Valley of Shadows

by Cooper, Steven

  “You shouldn’t be on your computer and your phone so close to bedtime,” Kelly warns him.

  “So now you’re the boss of me? A digital cop looking over my shoulder?”

  “Something like that,” she says. “I think it poses more risk than eyestrain, Alex.”

  “Like what?”

  She pushes her papers aside. “We spend so much time in front of these screens. You know, laptops, phones, TV. Maybe the radiation causes cancer.”

  “Oh, I see what’s going on . . .”

  “What?”

  “Hon, you can’t necessarily find the culprit for cancer. Yeah, there’s smoking and sucking on BPA plastic, and you’ve done neither. That I know of.”

  She laughs. “You know what I mean . . .”

  “I know you want to know why, how, and all that. It could be genetic. But, in the end, you might never know the why or the how, and you better prepare for that.”

  “Where’s my sympathetic husband?” she asks. “And who are you?”

  He moves to her and pulls her to his shoulder. She rests her face there. “I’ve been here all along, as sympathetic as you’ll ever need me to be, but also realistic. I don’t want you going down that rabbit hole, OK? It’s a bad place for you. I’m here to keep you away from bad places even if you pretend you don’t need me.”

  She looks up at him. “I need you. There I said it,” she declares. “But it’s no different now than it’s ever been. I don’t need you any more or any less today or tomorrow than I did last week. That’s the amazing thing about us. We’re a constant.”

  He is on the verge of tears. “Can we go to bed?”

  “Best idea I’ve heard tonight.”

  Resting beside her, the night whispers anxiety in his ears, zaps him with doubt. The hum of night is not benign, not safe; it’s serrated and cruel. He says, “You scared for tomorrow?” When she doesn’t answer, he listens for a moment until he hears her breath. He looks over and sees the rhythm of her chest rising and falling, and he concludes that she’s fast asleep.

  30

  What gets him first are the sounds. Like an orchestra warm-up that won’t cease, the hospital is a cacophony of tones and rings and dings and beeps. Monitors, IVs, phones, elevators, carts. Everything. And they haven’t even made it beyond the pre-op suite.

  What the hell are those things dangling from her ears? Feathers? Tassels? Dr. Susan Waxler pulls her untamed curls behind her ears and says, “I’m glad we could fit you in. The sooner we can get this done, the sooner you can move on. That’s the way we like to think about it around here.”

  Oh, they’re peacocks. The surgeon is wearing peacock earrings. And she just announced Kelly is going to die. No. She did not announce that. She made an announcement, for sure, but it sounded like a list:

  birth date

  left breast

  lumpectomy

  procedure forty minutes

  sentinel node dissection

  pathology

  overnight

  recovery three days to a week

  “Will you be taking off the peacocks before the surgery?” Mills asks her.

  “Excuse me?”

  “The earrings? I’d hate for you to lose one inside my wife.”

  The doctor laughs out loud, stopping abruptly to tilt her head. “You’re serious,” she says. “If it would put your mind at ease, then yes, the earrings come off.”

  Kelly giggles. “Have you met my husband?” she says from the gurney, her words sluggish from a mild sedative. “Alex, this is Dr. Waxler . . .”

  The surgeon nods and acknowledges him. “Yes, I have. Are you waiting?” she asks.

  “Of course,” he says.

  “Have you met your wife’s oncologist?”

  “He came by earlier, when we first got here.”

  “OK. Just make sure her case nurse has your phone number in case you have to leave.”

  “I’m not leaving,” he insists.

  “Then just say goodbye for now,” the doctor tells him. “We’ll let you know as soon as she’s awake.”

  He leans over and kisses his wife and says, “I love you.”

  She smiles and says the same. Then he watches as they wheel her away. And he waits. And waits. And he studies his watch. And he studies the ceiling. And he ignores a call from Gus. Likewise a call from Powell. Then he thinks twice and calls Powell back, gets her voice mail. He stares at the ceiling again. He imagines Kelly’s breast. And the knife. The incision. Everything. An hour later, not forty minutes, not forty-five minutes, not fifty minutes—an hour later, someone comes to fetch him and says, “Everything went smoothly. She’s awake and doing fine.”

