The Other Mrs.(92)

“When you were six, your father remarried,” she says, but I object to this.

“No, he didn’t,” I say. “It was just my father and me.”

“You said you don’t remember your childhood, Doctor,” she reminds me, but I tell her what I do remember: being eleven years old, my father and me living in the city, him taking the train to work, coming home fifteen, sixteen hours later, drunk.

“I remember,” I say, though I don’t remember what came before this, but I’d like to believe it was always the same.

She pulls paperwork from her briefcase, telling me that the year I was six years old, my father married a woman by the name of Charlotte Schneider. We lived in Hobart, Indiana, and my father worked as a sales rep for a small company. Three years later, when I was nine, my father and Charlotte divorced. Irreconcilable differences.

“What can you tell me about your stepmother?” she asks, and I tell her, “Nothing. You’re mistaken. Officer Berg is mistaken. There was no stepmother. It was only my father and me.”

She shows me a photograph. My father, me and some strange but beautiful woman standing before a home I don’t know. The house is small, just one and a half stories tall. It’s nearly engulfed in trees. In the drive is a car. I don’t recognize it.

My father looks younger than I remember him, more handsome, more alive. He stares sideways at the woman, his eyes not meeting the camera lens. His smile is authentic, which strikes me as odd. My father was a man who didn’t often smile. In the image, he has a full head of dark hair and is without all the sawtooth lines that later took over his eyes and cheeks.

My father had a nickname for me when I was a girl. Mouse, he called me. Because I was one of those twitchy, tic-prone kids, always wrinkling my nose up, like a mouse.

“I showed this picture earlier today. It didn’t sit well with the child alter, Sadie. It made her run to the corner of the room, begin scribbling furiously on paper. She drew this,” she says, holding the drawing up, showing it to me again. The dismembered body, the blob of blood.

“Around the time you were ten years old, your father filed for an order of protection against your stepmother. He sold your home in Indiana, moved with you to Chicago. He started a new career, at a department store. Do you remember this?” she asks, but I don’t. Not all of it, anyway.

“I need to get back to my family,” I tell her instead. “They must be worried about me. They must wonder where I am,” but she says that my family knows where I am.

I picture Will, Otto and Tate in our home without me. I wonder if the snow relented, if ferry traffic resumed, if Will made it home in time to pick Tate up from school.

I think of Otto at home when the police arrived to collect the washcloth, the knife.

“Is my son here? Is my son Otto here?” I ask, wondering if I’m even at the public safety building anymore or if they’ve taken me elsewhere.

I look around. I see a windowless room, a wall, two chairs, the floor.

There’s no way to know where I am.

I ask the woman, “Where am I? When can I go home?”

“I just have a few more questions,” she says. “If you’ll bear with me, we’ll get you out of here soon. When you arrived at the station, you told Officer Berg there was a bloody washcloth in your home, along with a knife.”

“Yes,” I tell her, “that’s right.”

“Officer Berg sent someone to your home. The property was thoroughly searched. Neither item was there.”

“They’re mistaken,” I say, voice elevating, my blood pressure spiking as a headache forms between my eyes, a dull, achy pain, and I press on it, watching as the room around me begins to drift in and out of focus. “I saw them both. I know for certain they’re there. The police didn’t look hard enough,” I insist because I know I’m right about this. The washcloth and the knife were there. I didn’t imagine them.

“There’s more, Dr. Foust,” she tells me. “Your husband gave the police permission to search your home. They found Mrs. Baines’s missing cell phone there. Can you tell us how it came to be in your home, or why you didn’t turn it in to the police?”

“I didn’t know it was there,” I say defensively. I shrug my shoulders, tell her I can’t explain. “Where did they find it?” I ask, feeling hopeful that the answers to Morgan’s murder are there on her phone.

“They found it, oddly enough, charging on your fireplace mantel.”

“What?” I ask, aghast. Then I remember the dead phone. The one I assumed was Alice’s.

“We asked your husband. He said he didn’t put it there. Did you put the cell phone on the mantel, Dr. Foust?” she asks.

I tell her I did.

“What were you doing with Mrs. Baines’s cell phone?” she asks, and this I can explain, though it sounds so unbelievable as I say it, telling her how I found Morgan’s cell phone in my bed.

“You found Mrs. Baines’s phone in your bed? Your husband told the police you’re the jealous type. That you’re mistrustful. That you’re intolerant of him speaking to other women.”

“That’s not true,” I snap, angry that Will would say these things of me. Every time I accused him of cheating, it was with good reason.

“Were you jealous of your husband’s relationship with Mrs. Baines?”