First, I heard rumors about her and Dan Jarvis, a professor at MCC. The pervert denied it, and so did she. So, I let it go. What’s good for the goose is good for the gander. And if that’s all it had been, then maybe Kate and I could’ve gotten past it. But it didn’t stop there. She met this sorry sucker.
And Aves, I think she told him about W.B.
My eyes keep reading, two pages worth, but my heart seizes there. Stops. On that line.
I’d signed a nondisclosure agreement. I’d kept my mouth zipped shut. Locked that secret inside me and tossed the key down the well. And let it grow big and vicious as a monster, feeding on all the good things it found.
And Ian? What had he done?
He’d told her.
My fists clench so tight, my knuckles whiten. And I understand the knife’s blade line between love and murder. How easy it is to step over. If Ian wasn’t already dead, I would have no choice but to kill him myself.
****
The rain is my undoing. Because it begins the same as it did Valentine’s night. With a single fat drop on the window, trailing like a tear. Then another and another and another. Until the whole pane is marked with tear tracks, and the world outside blurs behind them.
I’m right back there, fleeing from the mansion on Cortez Road. Driving way too fast, borderline reckless on the slick streets. Wipers whipping across the windshield with a quiet fury. And a scream stuck in my throat like a shard of bone. Then, bursting through my own door, soaking wet and shivering. So cold it had taken Luke to warm me.
Suddenly this house is the last place I want to be. But I’m trapped here and frantic as a netted bird. I pace from window to window as the rain picks up. Harder now. And my undoing becomes my saving grace. Because the ants don’t like rain, naturally. Some run for cover inside the warmth of their stations’ vans. Others give up and head for home. A few of the hardy little buggers prop up their golf umbrellas, determined to wait it out. But when the wind starts tugging at their canopies, pulling them downside up, they admit defeat.
While the rain pounds against the now-empty sidewalk, I open a duffel bag and prepare my getaway, full speed ahead to anywhere but here. I scoop up a handful of underwear and socks. Toss in a few T-shirts and my toothbrush. Tuck Ian’s letter beneath it all like a precious jewel or a sordid secret. Because the truth always is. Precious and sordid.
Breathless, I lug the bag into the hallway and grab my keys, mentally tucking myself into a nondescript hotel bed. Locking myself behind a deadbolt and a security latch. Safe inside a room with very few hiding places. And only one way in and one way out.
The wind gusts outside the door like a warning whistle. And with my hand on the knob, I freeze. Is that . . . ? I lean in, look closer.
A small brown spider scuttles up the frame toward the beginnings of its web in the corner. It stops, and we regard each other with suspicion. The rain patters like a child’s stamping feet against the roof, but all I hear is Maddie’s little voice. The itsy bitsy spider crawled up the water spout . . .
I try to slow my breathing, but the Hydra’s in control now. And my chest tightens as it bears down, one vicious head after another.
Down came the rain and washed the spider out . . .
It’s not real.
It’s not real.
But it sounds as if she’s right behind me—her throat raw from crying, her voice cracked with fear.
I should know what to do. How to Outsmart Panic—I’ve got the damn pamphlet in my office. And yet, here I am, the room spinning around a spider and a little girl’s nursery rhyme. I focus on a small spot on the floor, a discoloration in the wood, trying to ground myself. But it only turns to a spot of blood I’ll never wash out.
Jesus. I wish I’d saved those Xanax.
I head for the bathroom anyway, thinking a cold shot of water might stop the neurons in my brain from rapid-firing. Slow the adrenaline rush. Get my power-hungry amygdala to surrender the reins.
Out came the sun . . .
One splash.
And dried up all the rain . . .
Two.
And the itsy bitsy spider . . .
Three splashes. And Maddie’s singing is gone.
All I see is my reflection in the stillness of the mirror. My eyes, two shimmering stones in a lake of unfathomable depths.
All I hear is a fierce pounding, too methodical to mistake for my own wild heartbeat. It’s the sound of someone insistent, intent on coming inside.
I peer around the corner into my bedroom where the pane of the window frames Ricky’s face. The rain smudges his features, softens them. But there’s no denying the brutal smack of his palm on the glass.
His dark eyes lock onto mine, and there’s nothing left to do.
My legs as useless as leaves in the wind, I lumber toward the window, pulled by the gravity of his desperation.
I open it, and the rain comes blowing in.
****
“How did you get here?” It seems the safest question. The simplest. Where a therapist should start. With an easy one. A barometer.
Ricky wrings out the T-shirt clinging to his belly, adding to the growing puddle at his feet. He rubs his buzzed head with the towel I’ve given him, growling at me from beneath it. “I dropped in from a helicopter. How do think I got here? I fucking walked.”
“Hey, I didn’t have to let you in. You scared the hell out of me. I could’ve called the cops.”
Truth is, he still scares me. The way his fists clench, strangling that towel. The unpredictable darting of his eyes. And the strong musk of misery that clings to him, as pungent as the beer on his breath. He’s a drunk man with nothing to lose. And he’s standing in my bedroom, his shivering flesh as real as my own.
