Five Minutes Alone (23 page)

CHAPTER FORTY

Bridget doesn’t say much. She has one leg pulled upwards and her fingers interlocked around her ankle, with her chin resting on her knee. The only time she makes any conversation is when she’s giving directions. The route they’re taking—it’s making him worry it’s a wild-goose chase. Whatever part of her brain short-circuiting this morning never changes direction—it’s left here or right there, and there’s never any hesitation, never any
Oops I think it might have been that way,
no looping around and covering old ground.

They are north of the city. Long, straight roads for most of the journey, big paddocks and farm animals and long grasses, orchards and trees, and then a turnoff and similar roads, but slightly narrower, slightly less traveled, then there are houses and smaller farms, then back to stretches of long paddocks that look deserted to the left, and to the right a forest.

“We’re close,” she tells him.

It’s secluded out here. Not the best place to shoot and bury somebody, but not the worst. After another fifteen minutes she tells him to slow down, and half a minute after that they’re pulling into a spot twenty yards off the side of the road.

“Tate’s car isn’t here,” he tells her. “Nobody is here.”

“He’s hidden it,” she says, taking off her seat belt. “Or maybe he’s not here yet.”

“How far in?” he asks.

“About ten minutes,” she says, “only . . . something isn’t right,” she adds. She has her eyes closed and her hands on the side of her head, she’s applying pressure as if trying to pop her own skull. “I feel dizzy.”

“Take a few deep breaths.”

She takes a few deep breaths. “It’s not helping. I feel sick.”

“Let’s get you outside.”

“Not that kind of sick.” She lets go of her head and she twists towards him. “The last thing I remember about that day,” she says, “when Emily died, is that we were at the movies. I don’t remember walking across the parking lot, but I know we must have, and because I can’t remember it I can’t even tell you what I could have done differently. Did I scream? Did I try to protect my daughter? Was it my fault? Had I not looked before stepping out? I don’t know. I know what I was told. I was told I tried to push Emily out of the way, but what nobody ever tells me is that I should have done more. It was my job to protect her, and I failed.”

“I’m sorry about what happened,” he says, and he is. He remembers Tate getting the phone call. He remembers something else, something he’ll never tell another soul. His first thought when he heard the news was
Thank
God it wasn’t my family.

“We should hurry. I don’t want Teddy to go to jail. Can you help him, Carl?”

He nods, and he has an image of the bullet in his skull going up and down inside him. “I can help him.”

“He’s through those trees,” she says.

“Can you show me?”

She opens the door as a way of answering.

He follows her into the trees. The sun is still rising, the trees filtering the light, sometimes letting the warmth reach them for a few seconds at a time, then putting them into the shade. The ground is slightly damp. Moss sticks to their shoes and he feels his feet sink slightly into the dirt. Every direction looks the same. Fallen trees, rocks, a cropping of boulders here and another one there and, on occasion, two sets of footprints going in his direction and coming from the direction they’re walking. Is it possible Tate and Quentin James were just out here? Bridget sees them too, but she says nothing, and he wonders what she makes of them, and figures she’s thinking they’re already too late.

“I hope he won’t be mad,” she says.

“Sorry?”

“Teddy. I hope he won’t be mad at me. I know how much he wants to hurt the man who did this, but killing will change him, don’t you think? Even if he gets away with it, he’ll be broken, won’t he? But will he hate me for stopping him?”

Schroder shakes his head. The footprints suggest they’re already too late. “I’ve known Theo for twenty years,” he says. “If there’s one thing I know it’s that he could never hate you. You’re the world to him.”

She starts to cry. She doesn’t look at him. “I don’t want him to kill for me and I don’t want to lose him, Carl.”

“Then let’s make sure nothing happens.”

She nods, then blots her eyes with the palms of her hands, and then they keep walking. He lets her set the pace. The other footprints tell him they’re going the right way. After ten minutes the pace slows. There’s a fallen log. He sees broken twigs and on the log moss has been scraped away. But there’s no sign of overturned earth. Nothing to indicate Tate buried somebody earlier today.

“This is it,” Bridget says.

And she’s right, this is it. The footprints don’t go further. They intersect each other, they form patterns in the dirt, and they head back the way they came. But they don’t go any further.

He says nothing.

She looks at the ground, then slowly starts turning a circle, then she stops. She walks to one of the trees, a fir tree that has to be four, maybe five stories tall. She reaches to one of the lower branches. Hanging from it on a piece of string is a small, finger-sized wooden figure. She wraps her hand around it and pulls down, the branch bending downwards until the string snaps. She looks at the figure, angling it this way and that way so Schroder can see it too. It’s a wooden bear. A smile comes to her face. “This was Emily’s,” she says. “My father carved it a year ago. It took him a month. It was a birthday present. Emily named the bear Henry. Dad’s going to carve a different one for her every year, and he’s already halfway through a . . . Oh,” she says. Then she looks up at Schroder. “Oh.”

