by Ellery Kane
Just that easy. Easier than she’d thought.
Try getting it up tonight, asshole.
She wanted to be there when Kate returned to the table and found him vexed. When she asked him what was wrong and he lied and said, “Nothing.” When he downed that glass, and the Adderall kicked in. When the dopamine and norepinephrine started to fire.
But she couldn’t, of course. It had to be enough to know the bomb she’d planted would detonate in time. That Ian would know the unpleasant sting of shame. The savagery of remorse.
Boom.
****
Ava lay on the sofa, not sleeping. She’d been waiting hours for this. The turn-click of Ian’s key in the lock. The gentle creak of the door as it yawned open. The thud of his loafers, determined and hollow against the floor. But when the moment came, it twisted her stomach.
Backlit, he stood in the entry, looming like her father on his worst day.
“What did you do?” he hissed.
And she heard the awe underneath. Outrage too, of course. Indignation. But the awe made it worth it. The awe made her sit up, bright-eyed.
“You failed the Fidelity Five.”
“What are you talking about?” He scowled at her, and it left her sad and empty. She’d hoped he could at least laugh at the irony. But he glared, sour. She’d expected too much.
“I saw you with Kate. I know what’s going on.”
“So you admit it then?”
“Admit what?”
“Apparently Wallace Bergman’s ghost showed up at The Chateau to have a chat.”
“Did he? Well, that must have been interesting for Kate. I’m sure you told her all about our friend, Wally. The unethical referral. The snooping on my session notes. The crash. The ketamine you gave him.”
She’d read the articles like the rest of the world—“Autopsy Reveals Bergman Used Dangerous Drug.” But she’d never said it out loud. Never given life to the suspicions that grew in the back of her brain like weeds. The kind that choke out all other life. And now that she had, she knew. They were done.
If Ian felt it too, she couldn’t tell. He stood at the end of the sofa, working his jaw. Clenching and unclenching his fists. Part Adderall, part outrage. “Whatever I did, you did. Remember that.”
“How can you live with yourself? Do you really think fucking Kate is going to make it better?”
A raised eyebrow. The faintest hint of a smirk. And she drew back from his smugness, repulsed.
“I’m not just fucking her, Ava. I’m in love with her. And I want a divorce.”
THE DOWNTOWN STAR
“A Dramatic Showdown at Slain Love Doctors Funeral! Scandal in a Sleepy Town!”
The memorial service for Love Doctors Ian and Kate Culpepper took a startling turn Tuesday when an intoxicated Ricky Sherman wielded a knife and confronted guests, awakening the dead at Whispering Cypress Memorial. Witnesses recounted Sherman’s drunken tirade, which included his references to Ian Culpepper being a “lying bastard” and “scumbag.” Sherman appeared to be upset about his 2016 appearance on Love Doctored, during which he was exposed as a philanderer in the now-infamous Fidelity Five. Later that same day, Sherman’s wife, Vanessa, was found unresponsive in their dressing room at BXA studios.
Police arrested Sherman and booked him on charges of public intoxication, drunk and disorderly conduct, and brandishing a weapon.
Among the shocking allegations by Sherman, Ian Culpepper was still married to his second wife when he became involved with his third wife, Kate. The Downtown Star has exclusively learned that Culpepper’s second wife, Ava Lawson, works as a psychologist in Carmel, just miles from where the lovestruck couple was found stabbed to death, and that she, like her predecessor, met the dashing Culpepper while his student. Another former student of Culpepper told The Downtown Star that Lawson was quiet and studious—“a bit of a wallflower”—and that it came as a shock when Culpepper announced their engagement.
Friends of Lawson say she was devastated by the breakup and disappeared from Los Angeles shortly after the Love Doctored premiere. With Culpepper’s unexpected return to Carmel, some friends had worried Lawson might be swayed to rekindle their love affair. “Ava couldn’t resist him,” one friend told The Downtown Star, describing the young doctor’s fixation on her ex. “I’d say it bordered on obsession.”
