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  Susan’s jaw unhinged. Laurie laughed.

  “You’re terrible,” Miss Debbie said to Detective Freeling. “Susan, hon, I’m Debbie. We don’t have any unicorns or mermaids or whatever, but we do have a litter of puppies in the sally port, if you’d like to come see them.”

  Susan sprung up out of her chair. “Yes, please! Can I, Mom?”

  Laurie nodded. “Go on.”

  “Neat.” She bounded over to Miss Debbie, then followed the woman out into the hallway.

  Detective Freeling shut the door and returned to his desk. “Don’t worry, she’ll be fine with Debs. Cute kid.”

  “Thank you. Detective, I’ve never done this before. I wasn’t sure what to expect.”

  “Oh, don’t worry, it’s no big deal.” He was rifling around the desk drawers in search of something. “I’ll just turn on a recorder and have you tell me everything you told me last night. Couldn’t be simpler.” He frowned, then rubbed his forehead. He had big hands. “If I can find the recorder.”

  She pointed to the breast pocket of his shirt, where something small and mechanical-looking stuck out. “Is that it?”

  He glanced down, then smiled at her embarrassedly. “Yeah, that’s it.” He pulled the recorder out and fiddled with it. “This ain’t even my office. Normally, we’d do this at my desk, but it’s a cube, and there are about twenty other bucket heads moping around back there right now. Here.” He swiped some papers off to the side to clear some room on the desk. “I’ll turn it on, do a little preamble, and then you just tell your story. Don’t get nervous, it’s not a big deal. If you flub it up real bad, we can kill it and start again. Sound good?”

  “Let’s do it.”

  Detective Freeling hit the record button and then set the recorder down on the desk. He glanced at his wristwatch—a digital Casio that looked like he’d probably had it since high school—and said in a strangely official voice, “This is Detective Brian Freeling, Anne Arundel County Police, Eastern District.” He recited the time and the date, then nodded for Laurie to go ahead.

  When she had finished, Detective Freeling switched off the tape recorder and dropped it back in the breast pocket of his dress shirt.

  “Don’t forget it’s there,” she joked.

  “Oh. Ha ha, yeah, no sweat. It’ll probably wind up going through the wash tonight.” He got up and dragged his chair around to her side of the desk, then sat down. “Hey, listen, I said I had some more news for you. It’s about your dad.”

  “Oh. I thought you said it had nothing to do with Tanya Albrecht.”

  “It doesn’t. It has to do with your dad’s death.”

  She realized she was fumbling with the clasp on her purse. She stopped.

  “He didn’t fall out that window,” Detective Freeling said. “He was pushed.”

  “Someone—” she began, then cut herself off. Suddenly, her face felt very hot.

  “We got a confession and made the arrest this morning.”

  “Who?” The word squeaked out of her. She thought for sure he was going to say, Some little girl named Abigail Evans. Ever heard of her?

  “Teresa Larosche,” said Freeling. “She was your dad’s nighttime caretaker.”

  Laurie shook her head. “No. That can’t be.”

  “Her fingerprints were in the third-floor room—on the inside of the doorknob, around the windowsill where your father went out. I went back to her apartment for a second interview, just to sew up the loose ends, and she must have figured that I knew something that I didn’t. When I started asking about the fingerprints, she broke down and confessed.”

  “When did this happen?” Shock had dried out her mouth, making it difficult to speak properly.

  “Early this morning. She’s in lockup now. Been cooperative all morning.”

  “I don’t . . . I don’t understand. What . . . what exactly happened?”

  “She’s a very disturbed young lady, Mrs. Genarro. You’ve met her once, correct?”

  “Yes. She’s the one who gave me the key to the room on the roof. She seemed worried about something—scared, even—but she didn’t strike me as someone who would . . .”

  He showed her his palms, as if to say, Well, folks, there you have it.

  “Why did she do it?”

  “Because he frightened the hell out of her,” said Freeling. “When she first started talking, I thought she was setting herself up for a self-defense argument, but she didn’t go there. My guess now is that a good lawyer might try to get her to plead to temporary insanity.”