“What’s wrong?”

“We need to go.”

“Bridget?”

“I shouldn’t have brought you here,” she says, talking quickly.

“What’s here?” he asks, but he already knows.

“Please,” she says, “I made a mistake. Something in here isn’t right,” she says, and taps the side of her head. “I’ve brought us into the middle of nowhere for no reason, and I don’t know why I thought this belonged to Emily.”

“It did belong to Emily,” he says, “and you brought me out here because this is where Quentin James is buried.”

She starts to cry.

“Your husband killed him three years ago, and recently he brought you here,” he says, because one of the sets of footprints is smaller than the other, and it matches the steps Bridget has been leaving on the way in here today.

“Carl, please, you can’t tell anybody. You can’t. Nobody is supposed to know.” She starts tapping the side of her head, softly at first, then with the palm of her hand, harder and harder. He reaches forward and takes hold of her hand. “What if it had been your daughter?”

“I promise I won’t tell anybody.”

She slowly nods and he lets go of her hand. She puts the wooden figure into her pocket, thinks on it for a few seconds, then hangs it where she found it. She ties the string over the branch, then steps away to watch the toy slowly sway from side to side.

“I feel so stupid,” she says.

He says nothing.

“There’s something wrong with me,” she tells him, still watching the toy. “Something deep inside here,” she says, and taps her head again, but this time gently. “It’s getting worse. I haven’t told Teddy, but I can sense it.”

“It was the accident. The brain is a funny thing,” he says, and how many times did his doctors tell him the same thing? “Just give it time.”

“You know exactly what I mean, don’t you,” she says, and it’s not a question but a statement. “I wake up sometimes a stranger to myself. I wake up one day thinking one thing, but it’s another. The world is moving one way and I’m moving another. I think Emily is still alive, and those times are the best, because in those times there is nothing wrong, but then they turn into the worst when you remember.” She turns towards him. “If you take Teddy away from me then all is lost. I won’t survive. I wouldn’t even want to survive.”

He doesn’t mind repeating himself. Doesn’t like it, doesn’t hate it. “I won’t tell anybody. I promise.”

“Do you really?”

“Yes,” he says.

“I’m pregnant. Teddy doesn’t know. Yesterday I went to the mall. I wanted to buy a pregnancy test, only I had a . . . I don’t know what to call it. An attack, maybe. My mind attacked itself and I went back to the day Emily disappeared. I spent yesterday afternoon thinking my daughter had been kidnapped. I still haven’t bought the test, but I know I’m pregnant. Somehow I just know, the same way I know my brain is getting worse. My hope is that . . . is that I can stay myself for as long as it takes to have the baby. That’s what I pray for. Did you know?” she asks, then nods towards the ground where three years ago her husband came out here and left a dead man behind. “What Teddy did to that man?”

He nods. “Yes. I just didn’t know where.”

“And?”

He shrugs. “And what? What Tate did,” he says, and he’s back to
Tate
now, not
Theo,
“was something most of us would have wanted to do. What he did took a lot of strength. It took a lot of courage.”

She gives him a look he can’t read. “Is that what you think? That what Teddy did was courageous?”

“It is,” he says. “Don’t you?”

“I think about it every day,” she says, “and I’m still not sure.”

CHAPTER FORTY-ONE

Kent pushes the doorbell and we step back. I turn my face towards the sun. It’s going to be another nice day, and there will be more of them as we slide into summer, and then less of them as we slide back out. Summer has a way of always going too fast and never being what we want—either never hot enough or too hot, never as perfect as I remember them being when I was growing up.

Kent rings the bell again, then follows it with some knocking. Jammed between the door frame and the door is an envelope, the words
Mom
and Dad
written on it. We stand back from the door and give it another minute.

“Now what?” Kent asks.

“Now we call her.”

I have her cell phone number written in my notebook, and I punch it into the phone. It goes immediately to voice mail. I leave a message.

“Does she work Sundays?” I ask.

Kent shakes her head. “Doesn’t mean she wasn’t called in, though.”

“Maybe she’s just hiding from us.”

“Is that really what you think?” she asks, nodding towards the envelope.

“That could be anything in there. Could be money, or a key, or a newspaper article.”

“Could be any number of things,” Kent agrees, “but there’s one that sticks out more than any other,” she says, and it’s what we’ve both been thinking since we got here. Kelly Summers has packed her suitcases and gone. “I’m going to open it.”