Chapter
Nineteen
Thursday
February 23, 2018
“What friends?” I say aloud to no one, which only proves my point. I close the article and shut my laptop, pushing it away from me like it’s cursed. Even though my nonexistent friends are right. I had been devastated. And maybe a little fixated too. But that’s what happens to love with nowhere to go. No one to give it to. It swells and rises like floodwater until nothing can contain it. It’s poison. And sometimes people get hurt.
I pace from the sofa to the kitchen window and back again, not bothering to peek through the blinds. I already know I’m surrounded by a small army. Reporters outfitted with cameras and microphones and freshly pressed suits as body armor. TV trucks like tanks with their satellites aimed with machine-gun precision. I’ve been ambushed. Flanked. Outmaneuvered. Ava Lawson, second wife of Ian Culpepper, snuffed out of her hole and laid bare before the firing squad.
This morning, I canceled my clients for the rest of the week, hopeful none of them would answer my call. Only Verna did, prattling on about a relapse—a state-of-the-art back massager she’d bought on QVC—seemingly unaware of my newfound infamy. After I’d done a sufficient amount of reassuring and she’d repeated the ask-why-before-you-buy mantra she’d come up with last session, I unplugged the rotary phone. Set my cell to silent, the voice mailbox already full.
Now I wait in a stubborn standoff. I won’t give them what they want: a look at my haggard face, drawn and gray from not sleeping. A confirmation of who I am: spurned ex-lover, fool, suspect, sucker. And they’re not leaving. My resistance only serves as confirmation I’m worth waiting for.
Luke texted hours ago, three words:
Are you okay?
I knew he’d read The Downtown Star, along with the rest of Carmel. And I wanted to answer him, but what would I say? What could I say?
No.
Do you think I’m a wallflower?
Obsession is a bit of an exaggeration.
And by the way, one of my knives is missing.
I finally settle on humor, forced though it may be, staring back at the wood block as my fingers type:
I’d be better with doughnuts. Or your mom’s red velvet cake.
****
“You don’t deserve him. Which is why you don’t have him. Not anymore.” I’m talking to myself again, muttering really. Because Luke is striding up the driveway in plainclothes holding a pink box from Seaside Sweets, which only proves my point yet again.
A few reporters call out to him—“Hey! Is she in there?”—angling for a shot. But they know their limits, stopping at the sidewalk and gazing hungrily like starved animals desperate for scraps.
I open the door just wide enough for Luke to slip inside, careful to stay out of sight. Then I stick my hands in my pockets so I won’t reach for him. Take a step back to maintain my distance.
“I can’t stay long.” Which is probably his way of doing the same. “But Mom insisted.” He lifts the lid, and we both laugh at the words—Happy 50th Birthday, Susan!—swirled in what I’m hoping is cream cheese icing. “She said you needed it more.”
“My deepest apologies, Susan. But she’s right.”
“How are you holding up?” Luke asks as he deposits the cake on the kitchen counter. “Did you talk to that attorney yet?”
“Yes.” Because I did look online, researched a few. I even wrote down some numbers. But actually calling would mean something more. That I am in trouble. That I hav
e done something wrong. “And I’m okay. They’ll leave eventually, right?”
Luke’s smile is sad. Like he can see inside me to the broken parts. I spin away from him, toward the cabinets before I tear up. But I hear him shuffling behind me, the clink of plates against the granite.
“Should I cut you a slice?”
When I turn, he’s already there. At the knife block. And all I can do is nod my head and wait for him to notice. But he doesn’t. He just selects the slicer—with its delicate blade, thin as a playing card—adjacent to the empty slot.
“I’m glad you’re having one too,” I say. “At least I can be sure your mom didn’t poison it. She must really hate me. Especially now.”
Luke rolls his eyes and groans at me. “She doesn’t hate you. But she is disappointed you weren’t honest with her. With us.” I watch the way he holds the knife, careful and steady. It glides through the icing, then through the cake’s flesh, with ease. “Hey, she’s mad at me too, if it helps.”
