by Megan Goldin
‘What, Joe?’
‘I could swear the blond woman in that photo was in one of the photos at the Sommerville riding school.’
Chapter Twenty-Five
Julie
I wake with a bitter taste in my mouth and a pounding headache. It’s late morning. The sun streams into my bedroom. The house is quiet save for the reassuring hum of the dishwasher in the kitchen. I lie in bed and listen to it for a while. The familiar mechanical rhythm lulls me back to sleep.
When I wake again, the dishwasher is no longer running. I’m unsure whether the cycle is over or if it’s a different day. I crawl deeper under the covers and drift off.
Each day blurs into the next. Some days I wake so late that I don’t bother getting out of bed. Other days I blindly make my way to the shower and go through the motions of getting dressed and fixing my hair. Usually my pathetic efforts at restoring normality exhaust me so much that I’m back in bed by early afternoon. The lethargy that fills me is overwhelming.
Matt’s been amazing. When he’s home from work, he spoils me with freshly squeezed orange juice and fruit shakes that I don’t really feel like drinking. He brings me newspapers and magazines and leaves bouquets of flowers from the garden in a vase next to my bed. He has arranged for a neighbour to pick up Alice from school until I feel better. Even the groceries are delivered to the house. I don’t need to do any shopping. He cooks dinner some nights and on others he buys prepared food from a delicatessen in our local strip mall. There’s really nothing to do except sleep.
‘Relax, Julie,’ he tells me. ‘Get some rest. It will make you feel better.’
The thing is that it doesn’t make me feel better. It makes me feel as if I’m in quicksand. The more I struggle to get out, the deeper I am dragged in.
I don’t know how many days have passed since Matt became vigilant about my medication. ‘It’s for your own good,’ he says every time I make a face during the nightly ritual of him handing me capsules and watching intently as I swallow them with a glass of water.
I wake again. Another morning. Rays of sunlight pour in. Time is passing without me noticing. The cloudless sky shimmering an incandescent azure gives me a new purpose to get up, to break out of the monotony of this new daily routine.
I stumble to the bathroom feeling light-headed. I sit on the toilet seat long after I’ve finished peeing, trying to think of what I need to do next. I decide to shower and wash every part of me so that I feel new and reinvigorated.
In the shower, I lean forwards with my hands against the wall tiles as hot water runs down my back. Steam condenses on the glass shower doors. It reminds me of the windshield of a car, shattered into a spiderweb of cracks.
‘You’re not safe, Julie.’ A rasping voice suddenly comes into my head. ‘You need to get away.’
The words run in a loop. My legs buckle. I slide down the tiled wall until I’m sitting on the marble shower floor with water hitting me in a steady barrage.
I lose track of time. Eventually I muster whatever strength I have left and scramble out. In the bathroom mirror I’m confronted by a naked woman, slippery and wet, with translucent skin and frightened eyes.
‘Julie, you need to get away,’ says a raspy voice. ‘You’re not safe.’
My wet hands slip clumsily on the door as I try to escape. When it opens, I’m suddenly afraid to leave the safety of the bathroom. I’m terrified of what awaits me on the other side. I feel as if I am drowning a little bit more each day. The more I fight, the more I descend into an abyss.
Chapter Twenty-Six
Mel
No matter how hard Joe tried to project boredom, it was obvious that he’d gotten a kick out of the day. His shoulders were straight for a change, not slumped. He was more animated than I’d seen him in ages. Best of all was the smile on his face. It had been too long since I’d seen anything but a petulant scowl.
‘You have a real knack for this type of work, Joe,’ I told him. We were in the kitchen and I was cutting vegetables for a garden salad.
‘It was kind of fun,’ he said. ‘I wouldn’t mind going out with you again, Mom.’
‘Well, you’re not done working yet. There’s something else I need you to help with.’
‘What?’
