The One I Trust (24 page)

“I was hoping we could go away for the weekend,” she said. Her voice was calm . . . controlled. “Just the two of us.”

“Okay,” I said.

Was God really fixing everything this fast?

“I rented a little cabin in the mountains,” she said.

“What?” I cried. “Emily! We can’t afford that!”

“I’ve got it taken care of.”

“What do you mean? How?”

“I just do,” she said. Her voice was still calm. “I’ve got it taken care of.”

I wanted to react, but I thought for a moment and I remembered what God wanted me to do. I nodded slowly.

“Okay,” I agreed.

She nodded back, and then she got up and went into the bedroom.

I sat there for a minute, looking after her, completely unsure what I should do next.

Was I supposed to go in there?

I asked God what He wanted me to do, but I didn’t hear any kind of answer. This probably made sense—I didn’t really think that God was going to let me use Him like a Magic 8 Ball every time I needed to make a decision. He had let me know that I was supposed to love Emily no matter what, but it was going to be up to me to figure out exactly how to do that.

After another minute I stood up and went into the bedroom. Emily was in the bathroom brushing her teeth. When she saw me, she moved to one side so that I could get my toothbrush.

“You go ahead,” I said. “I can wait until you’re done.”

She nodded and continued brushing. When she had finished she stepped out and I went in. By the time I came out, she was lying on her side of the bed with the lights off. I couldn’t see her face.

I stood there for a moment before turning off the bathroom light and walking carefully over to my side of the bed. I crawled in and pulled the blankets up. Emily’s back was to me and she didn’t move or say anything.

After a long pause I said quietly, “Good night.”

“Good night,” she replied, just as quietly, and I reached my hand out tentatively and put it on her shoulder.

She reached up to touch my hand with hers, and then she turned her head so that her lips found my hand, and she kissed it. She put her hand back down and went to sleep.

BY THE TIME Ray dropped me off at the house the next evening, Emily had already packed a cooler and her bag and loaded them into her car. I gave Ray a few last-minute reminders about feeding Gracie, and then I thanked him before going inside to throw some of my things together. It was after seven o’clock when we pulled into a drive-thru in Durham, and it was almost eleven by the time we found the cabin Emily had rented for us. After we had unloaded and unpacked, I was beat. Although Emily didn’t seem anywhere near as tired as she usually did, she crawled into bed next to me. We slept beside each other just like we had the night before, except that this time we fell asleep holding hands.

It was after eight o’clock when I woke up the next morning. Emily wasn’t beside me and I stepped out into the living room hoping to find her there.

She wasn’t, but there was a warm pot of coffee in the kitchen. After looking around a bit I found her on the deck, watching the little babbling creek that was rushing by.

“Good morning,” I said, stepping outside and pulling the door shut behind me.

“Good morning,” she said, actually giving me a small smile.

I walked over and stood next to her, watching the creek.

Waterfront property.

“Would you like to go in?” Emily asked after a few moments. “I’ll make us some breakfast.”

“Sure.”

We went inside and she made fried eggs, bacon, and toast, which we ate quietly at the little kitchen table. When we were finished, I took a sip of my coffee and asked Emily, “What do you want to do today?”

“I want to go for a walk,” she said.

“Okay,” I said.

I brushed my teeth, took a shower, and got dressed. When I emerged from the bedroom, Emily was waiting for me.

“Are you ready?” she asked.

I nodded.

She took her phone out of her pocket and laid it on the kitchen counter.

“Why don’t we leave our phones here?” she suggested.

“Why?”

“So we won’t get interrupted.”

“I can turn it off,” I said.

“Please?”

She looked at me pleadingly, and the air of calm that had surrounded her since she’d walked in the door on Thursday evening threatened to disappear. I set my phone on the counter next to hers and we set off down the driveway and then up the road that ran in front of the cabin and along the creek.

After a few hundred yards we came to a spot with a big, flat rock that overlooked the creek. Emily said, “Why don’t we sit here for a few minutes?”

“Okay,” I agreed.

We sat quietly on the rock for a minute until Emily broke the silence.

