Keith Ablow - Compulsion

Garret jammed the box into the closet, forced the door closed, then turned and looked at me. "For instance," he said, "without getting shrinky with the shrink, she wanted you to hit her in there."

"What?" I said.

"She yelled," Garret said. "Darwin would have gone ballistic. She was testing you to see if you would hit her."

Garret's insight made some sense. I had asked Julia to trust me, to fully disclose her past. One way to interpret her extreme response was as a way of probing how far she could push me without me pushing back. "You know your mother pretty well," I said.

He shrugged. "I've noticed the same kind of thing about myself since you've been living with us," he said. "Like this room. I could never have left it this way with Darwin around. Not unless I wanted the strap. I think I've let it get this messy to see if you'd cut me slack."

"It's really not my place to tell you how to keep your room," I said.

"You're pretty much the man of the house," he said.

I wasn't feeling much like the man of the house. I nodded at his desk. "So what are you reading, anyhow?"

"Poetry," he said.

"Who?" I asked, looking at the title, The Land of Heart's Desire.

"Yeats," he said.

"Is he your favorite?"

"I don't really have a favorite," he said, easing himself into a beanbag chair in the corner of the room. "I like Emerson and Poe just as much. Maybe better."

I glanced up at the bookshelves, the only space in the room that was neat and clean. The volumes were arranged alphabetically, by author. I scanned the names. Auden, Beckett, Emerson, Hegel, Hemingway, Locke, Paz, Poe, Shakespeare. Yeats was at the end of the shelf-seven, eight volumes strong by himself. "What do you like about poetry?" I asked.

"Saying more with less," he said. "People use too many words. They become meaningless."

"Agreed," I said. "You like to write poetry, too?"

"Some," he said. "Just for myself."

That seemed to say I shouldn't expect to read any of Garret's work any time soon. "You're the most important audience," I said.

"Darwin would get pissed if he caught me writing," Garret said. "He said it was for girls. That's one of the reasons he wouldn't let me stay too long in my room."

"That's ridiculous," I said. "Nobody thought of Hemingway as a girl."

"His mother did," Garret said.

I smiled. Hemingway's mother had dressed the budding author in girl's clothes from time to time, one reason he might have become almost hyperbolically male as an adult. "Except her," I said.

"Maybe I will show you some of my stuff, someday," Garret said tentatively.

"I'd love to see anything you write," I said.

He looked out his window, then back at me. "She just needs time-and some space. Maybe it's good you're taking Billy to that Riggs place."

"I want to thank you for helping him with the decision to go there," I said. "It's the right one. You think you can hold the fort down a couple weeks by yourself?"

"No problem," he said.

"I'm sorry to worry you-about your mom and me," I said.

"Don't be," he said. "I'll never have to worry the way I used to."

I left Garret's room just before 1:00 a.m. As I walked by Billy's room, his light went out. Had he been eavesdropping, I wondered, or had Garret and I simply been keeping him up by talking too loudly?

On my way out of the house I paused to look at the toys Candace had arranged in the curio cabinet. A little windup bear with brass cymbals caught my eye. It was the kind of thing that had probably kept Julia entertained for hours as a child. I smiled, thinking how delighted she must have been the first time she wound it up and watched it perform, how simple her pleasures were back then.

A chill blanketed me. Because in my heart I knew, without knowing exactly why, that everything really had started to unravel, and that she would never be mine.

My sleep that night was broken into naps. Each time I awakened, it was with another memory of Julia, Darwin, or the boys. I pictured the first time I had met Julia outside the Bishop estate, remembered our lunch at Bomboa Restaurant in Boston. I thought back to my visit with Billy on the locked unit at Payne Whitney, to my verbal altercation with Darwin at Brooke's funeral, to Anderson and me searching Garret's locker at the Brant Point Racket Club. I thought again of Claire Buckley's demeanor when she had turned the mystery letter over to North Anderson and me. And I reviewed what Anderson and I had each said to Julia at Mass General after she had been assaulted, what she had said to us. The sleep between memories became shorter and shorter, the images more and more vivid. It was as if my mind was replaying the last three weeks, looking for a window onto the Bishop family's secret.

At 3:47 a.m. that window opened wide, letting in an icy wind that literally made me shiver. I sat up in bed, my mind snapping to full attention with a memory not from days or weeks before, but just hours. It was something I had seen in the main house, and it felt like a stray, abnormal laboratory result on a patient, one that tells you that a cancer long thought vanquished has been quietly invading deep into the bone, eating away at the marrow.

A whole train of thoughts began moving through my mind. I stood, squinting into the darkness, starting to connect the dots in a very ugly picture. An almost unthinkable one. I started to pace. The thoughts came faster and faster, careening through the night. I felt nauseated and lightheaded.

I did not return to bed until more than two hours had passed. I did not sleep at all. Because I was no longer convinced Darwin Bishop had killed little Brooke. I was growing more and more certain, in fact, that someone else had. Someone I had trusted. And for reasons that both saddened and sickened me.

A cold sweat covered me. If I was right, that person was still stalking Tess, who was sleeping in her nursery, not fifty feet from my door.

My mind raced until sunrise, refining a strategy to expose the killer. It was a strategy of psychological warfare designed to quickly strip away the person's emotional defenses, uncapping explosive rage. If it worked, whoever had taken Brooke's life would make an attempt on mine within the next twenty-four hours.

Tuesday, July 23, 2002

At 9:00 a.m. I called the Payne Whitney clinic and had the operator page Laura Mossberg. She answered a few minutes later.

"It's Frank Clevenger," I told her. "I need your help."

"Really," she said, that special, therapeutic kindness in her voice.

"With the Bishop case," I said, to keep her off mine.

"I thought the case was closed," she said. "I read about the father being arrested. I was shocked."

"You just never know with people," I said.

"You seem to," she said. "You never believed Billy was guilty."

I sidestepped the compliment. "There's one loose end I still want to tie," I said. "For my own peace of mind."

"What's that?" she asked. "Does it relate to the records I sent?"

"Yes," I said. "And I wondered if you could get me a little more information from the family's medical records."

"What is it that you need?" she said.

"I'm hoping you might be able to find blood types for each member of the Bishop family, including all the children," I said. "Julia, the twins, and the boys."

"That shouldn't be a problem," Mossberg said. "We have the surgical record from Mr. Bishop's vasectomy, his wife's obstetrical chart, and birth records for the little girls. I'm sure Billy and Garret were also blood-typed, given that they were adopted."

"Excellent," I said.

"I won't ask why you want the data," she said, her tone hinting that she really wanted to ask.

"Well, I appreciate the help," I said. "I don't expect the information to change anything, but I'll certainly let you know if it does."