HER PERFECT SECRET a totally gripping psychological thriller Page 3

  “She’s upstairs, yeah.”

  “Go on in,” Paul says. “Make yourself comfortable.”

  “Okay, thanks.” He flashes us another quick smile before moving on.

  We watch as he approaches and enters the house.

  I can’t keep it quiet any longer. Paul must read it in my face because his mouth turns down, eyebrows knitted with concern. “What?”

  I take him by the arm, trying to be casual, and walk him toward the driveway. Our Range Rover is there, plus the old Ford pickup truck we leave at the house. Behind them both is Joni’s Subaru. The garage, where cars usually go, has been serving as Paul’s workshop. He’s building a boat, a process that’s spanned four summers now. He swears it will be done before we return home at the end of next week.

  I lead him inside, the smell of sanded wood filling my nose. We’re out of view of the house, out of hearing range, too.

  “Em? What’re you doing? What’s going on?”

  We stand together beside the boat he’s making. It’s upside down, the wood bare and smooth. Paul can’t help it — he looks at his creation and then runs his hand over it. But his eyes come back to mine. “I know,” he says. “It’s nuts. But it’s Joni. Par for the course. ‘You just gotta laugh because it’s all so crazy.’ Right? He seems like a good guy, Em. I know you think I just like everybody. But he really cares about her. He—”

  “I think he was a former patient.”

  Paul’s hand stops. He looks at me, brushes his palms together absently, kicking off a little dust. “What?”

  “Fifteen years ago.”

  “In what . . . ? I mean . . .”

  “A murder case. An evaluation I did for the New York State Police. Remember? Investigator Mooney?”

  I see the memory hit his eyes, changing his gaze. “The Bishops,” he says.

  “Yeah.”

  He points towards the house. “That’s him? That’s the boy?”

  “I think so.”

  Paul’s hand drops. He takes a step closer. “You think so? Or you know?”

  “I think I remember him. He looks exactly like Tom Bishop would look if he were now twenty-three. I mean, exactly.”

  “But he’s . . . Michael Rand . . .”

  I wait, lifting my eyebrows at my husband, inviting him to work it out.

  “Maybe he changed his name? Because of everything that happened?”

  “Wouldn’t you?”

  “I mean, he was a kid . . .”

  “He had people looking out for him. His aunt and uncle, for one thing. David Bishop’s sister and her husband. The ones who took Tom in after it all . . . after the trial.”

  Paul has been staring off, but now he focuses on me. “What are their names?”

  “I thought of that. I’m not sure I remember, but I don’t think it was Rand.”

  “Can you check? Is there some way you can find out?”

  “Well, maybe. My files, but those are back at my office. And I didn’t write much down, just some notes for myself and then the report, which went under judicial seal. Because he was a minor.”

  I’m quiet, contemplating, and notice Paul has gone kind of lifeless again.

  “So,” I say.

  Suddenly Paul shakes his head. “I don’t know. I mean, you’re not even sure.”

  “Not a hundred percent.”

  “It’s just a lookalike thing.”

  “Well, that and . . .” The way he makes me feel.

  Paul shakes his head again. “Honey, I don’t think so. I just spent an hour with that guy. I’m a pretty good judge of character. And he told us what happened to his parents. You know, changing your name is one thing, but concocting a false past?” Paul shook his head. “It’s a resemblance, nothing else.”

  I don’t want to argue, even if it feels as much like denial as logic coming from my husband. But in truth, all I have is a feeling.

  Pieces of a memory.

  A trace of a boy who saw something horrible.

  * * *

  There were ten minutes left in our fifth and final session. Mooney’s words had been ringing in my mind ever since she and Starzyk interrupted us. That may not be all he saw. The sense of urgency. I didn’t like it; it was anathema to my practice, but I understood it.

  And then I asked the question.

  “Tom?”

  He looked at me. Maybe he heard it in my voice: I needed something from him.

