“Help! We are in here. Help! Please!” I rattle the doorknob. I sob with gusto. I hate this ending; I refuse it.
From the other side comes a calm and slightly inconvenienced voice. “This is Officer Kline with the Saranac police. I need you to unlock the door.”
“We can’t!” I cry. “We are locked in here. Corrine Holland has the key. She went to the clubhouse, but she has a gun—”
“Corrine Holland is in our custody.”
I turn back to Henry with rabid eyes. He’s sitting on the bed with his hands steepled over his mouth. If they’ve found Corrine, they’ve found Campbell. I turn back to the door. I think faster than I ever have before.
“Thank God,” I say, and I repeat it again with a wail. “She killed her husband. And then she locked us in here, and we have been so scared she was coming back to kill us. Did you get my message? Please tell me you did.” Behind me, I can feel Henry staring at my back, bewildered.
“Two hikers found a note scrawled on a receipt in mud. It said,Help.”
I close my eyes. Press my forehead against the door. “That was me. I wrote that. I dropped it on the trail for them to find. Thank God. Thank God they picked it up.”
“Ma’am,” the officer says. “Are you hurt?”
“No. No. We’re okay.”
“Does anyone in there have a weapon on them?”
“No! Of course not. We’re so relieved you found us!”
“Okay, then,” he says, and am I wrong, or does he sound more reassuring now, speaking to me the way you would the victim of a violent crime? “I’m going to radio someone at shore to see if they can get the key off her. Hang tight for now. Can you please identify yourself and any other persons in there with you?”
“My name is Faye Heron,” I say. “And I’m here with Henry Spalding. Please. Help us.”
Chapter 33
The Saranac police station is located in a former Army National Guard armory. It has to be at least twenty thousand square feet, and most of the building appears unused and pitch-black. The floors have recently been mopped in the lobby, and I stare at my small muddy footprints next to Henry’s Bigfoot ones while a baby-faced administrator tells the officers that interrogation rooms two and three are open, and so are four and five, and so are—
“We got it,” Officer Kline says, cutting him off. When we first arrived, he had explained that this was temporary housing for the force while their new headquarters are being constructed just outside of town. I asked him all kinds of questions about that and acted as invested as one can be about the challenges of moving vending machines containing opioid reversal spray bottles, because I want him to like me and I need him to believe every lie that comes out of my mouth.
“This way,” he says to us with a tilt of his head. Before the administrator buzzes us through to the back, he says over his shoulder, “Talley, can you grab some waters and put them in two and three?”
Invisible bias had me convinced that all three officers outside the cabin door were men. But when someone finally got the key off Corrine and set us free, it was a woman in her mid-twenties namedOfficer Talley who escorted me down the dock with her purple fingernails at my back. She has not stopped staring at me since.
Henry and I follow Officer Kline a few steps into a corridor lined on one side with doors and on the other with a series of windows showing the armory’s strip of muddy lawn and beyond it a homely stretch of state road. Officer Kline taps his hip to the keypad for room number two and tells me to go in and sit down and someone will be in to take my statement soon. Stepping away from Henry and into that room feels like a surgical separation. I am aware of every stroke of the bone saw as the door swings shut on Henry, standing solemnly in the melancholic morning light, looking at me like he needs a squeeze of morphine too.
The room has flat gray carpeting, mismatched dining room chairs around a small wooden table. Mounted black cameras train their beady red eyes on me. On the table is a Dixie cup with a collection of blue and black pens. I stare at those pens and I wonder if it is some kind of psychological test. If they already know that five days ago I incapacitated Campbell with a lowly BIC and then I murdered him with hardly any effort at all.
Officer Talley comes in with some water and a chewy bagel, cream cheese in a ketchup packet. She stares at me more while I eat. The only time she speaks is to ask me if I would like any coffee and when I say I am okay because I can only imagine what armory coffee tastes like, she teases that maybe later someone will make a Starbucks run. I can’t tell if she hates me or if she’s buttering me up to ask for an autograph.
Officer Kline comes back into the room with a crumb in his facial scrub. He asks me to move to a different chair, indicating the cameras, saying something about the angle, and we ring-around-the-rosy until he tells me to sit.
“Okay,” he says, a little bit short of breath. He’s a skinny man with a blond goatee and a small gut. “I’m going to read you your Miranda rights now. You’re not under arrest, but you are being questioned in police custody, so that’s why I have to do it. Do you understand the difference?”
I nod, thinking,Now there’s an authentic detail.
“You need to verbalize your answer, ma’am.”
And there is another. “Yes.”
He goes through the whole thing, weird not to hear it in theLaw & Ordervoice, punctuated with theLaw & Ordergavel bang, and I nod and I nod, even at the part where he talks about my right to have an attorney. I do not want to ask for counsel, because it will make me look guilty, and because I am guilty and any counsel in their right mind will advise me against moving ahead with this.
“Do you understand these rights as I have read them to you?” Officer Kline asks.
“I do.”