Her Last Breath

by Hilary Davidson

  “Of course you did, Ursula.”

  “It would have been better if she’d married into a different family,” she said. “Marriage to a Thraxton is sheer misery.”

  I took that as a comment on my father, but it could just as easily have applied to me. “Did you tell Caroline that?”

  “I believe the words passed my lips.”

  Even my stepmother, who’d raised me as her own child, thought I was a monster. I couldn’t blame her. She knew everything about me and what I’d done.

  “There is only one person I can think of who hates you enough to open up the Pandora’s box of your past,” Ursula added. “She would laugh to see your marriage crumble.”

  I understood what she meant immediately. There were any number of people who wouldn’t mind watching my life fall apart, but only one who would actively try to destroy it.

  CHAPTER 11

  THEO

  I walked Ursula home, even though it was only across the street. Then I went back to morosely contemplating photographs on the wall of my bedroom. Had there ever been any photographs of Mirelle and me together? In this digital age, when people chronicled every mediocre meal, it seemed impossible that there weren’t any. But we’d met at a particularly dark period in my life, and I’d only spiraled further down afterward. I’d started using drugs like ketamine and midazolam when I was a teenager to block whispered words and violent images from my mind. Adding heroin to that mix had dragged me into hell.

  I am full of hidden horrors, whispered the worst of the voices.

  I picked up my phone. It was after ten o’clock, but Dr. Haven kept unusual hours. She answered on the third ring.

  “I’m sorry to bother you so late. This is Theo Archer”—my best attempt at an alias was using my mother’s maiden name—“but I was really hoping to make an appointment with you.”

  “We can talk right now if you’re in crisis,” she said. “Are you okay, Theo?”

  “I’m fine,” I lied. The truth was, I never felt like I had any privacy in a building owned by my family. The town house had been a wedding gift to us, but my father’s name was still on the ownership papers. He wasn’t the relative I was worried about at that moment; that honor went to my sister, who had always been ready to stab me through the heart. When Ursula said there was only one person who hated me enough to reveal my past to Caroline, Juliet was who she meant. “But if you have any open appointments tomorrow . . .”

  “You could come by at eleven, but I only have half an hour,” she said.

  “I’ll take it. Thank you.”

  I’d seen various psychologists and psychiatrists at my father’s insistence when I was young, but I quickly realized they all reported back to my family. My sister delighted in mocking me, emailing therapy suggestions to help me over what she described as my pathological fear of animals. I hadn’t set foot in a zoo since I was three, and unfortunately my son was obsessed with them. I’d found Dr. Haven on my own, and she was my secret. But the therapy I was working on with her was not at all what Juliet was suggesting.

  I heard a dull thud, and I leaped up. The sound had come from Teddy’s room. I hurried up the hall and opened the door.

  My heart skipped a beat, because Teddy wasn’t in bed.

  I turned on the light, and there was a squawk from the other side of his room. Teddy and his accomplice, Bunny, were sitting in front of his bookcase.

  “What are you doing?” I asked. “You’re supposed to be in bed.”

  Teddy pulled Bunny closer. “Nothing.”

  He had several large storybooks pulled out and strewn around the floor. He was holding something in his hand but shielding it from my sight.

  “Teddy, what are you doing?”

  “Nothing,” he repeated.

  “It doesn’t look like nothing. What are you holding there?”

  “Can’t tell you,” he said.

  “Why not?”

  “Mama said it’s secret.”

  I came closer. “That’s changed now, Teddy. Mama’s gone, so you can tell me everything.”

  Teddy’s eyes were big as quarters, and he gazed at me pleadingly. “But when she comes back?”

  I sat on the rug beside him. “I wish she would. But she’s not going to, Teddy. It’s just us now.”

  He was hugging something to his chest.

  “Can I see that?” I asked.

  He allowed me to take it from him. It was a heart-shaped gold locket. Inside was an adorable childhood photograph of Caroline and her sister.

  “It’s a picture of Mama,” he said softly. “With Auntie Dee. They’re just little.”

  “It’s beautiful,” I said. “You took it from Mama’s room?”

  “No! Mama left it here.” He pointed at his bookcase.

  “Why would she do that?”

  “She said gremlins move things around. It’s safe here.”

  Caroline had been making bizarre accusations over the past several months, accusing me of invading her privacy.

  “Can we go to the zoo tomorrow?” Teddy asked me, his tone brightening.

  “Maybe you can go with Gloria?”

  “You never go with me.” He hugged Bunny tightly. “Mama will take me.”

  My son sounded so determined when he spoke, as if the past week had simply been a bad dream. It broke my heart. “You know Mama isn’t coming back, don’t you, Teddy?”

  “You said you can still see her.” His voice was shrill with the piercing logic of a young child. It was my fault for not knowing how to explain to him that his mother was dead. When he cried, I tried to console him with the idea that you can hold someone you love in your heart, even though you can’t touch them. It was foolish of me to hope that a boy who wasn’t yet four could grasp that concept; I couldn’t manage it myself.

  “The service at the church was for her, Teddy,” I said gently.

  “Uh-huh.”