“I think I’ve figured out what’s going on,” she said.

“You have?”

She nodded. “Yes.”

“What do you think’s going on?”

She looked me right in the eye and made sure that she had my full attention. For the first time in weeks, she looked completely in control. Even the bags under her eyes were gone.

“Someone’s been spying on us,” she said.

I don’t know exactly what I’d been expecting her to say, but it definitely wasn’t this.

“Spying on us,” I repeated carefully.

“Yes.”

“What do you mean?” I asked. “Who’s been spying on us?”

“I don’t know,” she said quietly. “But they’ve got our house bugged and our computers and maybe our phones. They’ve been breaking into our house when we’re not there and doing whatever they can to tear the two of us apart . . .”

And there it was.

Paranoid schizophrenia
.

“EMILY,” I SAID gently. “Why in the
world
would someone be spying on us?”

This was a dumb thing to say, especially since after all my years on the force I knew better than anyone that you can’t reason with a paranoid schizophrenic, but . . .

“I don’t know,” she said again, still in a hushed voice. “But they’ve hacked into my computer. That’s why my emails keep disappearing.”

“I . . . I don’t think anybody’s hacked into your computer.”

“Yes, they have.” She sounded adamant. “There are computer programs out there that track websites and keystrokes and everything. Mostly it’s for parents who want to keep track of what their kids are doing, but they probably—”

“Emily—” I tried to interrupt her but she interrupted me right back.

“Remember when my keys disappeared?”

“Yeah . . .”

“What I think happened is that somebody stole them that very first day and made copies of them and then they put them back in my car. Then—that weekend when we went to school to look for those papers—they came into the house while we were gone and loaded the program onto my computer.

“They also planted bugs and they can hear everything we’ve been saying in the house and in the car,” she went on. “Our phones are probably tapped, too.”

“Emily,” I said. “I don’t think anyone broke into our house.”

“Yes they did,” she insisted. “And they
keep
breaking in. They turned our oven on, and they put dish soap in the dishwasher, and they turned your guns upside down in the safe, and they bleached your laundry, and they left lacy underwear in our bed.”

“Who would do all that stuff?” I asked, trying my hardest to sound patient.

“I don’t know.”

“And
why
would someone do all that stuff?”

“I don’t know.” Her new go-to answer.

I sighed and then she said, “I know you’re not having an affair.”

“No,” I agreed. “I’m not.”

It was the first reasonable thing I’d heard her say since we’d sat down.

“What made you finally realize that?” I asked.

She lowered her eyes.

“I hired a private investigator,” she said.

“You
what
?”

She looked back up.

“I hired someone to find out if you were cheating on me.”

“Emily!” I cried. “We can’t afford a private eye! We can’t even afford this cabin! Where are you getting all this money from?”

She dropped her eyes again.

“I called Charlotte,” she said quietly.

“You
what
?” I cried for a second time.

She raised her head defiantly.

“I called Charlotte,” she repeated. “I thought about calling my parents but I didn’t want them to think anything was wrong, and Charlotte seemed so nice and she said if she could ever do anything to help . . .”

Her voice trailed off and I suddenly realized exactly why Charlotte had sent me that Bible:
God
hadn’t spoken to Charlotte . . . Emily had.

My heart dropped at the thought that what had happened with God on Thursday had been nothing. But then I realized that it had been
everything
. . . the most powerful experience I’d ever had in my life. Just because Emily had been the one to make the call didn’t mean that God hadn’t used it.

“I’m sorry,” Emily was saying. “I know you didn’t want us to borrow money from anyone.”

“It’s okay,” I assured her.

“I also had the locks changed,” she said.

I covered my eyes with my hand and sighed deeply.

“It wasn’t that expensive,” she assured me quickly. I felt her place her hand on my leg. “It was just the front door and carport door. I figured since we keep that wooden bar in the sliding glass door we didn’t need to change that one . . .”

I uncovered my eyes and looked at her.

“Okay.”

“You’re not mad?” she asked.

“No,” I said, shaking my head. “You’re my wife. I love you.”

