Till the Dust Settles

by Pat Young

  ‘Doesn’t matter what she wants. She’s my wife. It’s her duty. She took a vow to love me, in sickness and in health. You heard her. You were there when she said it.’

  ‘Yep, I was there. I heard you vow to love and cherish her too. Look how that turned out.’

  ‘Dylan, don’t be a smart-ass. Help me or don’t help me. I’ll find her. And when I do, well, I’ve got a pretty good idea that’ll convince her to stay. And a backup plan if she refuses.’

  Dylan could think of one, but not the other. ‘Yeah, what’s that?’ he said.

  ‘If she won’t stick around to help me, I’ll threaten to turn her in to the cops.’

  ‘And the backup plan?’

  ‘Trust me, you don’t want to know.’

  18

  Cleaners. Lucie had been dreading something like this. It was bound to happen sooner or later. Women like Charlotte Gillespie didn’t usually soil their hands performing their own domestic duties.

  ‘Rob? Tell them thanks, but I don’t need any cleaning done today.’

  ‘Sorry, Ms Gillespie. They’re already on their way up. I checked their ID, don’t you worry. It’s all good.’

  ‘Can’t you stop them, Rob? I don’t feel well.’

  The doorbell rang. Lucie stopped breathing. She hung up the intercom handset and listened to the voices outside the door. It sounded like a football team. So many voices, all male. One of them was bound to know Charlotte. If Lucie let them in, it was game over.

  She wouldn’t answer the door. They’d get fed up waiting and go away, eventually, thinking no one was home.

  The bell rang again.

  This was stupid. She dragged her hair out of its ponytail and pulled it forward onto her cheeks and forehead. Raising one hand to her face she opened the door with the other.

  A bunch of young guys stood in the hall, the United Nations in white overalls, armed with brushes, mops and crates of cleaning products. Each wore a broad smile and a cap with the logo ‘K n K’.

  ‘Kleer n Kleen at your service, ma’am,’ said a short, wiry guy who looked a bit older than the others. He gave a small salute and marched in past her, his colleagues trooping at his heels.

  Lucie held her arms out to try and keep them at the door. ‘Hold on,’ she said, ‘I don’t really need any cleaning done, thanks. Can you come back next week?’

  ‘Sorry, ma’am,’ said the leader. ‘The only paperwork we got is for today.’ He produced a sheet of pink paper from his hip pocket and waved it at Lucie. ‘Don’t say nuthin’ about next week. We’ll be outta here in two hours, max.’

  Lucie decided the easiest thing would be to let them go ahead. What harm could it do? If they wanted to clean an already clean apartment, well, fine.

  ‘Hey, Boss? Lady watching TV. What we do?’

  ‘Ma’am? We can leave this room till last, if you prefer. Or were you planning on leaving now we’re here?’

  Lucie shrugged and shook her head. Before she could ask him to explain, another cleaner emerged from the bedroom.

  ‘Should I get the cartons, Chief?’

  ‘Yeah, and take Zak with you.’ He looked around the room and said, ‘There’s a lot of stuff here.’

  This was making no sense at all. But at least nobody was paying her any undue attention. All she had to do was bide her time. They’d soon be gone. Lucie sat down, grabbed a handful of popcorn and tried to pick up the storyline of episode two.

  When the guys came back with the paper boxes, Zak paused by Lucie’s side and pointed at the TV. ‘Yay, the one where Stanford introduces Carrie to Derek. Love it.’

  Lucie offered him the popcorn but he shook his head. ‘Sorry, boxes to pack.’

  The credits were running when Lucie thought about what he’d said. ‘Boxes to pack’? She ran to the bedroom. The bed had been stripped bare, its pillows and throws stuffed into a box which Zak was about to close and tape. Two ‘cleaners’ had made a good start on clearing Charlotte’s beautiful clothes from the shelves in her closet. One was piling sweaters into a carton while another had begun to remove shoeboxes from their stacks on the back wall.

  By the tall cabinet where Charlotte kept her lingerie a huge guy with a beard was holding a lacy bra and tiny scarlet panties against his overalls.

