Die Before I Wake (22 page)

It took me nearly a half hour to find it, in part because the pill Tom gave me had made me groggy, but mostly because I kept getting sidetracked by seductive entries that looked so interesting I just couldn’t help checking them out, if only for a few seconds. Invariably, those few seconds turned into minutes and, totally immersed in something fascinating but unrelated to my search, I kept losing track of time and my original purpose. But in my own inimitable fuzzy-brained manner, despite my screaming ankle and my dull headache, I persevered.

That perseverance paid off. I almost missed the article, buried as it was between a story about the current state of the Maine housing market and a history of some woman named Elizabeth Maines who’d died in 1856. DEATH OF DOCTOR’S WIFE

SHOCKS SMALL MAINE TOWN. It had been picked up by the AP, and apparently distributed around the New England news outlets. It might have even gone national, if it was a slow news day.

NEWMARKET, MAINE (AP)—The small town of Newmarket is still reeling from the death of one of the town’s most beloved citizens and the wife of a prominent physician. According to local authorities, Elizabeth Larkin, wife of Dr. Thomas Larkin and mother of two young children, took her own life on Tuesday evening when she jumped from the railing of the Swift River Bridge and perished in the waters of the Swift River. Neighbors in this small southern Maine town are stunned. “She was such a nice lady,” said Seth Leibowicz, a local grocer. “Always smiling, always with a kind word.” Yet other, unnamed sources say that over the past six months, Larkin had become in-creasingly despondent. Friends and neighbors have expressed dismay because on Tuesday night, Larkin left her two-year-old daughter in the car, unattended until a local resident found her there and called authorities. “I don’t understand,” said bakery owner Tess Pullman. “What kind of mother would leave that poor little girl alone like that? Not the Beth I knew. She was a good mother. She’d never do anything to trau-matize her child like that. Something happened to change her, that’s all I can say.” Police Chief James Andrews confirmed that after an investigation, Larkin’s death has been ruled a suicide. He declined further comment.

Phone calls to the Larkin home went unre-turned.

Larkin leaves behind her husband, Dr.

Thomas Larkin, her two daughters, Taylor and Sadie, her sister, Melanie Ambrose, also of Newmarket, and her mother, Janice Radcliffe, of Zephyrhills, Florida.

I sat there, numb, as what I’d just read gradually sank into my fuzzy brain. Sadie had been there that night. She’d sat in Beth’s Land Rover, there on the bridge, and witnessed her mother’s supposed suicide leap. Or perhaps she’d witnessed something else, something worse than suicide, something her two-year-old brain didn’t quite comprehend but was cognizant enough to fear.

Dear God.

How long had she sat there alone after Beth went over the side? How long before this unnamed “local resident” found her, a helpless two-year-old child, alone and crying for her mother? Ten minutes? An hour? Two hours? I’d spent some time out on Swift River Road. In all the time I’d been there, I’d seen just one vehicle pass. The road was obviously not heavily traveled. At night, after dark, it must have been terrifying for Sadie. What had Beth said to her before she left the car? Had she planned not to return?

Had she spoken words of comfort to a daughter she knew would never see her mother again? Or had fate, in human form, intervened in Beth’s plans to return safely to her child?

There was something terribly wrong here, something so wrong I couldn’t believe that supposedly intelligent people had been stupid enough to fall for it. I could see clearly what the rest of the world seemed to have missed: No mother, no matter how much she wanted to die, would kill herself in front of her two-year-old, leaving the child alone, in the dark, unprotected, on a back country road that was seldom traveled, dependent on the goodwill of strangers for her safety and an open target for child molesters and other unsavory characters. No mother would leave her child alone in a car, on a high bridge over a swiftly running river, if the possibility existed that the child might leave the car in search of her mother and fall off the side of the bridge into the swirling waters below.

Never. Not in a million years. Not even the worst mother in the world would do this. Not deliberately.

The last piece of evidence fell into place, and the tiny shred of doubt that had remained, the doubt that had allowed me to concede the possibility that Beth’s death really was a suicide, was gone. I knew now, beyond any reasonable doubt, that Elizabeth Larkin, my husband’s former wife, mother to Taylor and Sadie and sister to Mel, had been murdered.

