Before She Knew Him(6)
Matthew, who’d already texted Mira to tell her he was running a little late, leaned back behind his desk and did one of the things he was very good at doing. He listened to a woman.
Chapter 3
On Sunday Hen considered calling the police tip line or trying to get in touch with the lead detective in charge of the homicide of Dustin Miller—it was two and a half years ago now—but she knew if she was going to notify the police, she’d have to tell Lloyd, and she didn’t want to do that quite yet.
Instead, after coffee and breakfast, when Lloyd went out for a run, she sat down with her laptop and typed “Dustin Miller death” into the search engine. As soon as the string of articles appeared on her screen, Hen felt a surge of nausea and excitement. Three years earlier, Hen had agreed to a med switch recommended by a new psych pharmacologist she’d gotten when Lloyd had switched jobs and their health insurance had changed. It had sent her into a manic period during which, along with the upside of getting a ton of work done, she became obsessed with the homicide of Dustin Miller, who lived in Hen and Lloyd’s old neighborhood. She’d actually been on a walk in the Huron Village section of Cambridge when she’d seen the EMTs wheeling a gurney topped with a body bag out of the Victorian down the street from her house. She’d stopped and stared, watched as more police cars and unmarked vehicles arrived and then two tall men in gray suits.
It was on the news that night, the suspected homicide of a recent Boston College graduate who’d been found dead in his home. At first, Lloyd, shocked as she was by the proximity of the crime, had been as interested as Hen. But as time wore on, as more details emerged, and as it became clear that the police, despite “promising leads,” had not identified a single suspect, Hen found herself more and more obsessed, poring over every detail the police released and walking by the rose-colored Victorian several times a day. There had been no signs of a forced entry, and Hen assumed that whoever had killed Dustin had probably known him. He’d been found tied to a chair, asphyxiated by a plastic bag secured over his head with duct tape. There had been a few items missing from the house, including his wallet, a laptop, plus a trophy he’d received from the Junior Olympics of fencing. He hadn’t fenced at Boston College—he’d played tennis—but he’d been a fencer at Sussex Hall, the private school outside of Boston he’d attended from sixth grade through twelfth.
Dustin had left behind a Facebook page, and Hen spent hours looking at it, not just his previous posts and pictures, but what friends had written since his death. Most of those comments were attached to his last post, a picture he’d taken of his street—Hen’s street—the pear trees in blossom, a pink streaky sky above the roofs of the houses. In the corner of the photograph, a woman wearing a short skirt was walking away from Dustin. The caption read, “God, I love my new street.” Hen went back and forth trying to figure out if he was simply referring to the blossoming trees, the pretty houses, and the spring in the air or the leggy girl caught in the picture.
“You’re a guy, Lloyd. What do you think he meant by this picture? Was he talking about the girl?”
Lloyd had looked at the Facebook page for five seconds, before saying, “What does it matter?”
“He took that picture probably just hours before he was killed.”
“You think the picture had something to do with why he was killed?”
“No, I didn’t say that. It’s just . . . you don’t find it creepy?”
“I do. I find it very creepy, and that’s why I don’t want to spend all this time thinking about it and talking about it. I don’t think you should, either.”
Ever since she’d been old enough to pick out her own library books, Hen had always had a morbid streak, a preoccupation with death. She had never considered it any kind of liability—she’d won several art awards in high school with her dark, disturbing illustrations—but in her freshman year at Camden College, she’d had her first manic episode, cycling rapidly through bouts of wild self-confidence and crushing insecurity. She couldn’t sleep, staying up late obsessively rewatching her season one DVDs of Twin Peaks. She’d fall asleep at dawn and started missing her morning classes. She had constant bad thoughts, her mind a fever of death-related imagery. She imagined elaborate acts of suicide and chewed her nails till they bled. Around this time, Sarah Harvey, another freshman on the hall, came down with the flu, becoming so ill she had to return home for the semester. A rumor went through Winthrop Hall that Sarah’s roommate, Daphne Myers, had purposely left the windows open in their shared room in order to try to make Sarah sicker. Hen became fixated on Daphne—she hadn’t liked her from the moment they’d met on day one of freshman orientation—and convinced herself that Daphne hadn’t been just trying to make Sarah sicker; she’d been trying to kill her roommate. It made perfect sense. Tall, blond, dead-eyed Daphne, a psychology major, was a psychopath.
Hen decided that her purpose—the reason she’d been placed at Camden at that particular time—was to discover the truth about Daphne. She began to watch her all the time, and the more she watched her, the more she came to believe that Daphne was an evil human being. In November, Daphne, who’d gotten friendlier and friendlier toward Hen—Very suspicious, Hen thought—told Hen that she was switching from psychology to fine arts and asked her what professors she recommended. She even showed Hen one of her art pieces, a pen-and-ink drawing that, to Hen, seemed like a brazen copy of Hen’s exact style. It was a deliberate provocation, and Hen went first to her academic adviser and then to the local police, saying that she felt her life was in danger from Daphne Myers, who had already tried to murder Sarah Harvey. At both meetings, Hen had broken into hysterical tears. Her parents were notified, and Hen’s mother arranged to visit, but before she arrived, Hen, at three in the morning, her skin electric with anxiety, her mind a buzz saw of terrible thoughts, went outside of Winthrop Hall in only an oversized T-shirt and threw a paving stone through Daphne’s window. When Daphne peered out through the busted window, Hen charged her, slicing open a wrist on a piece of jagged glass. Hen was treated at the emergency room, then admitted to a psychiatric hospital, where she stayed for ten days, emerging with a diagnosis of bipolar 1 and a protective order banning her from coming within five hundred yards of Daphne Myers. She was charged with criminal assault.