  ‘Hey, look, Marco,’ he joked, ‘just your style.’

  ‘What are you doing?’ asked Lucie.

  Like a guilty schoolkid, the lingerie guy hid his hands behind his back and blushed.

  ‘Leave that stuff alone!’

  ‘Sorry, lady,’ said the shoe remover, looking up from his boxes. ‘Boss say everything go.’

  Lucie realised there was more to this than a weekly clean and polish. Trying to keep the panic out of her voice, she said, ‘Where is your boss?’

  ‘He in bathroom. Boss! You needed out here.’

  Lucie pushed open the bathroom door. The smell of bleach caught in her throat. Every cupboard and drawer lay open, empty and pristine and the boss, his face covered by a mask, was on his knees in the shower.

  Lucie pointed to the box in the middle of the floor, stuffed full of make-up, toiletries and towels. ‘What’s going on here?’

  Looking as if he wasn’t delighted to be disturbed, the boss stood up, removed the mask from his mouth and with a ping of elastic let it drop under his chin.

  Lucie repeated her question, a little less assertively this time, aware of how vulnerable she could be, alone in a house full of strange men.

  The boss gave a long-suffering sigh and pointed to the logo on his cap. ‘Like it says, ma’am. We’re clearing and cleaning.’

  ‘But you can’t.’

  ‘Look, lady. Why don’t you go watch your movie and give the guys a chance to work? We’ll be outta your hair before you know it.’ He smiled. ‘You going abroad or what?’

  Lucie struggled to find an answer that might make any sense at all. ‘What makes you ask that?’

  ‘Cos that’s what most of our clients do.’ He paused. ‘Well, not the dead ones, obviously. You going somewhere nice?’

  Lucie thought fast. ‘Meant to go to Europe, but with … you know?’ She left the rest of the story for him to make up.

  The man nodded, his mouth a slant of sad resignation. ‘Ah, 9/11. I get it. And now you ain’t going, huh?’

  Lucie said nothing.

  ‘And that’s why you don’t want us in here today, taking all your stuff away to storage?’ He looked at the box on the floor. ‘Oh man, we messed up. Why didn’t you say something?’

  ‘I thought you were just going to clean the place.’

  He suddenly rushed from the bathroom, pushing past her, shouting, ‘Guys! Stop what you’re doing. Drop everything. We made a mistake. Put all the stuff back where you found it.’

  Lucie could hear the groans, the complaints, one or two cuss words.

  ‘It’s okay,’ she said, keen to see the last of Kleer n Kleen. ‘If you guys empty the boxes and take them away, I’ll put my things back.’

  ‘You sure, ma’am?’

  Lucie nodded, trying to look as if she didn’t mind having an entire apartment to put to rights, when all she wanted to do was watch some TV and pig out on popcorn.

  One good thing came out of it, though. She found Charlotte’s laptop.

  Lucie had been a real technophile when she was at college but when the laptop she’d had as a student died on her, she and Curtis had been unable to replace it. Before money became too tight for such treats, she’d occasionally go into an internet café, buy herself a cup of coffee and log on to check emails. Eventually Lucie’s flow of mail dried up. She gradually lost contact with all of her friends and had no reason to log on.

  It was ages since she’d touched a computer. She unzipped the bag and removed a glossy new laptop, hoping she’d remember how to use it.

  The machine booted up a treat but then, of course, it wanted Charlotte’s password and Lucie couldn’t oblige. For what seemed like hours she tried, worried she’d guess once too
often and get locked out for good. No joy. She shoved the laptop in its bag and chucked it, in frustration, to the back of the closet.

  The sky beyond the glass wall was darkening towards twilight. Smoke drifted and mingled with the corals of sunset as though the whole city were ablaze. It was far too beautiful a backdrop for tragedy.

  Without TV to remind her, it would be easy to forget that only a few blocks away rescue workers were risking their lives to search burning rubble for survivors.

  19

  Lucie’s days started to take on a pattern. She rose when she woke and jogged for half an hour on Charlotte’s treadmill while she listened to Charlotte’s music on Charlotte’s Walkman.

