Blinded (17 page)

My best guess is that Lauren hobbled out of bed after a few fitful hours of sleep somewhere around threeA.M.The primary short-term side effect of high-dose steroids is agitation, and she was agitated. Not wide awake, but agitated. I followed her out to the living room to check on her but never looked at the clock. She got herself settled on the sofa with the remote control and sent me back to bed. Did I sleep after that? I don’t know. I do know that the alarm jangled at five forty-five.

Grace started squealing at five forty-seven. She was my snooze alarm.

Viv, our daytime nanny, arrived at six thirty-five. I filled her in before I kissed Lauren and Grace and ran to my car at full speed.

Emily’s paw umbrella
clack-clacked
on the floor as she chased me to the door. I apologized to her because I didn’t have time to make repairs.

Gibbs looked much better put together for our seven o’clock appointment than I did. The morning was brisk, and she was modeling her fall things. The autumn forecast, fashionably speaking, apparently called for snug black jeans, tight sweaters, and large beads of silver and gold. Gibbs wore it all well, no surprise.

I’d brought coffee from home. Gibbs had stopped at Starbucks. Every time she sipped, she left a slightly wider lipstick stain on the plastic cover of the paper cup.

“Whew, interesting weekend” was her opener.

I suppose.
I tried to read her face for signs of what she might be feeling, but no clues jumped at me.

I did, however, check “distressed” from my list.

“Tell me,” I said. I could just as easily have chosen silence or said “go on” or “yes,” but “tell me” is what I chose.

“I talked with that detective, finally.”

She lifted her latte and took a baby sip. I expected her to continue with her tale of her meeting with Reynoso, but she returned the cup to the small table between us and looked at me expectantly.

I sat holding my mug just below my chin with both hands, and I waited. Gibbs had apparently decided that this appointment was going to be more dental than psychological and that it was going to be my job to pull the teeth. In turn, I decided that it wasn’t going to happen. In therapy, when things go according to plan, the patient sets the pace.

On good days in the therapist’s chair, I could outwait Job. And I felt like having a good day.

I needed a good day.

Two minutes, maybe three, later, Gibbs blinked. “Oh, and I met that friend of yours. Detective Purdy? He stopped by my house yesterday for a visit. He’s so nice. Don’t you think he’s nice?”

I thought,
You have to be kidding.

But I kept my face impassive and said, “Tell me.” Steam blossomed up from the mug below my chin.

I allowed Gibbs to go on uninterrupted. She sensed, I think, that her story was causing me consternation, but I doubted that she understood why I was feeling almost cataplectic at what she was telling me.

If Gibbs was to be believed-and I admitted to myself that I was experiencing more than a few instances of severe doubt about the veracity of her story-Sam was probably well over halfway, or more, to Georgia as she and I were speaking. I’d been on road trips with Sam before. The image in my head needed no further developing. He was crammed behind the wheel of his Jeep Cherokee, listening to some music that was as full of lament as was his current life. He was hungry. He was cranky. Road maps were spread out on the passenger seat beside him. Maybe they had already crumpled into heaps on the floor. He’d marked his preferred route with a pastel highlight pen, then marked an alternative in a different color. Something you could count on when traveling with Sam was that every time he stopped for gas, he would decide that there was a better way to get from where he was to wherever he wanted to be.

If it was more than an hour from his last fuel stop, he probably needed to visit a bathroom. But he wouldn’t pull over again until he needed gasoline. Highway rest stops were for wusses. Sam was a velocity traveler, not a comfort traveler. Bladder be damned, full speed ahead.

I was willing to make a guess that he was someplace in Arkansas or, if he was making particularly good time, had already crossed the border into Louisiana.

I had a fleeting wish that I was beside him, riding shotgun. Sam grows reflective on long trips. The monotony of the road or the infinity of the sky or something about the miles passing below his feet causes him to consider opening windows into his life that were otherwise nailed shut and hung with blackout curtains.

There was so much for Sam and me to discuss right then: Sherry. Simon. Heart disease. Rehab. Cop work. Lauren’s exacerbation. The future.

God, the future.

And of course, Gibbs and Sterling Storey.

But the real reason I had a yearning to be sharing the Jeep with him was that I wanted to be a fly on the wall, a silent spectator, as the inevitable collision occurred between the recalcitrant Iron Ranger and the southern good old boy. I wanted to watch as Northern Minnesota, personified by Sam, said hello to Southern Georgia, personified by any number of unwitting volunteers. I would have paid good money for a chance to witness what happened as Sam Purdy tried to reconnoiter Dixie.