“I love you, too,” she said, and she leaned forward and kissed me on the lips.

“Let’s head back, okay?”

“Okay,” she agreed.

We stood up and started to walk down the road when suddenly she stopped in her tracks.

“You do believe me, don’t you?” she asked, turning to look directly at me.

“Of course I do,” I said. There wasn’t going to be any point in letting her think otherwise until I had a game plan in place for getting her some help. She gave me another small smile and reached for my hand.

“We’re not going to be able to talk about this back at the cabin,” she said, shaking her head. “They might have come up here and planted bugs before we got here.”

“Don’t worry,” I said, squeezing her hand. “I won’t.”

Our cabin was just south of the little town of West Jefferson. We decided to go into town, shop for a while, and have lunch.

Emily seemed more at peace than I’d seen her since school had started—as if a huge weight had been lifted from her shoulders. When she left me at the table in the restaurant to go to the bathroom, I pulled out my phone and researched paranoid schizophrenia just long enough to confirm my suspicions:

One criterion of paranoid schizophrenia is delusion or a strong belief that is maintained even when disputed by overwhelming, contrary evidence . . . Common delusions of a paranoid schizophrenic include the belief that someone is monitoring their activities or that someone is “out to get them” . . . In all but rare cases, these beliefs are irrational and can cause the schizophrenic to exhibit abnormal behavior . . . Onset typically occurs in early adulthood, between the ages of 15 and 25 . . .

I glanced up to make sure twenty-year-old Emily wasn’t coming out of the bathroom and then I kept reading.

Symptoms of paranoid schizophrenia often result in detrimental effects on daily functioning and can negatively affect quality of life for both the patient and their loved ones . . . Paranoid schizophrenia is a lifelong illness that requires constant treatment and medication to provide a person with a relatively stable and normal lifestyle . . . Treatment can be hindered by the schizophrenics’ inability to accept their condition—

“What are you looking at?” I heard Emily ask.

“Just checking my email,” I replied.

I knew God didn’t like lying, but I was pretty sure He didn’t want me to tell her what I’d actually been doing either.

She sat down at the table.

“You know,” she said. “I was thinking. I filled out a pistol permit a while back and I haven’t heard anything yet. Do you think—”

“Wait,” I interrupted. “What?”

“I filled out a pistol permit,” she repeated.

“You got a gun?”

“No, I haven’t gotten my permit yet. I was thinking that maybe—”

“You don’t need a gun.”

“Yes, I do,” she said. “Especially now that we know someone’s after us. I—”

“I’ll protect you,” I interrupted yet again, reaching to my back where my Beretta was tucked into my waistband.

“But you aren’t always with me,” she argued. “I need to be able to protect myself even when you’re not there.”

“You’ve got Gracie,” I said. “Remember?”

“Not when I’m out.”

I decided to worry about one thing at a time, so I was glad when she changed the subject.

“You know what else I was thinking?” she asked.

“No,” I answered truthfully because I honestly couldn’t imagine.

“I was thinking that you might want to consider becoming a private eye.”

“What?”

“Yeah.” She nodded. “You know the guy I hired? Well, his name is Wyatt and he used to be a police detective in Durham County. He said there was this big scandal in his police department a few years ago and he quit. He thought about going somewhere else, but he decided he wanted to do something different, so he became a PI. He said that lots of PIs used to be officers.” Emily was definitely right about that. She went on. “I was just thinking maybe you should look into it.

“Not that I’m saying I want you to do something else,” Emily said quickly when I didn’t respond right away. “If you’re happy with what you’re doing then I want you to keep doing it. I just thought that maybe it was something you might want to consider.”

“No,” I said. “You’re right. I probably need to start looking into something else.”

Except for when she’d declared that I wasn’t having an affair, it was the most sensible thing Emily had said all weekend.

DURING MY FIRST break on Monday I called the sheriff’s department and asked to talk directly to Sheriff Stuart. That was where Emily would have gone to have her fingerprints taken and to have her background check run so that she could get her pistol permit. Knowing the sheriff personally helped me to get right through.