  She showered and dried her hair, set a place at the breakfast bar, brewed some coffee from freshly ground beans and sat up to enjoy her first meal of the day. The food deliveries looked like working out well and she’d decided that soon she’d start adding one or two items she fancied and leave out things she didn’t enjoy. She was aware that changes would have to be made gradually if she were to avoid arousing suspicion, but the grocery boy seemed to take her at face value. She’d been brave enough to dispense with the disguise on his second visit and the young man hadn’t batted an eyelid. As far as he was concerned, she was Charlotte Gillespie.

  When she’d washed up her breakfast things she did some housework. Kleer n Kleen hadn’t got to the cleaning part before she’d flung them out and the apartment was in need of a little dusting.

  She was no closer to working out why Charlotte would want her place emptied and cleaned to a surgical standard. Putting everything back in its place had given Lucie the chance to explore nooks and crannies, keen to find out as much about Charlotte as she could. She’d come across well-organised paperwork relating to many of the financial aspects of Charlotte’s life and discovered that she owned her apartment. Lucie was relieved there would be no landlord snooping around, making inspections or looking for rent arrears. She’d also unearthed a little sketchbook, which seemed full of abstract doodles. Lucie was admiring Charlotte’s artistic skills when she noticed some pages had numbers and symbols incorporated into the drawings. With the fingers of her left hand crossed, she typed the first set into the laptop and bingo, she was in.

  A second series proved to be the passwords for Charlotte’s online banking. Statements showed a business account from which a staggering amount had been withdrawn just over a week ago. Lucie wondered what on earth Charlotte had bought with that much money. A house in the Hamptons? A more upmarket apartment, say, in Paris, France, or Monte Carlo? A checking account showed an outrageous balance and a monthly deposit that made her eyes water. It was more than she and Curtis lived on for a year.

  Every time Curtis came into her mind, she made a real effort to push him back out again. She was also pushing to the back of her mind any thoughts of what the future might hold for her. A hundred times a day she told herself to live in the moment and enjoy the predictability and pattern of this new life.

  What she had learned about Charlotte was that her wealth seemed to come at the cost of a love life. She was certainly unmarried. And if she had a boyfriend, he never stayed over. Nor were there any special birthday cards or gift tags with romantic messages. After Kleer n Kleen’s visit, Lucie had found a neatly organised photo album, but not one picture of a guy, not even Matthew. Plenty of girlfriends. Charlotte celebrating birthdays and baby showers. She’d been a very pretty bridesmaid several times but, as Granny would have put it, never the bride. An official race photo showed Charlotte finishing the New York Marathon. As she crossed the finishing line, arms raised in triumph, the clock on the gantry displayed an impressive three hours twenty. No wonder she looked so proud of her medal in the series of personal photos that filled the next few pages. At least one skiing trip was recorded and several sunny vacations featured a smiling Charlotte but there was no sign of a companion. Lucie wondered who had taken the photos.

  There was no album showing the happiest times in Lucie’s adult life. Even her wedding day had gone unrecorded, because she’d been afraid the baby was already showing. And there had been no skiing trips or sunshine holidays for her.

  She should have married Josh. He’d been really keen before Hurricane Curtis hit her life and laid waste to her plans. Josh was all that Curtis was not. Straight, floppy hair streaked blond from summer weekends at Martha’s Vineyard, skin a golden tan from crewing on his father’s yacht. Josh would be an expert in child medicine by now. She could see him with a perfect wife and two matching children, spending Sunday afternoons looking at dinosaur bones in the Museum of Natural History. They’d buy the kids books as souvenirs then go to the coffee shop and eat toasted teacakes before heading home for bath and bedtime stories.

  She’d hardly given Josh a thought in the almost-decade since she’d seen him. She’d only agreed to go out with him in the first place because she thought it might impress her father. To be honest, she’d found him a little bit boring, probably the reason why Curtis had seemed so enticingly dangerous by comparison. In reality, Josh was probably screwing his medical secretary nowadays. Or he was already divorced because his wife had an affair with the bohemian house-painter who’d come recommended by one of the friends she met every week for lunch. Those kids, if they ever existed, would be well past the cute toddler stage by now. They’d be pre-pubescent brats with braces on their teeth and ‘issues’.

