“He said you took the dogs for a walk, but as time went on and you didn’t come home, he started to worry about you. Especially when he heard the dogs barking. He looked outside to see what was the matter. When he did, he found the dogs out there but not you. You left the dogs in the yard when you went over to the Baineses’ home that night, didn’t you?”
My stomach drops. There’s the sensation of free-falling, of plummeting down the first hill of a roller coaster, organs shifting inside of me.
I say, enunciating each word at a time, “I didn’t go to the Baineses’ home that night.”
But he ignores this. He goes on as if I didn’t even speak. He starts speaking of Will on a first-name basis. He is Will and I am Dr. Foust.
Officer Berg has chosen sides. He isn’t on mine.
“Will tried you on your cell phone. You didn’t answer. He started thinking that something terrible had happened to you. He hurried to the bedroom to put his clothes on so he could go searching for you. But just as he was about to panic, you came home.”
Officer Berg pauses for breath. “I have to ask you again, Doctor. Where were you between the hours of ten and two on the night that Mrs. Baines was killed?”
I shake my head, saying nothing. There’s nothing to say. I’ve told him where I was, but he no longer believes me.
Only now do I realize that Officer Berg has carried a large envelope into the room with him. All the while it’s sat on the table, just out of reach. He stands and reaches for it now. He slips a finger beneath the flap to open it up. Berg begins to lay photographs on the table for me to see. They’re truly heinous, growing more ghastly with each image he draws out. The images have been enlarged, eight by ten inches at least. Even when I avert my eyes I see them. There’s a photograph of an open door—doorjamb and latch intact. Of sprays of blood trickling down the walls. The room is strikingly tidy, which makes me think there wasn’t much of a scuffle. The only things out of place are an umbrella stand, which lies on its side, and a framed photograph, hanging cockeyed as if it got elbowed in the fracas.
At the center of it all lies Morgan. She’s splayed in an uncomfortable position on an area rug, brown hair veiling her face, arms thrown up and over her head as if, in a last-ditch effort, she tried to protect her face from the blade of the knife. A leg looks broken from the fall, bent in a way it’s not meant to go. Her pajamas are on, flannel pants and a thermal top, all of it red, so it’s impossible to see where the blood ends and the pajamas begin. The left leg of her pants is hitched to the knee.
Small footprints are pressed into the puddles of blood. They lessen in density as they drift away from the body. I envision an officer’s hands luring the little girl away from the dead woman’s body.
“What I see here, Doctor,” Officer Berg is telling me, “isn’t a sign of a random crime. Whoever did this wanted Morgan to suffer. This was an act of anger and aggression.”
I can’t tear my eyes away from the photo. They drift over Morgan’s body, the bloody footprints, back to the photograph mounted on the wall, the one that hangs cockeyed. I grab the photograph from the table and bring it to my eyes for a better look at that mounted picture frame, because I’ve seen it before and not so long ago. The way the trees line the street is familiar. There is a family of four. A mother, father and two daughters, roughly the ages of ten and twenty.
The woman, the mother, in a pretty green dress is set on a bright yellow chair in the center of it, while her family stands around her.
“Oh God,” I gasp, hand going to my mouth, because this photograph—framed and mounted to Morgan Baines’s wall—is the same as the one in the newspaper article about Erin’s death. The one on my computer. The older girl, nearly twenty years old, is Will’s former fiancée, Erin. It was likely taken just months before she died. The younger girl is her little sister.
I choke on my own saliva. Officer Berg pats my back, asks if I’m okay. I nod because I can’t speak.
“It’s not easy to look at, is it?” Officer Berg asks, thinking it’s the dead woman’s body that has me rattled like this.
I see it now, what I couldn’t see before. Because the woman in the photograph—the mother perched on the chair—is older now. Her brown hair is now gray, and she’s lost a significant amount of weight. Too much weight, in fact, so that she’s gaunt.
It’s utterly impossible. It’s too hard to digest. This can’t be.
The woman in this photograph is Morgan’s mother. The woman I met at the memorial service. The woman who lost another child years ago and has never been the same since, according to her friends Karen and Susan.
But I don’t understand it. If this is true, it means that Morgan was Erin’s sister. That Morgan is the little girl in the photograph, the one who’s about ten years old.
Why didn’t Will tell me about this?
I think I know why. Because of my own insecurities. What would I have done if I’d learned Erin’s sister was living in such close proximity to us? I realize Will and Morgan’s friendship, their chumminess, it was real. It existed. Because of their shared affinity for the one woman Will loved more than me. Erin.
The room drifts in and out of focus. I blink hard, trying to get it to stop. Officer Berg teeters on the chair beside me. He doesn’t move; it’s my perception of him that makes him move. It’s all in my head. The edges of his face begin to soften. The room suddenly expands in size, walls widen, moving out. When the officer speaks, his words are nearly extinguished by whatever is going on in my head. I see his lips move. His words are harder to make out.
The first time he says it, it’s unintelligible.
“Pardon me?” I ask, speaking loudly.
“Will told us that you have a tendency toward being jealous and insecure.”
“He did, did he?”
“Yes, Dr. Foust, he did. He said he never expected you to act on those feelings. But he also said that you’ve been having a hard time lately. That you’re not quite yourself. He mentioned a panic attack, a forced resignation. You’re not the violent type, not according to Will. But,” he says, repeating his own words, “he says you haven’t been yourself lately.”
He asks, “Do you have anything to say to that?”