  Or, his father did.

  And that’s how I approached it.

  “If your dad could talk to you right now, what would he tell you to do? If you saw something, if you saw what happened to him — not afterward, but when it happened — don’t you think he would want you to tell?”

  Tom gazed at me, impassively at first. I suppressed the urge to say more, I fought to give him space. And then his face changed — it started to crumble.

  And the noise — at first, I wasn’t sure where it was coming from. A terrible sound, like a moan, at once both inhuman and utterly human. It was coming from him.

  Tom opened his mouth, and he took a breath, and that moan escaped him again. Tears filled his eyes, then spilled over the lids, ran down his reddened cheeks.

  I stood, my heart rate going up. What is this? What do I do? But that was foolish. I’d seen people cry, scream, go on a tear — I’d seen every emotion.

  Okay, maybe not like this. Maybe not an eight-year-old boy with the sound of pure heartache issuing from his open mouth. Because that’s what it was. A depthless anguish.

  “Tom . . .” I said, trying to soothe. I resisted going to him but reached out, fingers in the air just a yard from his face.

  “I saw,” he managed.

  “Okay.” I released a pent-up breath. “Okay, Tom. You saw . . . You saw what happened to your father?”

  Tom moaned again, the pitch even lower. He gave a sidelong look at the door, exposing the whites of his eyes. Like he was remembering the police on the other side of it, wondering if they’d come back. If they were listening now.

  “I saw her,” he said next.

  “You saw her? Your mother?”

  He was still describing his discovery of his father’s death, it seemed.

  “I heard them.” Tom whimpered a little between each sentence. Like the words physically hurt. “They were yelling at each other.”

  I didn’t interrupt. The police had said there were signs of forced entry. That someone had broken into the Bishop home and David Bishop had confronted them, had words.

  “They were yelling and it woke me up and I went downstairs.”

  But this was different. I couldn’t tell if he was talking about the assailant or his mother. We were in different territory from what he’d told the police.

  “I went down and . . . I went down and I saw them fighting.”

  I had to speak. To clarify. “The intruder and your daddy?”

  Tom looked at me — I’ll never forget the haunting in his light-colored eyes — and he shook his head. He moaned one last time, swallowed, and said, “Mommy and Daddy. Fighting. And Mommy had a hammer.”

  PART TWO

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  I have to know.

  First of all, the resemblance is uncanny. We’ve all heard stories that everyone has a double in the world — maybe this is what that is. Or perhaps time has distorted my memory. That would be fine. I prefer the possibility of dementia or confabulation to the alternative: Michael has sought us out for some reason. Revenge? Because I unlocked the truth that had his mother convicted of capital murder?

  But the odds that Michael is Tom, and Michael just happened to meet and date my daughter — then propose marriage — all the while innocently disremembering our time together — those are stacked too high. Too many coincidences. And I’ve learned from both my time spent working with law enforcement and my own experiences as a psychologist that coincidence rarely exists. There’s always a connection.

  The last possibility is this: Michael is acting unco
nsciously, or at least semi-consciously. Memory is a wild place. I’ve had patients who’d forgotten whole chunks of their lives. Patients who misremembered things substantially — swapping out characters from their past, switching family members, confusing strangers with friends. Mostly, we humans compartmentalize. Especially when traumatized. We quickly and carefully hide away painful experiences in a mental room, lock the door and drop the key down a deep well.

  I drink coffee as I contemplate, watching the lake through the picture window in the living room. Paul is out there now, using our push mower on the sloping front lawn. We have a caretaker, but we give him an August vacation. Paul likes to do his own mowing, especially when he has something to think about. And I suppose I’ve given him just that.

  We’re not in agreement at the moment, Paul and me. He thinks it’s coincidence. But he knows me and knows where I’m headed. That I’m not going to be able to relax until I figure this out.