  It’s Dr. Susan Waxler without the earrings.

  He goes to see his wife, who looks up at him from the bed with a sleepy smile on her face. She says, “Hi.”

  He says, “Hi.”

  And he holds her hand. And she says, “You know I’m spending the night, right?”

  “I know.”

  “Just one night. I come home tomorrow.”

  “I know.”

  “So why don’t you go to work? Are you playing hooky?”

  Mills laughs softly. “I’m not leaving you. You know that.”

  She rests her head to one side. “Actually, Alex, I’d like to sleep,” she says. “I don’t think I can sleep knowing you’re here brooding. Go to work.”

  “I’m not brooding.”

  “Yes, you are. Go to work. I really want to sleep.”

  He hears a desperation in her voice, and that’s what makes him acquiesce. “I’ll be back for dinner. I’ll even eat hospital food with you, so you won’t feel so bad.”

  “The only thing I want to eat right now is a Pop-Tart for some reason.”

  “Can she eat a Pop-Tart?” he asks a nearby nurse.

  “Nothing right now,” the nurse replies.

  “Goodbye, Alex.”

  He kisses her forehead and her cheek.

  For the first few minutes in his office, he sits with the door closed. He can’t believe life can actually go on. Out there, everybody lives. They go to work, they do their food shopping, they sit in the barber chair, they fill their tanks, sit in traffic, meet for lunch, they plan weddings, they worry about money, they celebrate birthdays, they make deals and break deals, they head to the gym. They do this all day. Nothing stops. The machine doesn’t have a pause button for Alex Mills and his anguish. The machine is so fucking noisy with its laughter and traffic and airplanes and joy. No one notices the burdened or the grieving. No one notices the darkness or the shadows, especially not here in the Valley of the Sun. No one gives a shit. Not one shit. He has to screw on his working head now. He has to take off the husband head. This is going to be one fucking impossible transfer. He wants to throw up. He sees Kelly staring back at him from the photo frame and he gets that thing in his chest, that swelling of despair, that inflammation caused by the broken pieces of his heart—he feels it now, the fist in there beating him to a pulp. But nobody gives a shit. They’re pissed off the drive-thru is backed up. They hate their bosses. They need an oil change.

  Fuck!

  His phone rings. Gus.

  “Perfect timing,” he tells his friend.

  “Good. We’ve been misconnecting.”

  Mills swallows hard. “I know.”

  “You OK?”

  As he describes the latest news on Kelly and her cancer—there, he said it—he feels, with every word that leaves his mouth, better adept at breathing. The swelling of his chest has gone down. The words are practical, informational, tactical even.

  “It’s a process,” Gus tells him.

  “Exactly!” he cries. “If you were here I’d give you a big, fat kiss.” “Really?”

  “No. Probably not. But I love you, man.”

  “You too, Alex. And Kelly too. I think she’s going to be fine.”

  Alex stands up. Stares out the window. “Is that Gus, or Gus the psychic?”

  “Both,
” he replies. “My gut tells me this will be ugly for a while. She will not be feeling well. But I don’t think this thing will take over her whole body.”

  “Metastasize?”

  “Right.”

  “You’re an imaging expert and a psychic. How can we go wrong?” Gus laughs. “It’s actually more simple than that, Alex. I’ve been around Kelly long enough to pick up vibes. I just don’t see her body as metastatic.”

  “Oh, come on, man. That sounds far-fetched, even for you.”

  “I know,” Gus concedes. “But I’m just giving you my vibes.

  Speaking of which, do you have a second to talk about Francesca Norwood?”

  “I do.”

  Gus tells him about some kind of tunnel and says Mills should ask Francesca about it.

  “That’s not a lot to go on,” Mills says.

  “I know. But I think it will open a new conversation.”

  “Don’t worry. I have a lot for a new conversation,” Mills says. “Like a treasure trove of emails.”

  He describes the back and forth between Francesca and Viveca.

  “Wow. That is a treasure trove. Can you forward me a few of the emails?”

