“What?” Xavier sounded almost offended. He shook his head vigorously. “No, no, no. Amanda is—was—my niece.”
Fuck. All the time I’d already wasted.
I tried to keep myself composed. “Excuse the mistake. Do you know where I can find Amanda’s father? I really do need to talk to him.”
Xavier’s eyebrows bunched as he tilted his head to the side. Like maybe I was messing with him. “Saint Ann’s Cemetery.”
“He’s dead?” I asked, my heart picking up speed. “What do you mean? When?”
“Oh, twelve, thirteen years ago now.”
“That’s not possible.”
“Afraid it sure is.” Angry now, definitely. “What the hell is this anyway? Are you fucking with me?”
What the hell was he talking about, dead?
“No, no. I’m sorry, Mr. Lynch, I just—I don’t understand. My information didn’t say anything about his having passed away.”
“I don’t know how you can know Amanda and not know that she killed her father. Not that it was her fault. My brother William always was a fucking asshole.”
My ears were ringing. Holy. Shit.
“I’m sorry, what?” My voice was high and shrill.
“Amanda killed her father. Twelve, thirteen years ago,” he said, with less of an edge this time. “But he deserved it for sure.”
“What happened?”
“Apparently Amanda came up on William in the bathroom on top of one of her girlfriends. They’d been spending the night at that dump of a trailer on prom weekend, of all damn things. William was drunk and, um, violating the friend, or trying to. Cops said the friend was already dead by then—William had hit her head on the bathtub. My guess is that part was an accident. He probably didn’t even notice. William was so damn huge, bigger than me. I know that doesn’t make what he was doing better, but …”
Xavier glanced up at me. His eyes were sad now, and ashamed.
“I’m sorry,” I said reflexively.
“Yeah, well, Amanda tried to save her friend, I guess. There was a straight razor sitting right there on the sink. And that was that.” Xavier shook his head, looked down, and kicked at the doorframe. “And that was that. Fucking waste. My brother never was right, though, not even as a little kid. Not crazy, just wrong. As a grown-ass man, he was one sick son of a bitch.”
My mouth felt glued shut. I swallowed hard.
“What was Amanda’s friend’s name?” I asked, pressing my heels down. The ground felt unsteady beneath me. “Do you know?”
Xavier looked up toward the sky. “Cathy or Connie …”
“Carolyn?”
“That’s it. Carolyn,” he said with a nod. “Her and Amanda were like sisters. Or that’s what people said. I got to be honest—details were lost on me back then. I had a lot of problems. That’s why I’ve stopped drinking—that garbage will ruin your life.”
KRELL INDUSTRIES
CONFIDENTIAL MEMORANDUM NOT FOR DISTRIBUTION
Attorney-Client Work Product
Privileged & Confidential
July 2
To: Brooklyn Country Day Board of Directors
From: Krell Industries
Subject: Data Breach & Cyber Incident Investigation—Progress Report
Interview Summaries:
A total of 56 families have come forward to be interviewed regarding hacking of their personal information. Each occurrence involved the theft of personally compromising information. In no instance did anyone comply with the demand for money. Nonetheless, in no case was the threatened retaliatory action ever taken—no potentially defamatory information has yet been made public.
Preliminary Conclusions:
Evidence continues to suggest that the individual responsible:
Had some change in circumstance with respect to Brooklyn Country Day in April or May of this year.
Stands to benefit in some secondary way from the harassment, such as a reporter who would then move in to cover the alleged hacking.
It is possible a Brooklyn Country Day student is seeking to inflict discomfort or embarrassment on fellow students. We will work with the administration to isolate any such students.
Lizzie
JULY 11, SATURDAY
I drove from St. Colomb Falls straight to Weill-Cornell Hospital on the Upper East Side. Nestled behind a gate and between dozens of trees, the hospital looked, in the setting sun, more like a leafy college campus than home to Millie’s cancer ward.
