Goldilocks

14

“She came in five minutes ago,” Ehrenberg said, “told the girl downstairs she wanted to talk to whoever was in charge of the Purchase murder case. Girl sent her right up. I introduced myself, and the first thing she said was, ‘I killed them.’ She started filling me in, and I stopped her cold, put in a call to the captain. He told me to call the State’s Attorney’s office, we want them here doing the interview. We can’t afford any foul-ups on this. If we have two confessions kicking around, we may end up with nobody getting blamed for the crime. I’ll tell you, I never did buy that boy’s story all the way, too many loose ends that kept unraveling.”

We had come down the corridor and into the reception area. The orange letter-elevator still dominated the room, the girl was still behind her desk typing. Ehrenberg asked her if the captain had arrived yet, and she told him he hadn’t.

“She’s in there waiting to talk to you,” he said, and indicated the door to the captain’s office.

She was sitting in the same chair Michael had sat in yesterday morning. She was wearing a dark blue linen suit and blue patent leather pumps. Her blonde hair was pulled into a severe bun at the back of her head. She looked up as I came into the room.

“I wanted you here when I exonerated my brother,” she said. “Detective Ehrenberg told me you were right downstairs.”

“Yes. Talking to Michael, in fact.”

“How is he?” Her eyes searched my face — her father’s eyes, Jamie’s eyes.

“He seems all right,” I said. “Miss Purchase, you told Detective Ehrenberg you killed Maureen and her daughters. Is that—”

“Yes.”

“Is that true?”

“Yes, it’s true.”

“Because if it isn’t, you won’t be doing Michael a damn bit of good by confessing to a crime you didn’t commit.”

“Mr. Hope, I killed them,” she said. The pale blue eyes fastened on mine. “Believe me, I killed them.”

By eleven-fifteen, they had all gathered and were ready to discuss it. They were experts, all of them, and they knew that the progress of an interview, as they insisted on calling it, could be seriously impeded by the presence of too many “authority figures,” as the man from the State’s Attorney’s office labeled us. I was one of the authority figures; Karin Purchase had stated plainly that she would not make a statement unless her brother’s attorney were there to hear every word. The captain in charge of the Detective Bureau wisely offered to stay out of the questioning session, offering the opinion that Miss Purchase now knew Ehrenberg was the man in charge of the investigation, and might feel more comfortable in his presence.

The man from the State’s Attorney’s office was a stout and perspiring gentleman named Roger Bensell. He was wearing a winter-weight brown pin-striped suit, with a yellow shirt and a maroon tie. His shoes were brown, with perforated pointed tips that made him look like a fat ballroom dancer. He kept mopping his brow and telling the captain that this was an important case. I had no doubt that both the captain and Ehrenberg were well aware of this; the very fact that the State’s Attorney was here seemed to prove that contention. It was decided that Ehrenberg and I would both be in attendance while Bensell conducted the interview. The captain informed Karin of this, and she was entirely agreeable.

He further suggested that since the rooms customarily used for interviewing were somewhat smaller than might allow for the comfort of four people, Karin might prefer being interviewed there in his own office. Karin accepted his offer. The captain introduced her to Mr. Bensell of the State’s Attorney’s office, and left the room. Mr. Bensell asked if she was ready to begin. She said she was. He pushed the RECORD button on the tape recorder and, just as Ehrenberg had done yesterday, told the microphone what day it was, and what time — eleven-twenty A.M. — and where we were, and who was present. He then laboriously read her rights to her, and Karin acknowledged that she understood each and every one of them, and said that the only attorney she wished present during the interview was Mr. Matthew Hope.

Bensell then began the question-and-answer session.

Q: What is your name, please?

A: Karin Purchase.

Q: Can you tell me where you live, Miss Purchase?

A: In New York City.

Q: Where in New York?

A: Central Park West. 322 Central Park West.

Q: Do you have an address here in Calusa?

A: Right now, I’m staying at the Calusa Bay Hotel.

Q: By right now...

A: I moved there last night. When I first arrived in Calusa, I checked into a motel near the airport.

Q: When was that?

A: Sunday night.

Q: By Sunday night, do you mean Sunday, February twenty-ninth?

A: Yes. I know what Mr. Hope is thinking. He’s thinking I told him I’d arrived in Calusa only last night. But I was lying to him. I got here on Sunday.

