by Saul Black
Elspeth screamed.
Two small whimpers—then a full, piercing, wide-eyed horror-movie scream.
She sat up, shaking, crying, hands over her face.
“Honey, it’s okay, it’s okay,” Rachel said, having been wrenched awake herself. “Baby…? Did you have a—” She saw Valerie in the doorway. Stopped. Frowned. Her face went tight with fury. Valerie held up her hands in silent apology. Backed out of the room. Elspeth hadn’t seen her.
Serves me right for being such a bitch to the nurse, Valerie thought. Shit.
It was almost twenty minutes before Rachel came out of the living room, alone. The TV had been switched on. Shrek. Comfort. Elspeth was being allowed to be a little kid again, to return to a time before anything ugly had happened to her. Since the murder of her father, Valerie guessed, Elspeth was being allowed anything.
“What the hell?” Rachel Grant whispered.
“I’m so sorry, Mrs. Grant. I just arrived.”
“What is it? You found him?”
“No. But we have something. Jenner was spotted not far from your place in Campbellville on the night of the thirty-first. It’s possible he was watching the house. I’d like to go up there and take a look around.”
Rachel Grant stared at her as if the information had frozen her into incomprehension. She opened her mouth to speak—then shook her head, and waved Valerie toward the kitchen.
“What do you mean?” she said, once they’d switched rooms. “How would he know about the house there?” She was standing against the island worktop, arms wrapped around her middle.
“Well, he knew about this place,” Valerie said. “And as I said before, Adam’s phone records show he spoke with Jenner several times. Obviously, we still don’t know what they talked about.”
“This woman,” she said. “That’s what you think they talked about.”
Not a question.
“We really can’t know,” Valerie answered. The kitchen was benign with sunlight. As it had been (she imagined Rachel Grant thinking) when Adam had photographed Sophia. On the worktop barely ten feet away. Her ass had rested there. Maybe they’d fucked right here, where Rachel Grant was standing. Valerie wondered if Rachel was already thinking of selling the house, getting out, starting over. A forced rebirth. She saw it in survivors, the realization that the life they’d thought established was gone, the future of vague plans and approximate certainties reduced to a blank canvas.
“In any case,” Valerie said, “I need to check it out. Do I have your permission?”
Rachel smiled. The same masochist’s smile Valerie had seen before. “It goes on, doesn’t it?” she said. “Even when there’s nothing left, it goes on.”
Valerie didn’t want to answer, since she had nothing but the truth to offer. But there was a bitter strength to this woman that demanded your honesty.
“Yes,” she said. “Unfortunately, it does.”
Rachel stared at her. Then said: “I can’t do this anymore.”
For a moment Valerie thought this was just an admission of exhaustion. Rhetorical, if so, since she knew Rachel would find the strength to keep going—for her daughter’s sake.
But she’d misread it.
“I knew about her,” Rachel said. “I knew about Sophia.”
And here we are, Valerie thought, in the short silence that followed, that point in an investigation when the camera angle shifts and you see a whole different side to the object you thought you knew.
She waited. Assimilated. Put the next question in its simplest form.
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
Rachel shook her head. Mild self-disbelief. Then self-acceptance. “Because I’m pathetic,” she said. “Because I don’t want Elspeth to know. Because I thought it was dead and buried. Because it still matters to me that people don’t think of him as worse than he was. Take your pick. The real reason is I’m such a fucking narcissistic egomaniac I’m still angry with myself that I forgave him and took him back. I doubt you’ll believe that, though it’s the truth. You can love someone so much it makes you ashamed of yourself. I didn’t tell you because it was an indictment that I wasn’t enough for him, and a double indictment that that wasn’t enough for me to kick him out. Astonishing, isn’t it?”
Again, Valerie assimilated. Astonishing? No, it wasn’t. Nick had taken her back when she’d done exactly the same thing.
“I understand,” she said.
“Sure you do.”
