Lunch first, she decides. What’s the harm in that?
Lunch is salad and more coffee and Theresa’s story of how Brian has started asking for a dog. “A puppy, to be precise. How do you tell a little boy that he can’t have a puppy? That mommy has no time to take care of a puppy? I blame our neighbors—their Labrador just gave birth. The wife offers one to Brian every time we see her. Am I a bad mother? I feel like I’m robbing him of his one chance to grow up with a dog…”
Lyndsey listens, stabbing listlessly at lettuce, but all the while her mind is on what she left behind at her desk. She can’t help but wonder, What were you doing in the network chats, Theresa? Of course, she broaches nothing with her friend. Eventually, they amble back to the office, and Lyndsey can’t wait to head to her little office.
There’s a bombshell waiting for Lyndsey when she gets back to her computer. An email from Murphy:
Katherine Franklin was found dead in her townhouse in Springfield this morning. Security was dispatched to her house when she did not report for duty at her normal time and did not respond to supervisor’s phone calls. EMTs found her unresponsive and she was taken to the nearest hospital, where she was pronounced dead. An autopsy will be conducted but preliminary diagnosis is suicide by overdose. A note was found at the scene and, after review by Security, the contents will be shared with you. While not admitting guilt, she does express remorse for her mistakes in judgment.
Lyndsey clutches at her chest. She spoke to Franklin just yesterday.
Now the woman is dead.
Before she can absorb the news, however, there’s a briefing to attend, and she gets pulled into another meeting. Hours pass, during which she turns the news about Franklin over in her mind until she is almost numb to it. I can’t process this right now. There was something else I needed to do…
That’s right. The forum.
It’s the end of the day before she can go back to the forum and search on Theresa’s posts. Luckily, it’s easy to find them, just a couple clicks and she can pick up where she left off.
What have you been up to, Theresa? Who have you been talking to?
Theresa replied to Jan Westerling. And Kyle Kincaid.
Friendly little connections made to both reports officers.
Suspicion flares up like acid reflux. Lyndsey tamps it down, blaming the lateness and hours spent poring over tiny bits of information that are now all cloudy in her mind. There’s an innocent explanation for it, she assures herself.
Get a good night’s sleep and take another look in the morning. Don’t stew on it now.
Lyndsey flips the light switch and hurries past Eric’s office. She definitely won’t bring this up to him now. For something like this, you need to be sure.
Theresa leans in the doorway to her son’s bedroom, watching him sleep. It’s one of her favorite things to do. He’s so peaceful—not that he’s not peaceful most of the time. He’s such a quiet kid, it worries her sometimes. He can sit completely still for hours, you can barely tell he’s breathing. Not many kids can do that.
Why did she bring up Brian when she spoke to Lyndsey at lunch? She hates to do that; she doesn’t want Brian involved in this horrible business at all. Though it’s impossible: he’s at the very heart of it. She’s doing it for Brian. Though she would never, ever resent Brian for it. It’s her own choice.
She would love to let him take one of the neighbors’ puppies. She can picture the two of them in the yard, Brian running and laughing and calling to the dog, the puppy nipping and jumping. Brian acting like a seven-year-old boy instead of like a ninety-year-old man, always so careful because he knows the earth can open up and swallow you whole at any time. It happened to his father, didn’t it?
But: no puppies. It wouldn’t be fair to the dog. Where they’re going, they’d only have to leave it behind.
SEVENTEEN
SIX MONTHS EARLIER
Theresa Warner always disliked hospitals. For one thing, there was the air, so sour. The antiseptic tang of it turned her stomach. And then there was all that uncertainty, long hours of waiting. She never was good at being patient. This hospital, Sibley Memorial, reminded her of past visits: days spent in the ICU when her father was dying, or that time Brian fell from a tree. Four hours in the emergency room for ten stitches to close a gash on his forehead. Fretting over whether it would leave a scar.
She came straight from work, feeling out of place in her navy suit and heels. Everyone else was dressed in comfortable clothes, ready for a long day in the waiting room or at a loved one’s bedside. Then there were the nurses and cleaning staff dressed in well-worn scrubs, but also latex disposable gloves and aprons. That settled it: she wouldn’t touch anything. She wasn’t going to bring some god-awful germ home to her son. Antibiotic-resistant germs were out of control, new ones found every day, ones that ate the flesh from your bones, could kill you before the week was out. And they all lived at the hospital.
Under ordinary circumstances, Theresa would not be visiting Jack Clemens. But Eric Newman had told her that Jack had asked especially for her. Jack was not someone she knew well; he belonged to her past, a former colleague of Richard’s. She was not about to deny a dying man (pancreatic cancer, no less, no coming back from that) but she wasn’t happy about it. Sibley was in the District, not an easy drive from McLean. It meant leaving work early to beat rush hour traffic but worse, it meant time away from Brian. It was bad enough that they were apart the entire day because of work and school, which couldn’t be helped but she resented anyway. She doubly resented any imposition on her time outside the office. Even for a dying man. Her throat closed as she imagined the terrible things that could happen to Brian if she wasn’t there to protect him. A home invasion. A tree falling on the house. She never had this crippling anxiety before Richard’s death, of course. She kept waiting for it to fade but it only got worse with time.
She scurried through the maze of hospital corridors, wondering what Brian was doing at that moment without her. Probably sitting on the love seat in the den with the cushions stacked around him like his own little bunker. The National Geographic channel, his favorite, would be on—it was always on, like white noise—but he would have one eye on the clock, watching for her return. He would be deaf to the sitter, listening only for the sound of his mother’s car pulling into the driveway.
Theresa hesitated outside Clemens’s room, gathering her resolve. You’re here, just get it over with. For Richard’s sake. The hospital bed was surrounded by high-tech equipment. Lit-up boxes, adorned with red LED numbers, beeped. A monitor displayed vitals in lines and numbers. Tubes and wires hung from the ceiling and twisted around the bed rails like vines in a jungle. A nurse stood to one side, squinting at the monitor as she typed at a portable stand.
And in the center of the bed, completely dwarfed by all the equipment, was the shrunken figure of Jack Clemens. He had once been a good-looking guy, secretly admired by more than one woman in Russia Division, but was now practically child-sized and bald from chemo. It made him seem like an old, old man but—Theresa did the math in her head—he should be in his early fifties. A breathing apparatus sat on his face like a creature from an Alien movie. There were dangling tubes everywhere; he looked like a frail white spider at the center of a very large web.