I blinked myself back to the present. Gibbs was still talking, oblivious to the extended holiday my attention had just taken.

“He said he’d call when he got to Albany, but I don’t expect that will be before tonight. I’m thinking thirty hours minimum.”

“Tonight,” I repeated for no other reason than to get my bearings. I didn’t bother telling her that Sam would be doing the trip nonstop; that his head wouldn’t see a motel pillow between here and there. I didn’t know the mileage, but Gibbs should be dividing by seventy-five-plus miles per hour, not any pedestrian fifty-five.

“You think sooner? You know better than I do, I’m sure. Cops don’t have to drive the speed limit, do they? He could just flash his badge and make the ticket go away, couldn’t he?”

With those words she grew silent.

I used the interlude to consider the obvious. What was it Sam hoped to accomplish in Georgia? I knew him well enough to suspect that his motive had nothing to do with what he had told Gibbs: that he wanted to help her find her husband in the Ochlockonee River.

In usual circumstances Sam wouldn’t have driven to Denver to look for Sterling Storey in the shallows of the South Platte.

So then, why?

The silence spread between us like a little pond of fetid water. We each sat on an opposing shore.

Gibbs finally said, “He used to think he was falling. Sterling did. That’s when he used to say ‘catch me.’ Isn’t it ironic? Isn’t it? And now he goes and… disappears trying to catch somebody else. He really was falling, and there was nobody there to catch him.”

The abrupt change in direction threw me, once again, off balance. The invisibility of the silent associations that had helped Gibbs traverse the undoubtedly rich affective territory between Sam’s arrival time in Albany, Georgia, and her husband’s beseeching her for support while he fantasized himself falling perplexed and frustrated me.

Catch me.
Yes. Gibbs had once told me something about Sterling saying “catch me.”

But what?

Sex. Was it sex? It was probably sex. But I couldn’t remember. My brain was on full overload. I felt as though I had
un hacha en mi cabeza
.

It probably had been sex. An awful lot of what Gibbs ended up talking about seemed to ultimately be about sex. Maybe Diane was right: Maybe I just had a difficult time hearing it.

I asked, “Literally falling? Or figuratively falling?”

“Gosh, that’s an interesting question,” Gibbs said. “I never really thought about that. I always thought he meant falling like that first time on the balcony. Do you remember?”

Do I remember? Do I remember what?

“He was leaning against the side railing, and I was in front of him, you know… I was wearing a skirt. But I wasn’t wearing any…”

She blushed a little. I finished her sentence in my head. The next word was going to be “underwear.”

Diane would have corrected me. She would have maintained that Gibbs’s next word was going to be “panties.”

“Well, I don’t have to paint a picture for you, do I?” she said.

I considered whether the comment was flirtatious or seductive. Although it probably was, a conclusion escaped me. This was not my morning for clarity. I could blame it on the early hour, but that wasn’t the cause.

No, of course not,
I said to myself,
you don’t have to paint a picture for me. I already have one:
New Year’s Eve party, Wilshire Boulevard. The balcony of a friend’s condo. You and Sterling, the first time you had sex. You weren’t wearing any…

“That was the first time Sterling said ‘catch me,’ ” I said. My words sounded insincere, even to me. I knew I was saying them to offer proof that I remembered what she had told me.

“Yes,” she murmured, reflecting on something I couldn’t fathom, perhaps my insincerity.

“He said it again last week,” I pointed out.

She nodded. “When we were…”

She stopped herself, searching for the correct verb. For that particular activity there were a lot of choices.

Then I remembered. Gibbs had already told me that she could see another couple in the bedroom that night. They were… doing that verb, too. I said, “There was another couple, too. That night in L.A. In the bedroom next door.”

“Yes. Yes, there was.”

She seemed surprised that I knew. Had she actually forgotten telling me? Had she?

“Sterling was so afraid he’d lose control. Lose his balance. That he’d fall, somehow. We were ten stories up, at least. That’s when he said ‘catch me.’ He said it like he meant it.”

In my head I was playing with the geometry and the anatomy and the physics and the possible erotic acrobatics. I didn’t see how Sterling could have been at much risk of actually going over the railing backward-he wasn’t that tall, and Gibbs had the body mass index of a large butterfly-but then my personal experience in such matters was limited. Diane would be able to explain it to me: She’d be the kid in the back row with her hand in the air, yelling, “I know that one. I know that one.”

