Линвуд Баркли - Find You First

He stepped out onto the bridge, walked around the back of the car to reach the pedestrian walkway on the east side. He peered over the top of the railing.

There it was. The headlight of the approaching train.

His heart hammered as he set the step stool down, got onto it, and gripped the top of the railing. All he had to do to get over was hoist himself up at the same time as he gave a good push with his legs.

The train was almost to the bridge.

It was time.

Grip. Push.

“Hey, whoa, stop it!”

He felt someone grab him around the legs. He glanced over his shoulder, saw a large woman clinging to him. She was dressed somewhat formally, in a pale blue shirt, black pants, and a black suit-like jacket.

“Don’t do it, Dr. Gold!” the woman cried. “Don’t do it!”

How did she know who he was? He’d never seen this woman before in his life.

“Let go!” he said. “Let me go!”

“I gotcha! I gotcha!”

Martin Gold couldn’t get over the railing. The woman had a good fifty pounds on him, he was betting. He’d lost his leverage.

The train rumbled underneath them as it slowed coming into the station stop. It was now immediately west of the bridge.

The moment was gone.

He stumbled off the plastic step, lost his balance, and hit the walkway. The woman knelt over him, straddling him. She was doing more than just trying to help him. She was keeping him from getting away.

“It’s going to be okay,” she said. “Charise is going to take good care of you.”

And that was when Gold noticed someone else on the bridge. Running this way. This person he recognized.

Miles Cookson.

Shit, Gold thought. It’s over.

New Haven, CT

Gilbert and Samantha stood at her second-floor bedroom window, peering down from behind the curtain, wondering what Caroline might do next. She stood in the middle of the yard, looking up, aware that they were watching her.

“I’m sorry!” she shouted. “I’m sorry about everything!”

Earlier, she had only been crying. Now she was sobbing.

“Please let me in! I did it all for you!”

The locksmith had left only moments before Caroline dared return home with a story that would satisfactorily explain her actions. The code for the security system, mounted on the exterior door handle — and which, if entered correctly, not only unlocked the door but turned off the alarm — had also been changed.

“Maybe we should let her in,” Samantha said.

“No,” said her father.

“We can’t let her stand in the yard all night.”

“Yes,” Gilbert said. “We can.”

Gilbert had also canceled all their credit cards, except for his Cookson Tech card, to which Caroline did not have access.

Caroline, at one point, had gone around to the back of the house and attempted to gain entry through the sliding-glass doors that led into the kitchen, but Gilbert had made sure those were locked, too. She’d picked up one of the metal deck chairs and thrown it at the glass, but without enough force to crack it.

So she had gone back to the front yard, hoping that expressions of contrition would do the trick.

“I’m sorry!” she shouted again, figuring her family would hear her even if she couldn’t see them. “I was trying to do the right thing! I was trying to help us! Gil, please go to the front door! You don’t have to open it. I just want to talk to you.”

So he went downstairs and positioned himself by the door. Caroline, on the other side, was whimpering.

“I was trying to get justice for you,” she said.

“No, you weren’t,” Gilbert said.

“It’s true. It is. I told Samantha it was all for you.”

“Go away, Caroline. Don’t come back.”

“I’ll talk to Miles. I’ll make it all better.”

“I don’t think that would be a good idea.”

Now, no words. Only crying.

Gilbert, exhausted, put his forehead to the door. “You need help,” he said.

More crying, sniffling.

“You need to talk to somebody,” Gilbert said. “Maybe... that would help. You need to figure out why you do the things you do. If you really want to do the right thing for this family, that would be a place to start.”

Still nothing from the other side of the door. The whimpering had ceased. Gilbert wondered whether she was still there. And then he heard some kind of crash. Glass shattering. Then the whooping of an alarm.

He ran to the living room window.

The windshield of the Porsche Miles had given him had been shattered, caved in. The hood was covered with what looked like topsoil and leaves. The car’s lights were flashing as the alarm continued to wail. Gilbert noticed that one of the planters by the walk up to the front door was missing.

Caroline stood next to the Porsche, brushing her hands together, admiring her handiwork. She turned, slowly, to look back at the house.

Gilbert thought she suddenly looked very calm. Maybe her act of automotive vandalism had served as a kind of release.

Samantha had come downstairs. “Did you see what she did?”

“Yes.”

He saw, at that moment, how pathetic his wife looked. Standing there, tear lines streaking her cheeks, her makeup smeared, hands covered in dirt, her hair in disarray.

Gilbert knew he should be angry, and he certainly had been, but now all he could do was pity her.

Caroline took one last look at the house, turned and walked to the curb, where she had parked her Volvo SUV across the end of the driveway. She got in behind the wheel and drove away. Calmly. No spinning of wheels. She even used her turn signal when she got to the end of the street.

Samantha asked, “Where do you think she’s going?”

Gilbert shook his head. “As long as she doesn’t come back, I don’t care.”

New Haven, CT

“This is kidnapping. You can’t hold me here against my will. I’ll call the police.”

Miles tossed a cell phone to Dr. Martin Gold. It was the one Charise had taken off him earlier. “Go ahead. Call them right now. Let’s tell them everything.”

Gold seemed to sink into the leather couch in the living room of Miles’s home. He looked from Miles to Charise, who was standing nearby, arms crossed, ready to throw him back onto the couch if he considered making a run for it.

Once Miles had returned from Fort Wayne, he’d had Charise drive him back to the ReproGold Clinic. When the doctor turned out not to be there, they went to his home, but a block before they reached it they spotted the doctor behind the wheel of his Lexus, headed in the other direction.

They followed.

They trailed him to the Mount Vernon bridge, and were puzzled, at first, when he stopped his car in the middle of it. But his intentions soon became clear.

“Oh, my God,” Miles had said. “He’s going to jump.”

Charise had not waited for instructions. She’d bolted from the limo and run onto the bridge, then grabbed Gold, hauled him off the railing, and sat on him so he could not get away.

She had then whispered in his ear that if he did not come back to the limo with her, she would do something so horrible to him that he’d beg her to let him try jumping off the bridge again to make the pain go away.

After she had him in the car next to Miles and was back behind the wheel, Miles had said, “That was amazing.”

Charise had said, “Compared to what I used to do, sir, this was like subduing a five-year-old girl.”

Miles had wondered, briefly, whether they should be taking a suicidal man to the hospital, but believed getting some answers from Gold took priority. They could get him the help he needed later. So Miles had directed Charise to take them to his home.