And Then You Were Gone

by R. J. Jacobs

  “Just say where,” I said.

  Cal reached over and flipped the truck’s clunky signal as we headed down the hill. We parked and walked. It had been years since I’d been in the central campus but little had changed. The brick facade of the athletic dorm, where I’d lived for four years, rose familiarly above the trees. In the courtyard, I leaned against a statue of a bronze coed who stared off inscrutably, a book resting lazily in her lap. I smoothed my clothes.

  The courtyard itself was vintage picturesque Vanderbilt, an arboretum arranged beneath a dome of unreality. Undergrads called campus the Vander-bubble for a reason. It insulated them. Inside existed the Disneyesque sense that wealth and beauty simply forbade bad things from happening. Waxy magnolia leaves fluttered as if preprogrammed. Beyond their canopy, the gray sky towered limitlessly. Even the vague imperfections seemed like calculated elements of charm.

  I heard Silver’s footsteps before we saw him. Sunlight flashed on his glasses, giving the appearance that they were lit from within. The energetic, paternal man I’d met a year earlier slumped, a hint of a skeptical smile tugging at his lips as he descended the stone walk. I wondered how much I might have alarmed him with the urgency of my phone call earlier, but then I guessed he was used to harried researchers working deadlines. I wondered if he’d registered my absence at Paolo’s funeral. We went through the business of introductions between him and Cal.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “I’m very off. We had a terrible tragedy last night. I’m reeling, frankly. I don’t know which end is up. A tragedy after a tragedy.” Only then did I hear the full weight of what had happened in his voice, ribbons of emotion cutting through. He touched his wristwatch, head swaying exhaustedly as he turned to walk.

  My boot tapped the path, his pace obviously slowed to accommodate mine. Beside us, a wave of leaves glittered like a school of fish.

  “That’s why we’re here,” I told him. “I was the one who found Sandy.”

  It stopped him abruptly, the surprise. He looked at me, blinking. “I’m so sorry,” he said. “I didn’t know you knew her.”

  “I actually didn’t know her very well, but—”

  “We go around the clock to deadlines—it’s a lot of pressure.” He shook his head. “There’s a conference we’re all going to. First trip as a group in a long time. I begged her to go. I thought she needed it—a break, a chance to come together. She wouldn’t consider it.” He sounded close to crying, his voice trailing off. “She told me she was taking some medication. I knew she’d been … down. I could see it. They said she was in her bath.”

  “Yes,” I said.

  “But it wasn’t an accident,” Cal chimed in behind us, almost startling me.

  “She didn’t commit suicide, Dr. Silver,” I said, struggling to find the exact words, the professional language Sandy had used. “She told me three days ago about something she’d seen in your lab. Data, tests that had been run twice with some slight variations.”

  “I’m sorry?” Silver seemed lost suddenly, as if he’d retreated into fatigue and grief.

  I reached for his forearm. “Sandy came to my office earlier this week. She told me she’d seen something that made her think Paolo had been murdered. Last night, she called me terrified; now she’s gone.”

  He winced, hand on his stomach, like I’d knocked the wind out of him.

  I retold the story of Sandy’s visit, realizing that each time I did, it sounded more implausible—like a lie I needed to expand to keep covering the gaps. Then I said his name: “Matt Cianciolo.”

  Silver’s head cocked, just slightly, when he heard it. I told him what Sandy had seen, what she’d wanted to get back to.

  “I think he killed her,” I said, jumping to the only conclusion that made any sense to me. “She found something in Matt’s work. Double records. She thought he could be selling the research.”

  From the clock tower, the hourly chime rang. Students began to pass between buildings, mostly gazing into their phones. A small group approached, and we cleared the path, stepping onto the soft, emerald-colored grass.

  Dr. Silver lowered his voice, defensively. “Take my word for one thing—there are no double records in my lab. I’m absolutely sure of that.” He paused, seeming to recall something before returning to his protective tone, like I’d pushed too far with so direct an accusation. “I hate to think about what Sandy was going through before last night. Maybe she was more depressed and overworked than anyone realized. It makes me feel terrible. The police also asked about Matt. I’m assuming you told them about him? To look into Matt Cianciolo?”

