Compulsion

11

I got back to my room at The Breakers at 9:40 p.m. I had grabbed takeout shrimp and arugula gourmet pizza for dinner-nothing being regular anything on Nantucket -and eaten it on my way back to the hotel. The night had turned windy and rainy, and that, together with the late hour, gave me a good excuse to bow out of spending the night at North Anderson 's. I called him at home and got the customary urgings toward safety that I would expect from a friend. Double-lock the door, no unexpected midnight repairs to the plumbing, and so forth. I sidestepped them, told him I'd be fine, that I was leaving the island in the morning and not returning for at least a day. I had business to attend to back in Boston, including another visit to Lilly at Mass General.

The management had left my bottle of wine back inside my room, on my nightstand. I smiled at its persistence, grabbed it, and was about to bring it far down the hall, where it couldn't find its way back to me, when the phone rang. I picked up. "Clevenger," I said.

"It's Julia."

"Where are you?" I asked.

"Downstairs."

I didn't know exactly how to respond. "In the lobby…" I said, for filler. Thinking of her just three floors away- alone-made me start to think what it would be like to hold her, without worrying that we might be seen.

"I need to be close to someone I trust," she said. "Just for a few minutes. I…" A moment of silence. "I want to tell you what it was like for me at the church tonight, what I really felt."

I knew the smart thing to do would be to join her in the lobby or meet her for coffee at the Brant Point Grill. But knowing what to do and actually doing it are different things. "I'm in room 307," I said.

When I heard a knock at my door, I resolved not to let things get too far, to keep some therapeutic distance between the two of us. I opened the door. Julia stood there in her black dress, her hair damp from the rain. She had been crying, but her eyes still glowed. I offered her my hand. She took it and walked into my arms. I pushed the door closed and let her cry as I held her. The feel of her delicate shoulder blade against my palm, the rising and falling of her chest against mine, a tear that ran off her cheek and down my neck were all intoxicating to me. No less so was the music playing in the background of our lives: her cruel husband, my cruel father, her need to escape a bad marriage, my boyhood fantasies of rescuing my mother.

Julia raised her head off my chest, turning her face up toward mine, with her eyes closed. And I did what might be forgiven, but not excused. I moved my hand to her cheek and kissed her, gently at first, then more passionately, sensing not the crossing of boundaries but the melting of them, their obliteration. Our mouths became one. And it seemed to me-and I believe to her-that our futures had also, mystically and immeasurably, been joined. My unconscious seemed to be saying that if these were the worst of circumstances in which to have found one another, they were, unavoidably and irretrievably, our circumstances. The rules of decorum that governed the great mass of relationships would have to yield. We were inevitable.

I have kissed many women in my life, but none of them made me feel the way Julia did. She ran her fingers up the back of my neck, then pulled me toward her, inside her, receiving all my passion, then pulling back, barely brushing her soft, full lips over mine, catching my lip between her teeth, gently pulling, making me feel she was hungry for me. Then her lips traveled up my cheek, and I heard her excited breathing louder than my own, felt her warm tongue slip inside my ear, move deeper, speaking about all the warm ways our bodies and souls could join into one.

Only after we had kissed a long time did I gather a fragile resolve to ease her away from me. "You wanted… to talk," I said.

She took a deep breath, let it out. She slowly opened her eyes and nodded. I took her by the hand and guided her to a couch that looked onto the harbor. The aluminum masts and gilded stems of a hundred or more sailboats caught the moonlight and swayed like a glittering crop of silver and gold on a field of blue. "Tell me," I said quietly, still holding her hand. "What was it like for you at St. Mary's tonight?"

She looked at our hands laced together, then placed her other hand on top of them. She looked back at me. "Like burying a piece of myself," she said. "I kept wishing it could have been me who died. Since the day she was born, I've had a feeling about Brooke-that she was someone extraordinary." Tears began streaming down her face. "It's horrible to say, but I felt much closer to her than I do to the boys. Even closer than I do to Tess."

Julia's recollection of her earliest reaction to Brooke was light-years from the estrangement Claire Buckley had described. Part of me wanted to resolve the discrepancy with a few questions, but it didn't seem like the time to ask them, partly because I didn't want to hear answers that would replace any part of my affection for Julia with new doubts about her. I wiped the tears off her cheek. "What other feelings did you have today?" I asked simply.

"Anger. Wanting someone to pay." She cleared her throat. "Most of all, guilt," she said.

"How so?"

She hesitated.

"You don't have to tell me anything, you know," I told her. "It's up to you."

She squeezed my hand. "I should never have exposed the girls to Billy. They didn't sign up for that risk."

