Lie Still (9 page)

“Who’s Jimmy Cooper?” I asked.

Mike had committed every single night to reading at least twenty old file cases from Clairmont’s criminal history. He wanted them wired in his head before they were wired into a new, high-tech computer system arriving at his office next week. The database was Mike’s first request after taking the job. He had figured it would take two years or maybe never to get approval. Instead, a big fat check to pay for it landed on his desk the next day.

“Jimmy Cooper is a man with a lifetime of drunk and disorderlies.” He scribbled a few notes, presumably about Jimmy Cooper, on the yellow legal pad in his lap.

I watched my stomach contort like a circus show, the baby punching out his nightly workout.

I juggled myself over onto my side, rubbing Mike’s thigh.

“Stop doing that unless you’re serious,” he said.

“Does anything bad ever happen in this town?” I asked.

“The last homicide was about two years ago. Domestic. A trailer park case just inside the city limits. The city council conveniently redrew that line two months later so it didn’t show up in their statistics. In the last seven years, the city has recorded two murders and two suicides in its jurisdiction. The man in the trailer park who beat his wife to death with a coat hanger. And an unsolved in 2002—a Jane Doe from God-knows-where dumped on the side of a county road west of town. FBI profilers came in on that one because of similarities to the murders of two young females in Boston and Philadelphia. The same ligature marks.”

He reached for the half-empty Abita on the nightstand. “A couple of recent suicides. A local high school student hung himself in his bedroom after a girl broke up with him.”

“Who found him? His mother?” My gut twisted into the complicated knot that it performed earlier in the day, with Tiffany breathing into my face.

“I shouldn’t tell you any of this,” Mike said. “You should be thinking nice baby thoughts. Bunnies and flowers.”

“Who was the other one? The other suicide?”

“Really?”

“Really.”

“The wife of the First Presbyterian minister overdosed on a cocktail of prescription drugs. Helen Mayse. Three months ago. That’s all you’re getting out of me tonight.”

“Helen?” I sat up. “I think Caroline was talking about her today. I think she’s the woman who died and left a spot open in that stupid club. Caroline didn’t give any hint of a suicide.”

“You saw Caroline again today?” He gave me an odd look. “You didn’t mention it.”

“It was just a quick glass of iced tea with a few women at her house.”

Mike shrugged. “Suicide still carries a stigma. People won’t talk about it.” He banged me on the head with the folder. “Come on, honey. This is just your run-of-the-mill small-town stuff. Relax. I’m glad you’re getting to know people.”

Caroline’s macabre performance this afternoon was stuck like a clot of bread in my throat. It was just as much a lie because I held it in, an excruciating lesson I had learned over time. This lie of omission was already casually walking over to the little nest inside I’d made for the others.

The baby was operating the dimmer switch for my brain. My eyes drooped.

“I hear you.” I fluffed up my pillow and laid down again. “Bunnies and flowers.”

E
leven hours later.

My name, “Emily Page,” stood out in bold type on the printed label.

The package was thin and brown, stamped crookedly several times in red ink with
PRIVATE
. No stamps. No return address.

The package, propped up against the doorframe, had grazed my feet as soon as I stepped onto the side porch to water a dying pot of impatiens. A familiar flutter of fear, but I pushed it away. She’d never hand-delivered anything before. She was old. Far away.

She could have hired someone. You don’t really think she’s going to kill you herself, do you?

I headed back inside to the kitchen and snatched a paring knife out of the wood block on the counter.

The package was thin enough to be empty, but I knew better. I slid the knife under the flap and reached my hand down deep, pulling out a sealed legal-sized envelope. Blank. White. No writing. I dropped the knife and slit the envelope open with my nail. I unfolded the single piece of paper inside. Surely it was a leftover form from our real estate agent we still needed to sign.

It wasn’t anything nearly so simple.

The type blurred in my shaking hands, but a cop’s wife instantly recognizes a police report. I caught a name, and a terrible verb.

I could see Pierce’s face in my mind. Hear his voice.
Lie still
.

I smoothed it out on the kitchen table. I’d never seen this—didn’t even know it existed—but Officer Marilyn Hinks got all the basic details right. Thirteen years ago, a sophomore female, Emily Waters, entered the Windsor University campus police office at 3:13 a.m. to report a rape.

I quickly read the brief summary of the complaint:

I felt faint. The paper was going gray around the edges. Warned me that I should put my head down between my legs. But I couldn’t stop reading.

This level of fury had coursed inside me before, and the outcome wasn’t pretty. But to see the policewoman’s sloppy work in black and white, to feel her derision and judgment jumping off the page—everything I’d wondered if she’d thought that night—was waking an angry demon from his nap.

It’s not like I don’t blame myself, but intellectually, I knew this ill-trained campus officer shouldn’t have dared to. Rape lite. It came unbidden to mind, the derogatory term I’d heard used for date rape.

It occurred to me suddenly, belatedly, that I needed to be more focused and distressed about
why
this piece of paper rose from its grave in a file cabinet far, far away and landed on my doorstep.

There were no clues, no note was attached. I dug my fingers
into the bottom corners of the envelope again and came up empty. Caroline? It seemed too soon. I’d been sitting in her house less than twenty-four hours ago. And, yes, maybe she was faking, but she appeared to be genuinely ill.

