The beach is nearly empty. Just Cleo, two black labs, and a man with hair as white as the seafoam. He tosses a piece of driftwood toward the water, and the dogs splash in after it. Cleo throws her head back and laughs. Exposing her swan-like neck, pale and graceful. Ian kissed her there the first time I’d seen them together, the first time I’d watched them through the eye of my lens.
Now, she glances back over her shoulders in both directions. Looks at her phone. And I know what she’s thinking. Part of me is holding my breath beside her, expecting to see him. Sauntering up, with his tousled hair and ice-blue eyes, designer jeans rolled up to his calves. And a chameleon smile that could be whatever you need it to be.
“Hey, Aves,” he’d say. Aves. That’s what he called me. He, meaning The Professor. Ian. Though Cleo had never said his name out loud. The Professor and his wife. Always that. Only that. It had been her idea. “Because they’re sort of well-known,” she’d said, with the kind of careful discretion The Professor valued in a mistress. And an ex-wife. Hence, the nondisclosure agreement I’d signed along with our divorce decree.
The dogs bound down the beach, barking at seagulls, and the man follows. Shrieking, the birds take to the air, scatter, and disappear in the fog.
Cleo is alone. And I wonder how long she’ll wait.
She examines her phone once more, removes a book from her bag, and settles in against the sand for the long haul. Waiting, after all, is the task of a mistress. And an ex-wife. Who knew we had so much in common? I snap a single photo of her this way. Relaxed and in profile. I want to remember her before. Before she knows what I know.
Ian is dead.
Kate too.
The permanent kind of inertia.
A sudden ring cracks the stillness like a whip, and Cleo jerks her head toward the sound of it. Me. And my pocket.
I stumble backward, juggling the camera, and fumble for my phone, answering the unknown number with a curt hello as I duck behind the twisted limb of a cypress. And just like that I’m back in my kitchen, caught and bleeding and breathing hard. The cut on my finger throbs under the bandage like a heartbeat.
“Hey. It’s me. You sound weird.” Luke’s voice, warm as it is, chills me like a spray of ocean water down my back. He never calls when he’s working. It’s a rule. Technically, one of mine, not Luke’s. Rules I assemble around my heart like iron bars. Though a quickie on his lunch break is perfectly legal. “Are you at your office?”
“Uh . . .”
Cleo’s gaze lingers on the spot where I’d stood. I want to hold the lens up, examine her face, but it’s too risky. Instead, I start walking away. “I went out for a bit. Why?”
“We need to talk.” Four little words. Cursed words. Where have I heard them before?
Honey, we need to talk. Daddy is sick. The kind of sick that makes him sad all the time. Be a good girl and don’t bother him.
Aves, we need to talk. I’m in love with someone else. I want a divorce.
Doctor Lawson, we need to talk. Your mother is suffering from progressive dementia. She’ll have good days and bad days. Until she has bad days and worse days.
“About what?” I ask, steeling myself for the blow. For the sucker punch to the gut that will drop me to my knees. “Where are you calling from?”
“The payphone at Bruno’s Market. Can you meet me?”
“The payphone?” A burst of nervous laughter breaks free, escapes. I sound slightly crazed. Hypomanic, Ian might have said. He’d always been fond of diagnosing me. “I didn’t know you knew how to use one of those things.”
Luke lets out his breath like he’s been holding it. And just as sudden as the laughter bubbled up, there’s a lump in my throat I can’t choke down.
“I have a client in twenty minutes,” I manage.
“I think you should cancel.”
“I can’t just—”
“Ava, cancel your client. Meet me at our spot. Now.”
“But—” The line goes dead. And the dial tone is my flat line. We have to talk. Doomed words, I already know. Because it’s the first time—the only time—Luke has ever hung up on me.
****
The Valentine statue—our spot, as Luke called it—is roughly a ten-minute walk up Ocean Avenue. Luke is already there, in uniform, sitting on one side of the bronze sculpture of an elderly couple who have just exchanged a valentine.
