A Fatal Debt

I glanced briefly down at A

“Dr. Cowper?” said a disembodied voice.

We both flinched, and A

“I know you’re there,” the voice said matter-of-factly.

A

“Yes, Mrs. Shapiro?” I said.

“Come here,” Nora said.

28

I stepped through the front door of the cottage into the night air. It was cool to the skin, the last warmth of the afternoon gone, and I walked down the path where I’d stood with A

Passing this way by car, concentrating on taking the turn up the hill in the daylight, I hadn’t noticed that the drooping trees formed a tu

I walked the last few steps to my car and pulled open the front passenger door as softly as I could. The car wasn’t locked because I hadn’t bothered when I’d arrived, but things were different now. Nathan had caught me defenseless out by the airfield and I needed a means of protecting myself. Leaning into the car, I pulled open the compartment in front of the passenger seat. I removed a small package and placed it in my pocket.

The kitchen door gave to my touch. I stepped inside to see Nora’s leather bag on the counter, the one from which she’d extracted Harry’s gun as I’d sat with her in the waiting room of the ER. The kitchen was bare: the cutlery was put away, the plates stacked. Dust from the renovation had been wiped from the kitchen surfaces so thoroughly that I doubted if there were fingerprints left. The door on the far side of the room was half-ajar, displaying a glow from the living room. I paused for a second, thinking of watching Nora and A

“Come through,” Nora called from the next room.

I walked to the steel intercom and pressed a button on its facade, making a light on it glow red. Then I opened the door and went through to the living room. The room was bathed in a soft light from the moon and a lamp next to an armchair at the far end of the room. It was dim where I stood, looking across the room.

Nora was thirty feet from me. She was sitting in the seat under the lamp and her face was pale, immobile. She held a gun in her right hand, trained on me. It was the Beretta that she’d retrieved from the safe. I’d seen that weapon before and even handled it, but I’d never observed it from that angle. I stared helplessly into the tiny hole of the muzzle, the sight notched above it on the barrel. She waved the gun in the direction of the sofa opposite her, like a short wand. I hesitated, but there was nothing I could do. I walked to the sofa obediently and sat down where she’d indicated. We were about ten feet apart, slightly farther than a psych and his patient, with her looking at me and me gazing back. There was no question about who was in charge.

From close up, I could see that her face was a mask of exhaustion. She’d never resorted to Botox or the knife, and her makeup was no longer doing its job. All of the softness I’d seen in her before had disappeared, leaving only an intimidating blank.

“You don’t need a gun, Mrs. Shapiro,” I said.

“You tell me what I’ve got to lose,” she said, keeping the weapon pointing at me as she spoke. “The Episcopal sticker on your car let me know I’d find you in here. But where’s A

I’d never heard such awful, dead cynicism in her voice before. Of all those who’d fooled me, she done it most adroitly. The woman in front of me felt completely different from the one I’d believed I’d known.

“I told her to leave. She’s gone somewhere safer,” I said, trying to control the quiver in my voice.

“You toldher, did you?” Nora said in a tone of ridicule. “She used to take her orders from me, but I can see things have changed.”

She scared me, but the sting of her betrayal hurt worse. I’d had a few hours to become accustomed to the truth, but it would take a lot longer than that to get over it. Why had I placed such faith in her from the first moment we’d met? She hadn’t needed to work hard to deceive me because she had been my fantasy-the calm, devoted wife of an aggressive, selfish man. I’d rushed to help her without pausing to examine her story.

That was my failure, I knew now. It wasn’t Harry I’d misdiagnosed in the psych ER-it was Nora. She’d been able to play me because I’d yearned to believe in her. She’d become the mother I still missed, and I’d rushed to take vengeance on the man I thought had betrayed her. My life was spent disentangling the psychological traps into which people fell, yet she’d lured me into the oldest one of all.

“The first time we met,” I said, “did you know then what you were going to do? I believed everything you told me.”

Nora smiled faintly, but the blank look in her eyes didn’t alter.

“I didn’t lie to you. Not then. I found him with the gun that afternoon. Just through there.” She pointed to the wall behind which Harry’s study was located. “He looked so haunted, as if he’d lost everything. I was scared for him. Then I held him and he broke down. He told me about that woman.”

She pronounced the word with distaste and then paused for a few seconds, purging the memory again. Then she went on talking in a low, steady voice with her eyes blank. It was a kind of therapy for her, I realized, and I tried to encourage her by saying little, not even looking at the gun. It was some sort of redemption to be able to use the skills she’d abused to keep her from killing me.

“You must have felt hurt,” I prompted her.

“Hurt?” she said contemptuously. “I didn’t care about her. She thought she knew him, but he’d already forgotten her. It was Greene who’d taken him away from me. Harry was going to kill himself, but Greene had pulled the trigger. I’d only just caught Harry in time. If I hadn’t, Marcus would have finished him.”

“When did you decide what to do?”

“It was after you’d admitted him to the hospital. He was in a wheelchair and you’d taken his clothes away. He’d been stripped bare and humiliated. He was being wheeled away from me and this rage started to boil up inside of me. It wasn’t Harry who deserved to die, I thought. It was the man who’d done that to him.”

I remembered that scene. I’d witnessed it myself from another angle, in the hallway of the psych ER-Harry in the wheelchair with his notes on his lap, Pete O’Meara pushing him to the elevator silently, and Nora watching them. I’d believed she was just looking on sadly, with love for her shattered husband, not realizing the fantasy that was taking shape in her mind.