by Blake Pierce
“Where are you going in a hurry?” Shelley asked, as Zoe burst into the observation room, grabbed her coat, and turned on her heel.
“There is more investigation to be done.” Zoe was already halfway out into the corridor. “I am going to reexamine all of the evidence.”
“All of it?” Shelley shot to her feet and followed after her, managing to grab her arm and hold her still for a moment.
“Yes. Why would I not be thorough?”
By the way Zoe was looking at her, Shelley had a feeling that she hadn’t looked at a clock in a while. “Zoe, it’s late. We need to leave this for the night and get Dr. Applewhite to a holding cell. In the morning, we can start fresh.”
“We cannot leave!” Zoe gaped, seemingly horrified. “She is stuck in there until we clear her name.”
“I know, Z. But we aren’t going to get her cleared tonight. Besides, there’s proper procedure to follow. You can’t just leave her in for questioning all night long and pop in and out whenever something occurs to you.”
Zoe was deflating, her sense of purpose beginning to drain away. This was what Shelley had been afraid of. Though someone else might not have seen it, she could. Guilt was eating away at Zoe—and fear. Fear that she wouldn’t be able to do anything to get Dr. Applewhite cleared. For someone like Zoe, those heavy emotions could end up being dangerous, particularly since she had no real support network to catch her.
Shelley had to do something about that—and she wasn’t about to let Zoe go home and wallow in it. Zoe could be intense at times. There was really no telling what she would do with that kind of emotion rolling around in her head, given that she didn’t seem to have developed appropriate outlets for negative feelings. They just swum around, bottled up inside her. Maybe she was seeing a therapist now, but she had only been seeing them for a short while, and that wasn’t enough yet to make a real difference.
“Why don’t you come back and have dinner with me and my family, after we’ve finished up here?” Shelley asked, on instinct. That would get Zoe under her watchful eye, and might even cheer her up a little. There wasn’t a lot that could stop a unicorn-obsessed toddler from putting a smile on someone’s face, in Shelley’s experience. She would call her husband from the car and let him know to put on a bigger meal. He never minded having company.
“Have dinner?” Zoe repeated. “While Dr. Applewhite sits in there, alone?”
Shelley tilted her head. It was funny how Zoe could be so disconnected at times. When she cared about someone, though, she cared about them deeply. To the bone. She had a loyalty that could not be questioned. It was one of the factors that made her endearing, even if other people didn’t often see it. “Dr. Applewhite will sit in there, alone, whether you eat with me or not. Look, just come back with me, okay? I don’t want you going home on your own tonight. You need some company.”
“I do not wish to intrude on your family time.”
The response was stiff, and most people might have taken it as rude. They might have thought that Zoe didn’t care for, or want to meet, Shelley’s family. But Shelley was seeing through that exterior, and she saw someone who was confused, tired, and carrying a heavy emotional burden. Someone who felt so guilty, she was starting to think she was bad for anyone to be around.
Shelley couldn’t let her think that.
“You won’t be intruding,” Shelley said, smiling to prove it. She was going to look after Zoe, whether she wanted it or not. She needed looking after. She needed protecting from all the bad that was out there in the world, so much of which she had had to deal with already. It wasn’t right for her to go home on her own. “I insist. Come on, Z, seriously. I’m not taking no for an answer. Get your things together. You can drive there behind me and go home after. I’ll take care of the booking process.”
Zoe sighed, and Shelley danced a victory dance inside her head. “Fine,” Zoe said, her voice heavy with both reluctance and defeat. “I will meet you in the parking lot.”
***
Zoe pulled up on the road outside a two-story home in a suburban neighborhood, noting the presence of sixteen miniature fence posts around a small front yard and the four windows, each fitted with white blinds. She also took in the two cars on the drive—no doubt necessary for Shelley and her husband to keep their respective careers, with Shelley’s schedule being so unpredictable.