“You can’t,” I tell her. “It’s not addressed to you.”

“So what do you want to do? Come back later today? If she’s on the run and this is her good-bye letter, then we’re only letting her get further away. For all we know she’s already caught a flight to the other side of the world. She’s had twenty-four hours. She could be in Asia by now, or the US.”

And if she is, then good luck to her. If she’s there and not here, then we can’t question her and she can’t tell us about Schroder.

“Let me take a quick look around,” I say.

I walk across the front lawn and around the corner of the house. There’s a six-foot wooden gate and in the middle are two sets of shoe prints. People scaled this fence. Since it’s locked, I scale it too. My old man knees have warmed up for the day and don’t complain. My feet add to the scuff marks already on the timber. I drop alongside the attached garage. I look through the window. Kelly Summers’s car is inside. I move to the back door and knock. No answer. It’s locked. I walk the rest of the way around the house, passing the bedroom with the damaged window. The curtains are closed and I can’t see inside. I come up against the fence again, this time on the other side of the house, this part without a gate in it. I scale the fence and drop into the front yard.

“Car’s still in the garage,” I tell Kent.

Kent has the envelope in her hand. “It’s not sealed,” she says.

I know what she’s thinking. If it’s not sealed, she can open it, read it, and put it back just how she found it. Whatever is inside might be relevant, or it might not be. She looks at me and I look back at her, and I know what she wants to see, and after a few seconds I give it to her. I nod.

Right then my phone starts ringing. It’s my father-in-law. I walk into the middle of the yard and I watch Kent opening the envelope and I listen to my father-in-law as he asks me if I know where Bridget is, to which I reply she’s still at home, to which he tells me that she isn’t. He’s there, his wife is there—but Bridget is missing. The first thing that comes to mind is what happened yesterday. She’s going to be at the mall, or making her way to the mall on the bus, and soon she’s going to be looking for Emily. Kent is reading
the letter she pulled from the envelope. Her face becomes tight with concern. I suddenly have a very bad feeling the letter isn’t the kind of good-bye we both first thought.

“I’m not real sure what you want us to do,” my father-in-law says.

“I have an idea where she might be at,” I tell him. “Hang tight, and I’ll call you back in a few minutes, okay?”

“You shouldn’t have been working today,” he says, and he says it in a way that makes it obvious if anything bad has happened to Bridget then it’s my fault. “You need to be taking care of her.”

“I’m doing the best I can.” I hang up. Kent is still reading the letter. I can tell from her expression it’s bad news.

“Kick it in,” she says.

“What?”

“The door,” she says. “Kick it in.”

I don’t ask her why and I don’t need to. I take a step back, put my hand on the handle to make sure it isn’t unlocked—and it’s not—and rather than kicking it, I ram my shoulder into it. It shudders in the frame, but holds. I keep holding the handle for balance, then pull myself into the door once again. It’s solid, it hurts, but there’s a slight crack. The third time doesn’t work, but the crack is louder, then the fourth time the door splinters inwards. At the same time a voice calls out from behind us.

“What the hell are you doing?” We turn towards an elderly woman walking her dog. She’s staring at us from the sidewalk. “I’m going to call the police.”

I go inside. It’s stuffy in here. Rebecca calls out to the woman that we are the police, and then she’s a few footsteps behind. I hear the elderly lady call out, but I don’t hear what she says. We move quickly through the house—the hallway past the kitchen, past the lounge, past the lavender smelling bathroom with the bright green shower curtain. One bedroom, two bedrooms, and it’s bedroom three where we find Kelly Summers, lying on top of her bed in a pair of silk pajamas, her skin pale white, like she laid out under the moon all night and got bleached by it. I can hear Kent fumbling for her cell phone. I check for a pulse. Kelly Summers is cold. Very
cold. She looks at peace. She looks and feels like she’s been dead for most of, if not all of, the entire night.

“She almost looks happy,” Kent says, and she’s standing behind me, the phone down by her side, the call not made. “Look,” she says, and nods towards the bedside dresser. There are three envelopes there. One is addressed to her mom and dad, another to all her friends, and a third to Detective Inspector Theodore Tate and Detective Inspector Rebecca Kent.

“What did the other note say?”

“It was a warning,” she says, and she hands me the note while she picks up the letter addressed to us.

Hi Mom and Dad—

This is going to be hard to read, but I’ve done something that’s going to make you both really sad. I’m in the bedroom, but by the time you read this it’ll be too late to save me. I’ve taken a bottle of pills and soon I will be at peace. I’ve left this note here so you know what to expect once you unlock the door. Perhaps you should call somebody first. I’ve left another note inside. I love you.