He plops the blood-red cake at the center of the plate and slides it to me. Maybe red velvet wasn’t the best choice.
“Great. So what you’re saying is she poisoned both of us?” Mid-bite into his own piece, Luke catches a sudden burst of laughter with his hand. And it makes my heart ache. “At least Cooper will be happy. Has he said it yet? I told you so?”
“He’s been heads down in this case chasing leads for Dad. I feel bad for him. He wants it so badly.”
“To make detective?”
“To get Dad’s approval. After that last citizen complaint, Dad’s been riding him hard.”
I cut off a small sliver of cake and move it across the plate and back again, leaving a trail of white frosting. And a mouthful of words, thought but unspoken.
“I know what you’re thinking,” Luke says, preparing a mountainous bite. “But Coop’s not a bad guy. He just forgets that sometimes.”
More like permanent amnesia, I think. But I stuff in a forkful of red velvet instead. Best to leave it alone. “So, did Cleo give a statement yesterday?”
“She never showed,” he says, between mouthfuls. “Have you talked to her?”
“Not recently.” Two words, vague and deliberately chosen, and his face falls. I’m doing it again. “Look, I can see you don’t trust me. And I can’t blame you for that. You know, if I was your therapist, I’d say you made a mature decision.”
“Aren’t you supposed to be the mature one?” he teases.
I ball up my napkin and toss it at him, trying to be playful, but the ache in my chest only grows. “Gee, thanks. You really know how to kick a girl when she’s down.”
I’m not hungry anymore, but I match his bite with one of my own because it’s expected of me. This is Susan’s cake—whoever she is—and I’d demanded it. Practically stolen it from her. I damn well better eat it. And enjoy it too. That’s the guilt talking. The squirming Hydra that wants to be fed.
We chew in silence until Luke finishes. He clears his plate and stands at the sink, fidgeting. “So . . . what was Ian like—as a husband? You never really told me.”
I try to find the right way to say it. That Ian was exactly what I’d always expected a man to be. His dark moods, his tantrums, his threats. His insatiable needs and his desperate fear of being left. The only kind of man I’d ever known. Until Luke.
“Have you ever heard the line that the things you like most about someone in the beginning will become the things you hate?”
“Sure. Like the way you try to fix everything with sex? Great, at first.” I smirk at him, shake my head. “Okay,” he admits. “Still great.”
“Anyway . . . that’s how it was with Ian. When we met, he was passionate and confident. Driven and fiercely loyal. But on the flip side, he could be arrogant, vindictive, and relentless.”
“Was he ever depressed?”
“Not in the conventional sense. But he’d get dark when things didn’t go his way. And looking back, I’m not sure he was happy.” Two unhappy people make one unhappy marriage. Ian had doled out that piece of wisdom on the second episode of Love Doctored, Kate simpering by his side. I’d wanted to throttle them both.
“Last week, you said you had a hunch Ian did it. Like a murder-suicide.” There’s an unspoken question, and I take another bite of cake, fearful of what he might suspect. About Ian. About me. About the things unhappy people do together. “Did he ever try to kill himself?”
“No. Not that he told me about anyway.” Luke’s eyes leave mine, and I feel his doubt. I hear my old self say valen-pocalypse, the silly word I’d made up for the first time, thinking it would be the last. Thinking that would be the worst of our Valentine’s. “He’d make threats, and it would scare me. But I never really believed he’d do it. I thought he was just using what happened with my dad against me. Ian could be very manipulative.”
Luke raises his eyebrows. As if to say so can you. I push the plate away from me, trying not to think about how right he is.
“Are you done?”
I nod at him, still burning from the heat of his words, unsaid. He takes my plate. Rinses it. Dries it. Returns it to the shelf. And sits on the stool next to mine.
“Do you want to know why I’m asking?”
“I don’t want to get you in any trouble.”
“Dad talked to Julie Avery’s parents.”
