Her Every Fear

by Peter Swanson

  But she did like the picture of her and her mum. They were shoulder to shoulder on the wooden steps, and they were smiling, but not toward the camera. They’d clearly been talking about something amusing. Kate liked the picture because she didn’t look anxious in it (it must have been taken at the beginning of the week), and that was probably why she’d kept it and hidden it away in the pages of her favorite book. It was something she often did with photographs that she didn’t know what to do with. Put it in a book, and maybe discover it later on. Or maybe not.

  Kate had a thought, wondering if Corbin put secret pictures in books to discover later, as she did, or even to hide them. And as soon as this thought passed through Kate’s mind, she knew that she would have to look through every book. It was the way she was. Once she fixated on something, she would need to see it through to the end. A year ago, she’d half recalled a quote from an Agatha Christie book, something about how all killers are someone’s oldest friend, but couldn’t remember what book it came from. Over Christmas, back in her childhood room, she’d scoured obsessively through every Christie book she had till she found it.

  Kate stood and went to the television, surrounded by its wall of books. The shelves were filled with airport thrillers and business books. Here and there was a stack of coffee-table books, stacked on top of one another so they’d fit on the narrow shelves. Like the books in the living room, these looked like they belonged to Corbin’s father, not to Corbin himself. Still, she wondered what she might find if she looked through the pages. There were a lot of books, but she had a lot of time. She knew she needed sleep, but she wasn’t really tired, not since being woken up by Sanders.

  She had to stand on an ottoman to reach the first book on the far left of the top shelf. It was a hardcover copy of John Grisham’s The Firm. Using her thumb she fanned through the pages, then tipped it upside down and shook it. Nothing. She replaced it and checked the next book.

  By the time she’d finished going through all of the books on the den’s shelves, she’d found many bookmarks, five receipts, all from at least ten years ago, and one cut-out magazine picture of Ashley Judd in her underwear that was folded up inside a paperback copy of something called Who Moved My Cheese?

  Kate sat on the leather ottoman. What was she looking for? A picture of Audrey Marshall with the words kill her in red ink across her face? No, but maybe something to prove that Corbin had some kind of personal life that he kept hidden, and possibly one to do with Audrey. So far, Kate had three accounts of that particular relationship. Corbin said they barely knew one another. Audrey’s friend said that Corbin and Audrey were casual hookups. And then there was the third account, from Alan Cherney, who claimed that Corbin was over at Audrey’s place a lot. Why would Alan lie about that? Kate believed him, or at least she believed that he believed it. He’d clearly been obsessed with Audrey Marshall, but she trusted him. And not just because she found him attractive and easy to talk to.

  She left the den and walked into the living room, now filled with milky morning light. It was dawn already. She checked her e-mails. Martha had written a long detailed e-mail back about Corbin. They’d met at the Beef and Pudding, then snogged, “just a little,” on a walk back to their flats, but Corbin told her he’d been tired and went alone into Kate’s flat. Martha hadn’t seen him since. “Does he have a girlfriend back there?” Martha wrote. “E-mail him and ask him. Pretty please.”

  That’s what I’m trying to find out, Kate thought. She was relieved to hear that Corbin seemed to be avoiding Martha, and that she probably didn’t need to warn her friend that the hot American might be a girlfriend murderer.

  Kate needed coffee but thought she’d get a start on the books in the living room first. There were many more in here than in the den, and the shelves stretched all the way to the very high ceilings. There was a sturdy-looking desk by one of the windows, and she pulled it over to stand on. Standing on the desk, she was just able to reach the top shelf, and pulled out the first dusty hardcover. As she riffled through its pages, Kate was struck by a wave of déjà vu that felt almost physical. Her knees buckled. She had a clear memory of going through the books on these shelves before. Of standing on this desk, and of the way her bare feet felt against the grain of the desk’s wooden surface. A bubble of anxiety formed in her chest. She said her mantra to herself and did her breathing exercise. The déjà vu passed, and in its place, Kate was flooded with the dreams of the night before. In her dreams, she’d searched through these books, as well. At least, that was what she remembered. Tipping the books upside down, their pages sliding out and covering the floor of the apartment, the pages filling the rooms like snow fills an empty swimming pool.

  Did I really dream about searching all these books, and now I’m doing it? Kate thought. And for one terrifying moment, she thought she was still dreaming. Then the feeling passed.

  She made herself coffee before going through the rest of the books. She must have checked hundreds before she finally found something of interest.

  She had reached a stretch of books on one of the low shelves that felt different, and Kate felt that these books—a lot of Stephen King, The Wheel of Time series by Robert Jordan, two Chuck Palahniuk novels—had belonged to Corbin. She went through these books more carefully than she had with the others, and it paid off. In a paperback copy of something called Ender’s Game by Orson Scott Card, she found three photographs of the same girl. It might have been the same girl from the photograph Kate had found earlier in the closet off the den, although it was hard to tell because these pictures were slightly out of focus, taken on a narrow bed in what looked like a narrow bedroom. The walls were white, and an unframed poster—a Picasso print?—was taped to the wall.