  “I can’t, Gus. They’re evidence, so I can’t send them to an unauthorized person. But we could meet somewhere, say, your house, and I could pull ’em up on my laptop and show them to you. Besides, they’re out of order and somewhat out of context.”

  “Understood. We’ll set up a time,” Gus says. “Now get back to your day, Alex. I mean really get back to it. You can stare at the world like you’re peering in from the outside, or you can go join the world and get some stuff done. Roll up your sleeves, man, and dig in.”

  Alex shakes his head to nobody or nothing in particular. “You really have to stop this, Gus. You know, this mind-reading thing.”

  And Gus says, “Goodbye, dude. I’m out.”

  Mills stands there holding the phone for a few moments after Gus is gone, letting the adrenalin surge.

  Gus is like lightning in the desert.

  How do you thank a fucking storm?

  You thank a fucking storm by gathering your squad in the conference room and adding another column to your whiteboard, which already looks like some kind of flight chart produced by the FAA.

  Mills starts with a debrief about the emails between Viveca and Francesca.

  “I have to talk to Francesca again,” Mills insists. “She obviously knows more than she’s telling us. I need to find out what she’s hiding and why she’s hiding it. What about emails between Aaliyah Jones and Viveca Canning?”

  “Still looking, Alex,” Myers says. “I’m sure they’re here somewhere.”

  “And the reporter’s phone?” Mills asks.

  “Company-issued,” Powell says.

  “Fuck,” is Mills’s response. “I think we’re going to have to go for a search warrant for her voice mails on her newsroom landline and the cell phone.”

  “Based on what?” Preston asks.

  “She’s missing!” Mills hisses.

  “Then it’s a Missing Persons thing,” Preston reminds him. “Let me partner with them. They’ll have a much easier time getting the warrant. We’ll get it done.”

  Mills paces. “What about the thumb drive?”

  “There is no way to tell unless we open it,” Powell says. “Catch-22.”

  “Nothing on the exterior to indicate it’s company-issued? A small engraving?”

  “No,” Powell says, moderately annoyed, it seems, that she needed to clarify.

  “Then we might be OK,” he says. “Let me check with Woods.”

  The room goes quiet. Mills can hear the quaint murmur of the fluorescence. Probably carcinogenic. Everybody seems to be pacing, seated as they are. Pacing with their minds.

  “Do you think we should have Clark Canning’s body exhumed?” Preston asks, shattering the silence.

  “The thought has crossed my mind,” Mills says. “If the county attorney goes before a judge with the emails, he’d probably get a green light to exhume. But not yet. That calls too much attention to itself. You know, a big, dramatic thing. I don’t want to tip anyone off.”

  “But you’d consider it?” Preston persists.

  “Yes. But first, there’s supposedly that email between Viveca and Gleason Norwood. I’m thinking that’s key. Before we go exhuming any bodies, we need to exhume that email.”

  He glowers at Morty, who stares back slack-jawed.

  “Wake up, Morty! Are you following me?”

  “Yeah,” he says. “You want me to find that email between Viveca Canning and the preacher.”

  That was like scolding a child for a crime he did not commit. And Mills instantly regrets it. “Thanks, Morty. I really appreciate all the hard work you’re doing.”

  The guy nods like a puppy dog, half no prob, half fuck you.

  The new column:

  Follow up

  Mills: Reinterview Francesca/Jillian/Bennett, See Woods re: Thumb drive

  Preston: With MP for Aaliyah voice mails

  Powell: Lab/Car, Lab UI fingerprints, other prints, Scottsdale/gallery security vid

  Myers: Cyber/email GNorwood<->VCanning, AJones<->Viveca

  Canning

  “I know it’s a Friday,” he tells the squad. “But for the rest of the day act like it’s a Monday. We have more work ahead of us than behind us.” He then takes his own advice and drives out to Paradise Valley, where he hits the drive-thru at a taqueria and continues on to the Desert Charm. If best-laid plans were truly best, this would have the element of surprise. But this was more of an impulse than a plan, and Francesca Norwood is nowhere to be found. This was not best, nor laid, but it was worth a try. The front desk won’t tell Mills whether she’s coming back or whether she’s checked out. Then he flashes his badge, which technically is useless in PV, and a manager comes forward and confirms that Ms. Norwood is still a guest. “We don’t have a check-out date on record for her.”

