I fast-walk, dodging puddles and listening to the thwack of my flats against the rain-soaked cobblestone. Before I pass by Seaside Sweets, I cross to the other side. My nerves too frayed, thoughts too jumbled, to face Marianne and her questions. By now, I’m sure she knows I’m the ex-wife of the too-good-looking and very dead Love Doctor.
When I spot the sand at the end of Ocean Avenue, my breath quickens. An unmarked police car, like the one my father drove, is double-parked, empty. I skirt into the cover of the windswept cypress and remove the lens cap. Aim my lens down the beach, where a lone figure is bent over the sand. I see sturdy shoulders and gloved hands. A bad knee that hitches when he hoists himself up and brushes sand from his trousers, a clear plastic bag in tow.
He turns toward the camera—Jack Donovan—and I nearly lose my balance, though he’s at least a hundred yards from me. Nearby, the white-haired beach comber I’ve seen before stands guard, his two black Labs leashed and stanchioned beside him.
As the two men talk, beginning the slow trek back up the beach, I lower my focus to the bag in Jack’s hand and snap a photo. And another. And another. I’m sure of what it is even if I don’t want to be. That black handle—that long, glinting blade—the same slate gray as the sky. It must’ve been the storm that dredged it up from the bowels of the ocean, spit it back to shore like I feared.
I sit on one of the low cypress limbs blown smooth by the wind, thinking of Wallace Bergman, and I worry. Because secrets float to the surface, wash up like shells on the beach. Secrets come unearthed, rising like bones from a shallow grave.
Chapter
Fourteen
Just before 3 p.m., I lock my office and drive up Ocean Avenue in the direction I rarely go, away from the beach. Past the bookstores, bakeries, and art galleries, the curlicue rooftops of the charming cottages that belong in a fairytale. I leave it all behind. But I carry my secrets—old and new—and my shoulders droop under the weight of them. Guiding the wheel takes effort. Like turning a stuck rudder. And I wonder if I’ll ever feel light again.
The place I’m heading to is just off Ocean, a converted house with a swing set out front. Just looking at the place—the wood planters with pink geraniums, the friendly welcome mat, the unwashed Volvo in the drive—you’d think a family lives there. But if you watch long enough, you’ll see them. The broken children with their broken parents filing in and out every fifty minutes like clockwork. In a pilgrimage to see him. Dr. Maury Littleton, renowned child psychologist.
I don’t know him personally, but I know of him. I’d even referred him a patient or two. He’d retired from practice at the Kennedy Krieger Trauma Center in Boston a few years back—The Monterey County Courier had done a story about him—and set up shop here among the cobblestone streets and storybook homes. It seemed fitting. Especially when I’d seen his picture. His smile took up most of his face, his wiry gray eyebrows the rest. And set beneath them, teddy-bear brown eyes. The perfect mixture of grandfather and wizard. Where else would the cops send Maddie?
I’d telephoned the police station this morning, pretending to be Dr. Littleton’s secretary, confirming his 10 a.m. appointment with Madison Culpepper. And I’d feigned just the right amount of surprise and concern. “Oh. Let me check. You’re absolutely right. It is at 3. No. That won’t be a problem.” I’d hung up the phone, exuberant. Relieved.
But now that I’m here, parked on the street and lingering on a sidewalk bench a block away, I don’t know why I’m here.
Well, that’s not entirely true.
I need to talk to Maddie.
Even if it sounds completely certifiable, in my professional opinion.
Sheila is right on time, looking as put together as when I saw her last at MCC. Dark jeans, a black sweater. Black pointy-toed boots. And oversized sunglasses that make her look mysterious and elegant. Just the sort of woman who’d give birth to someone like Kate.
She opens the car’s back door and Maddie emerges, clutching a stuffed bear in one hand. With the other, she reaches for her grandma, latches onto her sweater, and follows her up the walk.
If I didn’t know, I’d never guess about the ghosts walking beside them. The kind of searing pain that must be festering beneath it all. Only the dead silence between them gives it away.