Zoe noted all of this and continued to look, because for as long as she was making observations, she wasn’t getting out of the car. And the longer she could stay before getting out of the car, the longer it would be before small talk and socializing and the chaos of a household with a young child.
She sighed to herself and disengaged her seatbelt, knowing that she was being childish. She just didn’t much feel like talking and laughing with a stranger when all she could think about was Dr. Applewhite, spending the night in a cell.
Shelley was waiting for her on a neatly manicured path that cut through the grass of the front lawn, her back to her own house. Zoe joined her, doing up the middle button on her suit jacket, trying to mentally steel herself for what was about to come.
“Don’t look so worried,” Shelley said, elbowing her gently in the ribs as they paused at the front door. “I’m not married to a dragon, and we aren’t raising a werewolf. Just normal folks.”
Zoe wasn’t about to admit that normality was what she was afraid of, since it was so often completely alien to her. Nevertheless, she followed Shelley through the unlocked door, and entered a warm space that was instantly filled with the sounds of cooking emanating from the kitchen.
Zoe took a deep breath of the air, scenting herbs and vegetables against the rattling of pans and hum of an extractor fan above a steaming dish.
“I’m home,” Shelley shouted at the top of her voice, making Zoe flinch.
She turned to see her colleague taking off her shoes and putting them onto a rack of five other pairs, and reluctantly did the same. Other people’s customs at home—it was always strange to adapt to them. Zoe had two cats, and there seemed to be little point in sparing her carpets the touch of her shoes. They were already susceptible to loose fur, tracked mud, cat sick, and whatever small pieces of animal they had not quite finished eating after dragging them inside.
At least, when they could be bothered; Euler and Pythagoras were rather lazy in their middle age, seeming to prefer the tinned meats she brought them from the store.
“Mommy!”
A small whirlwind of pink rushed into the hall from another room and quickly collided with Shelley’s legs. The young girl—who, Zoe remembered, was named Amelia—was quick on her feet, despite the fact that she must have been only just comfortable with walking and running. She held her hands up in the air for balance, until she could grasp onto her mother’s calf for support.
“Hi, sweetie,” Shelley said, leaning down to lift her daughter into her arms. “This is Mommy’s friend, Zoe. Do you want to say hi?”
Amelia took one glance at Zoe and then hid, burying her head in her mother’s shoulder.
Zoe watched with a growing sense of horror. Of course, the child would sense that there was something wrong with her. Children were intuitive. At least, normal children were. They knew when there was something off about a person. They knew it without being able to explain why.
Maybe Zoe should just excuse herself, back out, and go home. Her own mother’s voice rang in her ears with that old familiar taunt: devil child.
“Don’t be silly, you’re not shy,” Shelley chided with a laugh, bouncing Amelia up and down on her hip. “Come on. Say hello to Zoe.”
Amelia turned back with a grin, her blonde hair brushing over her shoulders. “Hello!” she exclaimed, the word not quite fully formed, but distinguishable.
Zoe hesitated. What should she do? The girl looked happy enough, smiling and giggling. “… Hello, Amelia,” she managed.
“Daddy’s making dinner,” Amelia announced proudly.
“It smells good,” Zoe con
ceded.
Amelia, seemingly happy with the way the conversation had gone, laughed merrily and wiggled her feet. Shelley took this as a cue to put her down, and Amelia ran down the corridor toward the lights and sounds of the kitchen.
“You remembered,” Shelley said, beaming.
For a second Zoe had no idea what she was talking about, until it dawned on her. “Of course. It is easy enough to remember your daughter’s name.”
“Not everyone does.” Shelley squeezed Zoe’s shoulder briefly, then followed her daughter down to the room that was mostly hidden past the doorway. Zoe could see that it extended to the right, but that was all. “Come on. Come meet Harry.”
Harry was a new name, but Zoe assumed that it must refer to Shelley’s husband—that was, of course, if they did not have a pet of any kind. Who else could it be?
