“I’m not sure. This is awkward. Especially over the phone.”
He had a cultured voice, deep and resonant. A handsome voice. And at the same time, vulnerable. I liked him right off. Even his hesitancy. Most people I knew hid behind too many words, spoke too quickly.
“Well, we don’t need to talk about anything over the phone. We can make an appointment. We can talk when you come in.”
With the phone wedged between my ear and shoulder, I walked over to the bookshelves and poured myself a glass of water from the silver carafe. It was cold, and before I took a sip I held it up to my forehead. The headache I’d had for the past hour was getting worse, and I hoped the cool glass would offer some relief. I should just give in and take two aspirin. But even though the pills were benign, I had a difficult time taking them.
All these years later and I still would rather suffer pain than succumb to taking pills.
“You don’t know who I am, do you?” Elias Beecher asked.
“No. Should I?”
“No, I guess not. I’m sorry. It was rude of me to assume that you would.” His consideration surprised me, reminded me of someone, but I couldn’t think of whom. “For some reason I thought you’d know my name,” he said, but still didn’t explain.
I took the bottle of aspirin out of my top desk drawer and put it down in front of the phone. The white bottle. The blue label. It was harmless. It would make my head ache less. Yet, still I hesitated.
“I’m sorry, should I?” I asked.
“Yes. Well, she told me that she had come to you for help. And that you were helping. And I was so grateful. I should say that first. How very grateful I was that you were going to help her and that she was feeling that she might get her-our problems resolved. God, I love her. And that’s all I want.”
Was this the husband or the father of one of my patients? There was so much sadness in his voice. Nothing pulled at me like someone’s melancholy. I wanted to help him. Now. As soon as possible. And I was impressed that he was willing-and able-to talk openly to me even though we’d never met. It reinforced the vulnerability I’d heard in his voice. There are so many people closed off to their own emotions, but someone like Elias Beecher is a therapist’s dream. It is much easier to help someone when they aren’t fighting you. When they want to let you in.
“Mr. Beecher, I know that you are very upset. But I can’t even begin to figure out if I can help you or not unless I understand who and what you are talking about. Do you think you could start at the beginning? Who was talking to me? And why was she talking to me about you?”
He took a deep breath. “Dr. Snow, the woman I am engaged to is one of your patients. And she has been missing for almost a week. I’ve gone to the police. I’m a lawyer, I know how it works. She’s a missing person until she shows up dead, and only then will she be a priority. There were no threats on her life, no sign of foul play, no break-in at her apartment. If she was kidnapped, no one has made any contact with me for ransom. I just don’t have anything to give the police to entice them to take this more seriously. And to complicate it further, I know they think I might be responsible for her disappearance. The boyfriend or husband is always a suspect, isn’t he?”
Elias Beecher had been talking so quickly and with such urgency I hadn’t had a chance to interrupt, but he’d finally stopped long enough to take a breath.
My hands were as cold as the water in my glass, and I clasped them together in my lap.
“Who is your fiancée, Mr. Beecher?” I had to hear him say it.
“Cleo Thane.”
19
I reached out to my desk and put my hand around the plastic bottle of aspirin. Wasn’t Gil Howard Cleo’s boyfriend?
“Dr. Snow?”
“Yes. I’m sorry. And, yes, she did mention you but not by name. As far as you can tell, how long has she been missing, Mr. Beecher?”
“Six days. That’s what I told the police. They said they couldn’t do anything. Yet. I filed a missing-person report. But from the way they treated me, from the questions they asked me, I think all I accomplished was making myself a suspect.”
I popped the top of the bottle, but I didn’t shake any of the pills out. I didn’t want to distract him with the sound. I didn’t want to change the tenor of this conversation. I needed to listen hard and glean everything I could from what he said.
“A suspect? In her disappearance?” I asked. I knew they would. First and before anyone else, the police would look at those who were closest to her. But I wanted to hear how he responded to my questions. His reactions were critical to helping me understand whether or not he was, indeed, a suspect.
He laughed. And like his voice, the sound was intimate and resonant. “I’ve been in love twice in my life,” he said. “The first time when I was in college. She left me for the one man I could never compete with. And now with Cleo. And this time she made me feel that no man could compete with me. The others are just clients.”
“Did the police ask you about Cleo’s business?”
“Yes. But I didn’t exactly tell them. What would I have said when they asked me how I felt about it? How would I explain it so they would understand that, yes, I mind what she does-of course, I wouldn’t be human if I didn’t. But not enough to put her in harm’s way. Cleo is young. She’s lovely. And she’s magical-the way she’s untouched by it all somehow.”
I was nodding. I had felt this myself. I knew what he meant. But I didn’t say anything. I didn’t want to interrupt him.
“I don’t know how else to explain it,” he continued. “Cleo is only acting with those men. She becomes someone else. With me, she has this light…this delight…in things. A perspective. I’m rambling. I’m sorry. None of this is pertinent. I should know better than to go on like this. The point is that she is missing and has been for six days and I have to find her and I want to know if you can help me.”
“I’ve been worried about her, too. I’ve been hoping she’d gone on a vacation or a business trip and just forgotten to let me know.”
He laughed. A different laugh. This one was…what? Harsher? More ironic. I was listening to him with an intensity that made my head pound even harder.
Who was he? What kind of man? Was he involved in Cleo’s disappearance?
It wasn’t unheard of for the guilty party to be the one who went to the police. It was in the news every day. A wife is missing. The husband reports it. Six weeks later, he’s arrested for her murder.
But nothing Cleo had said about Caesar-or Elias, now that I knew his real name-had suggested that he had been at a breaking point with her.
“Can I see you?” he asked. “Will you talk to me? Will you help me? Between the two of us, maybe we can figure out what happened.”
“I can try. I’m not sure how much I can tell you. Everything that Cleo talked to me about is confidential. But certainly, I’ll do what I can.”
“I know you will. From everything Cleo told me about you, I’m sure that you can help me. You are very important to her. She really respects you.”
I thanked him, feeling even worse than I had before I’d picked up the phone. We made an appointment for the next day, and as soon as I hung up, I grabbed hold of the bottle of aspirin again and held it as if the medicine inside would seep into my bloodstream through the plastic.
But it wouldn’t. In order to get any relief from the pain, I was going to have to shake out two pills, put them in my mouth and swallow them.
And once I did, I could try to figure out the new piece of the puzzle. Who was the man I’d called earlier that afternoon? The one I’d assumed was Cleo’s lover? Who was Gil Howard?
20
Five minutes later I was still sitting at my desk, staring at the bottle of pills, feeling the pain throb behind my eyes, knowing it was not going to go away by itself, when there was a knock on my door.