Julia's suspicions clearly hadn't shifted substantially from Billy to her husband. "I understand," I said. "What do you think you should have done?"

"I should never have allowed the adoption. We weren't prepared to handle a boy with Billy's problems. And Darwin wasn't interested in being a father to him, anyhow."

" Darwin insisted," I said.

"Then I should have left," she said. "For that reason, and the others."

I felt like I had another chance to press my case for Tess's safety. "Aren't those other reasons still valid?" I asked gently. "Billy isn't at home, but the rest of the stresses still affect Tess-and Garret."

"You mean Darwin 's temper," she said. "The control issue. His violence."

"Yes."

"I've talked with my mother," she said. "I may go back to the Vineyard with her and the children."

"Good," I said.

"There's just no telling how Darwin will respond."

"I think Captain Anderson would provide police protection," I said. "At least for a while."

"Right." She didn't seem satisfied with that safety net.

"And I would be around," I said, "if you needed me."

She squeezed my hand more tightly. Then she raised my hand to her lips, kissed it. "How can I feel this close to you this fast?" she asked.

"I've asked myself the same question about you," I said.

"Any answers?"

"Blind luck," I said.

She closed her eyes and slowly moved my hand inside the "V" of her dress, so that my fingers slid naturally under the lace of her camisole and onto her breast. When they reached her nipple, it rose up for me and she made a sound of exquisite pleasure, like she had just awakened and was stretching in a warm feather bed.

Every man dreams of finding a woman who will not only yield to him, but one who will embrace and confirm him, matching every iota of his masculinity with an equal or greater measure of femininity. Julia was this rare woman.

Touching her made me want to touch her everywhere. I moved one hand to her knee, just above her hem, and the other to the back of her neck. I drew her toward me, so that I could unzip her dress. She rested her head on my shoulder, waiting and willing. But I couldn't allow myself to undress her. I ran my fingers down the edges of her spine, over the cloth. Then I kissed her cheek and sat back on the couch. "This isn't the right time," I said. "With you coming here from the church, feeling everything you're feeling, we couldn't be sure what it meant."

She nodded, almost shyly. "It's late, anyhow. I should be getting home."

We stood up. There was an awkward moment, readjusted to the fact that we wouldn't be making love.

"You're here for the night, or longer?" Julia asked.

"I'm leaving in the morning, but only for a day. Then I'll be back."

"We could meet somewhere Friday night," she said.

That felt like throwing caution to the wind. "The fact that I'm being followed won't scare you away?" I said.

"It didn't tonight," she said. "I'm more frightened by the thought of not seeing you."

"Paranoia," I said. "A fear with no basis in reality." I smiled. "I treat it all the time."

Thursday, June 27, 2002

I woke just after 5:00 a.m. with my heart racing. I flicked on the bedside light and searched for something amiss, but nothing had disturbed the elegant furnishings of my room or the peaceful harbor outside. I got up and walked to a set of sliding glass doors that gave onto a small deck. The sailboats still swayed in an easy breeze. I walked out and breathed deeply of the ocean air. The day was already warm. It was calm enough to make me nervous, and I wondered whether the quiet was the thing weighing on me. Maybe I was missing the throaty drone of tugs and barges working Chelsea 's Mystic River, the smell of overheated petroleum, the firefly headlights of the occasional early morning commuter crossing the Tobin Bridge. But something made me reject that easy answer. I walked back inside and, still thinking of Chelsea, instinctively dialed my home phone for messages. One had been left just forty-one minutes earlier. It was from Billy. My heart raced faster.

"What I don't understand," he said, "is why they always leave the second-floor bathroom window unlocked." His speech was staccato-pressured speech, we call it in psychiatry. "They don't even lock it when we leave the island for Manhattan -which, I guess, is also an island, but I forget that, sometimes. I mean, it's like they figure no burglar will notice the window because it has frosted glass, which is just… stupid. Unless they think nobody would notice it behind the oak tree, which actually makes everything easier, if you can climb. 'Cause no one can see you once you're into the branches. Not that Darwin 's Range Rover robots are exactly Secret Service." He laughed, but it was a quick, anxious laugh that made me think he was high or very scared or manic. "Anyhow, that takes care of my immediate cash crunch. I won't need to bother you." He laughed again. A couple seconds passed. "I think you believed me at the hospital. That's why I'm calling. I want you to know I believe what you said, too. I don't think I really ever wanted to hurt anything or anyone other than my father." He hung up.

