Joan pulled open the hospital room door and then glanced back at the two of them. Emma closed her eyes and tears ran down the sides of her face. David wiped her tears gently away with his thumb. Joan frowned as she stepped out into the hallway.
A
RUSTLING
sound nearby registered in her sleep, and Emma’s eyes flew open, her heart pounding as if it would leap from her chest. She blinked at a woman wearing a shower cap and dressed in polyester pants and a tunic, carrying a tray of food. “Here we go,” said the aide in a cheerful voice. “Breakfast. Better wake up, Prince Charming.”
Emma turned her head on the scratchy hospital pillow, damp from tears she had shed in her sleep, and saw her husband. David was slumped in the visitor’s chair, fast asleep, his head resting on his fist. He was unshaven and looked utterly exhausted. “David,” she said.
David opened his eyes and jerked his head upright. In his dark eyes she saw confusion and sleepiness. But something else too. His gaze met hers and his eyes looked haunted, as if he had seen a ghost. “Breakfast is served,” she said gently. She turned to the woman with the tray. “Could you put it down there?” she asked, pointing to the adjustable table on the other side of the bed.
“Okay. You be sure and eat now,” said the nurse. “You need your strength. The doctor will be in shortly to see you.”
Emma nodded and closed her eyes. “Okay,” she said, although the familiar nausea of morning sickness was unsettling her stomach.
David shook his head and rubbed his unshaven face. Then he scraped the chair across to her bedside, stood up, leaned over the bed, and kissed her on the forehead. “Baby,” he said. “How are you feeling?”
Emma took a deep breath to quell the nausea, shifted her leg, which felt as if it were on fire, and put a hand gingerly on her wounded side. “I’ve been better,” she said. “I guess I fell asleep as soon as you got here last night.”
David nodded and sat back down in the chair. “I watched you sleep for a little while. I was tempted to crawl into bed with you, but I didn’t want to jostle all those stitches. I don’t know when I passed out.” He reached out and took her hand. “Not much of a wedding night.”
Emma nodded sadly. His hand felt like the only warm thing in the whole room. “I’m glad you were here with me,” she said. “I would have been afraid if I woke up alone.”
“Emma, I don’t know what to say. I should have been with you in that cabin. I never should have left you alone there….”
Tears began to leak out of Emma’s eyes again. “It was terrible, David.”
“I know,” he said angrily. “I know it was.”
“He was behind me with the ax, and I turned around….” Her voice faltered.
He squeezed her hand so hard that she almost yelped. “Don’t,” he said. “Don’t think about it.”
“I kept praying for you to come back.”
David sighed. “I couldn’t feel any more guilty. Believe me. If I could do it over…I went walking along the riverbank. You know, I was kind of filled up with all the events of the day. I was just thinking…actually I wasn’t thinking. Just wandering, reveling in my good fortune. The sunset was so beautiful. I found this old duck blind my uncle John used to take us to. I climbed up on it to look at the water and I fell through where it was rotted. I could hear the gunshots. I was frantic to get out of there, but that only made it worse. By the time I got myself free the police had arrived. They were searching for your attacker, and instead, they found me.”
“Did you see him?” she asked.
“Who?” David frowned at her.
“Him,” she said, agitation in her voice. “The man…with the ax.”
David hung his head. “No,” he said. “I wish I had. He’d be a dead man now.”
For a moment they were both silent. Then David stood up abruptly and came around to the other side of the bed.
“Be careful of the IV,” she said.
He ducked around the pole and adjusted the table in front of her. “What are they giving you in that?” he asked.
“I don’t know,” she said. “If they told me, I don’t remember. I was too out of it.”
“Well, here, eat something,” he said. “You need your strength.”
“I’ll try,” she said.
He ripped the paper lid off the cup of apple juice and handed it to her. Emma took it from him and had a careful sip. Her stomach started to settle. “Were you able to help the police?” she said.
David snorted with laughter. “Help them?”
Emma, who had begun to chew on a piece of dry toast, blinked at him. She felt a sudden confusion. “They said you were at the station trying to help them.”
David shook his head. “I was at the station being interrogated. Look, Emma, you have to face facts. As your husband, I’m the prime suspect.”
“You?” she cried.
“The husband always is,” David said. “I was at the scene. My fingerprints were on the murder weapon.”
“The ax? But you were chopping wood,” Emma protested.
David shook his head. “Didn’t Atkins ask you about me last night?”