  I wait, as patiently as I can, until Joni and Michael come downstairs. They’ve been up there for a half an hour, and they’re both looking a bit glowy. Joni has changed into a bathing suit, and Michael is wearing trunks.

  “We’re going to take a dip, Mom. Then we’re going into town. Okay?”

  “Sure.” I wrap my hands around my mug of coffee. “Have fun.”

  They’re out the door like a couple of kids. And they are kids, really. Barely into their twenties. I watch them run down the lawn. Paul smiles and gives a wave. Once they reach the dock, Michael sweeps Joni off her feet. He carries her, like the bride over the threshold, to the end of the dock, where he pretends to toss her in. She makes a big show of it, kicking her legs and throwing her head back, which fans her long, highlighted hair. Then he sets her down and she promptly dives in off the end of the dock. Michael waits for her to re-emerge.

  Our kids, Joni and Sean, grew up coming here. Paul bought the place when Sean was just two and Joni not yet conceived. She learned to swim in the lake when she was five years old. I watch her break the surface now — she was underwater for several seconds and she’s out a good ways — and then Michael jumps in.

  Now’s the time. I turn from the window and head upstairs. I’m not proud of what I’m about to do, but I make a deal with myself: I’m only looking for identifying information. I’m not going to read Michael’s personal thoughts.

  The stairs creak beneath my weight. Paul hates that the stairs creak and considers it a design flaw. He’s funny, my husband: laid-back in life, slow to act, but a ruthless perfectionist when it comes to his work. Maybe since he’s so tough on himself that way, he’s got to go easy elsewhere in order to stay sane.

  It smells like sex in my daughter’s room. The bed is still made, but the comforter is rumpled. Wrinkling my nose, I crank open the casement windows to let in a bit of air. Luckily, the room is on the backside of the house — no one will spot me from the lake. The forest is in the back, thick with pines and hemlocks and birch trees. There’s a walking trail that disappears into the lush greenery. Barely visible is an old shed that was part of the original construction.

  Lake Placid and its neighbor, Saranac Lake, were mainly developed as early fashionable resort centers. As Michael mentioned, for the affluent who came to escape the city smog, to draw in the fresh mountain air in the hopes they wouldn’t die of consumption.

  Many did. They spent months — years — sitting out on large porches, bundled in blankets, heads covered with knitted winter hats, as they shrank away into death.

  But they couldn’t stop the tide of vacationers, attracted by the chance to get back to basics without sacrificing the luxury to which they were accustomed. Men with hunting and fishing skills became guides for the rich, taking the city folk deep into the woods, cooking their trout dinner over an open fire, regaling them with stories of the “north country,” playing the banjo or guitar. People built huge log cabins and decorated them with deer heads and stuffed black bears and colorful, hand-woven Native American rugs. They hung pack baskets and snowshoes and black powder rifles. They called these places “Great Camps.”

  When we bought our property, it contained a Great Camp that had fallen into disrepair. Paul estimated the cost of restoring it was greater than razing it and building a new, more modern home. He relished the challenge of designing his own place.

  Michael’s duffel bag is on the floor near the bedroom closet. The main zipper is shut, but the side pocket where Joni returned the diary hangs open. I squat down beside the bag and, feeling a bit like a TV detective handling evidence, use the pen I’ve brought to push the fabric farther open. The leather-bound notebook is where it was. The pen won’t help me now. Glancing over my shoulder at the bedroom door, I pull it out, unwind the rope holding the book closed, then open it.

  My breath suspended, I check the first couple of pages, catching pieces of sentences, dates. I make an effort to skim these, not to comprehend. Michael deserves privacy, though I can’t help but consider the handwriting — big, blocky, exuberant, really — along with the use of both black and blue ink, even pencil.

  I flip to where the text ends, about two-thirds of the way through. It looks like he’s been keeping this journal for just about six months and has written a fair amount in that time. It’s not unheard of for a young man to keep a journal, but it does seem unusual, especially in this day and age.