  “You need to get back into bed,” I said.

  “I’m not tired.”

  “What about Bunny? He looks sleepy, doesn’t he?”

  Teddy considered his friend seriously. “You are tired, Bunny,” he said, sounding slightly surprised, as if the stuffed animal had spoken.

  I tucked them both into bed and got Teddy some water. “No more adventures tonight,” I said. “Sweet dreams.”

  “Where’s Mama now?” Teddy asked.

  My heart skipped a beat. “She’s in a better place, Teddy.” Until that moment, I’d never understood why people offered platitudes like that to children. But I had nothing else to give him.

  CHAPTER 12

  DEIRDRE

  At eight in the morning, I was at the Seventeenth Precinct on East Fifty-First Street waiting to talk to Luis Villaverde, the detective quoted in the article about Caro’s death. I hadn’t had any contact with the police after they’d told me she was dead. Someone else—Theo was the obvious suspect—had dealt with the identification and formalities.

  Villaverde gave me a toothy grin. He was in his midthirties, olive skinned and dark eyed. He wasn’t tall but he was muscular, with dents on his nose and scars on his face that made him look like a washed-up boxer. “How are you holding up?” he asked.

  “We had the funeral yesterday,” I said. “It was hard.”

  “Sudden deaths are always tough to square. Especially when someone’s as young as your sister. What can I do for you?”

  “I need to talk to you about the case.”

  “The case?” He eyed me skeptically.

  “Could we talk somewhere private?”

  We ended up in an interview room, sitting in metal chairs across from each other over a metal table. “I guess this makes it hard for people to leave graffiti,” I said, thinking of the wooden table I’d been questioned at when I was fifteen. There had been dozens of sets of initials carved into it, plus choice insults for the cops.

  “Mostly it’s because of bedbugs,” Villaverde answered. “What did you want to talk about?”

  �
��What’s going on with the investigation?”

  “We don’t have an open investigation.” He looked bemused. “Your sister died of a heart attack, to put it in the simplest terms. Unfortunately, she had an underlying heart condition from her pregnancy.”

  “What are you talking about?” Even though I was confused, a memory zipped through my brain. “Wait, is this about Caro having hypertension when she was pregnant with Teddy? Because that stopped after he was born.”

  The cop flipped through some notes on a yellow pad. “According to her doctor, she had an arrhythmia that became an ongoing issue. Your sister didn’t tell anyone, far as we can tell. Her husband didn’t know. Your dad didn’t know.”

  No one had explained Caro’s heart issue to me before. “I can’t believe it was serious enough to kill her. She never said anything.”

  “She might’ve lived if she hadn’t hit her head,” Villaverde said. “People think a concussion only harms your brain, but it affects your heart. It constricts how it beats. It’s a tragedy, what happened to her, but as soon as we establish that there was no foul play involved, it’s not our department anymore.”

  “How do you know there was no foul play?” I demanded. “Why was there no autopsy?”

  “Look, a lot of people think an autopsy is automatic,” Villaverde said. “But that’s only true if the person was a victim of violence. Otherwise, it’s largely up to the family. We asked in this case, and her husband said no.”

  Of course Theo had refused. Whatever he’d done to Caro had been careful and quiet.

  I found the printout of Caro’s email. “I got a message from my sister yesterday. She wrote it just before she died. You need to read it.” I slid it across the table so that he could.

  “You got this yesterday?” Villaverde raised a dubious eyebrow. “She died over a week ago.”

  “Caro set the message up to go out if she died.”

  “How do we know this is legit? Anybody could set something up online.”

  “My sister is the only person in the world who’d make these references to our family.”

  He gave it a quick once-over. “She called you Dodo in it. That’s your nickname?”

  “It was when I was in kindergarten. She was Caro and I was Dodo. That’s what our parents called us.” I didn’t understand why he was zeroing in on the least interesting part of the message. “There’s more to it than that. I keep thinking of Mom, and how you never believe you’re going to end up like one of your parents, until you do.” I took a breath. “That’s a reference to a letter my mother wrote a long time ago. It’s the real reason I know this email is from my sister. Literally no one else knows these details about my family.”

  “What details?”

  At that moment, it would’ve been easier to strip down to my underwear and hurl myself out a window than tell him the truth. But what choice did I have? “My father used to hit my mother. They argued all the time, and it would get physical. Especially when he was drinking, which was pretty often back then.”

  “Were the police ever called?”

  I started to laugh, before I caught myself. “We were supposed to act like it didn’t happen. In my family, it was a bigger crime to tell an outsider about private stuff than it was for my father to hit my mom in the first place.” My parents were immigrants from Northern Ireland; nothing was more sacred to them than their code of silence.

  “Did your father hit you or your sister?”

  “No. We were girls, so it was our mother’s job to discipline us.”

  “Did your mother hit you?”

  “That’s none of your business.” The words burst out of my chest. I wasn’t there to talk about my mother. She had died of cancer just before Teddy was born. We’d disagreed on a lot of things, but I’d always loved her.

  He frowned, but he let that slide. “How bad did it get with your father?”