I hold in another fit of hysterical laughter and take a seat on the other side of the couple, next to the sculpted woman. Her head rests on her lover’s, a tender smile on her face. Forever. Only a love frozen in stone could sustain that long.
“When was the last time you saw Ian?” Luke whispers, each word weighted with worry. With accusation. And those words sink me like stones tied to my waist.
“What?”
“Just answer the goddamn question, Ava.”
“Summer, I guess. I ran into him on the street.” Luke doesn’t know it yet, how well I lie. But he’ll learn. “Why are you asking that?”
He stares straight ahead. His cop face.
“Please tell me what’s going on.” I grab for his hand, but he shrugs away, beyond the reach of my persuasion.
“What happened to your finger?” As if I’ve done something wrong. But I haven’t. I didn’t. Keep telling yourself that, kiddo. And the voice in my head is Ian’s. Again.
“I dropped a wine glass this morning cleaning up. I cut it. That’s all. You’re freaking me out looking at me that way. Like I’m a criminal or something. Did you forget you were with me all night? Or did I imagine you in my bed?”
He shakes his head, rolls his eyes at me, and sighs. Like I’m the young one, the one who’s still on the good side of thirty.
“I shouldn’t be telling you this,” he says. And suddenly I wish he wouldn’t. But it’s too late to stop him. “Ian and Kate were stabbed. It was bad. Really bad. The sort of bad that doesn’t happen here. Not in Carmel.”
I feel the air rush out of me, my lungs like deflated balloons. “So it wasn’t . . . Ian didn’t . . .”
“God, Ava. Spit it out.”
“It’s not a murder-suicide?”
“No. Why would you say that?” The cop face again. It cuts me to the bone. But I pretend to shrug it off.
“A hunch, I guess.”
“A hunch? What are you not telling me?” It’s a loaded gun, that question. A revolver with a bullet in every chamber. Round and round and round it goes, where it stops . . .
“You think I’m lying to you?” I try to find the answer in his eyes, but he won’t even look at me.
“They haven’t figured it out yet—about you and Ian—and I’m not gonna tell them.” And by they, he means his father, Detective Jack Donovan. And his brother, Cooper. A chip off the old gumshoe block. “But, Ava, they will. And soon. So you better get your story straight.”
“My story. Right. So you do think I’m lying.”
“I didn’t say that. I just don’t know how else to explain it.” His frown softens, and I realize I prefer anger over this. He pities me.
“Explain what?”
“Your name was at the scene.” The scene. I get stuck on the words. Because that’s how it feels. Unreal. Staged. I’m in a scene, and Luke is acting. He’s the handsome, do-gooder cop who’s fallen for the black widow. “Ian wrote it on the bathroom mirror before he died. Or at least that’s what it looks like.”
“He wrote my name?” Why does my voice sound like that? Like I’m sinking underwater and Luke’s up on the surface, nodding his head.
“In his own blood.”
Chapter
Five
“Are you sure you don’t want me to drop you off at home?”
Luke pulls his cruiser over to the curb in front of my office, tucks a strand of my hair behind my ear, and leaves his hand to rest on my shou
lder. He’s tender again. It might’ve been the dry heaving that did him in. Or the way my teeth wouldn’t stop chattering. Still won’t.
“No. It’s okay. I only have two more clients, and they’re both easy. Besides, it’ll look suspicious if I leave now.”
He squeezes my shoulder and returns his hand to the wheel. “Fair enough.”
“But, Luke . . . will you come over later? After?” God, I sound pathetic, teetering on the edge of desperation. This is why I have rules. And I know I’m breaking one, asking him to stay over two nights in a row.
“I don’t know if that’s a good idea.”
“Alright.” I open the door and put one foot out in the world. That world—mine now—where old husbands and new wives turn up dead. Where ex-wives’ names are scrawled in blood like the scene of a Manson murder.
“Hey, Ava.” I turn to look at him even though it hurts. “I’ll try.”
And I know, right then, Luke’s been telling the truth. He loves me.