The implications were staggering. Somebody had wanted Beth dead, wanted her dead bad enough that they were willing to kill her in front of her child. And either the police department was made up of incompetent idiots—which was a possibility, considering Dwight’s level of competence—or a lot of people were covering up the truth.

Who knew the truth? Riley? Claudia? Jeannette?

Tom? The idea that my husband might be covering up a homicide was beyond comprehension. It simply wasn’t possible. There was no way Tom was involved in any kind of cover-up. No way Tom was involved in—
oh,
God. I closed my eyes and buried my head in my hands. I wasn’t even going there. Tom was a good man. A good husband, a good father, a good doctor. He’d taken the Hippocratic oath. He was not a killer.

But I couldn’t shake the words Beth had said to me last night in my dream:
Watch your back. Don’t
trust anybody.
Did that anybody include Tom?

Fear is a peculiar emotion. It distorts your per-spective, makes you see things that aren’t there, prevents you from noticing what should be obvious.

My thoughts raced, like a runaway locomotive, one after another. Sadie had been with Beth the night she died. I could only presume that she’d witnessed something, although only Sadie—and possibly Beth’s killer—knew what that something was. Why was Tom so adamant that the girls have no reminders of their mother? Why was he so determined that Sadie not see a therapist? What memories did he fear Beth’s painting might shake loose? Was he afraid Sadie might say something to her therapist that, if disclosed, could destroy his life? Was he driven by guilt, or was he trying to protect someone else? His brother. His mother. Maybe some other person as yet unknown to me.

No. I wasn’t going to let myself think this way, allowing fear to overtake reason. There was absolutely no basis, aside from my own overactive imagination, for thinking that Tom might have been involved in his wife’s death. How could I even consider doubting him? This was
Tom
I was talking about, for God’s sake. My husband. My friend. My lover. Damn it, I would know if he were involved in anything sinister. I lived with the man. I slept with him. If that kind of evil existed inside Tom Larkin, I would have sensed it. But I hadn’t sensed anything of the kind. Tom’s actions weren’t questionable. He was simply a concerned dad, trying to protect his little girls. And I had been reading way too many mystery novels.

But somebody was responsible. Somebody had killed Beth. I hated to even think it, but if I were to point fingers, Riley seemed the most likely candidate. After all, Beth had been his girlfriend at one time. But she’d married his brother instead of him.

That had to hurt. Had it eaten away at him all these years, festering and poisoning him until, in a fit of passionate rage, he’d confronted the woman he’d lost to his brother and tossed her off the side of a bridge? Hadn’t Riley always been jealous of Tom, jealous of everything Tom possessed? Jealousy was a strong motive. Was it strong enough in Riley’s case to compel him to take away the thing his brother loved most in life, the woman he believed Tom had stolen from him? My brother-in-law seemed a decent, levelheaded guy. I liked him. As far as I could see, everybody liked him. Despite his occasionally acerbic tongue, he’d been kind to me. But I hardly knew Riley Larkin. All I’d really seen was the super-ficial outer shell. I had no idea what went on behind those blue eyes.

I didn’t want to believe that Riley had killed Beth.

It seemed improbable, but I’d seen less likely scenarios. And if not Riley, then who?

I considered Jeannette. Tom’s mother was a very unhappy person, and that unhappiness radiated out-ward to everyone she came in contact with. She hated me on general principles. Had she hated Elizabeth, as well? Something Riley once said came back to me now:
Nobody’s ever been quite good enough for our
boy here.
The implication, which I hadn’t picked up on at the time, was that Jeannette Larkin had considered no woman—including Elizabeth—to be a suitable wife for her son. Tom had admitted that his mother was overprotective. Was it outside the realm of possibility to believe that a deranged woman might consider the act of killing her son’s unsuitable wife to be an act of protection? If it were Jeannette who’d done the deed, that would account for the secrecy, the knowing looks that passed between Tom and Riley, the cover-up that almost certainly was going on. Tom wouldn’t want his mother, his children’s grandmother, to go to prison. He would protect his mother any way he could. Motherhood was sacred; I suspected most children would do the same.