No point pressing that. Just get the facts. Valerie took out her notebook and pen. Carefully. Anything not done carefully might pitch Rachel away from saying anything more. “Tell me,” she said. “Let’s start with her surname.”
Rachel stared at the gleaming floor, arms still wrapped around herself. “I don’t know it,” she said. “I didn’t ask.” Pause. “She was a whore.”
Not figuratively, Valerie decided, but best to make sure. “A prostitute?”
“A dancer. Some strip club in L.A. Where the girls weren’t restricted to dancing, obviously.”
“Do you know the name of the club?”
“No.”
“When did it happen?”
“Two years ago. He was down there for a funeral. I’m sure you can imagine the narrative. Death. Sex. A heightened sense of mortality so you suddenly need to grab life. It would’ve been better for me if I didn’t understand. But that’s the curse of a generous imagination. I did understand.”
“Whose funeral?”
“An old college friend. Massive aneurism, totally unpredicted.” She glanced up and saw Valerie’s pen poised, waiting for the name. “Noah…” She searched, mentally. “Levine. I think the surname’s Levine.”
“You don’t recall the exact date, do you?”
“Summer. Early June.”
“Well, we can get the exact date. Did he go to the club alone?”
“He said he did.”
More CCTV joys. Some strip clubs had them, some didn’t. And how many strip clubs were there in L.A.? “Sophia” most likely a working name. Finding the real one would require a tax-legit establishment. And that was assuming she’d given them her real name to start with. Another needle in another haystack.
“But it wasn’t a one-off, clearly,” Valerie said.
“No. It wasn’t.”
“How did it continue? I’m sorry, I know this is—”
“I only had his word for it, but he said another four or five times. According to him, she moved up here not long after they met.”
“Still dancing?”
“Who knows? There was a limit to the details I wanted. I wasn’t interested in her biography. Just in what she did that I didn’t.”
And what was that? Valerie didn’t ask, since she knew. The photograph of Sophia tied, gagged, blindfolded. The old dreary story: sexual territory a marriage left unmapped. There was a sadness emanating from Rachel now, beyond the grief. Releasing this information had lowered her, with a strange, inevitable gentleness, to a new level of ordinariness. The ordinariness of imperfection. Don’t speak ill of the dead, we were in the habit of saying. But the dead had always been real people, and real people’s imperfections couldn’t be erased, even by death. The world was everything the world contained. Reality had no patience with the need for delicacy.
“How did you find out?” Valerie asked.
“He told me. It’s not as if I caught them in the act. Maybe if I had I wouldn’t have forgiven him. He knew me well enough to know that.”
“How long ago?”
Very wearying to Rachel, Valerie could see, to dredge through the facts, the dates, the logistics. There was a dull horror to it, that these seismic events in the heart were anchored to particular times, places, mundane details. Her husband zipping up his fly, afterward. The dismal plainness of small atrocities.
“He told me in the fall. October, I guess.” A pause. “I didn’t know he ever brought her here. He swore he didn’t.”
So that part of the shock when she
’d seen the pictures was real. She hadn’t known the sacrilege had gone so far, into her home, into her bed.
“Maybe he lied,” Rachel said. “Maybe he didn’t end it when he said he did. Maybe I don’t even get that consolation. Maybe I don’t get anything.”
Maybe you don’t, Valerie thought.
“Did you ever see her? In person?”
Rachel paused. Nowhere to go now but back to the truth. “Yes,” she said. “It was before he told me. A total coincidence, as it happens. I was pulling up outside his office and I saw him talking to someone in a car parked half a block down. A glimpse. Nothing, really. Just the blond hair and too much makeup. I suppose if I’d been blond he’d have gone after a redhead.”
Or a brunette, Valerie thought. Like me. Maybe he sensed I didn’t want to be tied up and blindfolded and gagged. Her own guilt bristled anew. How could it not? It could have been her. It had been her, up to a point. And here was the evidence of what that would have done to his wife. The questioning now felt bankrupt. The words were unclean in her mouth.