‘Start up the computer and I’ll show you,’ I said as I put spaghetti in a pot of salted boiling water. On the way home we’d picked up a hard drive from the events company that had organised the psychology conference. Their head office was in the downtown precinct. I’d intended to watch the conference footage later when the boys were asleep, but if the investigation kept up Joe’s enthusiasm then I’d milk it for all it was worth.
‘Ready,’ Joe called out once the hard drive was connected to the computer. I pulled up a chair alongside him at the work desk in the niche in the kitchen. I scrolled through the files until I found the video from the conference. I fast-forwarded through it until I reached the footage of Matthew West’s address on the Saturday that Laura West was last seen alive.
‘Hypnotism,’ Professor West said, ‘is highly controversial. Some say it’s quackery and others say it’s a placebo effect; the power of suggestion. In a study that I conducted, I found that among certain subjects, hypnotism actually affects brain function on an organic level.’ He clicked to a slide with a graphic of the human brain.
‘We chose thirty subjects who we found responded to hypnotism more than the average person. We conducted a range of experiments on them. For example, we gave the men a brick and timed how long they could hold it out front with one hand. They lasted, on average, two minutes and thirty-three seconds.’
He put up a slide with a photograph of the test subjects holding out bricks.
‘Then we hypnotised the subjects and asked them to do the same thing, except this time we told them they were holding a feather, not a brick. Under hypnosis, they held the brick in front of them for twenty minutes and eleven seconds, on average.
‘We took those same subjects to a medical facility and put them in an MRI machine to monitor their brain activity under hypnosis,’ he explained. ‘While they were in the machine we showed them various objects and asked them to identify the colour of each. When we hypnotised them with the suggestion that every object was blue, twenty-nine out of thirty of our test subjects identified every colour shown to them as blue. It didn’t matter what colour we put before them – red, pink, orange, yellow, green, black – you name it, they said they were all blue. Now, let’s look at the brain scans of subjects under hypnosis.’
I fast-forwarded through his address until the audience applauded and he walked off the podium to return to his place at the speakers’ table.
‘Here’s what I need, Joe.’ I paused the video. ‘I need you to go through the other video files after this one and let me know if at any point you don’t see Matthew West sitting at that table. Ok? If he gets up for any reason, write down the time code he leaves the room and the time code when you see him coming back.’
‘Sure thing, Mom.’
‘Good. But let’s eat dinner first.’
We sat down with Sammy to spaghetti bolognese and a bowl of fresh salad that nobody touched except me. After dinner, Sammy did his English homework at the table, while Joe went through the rest of the conference video on the computer.
‘Mom,’ he called out to me twenty minutes later as I was unloading the dishwasher. ‘Mom. He’s gone.’ I watched the video over his shoulder.
‘That professor dude,’ he said. ‘Check this out.’ Joe rewound the video and played it. ‘He gets up from the table here,’ he pointed to the screen. ‘Then he goes out of the room. And he doesn’t return back to his table.’
‘Are you sure he doesn’t move to a different table, Joe?’ I asked. I scrolled through the video backwards and forwards. Joe was right. There was no sign of Matthew West in the audience during the subsequent speakers’ presentations. Matthew West’s disappearance in this video was a possible chink in his alibi. But did it
give him enough of a window to drive across the state, murder his wife, and return for the conference dinner that night?
‘Great work, Joe,’ I said. ‘Watch the rest of the footage in case he comes back.’
‘You know, Mom,’ he said, looking up from the monitor, ‘I’m thinking that maybe I should be a cop after all.’
I worked on my laptop at the dinner table next to Sammy, researching Matthew West’s professional profile. He’d written several papers in the years before Laura’s death. From what I could tell they were all published in minor psychology journals. His career had only really taken off four years ago, after he’d published a landmark study in a prominent journal. It had been extremely well received. I found write-ups and profiles, referring to him as an up-and-coming figure in the field of cognitive psychology.