  “Yes—” I said, barely able to temper my impatience.

  “I told them what I’m telling you.” He again dropped his voice, his eyes taking a slightly scolding glint. “There is no way Matt would harm anyone. Zero chance.”

  I could feel Cal’s presence behind me and was grateful he was there. His shadow felt like a guardrail keeping me from spinning off course. Insistence poured out of me. “It’s not a coincidence that both she and Paolo died, Dr. Silver. She thought Matt was doing something illegal—” I began to stammer.

  Dr. Silver recoiled. “There are a lot of personalities in that small space. I … maybe I shouldn’t say any more. I don’t know why I’m being so open.” He glanced suspiciously at Cal, then back at me. “You must be very good at your job, Dr. Firestone, but I really should go.”

  I ignored the jab—I was used to the weird and squirmy ways in which some people thought of psychologists. “Was Matt at work last night? Just tell me that.”

  Silver’s lips tightened.

  I pressed on, “I—somebody has to find out what’s in his computer and get it to Detective Andre Mason. He knows all about it, all about it.” My words were starting to rush, to pressure ahead, like typos in a sentence typed too fast.

  Dr. Silver’s brown, professorial shoes retreated slightly, his heels meeting the rolling shade cast by a magnolia tree. Behind him, swaying leaves let through bursts of sunlight; camera flashes from an old movie.

  I stepped ahead, erasing the distance he’d just created. I was practically pleading. “How would someone access that computer?”

  His eyes dropped, eyebrows raised, as if searching for a trivia answer. “The only person who could would be me. We’re on a closed network, but I can look at anyone’s work.” He paused for a second before starting away, adding, shortly, “And I will, thank you. I’ll look. I’m in touch with the detective, Mason.”

  I reached out as if I were hooking on to him. “No, look, I need to know what’s there.”

  Silver stumbled, nearly tripping backward. “And I need to protect my lab,” he informed me. “Look, I’m sorry for what you’ve been through. I didn’t know you knew Sandy, too. But I’m not drawing any conclusions. If there’s something on Matt’s computer, I’ll know.”

  I had the sensation of forgetting how to talk. Cal looked on silently.

  “I’m sorry,” Silver said, “but I really can’t imagine him doing anything like what you’re suggesting. And now, I’m sorry again, but I have to go.”

  He disappeared into campus, his pace expressing regret for having met with us.

  Birds calling from the fire-and-apricot-colored trees. Then, a second of silence. The walkways quiet again after the class change.

  “That went well,” Cal observed, his facetiousness barely perceptible. “Think he’ll just let us in?”

  “Oh, shut up.”

  “I don’t think we completely freaked him out—not completely. Pretty close, though.”

  I replayed what Silver had said in my mind. I turned toward Cal. “Sandy told me Matt takes that laptop with him everywhere.”

  “Okay …”

  “That means he takes it to his apartment.”

  “No.” Cal shook his head. “No way.”

  “I know right where it is,” I said, grabbing the sleeve of his jacket as I started toward the truck.

  TWENTY

  Cal
insisted I try to sleep. Walking back to the truck, he looked into the fever dream in my rabbit eyes and said I’d crash without it. Said he’d seen sleep deprivation in the field, soldiers eschewing judgment for impulse, real paranoia.

  “If you want to get this done,” he told me, “you have to shut down. This isn’t a straight line.” Mission strategy.

  He’s in on it. He’s distracting you.

  Still, enough of me knew he was right that I agreed.

  I closed my eyes, but it wasn’t real sleep—not the kind when your mind winds down, or flicks off, or goes wherever it goes. This sleep was the kind where your eyes close but your thoughts persist like a rolling boil. The ceiling fan blew over me, curtains holding back the gray midday tide of fall. Only a dull awareness remained that I hadn’t really worked in more than a month and that I had a checking account that was basically empty.

  When I couldn’t take any more, I texted him. I fed Andy, showered in a scalding rush, swallowed six Advil for my ankle, consumed an overripe banana, and sat in a sweatshirt on the front steps until Cal’s royal-blue 240 Volvo appeared—the kind that looks like a cross between a tank and a shoebox.