“By the time I parked she’d gone and he was back in the building,” Rachel continued. “I asked him about her, of course, teased him in that idiotic way, when you make light of something because you can’t let it be anything. He said it was a client. That was all.”
“You weren’t suspicious?”
“Not really. Things were good between us. I had the great reservoir of false confidence.” She smiled again. “And then later you find out, see the dots join with comical obviousness. It’s like your own stupidity’s been with you the whole time, walking right next to you, but you’ve only just turned and noticed it. You think your life’s immune to cliché. Turns out it isn’t.”
“You don’t happen to recall the car she was in, do you?”
“No. Black, I think.”
“Sedan? RV? Compact?”
Rachel fought through tiredness for the memory. “Sedan, I guess. I don’t know.”
Valerie was on the verge of asking if Adam had taken his mistress to the Campbellville house—but she abandoned it. It wouldn’t make any difference. And in any case Adam might have lied.
“Is there anyone else who might have known about the affair? A close friend of Adam’s? A work colleague?”
Rachel shrugged. “He told me no one knew about it,” she said. “But then he told me he never brought her here and that was a lie. His friends were his work colleagues. Maybe he told Dan.”
“Dan Kruger?”
Rachel nodded.
“Is there anything else you can tell me about this woman that might help us find her?”
“Not that I can think of.”
Valerie closed the notebook and put it away.
“I suppose this is all going to come out in court,” Rachel said. “If there’s ever a trial. If you ever get Jenner and…” She left it unfinished, defeated, Valerie thought, by the sheer sordidness: If you ever get Jenner and it turns out he and my husband were fucking the same woman.
“It might not be necessary,” Valerie said, desperate to give her something. “As I said before, the physical evidence is overwhelming. We just have to find him. That’s the only reason Sophia’s material. It’s possible she knows where he is. There’s no reason to think beyond that.”
Bullshit, of course, and Rachel’s face said she knew it.
“It’s for Elspeth’s sake. For myself I’m past caring. As you can probably tell.”
Quite, Valerie thought. Rachel looked as if, for herself, she didn’t care if she lived or died.
“I’ll do everything I can,” Valerie said. “I promise you it’ll be kept out unless it’s crucial to securing a conviction, which at this stage I don’t think it will be. In the meantime, I still need to take a look at the Campbellville house.”
Rachel eased herself away from the island with a wince. “Come with me,” she said. “I’ll give you the keys.”
23
The Grants’ country house was a couple of miles east of the small town of Campbellville, a roomy, two-story place set in an acre of evergreen woodland. White-graveled driveway at the front, a wildflower garden with a few dwarf apple trees at the back. At the rear of the garden a grand sycamore with a rope swing, the pleasures of which Elspeth had probably long since traded for inane hours on her cell phone or iPad.
Inside, the house was a smaller and more homely cousin to the one in the city. Appliances and furnishings still displayed West Coast professional wealth (as did the mere ownership of a second home, obviously), but without the urban residence’s visible straining for minimalist chic. It looked, in other words, comfortable. Original stripped-oak floors and a kitchen in which you could actually imagine someone cooking. The common denominator was books. The smallest of the downstairs rooms (with a view into the backyard) was walled in them, an eclectic selection ranging from classics to popular science, with a lot of what Valerie assumed (she had to assume, since she didn’t read anything these days) was serious or “literary” fiction in between. Rachel’s domain, she figured, recalling Vincent Lyle and the insomniacs’ reading club he and Rachel shared, waving to each other in the small hours.
In gloves and shoe guards Valerie spent three hours going through the place, top to bottom. It satisfied her insatiable snooper’s appetite—but she found nothing. No locked drawers, no hidden photographs, no diaries (although there was a desktop computer that would have to be trawled), no evidence that Dwight Jenner, or Sophia, for that matter, had ever been in the place. She hadn’t expected any other result. There was, naturally, an alarm system (Rachel had given her the entry code) linked to the security company, but it was unsupported by CCTV. If Jenner had been inside he’d either had the code or been let in. The only way to know for sure would be to get a team up here and dust for prints. Should have done that in the first place. But there would have been a wait, and she was impatient. Impatient and (let’s be honest, Valerie) overinvested in her own occult intuitions, her ability to pick up what patrol officer Niall Fox would have called the Vibe.