Q: What time Sunday?

A: I took a flight from Newark at five-forty-five, I arrived in Calusa at a little past ten. I called my mother from the airport, I was planning to stay with her, but she was out. So I rented a car and looked for a motel.

Q: Why did you come to Calusa, Miss Purchase?

A: To talk to my mother.

Q: About what?

A: About the alimony payments. My father stopped the alimony payments. When I spoke to her on the phone Saturday, she was very upset. I decided to come down and talk to her personally. To try to comfort her. To figure out what we should do next. But she wasn’t home.

Q: So you checked into a motel instead.

A: Yes.

Q: Can you tell me the name of the motel?

A: Twin Ridges? Something like that. I don’t remember.

Q: What time did you check in?

A: It must’ve been close to ten-thirty.

Q: What did you do then?

A: I tried to reach my mother again. She was still out.

Q: Yes, go on.

A: I watched television for a little while. Then I tried her again, and there was still no answer. I was very eager to talk to her. It was my idea to confront my father. To go there together with my mother and demand... you see, my brother had already told her he wouldn’t help. I was the only one who could help her. But she wasn’t home.

Q: This was what time, Miss Purchase?

A: I’m not sure. A quarter to eleven, I would guess.

Q: What did you do then? When you couldn’t get your mother on the telephone.

A: I decided I’d go see my father alone. Without her. I knew just what I wanted to tell him, I didn’t need her with me.

Q: What did you want to tell him?

A: What do you think? That he had to pay the alimony. It was hers. They’d agreed to it. She deserved it.

Q: Did you, in fact, go to see your father?

A: Yes.

Q: You went to your father’s house on Jacaranda Drive?

A: Yes.

Q: Did you go there unannounced?

A: Yes. I didn’t want to call him because this was something that couldn’t be discussed on the telephone.

Q: What time did you get to the house on Jacaranda Drive?

A: Eleven-fifteen or so. I got lost. I don’t know Calusa too well.

Q: What did you do when you got there?

A: I parked the car in the driveway, and went to the front door, and rang the bell. There were lights on, I knew they were still up.

Q: They?

A: My father and Goldi — my father and his present wife.

Q: Maureen Purchase?

A: Yes.

Q: Were they both in fact there?

A: No. Only Maureen. She was the one who answered the door. She didn’t recognize me at first. I had to tell her who I was.

Q: What happened after you identified yourself?

A: She asked me what I wanted. I said I wanted to talk to my father, and she told me he wasn’t there.

Q: Then what?

A: I asked her if I could come in. To see for myself that he wasn’t there. She said she was just about to go to bed, and I’d have to take her word for it. So I... she was starting to close the door. I shoved it open and went inside. She told me to get out, she tried to grab my arm, but I pushed her away and walked into the living room. My father wasn’t there, I looked in the bedroom, I looked in the kitchen, he wasn’t there. I was coming out of the kitchen when I heard her dialing the phone. I guess she was calling the police. Calling the police to evict me from my own... my own father’s house... There was a knife in the sink, I picked it up, I guess I had the idea of cutting the telephone cord. The phone was on a drop-leaf desk against the wall, she was sitting in a chair at the desk. She’d just finished dialing, she hadn’t yet said anything into the phone. She saw the knife in my hand and hung up right away, and shoved back the chair. The chair fell over, she sort of tripped on it, she was wearing a long pink nightgown, the skirt got tangled in one of the chair legs.

Q: Can you describe the nightgown, please?

A: It was pink nylon, a long flowing gown with a scoop neck and a rosette above the bosom.

Q: What else was she wearing?

A: Just the nightgown.

Q: Any jewelry?

A: A wedding band.

Q: Anything else?

A: Nothing.

Q: What happened after she hung up the phone?

A: She began screaming. I told her to shut up, was she crazy? But she kept screaming. I couldn’t stand her screaming like that. I threatened her with the knife—

Q: How?

A: I pushed it at her. I made a threatening gesture. To shut her up.

Q: Then what?

A: She ran past me, for the bedroom. I was afraid there might be an extension phone in there, so I ran after her. I didn’t want her calling the police and making false charges. She was trying to lock the door when I got to it, but I was stronger than she was, I simply pushed it open and went into the room. She kept backing away from me, she was really frightened by then, I think she thought I was going to hurt her. There was a walk-in closet opposite the door, at the far end of the bedroom. She ran into it and tried to keep me out, holding that door closed, too, but I pushed it open, and went in after her. There were clothes... you should have seen the clothes! He’d stopped sending my mother money, but Goldilocks had a closetful of clothes that must’ve cost a fortune. That’s what infuriated me. The clothes.

