Ben Marcus lifts his hand and waves back at me. Then he turns to go on his way.
I break into a run, screaming his name, and flailing my arms over my head. I hear the thud of feet behind me and guess that the guards are in pursuit, but I’ve gotten enough of a head start to reach Ben Marcus before they do. I skid to a stop a few feet before him and hold up my hands. “I just want to talk to you,” I plead. “Please.”
His eyes narrow and his brow furrows as if he’s angry, but I can see a slight quirk of his mouth that might be a sign of indulgence. He looks past me as one of the guards roughly grabs my arm. “Easy, Connor, Mrs. Hobbes just wants a chat. I’ve got it from here.”
“But she doesn’t have grounds privileges,” Connor says, his hand still gripping my arm.
Marcus fixes his eyes on Connor’s hand. “Then I’ll walk her back to the lounge,” he says slowly, as if speaking to a child. “You’d better get back to your post, Connor, the professor is heading for the trees again.”
We all turn to watch the professor shambling across the lawn, waving his arms at the trees as if he were hailing an army of Ents. Connor swears and takes off running. “Go easy!” Marcus calls after him. “He’s an old man.” Then he turns to me. “What can I do for you, Mrs. Hobbes? I hope you don’t expect me to escort you off the grounds. You know I can’t do that.”
The reference to our former relationship stings, but at least it gets right to the point. “You know I didn’t seem crazy when you met me,” I say. “I’m not. I’m being kept here under false pretenses and I need your help.”
Instead of looking surprised at my statement he looks weary, as if he’s heard this sort of thing before.
“So you didn’t claim to be someone else when your husband showed up?”
I know my safest path out of here is to convince everyone I know that I’m Laurel, but looking into Ben Marcus’s eyes I remember how I’d disliked lying to him the first day I met him. “I did,” I tell him. “But that’s because I’m not Laurel Hobbes. I’m Daphne Marist.”
“The Westchester woman who killed herself in the bathtub?”
“Yes. That’s me. The woman they found in the bathtub was Laurel Hobbes, my friend, and she didn’t kill herself. She was murdered. That’s why they need to keep me here, because I know something . . . or would if I could just stop taking these drugs and remember.”
It all sounds so crazy when I say it out loud. I expect Ben Marcus to escort me straight back to the hospital and remand me into the care of the doctors, but instead he leads me to a bench beneath an oak tree. “Okay,” he says, sitting down beside me. “Why don’t you start from the beginning?”
THE SPOT HE’S chosen is peaceful. We’re facing an unmowed meadow of gold and purple grasses. The leaves above us cast deep violet shadows. I have the feeling Ben Marcus has chosen this spot for its calming effect, but the signs of autumn are alarming. Time is slipping away from me, summer gone, and autumn tipping into winter. I have the feeling that once winter comes I will be trapped here, snowbound in Laurel’s body and name.
Start from the beginning, he said, but what was the beginning? When Chloe was born? When Peter found me drowning in the bathtub? When he sent me to the support group? When I met Laurel—
That’s where I begin. I tell him about making friends with Laurel, how good it was to find someone who understood what it was like to be all alone with a baby.
“What about your husband?” he interrupts. “Wasn’t he around to help?”
“Yes,” I say, “actually Peter was really helpful. He adores Chloe. Only that sometimes made me feel even more alone. . . .” I falter, unsure how to explain. Instead I ask him if he has children.
“A six-year-old daughter,” he says, looking away. “She lives with her mother. Tell me what happened after you met Laurel.”
So I’m not the only one who has things she doesn’t want to talk about. But I am the one confined to a mental institution and about to get her brain fried so I tell him about Laurel. “She is—was—one of those people who draws people to her. You know? Like all the light in the room gravitates toward her. It’s so crazy anyone thinking I’m her. I’m nothing like her.”
“You were pretty lit up when I met you.”
I blush at the compliment—if it is a compliment. “Maybe because I was pretending to be Laurel,” I say. “I bet I don’t look very ‘lit up’ right now.”
He looks at me and I wish I were wearing anything other than pajamas. I look down at my hands, at the chipped polish on my nails and the ragged cuticles. Those days at the salon seem a lifetime away.
“You’re all right,” he says. “No one looks very shiny at Crantham.”
“Laurel didn’t look very shiny the last time I saw her,” I say. “She looked like all the light had been sucked out of her.”
“She sounds like someone with bipolar disorder,” Ben Marcus says. “You say she thought her husband was poisoning her?”
As I describe Laurel’s theories I can feel Ben Marcus’s gaze on me. They sound paranoid and delusional, like something a woman in a mental institution would come up with. Even I had thought they were crazy. But they don’t sound half as crazy as the situation I find myself in now.
“I suppose she could have killed herself, but why do it in my house?” I finish.
“Maybe she wanted you to save her,” he suggests.
“Then I let her down,” I say, thinking of the time I
