Heartsick

  “Sure.” Claire plucked a piece of gum from the jar and handed it to Susan.

  Susan unwrapped it and put it in her mouth. Her hands were still sore from the tape, and her wrists were raw. The gum was sugary and hard. “It’s stale,” Susan declared sadly.

  “Just a few more questions,” Claire said. “Before your mother breaks down the door.”

  “My mom’s here?” Susan asked, surprised.

  “Outside,” Henry said. “They practically had to put her in a half-nelson to keep her out of here while we wrapped up.”

  Bliss was there. Bliss had come and was waiting for her. It was something a mother would do. Susan imagined the cops having to deal with her. Bliss was probably bossing everyone around, threatening to go to the Citizen’s Police Action Committee. Susan smiled happily.

  “What?” said Claire.

  “Nothing,” Susan said. “Go ahead.” They had been going over the same questions for almost an hour. Susan felt that she had recounted, minute by minute, every interaction she’d had with Paul Reston since she was fourteen years old. She had told them how he had manipulated Addy. Now she didn’t want to think about him anymore. Her head throbbed. The EMTs had used butterfly bandages to tape the cut on her forehead shut, but she was going to have a hell of a black eye in the morning. She wanted a cigarette. And a bath. And she wanted her mother.

  Claire was leaning against one wall, Henry against the other. “You’re sure he didn’t mention any other girls, girls we might not know about?” Claire asked.

  “I’m sure,” Susan said.

  “And you didn’t save any letters that he sent?”

  There had been hundreds of them. She had tossed them in the bonfire on her dead father’s birthday while she was still in college. “I got rid of them all. Years ago.”

  Claire gave Susan a careful appraisal. “And you’re okay? You don’t need to go to the hospital?”

  Susan touched her neck, where an ugly red mark had formed. It stung, but it would heal. “I’ll be fine.”

  There was a knock at the door and Henry opened it and Archie Sheridan walked in.

  “Maybe we can wrap this up in the morning?” he asked. “Let Susan go home and get some sleep?”

  “Sure,” Henry said. He glanced at his watch and turned to Claire. “You still up for heading back to McCallum’s?”

  “For what?” Archie asked.

  “He wants to see if he can find that goddamn cat,” Claire said. She made a face at Archie. “He’s such a softy.”

  “What?” said Henry as he and Claire left the office. “I like cats.”

  Archie’s hair and clothes glistened with condensation. He looked like something that had been left in the yard overnight and now was covered with dew. Susan wanted to leap into his arms. “You’re all wet,” she observed.

  “It’s raining,” Archie said.

  “Thank God,” Susan muttered. And then she started to cry. She felt Archie kneel down next to her and put his arm around her and pull her into his wet corduroy blazer. She let herself sob. Not because she wanted to, but because she couldn’t stop it. Her whole body shook, gasping for air. She hid her face. Archie smelled like rain. His sweater scratched her cheek, but she didn’t care. After a few minutes, she looked up and saw that Henry and Claire were gone.

  “Feel better?” Archie asked softly.

  Susan held her hands out in front of her and watched them quaver. “No.”

  “Afraid?” he asked.

  Susan considered this. “The expression ‘scared shitless’ comes to mind.”

  Archie looked her in the eyes. “It’ll pass,” he said.

  She examined his face, his eyes full of kindness, his pupils tiny. That had been quite a performance on the boat. If it had been a performance. “What are you afraid of, Archie?” she asked.

  He slid her an amused, suspicious glance. “Is this for your story?”

  “Yes.” She looked at him for a minute and then laughed. “But we can go off the record if you want.”

  He was thoughtful and then his face grew dark and he seemed to shake some prickly idea from his head. “I think I’m done being a subject for a while,” he said.

  She nodded, and in that moment she realized that Archie had never told her anything, never let her see anything, that he didn’t want her to know. It didn’t matter. He could have his secrets. She was done with hers. “He said that I was his person,” she told him. “He said that we all have people in the world we belong to. Connect with. And that I was his. He said that there was no denying it.”

  Archie laid his hand on her arm. “He was wrong.”

