The House Across the Lake(48)

Three days ago, however, brings up a bonanza of visited sites. Some, including the same Bloomberg Businessweek article about Mixer I’d found, strike me as the work of Tom Royce. Others, such as the New York Times fashion section and Vanity Fair, suggest Katherine’s doing. As does an interesting Google search.

Causes of drowning in lakes.

I click the link and see a brief list of reasons, including swimming alone, intoxication, and boating without a life jacket. That last one makes me think of Len. It also makes me want to clomp downstairs and pour myself something strong from the living room bar.

Trying to rid myself of both the thought and the urge, I do a little shimmy and move on. I go to Google and check the most recent topics searched on the laptop, finding more about drowning and water.

Swimming at night.

Ghosts in reflections.

Haunted lakes.

A sigh escapes my lips. Eli’s campfire tale sent either Tom or Katherine running to Google. One of them, in fact, did a lot of searching a few days ago. In addition to lake-related topics, I find searches for World Series scores, the weather forecast, paella recipes.

One topic, however, stops me cold.

Missing women in Vermont.

Why on earth was Tom or Katherine interested in this?

Shocked, I move to click on the link when I spot a name just beneath it.

Mine.

Seeing my name in the browser history isn’t a surprise. I’m sure I’ve been Googled by plenty of complete strangers in the past year. It makes sense my new neighbors would do it, too. I even know what the top hit will be before I click it. Sure enough, there’s a picture of me guzzling down a double old-fashioned and the headline that will likely dog me for the rest of my life.

“Casey’s Booze Binge.”

Below it are articles about my firing from Shred of Doubt, my IMDb page, Len’s obituary in the LA Times. All of the links had been clicked, making it clear that either Tom or Katherine had been researching me.

What’s not so clear is which one it was.

And why.

When I return to the browser history to try to find out, I notice another familiar name had been entered into Google.

Boone Conrad.

The search brought up an article about his wife’s death. Reading it over, I learn two surprising facts. The first is that Boone is indeed his real name. The second is that he was a cop in the police department closest to Lake Greene. Everything else in the article is exactly what he’d told me yesterday. He came home from work, found his wife at the bottom of the stairs, and called paramedics, who declared her dead. The chief of police—Boone’s boss—is quoted as saying it was a tragic accident. End of story.

I move on, seeing that it’s not just people on the lake who have been Googled by one of the Royces. I also spot a search for someone I’ve never heard of: Harvey Brewer.

Clicking on it brings up a staggering number of hits. I choose the first one—a year-old article from a Pennsylvania newspaper with a ghoulish headline.

“Man Admits to Slowly Poisoning His Wife.”

I read the article, each sentence making my heart thump faster. It turns out that Harvey Brewer was a fifty-something mail carrier from East Stroudsburg whose forty-something wife, Ruth, suddenly dropped dead of a heart attack inside a Walmart.

Although she was a healthy type—“Fit as a fiddle,” a friend said—Ruth’s death wasn’t a complete surprise. Her siblings told police she had been complaining about sudden weakness and dizzy spells in the weeks leading up to her death. “She said she wasn’t feeling quite like herself,” one of her sisters said.

Because Harvey was set to receive a healthy sum of money after her death, Ruth’s family suspected foul play. They were right. An autopsy discovered trace amounts of brimladine, a common ingredient in rat poison, in Ruth’s system. Brimladine, a stimulant that some experts have called “the cocaine of poisons,” works by increasing the heart rate. In rodents, death is instantaneous. In humans, it takes a good deal longer.

When the police questioned Harvey, he caved immediately and confessed to giving his wife microdoses of brimladine for weeks. The poison, doled out daily in her food and drink, weakened Ruth’s heart to the point of failure. Harvey claimed to have gotten the idea from a Broadway play the two of them had seen on a recent trip to New York.

Shred of Doubt.

Holy.

Shit.

Harvey Brewer had been in the audience of my play. He’d seen me onstage, playing a woman who comes to realize her husband is slowly poisoning her. He’d sat in that darkened theater, wondering if such a thing could be done in real life. Turns out, it could. And he almost got away with it.

By the time I reach the end of the article, different moments with Katherine are gliding through my thoughts like a slide show.

Floating in the lake, motionless, her lips an icy blue.

It was like my entire body stopped working, was how she later described it.

Slumped in a rocking chair, gripped by a hangover.

I’m just not myself lately.

Woozy from only two glasses of wine.

I don’t feel too good.

It’s that night by the fire I latch on to the hardest, as details that seemed small at the time suddenly loom large with meaning.

Tom telling me how fantastic he thought I was in Shred of Doubt.

Him insisting on pouring the wine, doing it with his back to us, so we couldn’t see what he was doing.