  Back in his car, sitting there in the shadow of Camelback, he knows he should continue his worst/unlaid plans and drop in on Bennett and Jillian Canning. Instead he calls the family attorney (he’s lost track of how many times he’s called the asswipe) and leaves another message requesting a meeting with both of Viveca’s children. Then, though he has more work ahead of him than behind him, he drives straight to the hospital and stands by Kelly’s bed. It’s a good thing she’s sleeping. He can hover with impunity.

  31

  Gus paces all weekend. Not physically—he doesn’t pace his living room or his kitchen or the cul de sac outside. He doesn’t swim laps in the pool either; rather, he goes back and forth down the hallway of his psyche knowing she’s with Cameron, knowing Cameron represents everything rock ’n’ roll that she loves, that she’s lived for, that he hates. She will be immersed. She will not call Gus. He will not call her. For the weekend, she’ll be under some kind of spell that no psychic powers could break. They’ll go to a Hollywood party or two, Cameron and Billie, and they’ll laugh, maybe even sing a song. Maybe they’ll smoke a joint. They’ll probably smoke a joint, Cam wink-winking at his sobriety. She’ll say pot is harmless. It won’t be a glamorous party. It will be old-school and simple. There will be wine and breezes on somebody’s incredible balcony.

  He doesn’t want to break the spell.

  He wants to figure it out. Whatever it is. It is something, this departure Billie has chosen, however brief. Searching that hallway, pacing from end to end, he doesn’t find an answer. He doesn’t find a clue.

  Kelly was home by noon on Saturday. She dove into her notes and files and began to prepare for closing without stopping for lunch. Mills forced her to eat. He slapped together a sandwich, poured a bowl of soup, and put it between her and her stacks of paper. She ate and studied without missing a beat. She was on fire. Mills understood the fire as her way to boldly reset the agenda: trial now, cancer later. So he sought to find a way this weekend to give her another distraction. During
a pee break, when she made a rare retreat from the notes and the laptop, he handed her the prayer book from The Church of Angels Rising.

  At first she had said, “Are you serious? You want me to read this nonsense? While I’m peeing.”

  “I think this so-called religion will be at home in the toilet.”

  “Really?”

  “It would be a big help to me. I can’t make heads or fucking tails of it.”

  Then he couldn’t get her to put it down. She brought it to bed with her.

  “Captivating?” he had asked.

  Kelly had nodded intently, too intently to even open her mouth.

  Now, on this lazy, idyllic Sunday morning—the coffee is on, the house is still, Mills hasn’t shaved all weekend—Kelly comes tottering out of the bedroom, the book in hand, and says, “Did you read the last section?” Accent on “read.”

  He looks up and smiles at his lawyer in PJs. “No,” he says. “And I can’t believe you did either. The book’s, like, 700 pages long.”

  “Six hundred,” she corrects him. “And I skipped to the last part.”

  “Of course you did,” he says. So like her to not suffer the foolishness of the filler and to get to the conclusion. He motions for her to sit on the couch beside him.

  “The whole thing is a scheme,” she says.

  “Yeah, Norwood feels very snake oily. It’s the typical megachurch, televangelist hoax. His flock hands over all kinds of money so he can live in a megamansion and fly a Lear Jet.”

  “He has a Lear Jet?”

  “I don’t know. Just speculating.”

  “Well, this definitely is not Christianity he’s pushing,” she says. “It’s like a religion he just sat down and wrote one day.”

  “As have many before him,” Mills says. “Maybe all of them before him. What did you find?”

  She’s not exactly on fire again, but there’s purpose and conviction written all over her face, and a quiet resolve burning in her eyes. “A schedule of fees.”

  “Fees?”

  “Yeah, like you see at the DMV,” she replies. “It’s very straightforward, nothing disguised.”