“That’s okay.”
“Will you stay here?”
I was surprised. And smiled.
“I’m having lunch with Mitch and Dulcie.”
“Will you come back here afterward?”
“I don’t know. I’ll call you.”
“Okay.” His eyebrows were raised. He was trying to read me and I wasn’t making it easy.
His phone rang again.
“Jordain,” he said, and listened.
I was about to go into the bedroom and get dressed, but something about the consternation that settled on his face and the nervous way his fingers started playing an imaginary piano on the table made me stop.
“When did it come in?” He listened while the party on the other end of the line spoke. “When will the lab have results?” He listened again. “Okay. I’ll be there in an hour.”
He put the phone down.
“What is it?”
“Morgan, I need your help.” His voice was weighted down with exhaustion even though he’d only woken up an hour before. I nodded.
“It’s about Cleo.”
Now the skin on the back of my neck prickled. I held my breath.
“If there is a connection…and since you think there is, I’m willing to go with that. I need to know more about who she was seeing.”
I shook my head.
“Morgan. You’re withholding evidence.”
“I am protecting my patient.”
“But you’re impeding an investigation.”
“No. I’m doing my job and you are doing yours.” I was suddenly back in my office the first time I met Noah. I had the book in my possession. And Detective Noah Jordain stared at me with his steely blue eyes. He wanted to know what I wasn’t telling him.
“Is that what last night was about? All this? Did you bring me here and seduce me, hoping that I’d go all soft on you and just turn over the book and all my information to you? Are you nuts? I have an ethical obligation to protect my patient’s privacy.”
His eyes clouded over. His spine stiffened. He stepped back from me as if I had flung hot oil at him.
“Are you crazy? You think I was using you?”
“It’s possible.”
He didn’t say anything, just turned and walked toward the bathroom. Each step taking him farther away, making it more and more possible that I was right. If I had been wrong he would have defended himself. He would have fought back. Gotten angry. But he was retreating. The way someone would if he was guilty.
I heard the water in the shower. And I started to imagine it hitting his skin the way I had with my fists the night before.
While he was in the bathroom I got dressed and left his apartment. I didn’t leave a note.
He had only wanted what he wanted. But I wasn’t going to give it to him. It wasn’t his to have. Cleo might still be alive. Her disappearance might not be tied to the other killings. I had to operate from that assumption.
I stomped down the steps. Angry with myself. I’d thought he’d been interested in me when it was the information he’d wanted all along.
I knew better. I’d fallen for the oldest trick in the book.
When I got to the street I wiped away the tears. What? I didn’t cry. But I was crying. Over him? A man who had simply figured out where I was vulnerable? Good for him. No. Fuck him. Just fuck Detective Noah Jordain. And then I laughed, a choking sound with a mix of the leftover tears caught up in the ironic chuckle. That’s what I’d just done, wasn’t it?
46
I went home, showered again, got dressed, made coffee, drank it, and it was still only ten o’clock. With two hours left before I was meeting Mitch and Dulcie, and nothing to fill them with, I went to the office.
There were messages on my machine, and as I listened, I made a list of whom I’d have to call back. The last one was from Elias, who sounded even more exhausted than the last time I’d heard from him. For a minute, I imagined him standing next to Noah. In their own way they were both attractive. But so different from each other. Elias was polished, every inch the corporate lawyer. I could have just as easily wound up making a fool of myself with someone like Elias, I thought. He’d have less reason to use me.
“Morgan, give me a call. I sent the police a ransom note early this morning. I know you told me not to. But something has to jump-start them into finding out where Cleo is.” Then he sighed. A beat of silence. In the silence I could hear what sounded like a voice on his television. It was a woman-or a young girl-crying.
The way I felt. The way Elias felt.
I thought about calling him back and urging him to tell the police he’d planted the note, and then I thought about calling Noah and telling him that when the note came he should ignore it. But I didn’t want to talk to Noah. Except I couldn’t keep that information to myself. With all they had to do, I couldn’t allow the police to be sent off on a wild-goose chase when they were trying to solve real cases.
I called the precinct house and left a message. The operator told me that Noah was in, that I could talk to him myself, but I said no, I just had a message for him. And dictated it to her.
“Tell him the ransom note is fake. That Elias Beecher sent it to him to get him to take Cleo’s disappearance more seriously.”
She read it back to me and then I hung up.
As it turned out, it was the only smart thing I did that day.
47
Mitch and Dulcie were already waiting for me at the Boathouse restaurant in Central Park. Sitting on the deck, by the railing, both of them were twisted in their seats, looking out at the lake and the people rowing across its smooth surface. I stopped a few feet away, watching them, just enjoying the peaceful ease of the way they were together.
If Mitch and I had done a hundred things wrong, what we had done with Dulcie was right. The night with Noah bothered me even more now than it had earlier, and I yearned to go back in time to the moment Mitch had first said we should separate. This time I would have fought harder to keep us together.
My tears started up again. Damn. So before either of them noticed I was there, I turned and went to the ladies’ room.
After a few minutes of square breathing, and doing some internal talking with myself, I was okay. The therapist in me knew that the past twenty-four hours had been like a seismic shift, and even if my head didn’t want to deal with it, my body did. My skin, my lips, my shoulders, my back, my thighs, were all suddenly aware. I had been seduced, explored, rubbed raw and made love to. I had opened up-to Noah. I couldn’t just take all the pieces of me that he’d shaken up and fit them back into place. They’d swollen and altered. They didn’t match up anymore.
By the time dessert came, my cell phone had rung twice, but I’d let both calls go unanswered. I checked the numbers, but only in case either was a patient in crisis.
Neither had been. One call had been from Elias. The other from Nina.
“Mom?”
This was a signal. Whenever Dulcie and I were together and she started talking to me by saying my name with a question mark at the end of it, I knew something serious was coming.
“Yes, sweetheart?”
She looked from me to her father. This was obviously a rehearsed moment. Something was coming. Something they had talked about.
The sun, which had been hidden behind clouds for the past half hour, emerged again and lit up the red highlights in her hair. There were some edges on her face that hadn’t been there a week ago. Or maybe they had been, but I hadn’t noticed them. Dulcie was moving toward being a teenager. It was something we would endure.
I loved my daughter. I loved her more than anything in the world. I would die for her. But I knew that the next few years were going to be impossibly hard, and as every parent of every teenage girl who is honest knows, these upcoming years would try our relationship.
“Mom, I have this incredible chance to get a lead in a great play.”