Q: Go on, Miss Purchase.

A: I stabbed her, that’s all.

Q: Go on.

A: She screamed, and I stabbed her again. She got by me somehow, she got into the bedroom again. I went after her, I chased her around the room, cutting her, she was, she kept grabbing for the walls, she got blood all over the walls. Then she ran back into the closet again, and tried to close the door, but I pushed it open, she was bleeding very badly by then. I grabbed her hair and pulled back her head, and cut her throat. She fell to the floor and I just kept stabbing her. And then, yes, I tried to take off her wedding band, but it wouldn’t come off. So I began cutting her finger, to get the wedding band off. It wouldn’t... I couldn’t cut through the bone.

Q: Why did you try to take off the wedding band?

A: It wasn’t hers. It wasn’t rightfully hers. It was my... my mother’s. It should have been my mother’s.

Q: Go on.

A: I heard something behind me, and I turned, and one of the little girls was standing in the door to the room. She’d heard her mother screaming, I guess, she was standing there in a blue nightgown, a baby-doll nightgown, with matching panties. I got up, I’d been on my knees trying to get the wedding band off. The little girl turned and ran, and I went after her. I didn’t want her... I didn’t want her telling what she’d seen. She’d seen me. I didn’t want her telling. I caught her just inside the door to her room. I stabbed her, and she fell to the floor, and then I stabbed her again to make sure she was dead. I kept stabbing her. The other little girl was still asleep, she’d slept through all the screaming, I couldn’t believe it. I went to her bed and stabbed her through the bedclothes. I forget how many times I stabbed her. Three or four times. Until she was dead.

Q: Why did you stab the second child? The first child saw you, but the second child...

A: Sleeping there in my bed.

Q: Your bed?

A: So I stabbed her. That was it. I stabbed her. Then... then I went out to the living room, and picked up the chair Goldilocks had knocked over, and sat in it and decided I’d better call my brother for help. But there was blood all over my hands, I didn’t want to get blood on the telephone, it was a white telephone. So I went back into the bedroom, her bedroom, and washed my hands in the bathroom there, and dried them on a towel, a green towel. Then I went out to the living room again. There was a phone book on the desk. Two numbers were listed for Pirate’s Cove, one for the restaurant and the other for the marina. I called the marina number and whoever answered the phone said he would get Michael for me. When Michael came to the phone, I told him I was alone there with Goldilocks and the little girls. I told him they were dead, I told him I’d killed them. He told me to wait there, he’d be right there.

Q: Did you wait for him?

A: I waited for ten minutes.

Q: Then what?

A: I got frightened. First I thought I heard one of the little girls moaning in the bedroom, and I went in there to make sure they were dead, and they were. But I kept hearing the moaning. So I went in to look at her again — it seemed like the sounds were coming from her bedroom now — but she was lying there on the floor of the closet, dead, staring up at me, her mouth open... it frightened me. Later, when I had a chance to think about it, I decided that... that the sounds were probably some animal outside. But it sounded like moaning. I thought one of them was moaning. So I ran out of the house.

Q: Weren’t you worried that your brother might later enter the house and be found there by the police?

A: I didn’t think he’d go in. Why would he go in?

Q: Because you told him you’d be waiting there.

A: Yes, but he wouldn’t go in. If he saw my car was gone... if he saw there weren’t any cars in the driveway... well, he’d have to know I didn’t walk there. So he’d know I was gone. He wouldn’t go in. Anyway, it never entered my mind. I figured he’d just come there and see I was gone... it never entered my mind. I was frightened. I didn’t want to stay in that house another moment.

Q: What time was it when you left?

A: Twenty to twelve. I looked at the kitchen clock.

Q: Did you leave by the front door?

A: No. I was afraid someone might see me. I left by the kitchen door.

Q: Did you lock the door behind you?

A: No. How could I lock it?

Q: There are locks you can just twist...

A: Yes, that’s right, I had to... I tried the knob, and it wouldn’t turn, so I twisted the little button on the knob, just as you say. But I didn’t lock it again, I simply went out.

