Tell No One

“I heard Elizabeth scream again—she screamed my name this time—but the sound, all sound, gurgled away as I sank under the water.” 

David’s sinking under the water is a pathetic fallacy, which expresses his helplessness as he loses Elizabeth. The urgency of the scream is juxtaposed with the gurgling sounds of the water and indicates that events will spiral wildly out of David’s control. 

“Every one of those platitudes pissed me off. They made me—and this is going to sound uncharitable—stare at the idiot and wonder why he or she breathed while my Elizabeth rotted.”

David expresses his aversion to the platitudes offered to him after Elizabeth’s death, regarding his good luck to have known such a love. This quote indicates how he loves Elizabeth more than anyone else in the world and how depressed and bereaved he feels without her. 

“I immersed myself in patient care. I’ve always had that ability. As a kid I could study for hours. As a doctor, I can disappear into my work. I did that after Elizabeth died. Some people point out that I hide in my work, that I choose to work instead of live.” 

David’s tendency to hide in his work builds him up as a sympathetic character, a doctor, both devoted to his work and staying busy to avoid facing his wife’s loss. David’s state of hiding is a strong counterpoint to what will happen when he has to emerge from his coping mechanism, actively search for Elizabeth, and prevent Scope from committing further wrongs. 

“But ghosts don’t age. The Elizabeth on the computer had. Not a lot, but it had been eight years. Ghosts don’t cut their hair either. I thought of that long braid hanging down her back in the moonlight. I thought about the fashionably short cut I’d just seen.” 

In this passage, David attempts to come to terms with what he has just seen. He concludes that he cannot have seen a ghost because the woman on screen looks like a version of Elizabeth as she might be eight years from when he last saw her. She is real, not a haunting.

“Hoyt Parker had never been comfortable with me. There might have been some Electra complex here, but I’d always felt that he saw me as a threat. I understood. His little girl had spent all of her time with me.” 

This passage highlights one of the underlying tensions in the book, that between David and his father-in-law, Hoyt Parker. Although the Electra complex is usually used to describe a daughter’s sexualized feelings towards her father, rather than the reverse, Coben has appropriated the term to sow a sense of rivalry between Hoyt and David. The tension between the two men paves the way for a more sinister aspect to Hoyt’s involvement in Elizabeth’s disappearance. 

“It’s an amazing thing really, but when you think about it, we learn life’s most important lessons from TV. The vast majority of our knowledge about interrogations, Miranda rights, self-incriminations, cross-examinations, witness lists, the jury system, we learn from NYPD Blue and Law & Order and the like. If I tossed you a gun right known asked you to fire it, you’d do what you saw on TV.” 

This piece of commentary shows the predominant influence of popular culture on people’s knowledge of crime and police departments. The first-person narrator David moves out of the main sweep of the narrative where he is being influenced by Carlson and Stone to consider how he has to improvise through the unfamiliar scenario of being interviewed by the police. 

“Still, death is a great teacher. It’s just too harsh […] You might not be happier, but you will be better.” 

David contemplates that he is closer to being worthy of Elizabeth because she was a do-gooder and he was more status conscious. However, now, following her death, he has become a better person, focusing on saving children’s lives as a pediatrician. 

“‘They got a hard-on for your friend. And it’s been eight years. That means they’re desperate. Desperate feds are ugly, constitutional-rights-stamping feds.’” 

In comparing the feds’ pursuit of David to sexual arousal after a long spell of frustration, Hester Crimstein indicates that the feds’ pursuit of David is not logical or evidence based, but almost compulsive as it fills a gap in knowledge that has long troubled them.

“He pressed the gun against her forehead. She made that sound again. He fired twice and all the world fell silent.” 

These lines, describing Rebecca Schayes’s brutal murder by Gandle and Wu, indicate how they regard her as a dehumanized obstacle rather than a person.

“I’m not above making quick judgements based on appearance—or, to use a more politically current term, racial profiling. We all do it. If you cross the street to avoid a gang of black teens, you’re racial profiling.” 

In responding to the presence of Tyrese and TJ in his office, David has to overcome the racial prejudice which makes him initially think that Tyrese may have abused TJ. His deepening relationship with Tyrese will show how their association will have exceeded all of his expectations. 

“I kept running. The world passed by in a blur. I sprinted past a dangerous-looking rottweiler. Old men sat at the corner and whined about the day. Women carried too many bags. Kids who probably should have been in school leaned against whatever was available, one cooler than the next.” 

David’s flight from the police is set against the backdrop of city bustle. The sights and activity that David has to process imbue his run with a greater sense of strenuousness and the reader has the impression that he has covered a great deal of distance. 