And then it came back to her. That lady lieutenant asking her if they’d argued. If he’d ever hurt her. Emma grimaced as she remembered the questions. They seemed so irrelevant to her that she had put them out of her mind. “She asked me if I could think of anyone who would want to hurt me. I thought about those anonymous letters. The ones I got at work…I told her about those.”
David frowned and shook his head. “You shouldn’t do that, Em.”
Emma looked at him in surprise. “Do what?”
“Offer them information. My brother specifically told me not to do that.”
“Phil said that? When did you talk to Phil about this?”
“I called him last night,” David said.
“Oh, of course. I’m sure you needed to talk to your brother at a time like that,” she said.
David hesitated, chewing the inside of his mouth. “Actually, it was a little more than that. I wanted his advice as a lawyer. Phil called a friend of his, an attorney named Yunger. The guy drove down and got me out of there. From now on, Em, all our communication with the police should go through Mr. Yunger.”
Emma was silent. She set the crust of her toast back down on her plate and wiped the crumbs off her fingers, avoiding his gaze.
“What’s the matter?” he asked.
“Why do we need an attorney? We have nothing to hide.”
“Emma,” he said, taking her hand in his again. “A man was killed. We need to protect ourselves,” he said.
“From who?” she said.
“From the police.”
Emma pulled her fingers away from his. She felt a little chill. “The police are trying to find the man who attacked me. Why do we need protection from them?”
He gazed at her for a long moment without replying. “The police are looking for an easy answer. I am that easy answer.”
“That’s stupid,” she said. “We just got married. We love each other.”
“You’re rich. We have no prenup, remember?”
Suddenly, she felt almost guilty, as if her refusal to sign a prenup had led to this disastrous moment. “I didn’t want to compromise us…our future. It seemed like a lack of faith….”
“I know that,” he said. “But they don’t. They see your money as a motive.”
“David, no. That’s ridiculous. They can’t blame you.”
“Emma, don’t be naive. You read the paper. Innocent people get railroaded all the time. We have to avoid talking to the cops. Let the lawyer take care of it.”
She stared at him steadily, although she was trembling inside. “But that seems wrong to me,” she said.
David’s expression was grim. “You need to be with me on this,” he said.
The door to the room opened and a gray-haired man wearing a white lab coat over his shirt and tie came in. He frowned at Emma. “How are we doing here? Do you remember me? I’m Dr. Bell. I took care of you last night.”
Emma blinked at the doctor. “I’m…I’m afraid I don’t remember too much….”
“That’s understandable. You were heavily sedated. I thought you’d like to know that you can probably go home tomorrow.”
“Oh, that’s great,” said David. “Honey, that’s great.”
“Getting around is going to be difficult for a while,” Dr. Bell cautioned. “The lacerations were much wider than they were deep. You had over two hundred stitches, and there will probably be some residual nerve damage. You may want plastic surgery at some point to minimize the scars. You needed three transfusions for the blood loss, which is significant, but the bigger danger we faced, actually, was that your body would shut down from shock. Luckily, the EMTs arrived in time and you resisted succumbing.”
Emma shook her head. “I wasn’t…I didn’t do anything.”
“We never underestimate the power of the will,” said Dr. Bell.
“I appreciate all you did for me. And my baby,” she said.
“That’s my job,” he said, but he was smiling. “As for your recovery, the good news is that no ligaments or tendons were cut. You’re going to be in a lot of pain for a while. I’ll give you medication for that of course.”
“Is it all right to take this medication, with the pregnancy?” she asked.
“Perfectly safe,” he said. “At the recommended dosage.”
Emma nodded.
“With so many open wounds, we have to be alert to the possibility of infection. We have you on an antibiotic drip now,” he said, pointing to the IV bag, which hung on a pole beside the bed. “Once you get home, you’ll take an oral antibiotic. You have to keep your dressings clean. The nurse will show you how to change them. And you have to be careful of the sutures. No heavy lifting. No driving. Restricted activities.”
“Don’t worry, I won’t let her do anything she shouldn’t,” said David.
Dr. Bell smiled. “All things considered, you were very lucky, young lady. Once the wounds heal, there should be no lasting effects.”
Emma knew he was speaking clinically. As a physician. About her body. A lucky young lady. No lasting effects. She thought of the hooded man, swinging the ax above her head. She had to stifle the sob that rose to her throat.