Q: Did you close the door behind you?

A: Yes.

Q: Did you wipe off the doorknob?

A: What?

Q: The doorknob. Did you wipe it clean?

A: No.

Q: Did you wipe off the telephone?

A: No.

Q: Or anything in the house?

A: No, I just... I didn’t think of that. Are you talking about fingerprints?

Q: Yes.

A: I didn’t think of that.

Q: What did you do when you left the house?

A: I backed the car out of the driveway, and made a wrong turn. I was very frightened, I turned in the wrong direction. Instead of the way I’d come. Through the circle there, whatever it’s called. I wanted to go back to the circle. But I was heading in the opposite direction. I made a U-turn at the end of the block, and got myself straightened out. Then I drove back to the motel.

Q: What time did you get back there?

A: At a little past midnight.

Q: What did you do then?

A: I took a shower and went to sleep.

Q: What time did you wake up yesterday?

A: Around noon. I went for breakfast, and then I went back to the motel to pack. I had a reservation on the four-thirty flight.

Q: To New York?

A: Yes.

Q: You were planning to go back to New York?

A: Yes.

Q: Did you try to contact your mother again?

A: No.

Q: Or your brother?

A: No.

Q: Were you aware that he had confessed to the murders?

A: Not until later that afternoon. I didn’t call him because I was afraid the police might be there on the boat questioning him, and they’d want to know who was calling him and all that. I thought... I still had no idea anyone had been arrested for what happened. I thought I could go back to New York and that would be the end of it.

Q: When did you learn he’d confessed?

A: On the way to the airport I heard it on the car radio.

Q: What time was that?

A: It was on the three o’clock news.

Q: So at three o’clock yesterday, you learned that your brother had confessed to the murders?

A: Yes.

Q: What was your reaction?

A: Well, I knew he was doing it to protect me, but I didn’t think he was in serious trouble because I figured he wouldn’t know what to tell them.

Q: Tell who?

A: The police. If he hadn’t done it, then how would he know what to tell them? I figured they’d let him go eventually. But I wasn’t completely sure, so I thought I’d better not go back to New York just yet. Because if for some reason they started believing him... well, I’d just have to tell them what had really happened.

Q: Then you didn’t go to the airport?

A: No. I went back to the motel. The woman there thought I was crazy, checking out, checking in again. I sat in the room watching television all afternoon. At six o’clock the news came on, and the District Attorney or somebody, whatever he’s called down here, said that Michael had thrown the knife in the ocean. That bothered me. I was thinking if he couldn’t tell them what he’d done with the knife, why then they’d have to let him go. But if he told them he’d thrown it in the ocean... well, the ocean is a big place, they’d never be able to find it. They’d just have to take his word for it. So that bothered me.

Q: But still you didn’t go to the police...

A: No. Because I wasn’t sure yet. I still hoped they would let him go. I still hoped they’d think somebody else had done it, some person who just walked in off the street, you read about such people all the time. I went out to dinner at about eight, and while I was eating I decided I’d better do something about, you know, if the police ever got to me, about making sure they didn’t know I’d been in Calusa since the night before. I checked out of the motel again at ten-thirty that night, there was a night clerk on by then, and I moved to the Calusa Bay Hotel. I knew the plane got in at ten, you see, and I figured if I checked in at ten-thirty, then if the police got to me, I’d just say I’d arrived in Calusa that night, and gone straight to the hotel. There’d be a record, you know, of when I checked in. This was when I still thought they’d let Michael go. I was hoping they’d let him go, but at the same time I had to protect myself. He was the only one who knew I was in Calusa, you see, I hadn’t even spoken to my mother. And I knew he wouldn’t... well, he was accepting the guilt for me, so I knew he wouldn’t tell the police anything about me getting there earlier. On Sunday instead of Monday.

Q: When did you decide to go to the police?

A: This morning. I’d spoken to Mr. Hope last night, I’d asked him to come to the hotel so I could show him the letter I received from Michael, I thought if I could convince him, then maybe he’d convince the police as well. But I didn’t seem able to convince him — not about Michael, not about my father either. When I put on the news this morning, and there was nothing about the police letting Michael go, I knew then that he was in serious trouble, that they weren’t going to let him go, that they were going to send him to the electric chair for something I’d done. So I got dressed and I... I came here.