  In the first photograph, the girl, laughing, was striking an exaggerated pinup pose, propped up on an elbow, the photographer above her. She was wearing faded jeans and a pink camisole. In the next one she was laying back on the bed in a more natural position, her face now serious. Kate imagined Corbin’s—these must be his pictures—instructions: No, don’t be silly, just be natural. You look beautiful. She did look beautiful, especially in the third and final photograph. It was a close-up, her skin dotted with freckles, her mouth slightly parted. Looking at the pictures, Kate felt as though she was spying on something incredibly private, prying into a shared, and sexual, moment. She placed the pictures back in the book and replaced the book on the shelf, then quickly looked through what remained of Corbin’s novels, finding nothing.

  She leaned back against the shelf and closed her eyes briefly. She was exhausted, and not sure how much time she’d spent ransacking the apartment. And all she’d found was evidence of an old girlfriend tucked away in a forgotten book. What had she been expecting?

  There was a clock on the fireplace mantel, and Kate checked the time. Just past seven. Maybe she should get a quick nap in since she had her class today. She curled up on the nearest sofa in the living room, her head on a satiny, embroidered pillow. She closed her eyes and was almost immediately into a dreamless sleep.

  There was a knock on the door, three sharp raps, and Kate bolted upright. She stood, still half asleep, and walked toward the door. There was a mirror near the door and Kate looked at herself. Her hair, unwashed for a couple of days, hung lifeless and lank. She pushed it back behind her ears. She looked through the peephole; it was Mrs. Valentine, the older woman who had shown Kate the apartment when she’d arrived on Friday. Kate swung the door open.

  “Oh, Kate, did I wake you?”

  “No, no. Come on in.”

  Carol Valentine was swathed in a complex white sweater belted across the middle. “I won’t come in, but I wanted to invite you to our apartment for that drink. Any chance you’re free tonight?”

  Kate’s mind quickly ran through a number of excuses, but then she heard herself say: “Tonight’s perfect. I’d love to.”

  They agreed on seven o’clock, and Carol Valentine departed down the hall, leaving behind the scent o
f Jean Naté. That after-bath smell reminded Kate that she should probably take a shower at some point in the day, then she suddenly remembered that her class was starting that afternoon. She ran to her phone to check the time. It was just eleven. How long had she been sleeping?

  She showered quickly, then dressed in her best pair of jeans and her favorite sweater. The only good thing about wasting the entire morning napping was that she now had less time to worry about her first class, and less time to worry about the subway trip. She ate a hunk of untoasted bread with honey and butter, and had a second cup of coffee, even though she knew it was a mistake. Her skin was already rippling with anxiety, and she had begun tapping the pads of her thumb and index finger together in anticipation of the afternoon.

  She went to the bedroom and pulled her empty backpack from her larger bag. In her class confirmation e-mail, the instructor had said that there was no need to bring anything, that there were computers on site. Still, Kate wondered if she should bring her laptop. She decided against it, but grabbed her sketchbook from under the bed and put it in her backpack along with her pack of charcoal pencils. If she had time to kill, she could sketch, an activity that always calmed her down.

  She had to walk several blocks down Charles Street to get to the station she was looking for on the Red Line. The sky was half filled with fast-moving clouds, and when the sun shone through the day felt warm, like early summer. But when a cloud covered the sun, and the wind picked up, the temperature seemed to drop about twenty degrees.

  Charles Street Station was a massive structure made of glass, across a hectic intersection from Kate. She waited for walk signals, even though pedestrians in Boston darted across busy streets when there was any kind of pause in the traffic. Inside the station she bought a CharlieCard and put twenty dollars on it. It was easier than she thought it would be, and as she took the escalator to the outside platform, she was filled with a sudden surge of well-being. Here she was, in Boston, about to attend a class on InDesign. Life was good. And now that she was outside of the apartment, it suddenly seemed ridiculous how much she’d been obsessing about Audrey Marshall’s death and Corbin’s part in it. If he had been a genuine suspect, the police would have been back to search the apartment again.

  A train approached, rumbling to a protracted stop on the tracks. Kate stepped into the car and took an end seat closest to the sliding doors. About half the seats were taken, mostly by lone commuters wearing earbuds and staring at their phones. Two women in baggy, light-blue nurse’s uniforms had gotten onto the car with Kate. As the train pulled away from the station, one of them said something to the other and they both broke into a laughing fit. The train went over a bridge and Kate got a good view of the river and the Back Bay. There were sailing boats on the river, circling an inlet. Then, in a flash, the train entered a tunnel, the lights flickering. Kate shivered.

  The train stopped at Kendall Station. Three more stops and she’d be at Porter, her destination. Very few of the passengers departed at Kendall, however, and many got on. A man who smelled like fast food settled down next to Kate, his large thigh pressed against hers. She pulled her leg in and squeezed up against the barrier. A woman with graying hair but a relatively young face took hold of one of the grimy-looking bars in front of Kate. How old was she? Kate wondered if she should give up her seat and offer it to this woman, or would that be an insult. She decided to stay put. The doors shut with a hiss and the train rattled forward. She took a deep breath, but the air seemed thin, and she immediately began to tell herself what she always told herself in these situations. Let the panic come. It cannot hurt you or change you. She felt a little better. To do something with her hands, she unzipped the backpack on her lap and pulled out her sketchbook. She wanted to look at the drawings she’d done so far. She cracked the book. There was Alan Cherney, her first impression of him, and she thought she’d done a good enough job. Having spent more time with him the previous night, she now thought that his cheekbones were a little more pronounced, his lips just a little thinner. Later, she’d draw a new picture of him.