I pictured Caroline trotting up to the door in her pearls and running away in a senior citizen version of Ding Dong Ditch. It wasn’t a genteel lady move.

The scarier possibility, of course, was that my faithful, hateful mail stalker had gathered momentum. Something had taken her rage to a more intimate level.

The phone—a red, old-fashioned dial-up still attached to the wall—shrilled two feet from my head, and I let out a short scream.

Calm down. You aren’t a nineteen-year-old girl anymore
.

I picked up the receiver, ready to give the caller everything she had coming to her. To let her know that I wasn’t a person who could be blackmailed, although another part of me tried to speak up, saying I was exactly that kind of person.

“Emily?”

Not a female voice. Mike.

“Yes.” I battled a wave of nausea.

“You aren’t answering your cell phone.”

“It’s … on the bed. I think.”

“Hold on a second,” he said. The phone chilled my burning cheek. I could hear a small commotion on the other end. Several voices.

Could I tell Mike about the rape now? After all these years?

He’d be angry, hurt, that through all of our shouting matches, hours of marriage counseling, the ups and downs of our marathon sex life, I had never trusted him enough. Keeping the rape from him was one more dent in our marital armor. It would erase all the progress we’d made in the last six months. I’d thought about this thousands of times, relentless waves lapping at the shore.

I closed my eyes, hating myself. For the rape. For the things that followed.

But Mike’s curt words quickly erased any thoughts of telling him anything. “I’m over at Caroline Warwick’s house. She’s missing. Em, you were one of the last people to see her.”

My fingers involuntarily crumpled the police report until it was a wad in my fist, the size of a small grenade.

W
as I imagining the soft sound of crying in the background? Maria?

“Oh, Mike.” I cleared my throat. “When?”

“Caroline complained of a migraine all afternoon, then went to bed around seven-thirty last night. Maria claims she stayed on her shift longer than usual before going home, to make sure Caroline was OK. This morning, when she didn’t show up for breakfast, Maria found her bedroom empty, the bed rumpled, but the covers still in place, like she hadn’t ever pulled them down.”

“Maybe she made the bed and went on a late morning walk?” Why was this being treated as such a crisis when it had been less than twenty-four hours? And why was he calling me? Mike never included me in his investigations. Never.

I aimed the ball of paper at the kitchen wastebasket ten feet away, playing a game with myself. If it went in, I didn’t have to tell Mike anything at all. If I missed, I would come clean.

“Maria says Caroline tells people that she hasn’t made her own bed since she was six,” Mike said. “She’s fired three housekeepers who didn’t change the sheets by eight on the dot every morning.”

“Maybe she took a late night drive? Got in an accident?”

People like Caroline always came back. I arched my wrist and fired. The paper ball bounced off the wastebasket’s rim and under the kitchen table. Stupid game.

“We’re checking the hospitals. But all of her cars are in the garage. Three Cadillacs.” Mike lowered his voice. “I don’t feel good about this.” At once, I understood. Mike’s well-trained gut was talking.

“You think something has happened to her?”

“There’s a little blood on the back of a pillow. An open window. A footprint in the flower bed. Ladder marks in the dirt. A gutter with a dent in it. It could be a week-old nosebleed, a desire for fresh night air, a diligent gardener picking weeds, and a little hail damage. It’s not like I have a crack CSI unit.”

“There’s something else, I can tell.” Mike’s sarcasm had whipped up a new batch of paranoia in my head. Was Caroline’s bedtime reading a copy of my rape report? Was someone sweeping my past into an evidence bag? Mike couldn’t find out this way.

“There are three empty prescription bottles on her nightstand. Prozac, Percocet, and Vicodin. Exactly the drug cocktail that killed her friend Helen. Prescribed by Dr. Gretchen Liesel. The painkillers are for migraines, so that’s consistent at least. But the Mayse suicide is extremely fresh in my mind.”

“You think Caroline killed herself? She was definitely not suicidal when I saw her.” Anything but.

“It’s not my top scenario. And there’s another odd thing. Maria says Caroline always kept her Bible on her dresser. Wouldn’t let her touch it, even to dust. Onionskin pages. A relic.
There’s an inscription.
To our blessed daughter, on her tenth birthday
. Someone ripped a page out of it and underlined a passage. One of my guys found it on the floor by the window. Hold on, let me get it. It’s already been bagged.”

Mike came back on the line.

“Matthew 23:33.”

“It’s not top of my mind at the moment,” I said.

“You serpents, you brood of vipers, how are you to escape being sentenced to hell?”

Tearing a page out of someone’s Bible was like burning the flag in front of a soldier. Maybe worse.

“What do you want me to do?” I asked.
He wants me to tell him the truth
, I thought.
Tell him that the five women who sat in a room with Caroline Warwick yesterday, including his pregnant wife, would make a nice little lineup of suspects
.

“Stay home. I’m sending an officer over for your statement.”

“Mike, I …”

He’d already hung up.

C
ody Hill was a young, redheaded policeman who topped out at about 6’5″ and held a glass of ice water in sprawling hands that belonged to a former Clairmont High School All-State quarterback. It was a fact he mentioned about himself immediately after dropping onto my couch.

I forced my fingers to stop twirling a strand of hair into a tight rope. The crumpled campus police report now resided in the pocket of my jeans, a ball of lead. When did paper become so heavy?