“Mena—”
“The truth is I’ve always admired you. I know you think I’ve never aspired to more than this, but I wish I could do what you do. And so I listened in. I eavesdropped on your sessions with Tom Bishop. I’m not proud of it. But I know what you said to him. How you said it to him. Because, at first, it was just about getting him to doubt what he saw and heard. Getting him to doubt his own certainty — because his certainty was never really there in the first place. And then it was planting the seed that his mother did more than argue with his father. And that he — Tom — just didn’t want to believe that. But sometimes the truth was hard. So hard to bear.” Mena pauses to catch her breath. “And then he told the police exactly what you coached him to say.”
I think it might be over, but Mena isn’t finished. She’s fully crying now. But I can understand her. I don’t want to, but I can.
“I’ve always thought you did what you did to protect your family,” Mena says. “And I told myself I didn’t know what I heard. Maybe I was wrong. Maybe it was some new technique you were using. I tried everything. And then you were seeing your own therapist. I thought it was to get through the stuff with Paul. But you were dealing with what you’d done. Weren’t you?”
I don’t have an answer. I’m too stunned to speak.
Mena stops talking, only sobbing. Then, tear-choked words: “I’d only been working for you for three years. I thought about leaving. But I stayed. I convinced myself it wasn’t my business, that I didn’t know everything. And then she was convicted. Laura Bishop. She pled guilty, which must’ve meant she did it. So I thought I must’ve really misheard things, really screwed up. And I let it go . . . Until you called me and you told me what was happening. Then I knew. I knew it was true!” Her voices rises at the end to a shrill pitch. Mena is hysterical.
“Mena . . . Calm down.”
It’s all coming out now. Yes, it’s finally coming out. Like a hatch underwater, it’s opening. The trapped air is rising to the surface.
Too fast . . . too fast.
But maybe it’s for the best.
“Mena,” I say. “I’m sorry . . .”
As she continues to sob, the door to my hospital room opens.
CHAPTER SIXTY-FIVE
Parker and Reynolds are back. Parker is the more normal-looking one, less soldierly anyway, but it’s hard to read even his expression. Perhaps he’s stoic like this when he’s about to arrest someone.
“How are you feeling, Dr. Lindman?”
“I’m okay. Hoping to get out of here soon.” An odd thing to say, considering. Maybe it’s best I don’t speak.
Parker nods. As I watch, he pulls a small recording device from the phone. He puts it on the food table beside me.
“We had another talk with Laura Bishop tonight,” he says.
Reynolds adds, “She continues to have interesting things to say.”
Parker asks, “Would you like to hear it?”
I swallow over raw bones in my throat. My eyes are grainy, unblinking. “Okay,” I rasp.
Parker hits play. Then he folds his arms and steps back. Reynolds keeps post at the door.
Laura Bishop’s voice emanates from the small device. She sounds like I remember her, a kind of smoky, debutante air about her. Like some old movie starlet from the fifties. “About sixteen years ago, I had an affair with Paul Lindman,” she says. “Back then, my husband was kind of a socialite. So were the Lindmans. We’d make excuses to dress up and have parties and so would they. It seemed respectable at first. But there were drugs. There were people swapping spouses. The Lindmans weren’t into that — they weren’t swingers — but that didn’t stop Paul from seeking me out.”
I close my eyes. I don’t want to go back there, to those days, but it’s like I’ve been found at last. I’ve been hiding out from the past, but now its bright lights are on me.
“Paul found me in the city, where I work. He said he was interested in buying some art. He wanted some paintings for his office and the lobby of one of his buildings. So we started to meet. One of his buildings, one that his firm built, was a hotel. He showed me the penthouse suite. And that was it. We met there to ‘discuss art’ several times for over four months. Many times. Four months and two weeks, to be exact. And then I broke it off. Because Paul was getting weirdly possessive. He was jealous of David. I was still sleeping with my husband, and Paul knew it, and he hated it. And when I broke it off with Paul . . . Let’s just say he didn’t handle it well.”
She pauses. I don’t dare look directly at Parker or Reynolds but see them peripherally, standing like statues.
“I don’t believe he thought it through,” Laura says about Paul. “I don’t know how he imagined we could be together afterwards. Maybe he didn’t. Maybe he just wanted to kill what he thought prevented us from being together. Because he went back to his life.”
Her voice changes subtly in pitch. “Paul is good at hiding things,” she says. My skin tightens with panic. It feels like she’s speaking to me directly, knowing I’d hear this. “He’s hidden an entire part of himself from public view.”
Then Laura’s voice changes again, as if she’s faced away from the recorder. “She’s the same way. Emily. They’re two peas in a pod. Because she knew. She knew about the affair, and if she didn’t know for sure it was me, she suspected. And that’s why, when the police called her to evaluate my son, she didn’t admit to knowing me, or knowing David. She didn’t inform you. Okay, she said she’d heard our names, it’s not a very big town. But that was it. She lied about her conflict of interest because she wanted to know what my son had to say. My son. And when he described a man outside his window, sitting in a car, smoking, that’s when she knew. She knew it was Paul, and that she needed to steer my son away from that. Give him something else. Someone else. Me.”
I can hardly breathe. The room seems to shrink around me, Parker and Reynolds sliding toward the bed. I can practically feel the cold steel of the handcuffs sliding over my wrists. Picture myself being walked out of the hospital and put into the back of a waiting police car.
Parker ends the playback. He returns the recording device to his pocket. For a moment, he stares into the corner, as if marshaling the right words.
You have the right to remain silent.
He shakes his head, as if mournful. Then his eyes slide to mine. “She keeps going on for a while longer, but basically — that’s the gist. Laura Bishop claims that you brainwashed her son. That the whole thing — his statement to police that he saw his mother do it — it was all you. You kind of gave him the old Jedi mind trick.”
I search Parker’s eyes. Is this a time to be joking?
He looks back at me and then at Reynolds, by the door. Parker says to Reynolds, “Fucking ex-cons, right? Doesn’t matter if they’re out, they’re still working an angle. Every time.”