Q: Miss Purchase, you know we have a signed confession from your brother, don’t you?

A: Yes, but he was lying. He didn’t kill them.

Q: How do we know you’re not lying to protect him?

A: I’m not.

Q: How do we know this isn’t a false confession, Miss Purchase?

A: Because I know where the knife is.

I had not been back to Jacaranda since the night of the murders.

Now, at a little past noon, it looked drowsy and peaceful. Many homeowners up and down the street, tired of the constant struggle against browning grass, had seeded their lawns with pebbles, giving them the serene appearance of Japanese gardens strewn with oases of cactus and palm. The sunlight was dazzling on the dappled stones. We drove up the street slowly, almost like a cortege, the car from the State’s Attorney’s office in the lead, the unmarked Police Department car following.

I was in the car with Bensell and Karin; she had insisted that I hear every word. She told us again how she had backed out of the driveway and turned in the wrong direction, driving away from where she really wanted to go. We were moving west toward the pine forest bordering the beach. She pointed out a pair of sewers ahead, one on either side of the road. She said that on Sunday night she had stopped her car, and thrown the knife in the sewer there on the right. We pulled to the curb. Car doors slammed; the street echoed with sound and then was still again. Ehrenberg and Di Luca came walking over from the second car.

“This is where she says she threw the knife,” Bensell said. “Down the sewer here.”

The sewer opening was little more than a narrow metal rectangle set into the cement curb. There were no sidewalks on the street; lawns of grass or pebbles stretched immediately to the roadway, where they sloped into asphalt. But the sewer had been built into a concrete mini-sidewalk some four feet square, and a cast-iron manhole cover afforded easy access to the drain below. Di Luca went back to the car for a crowbar, and then pried off the cover. In the house across the street, a woman watched from inside her screened lanai. Ehrenberg rolled the cover onto a patch of parched grass. The sewer was relatively shallow, some three or four feet deep. An inch or so of water lay stagnant on the bottom; it had not rained in Calusa all month long. Resting in the water on a bed of sand and silt was a knife with a ten-inch blade.

“Is that the knife you used to kill them?” Bensell asked.

“That’s the knife,” she said.

It was a little past one when we got back to the police station.

Michael was still in his cell on the second floor; I could only assume he had not yet been moved across the street because of the new developments in the case. I followed the jailer down the long corridor, watched him insert the color-coded key into the keyway. He swung the steel door back, and did not lock it behind him. We walked past the row of cells to the bend in the corridor, and then to Michael’s cell. The jailer opened the barred door for me, and then locked me in. Michael was sitting on the grimy foam-rubber mattress. I heard the metal door clanging shut around the bend in the corridor, heard the key being twisted again.

I told Michael that his sister had confessed to the murders. I told him that she had led them to where she’d thrown the murder weapon down a sewer, and that Ehrenberg was fairly certain they would be able to recover latent prints and blood samples from the knife. There were cracks and crevices in the handle, and blood would have caked in it someplace. The water in the sewer was still, there was no possibility it could have completely washed away the blood; nor would water have had any effect on fingerprints.

I told him that the State’s Attorney was dubious about fingerprints and blood proving Michael’s sister had committed the murders. The way he saw it, this only proved she had transported the murder weapon to the sewer and disposed of it. I told Michael that Ehrenberg was hoping the latent prints they’d gathered all around the house would match up with his sister’s — prints on the phone, the doorknob, the faucet handles in the bathroom, where she said she’d washed the blood from her hands. But Bensell had debated the value of the prints as evidence, saying they would only prove she’d been in the house and not that she’d murdered Maureen and the children.

I told Michael that the police had confirmed his sister’s telephone call to the marina, that the dockmaster there had told them he’d taken the call at eleven-thirty and had gone to the boat to get Michael. But Bensell said this only meant she’d called Michael, and not that she’d called him from the house during the time the coroner’s report had stated the murders occurred — between ten and midnight. Bensell maintained that Karin could have called her brother from anywhere in Calusa, asking him to meet her at the house, where together they could have committed the murders. I explained that they were at this moment booking his sister for Murder One, but that they would not release him till they were convinced he’d had nothing to do with the commission of the crime.

“Michael,” I said, “I’d like you to take a polygraph test.”

“What for?”

“Because there’s no way you can help your sister now. The only person you can help is yourself.”