When I got off the elevator on Millie’s floor, patients were shuffling about, dragging IVs behind them like stubborn dogs. I hadn’t been in a hospital since my mother’s untimely death, and I’d forgotten how instantly claustrophobic the misery could be.
But then, my lungs had felt caged ever since I’d pulled away from Xavier Lynch’s house, haunted by the thought of Amanda running for all those months from someone who wasn’t even there. Or so Xavier’s story would suggest. It wasn’t as if I planned just to take his word for it. He’d seemed credible, sure, but also definitely threatening. For all I knew, he’d made up the entire thing and really was Amanda’s dad, after all.
Xavier’s story was certainly hard to process, too: Amanda had clearly thought her dad and Carolyn were very much alive. She’d written about both of them in her most recent journal. In one entry, Amanda had even described, in great detail, Carolyn visiting her house in Park Slope. Was that just how deep her commitment to her imagined world had gone? How badly she’d needed to believe? By the time I’d pulled into the St. Colomb Falls County Clerk’s cracked, weed-filled parking lot, I felt nauseous thinking about it.
After some back-and-forth and lots of polite chitchat, the tiny old woman inside the small, brick clerk’s office—mercifully open on a Saturday—had finally confirmed that William Lynch had indeed been killed twelve years earlier, after having murdered a teenage girl named Carolyn Thompson—his daughter’s best friend. No one had gone to jail because the perpetrator—Amanda Lynch, the clerk told me in a loud stage whisper presumably meant to preserve confidentiality—was deemed to have been acting in defense of her best friend.
And so Amanda’s dad really was dead. And so was her best friend Carolyn.
Afterward, I’d sat there in the blazing sun, trying to google my way to an understanding of how Amanda might have completely erased such a traumatic episode from her memory, and what her hallucinations might mean about her mental state. One of Amanda’s older journals had talked about Carolyn always getting herself in the middle of things. Was that what had happened that awful night all those years ago? Had Carolyn put herself in harm’s way to protect Amanda and ended up dead herself?
According to the ever-unreliable internet, there were many possible causes for Amanda’s hallucinations: schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, psychotic depression. Some illnesses were more serious than others. Some were episodic, others would have disrupted Amanda’s thinking so completely it was hard to imagine she’d have been as high-functioning as she was. But I did come upon one that seemed to click: delusional disorder. According to the Harvard Medical School website I ended up on, a person with delusional disorder “holds a false belief firmly, despite clear evidence or proof to the contrary … Unlike people with schizophrenia, they tend not to have major problems with day-to-day functioning. Other than behaviors related to delusional content, they do not appear odd.”
Fucking Zach. Could I say for sure that a better husband would have been paying close enough attention to see that Amanda needed help? That they might have even saved her from whatever terrible thing had happened to her the night she died? No. I, of all people, could not say that. I could not even say for sure that Amanda had delusional disorder, much less that it was directly tied to her death. But thinking of how tragically isolated Amanda had been was making my chest ache.
“I’m looking for Millie Faber,” I said once I’d made my way to the nurse’s station.
The nurse scanned a list of names. “Room six oh three. Down
the hall and to the left.” She pointed without looking up.
I made my way down the hushed hallway, the stillness back there even worse than the sick, shuffling crowd up front. At least those patients had been able to move. In the back, everyone seemed confined to their beds. How could Millie have seemed okay yesterday, only to be staying on the extra sick hallway today? Of course, my mother had gone from completely fine to absolutely dead in seconds. Also, Millie hadn’t actually seemed fine.
I knocked gently as I pushed open the door to 603, relieved to see Millie sitting upright in a corner chair, laptop on her knees, papers spread out across the dirty linoleum floor. She was in a well-fitting navy-blue sweat suit, not a hospital gown, and she had not lost her hair overnight or shed any more pounds.
“Are you supposed to be doing that?” I asked.
“Doing what?” Millie’s tone was gruff, her eyes still on her computer screen. But her face had brightened for a second when she heard my voice.
“Working,” I said.
She shrugged. “It’s work or worry. Better to keep busy.”
The longer I stared at Millie, the worse she looked, though. “It’s more serious than you said, isn’t it?” I asked.
