“Here — let me.” I hand off drinks to Paul and Joni and set mine on the arm of my chair, leaving Michael the one on the tray with the red straw.
Paul has arranged the chairs in a circle. There’s just enough room on the wide dock that runs along the shore. Once we’re all seated, he says, “Okay,” and he stretches forward with his drink. “To Joni and Michael.” He looks between them, then catches my eye. “May they have lasting happiness.”
“Cheers.” My toast sounds too quick and eager, but we all touch glasses. Everyone then sits back and sips.
For a moment, nobody speaks.
Michael gazes out at the water. “This is a beautiful lake. Nice and dark blue, almost black. Do you know how deep it gets?”
“A hundred and fifty feet.” Paul points to a spot in the distance. “Right in there? That’s seventy feet. It’s a good-sized lake. Over two thousand acres. Three islands out in the middle. See that?”
Michael shields his eyes with his hand. “I thought that was the other shoreline.”
“No, that’s Buck Island.”
“Wow. Beautiful.”
I sneak looks at Joni as they talk. She follows their conversation, seemingly oblivious of me. But I know that’s not true. She’s afraid. Joni has always been a tough kid, a real firebrand when she was a girl. As a teenager . . . well, we went through it all. And she emerged intact. Strong, even. But there’s one area where she’s fragile, and that’s my approval. I never intended it to be that way, but it’s her Achilles’ heel.
I need to proceed with a soft touch. “So. Any other surprises? How many weeks pregnant are you?”
“Mom.” Joni balks, but there’s a smile beneath.
“I’m just kidding.”
Joni and Michael look at each other for a long moment. Then Joni pulls a deep breath. “We just know that it’s right.”
“There you go. That’s good.”
She pushes on, ignoring me. “I know it seems crazy. It’s like a movie. Like those corny movies. But it happens in real life. We’re vibrating on the same frequency.” She takes a quick sip of her drink — a little liquid courage maybe. “He knows me. And I told him . . . I told him everything.”
Everything?
I watch Michael. It’s so hard not to stare at him. The nose, the flat eyebrows. The way his dark hair falls in front of his eyes when he leans forward. Joni is about to say more, but I interrupt. I can’t help it.
“What about you, Michael?”
His eyes flick to mine. “What about me what, ma’am?”
“Call me Emily.”
Joni answers for him. “I know all about Michael, too.”
Michael leans on his hand and stares at my daughter with adoration. Then he sits back, looking thoughtful. “My childhood wasn’t the easiest, but whose is? When I met Joni, and we got to know each other, and she told me about her . . . rebellious streak . . .” He smiles, and so does she. Then he continues, “I was open with her, that there was a lot of loss and grief in my past. Some pretty bad stuff.”
“I’m sorry to hear that.” I glance at Paul, but his eyes are on Michael, rapt with attention.
I want Paul to ask Michael what happened, but he doesn’t.
And neither do I.
For one thing, I probably already know.
CHAPTER FOUR
Fifteen years ago, in Bronxville, New York, in the middle of the night, a man named David Bishop was beaten to death with a hammer. In his own kitchen.
Police, arriving on scene, found a back door broken into, the alarm tripped. They also found David’s wife, distraught — hysterical — her hands covered in her husband’s blood.
“We heard a noise,” she told police. “David came downstairs. About — I don’t know, a minute — went by. Then I heard voices. I heard David shouting . . . and then . . . then he was . . .” She couldn’t finish.
Police also found David’s son, eight-year-old Thomas Bishop, in the house. When they spoke to young Tom, he explained that he’d awakened to noises. Angry voices, he said, “bad fighting,” and then screams.
“Who was screaming?”
“My mom was.”
He’d come upon her in the kitchen holding his father in her lap, covered in blood. And she’d shouted at Thomas to dial 911, and he did.
The investigation began. Thomas Bishop’s emergency call was listened to repeatedly. The back door was studied, the exterior searched for evidence of the attacker, the home dusted for prints. The Bishops had a security alarm system, but no cameras. The house was big, almost mansion-like, surrounded by ample lawn and privacy hedging. Residents of the affluent neighborhood saw nothing unusual, heard nothing unusual until the arrival of the ambulance and police.
Laura Bishop was likewise unable to provide help. She hadn’t seen the attacker. The voice she’d heard, she said, was muffled, through the walls. Male, perhaps in his thirties or forties, but impossible to say for sure.
The detective from the Bronxville Police Department soon kicked it up the chain to the New York State Police Bureau of Criminal Investigation. Six months later, the BCI investigation was going cold. Pressure was on the two people heading it up, Investigators Rebecca Mooney and Stephen Starzyk. They had gotten some conflicting statements from young Tom Bishop, and his family was worried that the repeated questioning by law enforcement was only adding to his trauma.
The investigators went to the DA, who went to a judge for a court-ordered evaluation.
That’s when I was contacted. Normally something like that might go to a forensic child psychologist, but I’d consulted with law enforcement before as a clinician. My name apparently topped a list somewhere at BCI headquarters. I don’t really remember getting the call, but I remember the first time Rebecca Mooney and I met, since, after chatting for about a minute, she looked at me with steely blue eyes and said, “I think the boy is not telling us something.”
“Okay . . .”
“I’ve gone over his statements, watched the videos a dozen times. What I can’t tell — is he traumatized, and that’s what’s coming across? Or is he scared of something? Something he saw?”
I was reluctant. Extremely. Every police officer and investigator I’ve met in my career has been an above-board public servant. They’re just people, and some are nicer than others — that’s the way people are — but they can get desperate when the pressure is on and police captains and district attorneys are breathing down their necks. They have something called a solve-rate, too, which is how many cases they’ve brought to a satisfying conclusion, with someone guilty behind bars.
The last thing I wanted was to help pressure some little boy into saying he saw something.
Like what? If he’d seen the assailant, why hide it?