“You just told me the fingerprints wouldn’t prove—”

“Michael, they’ll let you go the minute they’re sure you had nothing to do with this.”

“I had everything to do with it. I killed them.”

“Jesus, you’re a pain in the ass!”

“Why couldn’t she have stayed out of this?” he said.

“I guess for the same reason you couldn’t,” I said.

He looked at me. He nodded. He sighed heavily.

It was Ehrenberg’s opinion, and mine as well, that Michael had blended what he knew had happened with what he imagined had happened, using his intimate knowledge of the house — and what he had found there on his arrival — to construct a scenario within a plausible setting. There had always been a problem about his motive, but if we were to accept the existence of the knife rack, for example, then why not accept his statement that he’d seized a knife from that rack? If we were to believe that he’d kissed his dead stepmother on the mouth — and we both did believe it — then why not also believe he had stabbed her first? There had been no way of sorting the lies from the truth; in Michael’s various tellings, all had sounded equally genuine; even the hesitations, the groping for words seemed not really a lapse in inventiveness but only the customary disorientation of a person confessing to a brutal crime.

The polygraph would accept no lies.

A trained examiner would ask Michael questions, and the machine would accurately record any changes in his blood pressure, respiration, pulse, and electrodermal response. Ehrenberg was hopeful that the boy would be released before sundown, provided the test results showed what he thought they would. Bensell seemed a bit more dubious, and insisted he would not let Michael out on the street till he was absolutely certain of his innocence. They both advised me to go home. The test would take some time, and there was no sense in my hanging around. Ehrenberg promised he would call me as soon as he had the results.

I left the Public Safety Building at two-thirty that afternoon.

I didn’t know where to go.

I got into the Ghia, and started driving toward the office, and then turned in the opposite direction and headed for the bay. I wanted to go home, I guess, but I didn’t know where home was.

Aggie once asked me — this was last October, our love was still new then — whether we wouldn’t grow tired of each other soon enough, seek new partners again, look again for the danger or the thrill or the romance or whatever it had been that caused us to discover each other in the first place. She had been sitting on the edge of the bed naked, looking out toward the marsh on the eastern side of the house; the sun had already moved over to the beach side, this was two or thereabouts in the afternoon. She said she thought the reason people enjoyed stories about love affairs was not because they secretly longed for such affairs themselves. On the contrary, most of the stories ended in affirmation of the marital bond — the sinners going back to their respective spouses at the end. She went on to speculate that the happy ending was essential to any story of marital infidelity, and then she said—

She said that maybe those two strangers meeting on a train weren’t strangers at all. Maybe the woman was only Mrs. Smith as a young girl, and the man was Mr. Smith as he’d been when she first met him. The entire so-called “affair” was just a tale of their courtship and romance, a memory of more passionate times, with the “going back” at the end, the “happy ending” being a symbolic return to the humdrum safer reality of marriage. She was pleased with her idea. She waited for my approval, grinning, and then she kissed me. And then we made love again and in a little while I left her.

I drove over the causeway bridge now, and around Lucy’s Circle, and then across the new bridge to Sabal. But instead of continuing on toward Stone Crab Key, I made an abrupt left turn onto Jamie’s street and found myself driving slowly past the scene of the crime. The jacaranda stood leafless and flowerless in the center of the lawn. A month from now, it would explode against the sky in a glorious puff of feathery purple flowers, but now there were only naked branches and not a hint of promised bloom. I drove up the street toward West Lane, past the sewer into which the murder weapon had been dropped.

It occurred to me that Betty Purchase would probably never realize she was as guilty of committing those murders as was her daughter. Karin had wielded the knife, but she had also been her mother’s surrogate. The day Betty affixed the label “Goldilocks” to her husband’s new wife was the day she’d first planted the seed of murder. Nor would she ever understand that over the years she herself had become what she considered Maureen to be — the intruder, the other woman: Goldilocks for sure.

I made a left turn at the corner, parked the car in a clearly marked NO PARKING zone, and stepped over the chain Michael Purchase had crossed on Sunday when he’d fled that blood-drenched house. In the forest, I took off my shoes and the socks I’d been wearing since yesterday. The pine needles were soft underfoot.

I did not think I would go back to Susan.

But neither did I want to spend the rest of my life with Agatha.

Just before I reached the beach, I threw the socks into the woods.