F
IRST THING
Monday morning, Lieutenant Joan Atkins, dressed in a black suit and a striped turtleneck sweater appeared at the Clarenceville Police Station. She introduced herself to the local chief of police and waited while the chief summoned a young detective named Trey Marbery and assigned him to work with the state police lieutentant on the investigation of the assault on Emma Webster. Joan noticed that Trey Marbery seemed to be the youngest detective in the squad and also the only one of mixed race. She understood the chief’s choice. An older, white man would resist taking orders from a woman. Joan suppressed a sigh. Predictable, but tiresome all the same.
“What am I taking you away from, Detective?” she asked Marbery pleasantly.
The mocha-complected young man shrugged. “My biggest case is a hit-and-run. A retired professor from Lambert University who got killed last spring. The perp hit him head-on and left the old guy to die there like roadkill. I haven’t made much headway though. It’s frustrating. I could use a change of pace. I’m glad the chief assigned me to you.”
“Well, I’ll keep you busy,” said Joan, smiling briefly. “I need someone who knows his way around this town.” As she briefed Marbery, she was favorably impressed by the young man’s focused attention and intelligent questions. They walked out of the station house together.
“Where are we headed first?” Marbery asked.
“The place Emma Webster works. I want to see those anonymous notes. Do you know where the Wrightsman Youth Center is?”
“Yes, ma’am,” said Marbery.
“Good. You drive,” said Joan.
The building that housed the Wrightsman Youth Crisis Center was a large, gray stone Colonial house that had once been the home of Noah Wrightsman, one of the richest men in Clarenceville. After his death, Wrightsman’s heirs had wanted the tax write-off more than the grand old house. They’d donated it to Lambert University, which promptly turned it into the Youth Crisis Center.
Marbery parked in the gravel parking lot beside the center, and the two officers went around to the front door. Marbery pressed the bell. As they stood waiting, he observed, “I was here a few months ago.”
“Really?” Joan asked. “What for?”
“Dr. Heisler’s wife died. She took a header off the bridge into the river.”
“Was it suspicious?”
Marbery shook his head. “Well, you always have to look at a suicide as a possible homicide. But she was a poet. Very…artsy and high-strung. Even though she’d just won some big literary award, she got into a depressive spiral, according to the people we interviewed. Still, she didn’t wash up right away, so we were keeping the pressure on the husband. But when they found her, it was a suicide all right.”
“What did the coroner say?”
“He said she actually died from the impact of the fall from the bridge.”
“Sounds pretty straightforward,” said Joan.
Trey nodded as a round-faced Hispanic woman answered the bell and said that Dr. Heisler was expecting them. “I’ll take you to his office,” she said.
Joan glanced into some of the rooms she passed in the hallways. There were teenagers watching TV or working on computers in the common rooms. The house was as silent as a library. “I expected this place to be noisy,” she said to the woman who was leading them down the hallway.
Sarita Ruiz laughed. “You caught them early. A lot of them just took their medications. Give them a few hours.”
They arrived at Dr. Heisler’s door, and the woman indicated that they should go in. Burke Heisler was waiting for them, standing nervously in front of his desk. Joan was immediately struck by the contrast between the man’s rough-hewn face and his well-cut suit. “Detective Marbery,” Burke said grimly. “We meet again.”
“Nice to see you again, sir,” Trey said politely. “May I present Lieutenant Atkins of the state police.”
“Good to meet you, Lieutenant,” said Burke shaking hands. “Won’t you have a seat?” Burke indicated a love seat and two chairs facing each other in front of a cold fireplace. The detectives each took a chair. “How can I help you?” he asked. “Anything I can do. Anything.”
“Mrs. Webster told us that she was receiving some mysterious notes at work,” said Joan. “She said she kept them here. We’d like to see them.”
“My secretary can take you to her office, if you want to search it,” said Burke.
Joan nodded to the younger detective. “Can you take care of that?”
Burke called Geraldine on the intercom, and Marbery left the office to meet her in the reception area.
“Dr. Webster told us that she showed the notes to you,” Joan said.
Burke nodded. “She did.”
“Was she concerned about them?” Joan asked.
Burke hesitated and then sat down on the love seat. “She was concerned. They made her anxious, of course.”
“What about you? What did you think?”
Burke frowned. “I knew there was a possibility of erotomania.”
“That’s a…clinical term for obsession, isn’t it?” asked Joan.
“Well, in its most extreme form, it’s a psychosis. A person believes that the object upon whom they are passionately fixated, returns their feelings. Even where there is ample evidence to the contrary. But generally speaking, the obsessed person does not remain hidden but makes himself known to the love object. Interferes in their day-to-day life, hounds them, threatening them with harm if they refuse to reciprocate their feelings.”