****
I push through the door to my office, vowing not to think. To shut off my brain and its wailing panic button. I can do this. Two fifty-minute sessions.
But first I have to check. It would be careless not to. Be good, and if you can’t be good, be careful. That little nugget came from my father. He and Ian are dueling it out in my head, taking turns mocking me. On second thought, Ava, just be good.
Sorry, Dad.
I open the drawer of the antique secretary desk Ian had bought me long ago and dislodge the false bottom. When I’d first discovered it, it thrilled me. I ran to get Ian, to show him the desk’s quirky little secret. Back then, I delighted in the way it could show me one face while concealing another. So much like myself and my patients. So much like everyone really. But Ian especially.
I don’t bother with the ring box. I used to look inside it all the time—at the perfect round diamond atop the white gold band—like pressing a bruise. But what’s the point? The man who’d offered it once and then changed his mind is dead. And the girl who’d accepted it, her heart is as hardened as a walnut shell.
The envelope. That’s what I’ve come for. It sits exactly the way I left it. Exactly as it had been since I’d first placed it there for safekeeping. Crisp, white, and unmarked. Almost virginal.
I pick it up, open it, and drop the tiny memory card into my hand. The are-you-fucking-kidding-me memory card, as I like to call it. That’s what Ian said when I’d told him about the pictures I’d taken of him and Cleo. Making out like teenagers in the dark alleyway by the Flying Fish Grill. Half-dressed in the backseat of his AMG Mercedes. Sneaking kisses in the grove of pines near campus.
“No, I’m not fucking kidding,” I’d told him, mocking his PhD-turned-frat-boy vocabulary. “I’m dead serious.”
“Doctor Lawson?” The sound of my name on Cleo’s lips is a lightning bolt. A clap of thunder. A single raindrop, cold on the back of my neck. She’s standing in the open doorway—didn’t I close it?—weeping.
“Cleo, are you alright?” It’s the sort of question I use to buy time. Time to flip the switch from Ava Lawson, crazy ex-wife, to Ava Lawson, the professional. I slip the memory card back into the envelope and lay it on my desk.
“When he didn’t come, I . . .” A sob gurgles in her throat, and she holds out her phone, open to the Monterey Community College website with its breaking news headline, gruesome in its starkness: “Professor Ian Culpepper and Wife Found Dead.”
“It’s my fault. It’s all my fault,” she says.
I try to remember who I’m supposed to be. Who she expects me to be. “This is him? The Professor?”
She answers with a choked cry.
“Oh, Cleo, I’m so sorry.”
“It’s my fault,” she says again, even more certain this time.
She crosses the threshold into the office, her sneakers still sprinkled with beach sand. And I think how sad it is. How the beach will be spoiled for her forever. Ruined the way summer twilight is for me.
“What do you mean your fault?”
Her face tightens. She opens her mouth to speak. Closes it again. “I lied to you.”
Another lightning bolt. Another cold drop of rain. And I hide my unease behind a mask of surprise. “Oh.”
“I saw Ian yesterday afternoon. I went to his house to confront him just like we’d talked about. He was furious with me for showing up unexpected. And it was so strange being in their house, with their stuff. With her photo on the wall. I could barely breathe. But, I did it. I told him exactly how I felt. How fed up I was.”
I side-eye the clock, listen for the sound of footfalls. My next client will be here any minute, but I can’t stop now. I won’t stop. “What did he say?”
She half-laughs, but it’s joyless, tears clinging to its hard edge. “The usual empty promises. A whole lot of nothing. But I fell for it.”
“And?” I want to shake it out of her, whatever happened.
“Well, we started making out in the upstairs bedroom, and we got carried away. And then—”
“His bedroom? I mean, theirs?” I sound like a lunatic, but I’m thinking of our bedroom—mine and Ian’s—and how he’d probably taken Kate there. At least once. And how she’d probably let him undress her, tossing her clothing next to mine. Perhaps she’d even slipped my shoes on to see how it felt to be me. To be Ian’s wife.
