Compulsion

24

Wednesday, July 24, 2002

It was just after 1:00 a.m. I had turned out all the lights of the cottage at midnight. Only a hint of the crescent moon seeped through the slats of the window shutters.

I lay awake in bed, fighting exhaustion, fully clothed under a sheet. My Browning Baby handgun filled the front pocket of my jeans.

I was confident I had put enough bait on the hook. Julia had already begun to pack for our elopement. I was claiming the sexual prize Brooke's killer thirsted for. He had to come for me.

The cottage had a back door with a chain lock. I left it dangling. I also left the back two windows of the cottage wide open-invitations to murder.

I was pretty sure who to expect in my midst, but the forensic data at the heart of my theory wasn't foolproof. My own attempted murder would be the definitive piece of evidence.

My eyes were getting heavier by the minute. I had had no sleep the night before. I hadn't had any real rest in weeks. I got up, walked to the kitchen sink, and splashed cold water on my face. It didn't do much. I got back into bed, pinching my thigh now and then to stay awake.

That didn't work, either. I drifted off and woke in a panic. Five minutes might have passed. Or fifteen. Or fifty. I couldn't tell. My heart raced, and my eyes darted left and right, searching the shadowy cottage. I saw nothing. I was alone, safe, for the moment.

I sat up and swung my legs over the side of the mattress. Maybe a very quick, very cold shower would help, I thought to myself. I stood and started toward the bathroom. But then I froze, hearing footsteps outside the cottage, somewhere beyond my back door.

I felt for the Browning Baby in my pocket and walked toward the sounds. Someone was stepping on the leaves and fallen branches outside. I listened a little longer. The sounds went away.

I stayed close to the wall and carefully pushed aside one of the little drapes that covered the window in the back door. I squinted into the night. Then my breathing stopped as my worst nightmare gripped me.

Garret was perched on the lowest branch of a majestic elm, about nine feet off the ground, fifteen feet from the door. The moon's glow barely illuminated his muscular torso and the noose around his neck.

I rushed outside, horrified to see my life repeating itself in the worst way. I had lost a young man to suicide only once-Billy Fisk, whose memory had finally drawn me into the Bishop case. Was I about to witness the lethality of my failings again? I had obviously pushed Garret too far, not to the edge of murder, but to suicide.

Seeing Garret's bookshelf the night before, stocked with titles by the poet Yeats, had clued me in to his guilt. Julia had quoted Yeats in the mystery letter:

My temptation is quiet.

Here at life's end.

I had finally realized that Julia had intended that letter for Garret, not her therapist or some business associate of Darwin 's. She had taken Garret as her lover.

Garret had been the one who had attacked me in a jealous rage outside Mass General Hospital, uttering a line from Yeats before plunging a knife into my back:

What could she have done, being what she is?

"Good morning," Garret said softly.

I looked up at him. The muscles of his chest twitched. He was closing and opening his fists rhythmically. Wired. "Don't do this," I said.

"You need her so badly," he said. "Take her."

"Let me help you," I said.

He laughed a gruesome laugh, craning his neck toward the dark sky, like some sort of deranged animal. Then he looked down at me, his eyes wide. "You wanted this," he said. "You made this happen."

A wave of nausea swept over me. Was it possible my psychological strategy-increasing the sexual tension in the house to a fever pitch-had actually been an unconscious way of finishing off my last rival for Julia's attentions? Darwin was in prison, charged with murder. Garret might soon be dead. Had I designed to vanquish father and son alike? "Your mother used you, Garret," I said. "She manipulated you. Just like she did me and North Anderson and who knows how many other men. I see that now. I know you're not fully to blame for what happened to Brooke. Or Tess."

He stayed silent.

"I think I know what happened," I said, keeping my tone even. "After your mom had the twins, she stopped the 'special relationship' you two had. She had somebody else to love. Brooke. And Tess. And when she moves on, she moves on. Cold. It's brutal. And it's painful."

"Billy didn't kill any cat," he said. "You deserve to know that. You care about him." He lifted one foot off the branch.

"Please," I said.

"You asked for this," he said.

I looked down and shook my head, trying to come up with words that would give Garret hope.

"Good-bye, Frank," Garret said.

I looked up just as Garret leapt off the branch. I closed my eyes, picturing Billy Fisk's face, bracing for the sound of his spinal column fracturing with the force of the rope. But, instead, I felt the full weight of Garret's body drop on top of me, knocking me to the ground. My head bounced off the dirt, leaving me dazed. The partially healed muscles in my back gave way, and a searing pain ripped through me.

Garret crouched over me, smiling, holding a knife in one hand and the end of the rope in the other. He lifted the noose off his neck, dropped it. "It wasn't tied to anything," he said. "The proverbial loose end. You should have checked."

I reached for my gun, but Garret dove toward me before I could get to it. I barely managed to raise my knee as he fell, burying it in his abdomen and knocking the air out of him.

The knife landed between us.

We both scrambled for it. His hand found it first. I grabbed his wrist and forced him onto his back. I nearly had him pinned when he rammed his head into my chin. I lost my grip on one of his arms, and he rammed an elbow into my face and pushed me off him.

He climbed on top of me and drove the knife downward, toward my chest. I caught hold of his wrist again. He was even stronger than I had imagined. The tip of the blade was getting closer.

"Those that I fight I do not hate" he said, pushing even harder on the knife. "Yeats. My favorite." His lip curled. "You had no business moving in on us, in the first place. If you had just left us alone…" He put everything he had behind the knife.