  She flipped the page and looked at the self-portrait she’d drawn, then quickly flipped the page again to look at Jack Ludovico. She stared. It no longer really looked like him, at least not the way she remembered him in her mind. Close, but the eyes were wrong, and the face had a different shape. How had she drawn him so wrong? Or had this been the way he looked, and she was remembering him wrong?

  She really studied the picture, her heart beginning to race in her chest. Now she was sure it was not the picture she had originally drawn. Someone had gotten hold of the book and changed it. No, she told herself, not possible. And if that wasn’t possible, then she’d changed it herself, gone back in and altered the features somehow. But why would she do that? And why couldn’t she remember doing that if she had?

  The train came to a rasping halt. There was an indiscernible announcement over the loudspeaker that could have been saying something about Porter. Kate stood and looked through the grimy window of the train. They were at Harvard Station, one stop away. Even more people were squeezing their way into the car. Why was no one getting off?

  Her heart hammering, Kate pushed her way through the herd of passengers and out onto the platform. Clutching her sketchbook, she gulped at the air as the doors shut and the train moved away.

  Chapter 19

  Kate made it to her class with five minutes to spare. After leaving Harvard Station, she was able to navigate down Massachusetts Avenue toward the Graphics Institute, housed in several rooms of a gray Victorian mansion. It wasn’t too far to walk, less than a mile. Walking briskly in the open air cleared her head a little, and she decided she’d overreacted to the drawing of Jack Ludovico. So she’d got his face a little wrong, after meeting him briefly. That was all. She’d just come to a new country, and she was jet-lagged.

  The class was easier than she’d predicted. She was worried that the instructor would have the students go around the room and introduce themselves, but as soon as she walked into the second-floor classroom filled with twelve stations, each with its own Mac, she was simply told to take a seat. The instructor, who had a southern twang and a large ginger beard, jumped right into an explanation of the tools of InDesign. Kate was slightly familiar with the program, having been shown the ropes by the art teacher from the hospital she’d been held at after George Daniels’s death. Kate had always been artistic. Her first great love had been coloring books, and she sometimes wondered if that would be how she’d spend her declining years as well, an old lady doing paint-by-numbers morning to night. Even from a young age, she realized that being lost in an art project, or even simply doodling in the margins of a notebook, was the one sure way she could relax. It turned out to be the same with computer graphics, once she got past her initial fear of not understanding the programs. She had become very good at Photoshop, and picked up some freelance jobs through a graphic design temp agency in South London. She’d decided that, for better or for worse, she’d make it her career. It was a far better option than becoming a portrait artist, which is what her mother had been pushing her to do. Doing someone’s portrait was inherently intimate, in a way that made Kate nervous just to think about. Plus, the chances of disappointing a client were somehow much higher when doing their portrait.

  After class, the girl sitting next to Kate, who was so tiny that Kate initially thought she was a child, introduced herself.

  “My mother’s English, too,” said the girl after hearing Kate’s accent. “English by way of Pakistan.”

  They walked from the classroom to the street together, then stood for a while, talking. Kate told the girl, named Sumera, about the apartment swap and the plan to live in Boston for six months.

  “Do you have friends here?”

  “No,” Kate said.

  “Oh my God. You are so brave. I’d never do something like that.”

  Kate laughed. “That’s the first time, and probably the last time, anyone’s called me
brave.”

  “No, you really are,” Sumera said. “I mean it.”

  “Okay. I’ll accept it.”

  “Where’s your apartment?”

  Kate told her that she was living just off Charles Street near the river, and Sumera said: “Did you hear about that murder over there? Some girl was killed in her apartment.”

  “It happened in my building,” Kate said, deciding to not add that it happened in the apartment next to hers.

  Sumera covered her mouth. “Oh my God. That’s terrible.”

  “How did you know she was killed? I thought the papers only reported that she’d been found dead.”

  “It was on Reddit,” Sumera said. “Check it out. It’s awful. Someone said she’d been split open.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I don’t know if it’s true, but they said she’d been cut open down the middle, like maybe it was some kind of surgery thing. It’s obviously some kind of serial killer thing. I mean it’s Reddit, so who really knows—”

  “I don’t know what Reddit is,” Kate said.

  As Sumera explained, Kate tried to shake the image of Audrey Marshall cut open. Until this moment, she’d not imagined the specific details of Audrey’s death for the simple reason that there were too many possibilities. But now that she knew what had happened, her mind was picturing it, and she wondered why she’d seen nothing—no bloodstains at all—when she’d snuck into Audrey Marshall’s apartment. Had that been a dream?