  She rested her fist on Archie’s chest. “Well, anyway,” she said, “this is going to sound dorky, but thanks for saving my life.”

  “It doesn’t sound dorky at all.”

  She leaned forward and kissed him. It was a light kiss on the lips. He didn’t move. He didn’t reciprocate, but he didn’t pull away, either. When she opened her eyes, he smiled at her gently.

  “You’ve got to get over that,” he said. “The older men in authority thing.”

  She made a face. “Right. I’ll get right on that.”

  Susan walked out of the office into the foyer of the patrol office. She saw her mother before her mother saw her. Bliss’s red lipstick was faded and she looked small in her big leopard-print coat. Quentin Parker, Derek the Square, and Ian Harper were huddled a few yards away from her, and Bliss stood by herself against the wall. Ian saw Susan and smiled, but Susan barely gave him a glance as she went straight to her mother. Bliss looked up and burst into tears and wrapped her arms around Susan. She reeked of menthols and wet old fur and pressed against Susan like they might merge into one person. Susan was aware of her colleagues watching, but she was only slightly mortified.

  “They told me about Reston,” Bliss said in a shaky whisper. “I’m so sorry, baby. I’m so sorry.”

  “It’s okay,” Susan said. She peeled her mother off of her and kissed her on the cheek. “I think it’s going to be okay now.”

  She squinted past them through a bank of rain-splattered windows and for a second she thought it was daylight, until she realized that the lights were from the TV cameras. She was news and they all wanted a shot of her for the local morning shows. She was definitely going to have to do something different with her hair. Maybe dye it blue.

  “Hey,” Susan said to her mother. “Can I bum a cigarette?”

  Bliss’s brow furrowed. “You’ll get lung cancer,” she said.

  Susan fixed her steely gaze on her mother. “Give me a cigarette, Bliss.”

  Bliss dug a pack of menthols out of her enormous purse and held one out toward Susan. Then withdrew it when Susan reached for it. “Call me Mom,” she said.

  “Give me a cigarette.” Susan paused and scrunched her face up with effort. “Mom.”

  “Now try Mother dearest.”

  “Give me the fucking cigarette.”

  Bliss laughed and handed Susan the cigarette and then pressed a plastic lighter into her hands.

  Parker stepped forward. “We need to talk,” he said to Susan. “And only partially because I want to scoop the assholes waiting outside.”

  “I’ll give you the facts,” Susan said. “But I’m filing a harrowing personal account in the morning.”

  There was Ian. He was wearing a Yankees sweatshirt and jeans, clearly pulled on after a middle-of-the-night phone call, and all she could think was, You went to sleep when you knew I was missing? You asshole.

  But he looked at her like nothing had changed. Like she hadn’t changed. Well, she hadn’t changed. But she planned to. She put the cigarette in her mouth, lit it, and handed the lighter back to her mother. She only vaguely noticed that her hand was still trembling.

  She took a drag off the cigarette, putting a lot of elbow in it, like she had seen in old French movies, and she appraised him—arrogant, condescending, professorial. And she saw in Ian every boss, every teacher she’d ever slep
t with. Yeah. It was probably time to consider therapy. She wondered idly if the paper’s health-insurance policy covered it. This probably wasn’t the time to ask. “Once this whole thing is done,” she said to Ian, “I want to work on the Molly Palmer story. Full-time.”

  “It’s career suicide,” Ian protested. Then, in a final attempt at dissuasion, he added, “It’s tabloid journalism.”

  “Hey,” Bliss said. “My daughter—”

  “Mom,” Susan warned, and Bliss was silent. Susan was composed, indomitable. “Molly was a teenager, Ian. I want to find out what happened. I want to get her side of the story.”

  Ian sighed and rocked back on his heels. He opened his mouth as if to argue, then seemed to think better of it and threw his hands in the air. The smoke from Susan’s cigarette was getting in his eyes. She didn’t move it. “You won’t get her to talk,” he said. “She hasn’t talked to anyone. But if you want to try…” He let that trail off.