She trailed behind Shelley, noting the presence of three framed photographs on the wall that each showed some variation of the family members in black and white, and into the kitchen. It opened up as she had predicted, some twenty feet along the whole of the back of the house, with an open-plan dining room on the other side. There were six chairs around the table, despite there being only three people in the family unit.
At the stovetop, there was a man standing with his back to them. He was six feet tall, and his back and shoulders were broad. He turned as they came in, brandishing a spatula that was coated in some kind of white sauce.
“Hey!” He grinned, as Shelley stepped forward to plant a kiss on his mouth. “You must be the famous Zoe.”
Zoe watched their causal affection with growing jealousy. They were so comfortable, as if they barely even noticed the value of what they had. Zoe had never been close enough to anyone for those casual daily kisses that were as habitual as locking the door or brushing your hair. All of the relationships she had managed were short, and went nowhere. She had never so much as lived with another person since getting her first flat as a teen.
“Hello,” she said, automatically, nodding a greeting. “It is nice to meet you.”
“You, too,” Harry said, turning back to his cooking while he talked over one shoulder. “I just love having guests over. I get to be a little more creative in the kitchen, you know?”
“You like to cook?” The green-eyed monster already stirring in Zoe’s chest took another leap toward life. Not only was Shelley married with such a pretty child, but she had a husband who didn’t mind taking on his share of work around the house?
“Well, with Shelley’s hours, she wasn’t always home to take care of it, so I learned. I have to say it’s become a bit of a passion of mine. Me and Amelia take some time on the weekends to bake together, don’t we, munchkin?”
Amelia giggled and joined her parents by the stove. “We made cookies,” she said.
“That’s right! We should have some after dinner. Z, you’ll love them. We still have chocolate chip and oatmeal left,” Shelley said, reaching to get down some half-full jars from a cupboard above the sink.
“That would be nice,” Zoe said distantly, already feeling herself disengage from the conversation. She knew that she wasn’t supposed to, but she was seeing that there were four cookies left in one jar but only three in the other, and that the cupboard contained seven other items before the door was closed, and that the joint on the door was slightly off by two degrees causing it to hang crooked, and everything was closing in on her.
Zoe didn’t have this. She didn’t have anything even close to this. She had one person in the world—just one. Not a parent, or a lover, or a child, but just one person that she could rely on and trust and always be comfortable with. Dr. Applewhite. And now she was in a cell at the FBI headquarters, waiting to go through further questioning in the morning rather than going home to her husband.
Dr. Applewhite’s husband! How he must have been feeling! He would be so worried—and that was Dr. Applewhite’s real family, wasn’t it? Don was a lovely man, but he wasn’t as close to Zoe as his wife was. He wouldn’t see this from her side. He would be angry with Zoe. He would blame her, even if Dr. Applewhite didn’t.
He would be right, too.
And here Zoe was, coming to the home of a colleague who was kind enough to show care for her at a difficult time—and what was she doing? Comparing herself, over and over, relentlessly. Studying Shelley’s family and her home, judging her. Finding herself wanting. The flame of jealousy over Shelley’s perfect life was twinned with one of shame, and it was all getting too much.
“I think it’s about ready,” Harry said. “I’ll start dishing up. Amelia, honey, can you get some bowls out for me? You want to help Daddy serve dinner?”
Zoe wasn’t supposed to be here. She didn’t belong. She was intruding on this perfect picture, staining it just by being there. She wasn’t the kind of good person that Shelley and Harry and Amelia were. She should have seen that from the beginning, should have stayed away.
She couldn’t stay now.
“I have to go.” She rushed out, turning abruptly and striding down the corridor.
There were fifteen steps to the door, and in the interim after her announcement there was a sudden silence in the kitchen. Then she heard the clattering of plates behind her, murmured yet hasty words from Shelley and Harry, and footsteps.
“Z, wait,” Shelley called out, coming rapidly closer as Zoe grabbed her boots and started to put them back on. “Please, stay for dinner. It’s cooked now. Just sit and eat, and you can go home right after.”
