He shook his head. “No, we haven’t stayed in touch all that much on a regular basis. We hit the highs and lows in life—I thought anyway—but apparently I didn’t hit very many of the lows. Not if these chats are anything to go by.”
“And I didn’t know how low he really was,” she whispered.
He nodded and said, “I have a couple more here to check.”
She nodded and said, “I’ll just grab my laptop too. Something to keep my mind off what you’re doing.” She got up and walked around him, going upstairs. He went to one website, which turned out to be another suicide one. He had avoided going to it at first because something was familiar about it. He thought he’d seen a corresponding email address in David’s emails. But Simon checked it out, and, once again, his friend was talking about how the world would be better off without him and how his wife would find somebody else to be happy with and to have children with.
Simon swore at that because, if Louisa wanted one thing, it wasn’t life without David. She would never choose children over having a life with him. On the whole, it sounded like David was working his way through it in some of the conversations. Simon checked the dates, and nothing there suggested that anything had triggered this suicide action or that he was close to taking that final walk off a bridge.
When Louisa sat back down again, Simon asked, “Was there any trigger or anything upsetting him this last week?”
She looked up and shook her head. “I’ve asked myself that a million times, wondering what would have set this off,” she said, “but I don’t know of anything.”
He nodded slowly. “And—” Then he stopped and said, “I don’t even know how to ask this, but, outside of the parental thing, can you think of any reason why he would choose to do this?”
“I would never have imagined he would ever choose this,” she cried out. “I know in the past he’s made a couple dumb comments, and I’d shut it down really fast,” she said, “because who wants to hear anybody talk about suicide? That’s not funny,” she said, “so I didn’t think anything of it or put any credence into it because he would only bring it up when he got depressed.”
“Interesting,” he said.
“Why? What are you thinking?”
“I’m just not seeing anything that shows a trigger for why he did it. I can’t imagine that, from one day to the next, he just woke up one morning without any reason to live.”
Somebody had been talking to David in the one chat on a private message board. It took Simon a moment to figure out how these boards worked, but he found the one message with a response at the top.
Go ahead and do it.
His friend had responded.Hell no, why should I?
You should.
David’s response was clear and succinct.Fuck off.
Simon smiled. “Well, he said fuck off to somebody pushing him to commit suicide,” he said to Louisa. She gasped in joy. And then she looked at him, the smile falling away. “So then why did he do it?”
“I don’t know,” he said. “I’m still looking.” He went through it, and then, taking note of the one, he checked the other message board. And found the same type of message from somebody else.
Go ahead and do it. You’ll feel better. Everybody’ll be better off without you.
Simon frowned at that and went to one of the others. And it was the same thing. In each case, always somebody who private-messaged him, then said how it would be much better if he did it. That he would feel so much better and that his family could move on without this curse. Somebody was actively encouraging David. Simon’s fingers thrummed on the table as he thought about that. Then he went to the emails. “Did he have more than one email address?”
“Yeah, he had a couple anyway,” she said. “I don’t know all of them. Check the book.”
Simon flipped through the book and, in the back, were the email accounts. He checked the first one, but it’s the one that he used all the time, and there didn’t seem to be anything in it. When he checked the other two, one was completely blank and empty, and the last one appeared to be the one he used for all these chats.
Simon checked and found several messages from several different senders, all saying some version ofHey, dude, you should. A few were supportive, saying things like,Don’t, the world is still a brighter place, and you’ll be happier if you’re in it.
And then the last one was very different.
Do it or else.
Alarm growing deep inside him, Simon opened it up to see a picture of Louisa, sitting right across from him, only this time, the photo had been doctored, and a bullet hole was in the center of her forehead.
He slammed the laptop shut.
Chapter 6
Kate walked thefirst suicide scene, remembering how she had felt that morning. She stood back in the same position, where her memory said she must have been when the picture of her had been taken.