Kelly xxx

I fold the note along the same creases Kelly folded. Rebecca is looking at me, a sad expression on her face, the letter to us is down by her side, but she hasn’t read it yet. “Here,” she says, and hands it to me. “You can read it first. I’m going to go and sit in the sun and call this in.”

She leaves me with Kelly Summers and Kelly Summers’s ghost and neither of them is in a talkative mood, but I am, so I do the talking.

“None of this is right,” I tell her, “but it’s the world we live in. I really hope you’re in a better place,” I say.

I open up the letter.

Detectives—

By now I’m guessing you’ve figured out what happened. I came home Friday night and within a few minutes Dwight Smith forced his way inside through the window. I used to call him Cowboy Dwight, is that on file anywhere? When I stepped out of my bathroom there he was. He pushed me back into the bathroom and pulled off my robe, and then he slipped on the wet floor and he hit his head on the edge of the bath. I didn’t know if he was dead or alive, but I was too afraid to check. I was also too afraid to go for my phone in case he came to in the time before the police arrived. I reached up and grabbed the first thing I could—which was a ceramic soap dish. I only meant to hit Cowboy Dwight once in the head to make sure he would stay unconscious, but once I started I couldn’t stop. I don’t know how many times I hit him, but it was a lot. For what he had done to me, for the years I was a prisoner in my house, for taking from me the life I wanted to have, I made him pay. I could tell you I didn’t mean for that to happen, but I think I did. I think I knew if I called the police you would come out, you would be sympathetic, but also you’d know there was a moment where I could have tried calling for help. I panicked. I dragged him out into his car. It was hard work. Heavy work. But I managed. I was determined. And the rest you know. I know what I did was wrong, but I’m glad I did it. It was like you asked me on the doorstep—you asked if I felt a sense of justice. The answer is yes. And the truth is I would have killed him over and over if I could.

Killing him isn’t the reason I’m about to do what I’m going to do—or by now will have done. It’s strange, but him being alive is the only thing that stopped me from killing myself years ago. I was too angry to die. Angry at Smith, angry at a world that allowed Smith to do that to me. I didn’t know that anger was keeping me alive until I’d killed him. There’s no reason to go on—I haven’t been happy for five years, and that’s never going to change, especially now that I’m facing jail for far longer than
Smith ever did, because that’s what will have happened. You’re probably reading this and shaking your head, but it’s true, and you know it’s true even if you don’t like it. He rapes me and gets five years, I kill him and get twenty. Smith didn’t kill me five years ago, and he didn’t kill me last night, but he still took my life. I’m just glad I was able to take his, and I’m thankful to have the chance to take mine on my own terms.

Please don’t think the worst of me.

Yours,

Kelly Summers

(P.S.—just how do you sign off a letter like this?
Yours sincerely? Yours faithfully? Yours peacefully?
Well, I’m going to die wondering. . . .)

I’ve lost count of how many suicides I’ve seen over the years. Some of them sad, some of them not, some of them simple, some of them not. Kelly’s is one of the saddest. And what of Schroder? There is no mention of him in the note, and why?

Because he helped her. He saved her from the boogeyman. The letter isn’t an accurate version of events. Kelly Summers came home, Dwight Smith broke into her house, and Carl Schroder saved her. She doesn’t mention Smith’s car running out of gas, or how she got back into town because that stuff didn’t happen to her. She’s taken the blame for it, and by doing so she’s closed the case. Only four people on this earth will ever know what happened, and two of them are already dead.

Kent comes back inside. “Medical examiner is on the way,” she says, “and so is Hutton. You read her letter?”

“Yeah,” I say, and I hand it over to her.

“What about the other two?” she asks, and nods towards the table at the remaining letters.

I shake my head. “They’re not for us.”

“They could be important,” she says.

“Could be, but everything we need to know is in there,” I say, and point at the letter I just handed her.

“I’m going to head back outside. Is that okay?”

“I’ll follow you in a minute.”

I stay in the room with Kelly for a little while longer, and when I’m sure Kent is outside, I step into the hallway and make my way to the bathroom. The shower curtain doesn’t look as new as it did yesterday. There are beads of water running the length of the hem, some caught in the creases. I touch the edge and I close my eyes and I picture Schroder in the supermarket paying for this in cash. When I open my eyes I notice the candles and air fresheners he bought are in here too. This is the room Dwight Smith died in, and then Kelly and Schroder cleaned it up.

Outside Kent is sitting on the front porch waiting patiently. The old lady with the dog is still watching us from the other side of the road, while the dog stares over at a nearby tree, probably thinking about chasing a cat up there or taking a leak against it. I sit down next to Kent and I put my arm around her and tell her that everything is going to be okay. We sit and we wait like that for the others to arrive.