The tip came within a foot of my chest. There was only one move I could think to make. If I suddenly stopped struggling, Garret's momentum would carry him toward me. I could invert his wrist as he fell and bring him down on the blade. I didn't want to kill him, was horrified by the realization that I would be left the victor in a grotesque Oedipal tale, but I had no choice.

I felt myself getting weaker. The blade couldn't have been more than six inches from my chest. I had to act. I pushed with everything I had left against Garret, moving the blade a few inches further away, priming him for the fall. I looked into his eyes, reviewing the split-second move that would bury the blade in his chest, severing his aorta.

Just as I was about to let my arms give way, I heard a dull thud. Garret collapsed onto to the ground, moaning.

I looked up to find Billy standing over me, holding a bat. His face was a mixture of confusion and anger. I wasn't certain whether he was even conscious of what he was doing. He raised the bat over his head, his eyes thinning with rage as he stared back at me. I thought he was about to make sure I didn't send him off to any psych ward. But then his gaze shifted to Garret. He took a deep breath and reared back.

"Don't," I yelled. "It's not his fault."

Billy froze, the bat still cocked over his head.

I saw that his pupils had constricted to pinpoints. A rivulet of saliva ran from the corner of his mouth. Adrenaline had to be coursing through his blood vessels. This was the Billy I would have seen the moment he broke into a stranger's home, set fire to the Bishop estate, or strangled a cat. This was the Billy who had attacked Jason Sanderson's bullies. He was at one with his demons. "You're not a killer," I said. "Put the bat down."

He didn't respond.

I wasn't even sure he had heard me. I pulled my Browning Baby from the front pocket of my jeans. "Billy," I said, my voice shaking. "Put it down. Now."

He took a deep breath and arched his back.

I flicked the gun's safety to the off position, ready to fire. But I wasn't ready. Even as Billy snapped his wrists forward, I couldn't bring myself to pull the trigger.

The bat sailed past me and Garret, bouncing off a couple trees, landing in some leaves. Billy looked straight at me. "You got to trust someone," he said. Then he reached down and held out his hand for me.

As Candace comforted Julia, who was heaving with very real tears, the police took Garret away in cuffs.

The officers took some evidence along with them- things I'd found in Garret's closet before they arrived. Part of that evidence was an album filled with photographs of Julia. She didn't seem to be modeling, even though she looked model-perfect in every one. It seemed that Garret had taken the pictures without her knowledge. Some of them were benign: Julia walking around the grounds of the Nantucket estate, hailing a cab in Manhattan, riding a horse; Others were provocative: Julia sunbathing and swimming laps in a revealing bikini, pulling off a sweatshirt to reveal a see-through ribbed T-shirt, nursing Brooke. Still others crossed the line into the erotic: Julia sleeping naked, only half-covered by a white sheet. Julia in silhouette behind a steamed shower door. Julia, topless, shot through a window of the family's Manhattan penthouse. Julia locked in an embrace with North Anderson. And this last image, which still sends shivers up my spine and a pang of guilt through my heart: Julia and me kissing, inside my room at The Breakers.

The officers also took a stack of letters hidden deep in Garret's closet, each smelling of Julia's perfume, and each on the same heavy stock as the letter Claire Buckley had turned over to North Anderson and me. Garret's name, written across the front of the envelopes, was in the same delicate script.

The first of the letters I had opened was one from the middle of the stack. It had helped me see how blatantly Julia had romanced her own adoptive son:

The tone in every one of the letters was the same. Despondency. Desperation. Seduction.

The officers carried away something else, too. A pair of black, army-style boots. They were the same boots I had glimpsed the night I had fallen outside Mass General, a knife edging toward my portal artery. The heel of the left boot was stained with blue paint that would turn out to match a crosswalk painted near the garage less than an hour before I was attacked.

The blood types Laura Mossberg had dug up for me supported my theory that Garret and Julia had been lovers and that he was the killer. Julia's blood type was B negative. The twins' blood type was O positive. Only a man with A positive or B positive blood could be the father. Billy was A negative. Garret was B positive.

I am certain Garret never realized what genetic testing would later prove conclusively-that Tess and Brooke Bishop were his daughters. But Julia knew it, and that ended her affair with him. She recoiled from him, but kept the children, children she had desperately wanted.

All Garret knew was that Julia had cut him off from her affections after she gave birth to the twins, that her maternal love for them somehow excluded her erotic love for him. Enraged, desperate to restore himself to his rightful place in her life, he became an elegant and opportunistic killer.

Brooke's murder was simple enough. Billy would be blamed. And when Garret overheard Julia and Darwin arguing about the nortriptyline, he used the cover of Billy's break-in to poison Tess, careful not to get his own fingerprints anywhere on the medicine bottle. He had probably already left the photographic negative of North and Julia where his father would find it, look at it, and touch it. Then. he had retrieved that negative and planted it for us to uncover.

Garret had even given his father an apparent motive- pathological jealousy, the desire for revenge on Julia for cheating with North Anderson. And he had concocted a little physical evidence to go along with it. But the main ingredient in the scheme came as a surprise, even to him. Once Darwin lost control and actually assaulted his wife- no doubt fueled by the double bind of her accusing him of murder, obtaining a restraining order against him, yet carrying on her own affair-he was ripe for the kill. All Garret had to do was offer up eyewitness testimony, then cry a little as daddy went bye-bye. For life.

One thing Garret probably hadn't expected was my falling for Julia, too. And that, he could not abide. That called for action. A knife in the back. He probably felt like I'd done it to him first.