by Ann Gosslin
The door swung open. If Stern was surprised to see her on his front doorstep, looking like a drowned rat, he didn’t show it. Though he must have heard her car drive up, so it was unlikely she’d caught him off guard.
‘Dr Cartwright.’ He stood back to allow her to pass.
She crossed into the foyer and stood dripping on the slate.
‘If you’ll wait here, I’ll get you something to dry off with.’ He ducked into the downstairs bathroom and returned with a thick white towel. No sign of Tim.
Every day since his discharge from the hospital in Burlington two weeks ago, she had expected to hear he had suffered a relapse, or that Stern was mortally wounded.
‘This is a surprise,’ he said, showing her into the front room.
The fireplace was clean swept and laid with birch logs, but there was no need for a fire today. Even with the rainstorm, the air was oppressive.
As if he had guessed why she’d come, Stern dispensed with the usual gestures of hospitality, even failing to offer her a coffee from his machine in the kitchen. ‘You’ve come a long way.’ He gave her a cool look of appraisal. ‘Is this about Tim?’
The room was cast in shadow. Through the glass, she could see a new batch of storm clouds building up on the horizon. With the windows closed, the room was stifling.
‘I’ll get right to the point,’ she said. ‘When the police questioned you about your whereabouts on the evening of August 26, 1977, you told them you had spent the entire night at a hotel in Portland. The woman you were with confirmed your story, although her name was later redacted from the police report, at her request.’
Stern waited, arms across his chest. He had yet to bat an eye.
‘When I spoke with the woman in question, she admitted she wasn’t with you all night. And that you received a phone call around ten in the evening and left the hotel. When you hadn’t returned by one in the morning, she left and drove home.’ Erin waited. ‘She also said you asked her to lie to the police.’
Stern’s eyes were flat, his face expressionless. He flicked a spot of lint from his sleeve. ‘So, you talked to your mother. It must have been a shock to see you after all these years.’
Her heart bumped. He knows who I am?
‘I can see you’re surprised.’ His laugh came from deep within his throat.
When their eyes met, the fury in Stern’s face froze her blood.
And, just like that, the mask dropped, sliding away with scarcely a whisper. Wasn’t that what she’d wanted all along, to unmask him as a charlatan and a fraud? But nothing about this moment was the least bit satisfactory. Not when he’d pulled a trump card of his own. All this time, he’d been playing her for a fool.
The room grew darker with the gathering storm. Uncomfortably aware she was alone with this man, possibly dangerous now that she’d upped the stakes, she tried to figure out her next move. In the hall, the clock chimed the half-hour.
‘It doesn’t say much for your ability to read people, Dr Cartwright – or perhaps I should call you Mimi? Seeing as we’re old friends.’ His smile was thin. ‘Not to have noticed, I mean. That a psychiatrist of your calibre wasn’t aware I recognised you the moment I saw you. Well, not the very first, perhaps.’ He chuckled. ‘But I had a strong suspicion. I knew you as a girl, of course. A plump little thing you were, with the dirty blonde hair you inherited from your mother. But I’ve never seen anyone else with eyes like yours. Such an odd shade of green. Not quite human, I used to think, always watching. Impossible to forget. And when I caught you snooping in my den, taking an undue interest in that photo, I knew it was you. You couldn’t have been more than eight or nine when that photo was taken, but it clearly sparked a memory.
‘Your mother used to keep a copy of it on her bedside table. Naughty Vivien, rubbing our affair in her husband’s face. But, otherwise, a memento of our days as a happy foursome. Until that idiot father of yours got caught with his hand in the cookie jar. Working-class trash to the bone, but what a poser he was.’ He sneered. ‘Clever of your mother to concoct that cock-and-bull story of Ian’s death. But what else could she do? Who would want it shouted all over town that her prim and proper schoolteacher husband had been caught embezzling old ladies’ pensions?’ He ran his hands through his hair. ‘You’d think Ian would have enough sense to keep well away, after everything he’s done, but lately he keeps showing up like a bad penny.’
