by Adam Mitzner
So when I reenter the room, I hand Ella her water, careful to keep the second glass at my hip. If she hasn’t noticed the scar up until now, I aim to keep it that way. If all goes according to plan, she won’t have anything to fear from Dylan Perry—until my hands are around her throat.
I take the glass of water he’s offering. The other remains in place, blocking his scar.
“Thank you,” I say.
He nods that he’s heard me, but doesn’t say anything. That’s when a second, horrifying thought hits me: Dylan knows that I know that Charlotte’s killer has a scar on his hip. That’s why he’s trying to shield it from me.
He saw my notes. That’s the only explanation. Like an idiot, I left them on the dining table. He must have seen them when he got the water. I might as well have written him a letter saying that I know he killed my sister.
Stay calm, I tell myself. Relax your breathing. He’ll know if your demeanor toward him has changed.
I slowly move to leave the bed. To grab the knife.
“Where do you think you’re going, young lady?”
“I’m cold,” I lie. “I’m going to get my sweatshirt.”
“I’ve got a much better way to keep you warm,” he says.
I slide between the sheets, careful to keep my torso twisted so Ella cannot see my hip. After I’ve placed my water glass on the nightstand, I turn to Ella.
I move to grab my handbag, which means closing the distance between Dylan and me. He must think I’m engaging, however, because he takes the opportunity to press his lips onto mine, ramming his tongue into my mouth. It’s as disgusting to me as if he’d vomited.
Then he pushes me back onto the bed, his hands pressing down on my shoulders, effectively pinning me down.
I position my body on top of Ella’s, careful to make sure that my weight immobilizes her. The irony strikes me that I choked Charlotte to death without meaning to, and now I’m worried that it might be difficult to do the same thing to Ella—even though this time I’ll be acting with clear purpose.
Dylan’s weight makes it impossible for me to move. I struggle to shift my shoulders off the mattress, trying to get any part of me out from under him.
He doesn’t seem to notice my hand reaching over to the nightstand. Instead, he’s focused on getting himself to his goal. As he does, I slide slightly away from him, each time moving a little closer to my own.
My arm extends as far as it can, feeling the hard wooden corner of the nightstand. Dylan has entered me, which allows me one final movement. He undoubtedly thinks that I’m bucking with him, rather than trying to reach the weapon with which I’m planning to kill him.
I’m fully submerged, and she’s defenseless.
I move my right hand to her throat. Then my left.
All of a sudden, both of Dylan’s hands grasp my throat.
I abandon all thoughts of my purse and enter survival mode, grabbing his wrists to break his hold, but I’m no match for his strength. His grip tightens.
I can feel her submission. Her eyes are bulging, as if she can’t believe that it’s actually happening. It is nothing like killing Charlotte. Then it seemed to move in a flash, but this time everything is in slow motion.
I press down harder. It will be over very soon.
I can’t break his hold on my throat. My only chance now is the knife.
My hand flails for the table, knocking aside a framed photograph of Charlotte and me, and the glass Dylan just placed there flies to the floor. His grip tightens further around my neck. I can actually feel myself slipping away. My fingers splay out, reaching as far as I can.
The touch of the purse’s leather strap gives me a renewed strength. I stretch every inch of my limb, from the shoulder socket to the finger joints, until, at last, I’m wrapping my palm around the knife’s smooth grip.
In one swift motion, I whip the blade up and plunge it as hard as I can into Dylan’s side.
He screams in pain. The force of my thrust pushes him off me.
I pull the knife out of him. He looks relieved, as if I’ve just saved his life.
Then I drive the point as hard as I can into his throat.
He gasps and begins to shake. I let go of the blade, leaving it in his neck as he rolls onto his back.
It’s his eyes that stay with me to this day. The shock in them. I wonder if that’s what Charlotte looked like as he strangled her to death.