  “Because he frightened her?”

  “I know, it sounds ridiculous.”

  No, she thought. It doesn’t. Even now, she could hear Teresa Larosche’s words thundering through her head, clear as a bell: And do you want to hear something ridiculous? After a while, he started to convince me of it. And I started to think, shit, what if he’s right? He seems so certain, what if he’s right? Soon, I started waking myself up just to go around the house and make sure the doors were all locked. And, see, that freaked me out even more because, you know, just like I said—what if his dementia was contagious? What if it had somehow seeped into me?

  “It doesn’t sound ridiculous at all,” she said. “Not after last night.”

  “She asked to speak with you.”

  “Teresa?”

  “Normally, we wouldn’t bother, but in this case . . . well, it would be strictly for your benefit, not hers. Unless you don’t want to, of course.”

  She didn’t know how to feel about this.

  “I just thought you might have some questions,” Detective Freeling said. “This whole thing came out of nowhere. I just thought it might do you some good. Like I said, she’s been cooperative. She hasn’t even requested an attorney, despite her boyfriend’s protestations.”

  “Toby,” she said.

  “Ah, you’ve met the inimitable Toby.”

  “No. Teresa mentioned him the day we met.”

  “He’s a piece of work.” He stood up. “Like I said, Mrs. Genarro, it’s up to you. If you just want to get home, I’ll have Freddy take you back right now.”

  “No,” she said. “I’d like to speak with her.”

  Chapter 29

  Teresa Larosche sat in a cell by herself at the end of a cellblock that was rank with the stink of perspiration. Detective Freeling led Laurie down the cellblock past other jailed offenders, each one looking like a caged animal awaiting euthanasia. There was a folding chair set up in the hall facing Teresa’s cell. It reminded her of when Jodie Foster went to talk with Anthony Hopkins’s character in The Silence of the Lambs.

  Teresa Larosche was seated on a bench, her head down, her bleached hair hanging over her eyes. She wasn’t wearing the Hannibal Lecter–style jumpsuit that would have completed the visual, but a plain black T-shirt and jeans. The laces had been removed from her sneakers and she wore none of the jewelry she had worn on the day Laurie had met her for coffee. When the young woman looked up at her, she could see that there was no makeup on her face, either. Her eyes looked haunted.

  Detective Freeling placed a hand on Laurie’s shoulder. “When you’re finished, just come back down the hall and push the intercom button by the door.” He smelled like aftershave lotion.

  “Okay. Thanks.”

  Once Detective Freeling was halfway down the hall, Laurie sat in the folding chair. In the cell, Teresa’s eyes were red, bleary orbs that leaked wet tracks down her cheeks. She looked much older than the woman whom Laurie had met at the Brickfront coffee shop, though only slightly more frightened.

  “I’m sorry for lying to you,” Teresa said.

  “But not for killing my father,” Laurie said. “Why did you do it?”

  “Because he was poisoning me. Because he was getting into my head and I had to stop him from doing that.”

  “Why didn’t you just quit?”

  “It wouldn’t have done any good. Even when I wasn’t there—you know, during the day—it was like he was s
till inside my head. Remember that movie I told you about? The crazy guy and the psychiatrist or whatever?”

  “I remember.”

  “You know what I’m talking about, don’t you? You feel it, too.”

  “In the next few days, there will be a story in the news about my father. I can’t tell you about it now, but you’ll know what it is when it happens. So while I don’t know exactly what you’re talking about, it isn’t hard for me to comprehend just how horrible he might have been toward you. Believe me on that.”

  Teresa hung her head again. The part in her scalp looked very pink.

  “How did you do it?”

