“Of course it is, Mallory. You have a lot of unresolved grief. You’ve been masquerading as a college student, a track star, and it’s generating all this anxiety. And then the pressure of losing your job—losing your paycheck and losing your place to live—all those stresses caused you to relapse.”
I realize she doesn’t actually believe this—she’s just rehearsing a story. She continues: “You were desperate for a fix, and you knew Mitzi was using, so you sneaked into her house and you found her stash. Only, you didn’t realize her heroin was cut with fentanyl. Two thousand micrograms, enough to bring down a horse. Your opioid receptors flooded and you stopped breathing.”
“This is what you’ll tell the police?”
“This is what they’ll infer. Based on your history. And the autopsy. Tomorrow morning I’ll knock on your door to see if you need help packing. When you don’t answer, I’ll use my key to come inside. I’ll find you lying in bed with a needle sticking out of your arm. I’ll scream and call for Ted. He’ll pound your chest and try to give you CPR. We’ll call 911 but the medics will say you’ve been dead for hours. They’ll say there’s nothing we could have done. And because we’re such good people, we’ll make sure you have a proper burial and headstone. Next to your sister. Otherwise Russell would get stuck with the bill, and that doesn’t seem fair.”
Caroline unseals the polybag and holds it over the spoon, carefully filling it with white powder. She leans over the counter, concentrating on her work, and again I see the tattoo that’s just below her neck.
“You’re the angel in the drawings. You hit Anya with your Viper and then you strangled her.”
“It was self-defense.”
“You don’t strangle someone in self-defense. You murdered her. You stole her little girl. How old was she? Two? Two and a half?”
The spoon fumbles out of Caroline’s fingers and lands on the counter with a clatter. The powder spills everywhere and she shakes her head, irritated.
“Don’t pretend like you understand the situation. You have no idea what I’ve been through.”
She reaches for a plastic spatula and slowly drags it across the counter, gathering all the powder into a tiny little mound.
“I know you had Ted’s help,” I said. “I know he’s the man in the pictures. You killed Anya and took her daughter. And then you sent Ted to bury her body. When did this happen, Caroline? Where were you living?”
She shakes her head and laughs. “I know the game you’re trying to play. We use it in therapy all the time. You can’t talk your way out of this.”
“You and Ted were having problems. He said you spent years trying to conceive. Was this the last resort? Stealing a child?”
“I rescued that child.”
“What does that mean?”
“It doesn’t matter. What’s done is done and we need to move on. I’m sorry you won’t be part of our family anymore.”
Caroline carefully pushes the powder back into the spoon and then reaches for the BBQ lighter. She clicks the button several times before it produces a small blue flame, and I see that her hands are trembling.
“Does Teddy remember anything?”
“What do you think, Mallory? Does he seem traumatized? Does he seem sad or unhappy? No, he does not. He remembers nothing. He is a happy, well-adjusted child and I worked very hard to get him to this place. He’ll never know how much I’ve sacrificed for him. And that’s fine.”
As Caroline speaks, the powder in the spoon smokes and blackens and finally liquefies. East Coast heroin doesn’t have much of an odor but I’m struck by a whiff of something chemical—maybe it’s the fentanyl, maybe it’s some other lethal additive. I remember hearing about a drug dealer in Camden who supposedly cut his product with Ajax cleanser. Caroline sets down the lighter and picks up the syringe. She dips the needle into the bowl of the spoon and then slowly draws back the plunger, filling the syringe with sickly brown sludge.
“He remembers the rabbit,” I tell her.
“Excuse me?”
“In Anya’s pictures, she shows a little girl chasing after a rabbit. The girl follows a white rabbit down into a valley. Now think back to my job interview, Caroline. The very first day I came here, you had one of Teddy’s drawings on your refrigerator. A picture of a white rabbit. Maybe he remembers more than you realize.”
“Her pictures are lies. You can’t trust them.”
“I had a hard time making sense of them. But I think I finally put them in the right order. They’re in the folder, on my nightstand. They show exactly what happened.”
Caroline reaches in her bag for a length of rubber tourniquet. She stretches it between her hands, like she’s ready to tie it around my arm. But then curiosity gets the better of her. She walks over to my nightstand, opens the folder, and starts sifting through the papers. “No, no, see, these drawings are so unfair! This is her version of what happened. But if you’d seen my side of things? The big picture? You’d understand better.”
“What’s the big picture?”
“I’m not saying I don’t feel guilty. I do feel guilty. I feel remorse. I’m not proud of what happened. But she didn’t leave me with a choice.”
“Show me what you mean.”
“I’m sorry?”
“In the drawer of the nightstand, there’s a pad and pencil. Draw what happened. Show me your version of the story.”
Because I need all the time I can get.
Time for Adrian to drive home and get here and knock on the door and figure out something is very, very wrong.
And Caroline looks like she wants to do it! She seems eager to tell me her side of the story. But she’s smart enough to recognize that she’s being manipulated. “You’re trying to make me incriminate myself. You want me to draw out a confession, with pictures, so the police will find it and arrest me. Is that the idea?”
“No, Caroline, I’m just trying to understand what happened. Why did Teddy need to be rescued?”
She reaches for the tourniquet and moves behind my chair, but she can’t manage to tie it around my arm. Her hands are shaking too much. “Sometimes she gets in my head and it feels like a panic attack. It’ll go away in a minute or two.” She sits on the edge of my bed and covers her face with her hands. She takes deep breaths, filling her lungs with air. “I don’t expect you to have any sympathy but this has been really hard for me. It’s like a nightmare that doesn’t end.”