How she’d let her imagination run away with her. She’d gone from zero to sixty in under three seconds. Two simple words and suddenly she had Bill Myers and Charlotte Davis plotting to drive Paul crazy.
Next thing, Anna thought, she’d be believing 9/11 was an inside job, that doctors had a cure for cancer but were keeping it hidden, that there really were aliens at Roswell.
Didn’t that kind of prejudging go against everything she’d learned in her professional life? You don’t size up your patients in three seconds. You listen to all the facts. You talk to them. You dig below the surface and look for clues that are not immediately evident. What she had done was reach her conclusion first, then look only for evidence that would support it.
“Stupid stupid stupid,” she said, and started the engine.
Realizing how seriously she had misjudged the situation made her feel more than just foolish. Ashamed, for sure. But not in any way relieved. If Bill and Charlotte had been in cahoots—boy, there was a word she hadn’t thought of in years—then some of the responsibility would have been lifted from her shoulders. Her failure to accurately predict Paul’s self-destructive behavior would be mitigated.
As she continued driving back toward her house, she thought that if she’d tipped her hand with Bill Myers, if she’d really let it slip that she suspected something monstrous of him, she’d have felt obliged to write him a letter of apology.
It would be the only decent thing to— Anna slammed on the brakes.
Behind her, a horn blared.
She swerved the car over to the side of the road. Her heart was racing as she threw the SUV into park.
Write him a letter of apology.
She thought back to the service when Bill Myers was making his remarks about his good friend Paul.
How when he got lost and had to search through his notes, how he’d turned the pages over.
From where she sat, Anna could clearly see pages covered with scribbling.
Handwriting.
He had not printed out his speech.
Bill Myers had lied to her.
Fifty-Five
Back during the planning stages, Charlotte had agreed Bill was right. There was no guarantee, no matter how much they nudged him in that direction, that Paul would kill himself.
“You may have to help him with that,” Charlotte said.
Bill and Charlotte weren’t in the hot tub for this conversation. They were simply sitting in his car, parked behind a furniture store. He was in the driver’s seat, hands gripped tightly on the wheel, even though they were not moving.
“Charlotte,” he said.
“You’ve had to know this was a possibility.”
Of course he did. But he’d been trying to fool himself, thinking they could actually accomplish this without getting their hands dirty. Well, really dirty.
“Look, maybe he’ll actually do it,” Charlotte said, looking for a silver lining. “But at some point, we have to—what did my father always like to say?—shit or get off the pot.”
Once they’d planted the notes, and Charlotte had spoken with Dr. White and visited Hailey in Manhattan, and Bill had managed to get that typewriter placed on the bedside table right next to Paul, well, fuck, if that didn’t send him over the edge, what then?
When Dr. White came over in the night and suggested to Paul that he go to the hospital, Charlotte had panicked. She’d called Bill and told him to talk Paul out of it. They were hardly going to be able to move forward if Paul was in a locked ward.
So Bill had talked him out of it.
The question had always been how to do it. If Paul’s suicide was going to need a little help, what was the most convincing way for it to happen? Once Bill got over his initial squeamishness, he actually came up with a few good ideas. His best was to have Paul “jump” from the second-floor balcony, or the one off the master bedroom, one floor higher. But was it enough of a drop? Charlotte wondered. What if Paul survived, and told the police what Bill had done? (It would have to be Bill; Charlotte didn’t have the physical strength to heave him over.)
Bill was confident it would work. If Paul survived the fall, Bill would twist his neck.
So when Charlotte learned that Paul had drowned, she didn’t have to feign shock when Detective Arnwright gave her the news. Why hadn’t Bill told her he’d had a change of plan?
Maybe because then she really would look shocked.
She couldn’t bring herself to talk to Bill those first few days. Their first conversation had been at the funeral. Play it safe, she kept thinking. Give it time.
Soon, they’d reconnect.
Soon, he could tell her why he’d decided to drown Paul. She wondered how he’d done it. Dropped by after dark, invited him for a walk on the beach? Then suddenly grabbed him, pushed him down into the water, held his head under?
Anyway, it was done.
She and Bill could get on with a life together. She was aching for him as much as he was for her. She hoped she would always want him the way she wanted him right now.
God, I hope I don’t get bored with him, too.
No, no, that would not happen. They had a bond that was unlike any other.
It had been an interesting experience, all this. Charlotte had learned a lot about herself, what she was capable of. And she’d learned a lot about Bill, too.
She knew he had more of a troubled conscience than she did. She hoped that would not be a problem down the road.
What had he said to her one night?
“What we’re doing, you know it’s wrong.”
Right. And she’d taken only a second to fire back with:
“If you were going to worry about that you should have said something a long time ago.”
Fifty-Six
Detective Joe Arnwright’s desk phone rang.
“Arnwright,” he said.
It was the front desk. “Got a Dr. White wants to see you.”
“Sure, send her in.”
It struck Arnwright as oddly fortuitous that Dr. White would choose to drop by at this particular moment. He had, on his desk, and his screen, the report on the death of Paul Davis. Everything about the investigation appeared in order. It was still impossible to say, definitively, that Davis had committed suicide. He had gone into the water, and he had drowned. Had he intended that to happen? In the absence of a suicide note, there was no way to know his state of mind.
One thing seemed certain. He had not gone for a swim. People did not generally go swimming in jeans, shirt, and shoes.
It was possible he’d fallen off a nearby pier and washed up onshore. There was a dock over by the bottom of Elaine Road. And there was that outcropping of rock at Pond Point to the west. Maybe he’d gone for a walk out there and lost his footing.
But the interviews Arnwright had conducted with the man’s current and former wives, friends, and therapist painted a picture of a deeply troubled man.
And yet, there was one small detail that bothered Arnwright. In all likelihood, it didn’t mean anything. But it nagged at him just the same. Maybe one more visit with Charlotte Davis was in order. Arnwright would have to think about that. He didn’t want to bother a woman who’d recently lost her husband with what might be a totally trivial question.
Anna White appeared at the door to the detectives’ room. Arnwright stood and gave her a wave. Anna threaded her way between some desks until she was at Arnwright’s.
“I know I should have called, but—”
“That’s okay. Sit. Can I get you something?”
Anna declined. They both sat. Arnwright closed the folder that was on his desk and minimized the program on his screen.
“Hitchens giving you more trouble?” Joe Arnwright asked. “Because we’ve got him good on this dognapping thing.”
“I’m pleased to hear that,” Anna said. “But that’s not why I’m here.” She sighed. “I’m not even sure that I should be here.”
Joe waited.
“You know, when you came to see me the other day, I told you how responsible I felt about what happened to Paul.”
Joe nodded.
“I told you I felt I failed him, and I still do feel that way, so this thing that’s been on my mind, I have to question my own motives. I may be looking subconsciously for a way to lessen the guilt I feel.”
“Can’t be all that subconscious if you’re aware of it,” the detective said.