Gwyn looked surprised. “You’re FBI?”
“If I ever go back. I’m on a leave of absence now. We met when Nick was on assignment to the Corps Combat Development Command at Quantico. He didn’t come on to me. I had to come on to him. He was the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen, and I’m mule-stubborn about getting what I want.” She surprised herself when her heart clutched and her voice broke. “These four months sometimes feel like four years…then like just four hours.” Her thoughtlessness at once dismayed her. “Damn, I’m sorry. Your loss is fresher than mine.”
Waving off the apology, unshed tears in her eyes, Gwyn said, “A year after we were married—’83 it was—Gordie was in Beirut when terrorists blew up the Marine barracks, killed two hundred twenty. He was so often somewhere bad, I imagined him dead a thousand times. I thought all that imagining would prepare me to handle it if one day someone in dress blues knocked on the door with a KIA notice. But I wasn’t prepared for…for the way it happened.”
According to news stories, on a Saturday little more than two weeks earlier, when his wife had been at the supermarket, Gordon let himself out the back gate in the picket fence and walked down the hill to the lake shore. He carried a short-barrel pistol-grip pump-action shotgun. He sat near the water, his back against a grassy bank. Because of the short barrel, he was able to reach the trigger. Boaters on the lake sat witness as he shot himself in the mouth. When Gwyn came home from shopping, she found the street filled with sheriff’s cruisers, her front door standing open, and her life forever changed.
Jane said, “Do you mind my asking…”
“I’m hurting bad, but I’m not broken. Ask.”
“Any chance he went to the lake in the company of someone?”
“No, none. The woman next door saw him going down there alone, carrying something, but she didn’t realize it was a gun.”
“The boaters who witnessed it—have they all been cleared?”
Gwyn looked puzzled. “Cleared of what?”
“Maybe your husband was to meet someone. Maybe he took the shotgun for protection.”
“And maybe it was murder? Couldn’t have been. There were four boats in the area. At least half a dozen people witnessed it.”
Jane didn’t want to ask the next question because it could seem to be an accusation that the Lamberts’ marriage had been in trouble. “Was your husband…was Gordon at all depressed?”
“Not ever. Some people throw hope away. Gordie was chained to it all his life, an optimist’s optimist.”
“Sounds like Nick,” Jane said. “Every problem that came his way was just a challenge, and he loved challenges.”
“How did it happen, honey? How did you lose him?”
“I was making dinner. He went to the john. When he didn’t come back, I found him fully clothed, sitting in the bathtub. He’d used his combat knife, the Ka-Bar, to cut his neck so deeply that he severed his left carotid artery.”
7
* * *
THIS HAD BEEN a wet El Ni?o winter, the second in the past half decade, with normal rain in the intervening years, a climate anomaly that had ended the state’s drought. Now the morning light at the windows dimmed as though dusk must be descending. Once glass-smooth, the lake below lay stippled with white, a breeze scaling it as if it were a great serpent slumbering in the shadow of the pending storm.
While Gwyn took the finished muffins out of the oven and put the pan on the drainboard to cool, the ticking of the wall clock seemed to grow louder. During the past month, timepieces of all kinds had periodically tormented Jane. Now and then she thought she could hear her wristwatch ticking faintly; it became so aggravating that she took it off and put it away in the car’s glove box or, if she was in a motel, carried it across the room to bury it under the cushion of an armchair until she needed it. If time was running out for her, she didn’t want to be insistently reminded of that fact.
As Gwyn poured fresh coffee for the two of them, Jane wondered, “Did Gordon leave a note?”
“Not a note, not a text message, not a voice mail. I don’t know whether I wish he had or should be glad he didn’t.” She returned the pot to the coffeemaker and settled in her chair once more.
Jane tried to ignore the clock, the louder ticking no doubt imaginary. “I keep a notepad and pen in my bedroom vanity drawer. Nick used them to write a final good-bye, if you can bend your mind to think of it that way.” The eeriness of those four sentences frosted the chambers of her heart every time she considered them. She quoted, “?‘Something is wrong with me. I need. I very much need. I very much need to be dead.’?”
Gwyn had picked up her coffee cup. She put it down without drinking from it. “That’s damn strange, isn’t it?”
“I thought so. The police and medical examiner seemed to think so, too. The first sentence was in his tight, meticulous cursive, but the quality of the others steadily deteriorated, as if he had to struggle to control his hand.”
They stared out at the darkening day, sharing a silence, and then Gwyn said, “How awful for you—to be the one to find him.”
That observation didn’t need a reply.
Staring into her coffee cup as though her future might be read in the patterns of reflected light made by the ceiling fixture, Jane said, “The U.S. suicide rate dropped to about ten and a half per hundred thousand people late in the last century. But the last two decades, it’s returned to the historic norm of twelve and a half. Until last April, when it began to climb. By the end of the year, the annual tally was fourteen per hundred thousand. At the normal rate, that’s over thirty-eight thousand cases. The higher rate is more than another forty-five hundred suicides. And from what I’m able to tell, the first three months of this year, it’s running at fifteen and a half, which by December thirty-first will be almost eighty-four hundred cases above the historic norm.”
As she recited the numbers for Gwyn, she puzzled over them yet again, but she still had no idea what to make of them or why they seemed germane to Nick’s death. When she looked up, she saw Gwyn regarding her with rather more intensity than before.
“Honey, are you telling me you’re doing research? Damn right you are. So there’s more to this than you’ve said. Isn’t there?”
There was a great deal more, but Jane wouldn’t share too much and possibly put the widow Lambert in jeopardy.
Gwyn pressed her. “Don’t tell me we’re back in some cold war with all its dirty tricks. Are there a lot of military men in those extra eighty-four hundred suicides?”
“Quite a few, but not a disproportionate share. It’s equally distributed across professions. Doctors, lawyers, teachers, police, journalists…But they’re unusual suicides. Successful and well-adjusted people with no history of depression or emotional problems or financial crisis. They don’t fit any of the standard profiles of those with suicidal tendencies.”
A gust of wind pummeled the house, rattling the back door as if someone insistently tried the knob to see if the lock was engaged.
Hope pinked the woman’s face and brought a liveliness to her eyes that Jane had not seen before. “Are you saying maybe Gordie was—what?—drugged or something? He didn’t know what he was doing when he took the shotgun down there? Is there a possibility…?”
“I don’t know, Gwyn. I’ve found the littlest bits of things to piece together, and I can’t see what they mean yet, if they mean anything at all.” She tried the coffee but had drunk enough of it. “Was there any time in the past year when Gordon wasn’t feeling well?”
“Maybe a cold once. An abscessed tooth and a root canal.”
“Spells of vertigo? Mental confusion? Headaches?”
“Gordie wasn’t a man for headaches. Or for anything that slowed him down.”