“Were you in her room?”
“I may have looked in.
I don’t remember every—”
“The nurse remembered.”
He stood up.
His chair scraped back and he stood up, and he looked down at me, and for one moment the careful kindness was completely gone and I saw something underneath it that I recognized as the truth.
“Whatever Frank wrote in that letter,” he said, “he was a sick old man who spent thirty years turning a tragedy into a conspiracy because he couldn’t accept that sometimes people just d*e.
I loved Frank.
I love you.
And I am telling you, as someone who has been part of this family your entire life, that you should put those papers away and let your father rest in peace.”
He picked up his coat.
“Don’t do this, Claire.
For your own sake.”
He walked to the door.
“Gerald.”
He stopped but didn’t turn.
“Frank knew you were coming back to the hospital that afternoon,” I said.
“He sent me away before you arrived.
He wanted me safe.”
A long pause.
“Goodbye, Claire.” He opened the door.
“Call me when you’re thinking clearly.”
The door closed behind him.
I reached under the collar of my shirt and pressed the small button Paulson had shown me.
Three seconds later, my phone buzzed.
Paulson came to the house within the hour.
He sat across from me at the same table where Gerald had sat, and he played the recording back through his phone speaker, and we listened to Gerald’s voice fill Frank’s kitchen — *a frightened old woman’s memory, a dying man’s letter written on painkillers* — and when it ended Paulson set the phone face-down on the table.
“He never denied being in the room,” I said.
“No.
He didn’t.” Paulson looked at his notes.
“He said he may have looked in.
He said he didn’t remember every detail.
Those are not the words of someone who wasn’t there.” He paused.
“Combined with the nurse’s formal statement — she agreed to speak with us this morning, by the way — and the medical examiner’s preliminary review of your father’s chart, we have enough to open a formal investigation.”
“Into Catherine’s death.”
“Into both.” He met my eyes.
“The examiner found an anomaly in your father’s medication record from the afternoon of Gerald’s visit.