‘My father died in a car crash,’ Erin said. She struggled to keep the quiver from her voice.
Stern hooted with laughter. ‘Vivien deserves an Academy Award for that one, playing the grieving widow. I’d forgotten what a convincing actress she can be. I saw your father about a month ago. He showed up at my door, spoiling for a fight. Still blaming me after all these years for getting him sent to prison. Third time in the past three months he’s turned up here, looking for a handout, so, unless I’m hallucinating, he’s very much alive.’
The room closed in around her. Her father was alive? She didn’t believe him. Stern was just messing with her head. But then the light dawned. The day she’d spied on the house with the binoculars. The man on the doorstep in the beige jumper and baggy khakis.
‘You sent my father to prison?’
‘Who said it was me?’ He pivoted to face her. ‘It’s your mother who has a habit of sending people away. You of all people should know that.’
A drop in pressure seemed to suck all the air from the room. It was a relief when a clap of thunder broke the tension. Erin fought to stay calm, but her heart jerked oddly against her ribs.
‘Who I am isn’t relevant,’ she said, trying to keep her voice from shaking. ‘What interests me is why you lied to the police.’
His mouth twitched. ‘You used to be a criminal psychiatrist, am I right?’
She blinked, wondering whether or not to lie.
‘Yes, I know all about you, Dr Cartwright. Funny what you can find out these days, just by turning on a computer. So, you don’t need me to tell you that in a domestic crime the husband is always the primary suspect. When the police inquired about my whereabouts the night of the murders, I told them the truth. That I had dinner in Portland and then spent the night at a hotel with a woman who was not my wife. When asked if this woman was with me the entire night, I said yes.’
His unwavering stare bore into her skull. Sweat trickled down her neck.
‘I was in a state of shock. My wife and daughters had been brutally murdered. My son was missing. At the time, nobody thought he was a suspect. They assumed one of two things: that he’d spent the night with a friend, or he’d been abducted.’
‘You weren’t concerned for Tim’s welfare?’
‘Of course I was. I wanted the police to find him. What I didn’t want was for the Belle River police department, who hadn’t the first idea how to handle a murder inquiry, to waste precious time by treating me as a suspect. After Tim was found covered in my wife’s blood, whatever story I’d told the police no longer mattered. But, tell me, is there a point to all this? Your mother’s been jerking my chain for years. I don’t need more hassle from her daughter.’
‘You’re still in touch with her?’
The ghost of a sneer crossed his face. ‘Only by cheque.
She’s been blackmailing me for years.’
‘What for? You said you have nothing to hide?’
‘Vivien’s unstable. How could I know what story she’d cook up after the fact? Lobbing a cheque at her every now and then is like tossing a bone to a dog. Better to keep her quiet than have her drop a grenade into my life. And I had my new wife to think about.’ He wiped the sweat from his face. ‘My family was killed by my mentally ill son, yet it’s me who’s being harassed. How’s that for justice?’
A crack of thunder shook the house, followed by heavy rain that lashed the windows. From upstairs came a thump.
Erin looked at the ceiling. Was that Tim? Did he know she was here? The windows were closed but not locked. Would she be able to escape t
hrough one of them if Stern attacked her? She looked to the fireplace for a weapon, but the iron poker was gone.
‘Here’s what I think,’ she said. ‘You killed your wife and your daughters and made it look like Tim was to blame. Who would ever suspect you, a successful lawyer and upstanding pillar of the community? You were counting on that to tip the balance in your favour.’
A muscle twitched in Stern’s jaw. ‘Fascinating, Dr Cartwright.’ He clapped twice. ‘You have quite the imagination.’ He took a step towards her. ‘But, tell me this, if Tim didn’t murder my family, what was he doing two hundred miles from home, covered in his mother’s blood? How did he get there?’
‘You drove him there.’
‘I drove him?’ Stern laughed so hard he began to cough.
‘My dear young lady, you’re delusional. You might want to consider checking yourself into that asylum again. What was it called… Danfield? Once a raving lunatic…’ He raised his eyebrows, allowing the rest of the sentence to hang in the air.