I expect them to disappear inside where the wizard does his work. But they stop at the swing set and Maddie hoists herself into the seat, bear on her lap. Sheila gives her a push, and the old chains creak to life. I watch Maddie go higher and higher without a smile or a giggle. Until I hear Sheila say, “How about we sing a song?” And then she begins, hopefully. “The itsy-bitsy spider . . .”
Halfway through, Sheila is still the only one singing when the whir of an approaching engine interrupts. I catch a glimpse of the driver.
Shit. I should’ve known they’d be here. They’ll probably watch the whole thing go down behind a one-way mirror.
I duck my head and scurry off the bench toward my car, crouching beside it. I feel like a criminal. The way my breath is heavy with guilt. The way sweat pools on my low back, slickens my armpits. It’s all too familiar.
I peer up over the hood as Detectives Donovan and Lennox make their way from the unmarked car to the swing set. “Hi, Maddie,” Jack says, with a wide, overeager wave. “Hi, Mister Bear.”
The only answer is the squeak of the chains until they grind to a halt.
****
After the four of them go inside—a macabre little family—I sit in my car and think. About how I should get the hell out of here before someone sees me. About how my life became such a colossal mess. About how I need to get Maddie alone. And so I don’t leave. Not yet.
Instead, I wait, hunkered down. Window cracked.
Fifteen minutes later, the detectives emerge first, stone-faced. Sheila trails behind, lugging Maddie on her hip and Mister Bear in her purse. Maybe mutism is contagious, because none of them are speaking. Four mouths, four tight lines devoid of expression.
Finally, Jack turns to Sheila, and Maddie buries her face in her grandma’s shoulder. “We’ll try again after the funeral. Hang in there, Maddie.”
He pats her shoulder, and her little body trembles. I remember the way it felt to hold my words inside me like lightning in a bottle. To know that to set them free, to wield them, would make it real. And once it became real, my whole world would end.
While Sheila situates Maddie in her car seat, the detectives drive away. And I turn my key, ready.
Clueless, she pulls out of the drive. And I do what I do. I follow.
****
Sheila speeds right past the house on Cortez Road. The crime scene tape is gone now, and it guts me how normal it looks. As if Ian and Kate might still turn up, alive, to reclaim it. I slow down without thinking and watch the windows the way I’d sometimes done in the evenings, looking for signs of them. Holding my breath, afraid to blink. Gasping a little when I’d caught them—Kate’s silhouette in the upstairs bedroom, Ian at his desk, Maddie’s face pressed to the glass—as if I’d been given a gift. Spotted a rare bird.
Sheila turns into the gate of a rental house a half mile up the road, and I stop. This is the end of the line. But at least I know where they’re staying.
I plan to drive home. Really, I do. But somehow I end up parking down the street, getting out of my car. Scaling the back fence and standing at the kitchen door of the Culpeppers’ house.
Because I have an itch I need to scratch. A hunch. A feeling.
I stare in at the stainless steel Viking refrigerator. It looms at the back of the kitchen like a hulking beast. And I wonder what’s inside. Ice cream for Maddie. Greek yogurt for Kate. And for Ian, Diet Coke or Evian.
A monogrammed dishtowel—THE CULPEPPERS’ KITCHEN—hangs on the stove, slightly crooked.
A stack of unopened mail waits in a letter box.
Otherwise,
the counters are bare.
So I’m right. It’s gone.
I suppose the police might’ve taken it. But the story in The Monterey County Courier made it clear. No murder weapon found. And the Culpeppers owned a set of knives, an expensive set. Wusthof. I know, because I saved for months to buy it, paid cash at Sur La Table, and mailed it to them as a wedding gift. Anonymously, of course. With a note only Ian would understand.
And when I’d seen it here last Tuesday night, Valentine’s Day, placed carefully by the sink in a position of honor, it had felt like a victory. A hollow one, empty as a sun-bleached skull washed up on the beach. But a victory nonetheless.
There are always secrets between husband and wife. But not all secrets are created equal. What’s essential to determine is whether your secrets are the kind that corrode love or preserve it.
