Saving Meghan

by D. J. Palmer

  “Your O2 levels are in the eighties—what we docs call ‘hypoxemia’—which is why you’re probably still feeling some uncomfortable shortness of breath.”

  “I thought you’d quit being a doctor here,” Becky said as a spasm returned to her belly.

  “I’m here as a friend, not a physician,” Zach said. “The police were here as well—those two detectives, Capshaw and Spence.”

  “What for?”

  “To get a statement from you, but you couldn’t give them much of one. You’ve been in and out of consciousness for hours. We still don’t know what got into your system, but Dr. Lucy Abruzzo here in pathology is testing your chicken soup.”

  “My … my soup?”

  Becky’s stomach lurched again, maybe from the memory. She felt her world tilt, but thankfully her equilibrium returned quickly. Her vision had improved considerably in the short time she had had her eyes open. Now she could see the tubes sticking out of her arms, could follow the trail of wires attached to monitors reading her vital signs. The bright fluorescents overhead were harsh on her eyes.

  Zach must have noticed her agitation, because he turned off the room lights, providing Becky with instant relief.

  “You became violently ill while you were eating the soup,” Zach said. He went on to recount a terrifying ordeal that involved a frantic race to the local pharmacy and him force-feeding her a bottle of ipecac syrup.

  “In hindsight, I really screwed up,” Zach said.

  “Why?”

  “I shouldn’t have induced vomiting. Your breathing was already compromised and you could have aspirated, which could have been fatal. And with the poison already having been absorbed, making you throw up was dangerous at that point. I made a spur-of-the-moment decision when I drove past the pharmacy. I panicked, and my judgment was wrong, plain and simple. That seems to happen to me with people I care about.”

  Becky knew he was talking about Will—and surprisingly (and yes, flatteringly), her as well.

  “The doctors wanted you intubated and sedated,” Zach continued, “but I told them no, you’d want to be awake so you could help the police.”

  “I was so sick,” Becky said as horrible memories flooded her, the intense pain in her belly, the blinding fear of death. “Meghan … my God, Meghan. It must have been what she felt like.”

  Zach’s expression blended curiosity and concern. “Why do you say that?”

  “Because she was sick like that … suddenly and intensely,” Becky said in a weak, raspy voice. Zach helped her drink water from a cup on the tray beside her bed. “It happened once when we were home and twice here at White. It was why we brought her to the ER that day, when you referred us to Dr. Nash. The last time I visited her, I didn’t give her soup, because I wanted her to eat the hot lunch that day. It was part of our escape plan.”

  “So three times it’s happened,” Zach said.

  “Three, yes,” said Becky. “Four, if you count me.”

  A dark look crossed Zach’s stubble-covered face. He looked worn and exhausted, as if he, too, had swallowed something deadly. “Becky … have you ever wondered … if Carl could have something to do with it?”

  “Carl?” There was a pull on the nasogastric tube as Becky lifted her head slightly off the bed pillow to fix Zach with a confused look.

  “I brought up the idea of Carl’s involvement earlier in a rather unpleasant exchange with Nash and Knox Singer. It’s not common for the father to be behind a case of Munchausen by proxy, but it’s not unheard of either.”

  “You think Carl poisoned my soup?”

  “He’s been present for every instance where a possible poisoning took place. At your home, and here at White.”

  “He was with me every time…” Becky’s voice trailed off.

  “I should call the police,” Zach said.

  “Wait!” Becky pulled on the tubes again as she held up her hand. “Carl’s powerful and determined. He’s also the cosigner of my bond.”

  “And?”

  “And if he revokes it, I could end up in jail.”

  Zach seemed to share Becky’s concern. “What do you want me to do?”

  “Let’s see if we can get proof,” Becky said. A fresh jolt of adrenaline masked the discomfort of her nasal tube, making speech less effortful. “I kicked him out of the house. I don’t think he took his computer with him. I know the password. Maybe we can find his secrets before he thinks to cover his tracks.”