‘You could have drugged him and driven him there,’ Erin said. ‘Dumped him in the woods over the New York state line before turning around and heading back to Portland. It wouldn’t have taken more than six or seven hours, there and back. Nobody would ever know. After all,’ she said, ‘you had an alibi for the entire night.’
Neither of them moved.
Another thump came from upstairs, followed by the sound of a chair scraping across the floor.
‘If I’m a cold-blooded killer, then you’re mighty brave, aren’t you, coming out here to confront me on your own.’ He paused to rub his temples. ‘But you haven’t got a shred of evidence. Everything you’ve just said is pure speculation. Even if you went to the police, they’d never reopen the case.’
‘They would if they had an eyewitness.’
That got his attention. His mouth twitched. Coupled with the greenish cast to his skin, Erin would say he was worried.
‘That was the one loose end you needed to tie up, wasn’t it?’ she said. ‘To get rid of the only person who knew what really happened in your home that night. You could make his death look like suicide, or an accident. Who would question it? A mental patient recently released from long-term incarceration, who couldn’t cope with living in the world. Hanged himself from the rafters in the barn.’
Before Stern could answer, thunder rolled across the sky.
Erin held her breath and waited.
He turned to look at the storm and when he whirled around, his face was black. ‘If anyone’s responsible for what happened to my family, it’s that pain-in-the-ass mother of yours. She didn’t have the sense to keep her goddamn mouth shut. Always needed to be the centre of attention. It’s her fault my daughters are dead.’
Erin reeled back in shock. ‘My mother killed your daughters?’
‘She might as well have.’ Stern exhaled noisily. ‘That bitch told your father about our affair, and he told my wife. She knew Dorrie was unstable emotionally, and that it would push her over the edge if she found out about Vivien and me.
‘That night, Dorrie called me at the hotel in Portland to tell me there was an emergency at home. There was something odd about her voice, so I raced back. When I got there, she was doped up or drunk, stumbling around and taunting me. It took me a moment to understand what she was saying, that my girls were dead. She had suffocated them with a pillow and then cut their throats. She’d wanted me to see it, all that blood. She looked at me with those mad eyes and laughed in my face. Revenge, pure and simple. Destroying what I most loved in life. It was the only way, in that twisted mind of hers, that she could get my attention.’
His face, a sickly shade of grey, was streaming with sweat. ‘Do you have any idea what I had to put up with? Coping with a wife like that? Do you think that was easy? I was on track to be partner at a prestigious firm in Boston when one of the senior partner’s wives found her passed out drunk in the bathroom. I had to slink back to Belle River with my tail between my legs. If word got around that my wife was a junkie, I’d have been finished as a lawyer. My whole life in the toilet after everything I’d worked for. Every night when I walked through my own front door… I never knew what I’d find. But that I would come home one night to discover my beautiful daughters…’ He covered his face with his hands and sobbed.
For a moment, Erin felt a twinge of sympathy. It would derange any loving father to find his daughters murdered in their beds by his own wife. That explained the strange discrepancies between the deaths. The two girls smothered in their beds, their throats neatly cut, compared to the blood and gore of the wife’s butchered body. Until now, it had never made any sense.
‘So, you killed your wife.’
A branch scraped against the window, followed by a flash of lightning. Stern stood in the corner, rigid as a statue.
‘You need to leave now.’ Each word like the jab of an ice pick.
‘When Tim came home that night,’ Erin said, ‘it must have struck you that he’d make the perfect scapegoat. My guess is you knocked him out with some kind of tranquilliser, smeared his clothes with your wife’s blood, and then bundled him into your car and drove to New York. Who would suspect? After all, you were in Portland with an ironclad alibi.’
He seemed strangely calm as he waited for her to say more. But Erin had said her piece, and she slipped past him and into the hall. The front door, though only a few metres ahead, seemed impossibly far away.
Behind her, a floorboard creaked, and a wisp of air prickled the skin on her neck. Before she could react, a hand clamped over her mouth. She struggled in his grasp, but his strength was too much for her. As she went to bite his hand, something sharp pierced her neck. A shadow embraced her, and she slumped to the floor.