  “I told you the door was unlocked, but I didn’t know how it had gotten that way. Well, that’s not true. I unlocked it. He swore someone was up there, trying to get in. At first he wanted the door locked to keep them out, but then he wanted to go up there and confront whoever it was. That’s when I really started to get scared. I thought I heard someone up there, too. So I left the door unlocked. In the night, he got out of bed and went up there. He began screaming. Then crying. I went up and he was there, naked, shouting at the walls. Tears were coming down his face. He had . . . there was . . . my God, this huge fucking erection. And he had taken a . . . um, he’d defecated on the floor, too. And then I couldn’t be sure if he was crying or laughing.

  “When he saw me, he called me someone else’s name. I could feel his sickness crawling around in my brain. He had a sickness in him, just like my old man had his own sickness. Those things poison a person. Well, I was done being poisoned.”

  Teresa looked up at her. The young woman’s face had gone slack.

  “He pointed to the broken window, said that’s how they’d been getting in the house. He had cut himself on the glass, too, and was bleeding all over the rug.”

  “So, wait,” Laurie said. “The window was already broken?”

  Teresa nodded. “He was so big. I kept shoving him backward, I guess to keep him away from me, but also to shut him up, shut him up, shut him up. I thought the only way to stop the poison from going through my veins was to shut him up.”

  She spoke those final three words through clenched teeth.

  “So you pushed him out the window.”

  “To shut him up,” Teresa said, her voice now a whisper.

  “What name did he call you?” Laurie asked, wondering if she would actually say Sadie or Abigail, but knowing that it would be the same name her father had mistakenly called her during their last phone call—Tanya. But it wasn’t Tanya’s name, either.

  “It was your name, Mrs. Genarro,” Teresa said. “It was Laurie.”

  Susan complained about stomach pains the whole ride back to the house. This time, they were chauffeured by a uniformed officer in a squad car. Laurie and Susan both sat in the back behind a mesh cage like animals. The officer said nothing until he got lost and had to ask for directions to Annapolis Road. When they arrived home, Laurie located some Tums with her toiletries and gave two to Susan.

  “Blech,” Susan bemoaned. “Tastes like chalk.”

  “Why don’t you go lie down and I’ll call you when dinner’s ready?”

  “What’s for dinner?”

  “How about spaghetti?”

  “Okay.”

  Once Susan had gone upstairs, Laurie poured herself a stiff drink from the remaining bottles on the piano. It tasted like turpentine and she nearly gagged. She thought about the events of the past couple of weeks . . . and found she was wrapped in a blanket of unease concerning the status of her own sanity. This hadn’t been some ghost story. There was no menacing presence haunting her and pointing out clues. There was no Hateful Beast, no Vengeance. Her father had been murdered by Teresa Larosche. Perhaps the only ghosts in this tale were the ones that plagued her father’s deteriorating and guilt-ridden mind as well as the ones that no doubt populated Teresa Larosche’s nightmares. She had believed in the return of a vengeful spirit the way small children believe in Santa Claus. What did that say about her sanity?

  Ted is right. I need to get out of this house.

  In the kitchen, Laurie dialed Harmony Simmons’s number. She got the realtor’s voice mail, left a message, and hung up.

  She was halfway through cooking dinner when Susan appeared in the kitchen doorway, sobbing. Laurie hurried over to the girl.

  “Honey, what’s wrong?”

  “Blood,” Susan whimpered. “It’s really true!”

  At first, Laurie didn’t understand. But then she did, and she smiled warmly and hugged the girl. Susan’s arms hung limply at her sides while she moaned into her mother’s hair.

  “It’s not so bad,” Laurie said. “Come on. Let’s get you upstairs and cleaned up.”

  While Susan soaked in the bathtub, Laurie found some Tampax pads in her purse. She explained to Susan how to use them.

  “I don’t like it,” Susan grumbled. She had filled the tub with bubbles and there were some in her hair. “I don’t want it.”

  “It happens to every little girl when they become a woman.” For whatever reason, this made her think of Teresa Larosche, and how she had looked sitting in that jail cell, no jewelry on her fingers, no makeup on her face, no laces in her sneakers. She was once a little girl, too. What horrors did she face at the hand of her own father? The world, she knew suddenly, was full of innocent little girls turned mad.

  “Are you angry about it?” Susan asked.