  “When I was fifteen, I found a letter my mom had written, in case anything ever happened to her. She put it in the family Bible.” My chin sank toward my chest, as if I were in confession. The contents of her message were seared into my brain. Ryan Crawley is not a terrible man, but he’s capable of terrible things. If I am beaten to a bloody pulp, or die suddenly in an “accidental” fall, know that my husband is responsible. He’ll be contrite, but it will be too late. Please take care of my girls. I love them.

  The memory made me shiver, even all these years later. Caro was away at college then, and I’d called her in a panic to tell her what I’d found. She’d been bizarrely calm. Put it back, she’d told me. Pretend you never laid eyes on it.

  How can I do that? I’d cried. He’s going to kill her one day.

  Stop being so dramatic, Caro had said. This is just what they do. Ignore it. Focus on your own life.

  The cop cracked his knuckles, snapping me back to reality. “Okay,” Villaverde said, returning to the printout of Caroline’s message; I’d gotten up before the crack of dawn that morning so my landlord wouldn’t catch me using her printer. “If you’re reading this, I’m already dead. No matter what it looks like, my death won’t be an accident. Theo killed his first wife and got away with it. Bring him to justice, no matter what you have to do.” He cleared his throat. “Who was this first wife?”

  “I didn’t know she existed until yesterday,” I said. “But I confronted Theo about it. He didn’t tell me her name, but he admitted he was married before.”

  “He give you any details?”

  “I asked if she was buried in the family plot Caroline was being buried in. Theo said no.”

  “That’s it?”

  Even I had to admit it sounded weak. “He was angry. He couldn’t believe I knew. I can get more out of him. He ran off, and because we were at the gravesite, I couldn’t corner him again. But I’ll—”

  “You don’t need to do anything.”

  “But I can—”

  “This is our job, Deirdre. Just leave it with us.”

  “What are you going to do?”

  “We’ll check out this tip about the first wife,” Villaverde said. “If there’s anything relevant, we’ll reopen the case.”

  “There’s nothing about her,” I said. “I was up all night searching for everything I could find about the Thraxton family. There’s no mention of Theo being married before.”

  “If he was, we’ll find out. There’s always a paper trail.”

  It was agony, hearing him say if. I sat straighter in my chair. I knew I was someone he’d laugh about later with his partner.

  “What was Theo’s alibi?”

  “His what?”

  “His alibi,” I repeated. “What was it?”

  “He was on a business trip to Thailand,” Villaverde said. “But we never followed up on alibis in the case of your sister’s death, because we have it on security camera.”

  I remembered a line from an article I’d read: the socialite was caught on multiple security cameras during her run and there was nothing suspicious. But that only meant no one had seen anyone harm her. What if her heart condition wasn’t just from arrhythmia? I tried to think of a way to say that without sounding like a nut.

  “We have your sister on tape for most of her run that morning,” he added. “On a bunch of different cams from block to block. Do you want to see it?”

  NO, my brain screamed. I didn’t want to watch my sister die. I couldn’t imagine anything worse.

  But I said, “Okay.”

  I was in a trance as Villaverde led me to his desk, which held a huge computer screen. Before I knew it, I was watching grainy black-and-white footage of Caro. She wore a fitted dark top and leggings, and her blonde mane was pulled back in a ponytail. I watched her jog up to an empty intersection and pause, pressing her hand against the center of her chest.

  It was like a horror movie, only I knew exactly how this one ended.

  “The one thing that was a little funny was that your sister went running down to the United Nations,” Villaverde said. “H
er nanny said she liked to run in Central Park. Any idea why she went south instead?”

  “No,” I whispered, my eyes transfixed by the screen.

  I watched Caro run, her calm face oddly pained. Had she known she was going to die?

  “This is the bad part, at the Isaiah Wall,” Villaverde said.

  Caro clutched her chest and paused, but she slowly made her way up the steps, then vanished.

  I stared, barely blinking, waiting for more.

  “Where did she go?”

  “The steps curve up. There’s a blind spot after that landing,” Villaverde said. “She’ll be on screen again in a sec. I can fast-forward . . .”

  “No.” I wanted him to leave it. As the seconds ticked by, sweat dribbled down the back of my neck. There was Caro, straightening up at the top of the stairs, rolling her neck from side to side. She took four steps and vanished again. The next camera that caught her was farther away. My sister stepped through a waist-high gate and disappeared.

  “Where did she go?” I demanded.

  “Into the park. There are no cameras in there. But no one else goes in or comes out while she’s there.” He fast-forwarded. “There’s five minutes of nothing. Then this.”

  Finally my sister reappeared, only she was moving very slowly, hunched over like she’d aged seventy years. Her left hand was on her chest, and her right was touching the back of her head. She faded off camera again and materialized at the top of the steps beside the Isaiah Wall. Suddenly, both hands went to her heart, and she convulsed. Her body made a graceful little quarter-turn and she dropped, disappearing from the camera’s view until her body fell onto the stone landing. Even though there was no sound on the video, I could hear a sickening thud.

  “You saw her clutching her chest?” Villaverde asked. “She was already in cardiac arrest then. That’s why she fell.”