet and extracted a card.
‘Marston? At Belle River High?’ He ran his hand through his hair. ‘I don’t think so.’
She wanted to ask him about his yearbook picture and what ‘eldu#QUEpasa?’ meant, but that was surely going too far. What rational person would want the long-buried details of their teenage years picked apart?
Out in the street, Ray seemed to be in a hurry. He hailed a cab and held the door as she stepped in. No kiss on the cheek. No, ‘I’ll call you.’ Not a date then. Was she disappointed? Not in the least, she decided, after examining her thoughts. Just frustrated from grasping at so many straws. As her cab pulled away, he stood on the pavement with his hands stuffed in his pockets. His face was impossible to read.
The storm that had been building all afternoon broke just as her train pulled out of the station. A relief to listen to the rain pelting the carriage roof as they trundled north. Water streamed down the window, blurring the skyline. As they swayed along the track, she was lulled into the feeling of lying in a boat, adrift at sea. But the evening wasn’t a total loss. That bit about the Sterns and the couple at the yacht club was interesting. If not for Tim’s story, then her own. It could have been them. The few memories she had of her father were slippery as minnows.
The Hudson cut a dark ribbon through the landscape. Her face, reflected in the window, was pale, and faint lines were etched around her eyes. Perhaps she should contact Tim’s old school friend, Jeremiah. If nothing else, he would know if Tim had been a victim of Graham’s bullying. Foolish to get sucked in, and yet impossible to turn away.
*
In the quiet hour after lunch, Erin closed her office door and plugged in her electric kettle. As she waited for the water to boil, she grabbed the file for her newest patient and settled into the window seat. Out on the grounds, the lacework of fresh green leaves shimmered in the sunlight.
Reading between the lines of the case summary, it was clear that the girl had a long history of troubled behaviour. But Erin’s concentration was fading, and her thoughts kept drifting to the yearbook she’d returned to Ray, the one from his – and Tim’s – junior year of high school. She wished she’d asked him for the one from his senior year, though she might be able to find it online. Everything was online these days. She typed a couple of search terms into the browser on her computer, and in less than three minutes she’d found it. Belle River High School, 1978.
Like a diver poised to jump, she held her breath and scrolled to the M’s. There it was: the scowling mug and stone-cold eyes that had haunted her dreams for years. Graham Marston. When the doctor arrived in the dead of night to take her to Danfield, her brother had held her down as she cried out in terror, grinning like a jackal as he pinned her to the floor.
Under his name was the usual string of nonsense. VmanKingxxxAngeltwjsbr#rip. The arcane codes of high-school students everywhere. Concocted during a time when he was, what, the king of the world, the Viking conqueror? She read the text aloud, halting at the ‘tw’. Tim’s first two initials. A coincidence? Surely, they’d known each other. That pencilled scrawl of Tim’s had clearly mentioned the Viking.
She massaged her temples, trying to ward off a headache. Graham. The Viking. She had no interest in knowing where he might be now. Since her arrival at Lansford, she’d taken great pains to keep her previous incarnation under lock and key.
Out of curiosity, she scrolled back a year to the photo of Ray as a junior. Long, scruffy hair, sideburns, a druggy look about the eyes. Under his name was the Orwell quote, followed by a string of letters: eldu#QUEpasa?777party#docks@ Alcapolco+doree. Impossible to imagine the Ray she knew as this rebellious, drug-addled teenage boy. She scanned the pages of the 1978 yearbook, looking for the picture of Ray as a senior, and almost missed him. Jacket and tie. Short hair, neatly combed. Nothing but a quote by T.S. Eliot under the picture, something about having to accept the terms life offers you if you don’t have the courage to impose your own.
In the space of a year, he seemed to become a completely different person. Had he grown out of his rebellious pose, or was it something else?
30
The Meadows
Lansford, New York
May, Present Day
Janine swept into the staff lounge, clutching a cardboard envelope. ‘Here’s the FedEx package you were waiting for.’
Erin thanked her and tucked the envelope into a stack of files. As she gathered up her things, she spotted Greta Kozani checking her post. She was in no mood to listen to one of Greta’s harangues, so she ducked behind the bookshelf until certain she was gone.
With the staffroom to herself, it was tempting to linger with a cup of tea. But the photos in the envelope had her on tenterhooks and she couldn’t wait. She slipped into her office without encountering anyone and locked the door. On her desk, she sorted Lydia’s photos, placing the exterior shots in one pile and the inside ones in another.
Under the light of the desk lamp, she studied the living room and kitchen for anything she might have missed during her visit to the Stern farm. It was just as she remembered. No photos or anything else of a personal nature. Not even a shopping list tacked to the refrigerator. And the large front room, with its curated colour scheme and designer gloss, could have come straight from a magazine. No knick-knacks on the shelves by the fireplace, nothing but the boxed set of leather-bound classics.
It was the two shots of Stern’s study that started her pulse jumping. The first was too dark, but the second looked promising, with the photos tacked to the corkboard clearly in view. The flash had reflected on the photo at the far left, obscuring its subject. But the one she was interested in, of the two couples on the beach at sunset, was fairly clear. If she had it blown up, she might be able to identify the dark-haired man, and the blonde woman
with the sunburst medallion. The second woman was not fully in the picture, with only one shoulder and a triangle of her blue dress visible. Behind the foursome, a shirtless boy with brown hair crouched on the rocks by the water.
That sunburst medallion. The mere sight of it made her uneasy, and she tossed the photo in a drawer. How could she focus on her patients with these niggling details from the Stern case pulling her away? Just when she thought she’d put it all behind her, a string of nonsense syllables in a high-school yearbook, and a snapshot of a random couple on a beach, had the power to haul her back.
*
The following day, the enlarged snapshots from the photo lab in Albany arrived by courier. Erin shut herself up in her office and spread them on her desk. Both were grainy, and the resolution poor. One was too dark to see much of anything but shadowy figures against a paler background. But in the other, the four figures were clearly discernible, though the faces were a blur of eye holes and dark mouths.
She held the photo up to the light. The medallion worn by the tall blonde woman was slightly out of focus, but the sunburst shape was just about discernible. The diamond-patterned dress, orange and white, showed off the woman’s tan. Her teased hair, with ends that flipped up on her shoulders, was held in place by a white headband.
Erin propped the photo on the bookshelf and backed away. If she unfocused her eyes, the configuration of the foursome swam across her vision. She’d seen this photo before. But where? In a magazine, a newspaper? Or someplace closer to home? The man on the far right was clearly Stern. But the man next to him, the one with his right arm slung around Stern’s neck in a gesture of camaraderie, and the left hand holding a cocktail glass… With little to go on but a gut feeling, she was sure this was her father.
She leaned in to focus on the sunburst medallion. It could be a coincidence. But Vivien had worn a necklace like that.