—Ian Culpepper, Love CPR
Valentine’s Day
Six Years Earlier
Ava loathed LA no matter how hard she tried for Ian’s sake. Every morning, the city rose up through the smog exactly as she’d remembered. The palm trees. The relentless heat. The ocean air that smelled briny and alive. Nothing had changed, which was exactly why she’d never planned on coming back. Most of all, because her dead father still lived there, his presence as oppressive and oversized as the sun that blared at her through their cheap mini-blinds.
She rolled over and squeezed her eyes shut against it, wishing it would go away. It woke her up every morning, cruelly, ten minutes before the alarm.
“The place is cozy, and it gets lots of light. Perfect for a young newlywed couple. And there’s room to grow. The office would do nicely as a nursery.” That’s what the real estate agent had told them when they’d rented the guesthouse in Ocean Park sight unseen last March. The pitch, an unintentional, overly cheery litany of everything that felt wrong between them. Everything she couldn’t fix.
Ava had wanted to tell the realtor: “But we’re not that young. And we’re not growing.” And after last year’s valen-pocalypse, as she’d taken to calling it in her mind, even the word newlywed clunked in her brain with a dissonant thud. We’re not newlyweds anymore. Because she still couldn’t get past Ian’s lie. Not the one about Julie—that she understood somehow—but Prick Whitlock and the missing office supplies. As if she couldn’t have handled him herself. That, above all else, nettled.
But today could be different. A fresh start. Today she could put things right again. Prove to Ian how capable she was. Make the best of it, just like her mother told her to do when she’d cried to her about moving back here.
With a renewed sense of purpose, she intercepted the alarm—that chipper melody she’d come to despise—and headed for the bathroom. Ian had driven off hours ago to sit in bumper-to-bumper traffic on the way to UCLA for his 8 a.m. Tuesday/Thursday Intro to Pharma class. But he’d left a Post-it note for her stuck to the mirror.
Happy anti-versary! Good luck with Wally and call me after.
She crumpled the note in her hand, feeling disappointed, mostly in herself. This is the sort of romance I inspire, she thought.
Tossing the note aside, she splashed her face with cold water, then let the tap run, rinsing the ring of shaving cream and a haphazard line of Ian’s whiskers from the sink. Since his agent told him he had a young face, he’d started shaving every day, coating his skin with some exotic product they couldn’t afford. But he’d finally started booking news talk shows, making the rounds as an expert on couples or psych meds—or both—and that made him happy. So Ava sucked it up and said nothing.
She opened the towel cabinet and reached behind the fluffy stack to the makeup bag she’d hidden there. She zipped it open and popped the pill that would guarantee their office would remain an office. There would be no blue or pink paint. No zoo animal appliques. No bottles or diapers or 3 a.m. wakeups. No new little person with insatiable demands to widen the wedge between them.
Of course her mother had something to say about that too. “You’re nearly thirty, Ava. Don’t waste time.” But Ava knew she had to right the marital ship before they added more cargo. Otherwise, they’d sink. And fast.
She stripped down and stepped into the steaming hot shower, feeling hopeful. Because her best shot to steer the SS Culpepper to safety—Wallace Bergman—would be making his way to her office for his one o’clock Tuesday session.
****
Nearly every weekday for the last ten months, Ava had taken the Line 18 Big Blue Bus from their house in Santa Monica to her office in upscale Brentwood.
LA had no shortage of psychologists. But Brentwood had no shortage of would-be patients. “Deep pockets and empty souls,” Ian had told her, when he’d gone with her to rent the shiny modern space on San Vincente. And again when they’d printed her fancy business cards on heavy stock, branding her Ava Lawson, PhD, Psychotherapist.
It had been Ian’s idea to use her maiden name. That way they could refer patients to each other. His idea to bend the ethics code. “Just until you make a name for yourself,” he’d said. And she’d gone along with all of it, sending him desperate housewives seeking SSRIs, burned-out execs demanding Adderall, and wannabe starlets with bad nerves who needed a little something to make it through the next audition.
In return, he’d sent her no one.
Until two weeks ago.
