“I—I don’t know.” I drop my hand and run my gaze around the room, hoping it will offer an answer. My eyes settle on the dark wood coffee table. There’s a slim pewter tray with a glass and a pitcher of water, and next to the tray, a box of tissues.
As I stare at the tissues, my whole body begins to vibrate, as if someone is shaking me lightly from behind. An image begins to form in my mind—vague, blurred around the edges.
“I see myself,” I blurt out. “I’m standing here. Here in this room. I . . . grabbed some of the tissues because . . . there was blood. And . . .”
I scrunch my face, trying to keep the memory from escaping.
“And what, Ally?”
“I was here. It was the wrong day. I—” A small wave of panic crests in my core and begins to ripple through my arms and legs. I struggle for air.
“Breathe, Ally,” Erling says, but there’s a weird edge to her voice. “Breathe.”
The image in my mind expands, amoeba-like. Now I see a woman lying faceup on the rug, eyes opened and glazed, blood pooled around her head. I’m dabbing at the wound with the tissues.
“There was a body on the floor!” I exclaim.
“That’s right,” Erling says, her voice eerily calm. “The body of a woman. I’d murdered her that day.”
32
My heart slams again my chest, and I feel my mouth slacken in astonishment.
“I didn’t plan to tell you, actually,” Erling says, not letting go of my eyes. “Oh, I was going to have to deal with this awkward situation you and I have found ourselves in, but there was no reason for you to know the gory details. But now you’ve gone and remembered.”
I stare, frozen in place.
“Who was she?”
“If you must know—and I suppose there’s no harm in telling you at this point—she was a woman I knew years ago. Someone I’d . . . I’d had a fling with. Someone I was actually besotted with to be perfectly honest. Stupidly so.”
“But wh—?”
“Why kill her? Our affair had been a dreadful mistake. She was a patient of mine, and after a while, I came to my senses. I met a man after that, married him, moved away. Got divorced. But she tracked me down. I teach a class on Tuesday mornings, and she was waiting outside the house when I returned around eleven. I knew right away that this was going to be about me paying the piper. She wanted money, lots of it, or she was going to expose me—and she had the paper trail to prove things. I would have lost my license. My teaching job.
“As I hope you’ve seen, Ally, I love what I do and I’m good at it. I couldn’t let her destroy it so I stepped out of the room to get us coffee and returned with a gun I keep. And then I shot her.”
I’m speechless, words stuck in my head, but I sense the muscles of my face contorting.
“I can see you’re horrified,” Erling says. “But there’s no reason to be. She was a dreadful human being—narcissistic, borderline personality. In lay terms, she’d be called a grifter.”
“Did I see it?” I manage. My voice is barely a whisper.
“The murder? No, no. Unbeknownst to me, you must have arrived when I’d gone off to make certain arrangements. I’m sure it was as you guessed a moment ago. When I called Tuesday to ask if you’d mind coming the next day to Larchmont, you sounded very unsettled from the fight with Hugh; perhaps you’d already started to dissociate. You obviously took the train here that day rather than Wednesday. In my haste, I left the side door unlocked, and when I didn’t answer the buzzer, you obviously let yourself in, wondering where I was.
“And even if you hadn’t started to dissociate, Ally, that experience—finding a dead body for the second time in your life—must have triggered it.”
“How did you figure it out—that I’d been here?”
“There were a couple of red flags that gave me pause. Your mention of the call you made trying to figure when our appointment was. The unknown person’s blood on the tissues, of course. And then this.”
She reaches into the deep pocket of her cardigan and extracts an iPhone. As my gaze settles on the blue rubber case, I realize it’s mine.
“I found it peeking out from under the couch the day after Diane