“That’s also true. Including my niece, who today is part of my defense team. Life can go on after an abduction, Mrs. Lindel.”
“That why you’re here?”
“In part. Can I come in?”
She hesitated, then stuck her face in her dog’s face. “You be good now, Tinker, hear?”
Tinker licked her cheek. Eliza set the dog down. The Jack Russell eyed me when Eliza stood aside and I entered. I smelled gin and cigarettes as I walked past her into a center hall lined with hooks where pictures had once hung.
“Is there somewhere we can sit and talk?” I asked.
“The kitchen. Straight ahead.”
She followed me down the hallway through an open doorway into a dingy white kitchen where dirty dishes were piled high in the sink, newspapers and unopened mail covered the table, and prescription bottles took up two entire shelves of a bookcase. I caught a whiff of something antiseptic and thought I heard muffled voices.
“How are you holding up?” I said.
Eliza pushed back a strand of hair. “How does it look like I’m holding up?”
“I can’t help asking—the pictures in the hall?”
She stared at me. Her lower lip quivered. “I couldn’t take looking at Gretchen anymore. She was ripping me up every time I walked through there.”
“The stress must feel unbearable.”
“You don’t know the half of it.”
“Your husband?”
She stiffened. “Alden? Alden’s Alden. A trouper. Never gives up hope. Never says die.”
“I’m a clinical psychologist by training. I don’t know if he’s told you, but he’s been seeing me for therapy.”
She crossed her arms and studied me skeptically. “No, he didn’t say anything.”
“Two sessions.”
“Really? You’d think he would have told me. Why don’t we go ask him why he didn’t?”
My pulse quickened. “He’s here? I just saw him heading toward Capitol Hill. He looked like he was out for a night on the town. With another woman.”
“Another woman?” She laughed sarcastically. “I bet he smelled of cheap perfume, didn’t he?”
“I didn’t get close enough.”
“Well, you can now,” she said, gesturing at a door at the far end of the kitchen. “Alden’s right through there, watching Game of Thrones. Let’s go talk to him. Get things out in the open.”
“Let’s do that,” I said. I crossed the kitchen and went through the door.
CHAPTER
71
A WAVE OF antiseptic smells hit me as I stepped down into a space set up as a hospital room.
To my right, shelves bulged with medical equipment, supplies, and clean linens. To my immediate left there was a tall green oxygen tank with a hose that ran over to a hospital bed with its back raised.
Beyond the tank, an array of electronic monitors cheeped and beeped over the sounds coming from a speaker system linked to the big screen mounted on the opposite wall. According to a tag in the lower right corner of the screen, season 3, episode 4, of Game of Thrones was showing.