  Occasionally, I have a patient who I think might benefit from journaling and encourage them to do so. But it’s not for everybody. Some struggle mightily to put pen to paper, either because it’s just not natural to them — they’re more mathematical or mechanical than verbal — or because it’s too painful. It calls them to fish the key out of that deep well, to unlock their tucked-away mental room.

  Michael’s prose seems to flow. As much as I’m trying to only look for identifying information — numbers, addresses — it’s impossible not to glean a few things . . .

  Monday, April 4 — Having a hard time getting going today. Sitting here on the train, watching the commuters — everybody has their face stuck behind either a newspaper, tablet, or phone. Mostly it’s the phones. Even people whom I watched board together and sit down don’t talk, just poke at their phones. Does anyone just stare out the window anymore?

  So, he’s a romantic, I think. An idealist, maybe. Not exactly original in his observations. I’m nevertheless charmed. It makes sense my Joni is drawn to a man with the heart of a poet.

  I’m about to close the journal — the longer I look, the guiltier I feel — but something stops me.

  Sitting here on the train, he writes.

  Which train? I flip through the pages, looking for any mention of a place. It takes a few minutes. I’m about to give up, but then:

  . . . which is part of what’s so fascinating about this place. It’s part suburb and part city. And how location shapes people. Even after just a couple of generations. Long Island people are practically their own species . . .

  I’ve noticed the journal is filled with lots of philosophical observations like this, but this is the first I’ve seen announcing a location. He just now mentioned growing up by the ocean, and I’ll be damned if Long Island doesn’t trigger a memory. A name.

  Bleeker.

  Arnold Bleeker, I think, and his wife — I forget her first name. But they were the uncle and aunt who took in Tom while his mother awaited trial. And, as far as I know, they kept him afterwards.

  I quickly wind the journal’s string, then tuck it back into the duffel, making sure it looks just as it was. What I’ve found is nothing definitive — Long Island is a huge place, its shoreline hundreds of miles long — but another coincidence?

  They’re really piling up.

  About to leave the room, I stop, hearing music, vibration. The popular song is emanating from Michael’s phone, half-tucked under the pillow. It’s an incoming call, the number displayed on screen. 315. A Central New York number.

  I wait, feeling my heart beat a little harder. I chide myself for being f
oolish.

  The ringing stops. I linger just another moment, and the phone buzzes with a text.

  Despite the phone being in lock-mode, the text shows up on screen.

  Hey. You there yet? How did it go?

  Then, a second later:

  Did they buy it?

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Outside, Paul’s lawnmower has just quit. Is he finished? Returning inside? Leaving the phone, I walk swiftly out of the bedroom and into the master bedroom across the hall. This is where Paul and I sleep, overlooking the lake. I see him down there — he’s removing some clotted grass from beneath the machine.

  My gaze seeks Joni and Michael, swimming in the lake, but I can’t find them. Their towels are piled on the dock; they haven’t finished and headed back for the house yet. Then I see it: a ripple of water near the corner of the boathouse, signs of people swimming just out of sight. I breathe a little easier, then trot back into Joni’s bedroom.

  I pick up the phone.

  Did they buy it?

  Did they buy what? I infer the rest:

  Did they buy your fake story, Michael? The fabricated past about your parents dead in a car wreck? Did they buy that you were nice, sincere, and not sociopathic? Not planning to get some sort of revenge on the woman who aided your mother’s prosecution fifteen years ago?

  Maybe. Maybe that’s what’s unsaid, but I can’t be sure.

  You there yet?

  How did it go?

  These are innocuous. They could easily be about the marriage proposal. Telling your fiancée’s parents.

  But:

  Did they buy it?

  This is so loaded. A phrase with specific connotations. It refers to someone running a con.

  I set the phone down but don’t move for a moment, recalling the headlines from back then, the chyrons on the cable news: Bronxville Woman Pleads Guilty to Husband Murder.