  CHAPTER 53

  ZACH

  It was just after sunset when he pulled into the driveway of Becky and Carl’s Concord home. The posse of reporters—who had followed Zach to the pharmacy and later to the hospital—was no longer camped out front, because the story was not here anymore. The story was in the ICU at White, where Becky was recovering, and in the Behavioral Health Unit, where Meghan was locked up. But soon enough, the story could be with Carl, whose whereabouts remained unknown.

  Carl had not come to the hospital, either to check on Becky or to visit with Meghan and offer reassuring words about her mother. If he were anywhere near a cell phone, TV, or radio, he’d have known his soon-to-be ex-wife had nearly been fatally poisoned. His absence drew the interest of the two detectives, Capshaw and Spence, who viewed any unusual behavior as cause for suspicion.

  Zach had his own hunch about Carl. Pieces of the puzzle began to fit together in unexpected ways. Carl did not have the psychological makeup typical of someone committing Munchausen by proxy, but that did not mean he had no role to play. Zach kept returning to the idea of a somatic reaction in Meghan—that it wasn’t mito, and it never had been mito. Meghan had developed various symptoms that just happened to mirror mito because of some sort of external stress, something related to her father.

  It was entirely possible that Zach had embraced the mito diagnosis because it was his proclivity to do so, and Becky had jumped aboard seeking a clear answer, while it may have been Carl pulling the strings all along. Was his plan to manipulate Meghan in order to wage psychological warfare against his wife? If that theory held water, it would mean that Carl had intentionally poisoned Meghan, had killed Levine for reasons still unknown, and had planted the earring to cast suspicion on Becky. While the narrative had some logic to it, the big question Zach could not answer was why.

  Becky had told Zach where to find the house key—under a fake rock next to the wooden bench on the side of the house overlooking the stone patio, in what looked to be a professionally landscaped garden. He entered through a side door, half expecting to hear the warning chirps of a house alarm, but Becky had supplied him with the numeric code to deactivate it. There were no sounds of any kind. He found the lights in the kitchen after feeling for a switch plate on the wall. The chair he had knocked over had been righted. The thermos of soup was gone, bagged and tagged for evidence.

  Zach located the staircase, which Becky had said would lead to Carl’s office. He ascended the carpeted stairwell, wondering what he would do if he encountered Carl there. He did not think Carl would be eager to hear any of his prepared explanations. From the moment they’d met, the man seemed itching to dish out a good pounding. Or was the bullying part of Carl’s personality all part of his act?

  As Zach turned a corner on the stairwell, he spied a sliver of light spilling out from underneath the white painted door at the top of the landing. Zach listened intently for any sounds beyond but, hearing none, turned the brass knob, opening the door a crack to peer inside. He half expected Carl to be standing there, ready to pounce. Emboldened, Zach opened the door fully and went inside.

  The office was ransacked.

  Zach’s gaze traveled first to the books spilled onto the floor, then to a pile of papers that appeared to have been angrily swept off the expansive desk. While the framed pictures of Carl’s many showpiece homes and family photos of Meghan and Becky remained secured to the walls, the drawers of the desk had been pulled free of their slots, the contents within—pens, pencils, papers—dumped haphazardl
y onto the floor. It was then that Zach noticed the body, dressed in faded jeans and a navy polo, lying facedown, as still as the tipped-over chair beside him.

  Carl.

  Zach rushed to Carl’s side, knowing in his gut there was no need to hurry. The skin was cool to the touch as he checked for a pulse, finding none where none had been expected. The muscles were stiff, suggesting that Carl had been dead for some time. The top layer of skin had already begun to loosen and had a telling sheen of early-stage decay.

  Near Carl’s body, Zach spied an empty whiskey tumbler. He picked up the glass to examine it, using his shirt as a glove to preserve any fingerprints for the police. Inside the glass was the residue of something green, leafy, not unlike tea leaves. Zach was no botanist, but he very much doubted this was Carl’s favorite Earl Grey. He took a whiff inside the tumbler. He could smell the remnants of whiskey, but not the plant. It was odorless, probably tasteless, too, but he was certain it was the same substance that had sickened Becky.