“No.” She’s whispering now, and I’ve stopped breathing altogether. “The little girl’s. His daughter’s.”
I suck in a mouthful of air, a hungry gulp Cleo mistakes for disapproval. Judgment. As if I had the right.
“It’s bad, I know. But it got worse, because Kate showed up early to drop off Madison. I guess Kate had a doctor’s appointment Ian forgot about. So I had to sneak out the window of his study. I practically sprained my ankle running through the backyard. I should’ve known it was a sign.”
I listen to her whimper as I watch out the window. My 2 p.m. parallel parks on the street in front of the office. Unfastens her seat belt, opens her door. I have to hurry.
“Cleo, you couldn’t have known. Signs are just the brain’s way to make sense of random chaos after the fact. How is any of this your fault? The murders, I mean.”
Cleo swipes at her screen, scrolling through the article. She narrows her eyes. And there’s something aggressive, something feral about the way she moves toward me. Toward me and the envelope, splayed on my desk, stark as a nude photograph. Toward the desk’s false bottom and its secret, exposed. I almost cry out, tell her to stop.
“Because of this,” she says, leaning over me. She still smells like the ocean, and I spot a fleck of sand on her face, glinting like a shard of glass in the overhead light. I read the words beside her finger, the statement from an unnamed source, careful not to gasp.
“. . . The person or persons responsible may have gained access through an open window in the study.”
The hardiest romances spring from common ground.
—Ian Culpepper, Prescription for Love
Valentine’s Day
Ten Years Earlier
Ava chewed on the cap of her ballpoint pen and watched the clock at the back of the lecture hall. It read 5:12 p.m. A full two minutes past the ten-minute rule, and her classmates had already run for the door like a herd of wild buffalo, leaving her stock-still at her desk. She listened to them stamping down the hallway, whooping with the exhilaration of unexpected freedom. It made her feel lonely. A girl set apart. But that was nothing new.
It was her father’s watch that kept her there. Every morning, she wound the old Zenith and slipped it on her wrist. Not a bittersweet memento like her mother thought. More like the rubber band technique—a stinging lash to the heart each time she felt its weight against her skin—meant to remind her what could happen if her anger got loose again. If she was anything less than perfect.
The Zenith was never wrong. She made sure of that. And according to the Zenith, Professor Culpepper had two more minutes.
She contemplated the watch’s plain white face as their final scenes together—father and daughter—played like a bad movie. A reel that never faded, never erased, no matter how many years had passed. I hate you. I wish you’d just die. Those words born from some awful place inside her and set free at last, crushing him. She knew that now. Her throat raw as she’d slammed the door. Her body simmering with rage. And it felt so real. Even here in the pin-drop quiet of Tolman Hall.
An ironic laugh broke the stillness like a gunshot, and she flinched as the memories scattered, blackbirds taking to the sky. “The old ten-minute rule, huh?” Dr. Culpepper sounded different. Less like a professor and more like a man.
Her face flushed at the thought, and she didn’t dare look at him. Get a grip, Ava. She refused to be like the girls who sat in the back row, giggling at their hunky professor. The girls who were more sorority sister than third-year graduate student. Doctor Love, they called him. Not to his face, of course. Which was, even she could admit it, devastatingly handsome. “That clock is ahead.”
“So it is.” She heard the door creak shut, the clack of his loafers against the tile floor. And she arranged her face into a polite smile and kept it there until he stood over her, smiling back. “But you stayed.”
She nodded, feeling silly, and pointed to the Zenith, cinched tight around her wrist and clasped on the last buckle hole. The second hand tick-tick-ticked at her, making her wish she’d fled with all the others. Another buffalo in the herd, instead of the one left behind. “You still had two minutes.”
“A rule follower then, I see.”
Was that a bad thing? She couldn’t tell. But, she remembered that first day when he’d winked at the shy, studious girl in the front row. Her. And the way he’d scrawled solid analysis! in long, cursive strokes at the bottom of her last essay. Suddenly, she felt brave. “I like your class, that’s all.”
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