  “Are you kidding? No, hon. What’s to be angry about?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “I guess I’m just a little surprised. It’s happened so early.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “You’re still pretty young.”

  “I’m going to be eleven next month.”

  “That’s still pretty young.”

  Susan said, “I want Daddy to come back.”

  Chapter 30

  It was still dark when Ted awoke Friday morning. Moments ticked by before he realized he was back in his own bed in his own house in Hartford. He lay there for a while, smelling the familiar smells, while the room slowly brightened with the dawn. He was grounded enough to recognize that this might not be his bedroom for very long. This might not be his house.

  He had spent the drive yesterday replaying not only the argument with Laurie, but the events in his life that had led to that argument. Not just the affair with Marney—how careless he had been in hindsight—but his overall approach to his relationship with Laurie. How many hours had be spent moody and despondent because of his floundering writing career? How many conversations had he dominated with his bellyaching? In hindsight, it was a wonder that she hadn’t left him sooner, and taken Susan with her.

  Thinking of Susan made his face burn. Would Laurie really leave him? Would she take Susan and disappear?

  That’s impossible. Where would they go?

  What if she stayed in that house in Maryland? What if Laurie and Susan never came back?

  He got up, pulled on his running gear, and was outside jogging along Tamarack Street just as the early morning sun threw reddish spears through the trees to the east. The street climbed toward a grade in the hillside. The houses there were grandiose—all brick fronts, marble porches, balconies atop the porticos—and it was still early enough in the morning to see people climbing into SUVs, BMWs, and Mercedes for their morning commutes. By the time he reached the park at the end of Tamarack, he was firmly back in the working middle-class neck of the neighborhood. The park itself was nothing but a weedy basketball court. On the next street over, a row of Ryder trucks stood in the parking lot of a rental facility. Beyond the facility, the spire of St. Mark’s rose up against a still-dark sky.

  Back at the house, he showered for a good forty-five minutes. He made himself breakfast with whatever was still edible in the refrigerator—eggs, toast, grapefruit juice, a few grapes that had already started to wither and looked unappetizingly like some small mammal’s testicles. He was calm while he cooked and while coffee b
rewed in the gurgling stainless-steel machine. But when he sat down to eat, he found his calmness—along with his appetite—had deserted him. In his chest, his heart thudded furiously against his sternum. His pulse hadn’t slowed down since he’d come back from his run. Heart attack? That would be poetic—his first morning alone and he drops dead with no one around to call the paramedics. Brilliant.

  He dumped the food down the garbage disposal, forced down the grapefruit juice, grimaced. On the refrigerator, Susan’s artwork made his heart hurt. At some point, he found himself holding the portable phone. He dialed Laurie’s cell number, placed the phone to his ear, listened to it ring. When it went to voice mail, he hung up.

  Something didn’t feel right.

  He arrived at Rao’s a half hour early for the meeting. There were tables outside and it was already promising to be a nice day, but he didn’t feel like waiting around to be seated. He went directly inside to the bar. There was an attractive girl in a man’s white shirt trolling back and forth behind the bar. A male bar-back with a bald pate and severe black eyes stacked soapy glasses on a spongy green mat beside a stainless-steel sink.

  He ordered a Laphroaig from the bartender, then drummed his fingers restlessly on the bar top. The drink arrived and it smelled like a fire pit. He tossed it down, felt his intestines backfire like an old Plymouth, then ordered another. He had his cell phone out and was staring at it as if confused by its existence when the second drink arrived. Ultimately, he dialed Laurie’s cell phone number again. He had no speech prepared, didn’t know what to say. He simply felt awful about how he had left things with her. She had been hit with too much over the past forty-eight hours and she had been hanging on by a thread even before that. He shouldn’t have left them home alone.

  The phone rang a few times and then went to voice mail. He disconnected, then hit redial. This time, it went straight to voice mail without ringing.

  “Goddamn it.”

  Steve Markham arrived a few minutes later and sat on the stool next to him. “Christ, you look nervous,” Markham said.