  A scene formed in Zach’s mind: Carl ingesting a fatal dose of some poison, knocking over bookshelves and papers as life was leaving him, then collapsing to the floor, dead. Was it suicide? Had he feared that his secret would be revealed in the wake of Becky’s inadvertent poisoning? Zach scoured the floor with his eyes, searching for answers, when he spotted what appeared to be wrapping paper torn open in haste, not far from Carl’s inert form. Near the crumpled paper was a small open box, colored the distinctive aqua blue that comes only from Tiffany.

  As he glanced back at the body, Zach saw that Carl’s right hand was balled in a fist. In his hurry to check for a pulse, Zach had failed to notice the glint of a silver chain barely sticking out from between the fingers of his clenched hand. Zach pried open the fingers, suspecting that what had been inside that jewelry box could very well be the object in Carl’s dead grasp. He unfurled the fingers to reveal a diamond-encrusted silver pendant shaped in the form of a heart. He turned the pendant around in his fingers to examine it—forgetting for a moment the need to preserve what may be a crime scene—and saw the name ANGI engraved on the back.

  Zach called 911 and informed the dispatcher he could not stick around for the police. He had to get back to White Memorial. He had to let Becky know what he’d found, because something told him that Carl had sent her a message from the grave.

  CHAPTER 54

  BECKY

  What should she feel, knowing her husband was dead? Why weren’t there any tears? Where was the ache? The wailing? The flood of grief? When Zach broke the news about Carl, she felt none of those emotions. Instead, a strange sense of relief washed over her. Now the man who had shared her bed, her life, could not hurt her or Meghan ever again. The realization came with a perverse sense of justice. Carl had gotten what he deserved, because Becky now believed, as did Zach, that he had poisoned Meghan. It was entirely possible he could have killed her had Becky not consumed the soup meant for their daughter. The man Zach had found dead in his home office was not the man she had married and once loved. More than a stranger, he was a monster, and his motives were now as clear as the liquids being pumped from the IVs into her veins.

  This was not about Munchausen’s, Becky now believed. This was about Carl.

  He wanted out of the marriage, out of his obligations, out of his life so that he could start a new one with this Angi person, whoever she was. To do so, he was willing to kill his sick daughter and use Munchausen’s as proof of Becky’s instability when he set her up to take the fall for his crime. With one devilish act, both Carl’s anchors would be cut free so that he could sail away into the glory of his new life. Becky would go to prison and Meghan into the ground, while Carl and Angi would get to live out their days on some tropical beach, brushing each other with suntan lotion and imbibing mango rum smoothies.

  But Angi—that whore, that bitch—apparently had a plan of her own. Becky and Zach had a new theory, which they shared with Capshaw and Spence, who had come to the hospital to take a statement. At some point, Angi had decided to do away with Carl, poisoning him the way he had Meghan. Carl was not the type to take his own life, which was why Becky suspected his paramour had staged the suicide, which would be entirely believable, given what he’d been doing to his daughter. In the aftermath, Meghan would live, Becky would avoid jail, and Angi would vanish, along with her reasons for double-crossing her lover.

  Maybe Carl had set Angi up financially. Maybe he’d funneled money to her in the same secretive way that she believed he had to Kelly London, using his corporate account as a personal piggy bank. All would be revealed soon enough. Carl had indeed sent a message from the grave, and the police were now out looking for Angi. With such an unusual name, she would not be too hard to track down, Becky believed.

  What Becky wanted now was for the tube shoved up her nose to be taken out. She wanted the IVs removed as well. She wanted to be back on her feet so that she could visit with Meghan, to tell her in person that her father was gone before she heard it from someone else. Even though her father had committed an unfathomable act of pure evil, he was still part of her history and an integral part of her. In Meghan’s time of sorrow, she would need the comfort only a mother could provide.

