The Elizas: A Novel(103)

I was still a patient at the Oaks when I spoke to a detective at the station. They had to scramble around to find someone to take my call—Eleanor Reitman’s death didn’t have a file, as it was considered a suicide. Finally, when Detective Carson answered, he sounded dubious, and when I told him he had to visit me at the Oaks all the way in Palm Springs, he almost hung up on me.

But he came anyway. Detective Carson met me outside, on a bench. He had graying hair and a jowly but friendly face. His bright eyes were so light blue they were almost translucent. He was the kind of man I could see roughhousing with grandchildren; he probably had a trampoline in his backyard. We sat on the lawn; he took out a pad and pencil and asked me to explain my story. I was soothed by the old-school way of documentation, his scratchy pencil marking up the page. And so I told him. I told him what Eleanor had done to me when I was a child in the hospital, how she’d been banned from the nurses, how none of it had been communicated with me, how she’d returned and started drugging me in other ways. I explained our last dinner, how I’d switched the drinks—I didn’t realize what she’d put in my cocktail would be so dangerous. I just wanted to see if she’d planned to do it to me. I told him the story exactly as I’d written it in the book. I’d decided to buy into that version of the truth, mostly because I didn’t have a clear sense the truth could be anything else.

Detective Carson was not familiar with The Dots. He had to read passages from my book as a form of evidence; I waited for him to finish the passage where Dorothy catapults into traffic. “So she charged for you?” he asked, then slapped the book shut. “At that guardrail? And you pushed her over?”

I shrugged. “I guess so. I mean, I don’t remember any of this very clearly, though my therapist says that I’m choosing not to remember it. I remember wanting to push her, that’s for sure.”

“So you’re admitting to her murder, then?”

I took a deep breath. “I’m admitting to . . . something.”

“But you don’t remember.”

“No, but I don’t see how it couldn’t have happened.”

The detective pulled his bottom lip into his mouth. “I just don’t understand why someone would write a confession in a novel. Even someone who was mentally compromised, as you were. It seems to go against every instinct we have as humans.”

“I confessed because I thought it was fiction. I went through treatment, and the memories were taken out of me.”

“Yes.” He frowned. “Your family was in charge of that, right?”

“They were, but . . .” I stared at my trembling fingers. Maybe I hadn’t thought all this through. I didn’t want my family getting in trouble. “They were worried about me. They’ve been worried for a long time. But it’s not their fault. It’s mine.”

It was difficult to say all that. It wasn’t like I wanted to go to prison, but I’d resigned myself to it. I couldn’t walk around with a murder on my conscience. I couldn’t have people thinking I’d killed and gotten away with it. Like Dot, I needed to own up to it. It probably sounded na?ve—prison was going to be awful, I knew—but I really felt like that was how the story should end.

Detective Carson stood and brushed a few pods that had fallen from the trees off his pants. “The thing is, Miss Fontaine, the way you describe the incident in your novel doesn’t sound like murder. It sounds like self-defense. If I were your lawyer, that’s how I’d frame it.”

“Huh?” I snatched my book and leafed through the pages to the end.

“Eleanor came at you first. She poisoned you. There might not be empirical proof that she was the one who did it, but when she left, you got better. She’s the one who should have been in jail—for child abuse. And even that night—all you did was switch the drinks. You didn’t know for sure that she’d put anything in yours. And at the guardrail, you wrote that she charged at you and tried to push you over. There’s no picture showing otherwise. I have a report of the accident here, which describes that we identified Ms. Reitman’s body by her driver’s license. It details the state of her body while the department still had access to it in the morgue. There are no signs she was choked or hit or bludgeoned or struck in any sort of way by you. We don’t even know if she was poisoned by that drink you gave her—we weren’t able to do a drug screen on her. It could have all been an act.

“It doesn’t add up to much,” he said. “I mean, sure, you can claim you did it, I can send you to prison, but do you really want that?” He touched my shoulder gently. “You seem like a nice girl who just had some shitty luck. I’d go live your life. Stop feeling guilty. It’s not your fault. None of it is.”

“But—but—” I stammered nonsensical vowels and consonants. “My therapist told me to confess to you. He said this was the right thing to do.”

The detective had a hint of a smile. “Maybe he told you to do that because he knew I’d say what I’m saying. Maybe he hoped you’d listen to me. It’s not your fault, Eliza. None of this is. You’re the victim, okay? And that’s hard, too. Because now you have to heal.”

He extended his hand, and I realized after a moment he wanted me to take it. Once I did, he squeezed hard. I felt like he was my grandfather, comforting me after a bad dream. “Now, I read that this place serves really decent coffee,” he said. “Mind if I stop in and get a cup?”