“I cannot stay,” Zoe told her, chancing a look up at her partner’s face. She regretted it immediately. By the way a change came over Shelley’s expression, Zoe gathered that she was showing too much of her inner turmoil on the outside.
Emotions were tricky. She wasn’t good at faking the ones she did not feel, like everyone else was. But other people were good at hiding them, too, and Zoe had never been great at that. It was only when she had her ice-solid mask on, the lack of any kind of expression, that she had ever been able to fool anyone. It seemed that her mask must have slipped.
“Just take a breath, Z. Please. I know you’re having a hard time right now, but that’s what I’m here for. We’re partners, right?”
Zoe, her boots now firmly in place, could not look at her. “Not here. Here you are a wife, a mother. I should not be here. I have to go.”
She turned away from Shelley’s pleading arms, opened the door, and strode away, unlocking her car as she went. She started the car without looking back and drove home, somehow not at all comforted by the thought of the microwave meal waiting for her along with her cats.
CHAPTER TWENTY
Zoe watched a streetlight flickering up ahead at the end of the block, at the intersection with the next road along. On, off, on, off, on. The pattern appeared random, but of course, it wasn’t. It was defined by the dying bulb inside it, or perhaps the flow of electricity in some damaged part of the light, or some other factor that Zoe was not aware of. If she had been an electrical engineer, perhaps she would even have been able to tell just by looking at it.
Of course, she was not an electrical engineer. As she walked an unfamiliar part of her neighborhood, her hands stuffed deep in the pockets of her coat and her breath clouding misty in the air, Zoe mused that it would have been an easier job. Fewer people to deal with.
She was not sure exactly where she was going, except for the fact that it had to be somewhere. Within half an hour of sitting at home, during which time she had managed only half a meal before starting to feel queasy, Zoe had become restless. Staying there was perhaps not as uncomfortable as staying at Shelley’s, but it still didn’t feel right. She had put on her coat and walked out the door, with no destination in mind.
The only thing she could focus on was Dr. Applewhite. Scenes played out in her mind, the two of them together. All of the many memories that they had shared over the years. Never once had Dr. Applewhite let her down or made her feel judged.
She was the one who
had helped Zoe start to see her abilities as something useful, rather than an evil curse. Even if Zoe had never yet really been able to embrace them, much less be proud of them, they had become something that she was able to use. She saved lives now. She stopped people from killing, minimized risk, foiled escape plans. She stopped innocent people from being targeted for crimes that they did not commit.
Usually, anyway.
The worst part of all of this was that Dr. Applewhite had been the very person to set her on this path, to help her settle on law enforcement as a career. To encourage her to develop and nurture those skills, make use of them. How wrong of her it had been to think that this was the ideal solution! She was likely regretting it now, Zoe figured. Sitting alone in that cell at the J. Edgar Hoover building. Maybe she was awake like Zoe, unable to get comfortable in an unfamiliar place.
Zoe remembered being young and isolated, a college student with no idea of what to do with her life or where to go. Studying almost aimlessly, just picking up credits wherever she could with no real thought of what they would mean to her future life. She remembered taking a meeting with Dr. Applewhite, when everything had changed.
“Have you thought about what career you want to pursue?” Dr. Applewhite asked, as she moved a pawn across the chessboard between them.
Zoe studied the board intently. She had no real interest in the game, but the challenge was to try and identify possible strategies. The numbers she could see on the board told her where each of Dr. Applewhite’s pieces could go next, how many moves it would take her to get close to the queen. How many of them were mathematically placed for a check, and how she could avoid those moves.
“No,” Zoe said bluntly. She had been even more blunt back then, though no one who knew her now would likely believe it.
Dr. Applewhite moved another pawn, though Zoe sensed her mind wasn’t fully in it. If it was, then she would not have made such an obvious move. “I think it’s important for you to find a sense of purpose in what you do. Have you considered a career where you might help people?”