  “See if you can get her down here,” Becky said to Zach as he checked the drip flow of her IVs. It was pitch dark out her window, but the ICU bustled with its typical degree of chaos. The sounds from the hall beyond her cubicle, the incessant beeps and buzzes, so hard to ignore at first, had morphed into white noise akin to the dull din of a Vegas casino. Zach’s cell phone rang. He answered, a grave look soon coming to his face.

  “Are you sure?” she heard him say. His eyebrows were knitted together, while deep creases stretched across his furrowed brow. Becky’s gut told her the call had been about Carl.

  “That was Detective Spence,” Zach said, putting his phone away. “They spoke with the COO at Carl’s company. Apparently, there’s no Angi who works there, and there has never been one.”

  “That’s … that’s not possible,” Becky said, stammering. “Carl told me she was someone he worked with.”

  “Carl lied about a lot of things, didn’t he?”

  “Well, who the hell is Angi, then?”

  “I wouldn’t imagine it’s someone’s initials, not with that many letters,” Zach said, thinking it through. “A nickname, perhaps?”

  “Maybe.”

  “Or it could be a first and last name put together,” Zach said. “The first letters of each.”

  “Perhaps,” Becky said. She thought about names that begin with A-n.

  Anne … Angela … Anita …

  But those were just names, not people she knew. Maybe Carl knew her. Maybe she was someone at work whose identity he was protecting. The police could search every An/Gi name pretty quickly, she thought.

  God, how she wanted that tube pulled out. She wanted to stand, to pace, to think clearly without being all doped up. Who the hell is Angi? Because that’s the message Carl had sent, wasn’t it? There was a reason he had ripped open that package and held on to the necklace, the same kind of diamond-encrusted pendant with an engraving on the back that he’d once bought her.

  Angi … Angi … Angi …

  Becky thought of what Zach had said, that the engraving was a set of initials, first and last names. In her mind, she split the letters again. AN-GI … AN-GI.

  A surge of terror raced through her body.

  AN-GI.

  “What kind of doctor is Amanda Nash?” she asked, knowing the answer already.

  “Gastroenterologist,” Zach said. “Why?”

  Becky had only to answer with four letters. “AN-GI,” she said.

  CHAPTER 55

  MEGHAN

  When I heard Dr. Amanda Nash’s voice, I thought I was dreaming.

  “Meghan … Meghan, are you awake?” she called out.

  My eyes opened. Slowly, my foggy vision cleared. I propped myself up on my elbows to see her standing just inside my room. She
came toward my bed, calling my name in a gentle, motherly tone.

  “Meghan, wake up, sweetheart. I’ve something to tell you.”

  I became instantly alert. My body tensed as a terrible feeling came over me, a gnawing knowing that something awful had happened.

  Dr. Nash sat on the edge of my bed and placed her hand on my shoulder, the way someone does before they break bad news. “Meghan, sweetheart, there’s been some trouble.”

  “What … what kind of trouble?” I asked in a shaky voice.

  “Your mom is in the hospital. She’s here at White. She came in and was very sick, but she’s okay now. She’s going to be all right, and she wants to see you.”

  My heart began to jackhammer. “What … what happened to her?”

  “She had some … breathing difficulties. But we treated her quickly, and she’s making a terrific recovery. Why don’t you get dressed and I’ll take you to her.”

  I was on my feet in no time. I didn’t have to get dressed, since I was sleeping in sweats. One look out the window told me it was night. I got the sense it was late.

  I slid my feet into a pair of slippers Mom had brought me from home. My mouth had that gross taste of sleep, but I wasn’t about to take the time to brush it away. As we walked down the hall toward the locked exit, Dr. Nash gripped my arm like she had that first day, the day I came and never left, holding on like I might try to escape. I guess I’d given her good reason to be cautious.

  Dr. Nash paused at the front desk. “I’m taking Meghan to see her mother,” she said.

  Nurse Amy, who often worked the overnight shift, gave a nod as she typed something into the computer. A moment later, the door clicked open, and Dr. Nash escorted me out of the BHU for the first time since my inauspicious homecoming.

  “What happened to my mom exactly?” I asked.

  “I told you, breathing troubles.”