Breaking The Silence. Diane Chamberlain

She thought of Ray at home, staring gloomily out the window of his study, and Emma playing with the puzzle in her room. Looking at her watch, she realized she’d been gone well over an hour already.

      She stood up. “I have to go, Mrs. Tolley,” she said.

      Sarah looked at her in surprise. “Oh, you do?”

      “I’m sorry we couldn’t solve the mystery of how you knew my father.”

      “Did you say he was a doctor?”

      “No. A physicist. And an amateur astronomer.”

      Sarah looked as though she didn’t quite understand what Laura was saying, but she nodded. “Well, you come see me again, dear,” she said, walking toward her apartment door.

      Laura only smiled, unwilling to make that promise. She had no more idea of why her father wanted her to take on the responsibility for Sarah Tolley than she did before her visit.

       4

      SOMETHING WAS WRONG. LAURA KNEW IT THE MOMENT SHE stepped out of her car in the town house garage, although she couldn’t have said what triggered her sense of dread. As she neared the door, she could hear a child crying inside the house. Was it Emma or some other child? The sound was unfamiliar. A wail. A keening.

      Panicked, Laura struggled to fit her key in the lock, finally managing to push the door open. Stepping into the foyer, she found Emma sitting on the bottom step of the stairs, hunched over as though her stomach hurt. Her wailing turned to screams, and she leapt from the step into Laura’s arms.

      “Sweetheart!” Laura tried to keep her own voice calm. “What is it? What’s wrong?” Maybe Emma had bugged Ray to read to her and, in his sour mood, he’d yelled at her, but this seemed an extreme reaction. Emma was usually more resilient than this.

      Emma didn’t answer her. She clung to Laura, standing now, but pressing her head against Laura’s hip.

      Laura looked through the living room toward Ray’s office, a patch of cold forming at the base of her neck. Emma’s screams could not mask the stillness in the rest of the house. “Where’s Daddy?” she asked as she walked toward the office, Emma clinging to her more tightly with each step. “Ray?”

      The office was empty, the pages of Ray’s manuscript still piled on his desk. “Ray?” she called as she walked back toward the foyer and the stairs.

      “Stay here,” she told Emma, gently pulling the little girl’s arms from around her hips. “I’ll be right back.”

      She climbed the stairs, the cold patch at the back of her neck spreading down her spine. She walked through the doorway of the bedroom she shared with Ray. It was empty. Ray must have gone out. He’d left Emma alone. That’s why she was so upset.

      That would not be enough to undo Emma, though, and Laura remembered seeing Ray’s car in the garage. She was about to leave the bedroom when she noticed a stain on the wallpaper on the other side of the bed—a red stain in the shape of a butterfly. Biting her lip, she walked slowly around the foot of the bed. Ray lay on the floor next to the window, his head in a pool of blood, a gun in his hand.

      Staggering backward, Laura crashed into the dresser, knocking her jewelry box to the floor. She scattered the jewelry with her feet as she fled from the room and down the stairs.

      Emma’s wails had turned to a whimper, and she sat huddled on the floor of the foyer, her eyes on Laura. Laura grabbed her by the arm and led her into the kitchen, where she used the phone to call 911.

      “Is this an emergency?” the dispatcher asked.

      Laura’s brain felt foggy. Ray was dead. There was nothing anyone could do to change that fact, no matter how quickly they got to the house.

      “Is this an emergency?” the dispatcher repeated.

      “My husband shot himself,” Laura said. “He’s dead.” She had a sudden, desperate need to get out of the house. Ignoring the dispatcher’s questions, she dropped the receiver to the kitchen floor, grabbed Emma once again and ran with her outside to the small front porch.

      Sitting down on the old wooden bench Ray’d picked up at a garage sale, she pulled Emma onto her lap. I’m in shock. The thought was clinical and detached. She was nauseated and a little dizzy, and although she knew the air was cold, she couldn’t actually feel it. This is what shock feels like. Her eyes couldn’t focus, even as the police cars, the ambulance and the fire truck pulled in front of her town house, sirens blaring. Neighbors came out to their yards or peered through their windows to see what was happening, but Laura simply stared at the snow covering the front lawn. All she could see, though, was the butterfly-shaped stain on the wallpaper in the bedroom.

      “He’s upstairs,” she said to the first police officer who approached her. She pressed her chin to the top of Emma’s head as the army of EMTs marched past them and into the house, and she closed her eyes against the image of what they would find in the upstairs bedroom.

      Emma had stopped crying, but her head remained buried in the crook of Laura’s shoulder. She was really too big to sit on anyone’s lap, but she had made herself fit, and Laura did not want to let go of her. The little girl shivered in her light sweater, and Laura rubbed her arms. What had Emma seen? Had she heard the gunshot and gone into the bedroom to investigate? Might she have actually been in the room when Ray did it? Laura should not have left her with him. She should not have been gone more than an hour.

      It seemed like a long time before one of the police officers returned to the porch, carrying jackets for her and Emma. He’d brought Ray’s down jacket for Laura, and she put it on, pressing the collar close to her nose to breathe in her husband’s scent.

      “Who was in the house when it happened?” the officer asked, pulling a notepad from his pocket. He stood on the walkway, one foot resting on the step.

      “Emma.” Laura nodded toward her daughter, who had once again folded herself to fit in Laura’s lap.

      The police officer studied Emma for a moment and seemed to decide against questioning her.

      “And you were out?” he asked.

      “Yes.”

      “Do you know why the jewelry box and its contents were on the floor?”

      “I knocked into it after I found him,” she said. The image of the jewelry spilled across the floor seemed like something she’d seen days ago, not mere minutes.

      “There was a note in the bedroom,” the officer said. “Did you see it?”

      “A note?”

      “Yes. Taped to the dresser mirror. It read, ‘I asked you not to go.’ Does that mean anything to you?”

      Laura squeezed her eyes shut. “I had to visit someone this morning and he didn’t want me to go.”

      “Ah,” he said, as though he’d found the missing piece to the puzzle. “There was a big age difference between you and your husband, huh?”

      The question seemed rude, but she didn’t have the strength to protest. “Yes,” she said.

      “So, was this ‘someone’ you had to visit another man?”

      Laura looked at the policeman in confusion. “Another…? No. No. It was a woman. An old woman. But he asked me not to go, and I went, anyway. I was always leaving him. Always working. I left him alone too much. It’s my fault.”

      “Now, don’t jump to conclusions, ma’am. Did your husband suffer from depression?”

      She nodded. “Terribly. I should have realized how bad it had gotten, but—”

      “He has an old scar obviously made from a bullet in his left shoulder,” the officer said. “Was that from some previous botched suicide attempt?”

      “No.