Wallace Bergman, President of Programming for BXA.
The bright ding of the bell told Ava someone waited outside. And she jumped to attention. Wallace didn’t like to wait and neither did she. They had a lot of ground to cover. Never mind if they were plowing in different directions.
“I’m ready for you, Mr. Bergman,” she said, beckoning him into the office that felt nothing like her. The cold white leather sofa. The glass table with fresh flowers and magazines she’d never read. The austere clock that watched them both. Only the antique secretary desk Ian had found at a yard sale gave her comfort. It felt like a kindred spirit with its eyes of knotted wood, its secret compartment for a heart.
Wallace removed his hat—a pale pink fedora—and shuffled to the sofa. He offered her a blank face framed with thinning gray hair and a cashmere scarf, his eyes hidden behind dark sunglasses that probably cost her monthly rent. Eccentric, she’d written in her notes during their first meeting, underlining it twice.
“Would you like to pick up where we left off last week?” She pretended to consult her notes, but she needed no reminding. She’d discussed all of their sessions ad nauseam with Ian, relishing the way he hung on her words when she talked about Wallace. “You were telling me about a documentary you’d watched on the Stonewall Riots. And coming out to your parents in your thirties.”
He threw back his head and laughed wildly. “Ah yes, the worst-kept secret of my life. Things were different back then, but I always say everybody knew I was gay. Everybody but me. Even my wife.”
“You were in denial?”
“The deepest. It wasn’t until I fell in love with Richard that I realized.” His shoulders stiffened, bearing an unseen weight as he held his sunglasses from his eyes, blotting beneath them with a handkerchief. Ava caught a glimpse of watery, red-rimmed blue. Elusive as a strange and distant planet you could only spot once a year and only then if the conditions were right. “We were both married to other people at the time. Other women. When I met Richard, that’s when my real life began.”
“Have you told him what he means to you?”
“Words fall short, but yes, I’ve tried. The thing about Richard is he’s a bit in denial himself. He’d been in remission for so long, he thought—we both thought—he’d beaten the damn thing. Turns out it was there all along, lying in wait. Building an army. Planning a fucking coup.”
“I’m sorry. It sounds as if you’ve both been blindsided.” Ava knew exactly what he meant. Cancer. Depression. All evidence of the body’s betrayal, its desire to destroy itself. B
ut she tried to stay focused. “You told Doctor Culpepper you’ve been feeling pressured at work as well. Is that right?”
Of course, she was right. She’d heard it straight from the horse’s mouth, after Wallace had shown up at Ian’s office a few months ago needing something to help him sleep. “Get him talking, Aves. Feel him out. And if he asks how we know each other, I’m just your highly respected colleague,” Ian had said.
“Are you from LA?” Wallace’s question startled her. Back in Berkeley, she’d learned to deflect when her clients got personal. But here in LA, nobody asked, and she’d begun to feel as invisible as the chic wallpaper Ian had insisted she purchase.
“What would it mean to you if I was?”
“That you’d understand what Jack Kerouac meant when he said this city is a jungle. Lonely and brutal.”
“Is that how it feels to you?”
“Worse.” The bitterness in his laugh felt familiar to her, as familiar as her own. “Ever heard of The Suicide Forest?”
That stopped Ava cold. “The one in Japan?”
“Aokigahara Forest, it’s called. They say you’ll see bodies hanging from the trees there. Bones clinking around like wind chimes. It’s not so different in Hollywood, you know. You have to step over the dead to get to the top.”
Ava thought of her father. Of DeAndre Mack. And she shivered. “That’s a powerful image of despair. Have you ever thought of doing something else? Leaving your job?”
As soon as she said it, Ian started gnawing in her head. What the hell are you doing, Ava? Wallace Bergman leaving BXA was definitely not part of the plan.
“A million times. A million and one now. Especially with Richard sick. But I’m not ready yet. My past couple of pitches have been real flops, and I want to go out on a high. With a big winner. Emmys, ratings, the whole nine.”
“It sounds like you’re busy navigating a route through the forest. To get you to the other side.”
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