  Bliss didn’t drive, and Susan’s car was back in the Pearl District. “I don’t suppose you have money for a cab?” Susan asked her mother.

  Bliss frowned. “I don’t carry money,” she said.

  “Your purse,” Parker said to Susan, extracting her small black purse from the pocket of his coat and handing it to her. “They found it in Reston’s car.”

  “I’ll drive you both home when you’re ready.” It was Derek the Square. He hadn’t had time to blow-dry his hair, and it protruded straight out from his skull like grass.

  “I’m going to need you to file the story, kid,” Parker said. “Get it up on-line before we get scooped. You go home early, don’t expect to see your byline.”

  Derek shrugged, throwing a glance at Susan. “There’ll be other stories.”

  “I need a new mentee,” Parker said to Ian. “This one isn’t working out.” But Susan could tell he didn’t mean it.

  “What do you drive?” Susan asked Derek. “Let me guess. A Jetta? No. A Taurus?”

  Derek dangled a ring of keys from his fingers. “An old Mercedes,” he said. “It runs on biodiesel.”

  Susan tried to ignore the slow grin she could see spreading on Bliss’s face.

  “First, I’ll need to go to my apartment for my laptop,” Susan told Derek as she took a drag off her cigarette. “Then I want to go home. To Bliss’s.” Derek’s eyebrows shot up. “My mom’s house,” Susan explained quickly, digging through her purse for her cell phone. “She lives in Southeast.” She looked at her phone screen. She had eighteen new messages.

  “Bliss?” Derek said.

  Bliss held out a hand. “How do you do,” she said.

  Susan was going to say something clever, but she got distracted by her voice mail. The first message was from Molly Palmer.

  Anne shrugged on her long leather coat. She wasn’t needed. But she always liked witnessing the wrap-up. It gave her a sense of closure. She dug for her car keys as she exited the patrol office. The damp Northwest weather had officially returned. Anne didn’t know how the natives stood it. It just made her feel like the entire world was rotting away around her.

  “Good job today.” It was Archie, standing in the drizzle just outside the door.

  Anne smiled. “You want a lift?” she asked. “I’m headed back to the Heathman. I can drop you.”

  “No. I’ve got a cab coming.”

  Anne looked inside, where Claire and Henry were conferring with the crime-scene techies. “Someone here will drive you.”

  Archie shrugged. “I’ve got to make a stop.”

  “At this time of night?” Anne asked. She had an idea where he was going. She had gone to see Gretchen Lowell herself, in those first few days when Archie lay in a medically induced coma. Anne’s bad profile had stung, and she’d thought she might learn something from the Beauty Killer. But Gretchen had refused to talk. She’d sat mutely for an hour in her cell while Anne peppered her with questions. And then Anne had gotten up to leave, and Gretchen had finally spoken. One sentence: “Is he still alive?”

  “You heading back tomorrow, or are you going to stick around for all of the congratulatory press conferences?” Archie asked.

  Anne let him change the subject. “I’m on the red-eye.” You couldn’t force it, she knew, until he was ready for help. But it hurt her to see him suffer, and it hurt her more to not be able to do anything for him. “So I’m around during the day,” she said. She was going to skip the press conferences. There were two pairs of size fourteen sneakers at the Nike outlet with her sons’ names on them. But she added, just in case, “If you want to talk.”

  Archie fingered something in his coat pocket and looked at his shoes. “I need to talk to someone.”

  “But not to me,” Anne guessed.

  Archie glanced up and smiled at her. He looked exhausted to Anne, and she wondered if she looked similarly worn.

  “Have a nice flight,” he said warmly. “It was good to see you.”

  Anne took a small step toward him. “Anything that happened. While you were with Gretchen. Anything you felt or did. You can’t judge it. It was an extreme situation. She constructed an extreme situation. To push you.”

  He looked away, into the night. “I gave up everything I loved in that basement,” Archie explained. His voice was low, controlled. “My children. My wife. My work. My life. I was going to die. In her arms. And I was all right with that. Because she would be there.” He looked right at Anne. “Taking care of me.”

  “She’s a psychopath.”