I started to pace. I ran my hand over my shaved scalp again and again, a nervous habit that only manifests itself when I sense things have gone very wrong. Billy was on the island-or had been. And, unless he was bluffing, he had managed to slip into the Bishop house and steal something of value. I thought back to our discussion at Payne Whitney, when I had pressed Billy on a potential motive for killing Brooke. And that made a crown of shivers ring my scalp. Because Billy was right: I had argued that his violence had always been about taking things away from his father. I prayed that this time it had been a watch or a ring or a lockbox stuffed with cash, and not little Tess.

I showered and pulled on a fresh pair of jeans. Then I called North Anderson at home. It was only five-twenty, but I had to let him know that Billy was close by-or had been, and that he had apparently invaded the Bishop home.

Tina answered the phone after half a dozen rings. "Hello?" Her voice still had sleep in it.

"Tina, I'm sorry to wake you. It's Frank Clevenger."

She skipped the pleasantries. "Hasn't North called you?" she said.

"No." I picked my cell phone off the bureau and saw that it was registering "Out of Range." "Was he looking for me?" I glanced at the ceiling, cursing the layer of steel or concrete blocking my signal.

"He left for the emergency room about an hour ago. There's something wrong with Tess Bishop."

I felt lightheaded. "Something wrong? Did he say anything else?"

"She stopped breathing," Tina said.

"Where's the hospital?" I asked.

"On South Prospect Street, at Vesper Lane," she said. " Nantucket Cottage Hospital. It's only about a mile out of town. There are little blue hospital signs all over that will point you the right way. You can't miss it."

"Thanks, Tina," I said.

"Sorry to give you bad news, Frank. I'd love to see you. Maybe when this whole thing settles down."

"You will," I said.

I ran down the stairs to the lobby. The woman at the front desk gave me directions to the hospital, but as I raced from street to street in the darkness, I realized I actually could have connected the little, fluorescent "H's" and gotten there just fine. Another thing about Nantucket: Nothing is random. Everything has signage. Over the course of four hundred years, Nantucketers have slowly worn away all the island's rough edges, and all possibility for surprise, so that the island now has its metaphor in every piece of beautiful, smooth, dead driftwood that washes up on its shores.

In such places, I reminded myself, things must happen to let people know they are alive and human. Love affairs take root-complicated ones, full of jealousy, pain, and revenge. Deep depression strikes. Addictions flourish. And, occasionally, some very ugly variety of psychopathology, which has had time to twist on itself grotesquely-like a gnarled, forbidding tree-begins to bear poisonous fruit.

North Anderson 's cruiser was parked near the emergency room, next to an ambulance and two black Range Rovers. I parked alongside them and hurried through the sliding glass doors.

Darwin Bishop, in khakis, a pink polo shirt, and black Gucci loafers, was pacing the lobby, talking on his cell phone. Two of his security guards stood nearby. He turned away and, keeping his voice just above a whisper, said, "Sell all of it at fifty-eight."

I walked up to the receptionist, a blue-haired woman who was obviously beside herself. "I'm Dr. Clevenger," I said. "I'm here to see Captain Anderson."

"He's in Room Five, with Mrs. Bishop and the baby," she said, wringing her thickly veined hands. "I hope you can do something. She's so tiny."

"You're not going in there," Bishop said, from behind me.

I turned around. He was standing with his two goons. "What happened to Tess?" I asked flatly.

He ignored the question. "You're not welcome here," he said.

I started past the receptionist. But I hadn't taken more than four steps when someone grabbed my wrist and jerked it, hard, behind my back, his arm falling across my neck.

I looked over my straining shoulder and saw one of the bodyguards had hold of me. It was an amateur move that made me question whether Bishop had hired him away from a Kmart. I leaned slightly forward, then drove my free elbow into the man's rib cage. A sharp crack told me I had hit home. He groaned and let go. Then his friend started coming at me.

"That's the end of it!" Anderson yelled from the hallway, half a dozen yards past the reception desk. He walked toward us.

Bishop pointed at me, but kept his distance. "I want him out of here."

Anderson walked up to me. "Let's go outside. I can bring you up to speed."

I took a mental note of that minor surrender and followed him back through the sliding glass doors, over to his cruiser.

"What the hell is going on?" I said. "What happened to Tess?"

He leaned against the hood. "Cardiac arrest," he said. "They got her back, but her heart's still not beating the right way. They're not sure if there's damage to her brain from lack of oxygen."

"My God."

"The Bishops rushed her to the ER at about three a.m." he explained. "I guess she'd been crying for about an hour before she stopped breathing. Julia and Claire were with her the whole time. When she passed out, they called 911. Actually, they had Darwin place the call."

"What does the doctor say?"

"She drew a toxic screen and found a high level of nor… trip… something."