I said, “Really? He was really frightened of falling? Or was it, perhaps, something else?”

“That day, really. Later, I think it was something else. Afraid of falling, you know, metaphorically. He’d say ‘catch me’ when he was feeling down. Lost. He was asking for my help. To save him, I think.”

“Was it always sexual?” I asked. Immediately-I mean instantaneously-I knew I’d asked the wrong question. At the very least I’d asked a question when I should have sat as mute as a bronze Buddha.

“Was what sexual?” she asked in return.

I tried to recover. “Sterling’s concern about falling. Did he only say ‘catch me’ in sexual situations?”

She lifted the Starbucks cup, popped off the lid, and drained whatever remained of her morning coffee. Mocha-stained foam coated her upper lip like sea froth on a glossy red shore. She used her tongue to wipe her lip clean. She did it slowly, deliberately. Out first, then side to side.

Seductively? I just didn’t know. I wanted to see the replay. Sometimes I just needed to see the replay.

She said, “We’re back there again, aren’t we?”

“Back where?”

“I told you once we needed to talk about sex, didn’t I?”

I remembered that. “Yes, you did.”

“Well,” she said. “The truth is, I enjoyed it.”

“Excuse me.”

“I enjoyed it. It turned me on.”

Talking with me about sex turned Gibbs on? Uh-oh. It’s too early in the morning for this.

“And it has ever since that night on the balcony,” she said.

I was grateful for the clarification. But her words, I thought, carried a hint of defiance. Or maybe it was provocation. Did the difference make a difference?

“Sterling saying ‘catch me’ while you two were having sex turned you on? That’s what you’re saying?”

She shook her head.

Damn.

“No, no. God, no. Watching the other couple that night. That’s what turned me on. I told you about the night on the yacht in St. Tropez, didn’t I? When we met? I did, right?”

“Yes.” She knew she had.

“That was the first time I’d ever seen anybody else… do it.” She laughed. “Everybody else do it, actually. The feeling that I had that night was… indescribable. It was so unexpected. Then came New Year’s Eve on the balcony and the couple in the bedroom, and I… I was watching him and he was watching me and…”

Her words drifted away. She was breathing through her mouth, and her chest was rising and falling visibly.

The coffee in the mug in my hand had gone tepid. The light in the room had transformed from dawn to day, and stringy shadows from the naked branches of the leafless trees were streaking across the floor. Gibbs’s perfume marked the air.

I was thinking,
Weren’t we talking about Sam? I’m pretty sure we had started off talking about Sam.

“Yes,” I said. “Go on.” Two heartbeats later, before she’d responded, my train of thought skipped back, then forward once more, and I added, “Gibbs? You said Sterling was asking for your help when he said ‘catch me.’ Help with what?”

“I think he wanted me to help him stop killing the women.”

Ah, yes. That.

As strange as it may sound, the fact that Gibbs was confident that Sterling Storey had killed a number of women had to remain my secret.

Legally, I not only didn’t have a responsibility to tell anyone-for instance, the police-about the other women whom Gibbs suspected her husband had murdered, but I also didn’t have the right to tell anyone about them. If Gibbs had informed me that her husband was about to kill yet another woman, well, then that would have left me sailing in murkier waters. But even in those circumstances I probably couldn’t breach Gibbs’s confidentiality without her permission.

That’s right. The only circumstance that would have allowed me freedom to spread the word about the other murders was if Sterling himself came into my office and told me that he was about to kill yet another woman, then proceeded to conveniently identify that woman.

Given the events on the Ochlockonee River on Saturday night, that didn’t seem too likely.

But morally?

In the field of mental health, ethics and morals are an odd couple. Despite their differences, though, they get along most of the time. Sure there are occasional quarrels, but most controversies eventually get ironed out because their goals are so similar. Sometimes there occurs, however, a set of circumstances that creates a chasm between ethics and morals that is the size of the Mariana Trench.

This was one of those.

Morally, I knew I had to tell somebody that Sterling Storey had killed other women.

But ethically, it was just as clear that I couldn’t.

Look up “quandary” in the dictionary. In the margin beside the definition there will be a picture of me sitting across from Gibbs Storey wondering what the hell to do next.