“Go right ahead. I’m sure Daphne and Scooby Doo will be happy to hear I’ve agreed to be a cooperating witness.”
“You already told them everything.”
“Not everything,” he says. “Not by a long shot.”
I half-smirk at him, but he’s right. I’ve got no leverage. “I know. You want more money.”
“So there is more.”
“I didn’t say that.”
He tosses the towel onto my bed, and I finally get a good look at him. The whole sad enchilada. But I only see myself. “Money won’t give you what you’re looking for, Ricky.”
“Well, what am I looking for, Doc? Enlighten me.”
“Absolution.” When I say it, he flinches a little. Just enough to know I’ve hit a nerve.
“Alright. I’ll bite. Sure, I cheated on my wife. And yeah, I got called out on national television.”
I don’t bother to correct him, to remind him the show never aired. Because it had found eternal life on the internet. Which was definitely worse.
“And if you must know, I brought the vodka to our dressing room, because I wanted to get fucking hammered after that prick ripped our marriage in half. And apparently so did she.”
“You told me the show supplied the alcohol. That Ian knew you were both drinking.”
“Either way,” he says, like the truth is malleable. “Let’s not kid ourselves. Nobody’s innocent here.”
It’s sickening. The way I feign shock. “What are you talking about?” As if I can still claim to be innocent.
“Really? You want me to say it out loud?”
I don’t. “Go ahead. Let’s hear it.”
His jaw juts out, sure of himself. “At least I didn’t go full-on Betty Broderick and murder my ex-husband and his new wife. I mean, you said it, ‘I’m the kind of angel who gets shit done.’”
Panic had already drained me empty, leaving only a numb dread. And a stark realization. I’m not so different from the infamous Betty. A woman scorned. “If this is about that email I sent to you, I wasn’t serious. I just let you think I was behind
it all. It was a stupid mis—”
“I saw you.”
“You what?”
“I saw you that night. Valentine’s Day.”
“You were here? In Carmel?”
He shrugs, casually, knowing he’s got me backed into a corner. “I got tired of waiting for you. I’d planned to confront him myself. After he and Kate got back from dinner. But then you showed up and . . . well, I’m not sorry you did. The world is better off without him.”
“You actually think I stabbed Ian and Kate to death? By myself?” I try to look as harmless as a mouse. But I’m no mouse. “If I was going to kill them, I certainly wouldn’t have done it that way. What is it that you think you saw exactly?”
“Well, I didn’t see you go in—I must’ve gotten there too late—but I watched you come out. Fly out is more like it, a bat out of hell. I hightailed it out of there myself. Next thing I know, they’re both dead and you’re telling me to forget I know you.” A smirk twists the corner of his mouth. “And I will. If the price is right . . . total amnesia.”
“You don’t know what you’re talking about. You’ve got it all mixed up.”
“Do I? You all but admitted it when you got plastered in my motel room. What do they say about loose lips?”
I turn away from him and walk to the window, where the sky is as black as a bruise. As black as the spot on my soul. Where the thought grows like a cancer.
I could get rid of him.
My eyes land on the glass vase I’d returned to the corner of my dresser. The set of dumbbells peeking from beneath the bed.
I could say he attacked me first.
One hard smack to the head. Maybe two.
The rain hisses down the roof. And I remember who I am.
No. Who I used to be.
“How much?” I ask.
****
I draw the cheap motel curtains and the shade beneath them. Triple-check the deadbolt and deploy the security latch. Ensure all potential hiding places are vacant. And put the hammer I’d packed on the table next to the nondescript bed at The Sandcastle Motel.
I exhale, finally, and shudder with relief, laying back against the bed. I want to call Luke. To tell him everything that’s happened. To tell him about Ricky. And about Ian’s letter and what I suspect. But I need to be sure because I’ve already hurt him enough.
I turn on the television.
Then turn it off again, when I see myself on the news, emerging from the taxi, my face blank and stark white.
And when I think of Ricky and what he knows and the promises I made him, the fluttering in my chest starts up again, so I use the peaceful-place trick from the second page of the pamphlet. Visualization is the act of imagining yourself in the most peaceful place, free of anxiety, totally relaxed. Use all your senses to travel there in your mind, and you’ll find your panic subsiding.
Here goes nothing.
I close my eyes and remember the last time I saw Luke. After we’d left Cliffside and my mother, he’d taken the long way to the county jail. Seventeen Mile Drive to Highway One, stopping at a spot near the lighthouse. We’d sat there, silent, with the windows open, listening to the waves crest, the whitecaps roll in. The air smelled of the sea and the cypress. Until finally he’d said my name, urgent as a plea. Soft as a sweet nothing whispered in a lover’s ear. And then the words I’d needed but didn’t deserve: “I believe you.”
Closure is a myth, so don’t bother looking for it. The only things that heal a broken heart are time and distance and forgetting.
—Ian Culpepper, Love CPR
Valentine’s Day
Two Years Earlier
Ava sat in her car outside The Seventeenth Mile, the restaurant where her mother had worked for the last eighteen years. As a hostess, then assistant manager. And for the last five, manager with a capital M. It rose up on the cliffside, the crags of rock visible through the panoramic windows.
