Chapter 4: Eleven Days
They put Megan in the back of the second car with a blanket around her shoulders and a female paramedic crouched beside the open door, speaking quietly.
I watched from the first car.
The partition between the front and back seats was scratched plexiglass.
I could see Callum in the driver's seat, writing something on a form attached to a clipboard.
He hadn't said a word to me since the cuffs went on.
At the hospital, they separated us completely.
I was taken to a room with a table, two chairs, and a mirror that wasn't a mirror.
A detective came in twenty minutes later.
He was older, heavyset, with a wedding ring that had worn a permanent groove into his finger.
He set a paper cup of coffee in front of me that I hadn't asked for and sat down across the table.
"I'm Detective Harlan.
You want to tell me what happened?"
"I want a lawyer."
He nodded like that was the answer he'd expected.
He picked up the coffee, took a slow sip, and set it back down.
"That's your right." He didn't move.
"I'll tell you what I already know, and you can decide if you still want to wait."
"I said I want a lawyer."
"Your wife has been in that basement for eleven days." He said it the way you'd read a number off a form.
Flat.
Factual.
"She has a fracture in her left wrist.
She's dehydrated.
She lost nine pounds." He paused.
"She also had a phone."
Something shifted in my chest.
"A phone you didn't know about," he continued.
"Taped inside the frame of the folding cot down there.
Old model, prepaid.
She'd been rationing the battery for ten days before she finally used it."
I didn't say anything.
"She called 911 at 2:47 in the morning.
Whispered the address.
The line dropped after fourteen seconds." He turned a page in the folder in front of him.
"The call came from inside the house.
Your house.
The address you told my officers nobody had called from."
The fluorescent light above us buzzed faintly.
"She also left a voice memo on that phone," Harlan said.
"Recorded on day three.
In case, as she put it, she didn't get another chance."
He let that sit.
"She described everything.
The argument.
The door.
The locks." He closed the folder.
"She mentioned the bird."
"I want a lawyer," I said again.
My voice came out smaller than I intended.
Harlan stood up.
He picked up the coffee cup — his, not mine — and walked to the door.
"She said one other thing on that recording." He stopped with his hand on the door frame.
"She said she wasn't the first."
He left the door open behind him.
I sat in that room for a long time.
The untouched coffee in front of me went cold.
Through the open door I could hear the sounds of the station — a phone ringing, someone typing, a door somewhere down the hall opening and closing.
She said she wasn't the first.
I knew what she meant.
I had known, somewhere beneath everything, that she would eventually find out about Carol.
About what happened in the house before this one.
About why Carol had stopped returning calls, stopped existing in any form I could be connected to.
I had been careful.
I had been so careful.
But Megan had had eleven days alone in the dark with nothing but her own memory and a phone she was rationing like water.
Eleven days is a long time to remember things.
The lawyer arrived forty minutes later.
Young, tired-looking, carrying a soft briefcase.
He sat down, introduced himself, and opened a legal pad.
"Don't say anything else until I tell you to," he said.
I nodded.
He clicked his pen.
"Now.
Start from the beginning."
I looked at the legal pad.
At the blank white page waiting.
"How far back?" I asked.
May you like
He looked up at me over his glasses.
"As far back as it goes," he said.