My mouth hangs open, and I imagine how it must look to Luke. Like a dark, dark cave. So deep the air is different there. The kind that makes you light-headed, the way I’d felt each time Ian said her name. How can you be jealous of a dead girl? And the question hadn’t stunned as much as the way Ian had asked it. Like she didn’t belong to him.
“Ian’s first wife,” Luke says, thinking I’m confused. Or I’ve forgotten. As if I ever could.
“I know who she is.”
“They told him that every time Julie tried to leave, Ian would threaten to kill himself, and she’d go back. They said she’d left him for good a week or so before she died.”
The Averys had told me as much and more when I’d called them a few years back. Still, hearing Luke say it out loud steals the air from the room again.
“Ian had eight stab wounds on his body. And four shallow incise wounds on his wrists, not enough to do any damage. All done with the same weapon. According to the coroner, the cuts on his wrists were self-inflicted.”
****
Luke stays longer than he promised. He sits close to me on the sofa, lets me sink into his warm body. Puts his arm around my shoulder. Kisses my head. I let him. And it makes me wonder—just how manipulative am I?
I’m half-asleep when his cell phone rings. And I wish he wouldn’t answer. The shrillness of it gnaws at my brain—it reminds me of a patient I had once with misophonia who couldn’t stand the sound of her husband’s chewing—and I want to destroy it. I want to stay in this world. The kind where somebody like Luke could forgive somebody like me.
“Hey, Dad.”
Luke stands up and leaves me, fast-walking to the bedroom and talking in his cop voice. His dutiful son voice. My body stiffens in his absence. I hold my breath and listen.
“Yep. We’re on the way.” And seconds later, “She will. She’s fine.”
His serious tone starts my heart pounding, and I feel sick. I regard the pink Seaside Sweets box for what it really is. My requested last meal as a free woman.
When Luke returns, he looks right at me, earnestly, the way a choir boy does, and says my name. “I have to take you into the station.”
“Am I under arrest?”
He nods. “I asked Dad if we could do it this way. And he trusts me. He trusts you. If you agree to cooperate, I won’t cuff you. We can walk out together.”
“And if I don’t?”
“Then Dad sends in the cavalry.”
Resigned, I get up and go to him. “Can you
tell me why?”
“All I know is they found money in Ricky Sherman’s hotel room he said was from you. That it was your idea to blackmail Ian with some photos you took and that you’d gotten the money on Valentine’s Day. That’s extortion, Ava.”
“I didn’t kill him or Kate though. I had nothing to do with—”
“It’s probably better if you don’t say anything, okay?”
I walk to the hall closet with a lump in my throat. Reach in for my jacket. And freeze.
There it is.
A knife.
But not my missing chef’s knife. This knife matches the others. From Ian and Kate’s set. Its black handle protrudes from an old sweater pocket.
Doubt, sly and insidious, seeps into the cracks in my mind, widening them.
Did I do it? Am I crazy?
I feel Luke behind me, his eyes on my back. I have to do something, say something. Get rid of it somehow. I slip my jacket from the hanger, trying to reach for it. But Luke takes me by the arm and guides me toward the door. And the space between me and the knife widens until there’s nothing I can do but leave it.
All I can think of is the suicide forest. How I’d stepped over Wallace Bergman’s body and now I had to pay. “Do you believe me?” I ask, searching for reassurance.
His touch is tender but firm. A lot like his answer. “I want to. I really want to.”
Chapter
Twenty
It’s like the worst sort of dream. Where you want to scream—you need to scream—but your body makes no sound. I know that feeling. I’ve worn it like a second skin. And now too, with the voices making their demands through the windows of Luke’s truck, the knife I’d left behind for the cops to find, I want to wail with every bit of breath in my body. But I can’t.
“Ava!”
“Over here!”
“Were you sleeping with Ian?”
“Did you kill him?”
Luke has one hand on the wheel and the other on the seat, my fingers clenched tight to his wrist. As we lurch forward, a camera lens bangs the window, and I jump back like I’ve been shot. I squeeze my eyes shut.