Still, when I looked closely at his resume, I noticed that for a number of years early on in his career Matthew West was teaching at minor universities as an adjunct professor until, seemingly out of the blue, he received a full professorship at the leading university in our town, an institution with a national reputation. Why the sudden change in fortune?
I looked up Laura West. She was also Ivy League. Unlike her husband, she won a slew of awards for her work even when she was still in graduate school. She had so many fellowships and honours, including one at Oxford for a year, that I had to make a list in my notebook to keep track of them. Matthew West’s progression seemed lacklustre by comparison.
Laura West moved to this university with Matthew, her husband of two years at the time. She was a full professor while he was an adjunct professor. I suspected that it might have been a two-for-one deal. The university got her as long as they took him as well.
My phone vibrated on the table. The number of the forensics lab flashed on the screen.
‘Hey Dennis. You’re up late.’
‘I’m on vacation next week. Trying to clear the backlog before I go.’ He sounded tired. ‘Remember I told you we found fibres on the red jacket from the Kellers Way vic?’
‘Sure, did you manage to source them?’
‘We did,’ he said. ‘We found two types of trace material on her clothes. The first seems to indicate the victim, or at least her clothes, had been around lake water some time before she died. Possibly on a boat.’
‘When you say some time, are you talking about hours or days before she died?’
‘It’s hard to tell,’ he said.
‘What about the second trace material on her clothes?’
‘They match a carpet fibre used in Korean cars back around six, seven years ago. Both Hyundai and Kia used that particular carpet at that time. They no longer use it because it doesn’t meet the new rules for flame-retardant textiles. It’s been out of circulation for at least five years. That’s why it took us so long to match it,’ he said. ‘The fibres were largely concentrated on the left side of the jacket and pants, so it looks as if the vic was lying on her left side in a car, or more likely, a car trunk.’
‘So you think the victim’s body might have been brought to the burial site in a Hyundai or Kia. Probably transported in the trunk?’
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘That’s exactly what I think.’
The moment I got off the phone I logged into the police database on my laptop and searched Matthew West’s car history. He was not a Korean car sort of guy. This man liked his cars American and high-end.
But I discovered the same could not be said for his second wife, Julie, when her name came up against the Lincoln they currently owned. At the time that Laura West disappeared, Julie was registered as the owner of a Hyundai sedan.
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Julie
I’ve thought about it long and hard, and I’ve decided I won’t take my meds anymore. They make me passive. They fill me with inertia. They destroy any clarity of thought.
Every night Matt brings me the medication along with a glass of water. Such solicitude. He’s the model of a perfect husband. When I look at his expression as he watches me swallow my meds, I have to wonder why he’s so diligent about keeping me drugged out of my mind.
‘You’re not safe, Julie.’ That raspy voice intrudes on my sleep every night. I see the bloody face of a man, dying. I smell smoke that chokes my lungs, and the unmistakable scent of blood. If the car accident didn’t happen then why does it feel so real?
Tonight I make a show of taking my meds. I shove the capsules into my mouth and drink half the glass of water he hands me, washing them down without complaint. What Matt doesn’t notice is that I’m holding the capsules underneath my tongue when I drink the water. It’s taken me two weeks to perfect that trick. When Matt leaves to brush his teeth in the bathroom, I spit the capsules into my hand and hide them underneath the mattress. The next day, thanks to that little trick I pulled on Matt, I wake up med-free and energised. It’s a minor victory. I collect the capsules from under my mattress and wash them down the bathroom sink. It’s mid-morning and the only sound in our neighbourhood is the drone of a mower on someone’s lawn.
I strip off my pyjamas and step into the shower. The cold water is invigorating. It wakes me. Not just my body, but my mind. I haven’t gone running for ages and I’m probably out of shape, but I put on my running clothes and shoes and quickly head out the front door before I change my mind.