“And this…delusion can lead to violence.”
“Oh, absolutely,” said Burke.
“So why didn’t you alert the police to this situation,” Joan asked, “when Mrs. Webster showed you these letters?”
Burke shook his head. “These notes didn’t really fit the profile of a violent psychotic. And, as you will see, there are no threats in them. This isn’t the first time I have encountered this sort of acting out in a facility populated by highly emotional adolescents. Besides, I know from experience that there is nothing the police can do about anonymous love notes.”
“And there were no other incidents? Someone stalking her, Peeping Tom, anything like that?” Joan asked.
“Not that I know of,” said Burke.
“Do you have any idea who sent these notes?” Joan asked. “Any of her patients have a history of this kind of…fixation?”
Burke shook his head. “None that I know of.”
“I’ll need a complete list of her patients,” said Joan.
Burke nodded. “I can get that for you. Lieutenant Atkins, there is one thing I feel I have to mention to you.”
“What’s that?” Joan asked.
“We did have a situation here not long ago…. Emma was treating an anorexic patient, and the girl’s parents—her father specifically—took issue with Emma’s…methods. They pulled the girl from the center, and she died shortly thereafter of her disease. The girl’s father was extremely angry at Emma. He came to me, demanding that she be fired. I tried to reason with him, but when that didn’t work, I had him barred from the facility.”
Joan raised an eyebrow. “Mrs. Webster didn’t mention this to me.”
Burked sighed. “She doesn’t know about it. Emma’s confidence was shaken by the girl’s death as it was. And, in my judgment, she had acted appropriately. I felt that the father was…in the wrong on this. So I ran interference. I am the director of this facility. The buck stops here, as they say.”
Joan nodded and took out a pad and pen from her pocketbook. “This man’s name?”
“Lyle Devlin. He’s a music professor at Lambert. His daughter’s name was Ivy. I need to be clear about this. I’m not accusing Mr. Devlin of anything. But he was extremely angry at Emma.”
“I’ll talk to him,” said Joan, making a note of the name and slipping the pad back into her shoulder bag.
Marbery tapped on the door as he opened it. “Come in, Detective,” said Burke.
Marbery, who was wearing disposable plastic gloves, brought a manila envelope to Joan, who, also donning gloves, opened it and pulled out the contents. Each note was short. Joan shuffled through them, reading certain phrases aloud.
“‘In my dark dreams your face glows like a distant star. I try to fly to you. The pain of love is more than I can bear. How can you look through me and not see the secrets of my soul?’ She seems to have inspired quite a passion in this guy,” Joan observed.
“Passion can be dangerous,” murmured Trey.
Joan nodded and replaced the notes in the envelope. Then she removed her gloves and tapped a pale, oval fingernail against the envelope. “Tell me, Dr. Heisler, you said that Mrs. Webster is a personal friend as well as a colleague.”
“She was my wife’s college roommate. As a matter of fact, I was the best man at Emma’s wedding,” said Burke.
“Really? So, you’re friends with David Webster as well.”
“We’re friends from childhood. My family owned a casino, and his mother was a waitress at one of the casino restaurants. I went away to private school, but when I was home I used to hang around the restaurant kitchen, and sometimes David’s mom would bring him with her to work. We became best buddies. We’ve remained friends all these years. Emma and David met at our home.”
“Did you ever have any reason to suspect Webster’s motives in marrying Emma Hollis?”
Burke recoiled from the suggestion. “No, of course not. What are you talking about?”
Joan studied the doctor’s reaction. “Mrs. Webster is a wealthy woman. If she died, her husband would inherit her money.”
“David?” Burke cried in disbelief. “No. That’s out of the question. David doesn’t care about money.”
“I don’t want to contradict you, Doctor, but if his mother worked as a waitress, I doubt he was raised in the lap of luxury. Maybe you don’t care about money, but I suspect he probably does.”
Burke shook his head. “You don’t know him. He’s always marched to his own drummer. No. He never had any patience with money-grubbing people or people who bragged about being rich. That’s not who David is. I understand that most murder is domestic, but in this case, the answer has to lie elsewhere. Have you ruled out a random attack?”
“We haven’t ruled out anything yet,” said Joan.
“Well, you can forget about David,” Burke insisted. “He would never hurt Emma. David is crazy about Emma.”
Joan glanced at the envelope in her hand. “Is that an observation,” she asked, “or a diagnosis?”