She didn’t want to go in. Not again. But what choice did she have? This was happening.
At the door, she took a breath and considered running. Somewhere. Anywhere but here. The world where her mother had simply forgotten. And Ava had been left alone to sort it out.
But the door decided for her, swinging open. A group of golfers walked through it, laughing and dressed in pastels. Her mother sat on the bench near the hostess stand, her face wet from crying. She wore the black pencil skirt and starched white button-down that had become her uniform, but a strand of hair had gone askew, pulled free from the tight bun she wound at the base of her neck every morning.
Antoine, the new capital M, waved limply at Ava.
“I’m so sorry to bother you, Doctor Lawson. She showed up about thirty minutes ago ready for her shift. And when we told her, well—” He glanced sideways at her mother, her face frightened and confused. A deer pinned by the headlights and waiting for impact. “She got upset.”
Ava followed his eyes to the hostess stand, where a vase of hydrangeas lay toppled and broken. The pink and red petals formed a blood trail under the yellow WET FLOOR sign erected like crime scene tape.
“Okay. I’ll take her home.”
He nodded, then hesitated. “It’s probably not my place to say this. But is it safe for her to be alone? To be driving?”
“I’m working on it.” Ava bit the inside of her cheek to keep from crying herself. “This won’t happen again.”
Ava approached her mother cautiously and took her by the arm. “Time to go home now, Mom. We’ll come back for your car later.”
Her mother shrugged off her arm and let out an exasperated breath. “I’m not an invalid. Or a child. Let me walk out with some dignity.”
Outside, her mother marched stubbornly in the opposite direction, heading straight for her black Mini Cooper. “You can’t drive right now. You’re not thinking straight. You don’t work here anymore. Remember?”
Remember. Ava cursed herself for using the number one phrase on the doctor’s not-to-say list. Of course she didn’t remember. Or she wouldn’t have driven here, pressed and polished. That was the whole point.
“The restaurant had to let you go a few months back because of the problems with your memory.”
Her mother didn’t look entirely convinced.
“What happened in there, Mom? With the flowers?”
“They don’t go on that side of the stand. They’ll get in the way of the reservation book.”
Never mind that the restaurant hadn’t used a reservation book in five years or that Ava’s mother had been the one to push for a new computerized system. “You’re right, Mom. That was a bad place for them. But you can’t break things. And you can’t drive home by yourself. Not today.”
Ava watched her mother’s forehead scrunch and wrinkle. It seemed she could almost see behind it, to the rusted wheels turning again, slowly and with effort.
“Come on. I got you those chocolate hearts you like from Marianne’s.”
Ava felt awful, coaxing her own mother, bribing her like a frightened cat beneath the bed. But this was what it had come to. The roles had flipped suddenly and without her permission, tricking her like the reflection in a fun-house mirror. And now, the time she thought she had to tell her mother everything—about Dad’s note and what she’d done with it—had slipped through her fingers, as irretrievable as a single grain of sand on the beach.
“Is it Valentine’s Day?” her mother asked, eyeing the chocolates through the car window.
Ava nodded.
“Shouldn’t you be spending it with your husband?”
****
After her mother dozed off on the sofa, Ava poured her fourth glass of wine and opened her email to send the message she’d been dreading. The one she’d been putting off since she and her mother visited Cliffside Memory Care in December. Since the doctor had looked past them both and
issued his judgment: “Your mother is suffering from early-onset progressive dementia.”
Cliffside’s Director had patted her arm and told Ava to take her time, to think about what would be best for her mother. Ava had wanted to laugh at her. Best?
But she found herself using that cursed word in the email—My mom is getting worse, and I think it would be best if we schedule a move-in date—and wincing as she clicked Send.
With her betrayal hurdling through miles of cable fiber, Ava downed another sip of wine—the perfect nightcap—and curled beneath the covers, letting the television keep her company.
Another stellar Valentine’s Day. Next year she’d skip it entirely. Declare herself Valentine-agnostic. At least she hadn’t embarrassed herself like last year. The crazy ex-wife text she’d sent Ian to which she’d received no reply. Just as well, because he’d gotten his due.
Three weeks ago, a Love Doctored guest had turned up dead in the dressing room. And Ava had stared open-mouthed at the television screen, convinced she’d been hallucinating until she’d seen Ian’s face, a pack of reporters hot on his heels. He’d hidden behind his hand and ducked inside BXA Studios. Then, as wrong as it had been, she’d laughed.
With visions of Ian’s pallor dancing in her head and a rerun droning in the background, she let the slow tug of the wine pull her under.
The dream she’d had before. But it felt different somehow. She sat at her desk, the antique she wouldn’t part with even if it did remind her of Ian. And a patient was lying on her couch, obscured by a large pillow that didn’t exist—not in real life.
Because that’s how dreams work, she thought.
“Why are you here?” she asked the mystery patient, as she did each time. “Why are you in my dream?”
Ava heard the moaning. The desperate throaty gasps.
“Dad?” she whispered, as she did each time.
“Wallace?”
Then, the sounds stopped. All of them. Time held its breath.
Doctors of Darkness Boxed Set Page 91