"Nortriptyline," I said.

"That's it."

Nortriptyline is an antidepressant medication that can be fatal in overdose. Too high a concentration in the bloodstream slows electrical conduction through cardiac muscle, making the heart skip beats, then spiral into chaotic rhythms that pump no blood. "Where did the nortriptyline come from?" I asked.

"It's Julia's, prescribed by a psychiatrist in Aspen," Anderson said. "She was skiing there with Darwin a year or so back and was really feeling low. She says she felt better when they got home, so she stopped using it."

"But she kept the bottle?" I said.

"Right."

"So what are you thinking?"

"Actually, Frank," Anderson said, "it's looking like Billy's our man."

I hadn't even broached the news about Billy having broken into the Bishops' home. "Why do you say that?"

"He snuck into the house through a bathroom window during Brooke's funeral, stole some cash and jewelry. I guess he must have decided to take a little side trip to the nursery and feed Tess the pills. Claire had been writing letters in Darwin 's study most of the night."

"How did you know he'd been in the house at all?" I asked.

"He left a note," Anderson said.

"What did it say?"

"Payback's a bitch. Love, Billy."

"Where did he leave it?" I asked.

"In an empty bank envelope Bishop says was full of cash-about five grand. The envelope was in a little antique desk in the master bedroom. I guess that's where he keeps his spare change."

"Interesting." I shook my head, thinking how peculiar it would be for Billy to tie himself so clearly to a murder scene. "Billy left me a message on my Chelsea machine about an hour ago. I tried calling you to tell you about it just before I headed here."

"What did he say?" Anderson asked.

"That he went in through that window, stole some things. That's all."

"I've got officers combing the house for evidence. We'll see what turns up. All hell is going to break loose on the island now."

"Meaning?"

"I've asked the State Police to help with a manhunt for Billy," Anderson said. "They're bringing in thirty troopers, dogs, infrared search devices, the whole nine yards. And that's the tame part. Bishop may have used his contacts to keep the press at bay so far, but that dam won't hold. Reporters will start pouring in as soon as word about Tess filters through the wires. One rich kid murdered at home sounds like yesterday's news. Another attempted murder in the same family, and you've trumped the Ramseys."

"And raised them about nine hundred million," I said. "How's Julia?"

"Stunned," Anderson said. "She hasn't said ten words in there."

I wanted to be with her. More, I felt it was my place to be with her. But I was troubled by the fact that it was Julia's medication Tess had overdosed on. "Anyone in that house could still be the killer," I said. "The signs of nortriptyline toxicity can show up many hours after an overdose. Tess could have been poisoned before the funeral." Another thought occurred to me. "I'm not sure Billy would even know a nortriptyline overdose can be lethal. The only ones who talked to the doctor in Aspen were Darwin and-"

"Julia," Anderson said. "Agreed. Nobody's cleared yet. But anybody would say Billy is the lead suspect, by a country mile."

"Why would he leave a note and a voice message about breaking into the house, if he knew he would be connecting himself to another murder?" I asked.

Anderson shrugged. "We're not talking about a normal kid."

"No," I said, "we're talking about a sociopath. They usually don't make our work easy, do they?"

"I didn't say to stop poking around," Anderson said, "to the extent Bishop lets you."

"He could have poisoned Tess as easily as anyone else," I said. "For all we know, he might have decided Billy's break-in was the perfect cover. So, tell me: When, exactly, did he start deciding who investigates what?"

Anderson stiffened. "Don't go there again, Frank. I'm paying him the same deference I'd pay anyone. He doesn't have to give you access if he doesn't want to. I'm sure you can figure a way around him."

"Great," I said. "I'm on my own, all of a sudden. This wasn't a case I exactly lobbied you for, if you remember. I took it because you said you needed help."

"And I still do." He winked. "We're waiting on a helicopter from Mass General. Tess will be flown to their ICU for observation and treatment. Julia's going along for the ride, not Darwin. He meets her there tomorrow."

"So if I had a few questions for Julia, I should get to Boston sooner rather than later," I said.

"That sounds right," Anderson said. "Once Bishop lands in Beantown, I'd head back here to touch base with Claire and Garret. She was home alone with Tess during the funeral, and he strikes me as one very angry young man."

"Not a bad plan," I said.

"For a guy abandoning you." He looked out over the hospital's expansive lawn. "You know, I wanted to give Billy a real chance. He just didn't read like a killer to me." He looked at me. "I think I may have read him wrong."

"Maybe," I said. "Maybe I did, too. But my gut tells me to dig deeper."

"Then that's what you'll…" He caught himself. "That's what we'll do."