Brian Freeman - The Burying Place

'Problems?'

'Difficult labor. Post-partum depression. Things like that. And obviously, in Micki's case, losing a baby.'

'Could Regan have manipulated Micki into helping her kidnap Callie?'

Glenn thought about it and shook his head. 'I really don't think so. Not Micki. She's too loyal to me. Besides, kidnapping a baby? That's a heinous thing to do. Micki would never be involved in anything like that.'

Stride looked at Serena, who nodded.

'Dr Glenn, let's be very clear about this. Did you in any way harm your baby?' 'No. Absolutely not.'

'Were you in any way involved in her disappearance? Either taking her from the house or helping someone else to do so?'

'No.'

'Do you know what happened to her?'

Marcus stood up. 'No. I can't be any clearer than that. I was not involved in Callie's disappearance in any way whatsoever. You're wasting your time listening to the nonsense spread by Blair Rowe and the rest of the media. I know it makes good television to paint me as some kind of devil, but the fact is, I'm innocent. The best thing you can do is stop harassing me and do your jobs. Find out what happened to her.'

He turned to walk from the sunroom, but Serena interrupted him. 'We can clear this up once and for all, Dr Glenn. We'd like you to take a polygraph test.'

Marcus looked at her with suspicion. 'A polygraph?'

'Yes.'

'Polygraph tests are notoriously inaccurate and inadmissible in court, isn't that right?'

'The test helps us cross people off the list,' Serena explained. 'When you pass, we'll know that we should be focusing our investigation elsewhere. Otherwise, a cloud of suspicion will linger over you, particularly given the omissions in your statements to us.'

Valerie leaned forward. 'I think you should do it, Marcus. We both should. Let them clear us, so they can figure out who really did this.'

'Oh, so you think I'm involved too?' he retorted. He shook his head firmly. 'Sorry. No. I won't do that. Certainly not without consulting an attorney.'

'Marcus,' Valerie gasped.

'I said no. It doesn’t mean I had anything to do with this, but innocent people wind up in legal jeopardy all too often. I'm sorry.'

Marcus Glenn shoved his hands in his pockets and stalked from the room.

Valerie had known Marcus Glenn long before they ever met.

She remembered the big celebration in the high school gymnasium when she was ten years old. Her sister Denise and Denise's boyfriend, Tom, had taken Valerie with them to the city-wide party in honor of Grand Rapids bringing home the high school hockey championship for the second year in a row. Marcus Glenn was the star. The most valuable player. The tall teenager with the black hair and the reluctant smile. Valerie had watched him in his hockey jersey with the kind of crush she had previously reserved for singers on MTV. It didn't matter that Denise made snarky comments to Tom under her breath about Marcus thinking he was king of the world. Right then and there, Valerie remembered staring at him and thinking: I'm going to marry him.

It was only a juvenile fantasy. She never took it seriously, not until a dozen years later, when she was the hostess at the Sugar Lake Lodge restaurant. Marcus Glenn walked in with three other men, and Valerie may as well have been ten years old again when she saw him. He wore a perfectly tailored black suit and a hint of cologne; he was taller than anyone else around him; and he was talking in casual tones about the PGA star who had just won the Phoenix Open, a year after Marcus had done knee surgery on the man.

Marcus Glenn was back home in Grand Rapids. Young, wealthy, unmarried, a surgeon with gifted hands.

She remembered how their eyes had met. How his stare lingered on her face. She knew she was beautiful — plenty of men had gone after her over the years — but it still gave her a thrill to realize that he was interested in her. Of all the women in Grand Rapids who would have thrown themselves at him and his Lexus, she was the one he wanted.

He asked her out that night. She knew about the rumors: Marcus went from one girl to the next, sleeping with them and moving on. He wasn't ready to settle down. So she was surprised when he didn't invite her to a romantic dinner for two, but instead invited her to accompany him to a cocktail party thrown by members of the hospital board. He bought her a stunning dress. Kept her on his arm the whole night. Kissed her cheek when he dropped her off at her apartment.

They didn't make love until six weeks later, and it was a short, awkward coupling, strangely devoid of passion. That didn't matter to her. What mattered was that he asked her to marry him the next day. It didn't even take her two heartbeats to say yes.

Looking back, she knew how naive she'd been. It never occurred to her that he had simply added her to his collection like a butterfly, that she was exactly the kind of wife that a successful surgeon needed to show to the world. It was three years before she discovered that he had continued having sex with other women throughout their marriage. By then, they were in their new lake home, and she had a beautiful wardrobe and a new car, and she was on the board of nonprofit organizations in the northland where Marcus made lavish gifts. She had sold her soul, and it was too late to buy it back.

Valerie descended into a loneliness that was so black she couldn't see her way out. She went through her days like a robot. She remembered spilling her soul to Denise and Tom, but Denise — who was pregnant with her third child at the time — had little time or sympathy for a sister who had been blessed with all the breaks in life: money, looks, the successful husband, the big house. That was the beginning, the real intersection where they began to drift apart as siblings. Valerie had never dreamed how empty she could feel with no partner in her life to talk to, with no one outside the sterile mansion who would listen to her.

On one January night five years into their marriage, Marcus arrived home late from the hospital in Duluth. He had grown careless — or maybe he didn't really care at all — about hiding the evidence of his affairs. When he crawled into their bed, he stank of sex. After he fell asleep, Valerie lay awake for nearly three hours, crying soundlessly into her pillow, before she got up and emptied the remnants of a half-full bottle of aspirin into her sweaty palm and swallowed them down.

She had awakened in the hospital. Marcus was there. She realized that, in his way, he loved her and had been frightened of the idea of losing her. She also knew that, if she was going to stay with him, she needed something else in her life that would take the place of an emotionally distant husband. He had been adamant when they got engaged that he had no interest in having a child, but she essentially blackmailed him by telling him the truth. Without a baby, she would try to kill herself again, and she would keep trying until she got it right. So he said yes. She threw away the condoms. And they had their usual sex, bareback now, every Sunday morning.

Valerie never dreamed that three interminable years would pass from that breaking point. She had been tested; he had been tested. The first year had been exciting; the second year had been frustrating; and the third year had tipped her into a depression even deeper than she had known in the early years of her marriage. She knew perfectly well that she was the one who really wanted a baby. Marcus had his same perfunctory sex with her, but he didn't bother to pretend that he was disappointed when her period came back month after month. The loneliness came back along with it. And the emptiness. She craved a closeness with her husband to beat back her desperation, but that was something he could never give her. It wasn't who he was or would ever be.