What a princess. It’s always all about him.
You said it, Zoe. You said it.
Straightening, I say, “What took you guys so long?”
Jane beckons to another officer that has materialized on the beach. Through the fog, red and blue lights strobe. As the officer begins to read Eric his rights, she says, “He had to confess. I had to hear him. The further he went, the more damning the evidence.” She shrugs. “You chose the risk. I figured you could handle yourself. Although I didn’t expect him to attack you like that.”
“The man’s a sociopath. Of course he was going to attack me.”
“We’ve got him now.”
“Well.” I’m still annoyed — but I did choose the risk. “Thanks for coming.”
“You’re welcome.” She nods, and joins the other officers surrounding Eric North.
I am absurdly grateful that Jane had come, despite all the reasons not to, and brought the cavalry with her. At the very least, they can charge him with assault or even attempted murder for his attack on me, and second degree murder for Victoria.
My feelings about Takahashi are mixed. He’d helped me out of the water at the end, but where had he been before that? Watching? How much had he seen? If he saw the assault, why didn’t he help me sooner?
Jane, I could understand. She’d been waiting till the last second to get evidence to charge him. Plus she almost thought I was a criminal myself. But Seth? The man is standing nearby, and I ask him why he decided to come, and whether Travis was with him.
“Travis wouldn’t come. He didn’t want to see the place again, or identify the man he saw. As for me, I thought you wanted a witness. That’s what I thought you meant when we last talked. When I got here, I saw you struggling in the water, and Detective Candide pointing her gun.”
I guess I can’t expect him to be a hero. I don’t even know what I want from him. So I walk over to Jane. She’s talking to another officer but nods him away when she sees me.
“Thanks Jane,” I say. “I think you saved my life.”
She nodded. “I’d say so. That guy was serious.”
“Did you hear what he was saying?”
“Some. But I need to get a statement from you.”
“Okay.” I repeat what Eric had said, and what I suspect. That he sexually abused Victoria when they were younger. That he killed her because she was talking about it in her book, and he thought she might incriminate him. Or maybe he just couldn’t bear to hear about it. Either way, he was responsible for her death. And also for Daniel Chandler.
Jane nods. “You put everything together. How? Eric North wasn’t even on our radar.”
I look at her. The woman isn’t my friend. But she did listen to me when her partner hadn’t, and she had just saved my life. But.
Gotta trust someone sometime.
That’s not your usual schtick.
So sue me.
Life advice from Zoe? That’s a first. But we’ve reached an understanding, or at least an acceptance, and if I can reconcile with her, I should be able to do the same with Jane.
The detective is looking at me quizzically.
“Okay.” I say. “Okay. But it’s a little bit weird.” And I tell her, as simply as I can, about the vision. And how I’d followed up the clues in order to catch a killer.
“So,” she says, “you’re telling me you’re psychic.”
“No.” I pause. “Well, maybe.” I pause again. “I don’t really know what that means. I only know what I’ve experienced.”
Jane nods, her expression thoughtful. “I guess it worked out this time.”
I think of all the stumbles and mistakes I’ve made, rookie errors while I sought to reconcile the visions with reality. “I guess.”
She looks away across the river, at the bridge or maybe the hills.
“Detective, can you come over here?” calls one of the officers.
We both look up, but it’s Jane who answers, “In a minute.” Then she says to me, “I’ll be in touch.” And she walks away.
I go back up to the trail where the Reverend Seth Takahashi is waiting. He puts a blanket around my shoulders, and we watch as the police take Eric North away.
CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN
THE NEXT DAY, after spending the morning making statements and filling out forms at the police station, I get a call from Elizabeth Harkness. She asks me to come to Victoria’s apartment one last time. I have mixed feelings about this, but I do it.
The apartment is clean and barren. All the odds and ends of a life once lived are gone, the closets and cupboards are bare. Elizabeth is taping the top of a cardboard box as I enter. Her face bears its usual armor of impeccable makeup.
“Audrey.”
“Elizabeth.”
Her hands pause in their duty, and she stares down at the box. I wonder about the tectonic shifting going on inside her spirit, none of which is apparent on her features. I’m surmising that there’s something, anyway. No one can lose a child and be unmoved.
She says, “You found the killer.”
“Yes.”
Her hands shift slightly, picking at the tape on the box. I stand at parade rest, waiting, wondering why she called me here.
“Audrey…”
“Yes?”
“Do you think I did the right thing? With Victoria? How I raised her?”
I blow through my bangs. “I think you did what you felt was right.”
“But was it? Am I, somehow, at fault?”
I sigh. Impossible to unweave the tangled snarl of the universe and all its might-have-beens. But. “You didn’t make North do what he did. Those choices were his own.”
She nods, distracted by some inner thought process. “Still. I should have been a better mother.”
It’s easy to criticize, to judge and engage in armchair quarterbacking. Easy to opine ‘I wouldn’t have done that but this.’ And with no guarantee that anything would be better in the long run. There’s only one universal, so that’s what I say: “All of us should be better than we are.”
Another long moment of silence,