Millie frowned, eyes locked on her computer. She was quiet for a moment more. Finally, she looked up at me. “It had already metastasized by the time they found it—lung, bones, and liver. The trifecta. Apparently, it’s very unique. Lucky me.”
“Millie, holy shit.” I dropped myself down hard on the nearby windowsill. “I’m so—”
Millie held up a hand. “You know I don’t want pity. What I do want to talk about is how goddamn stupid it was for you to go up there. I thought we had an agreement?”
“Go up where?”
She scowled. “Let’s not lie right to my face. Sam told me.”
“Sam?” I asked. “You don’t even have his number.”
“I went by your house this morning, on my way here,” she said flatly. “Had a feeling you’d gone AWOL. I am a detective, remember?”
Sam had known I was headed to St. Colomb Falls. I’d thrown it at him like a threat: If something happens to me, it will be all your fault. Everything was Sam’s fault now.
“And what did Sam have to say, exactly?”
Millie put the folder down on her lap and rested her hands on top of it. They looked old, bony. “That you’d gone upstate to talk to the dead woman’s father. Who, if I’m not mistaken, you suspect of killing her.” She raised an eyebrow at me. “But Sam didn’t seem to know that part. He seemed confused why you were helping some random guy charged with murder in the first place. There was a lot he didn’t seem to know. Nice guy, though. Chatty.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?” Had she caught Sam buzzed at noon?
“Well, among other things, I could tell he didn’t have a clue who I was.” She lifted her chin and leveled her bloodshot eyes at me.
I moved my mouth to say something. But what? Please can we not do this now? Can we not do it ever? Millie seemed to register the panic in my eyes. Her face softened.
“Anyway,” she went on, “I would have postponed this nonsense by a day if you’d told me you were going to go yourself.”
“It couldn’t wait,” I said, then motioned to the hospital room. “And you couldn’t postpone this.”
“It can always wait. Trust me. This guy isn’t worth risking your life for.”
“It couldn’t wait,” I said again. “For my sake.”
“What does that mean?”
I took a deep breath. I was out of places to hide. “Zach Grayson is extorting me,” I said. “He’s using some compromising information to make me stay on the case until he’s cleared.”
“Seriously?”
“Yes, seriously.”
“Tell him to fuck off then!” Millie shouted.
“You do know how extortion works, right?” I asked. “You tell them to fuck off, and then they do the bad things you don’t want them to do.”
“Wait, this isn’t about—”
“No, no,” I said. “Zach doesn’t know about that. At least, as far as I know.”
“Then what the hell else could he possibly have on you?” She sniffed. Then she leaned in, an eyebrow raised again. “Wait, you didn’t go to one of those sex parties, did you?”
I shook my head. “It’s Sam. He’s an … alcoholic.” The word tore at my throat even now. “That’s where the problem started. The rest spirals out from there. There’s a lawsuit relating to a car accident Sam had, and now we owe a lot of money. I lied about it on a financial disclosure form when I took the job at Young & Crane, because I was worried they wouldn’t hire me. And we so badly needed the money to dig us out of debt. For sure, they’ll fire me if Zach tells them. I could be disbarred. It would ruin my career.”
“That motherfucker.” She shook her head in disgust. “How the hell did he even find that out?”
I shrugged. “Who knows. Other detectives?”
“Bet he pays them.” She smiled.
A nurse came in then with a tray of needles and small bottles of medicine. She set it on the counter behind Millie and, without making eye contact with either one of us, moved about, methodically adjusting various tubes. “You ready to get started in ten, sweetheart?” she asked Millie in a voice that was two parts robot, one part genuinely kind.
“Sure thing,” Millie said. “Soon as I’m done with my friend here.”
“Okay, sweetheart,” the nurse said distractedly as her phone buzzed. “I’ll be right back.”
She hustled out then, already on her phone.
