The Book Club

Chapter 13 — The Cold Case

The county archive smelled like dust and old decisions. Fluorescent lights hummed overhead. The clerk, a young man with headphones around his neck, pulled the box for her without much interest: PRICE, GREGORY A. — 2009. He set it on the counter like it was nothing. Seventeen years, in a cardboard box.

Megan sat at the scarred wooden table and opened the file with hands that shook. She told herself she was doing research. She told herself she was being paranoid. She told herself a dozen things, and none of them helped.

The facts were spare. Gregory A. Price, 58, found dead at the bottom of the stairs in his home on Alder Court at approximately 2:40 a.m., October 17, 2009. His wife, Deborah, had called 911, her voice on the recording described by the dispatcher as “controlled.” Cause of death: blunt force trauma consistent with a fall down thirteen steps. Blood alcohol level: elevated — 0.11. Ruling: accidental death. Case closed.

There was a crime-scene inventory, two pages, typed on a machine that needed a new ribbon. Megan read it three times before she found it, buried in the middle of the second page between the telephone table and the coat closet:

*Item 14: One (1) lowball glass, containing approx. 2 oz amber liquid, located on the step-side table at the top of the staircase. Not collected for testing.*

Not collected for testing. In 2009, in a clear-cut accidental fall with an intoxicated victim, why would it be? The responding officers had a drunk man, a staircase, a grieving widow. They’d done the math everyone does. Megan stared at those four words until they blurred.

She requested the responding officer’s notes. They were handwritten, brief, the writing of a man at the end of a long night: *Wife states victim had been drinking in his study. Wife states she was asleep in the downstairs guest room, woke to the sound. No signs of forced entry. No signs of struggle. Coroner notified.*

Megan copied everything she was allowed to copy and drove home through the gray afternoon, the copies on the passenger seat like a passenger she didn’t want. In her driveway, she sat with the engine off and did the math she didn’t want to do.

In the novel, the wife crushed sleeping pills into her husband’s evening whiskey. He climbed the stairs unsteady. She waited at the bottom and listened — the book was specific about the listening. The police found the glass, tested it, found nothing — because in the novel, the author had the wife wash the glass afterward. A detail Claire had called, at the meeting, “the smartest thing she does.”

The archive closed at five, and Megan sat in her car afterward watching the streetlights come on, the copies on the passenger seat. She thought about 2009 — the world before everything. Her twins had been nine. Deborah had been thirty-eight, with a husband and a house on Alder Court and a life that looked, from the outside, like everyone else’s. Megan tried to imagine it: the discovery of the forged loans, the phone records, the forty-seven calls. The slow, sick understanding that the man you’d been married to for twenty-nine years was going to erase you. She tried not to sympathize — murder was murder — but she couldn’t stop the thought from coming: what would I have done? She pushed it away. But it came back, all the way home, riding in the passenger seat with the copies, asking and asking.

But in real life, in 2009, on Alder Court — the glass was never tested at all. There was nothing to wash away. Just a sad, ordinary accident. The worst kind. The kind with no one to blame. Paula’s words came back: *Those are the worst kind, aren’t they?*

Megan walked into her house, put the copies in the folder with the pages, and sat at her kitchen table for a long time, staring at nothing. Then she picked up her phone and called the one person she could trust with a suspicion this terrible — the one person whose professional knowledge could confirm or destroy it.

“Janelle,” she said. “I need to ask you something. As a nurse. Hypothetically.”

A pause. “Okay,” Janelle said carefully.

“If someone put sleeping pills in a man’s whiskey in 2009 — crushed, dissolved — and he fell down the stairs that night. Would anyone have known? Would the tox screen have caught it?”

The silence on the other end was long. Megan could hear hospital sounds behind it — pages, monitors, the controlled chaos of the ER.

“Megan,” Janelle said, very quietly, “why are you asking me this?”

“Just — hypothetically. A book I’m — would they have caught it?”

“2009?” Janelle’s voice was tight. “Routine tox on an accidental fall? They’d run basic panels — alcohol, common drugs of abuse. A handful of crushed zolpidem in whiskey? If no one was looking for it, if no one suspected —” A pause. “No. No one would have known. The alcohol would explain the fall. Case closed.”

Megan closed her eyes. “Thank you.”

“Megan —” Janelle started, and there was fear in her voice now, the pieces assembling for her too. “Megan, what are you —”

“I’ll explain soon,” Megan said. “I promise. Just — don’t tell anyone I called.”

She hung up and sat in the gathering dark of her kitchen. The folder lay on the table, fat with pages and copies and seventeen years. She thought about Deborah’s hands — the way they’d shaken at the January meeting, the way they’d been steady in the parking lot. She thought about twelve years of Thursdays.

What had Deborah done? The question had an answer now. The real question — the one that kept Megan awake — was what Deborah would do next.