Stephen White - Blinded

Psychotherapy rule number eleven: Follow, don’t lead.

Had I just broken it?

“They are all women he was involved with at one time or another. At least that’s what he told me. I’m not sure I believe him.”

I waited. I couldn’t follow if she didn’t take another step forward.

“You don’t believe what? That he was involved with them?”

“I don’t know. Sterling lies a lot. He… betrayed me. You know?”

“No,” I said. “I don’t know. The reality is that I don’t know anything that you don’t tell me, Gibbs. But I don’t understand why he would admit to affairs that he didn’t have.”

“He probably had them.” She glanced at her hands before she continued. “The first one he told me about was at Augusta.”

“Augusta, Georgia?”

“Yes. He met her at the Masters.”

I waited, wondering why it was important that he met her at the Masters. “She was the first one he… killed?”

“She was the first one he told me about. But there was another one at West Point, too.”

“The military academy?”

“She was a hostess he met. At the Army-Navy game.”

I was still following her, but now I was on my tiptoes, trying to look over her shoulder.

“And then Indianapolis,” she added.

I thought I was getting the swing of it. Sterling met women while he was producing the broadcast of sporting events. “The Indianapolis 500? The car race?”

She shook her head. “No, the College Combine. The NFL draft? She worked for the arena people.”

I took a few steps back to give Gibbs room to lead. “Why just between us? Why not share this information with the authorities?”

“I don’t want people to think he was that kind of man.”

“Even though he was?”

She glowered. “He has demons, Dr. Gregory. Women make him crazy sometimes. Crazy. He’s been fighting it his whole life. He really has. I don’t think people will understand.”

I couldn’t argue with that. Gibbs was absolutely right: People wouldn’t understand.

“Women make him crazy?” I asked. It wasn’t much of a question. I could have just as easily have said, “I’m going to skip my turn, why don’t you just keep going?” But instead I said, “Women make him crazy?”

“He was afraid that they wouldn’t let him go, that they would ruin what he had. All the good things he’d accomplished…” Her voice trailed away.

I was confused about the good things. I asked, “His career?”

“Yes, but… no. I was talking about his marriage to me.”

“So he killed these women because… they threatened your marriage? I’m not sure I follow.”

“I don’t know very much about any of it.” She wriggled and tugged on her sleeves, finally looking back my way as though I were a vanity mirror and she was checking her reflection. “It’s not like we talked about this all the time.”

I had a thousand questions. I asked none of them.

Her voice was pressured when she resumed. “Just once. We only talked about all this once, okay? Right before we moved back here to Boulder. He admitted the affairs with all the women-there were others, too, many others. I don’t know the details. Ones he didn’t… you know, kill, but I think felt an impulse to… There was one in South Bend, a sports information something”-she shivered-“and a girl in Flushing Meadows-she was a publicity something with the women’s tour, I think. And Daytona Beach, maybe. I forget. I try to forget.”

South Bend was Notre Dame University, probably football. Flushing Meadows was tennis, the U.S. Open. Daytona Beach was NASCAR, I thought. Some car race. Sam would know.

She exhaled deeply. “That wasn’t a surprise to me. The affairs. I knew he was… seeing other women. I just did. It’s who he was. But he promised me that he was done. He told me he had changed, that moving back here would be a new start for us. That he valued our marriage too much to ever cheat on me again.”

A tear moved a centimeter down her cheek, paused, and then tracked at an angle toward her nose. She touched it with the tip of her finger. Another tear soon followed the same track. Her chest heaved a little.

“Take your time,” I said.

“He said he was going to prove his love for me all over again by putting his life in my hands. That’s when he told me that the women were gone. The ones who were a threat… to us.”

“Gone?”

“That’s what I asked. He said they wouldn’t bother us ever again. I asked him what he meant.”

The tears on her cheeks were leaving silky tracks in the powder on her skin.

“ ‘Louise is at peace. They are, too.’ That’s what he said. Those were his exact words. What do you think he meant?” Gibbs’s hands were rolled into fists.

I slid the box of tissues closer to her. She appeared not to notice.

I didn’t have a prayer of knowing exactly what Sterling had meant with his words. But every one of my guesses chilled me.

Gibbs continued. “We made love that night. And he said ‘catch me’ again. He was trusting me with his secret, begging me to keep him from falling.” She paused for a good hunk of a minute before she confessed, “His life was in my hands for a few weeks. That’s how long it took me to betray him.”

The bridge over the river where Sterling Storey disappeared wasn’t much to look at.

I’d been working under the assumption that it was a major highway bridge on the stretch of Highway 19 that connects Thomasville and Albany, but it wasn’t. For some reason, when Sterling had cut off the main road out of Tallahassee, which was Highway 319, he’d ended up on a smaller road, a two-laner that I guessed was a county road, marked Georgia 3, heading northwest just about parallel to Highway 19. The bridge on the smaller road was a concrete structure that had been doing its job for a lot of years, almost too many. The local cops figured Sterling had gotten lost in the storm and had taken the wrong turn out of Thomasville and ended up on the county road instead of 19.

It was a reasonable assumption, but assumptions trouble me.

The details of the accident weren’t what I expected. The minivan that had gone off the highway and that had been in danger of sliding into the swollen river was traveling southeast, not northwest, before it went off the road. I couldn’t figure out how Sterling had even seen it down there. It was on the opposite side of the road, on the opposite side of the bridge.

That wasn’t all that I couldn’t figure. After living in the high desert for as long as I had, it was a constant revelation to me how lush everything was in southern Georgia, even the week before Thanksgiving. With the accident having taken place at nearly eight o’clock at night, with all the woods and vegetation camouflaging everything, and with torrential rains obscuring anything that wasn’t camouflaged, I didn’t know how Sterling could have seen a damn thing out the windshield of his damn rented Camry.

Standing near the top of the bridge abutment, I stared at the placid river below my feet. The water in the Ochlockonee was more yellow than gray, and I suspected that with global warming and all, there were glaciers that moved faster than that river was flowing at that moment. It took every bit of my imagination to conjure up a picture of the biblical flood that had recently coursed down that channel.

Before I left the riverbank, I reread the police report that my partner Lucy had smuggled to me. The report was okay. Better than many I’d read. Written clearly, decent chronology, good descriptions. In most circumstances it would have sufficed. These weren’t most circumstances, though, and standing on the bridge, I realized what wasn’t spelled out in the report.