“I’m sorry!” she shouted. “I’m sorry about everything!”
Earlier, she had only been crying. Now she was sobbing.
“Please let me in! I did it all for you!”
The locksmith had left only moments before Caroline dared return home with a story that would satisfactorily explain her actions. The code for the security system, mounted on the exterior door handle — and which, if entered correctly, not only unlocked the door but turned off the alarm — had also been changed.
“Maybe we should let her in,” Samantha said.
“No,” said her father.
“We can’t let her stand in the yard all night.”
“Yes,” Gilbert said. “We can.”
Gilbert had also canceled all their credit cards, except for his Cookson Tech card, to which Caroline did not have access.
Caroline, at one point, had gone around to the back of the house and attempted to gain entry through the sliding-glass doors that led into the kitchen, but Gilbert had made sure those were locked, too. She’d picked up one of the metal deck chairs and thrown it at the glass, but without enough force to crack it.
So she had gone back to the front yard, hoping that expressions of contrition would do the trick.
“I’m sorry!” she shouted again, figuring her family would hear her even if she couldn’t see them. “I was trying to do the right thing! I was trying to help us! Gil, please go to the front door! You don’t have to open it. I just want to talk to you.”
So he went downstairs and positioned himself by the door. Caroline, on the other side, was whimpering.
“I was trying to get justice for you,” she said.
“No, you weren’t,” Gilbert said.
“It’s true. It is. I told Samantha it was all for you.”
“Go away, Caroline. Don’t come back.”
“I’ll talk to Miles. I’ll make it all better.”
“I don’t think that would be a good idea.”
Now, no words. Only crying.
Gilbert, exhausted, put his forehead to the door. “You need help,” he said.
More crying, sniffling.
“You need to talk to somebody,” Gilbert said. “Maybe... that would help. You need to figure out why you do the things you do. If you really want to do the right thing for this family, that would be a place to start.”
Still nothing from the other side of the door. The whimpering had ceased. Gilbert wondered whether she was still there. And then he heard some kind of crash. Glass shattering. Then the whooping of an alarm.
He ran to the living room window.
The windshield of the Porsche Miles had given him had been shattered, caved in. The hood was covered with what looked like topsoil and leaves. The car’s lights were flashing as the alarm continued to wail. Gilbert noticed that one of the planters by the walk up to the front door was missing.
Caroline stood next to the Porsche, brushing her hands together, admiring her handiwork. She turned, slowly, to look back at the house.
Gilbert thought she suddenly looked very calm. Maybe her act of automotive vandalism had served as a kind of release.
Samantha had come downstairs. “Did you see what she did?”
“Yes.”
He saw, at that moment, how pathetic his wife looked. Standing there, tear lines streaking her cheeks, her makeup smeared, hands covered in dirt, her hair in disarray.
Gilbert knew he should be angry, and he certainly had been, but now all he could do was pity her.
Caroline took one last look at the house, turned and walked to the curb, where she had parked her Volvo SUV across the end of the driveway. She got in behind the wheel and drove away. Calmly. No spinning of wheels. She even used her turn signal when she got to the end of the street.
Samantha asked, “Where do you think she’s going?”
Gilbert shook his head. “As long as she doesn’t come back, I don’t care.”
Fifty-Eight
New Haven, CT
“This is kidnapping. You can’t hold me here against my will. I’ll call the police.”
Miles tossed a cell phone to Dr. Martin Gold. It was the one Charise had taken off him earlier. “Go ahead. Call them right now. Let’s tell them everything.”
Gold seemed to sink into the leather couch in the living room of Miles’s home. He looked from Miles to Charise, who was standing nearby, arms crossed, ready to throw him back onto the couch if he considered making a run for it.
Once Miles had returned from Fort Wayne, he’d had Charise drive him back to the ReproGold Clinic. When the doctor turned out not to be there, they went to his home, but a block before they reached it they spotted the doctor behind the wheel of his Lexus, headed in the other direction.
They followed.
They trailed him to the Mount Vernon bridge, and were puzzled, at first, when he stopped his car in the middle of it. But his intentions soon became clear.
“Oh, my God,” Miles had said. “He’s going to jump.”
Charise had not waited for instructions. She’d bolted from the limo and run onto the bridge, then grabbed Gold, hauled him off the railing, and sat on him so he could not get away.
She had then whispered in his ear that if he did not come back to the limo with her, she would do something so horrible to him that he’d beg her to let him try jumping off the bridge again to make the pain go away.
After she had him in the car next to Miles and was back behind the wheel, Miles had said, “That was amazing.”
Charise had said, “Compared to what I used to do, sir, this was like subduing a five-year-old girl.”
Miles had wondered, briefly, whether they should be taking a suicidal man to the hospital, but believed getting some answers from Gold took priority. They could get him the help he needed later. So Miles had directed Charise to take them to his home.
Dorian was waiting at the house when they got there, and reported that a call had been made to the FBI’s Lana Murkowski. So far, she had not called back.
When Gold did not call Miles’s bluff and call the police, Miles took the phone back. He handed his own cell to Charise and asked, “Can you keep trying Chloe?”
Dorian said, “I can do that.”
“No, it’s okay,” Miles said. He had not looked Dorian in the eye since they’d returned. To Charise, he said, “Chloe has to turn her phone back on at some point.”
“Chloe,” Gold said. “The girl who was with you before.”
“Yeah,” Miles said. “So, you were going to jump. Why?”
Gold took a moment to answer. “I’ve had enough.”
Miles perched himself on the coffee table, in front of Gold, and said, “Why does someone consider taking their own life? Depressed, surely. Or maybe to avoid something worse than death. What have you done, Dr. Gold? Tell me what you’ve done.”
Gold couldn’t look at him.
“Tell me about Caroline Cookson,” he said.
Gold’s head jerked. “Who?”
It was a shot in the dark. Miles didn’t know if Caroline had a connection with Gold, or whether the stunt she’d pulled was in any way related to everything else that was going on, but he wanted to see the man’s reaction when asked. Miles repeated the name.
“Who’s that?” Gold said. “Cookson? A relative?”
“Sister-in-law,” Miles said.
“Did she come to my clinic? I don’t know the name.”
Miles believed him and went in another direction. He told Gold what had gone down in Fort Wayne, the attempt to kill someone whose mother had been to Gold’s clinic years ago, before moving to Indiana. As Gold listened, he grew increasingly agitated.
“Why would someone want Travis Roben dead?” Miles asked. “Or the girl in Paris? The student in Maine? All children of women who came to your clinic.”