46
A scrabble by her ear. The floor against her cheek was gritty and cold.
Erin opened her eyes to the dark. Not even a glimmer of light pierced the blackness. Her head felt woozy, and a dull pain cramped her gut. The dank odour of mildew and damp earth soured the air. She must be in a basement. Whether it was day or night, or how long she’d been out, was impossible to say. When did she arrive? Friday afternoon? By Monday, if she didn’t show up for work, someone would come looking for her.
But she’d told no one where she was going, not even Ray.
Her hands were cinched tight behind her back, a rag tied over her mouth. But even if she could call out, who would hear her? No one but Stern, who would only jab her with another hypodermic. Harrison must have given him a supply of knockout drugs in case of an emergency.
Footsteps overhead. She must be in the house, and not in some outbuilding or root cellar under the barn. Her wristwatch was gone, but she still had her amulet, and the weight of the quetzal against her sternum was comforting. Touching it with her fingertips always helped to calm her nerves, but she couldn’t even move her wrists.
As she struggled to sit upright, her head spun, and she nearly toppled over. There must have been something powerful in that syringe. Haldol or lorazepam. Or both. A combo used liberally at Danfield, whether warranted or not, where almost anything could get you the needle. Failing to turn off your light, talking back, begging to be let out. Whatever Stern had planned for her, short of dumping her body in a ravine, it couldn’t be worse than what she’d already been through.
At the sound of a scrape on the concrete floor, her heart skipped a beat. Was he coming for her now? Did he plan to kill her and dispose of the body? A shallow grave in the woods or tossed into an abandoned quarry, either would do. But her disappearance would place him directly in the crosshairs, exactly where he didn’t want to be, so he would have to be cleverer than that. Nobody just vanished. Someone would trace her whereabouts back to Stern. Unless… The thought made her shiver. Unless he was planning to pin her death on Tim. And why not? It would be easy for Stern to claim that Tim had overpowered him and knocked him out. When he came to, he’d been horrified to discover Erin’s lifeless body in the basement. Anoth
er death at the hands of his lunatic son. Such a tragedy. As far as the state was concerned, Tim had already killed three people. What was one more?
Her muscles tensed as she cycled through the possibilities, each more grisly than the last.
Another footstep.
Like a hunted rabbit. she kept absolutely still, hoping he would leave. She held her breath and strained her ears for another sound. Had he meant to finish her off with the hypodermic, and was only now coming to see if she was dead? Stern might be desperate, but he wasn’t stupid. And letting her go was the one thing he couldn’t do. She’d head straight for the police. Even if they couldn’t get Stern for killing his wife, they could certainly charge him with kidnapping and grievous bodily harm.
A door scraped open. A shadow appeared in the gloom.
When a dim bulb snapped on, she was momentarily blinded. She squinted and prepared to defend herself.
As the shadow detached itself from the doorway, her throat closed up. But with nothing to lose, she canted her body backwards and got ready to kick.
But it couldn’t be Stern. She blinked. The body was too bulky, the shaggy head familiar. Tim. His eyes were wide in the dim light, with a look of terror stamped on his face.
She tried to speak, but the gag in her mouth prevented her from making any intelligible sounds. She waited for him to make a move, but he remained stock-still, a tree rooted to the floor. As she shuffled her feet and tried to stand, he looked back over his shoulder in alarm. The seconds ticked by.
He moved closer and crouched down. ‘What are you doing here?’ The barest whisper, like exhaled breath.
She twisted round to show him her hands were tied, and waited for him to undo the knots.
An agonising minute passed before he edged towards her with a sideways motion, dragging his heels, crablike, across the rough floor. His hand trembled as he reached out to touch her hair, freed from its customary knot, before pulling away fast, as if stung. With clumsy fingers, he struggled to get at the gag’s knot on the back of her neck. Blood pounded in her ears. Tim’s breath grazed her cheek as he wrestled with the knotted cloth.