  “Seat belt,” he said.

  “Cal.” I shook my head.

  “Fine. Are you open to an idea that doesn’t involve us breaking in anywhere?” His tone sounded hopeful that a few hours’ sleep might have provided me some wisdom.

  “We’re not breaking in,” I informed him. “I am.”

  “Uh-uh, not smart. Think about that, Emily. You can hardly walk. You’re not ready for special forces tonight. Sandy said he carries the laptop around with him, right? What we’re looking for is an opportunity. Maybe it’ll be easy; maybe he’s careless.”

  He doesn’t believe you. It’s a trick; he’s wasting your time.

  Just then, I realized I’d forgotten my Lamictal.

  I shook it off.

  Take it later, I thought. We have forty-six hours.

  I sighed. “So, you just want to be what—like, on a stakeout?”

  “Yeah, if we—no, if you—just smash and grab, anyone would just call the police. If you actually want to get this done,” he said, “we’re going to have to follow him out of the lab. And then wait. Patience.”

  Patience: something I was known to not have.

  Cal shifted the manual transmission into gear and the engine hummed reluctantly, as if cautious about what it was being asked to do.

  “Am I imagining things,” I ventured as he drove, “or is this a different boxy Volvo than the one you were driving the last time I saw you?”

  Cal seemed content not to elaborate as we passed the street-parked cars and neat houses in Mom’s neighborhood. “No, you’re right. I have a few.”

  I knew I had to trust Cal. I was in free fall, in an incomprehensible amount of trouble. Everything at once was too much to think about—I couldn’t. But when I considered Mom, Marty, what they would say if they knew, the sensation was vertigo.

  “Okay,” I said. “Let’s watch for a while.”

  I directed Cal to a metered spot on the road that lined the medical center parking lot. I knew that area very well, having waited hungrily there many times for Paolo to finish his day. For half a second, I swooned for the incomprehensible luxury of leisurely waiting for my boyfriend with a paperback on my lap, the challenge of reading by variable streetlight my most pressing problem.

  In my memory, I could still hear Paolo’s voice as he leaned into the car. Him asking teasingly, “Would you mind giving me a ride? I don’t live far from here.”

  The Volvo chugged to a halt. Cal cut the engine, took his phone from his pocket, quickly checked his messages, and laid it on the dashboard. He scanned right, then left, then looked in the rearview mirror a long time.

  “Anyone who leaves the lab comes out that exit.” I pointed to the silver, space-age overhang, curved like an enormous frown. “That’s the only obvious way in or out.”

  “You’ll recognize him?”

  “Of course,” I said. I hoped.

  Of course you will.

  We waited. People passed—purposeful shadows moving between cars—unaware of being watched. Cal settled into silence that he seemed content to maintain. The seat belt made a metallic clicking noise as I released it and settled back into the seat. I looked around. For an older car, it was impeccably neat. I thought back to the crushed cups on the floorboards of the truck I’d been driving, the spiderweb crack in the windshield, the exterior that had maybe never been washed. The Breathalyzer, for God’s sake.

  Half an hour passed. Occasionally, Cal popped a joint—his thumb, his shoulder.

  I was too wound up not to talk. About something, anything.

  “You seem to have a thing for Volvos,” I said.

  He answered evenly, “I started with just the one, then I realized I just kept working on it after it was fixed. So, I bought another one, parked it right beside the first. I kept meaning to sell one. Didn’t get around to it. I kept going from there.”

  Something told me getting around to selling the cars wasn’t a high priority.

  “Have you done it long?”

  “No, just since I got back.”

  He meant from the war.

  “It’s relaxing.” He shrugged. “I don’t know. I hung around the mechanics a lot on the FOB and learned a few things. It’s like solving a puzzle. Satisfying when you finish one. There’s something to show for your work. You fixed something. Somebody gets to drive away because of something you did. Besides, they’re very safe cars,” he informed me, as if this was a brand-new idea.

  My eyes glued to the building’s exit, I tried to recall whether I’d ever successfully fixed anything approaching the complexity of a car. “It’s impressive, for sure,” I said.