Minutes later I’m running down the gentle slope of our street. I should do an easy loop around the neighbourhood and build up to a more ambitious run. I don’t. I turn right, in the direction of the toughest route in the area. I run towards Kellers Way.
I tell myself it’s because I want to be challenged. To see if I can still do it. That’s a lie. Deep down, I know it. I run towards Kellers Way because I don’t want to be afraid anymore. Because I want to remember.
There’s nobody on our street except for a handyman hammering on a front porch. A dog goes berserk as I run past the house on the corner. I cross the road and run through the local park, which is blooming with pink and white flowers on otherwise unremarkable trees that will return to being plain once the petals fall.
It doesn’t take long until I’m descending down Kellers Way under a canopy thick enough to shroud the forest in an eerie darkness, broken only by irregular sunlight stealing through gaps between branches. It’s only when I’m surrounded by the rustling of trees that I’m hit with the uncomfortable thought that this is where Laura’s body was found. It’s too late to turn back. And why the hell should I? Kellers Way is my sanctuary. I won’t let Laura take that from me as well.
My feet thump heavily against the asphalt as I get into my stride, the beat of crickets rises and falls as I move deeper along Kellers Way. I inhale and exhale the crisp air in short bursts.
Down an incline off the road, a piece of torn plastic tape with the words ‘Crime Scene’ hangs from a branch. I slip underneath and reach a clearing. A section of ground has been freshly filled with soil. This must be the place where they found Laura’s body.
It makes me inexplicably sad. I pick a wildflower and toss it gently towards the dark patch of topsoil near the gravesite. It seems like the right thing to do.
I turn back to the road and resume my run. Five, ten minutes later, I reach a sharp bend by a poplar tree. I stop to drink water and tighten my laces. This tree is my unofficial halfway point when I make this run. I look down an embankment covered with shrubs and I’m assailed by a memory of me frantically crawling up the slope, getting mud under my fingernails as I pull myself up to the top.
‘You’re not safe, Julie. You need to get away.’
A glint of red in the dirt catches my eye. I scrape away a thin layer of soil with the edge of my sneaker until lying in front of me is a piece of translucent red plastic. I poke around in the foliage with a stick to see if I can find more. The stick hits something hard. I slide the object out from under the bush and pick it up. It’s a much larger piece of broken plastic. The two pieces of red plastic fit together to form the cover of a car headlig
ht.
It confirms what I’ve always known deep in my heart; there really was a car accident here that morning. Matt’s wrong. My memory hasn’t been playing tricks on me. I remember what happened in Kellers Way.
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Mel
I arrived at my office to find my partner Will back at his desk with a bronze tan and a clipped hairstyle that made him look more marine than cop.
‘Good thing you came back today, Will. I was about to file a missing persons report,’ I said. Truth be told, it was a relief to have Will back. It had been an intense few weeks managing single-handedly, especially with all my troubles at home with Joe.
‘First proper vacation I’ve had in a decade. I should get married every year just for the honeymoon,’ he joked, before strolling to the lunchroom to make morning coffee. Will is a master coffee maker and a coffee snob to boot, which means the only coffee he drinks is his own. His dream is to open a coffee shop in the gentrified warehouse district downtown and sell coffee and chocolate chip cookies. Nothing else. I’ve warned him that he’d last two minutes out of this job. He was born to be a cop, just like me.
Will and I are currently the only dedicated homicide detectives in this town. When things get really bad, a detective from the drug squad is assigned to help out. That rarely happens these days. They’re badly stretched too. The town has recently become a stop-off on the east coast drug trafficking route from Miami to New York. Added to that, there’s a thriving industry of dealers who sell drugs to students at the three colleges around town. Those kids buy everything from study drugs used to boost concentration come exam time to recreational drugs to help them unwind.
‘You’ll have to give me more than one of your famous lattes to soften me up,’ I told Will when he returned with two steaming coffees. ‘You can’t imagine how crazy it’s been running cases solo while you were tanning in Cancun.’