“All right, we’ll figure out how to deal with Zach Grayson in a second,” Millie said once she was gone. “In the meantime, what did you find upstate? You have the prints? Not to reward your dumb-ass judgment, but as soon as I found out you went up there, I reached out to the lab. Got them to agree to run one more comparator sample for us on a rush basis whenever we have it. Just the one, and only to the print on the stair, and maybe the golf bag. But at least they agreed to bill us after the fact. All I need to do is call and say the word.”
“What about Vinnie?”
Millie waved a hand. “It’s one sample. He’ll survive.”
“You didn’t tell him.”
“Not yet.”
“Thank you,” I said with a dejected exhale. “But unfortunately all I discovered in St. Colomb Falls was that everything I thought I knew was wrong. Turns out Xavier Lynch is Amanda’s uncle, not her father. And Amanda’s father couldn’t have killed her because he’s dead. It happened twelve years ago. The father attacked Amanda’s friend; Amanda intervened. Her father and the friend both ended up dead.”
Millie let out a long whistle.
“I confirmed it with the St. Colomb Falls clerk’s office. Amanda was a juvenile, so the criminal records are sealed, but they told me enough.”
“I thought she had a whole journal about her dad stalking her?”
I nodded. “And she’d told her Park Slope friends that the dead friend was alive and well in Manhattan,” I said. “Amanda was troubled, clearly—seems to have been delusional, which calls into question all her observations. Or so the prosecution will say.”
“So no one was stalking her?”
I shrugged. “No one. Or someone other than her dad.”
“Weird that your friend Zach didn’t notice, huh?” And she meant weird as in: There’s no fucking way that’s true.
“Apparently, Amanda was high-functioning. Her friends didn’t notice anything wrong either. Then again, they’d only known her for a few months. But she had a job and took great care of her son, everyone agrees about that. Her delusions must have been contained. Zach claims she hadn’t said a word about her dad in years, not about any stalker either,” I said. “Sounds like they didn’t talk much about anything.”
“You believe him?”
“About that I do. Zach’s a narcissist. I don’t think he had any interest in hearing about A
manda’s problems. My guess is he made clear she was on her own.”
“Well, that’s fucking awful,” Millie said. “Where does it leave you?”
“Stuck on a case, and with a client I want the hell away from. But I’m pretty sure the only way to do that is to get the charges dismissed. Some unidentified person’s fingerprints are in the blood on those stairs. Which means somebody else was there that night. Somebody who didn’t call the police and who hasn’t come forward.”
“Of course it doesn’t necessarily mean your client didn’t kill her. He could have been there, too. He could have hired someone.”
“I know,” I said. “But even if he did, I’ve got to get him off if I want to keep my job. Unless I can figure some other way out, like finding something I can use against Zach. Make it worth his while to let me off the hook.”
Millie nodded. “I like that idea much better. Either way, just get your ass away from this whole thing. Life’s way too fucking short for this bullshit. Trust me.” She lifted one of the folders off the floor and held it out to me, but didn’t relinquish her grip. “This is everything I’ve got. And I’m giving it to you on the condition that you don’t do any more of your own sleuthing out in the field. I will find you someone to help for free if need be.”
I nodded too quickly. “Of course not.”
She let go of the file. “Hmm. That’s what you said yesterday. It’s bad karma to lie to people who are dying.”
“Come on, you’re not—”
“I am, Lizzie,” she said. Her expression was serious, but also calm. “That’s the reality. And it could happen anytime. That’s what the doctors have said. Point-blank. A bunch of times. They don’t go around telling you to get your affairs in order just for shits and giggles. This whole chemo thing is a Hail Mary pass. It’s possible it’ll even make me worse, fast. That’s why all the emails. I wanted to be sure I’d spoken to you … in case. You know I’ve always been more than happy to do anything that might make things a little bit easier for you. After everything your mother did for me when Nancy was sick, that’s the least I could do. But me being the intermediary—it was always a Band-Aid, wasn’t it?” She was quiet for a moment, then looked up at me through narrowed eyes. My heart was picking up speed. “What does Sam know, exactly?”
A Good Marriage Page 30