After spending nearly my entire adulthood prosecuting criminals, I finally understand the rush of adrenaline that accompanies taking a life. Dylan Perry—or whatever the hell his name really is—is sprawled on my bed with blood pouring out of his neck and his side, and all I feel is the exhilaration of knowing I’ve avenged my sister’s murder.
38.
I sit beside Dylan’s body for more than a half hour. The first—I don’t know how long—five minutes or so, before he succumbed to the inevitable, I didn’t do anything but stare at him, watching the blood flow from his wounds. A thick river of red pooling on my white linens.
All that time, I didn’t say a word. No screams of anger. No cursing his name. No shouting about what he’d taken from me. I’ve communicated all I had to say with the blade.
He gets the message. Enough to know that asking for help is futile. His eyes remain fixed on mine, though. So much so that they don’t move when he expires.
That’s when I call Gabriel.
“You need to come to my apartment. The guy who killed Charlotte just tried to kill me, and now he’s dead.”
I say it like that. Cool and collected. As if I was giving someone directions to the market, rather than admitting to the police that I’d just taken a man’s life.
I expect him to remind me that it was only a few hours ago I told him Paul Michelson had killed my sister. In fact, he might be interrogating Paul at this very moment.
“I’m going to call a patrol in the neighborhood,” Gabriel says instead. “They’ll get to your place before me, but I’m going to tell them not to question you. And if they try, you tell them that you want to speak to your father and mention that he’s a lawyer. Understand?”
I understand perfectly. He’s protecting me.
After the call, I put on a T-shirt and sweatpants and wait for the police to arrive.
The cops show up only a few minutes later. A man and a woman in full police blues. The man is about my age. Big, with red hair and pasty, white skin. His badge says McKeege. His partner is younger, a Latina. She’s barely five feet tall and with the bulletproof vest looks like she might fall over. Her name is Rosario.
McKeege is the lead, apparently, because he’s the one who speaks first.
“Are you Ella Broden?”
I nod. “Come in. Thank you for getting here so quickly.”
I lead them into my bedroom and directly toward the dead body splayed on my bed. The knife is still sticking out of his neck.
Rosario must not have been to many gory crime scenes because she instinctively turns away. McKeege looks on as if nothing’s amiss.
“Are you okay, ma’am?” McKeege asks.
For some reason, I find the use of the term “ma’am” comical. Like McKeege is a character in some 1950s police drama.
“As well as I can be, all things considered.”
McKeege turns back around to look at my bed. “Did you move anything?”
I shake my head that I haven’t, but, because he’s still not looking at me, I follow up the nonverbal communication with a quiet, “No.”
“Lieutenant Velasquez will be here any second now,” McKeege says, turning back around to face me. “Our instructions are to wait with you until he gets here. Is there anything we can do for you in the interim?”
“Do you mind if we sit in the living room?” I ask. “I don’t . . . I don’t want to see him anymore.”
Gabriel must have flown over from One PP, because he arrives only a few minutes after the uniformed cops. He’s a sight for sore eyes. So much so that I immedi
ately embrace him.
His professionalism, however, is front and center. He pushes me back. “Are you okay?”
“Yeah, I’m fine. Shaken . . . but feeling very lucky to be alive.”
“You are lucky, Ella. Wait here. I’ll be back in a moment.”
Gabriel walks into my bedroom with McKeege a step behind him, while Rosario is left to babysit me. Through the open doorway, I see Gabriel reach into his pocket and pull out latex gloves. He says something that I can’t hear to McKeege, which causes McKeege to reach into his own pocket and toss Gabriel what appears to be a leather wallet. I don’t recall him taking it from Dylan’s pants, but he must have. I can’t imagine McKeege giving Gabriel his own wallet.
Gabriel catches it with one hand and then, with the other, he pulls out a few cards. After a quick examination, Gabriel returns the cards to their sleeves and hands the billfold back to McKeege.
“His name is Christopher Tyler,” Gabriel says when he returns to me. “He’s a banker at a firm called Harper Sawyer.”