  “I know it’s not really conventional—living out on a farm, fixing up old cars. Most people think it’s pretty weird.”

  “You should hang around me more.” I laughed. I had to. “I make everyone around me seem pretty normal.”

  Talking like this was what we could do to not think about Paolo, or too deeply about what we were doing. We were quiet again, watching shadows. Fifteen minutes. Twenty.

  “Sorry,” he said. “I’m quiet. I’m not used to being around people that much.”

  “Well, we’re here. We may as well talk.”

  “I don’t talk much. I mainly keep to myself.”

  “Then you probably have a lot to talk about.”

  He looked at me.

  “Humor me. Come on, waiting is making me want to crawl out of my skin.”

  He thought for a second. “Are you gonna bill me?”

  “Totally,” I said. “Okay, so … the Marines. How long were you in the Marines?”

  “About eight years. Straight out of high school to pay for college. Which it eventually did, just not the most efficient route.”

  Only then did I notice the clear cord wrapped around the outside of his ear like a thick thread of fishing line. A hearing aid.

  “Where were you stationed?” I asked uncertainly. I’d done a VA rotation during my internship year but had been in a hurry to get to my work at the children’s clinic. What little I’d learned about military life and terminology had departed my memory like the forgetting of a dream.

  “Fort Hood, Fort Campbell, mainly. Then training—North Carolina, Georgia. But you’re asking if I deployed. Twice to Afghanistan.”

  His window was cracked, but he rolled it down farther. The bottom edges of the windshield had begun to fog.

  I wanted him to keep talking but didn’t quite know what to ask. “What was it like?” I said, eventually. I was prepared for him to snap back at me; I half expected it. But he pursed his lips thoughtfully, popped the knuckle of his index finger. I had the feeling that Cal’s resting pulse rate never rose above sixty beats per minute anymore.

  “No one’s ever asked me that before,” he answered.

  “Um, that can’t be true. Weren’t you
married?” The question sounded impossibly naive the instant it left my mouth. I wanted it back, but it was too late.

  A fraction of a smile, like a crescent moon. He shook his head almost imperceptibly. “I’d rather talk about Afghanistan,” he said. “Which was … crazy and mundane and everything all at once. It’s hard to describe to someone who wasn’t there. I know it’s strange, but in a way, I miss it. I don’t mean I want to go back. Really, I don’t and I wouldn’t. I mean, I have Olivia, but life there is simple. You survive. You follow orders. It’s one day, then the next day, then the next day. You do your job. It’s a lot easier than civilian life in a lot of ways. People out here in the civilian world are insane—there are no rules.”

  I didn’t want to say so, but I couldn’t help but think about what he was doing right then in that context. A part of me wondered what it was like to live day-to-day without feeling really alive. Another part didn’t have to wonder.

  “You had some hearing loss?” I asked.

  His eyes closed for just a second as the memory seemed to hit him, just a very long blink as it came back. He turned his head, gritted his teeth. “Yeah, I did.” Hard for him to admit, I could see.

  “Then you went to school after all, when you got back?”

  “Right into computers. The work was easier than what I’d already done. Sitting in the classrooms was hard. I was always watching the door, couldn’t talk to anyone. One day, one of the kids—because they looked like kids—he was maybe eighteen? Started saying everyone who’d served in Iraq and Afghanistan should be tried for war crimes and thrown in jail.”

  “You lost it?” I guessed.

  “Yeah,” he admitted, shyly. “I knocked over his desk, grabbed him by the collar. He looked terrified. I was in a blind rage; I’d never felt like that before. The professor called campus police. Nothing really happened—I explained what he said and they dropped it, gave me a warning. I sat in the back of the room for the rest of the semester, tried to finish as much as I could online after that. I’d reconnected with Olivia’s mom by then.”

  “I wasn’t going to ask.”

  “She’s something else. It’s definitely all about her. High school girlfriend, reconnected on Facebook. Amazing singing voice, and she knows it. There’s a reason we’re not married anymore. Two reasons, actually. Part of it was her wanting to tour all the time, and part was me, definitely. I try not to let little things get to me, but it’s a little like having two kids sometimes. Actually, softball used to be my place to just relax.”