  Lucie did a quick calculation. Because she did it so often, the answer always came easily. Her own sweet baby would be seven, had he or she lived. Lucie had never found out whether she’d been carrying a boy or a girl. The night she’d miscarried, the midwife had offered to tell her the sex of her tiny dead baby, but Lucie hadn’t wanted to know and Curtis hadn’t been there to ask. For some reason she’d always imagined a little girl, called Evangeline.

  Lucie plonked down on the white leather sofa and started to weep. She didn’t know for what or whom she was crying – a lost baby, a lost mother, a lost life. Maybe she was crying for all the lives that had been lost? While she was lucky enough to survive? Surely she shouldn’t be crying, she should be laughing and singing, dancing in her underwear, rejoicing in her new-found freedom.

  She dried her eyes on the duster. She was going crazy, stuck in this apartment with nothing but a TV and her own thoughts for company. She needed to see real human faces, not just the ones on television. It was time to get in touch with life again, before she lost her mind.

  20

  Dylan’s heart sank when he saw the open door up ahead. Yesterday, by the time he’d finished work and ridden the subway, the place had been closed for the day. He could have made it in time, but he chose to stop and check the posters of Lucie he’d stuck up anywhere he could get a space. Finding them again was like looking for a needle in a haystack and Dylan suspected some of Lucie’s photos had been removed to make space for other faces. It was hard to feel annoyed about it. Everyone was desperate for news of their loved one.

  As he’d scanned the rows of faces, looking for Lucie, he hoped against hope that one of his posters might have a message from her. A scribble that told the world she was safe.

  He’d spent so long looking he’d ended up in a mad rush. And when he’d found the address given to relatives searching for information he’d been too late. In truth, he’d been more delighted than disappointed to find the door locked. The longer he could put off knowing the truth the better.

  Every day Dylan prayed that Lucie might still turn up, alive and well. Even if she didn’t come back to Curtis, even if Dylan never saw her again. That was all he cared about.

  Curtis didn’t feel the same way. He was adamant they had to find out, one way or another. He’d shouted at Dylan for messing up the day before, and had accused him of deliberately wasting time so Curtis wouldn’t get the information he wanted. He’d even accused Dylan of knowing the truth and keeping it from him.

  The only truth Dylan was keeping from his friend was how much he’d like to
walk away and leave him to get on with it. This wasn’t the first time he’d asked himself why he put up with Curtis’s abuse. It had been a long time since Curtis was fun to be around. The easy-going, laugh-a-minute companion that Dylan had hero-worshipped since childhood had somehow morphed into a bad-tempered oaf who beat up on his wife. Not the type of person Dylan liked to spend time with.

  Dylan had other friends and had it not been for Lucie, he would have long since given up on Curtis. But Lucie had kept him close. At first it was so he could be near her and latterly it was to watch over her. Now he had to stick around in case Lucie came back and needed his support, if not his protection. Also, Dylan didn’t have it in him to turn his back on Curtis now. Even if he had brought his misfortune upon himself.

  The office was dingy and smelt of pine disinfectant and dust. A line of dejected-looking people straggled its way through the hall towards a counter and left by a side door. A child was crying and a woman hushed and soothed it in an embarrassed voice. A man on his way out sobbed openly, shaking his head as he walked towards the exit.

  Dylan stood in line and tried not to think the worst. Not everyone was being given bad news. A family passed him, hugging each other, their relief and joy clear for all to see. Dylan envied them their good news more than he’d envy a million-dollar win on the sweepstake.

  ‘Next.’

  Dylan stepped up to the desk.

  A woman with grey hair and a kind face greeted him with a weary smile. ‘How can I help you?’ she said.

  ‘I’m trying to find my wife, Lucie Jardine. I was told to come here.’

  ‘How are you spelling that, sir?’

  Dylan spelled out Lucie’s name and the woman noted it on a slip of paper.

  ‘Does she have any middle names?’

  Dylan panicked. He didn’t know.

  ‘That’s all right, sir,’ said the woman. ‘Can you tell me your wife’s maiden name, please?’