My own baser emotions made Jeannette the ideal candidate, but logic told me I was reaching. Wishful thinking, perhaps? Jeannette was a classic passive-aggressive type. To my face, my mother-in-law was civil. Not warm, but not openly hostile. It was behind my back that she released her aggressions. Which meant that murdering her son’s wife would be unlikely. Someone like Jeannette might be adept at character assassination, but I couldn’t honestly see her taking the direct approach involved in actually killing someone. I doubt she would have risked a face-to-face confrontation. She was more likely to kill someone with word than with deed.

I had nothing I could take to the police. I knew in my heart that Beth had been murdered, but anything beyond that was conjecture. I could ruminate and analyze and explore various wild scenarios until the cows came home, but the truth was that I had no idea who had killed Elizabeth Larkin, or why. All the evidence I had was little more than speculation.

Without something concrete, something that actually pointed to one specific person, all I had was empty hands. If I went to the cops with my suspicions, they’d tell me their investigation was already complete, then they’d pat me on the head and send me on my way with a strong admonition to stop playing armchair detective.

What they wouldn’t do was listen to me.

In other words, if I wanted to solve Beth’s murder, I was going to have to do it myself. Because the cops weren’t going to help me at all.

A wave of exhaustion crashed over me, a combination of pain pills and my body’s own defense system. Yawning, I closed my eyes. Immediately, a kaleidoscope of images, vivid and surreal, danced across my brain. Beth teetering on the railing of that bridge while Sadie watched, too young to comprehend what her mother was doing. Tom standing over me like an angry parent, scolding me for having the audacity to fall down those stairs and disrupt his otherwise smooth life. Riley, wielding that chain saw with grace and deadly accuracy. Claudia, laughing as she spread boysenberry jam on her croissant. Jeannette, casting furtive, poisonous glances across the dinner table at me. Roger Levasseur, his expression sorrowful as he studied me with those red and rheumy eyes.

I awoke with a start, realized I’d dropped off to sleep still sitting at Tom’s desk. The pills Dr. Jankowski had prescribed were having a bizarre effect on me, but they kept my pain at a manageable level, so I supposed I could tolerate them a little longer. I was a wuss when it came to pain, so hallucinations and excessive daytime sleepiness were probably an acceptable trade-off.

But right now, my eyelids drooped so heavily I simply couldn’t keep them open. I stumbled, woozy and weak, to the couch. Dropping my head on last night’s pillow, I pulled the blanket over me and immediately fell into a deep slumber.

I dreamed. Strange, colorful and highly improbable dreams, little snippets of scene or thought or dialogue that flowed one into another in disparate entities, like a play penned by Picasso. For a time, I tried to follow them, tripping along behind like an entomologist with a butterfly net. But like the elusive butterfly, the peculiar little prisms of my dreams remained just beyond reach.

It was the telephone that woke me. I opened my eyes, squinted at the light, and fumbled for the cordless phone on the coffee table. “Hello?” I croaked.

“It’s me,” Tom said. “I’m calling to make sure everything’s okay. Claudia said she knocked and knocked on the door, but nobody answered.”

“Tom.” I sat up, fighting the dizziness that hadn’t been there this morning, and rubbed my forehead in a vain search for clarity. “It’s these pills,” I said, sounding as fuzzy as I felt. “What time is it?”

“It’s nearly one o’clock. Claudia came over to bring you lunch, but the door was locked and she couldn’t get in. We were worried about you.” I tried to calculate how long I’d slept. Close to three hours. Three hours, on a sunny late-September morning, seemed excessive. “Should I be sleeping so much?” I said.

“You have a concussion, Jules. Your body’s been through significant trauma. Sleeping more than usual is normal. It’s how your body heals.” I shoved a strand of hair back from my face.

“That’s what Claudia said.”

“You should listen to her. And now you should get up and unlock the door. I’d just as soon you didn’t lock them anyway. If you fell again, nobody could get in to help you.”

“Why would I fall again?”

“Well, I don’t know. Let’s look at the evidence and see what we come up with. You have a concussion, you’re walking in an air cast, you’re stiff and bruised and lame, and you’re on some pretty heavy drugs. Humor me, babe. Be a good girl and go unlock the door so Claudia can bring you your lunch.”

“I’m not hungry.” I realized, with some amaze-ment, that it was the truth. The nausea that had unexpectedly rolled in had driven away all thoughts of food. For me, that was unheard of. Nothing ever chased away my appetite.