  A yellow cab pulled into the small parking lot behind the office. “Yeah,” Archie said, taking a step toward it. “But she’s my psychopath.”

  CHAPTER 49

  Archie wakes up completely disoriented. He is still in the basement. He is still in the bed. But everything is different. The bed has been moved against the wall. The stench of rotten meat is gone. He looks for the corpse. It has vanished; the cement floor is washed clean. His bandages are fresh. The sheets have been changed. He has been bathed. The room smells like ammonia. He searches the fractured images in his mind for some recent memory.

  “You’ve been asleep for two days.” Gretchen appears from behind him. She is wearing a fresh change of clothes, black pants and a gray cashmere sweater, and her blond hair is clean and brushed smooth into a shiny ponytail.

  Archie blinks at her, his head still muddy. “I don’t understand,” he manages to say, his voice weak.

  “You died,” Gretchen explains. “But I brought you back. Ten milligrams of lidocaine. I wasn’t sure it would work.” She shoots him a twinkling grin. “You must have a healthy heart.”

  He lets this sink in. “Why?”

  “Because we’re not done yet.”

  “I’m done,” he says with as much authority as he can muster.

  Gretchen gives him an admonishing look. “You don’t get to choose, though, do you? I get to make all the decisions. I get to be the one in charge. All you have to do is go along.” She leans in close, her face inches away from his, her warm hand on his cheek. “It’s the easiest thing in the world,” she says soothingly. “You’ve worked so hard for so long. Always on call. All that responsibility. Everyone always looking to you for answers.” He can feel her breath against his mouth, tickling his lips. He doesn’t look at her. It’s too hard. He looks through her. “They all think you’re dead now, darling. It’s been a long time. I don’t keep anyone alive this long. Henry knows that. I would think you would be pleased. No one needs you anymore.” She smiles and kisses him on the forehead. “Enjoy it.”

  He feels that kiss even as she peels back the bandage covering the surgical incision that stretches from his xiphoid process to his navel. Even as he catches a glimpse of the black sutures that hold his flesh together. She looks pleased. “The swelling’s gone down as well as the redness,” she comments.

  He stares unblinking at the ceiling. There is no escaping. It is all a sick joke. She could keep him alive down there for years. He is at her mercy.

  But he h
as to know. “What are you going to do with me?”

  “Keep you.”

  “For how long?” he asks.

  Gretchen leans over him again, this time eye-to-eye, so he can’t help but look at her, her blue eyes wide, one eyebrow slightly arched, skin glowing. She smiles and is radiant. “Until you like it,” she says.

  He closes his eyes. “I’d like to sleep.”

  When he wakes up, she has the X-Acto knife out again and she is cutting into his chest. It hurts, but he doesn’t care. It’s a minor nuisance, a mosquito bite. But it reminds him that he is alive.

  “Do you want me to stop?” she asks, not looking up.

  “No,” he says. “I’m hoping you’ll nick an artery.” His voice is frail, his throat still aflame with pain.

  She puts her palm on his cheek and leans in close to his ear, as if they are about to share a secret. “What about your children? Don’t you want to live for them?”

  Ben’s and Sara’s sweet faces flash before him and he wipes the image clean from his mind, until there is nothing. He turns his head toward the wall. “I don’t have any children.”

  “How long has it been?” he asks her. His slide in and out of consciousness has allowed time to slip away altogether. How long have they been there? Weeks? Months now? He has no idea. He has been spitting up blood again. He knows that it worries her. Her exquisite face has become taut and she is always there, always at his side. It is the one thing he can count on. He wants to stop spitting up the blood, to please her, but he can’t help himself.

  She is seated beside him. She puts a piece of blond hair behind her ear and presses her fingers against his wrist to take his pulse. She’s been doing this a lot, and he realizes that it is because he is dying. He knows that she will touch his wrist for fifteen seconds, and it is the only thing he looks forward to. There is something about her touch that consoles him absolutely. He savors those fifteen seconds, memorizing the feel of her skin against his so that he can imagine her fingers there when she lifts her hand.