Your Heart Belongs to Me

afternoon, sooner than promised, Wilson Mott provided by e-mail a background report on Samantha’s mother.
    As soon as Ryan had a printout, he sent the e-mail to trash, and at once deleted it from trash to ensure no one could retrieve it. He sat on a lounge chair by the pool to read Mott’s findings.
    Rebecca Lorraine Reach, fifty-six, lived in a Las Vegas apartment complex called the Oasis. She was employed as a blackjack dealer at one of the classier casinos.
    By means most likely questionable, Mott had obtained the current photo of Rebecca on file with the Nevada Gaming Control Board. She looked no older than forty—and remarkably like her daughter.
    She owned a white Ford Explorer. Her driving record was clean.
    She had never been a party to a criminal or civil action in Nevada. Her credit report indicated a responsible borrowing history.
    According to a neighbor, Amy Crocker, Rebecca rarely socialized with other tenants at the Oasis, had a “my-poop-don’t-smell attitude,” never spoke of having a daughter, either dead or alive, and was in a romantic relationship with a man named Spencer Barghest.
    Mott reported that Barghest had been indicted twice for murder, in Texas, and twice had been judged innocent. As a noted right-to-die activist, he had been present at scores of assisted suicides. There was reason to believe that some of those whom he had assisted were not terminally—or even chronically—ill, and that the signatures on their requests for surcease from suffering were forged.
    Ryan had no idea how an assisted suicide was effectuated. Maybe Barghest supplied an overdose of sedatives, which would be a painless poison but a kind of poison nonetheless.
    Mott’s report included a photo of Spencer Barghest. He had an ideal face for a stand-up comic: agreeable but rubbery features, a knowing yet ingratiating grin, and a shock of white hair cut in a punkish bristle that looked amusing on a fiftysomething guy.
    Because he might be critically ill, Ryan was troubled to find only three degrees of separation between himself and a man who would be pleased to grant him eternal peace whether he wanted it or not.
    This, however, did not confirm his intuitive sense that Sam’s mother—and perhaps Samantha herself—was linked to his sudden health problems.
    Life was often marked by synchronicities, surprising connections that seemed to be meaningful. But coincidence was only coincidence.
    Barghest might be a nasty piece of work, but there was nothing sinister in his relationship with Rebecca, nothing relating to Ryan.
    In his current state of mind, he had to guard against a tendency toward paranoia. Such a regrettable inclination had already led him to order Mott’s report on Samantha’s mother.
    Rebecca had turned out to be an ordinary person leading an unremarkable existence. Ryan’s suspicion had been irrational.
    Now that he thought about it, the presence of Spencer Barghest in Rebecca Reach’s life was not surprising. It didn’t even qualify as a coincidence, let alone a suspicious one.
    Six years ago, she had made the difficult decision to remove a feeding tube from her brain-damaged daughter. A weight of guilt might have settled on her—especially when Samantha strenuously disagreed with her decision.
    To assuage the guilt, Rebecca might have pored through right-to-die literature, seeking philosophical justification for what she had done. She might even have joined an activist organization, and at one of its meetings might have encountered Spencer Barghest.
    Because Samantha had been estranged from her mother since Teresa’s death, she probably didn’t even know that Barghest and Rebecca were an item.
    Ashamed that he had entertained any doubts about Sam, Ryan got up from the poolside lounge chair and returned to his study.
    He sat at his desk and switched on the paper shredder. For a long moment, he listened to its motor purring, its blades scissoring.
    Finally he switched off the shredder. He put the report in a wall safe behind a sliding panel in the back of a built-in cabinet.
    Fear had gotten its teeth so firmly into him that he could not easily pry it loose.
     

 
    TWELVE

    O ver the years, the immense pepper tree had conformed around the second-story deck. Consequently, the feeling of being in a tree house was even greater here than when you looked out of the apartment windows.
    Samantha had draped a red-checkered cloth over the patio table and had set out white dishes, flatware, and a