“I looked down and our eyes met. He was in pain. Pain I had caused. I kept my balance and unleashed a kick. It connected with his ribs. He made a wet ‘pluuu’ sound this time. […] I couldn’t believe what I was doing.” 

The graphic physical details of the fight, including the non-semantic “pluuu” sound the officer’s body makes, serve to engross the reader in the actions. David’s incredulity at his violence towards the young officer makes it seem as though he is an inexperienced fighter. 

“Washington Square Park—named, not surprisingly for George Washington—was one of those places that tried to cling to the sixties though the grip kept slipping. There were usually protesters of sort, but they looked more like actors in a nostalgic revival than genuine revolutionaries.” 

This sort of historical detail features in Coben’s writing from time to time. It gives the impression of a constantly changing urban scene and past relevancies becoming irrelevant. David’s overall perception of change serves as a fitting background to his sense that everything is changing around him in his own life. 

“She gave her wig one more tug and stared at her reflection. Her eyes blurred, and for a moment, she was back at the lake. Hope ignited in her chest, and for once she did nothing to extinguish it.” 

This passage describes Elizabeth’s enduring connection with David, given that the lake where they summered is perpetually in her consciousness. Even the disguise of her wig cannot mask what she feels to be true in her heart. 

“No matter. Survival first. His anyway. She had no choice. She had to go.” 

This extract, describing Elizabeth’s thoughts at the airport where she determines to board the plane without David, is an example of Coben’s use of short, incomplete sentences to imitate the patterns of human reasoning. The short, stark sentences also convey a sense of giving up and of Elizabeth’s disappointment. 

“‘We can kill them or let them go.’ Like it was no big deal either way, a coin toss.” 

Tyrese gives David the option of killing Wu and Gandle or letting them go free. The fact that their lives have become a “coin toss” indicates the newly violent stakes of the narrative.

“The sleeves were rolled up, revealing crude prison tattoos etched onto his forearm and the prison muscles coiling thereunder. There is an unmistakable look to prison muscles, a smooth, marblelike quality as opposed to their puffier health club counterparts.” 

This description of Helio Gonzalez’s forearms indicates how he is the product of a four-year spell in prison. Indeed, the word “prison” is used three times as an adjective, branding a particular kind of tattoo and muscle. Coben’s description of the “prison muscles” being “smooth” and “marblelike” as opposed to puffy and ostentatious makes it seem as though they are the product of hard work, rather than an aesthetic vanity.

“As her eyes traveled down the page, a block of ice hardened in her stomach. She saw the body’s height and the weight and stifled a scream.” 

When Carlson presents Shauna with the autopsy file, she realizes from the body’s height and weight that the wrong body has been identified as Elizabeth. Shauna’s scream and sensation of hardening ice in her stomach expresses her visceral reaction to the news that David’s sightings of Elizabeth may have been genuine. 

“I’m not big on moral absolutes. I see the grays. I make the calls.” 

David considers, on the day after Brutus has killed a man in his defense, that he does not easily distinguish between pure good and pure evil. The fact that he makes “the calls” is a clue to the secret he is keeping, that he would kill if necessary and did so in the case of Brandon Scope.

“‘Your father’s gun, the one you inherited, killed Brandon Scope.’”  

Nick Carlson’s pronouncement that the gun David inherited from his father, Stephen Beck, killed Brandon Scope, is another clue that points to David’s culpability in a sea of evidence to the contrary.

“He shrugged and walked over to one of those chintzy pull-down bars. It was old and loose. The glasses were in disarray, tinkling against one another, and I was more certain than ever that this had not been his first foray into the liquor cabinet today.” 

This passage describes Hoyt Parker’s drinking towards the end of the novel, when he fears for Elizabeth’s life. The “chintzy pull-down bar” is representative of Hoyt’s old-fashioned machismo. However, the fact that the bar is old, loose, and soiled with disarrayed glasses signals that Hoyt is reaching the end of the line. This controlling man is reliant on the drink and therefore out of control. 

“‘He’s like one of those mythical beasts where you cut off the head and it grows two more.’” 

Hoyt’s likening of Griffin Scope to a many-headed mythical beast—in this case, the hydra, who the Greek hero Hercules faced—sustains the illusion of Scope’s invincibility. There is no shortage of strong-armed men who will help him if two of his assassins go down. 

“Amazing how sinister I looked in the darkened photo, like a Mideast terrorist.” 

When David sees a picture of his face in the newspaper, he is amazed by how “sinister” he has been made to look. He feels like his privileged white features have been turned into what were at the time, more suspicious Middle Eastern features.