“Matthew Harrison . . . ,” I say. “It makes perfect sense. Classic Charlotte.”
“I don’t follow.”
“She was always playing word games. William Henry Harrison was an early president. He’s most famous for dying a month after taking office. His vice president and successor was John Tyler.”
Gabriel looks over his shoulder at the uniformed cops. In a whisper, he says, “You know as well as I do that presidential wordplay is not evidence that he killed your sister. And you were right—Paul Michelson’s luggage is the same model and color as the one the killer used.”
“Paul didn’t do it. This guy did.”
I explain it all in less than a minute. How he told me his name was Dylan Perry when he approached me at Lava, the second meet-up at Riverside, the notepad I’d stupidly left on my dining table, and his effort to kill me before I killed him in self-defense.
Then I tell him the clincher. “He has a scar on his hip. It’s in the shape of his first initial. Just like in my sister’s book.”
Gabriel’s eyebrows arch and he hurries back to my bedroom. I watch as he slides down the sheet, exposing Christopher’s lower abdomen. He doesn’t look at it long before he turns to walk back out to me.
I’m about to ask Gabriel if he believes me now when my father enters the apartment.
“Dad?” I say, confused by his presence.
“I called him,” Gabriel says.
My father walks more quickly than I’ve ever seen him move, rushing to embrace me.
“Oh my God, Ella. Are you okay?”
“I’m fine, Dad. It’s all over,” I whisper in his ear.
He’s slow to release me, and I take a moment to enjoy the sensation of his hug. When he lets go, he looks at me with tears in his eyes.
“What happened?” he asks.
“He was having an affair with Charlotte. I met him before Charlotte went missing. Actually, it was after he’d killed her, but before I knew she was missing. He gave me a fake name and must have sought me out to shadow the investigation. I had no idea he knew Charlotte . . . but, like I said, it’s over now. He killed Charlotte, and now he’s dead.”
“Do you know why he killed her?”
“No. Not really. Jealousy, maybe.”
My father considers this. He’ll never know why this man took his daughter from him. He looks as if this reality is yet another assault. The not knowing.
“We’re almost finished here,” Gabriel says.
I can see my father’s antennae perk up. His lawyer hat is back on.
“Did Ella give a statement?” he asks.
“In a matter of speaking,” Gabriel says.
“What’s that mean?”
“It means she said it was self-defense, and I believe her. It didn’t go further than that.”
“It’s okay, Dad,” I say.
Gabriel nods. “I’m going to leave you two alone for now. I can’t guarantee that I won’t need to get back to you about some things, but I’m going to try to limit that as much as I can. In the meantime, Ella, if you need anything, anything at all, please call me.” He smiles. “And that’s not just something I say. I mean it.”
I’m touched by Gabriel’s offer. I know it’s not just something he says.
“Thank you. For everything, Gabriel.”
He nods again and then places his hand softly on my shoulder. He doesn’t say anything further, just walks back over to his colleagues.
By now, the police tech crew has arrived and put the body in a bag on top of a gurney. They wheel my sister’s murderer away.
Gabriel is the last of them to leave. He waves as he shuts the door, and I wave back at him.
DAY TEN
WEDNESDAY
Ella Broden
39.
Charlotte’s funeral is held two days after I killed her murderer, ten days after her own death.
It’s raining. Not a driving storm, but more than a romantic mist.
Had it been any other day, I likely wouldn’t have minded, or even noticed. But today it seems like yet another form of divine punishment. I wanted my last day with Charlotte to be gloriously sunny, as if her warmth had descended from the heavens to envelop the earth.
When my mother died, my father purchased a matching burial plot beside hers, intended as his final resting place. With tears in his eyes, he asked if I’d mind it if he gave the space to Charlotte. “It’ll make it a little easier for me if I can see Charlotte next to your mother.”
I couldn’t hold back my own tears. “Of course,” I said. “I think . . . no, I’m certain, that they’d both like that. And it’ll be nice for us too, to be able to visit them together.”