Well, she thought, closing the front door behind her, so much for that.
She checked the time. 6:18 P.M. Traffic on I-5 would be moving like molasses. Fuck it. There was an acre around the place and more than an hour of daylight. Might as well take a stroll.
In the rest stop footage, Jenner had bought a pack of Marlboros, so Valerie kept her eyes trained on the ground for a telltale butt. Movie-inherited optimism. She found none. Tire tracks in the drive she told herself would only turn out to belong to the Grants’ vehicles. Away to the right a rough, narrow trail led into the trees. She followed it.
Daylight didn’t count for much in here. The dry smell of the evergreens was pleasant, like an old wardrobe. Again she thought of Elspeth. This place would’ve been an enchantment to her a few years back, bottle-green light, fairies in the ferns, adventures beckoning. Valerie’s own childhood had been imaginatively rich, courtesy of mild Catholicism and her grandfather’s penchant for cooking up outlandish and religiously incorrect mythologies. The Pope, he’d told her, was visited by the Holy Spirit, who told him what rules to make for the Church. To Valerie the Holy Spirit was the white dove of traditional iconography. According to her grandfather there was a secret dumbwaiter in the Pope’s bedroom in the Vatican, a narrow shaft that reached all the way up to heaven. Sometimes His Holiness woke to the sound of beating wings. A message from the Dove! It had all made perfect sense to her. Unfortunately it had also made perfect sense to her that, as further according to her grandfather, a deformed goblin lived in their hot water tank, and that the occasional noises emanating from there were sounds of him trying desperately to get out and come for her. She had no clue what this creature could have against her, but it didn’t stop her living in fear of its eventual escape and her own mysteriously deserved destruction.
She smiled, remembering. She’d been awed and terrified by her grandfather’s revelations, but always went back for more. Grown-ups were compelled to f
righten children, she theorized now (as the trees thinned ahead of her), a narrative inoculation to lay the psychological groundwork for the realities of adulthood, in which the world would sooner or later turn out to be a frightening place. Get used to fear now, kiddo, because there’s plenty to be afraid of coming your way.
Would she do that if she had a child of her own?
She stepped out of the undergrowth into fresher air—and found herself on the shore of a small lake. The path, apparently, circled it. Maybe fifteen minutes to walk around. Annoyed that her mind had wandered (back to children again, parenthood, for Christ’s sake give me a break), she set off with renewed dedication to scouring the ground, a rationalization she was well aware was growing more risible by the second.
More than fifteen minutes, it turned out. The lake’s circumference was deceptive. Nonetheless she found herself back where she’d started with nothing to show for her walk.
The sun was lowering toward the tree line on the opposite bank, but a shaft of late light fell on the turf and shingle around her. She lifted her chin and closed her eyes, enjoying the warmth. Then she turned to head back to the house.
Something glinting in the short grass caught her eye.
Without any expectation (she’d resigned herself to the fruitlessness of this sojourn) she stepped over to see what it was.
At the last instant, excitement having almost eclipsed the protocols, she remembered to pull on fresh gloves.
Then she bent and picked it up, carefully.
It was a man’s wristwatch.
24
Skeleton crew at the station by the time she got back, around 10:30 P.M. Laura Flynn and Rayner Mendelsund were at their desks, both with a look of resigned night-shift misery. Everyone hated it, the quiet, the coffee, the fluorescents’ reflection in the black windows, the thought of all the other San Franciscans out there, drinking, watching TV, relaxing. Or worse, committing some crime that would, with the ring of a phone, come their sleep-deprived way.