As far as I know, my father has never visited my mother’s gravesite. I never liked coming here either. I preferred to talk to her when I was lying in bed, or walking in Central Park, or even on the subway. Still, Charlotte and I came out every year on my mother’s birthday. It was Charlotte’s idea, of course. She’d always bake a cake, even that first year, when Charlotte was only thirteen and I didn’t think she even knew how to boil water. We’d have a picnic right on top of my mother’s grave. When we got older, champagne was added to the event, and Charlotte would balance a flute on our mother’s headstone.
For today’s burial, my father had wanted only the two of us to attend. He didn’t even see the need for an officiant to be present. But I told him that we needed to be more inclusive. Others loved Charlotte too, and they deserved the opportunity to say good-bye. In the end, we invited a few people and relied on the grapevine to get the word out to the rest.
I sit beside my father in the back of a Lincoln town car on the way to the cemetery, holding his hand for most of the drive. Early on in the ride, he shares with me what he thinks is news.
“I got the strangest call yesterday. Paul Michelson has decided to retain new counsel.”
“Did he say why?” I ask.
“No. Just that, given everything that’s going on with us and Charlotte, he needs someone more focused on him.”
I stifle the urge to laugh. No need to share with my father that I held his client at knifepoint.
“No great loss there,” I say instead.
He looks at me with a resigned air. But I know he doesn’t care about losing Paul as a client—especially because the retainer was nonrefundable.
“I have the strong feeling that it’s going to be hard for you to truly believe the whole innocent-until-proven-guilty thing after this.”
“We don’t have to discuss it now, Dad.”
“I think that maybe we do. I don’t want to make the same mistake twice.”
“What do you mean?”
“When your mother died, you were the glue, Ella. It should have been me, but it was you who held it together for Charlotte . . . and for me too. And I know that had your mother lived, you would never have become a lawyer. She wouldn’t have let you. I hope you don’t think I pushed you in that direction
. I truly never meant to do that. What I meant to do was stand back, allow you to make your own decision.”
“I just wanted you to be proud of me.”
“I could never be anything but proud of you, sweetheart. But what will make me most proud is if you live your life on your own terms. Not for me. Not for what your mother would have wanted. And please don’t do it now for Charlotte. Nothing would make me happier, or prouder, than for you to be who you want to be, Ella. And I’m confident that on this point I speak for your mother as well.”
I know he’s right. I just wish I had known it years earlier.
After that we barely say a word, but I imagine our thoughts are identical. The tragedy that Charlotte will never fall in love, get married, or have children. The utter injustice that the world is forever going to be diminished by her absence. People who never knew Charlotte even existed would be deprived of the words she would have written, and the lucky few who would have met her had she lived will now be less for not knowing her.
I keep imagining a man. In my mind’s eye, he’s blond, although Charlotte rarely went for fair-haired men. He’s not from New York City, but California. San Francisco, maybe. He’s smart and kind and handsome, and his friends and family can’t, for the life of them, understand why he’s never married—even he wonders why no woman has ever captured his heart. I envision him meeting Charlotte on some hiking expedition somewhere, and them marrying within a few months of first casting eyes on each other.
I feel sorrow for him too, even though he is merely an imaginary placeholder. Whoever was destined to be Charlotte’s soul mate has no idea of the tragedy he’s suffered, and he never will. From that perspective, I count myself as supremely fortunate. At least I had twenty-five years to bask in Charlotte’s love.
Trinity Cemetery was established in the 1840s, and is the only remaining active burial ground in Manhattan. Located on 155th Street and Riverside Drive, it’s less than three miles from Charlotte’s apartment and offers mourners the same sweeping views of the Hudson. The cemetery is affiliated with the famous Trinity Church on Wall Street, where George Washington prayed after his inauguration. It didn’t occur to me when my mother was laid to rest, but I’m certain my father had to use all his considerable influence to get a plot there.
