by Lisa Unger
9
In my mailbox at home there was a postcard from my father, sent apparently from their port of call in Positano. Having a wonderful time! it read in my father’s sharp, scrawling hand. Thinking of you as always. The thought of them traipsing around Europe snapping photographs and mailing off postcards, frankly, made me sick. I threw the postcard in the trash, poured myself a glass of wine from the half-empty bottle on the counter, and played my messages. I had an uneasy feeling, found myself looking around my apartment, peering through the doorway into my dark bedroom.
“Hey, it’s me.” Jake. “Can we get together tonight? Come to the studio around eight if you feel like it. We’ll go to Yaffa. Or wherever.”
I looked at my watch. It was six-thirty. I was hungry and lonely and considered heading downtown to meet him.
Beep.
“It’s me.” A low male voice, smoky and depressive. Ace. “Haven’t talked to you in a couple of days. I’d like to see you. I have some things on my mind.”
Great. Another catalog of indictments his shrink was encouraging him to bring up against my parents—and me, I’m sure.
“Yeah,” I said to my empty apartment. “Looking forward to it.” I suddenly had the horrible thought that I’d liked my brother better when he was a junkie. Though he’d been equally depressive and blame-laying, he wasn’t nearly as self-reflective.
Beep.
“Hey, there, it’s Dennis. It was nice to hear your voice. Give me a call back when you can.” That Times sportswriter I dated briefly. He sounded enthusiastic. I knew he worked late usually, so I took a chance, went into my office, looked up his number, and gave him a call. I forced myself to sound light and flirty when he answered, gave him the same spiel I gave Jenna about wanting to return Myra Lyall’s call.
“A very weird, scary thing,” he said when he’d finished telling me basically all the same stuff Jenna had revealed.
“That’s terrible, Dennis,” I said. I let a beat pass. “Do you know her assistant well? I got a call from her as well—what’s her name again?” Lie.
“Sarah Duvall.”
“Right.”
“Yeah, she comes out for drinks every once in a while with my crew. Nice girl. She’s a bit adrift at the moment. No one knows if Myra is coming back, but no one wants to admit that she isn’t, so Sarah’s in a kind of professional limbo. It’s been weird for her.”
There was an awkward silence on the phone. I remembered how Dennis and I went out together one night and he got so drunk over dinner at Union Square Café that he halfway passed out against the wall at a club we visited later. I literally had to support him as we stumbled to the street and deposited him in a cab while he tried to lick my neck. It was a bit of a turnoff.
“So…” he said finally. “Feel like getting together?”
“Sure,” I said. “Let me look at my schedule next week and I’ll give you a call back.”
“Great,” he said. “I’ll look forward to it.”
We hung up, both of us knowing that I had no intention of doing any such thing.
I had a strange sense of unease as I hung up the phone, as if there were eyes peering at the back of my neck. I spun around in my chair and confronted the emptiness behind me. I walked through my apartment, but there was nothing I could point to, nothing I could say might have been moved. I wondered if I was being paranoid, but something just didn’t feel right. The energy was off and I couldn’t wait to get out of the apartment.
I HEADED DOWNTOWN, deciding to walk. So I went south on Park Avenue South and cut through Madison Square Park at the point of the Flatiron Building, to Broadway. I went down Broadway, and then east on Eighth. I do all my best thinking in motion through the city. It energizes me, the noise and all the different personalities of each neighborhood. And as the self-conscious fanciness of Park Avenue South morphed into the bustle of Broadway and then into the familiar grit of the East Village, I thought about my time at Max’s apartment today. I tried to put my head around things, like the red website and the book of matches, the ghostly scent of Max and the wet bathroom, the call from Myra Lyall and her disappearance, the wiping of the Times servers, the things Jenna had told me. It gave me a headache, ratcheted the tension in my shoulders. The more I thought about these things, the foggier my head got, the more nebulous and vaguely menacing it all seemed. And then there was Agent Dylan Grace, his strange and threatening appearances, his hasty retreats.
“What’s happening?” I asked, saying it aloud without realizing. My own words startled me but no one on the street around me seemed to notice. The sky had gone dark and the air had grown colder. I wasn’t dressed warmly enough, as usual. I felt my phone vibrate in my pocket and I withdrew it with a stiff, cold hand gone pink from exposure. There was an anonymous text message. It read: The Cloisters. Tomorrow. 8 PM. Trust no one.
I WAS STILL shaking when I pushed through the studio door. I hadn’t stopped to think why it might be open as I bolted up the dark, narrow staircase and stepped into the large loft space. I felt as if someone was pursuing me, though I’d seen no one suspicious on the street. I could barely control my breathing and had to stop a minute. The studio was dark, the only light coming from Jake’s small office off to the left. I felt for the switch on the wall to my left and tried to turn on the lights but nothing happened. The space was an old warehouse, nearly windowless and bare; the electricity failed as often as it worked.
“Jake,” I called when I had my wind back. No answer. I moved past the large covered forms of his sculptures; they were as familiar to me as a gathering of friends—the thinking man, the weeping woman, the couple making love—though tonight each of them seemed weird and angry. For a moment I imagined them coming to life beneath their white sheets.
I moved past them quickly, toward the light coming from Jake’s office. I expected to see him hunched over his laptop, headphones blasting over his ears, oblivious to my arrival as usual. But the small room was empty. His laptop hummed. I walked over to the desk. A cup of coffee from the pizzeria downstairs was cold.
I sat down in the chair and rested my arms on the desk, my head on my arms. I could still feel my heart beating in my throat. But in the familiar space, I started to feel safer, calmer. After a few minutes, I sat up to take my phone from my pocket and look at the text message again. In doing this, I jolted Jake’s laptop. The shooting-stars screen saver vanished and it took me a second to register what I was seeing. It took another second after that to believe it.
It was the same red screen I’d been staring at on and off at my own computer. The same website. Except now there was a small window open in the upper right-hand corner of the page, some kind of streaming video of a busy street corner bustling with chic pedestrians. I leaned in closer. It only took the flow of traffic for me to identify the city—the fat black taxis, the towering red buses. It was London. The low brown buildings, boutique shop windows, and street cafés made me think it was SoHo, possibly Covent Garden.
I watched. It was night, the street lit by orange lamplight. People were dressed warmly, walking quickly. If the webcast was live, it would be after midnight. The people looked young, were mostly in groups it seemed, maybe heading home from the pubs, from late-night drinks after the theater. I moved my face close to the screen, looking for I don’t know what. I half-expected to see the shadowy form I had seen in the photographs that had started all of this. But there was nothing to see, just groups of jovial people, hurrying from one place to another in the cold evening.
After a while, I leaned back in the chair and rubbed my eyes, which had started to sting and tear.
“What am I seeing here?” I asked myself aloud. “Why would Jake have this on his computer?
A soft sound from the loft space was my only answer. That’s when it occurred to me that the door downstairs had been unlocked. In all the time I’d been coming here, that door had been unlocked only once. I felt my throat go dry as I got up slowly and walked toward the doorway that separate
d the loft and the office. I noticed that the high narrow window, the only window in the place, was open. The night had turned windy and the breeze blowing through the window rustled the white covers over Jake’s sculptures. It took only a second for me to identify with relief that this was the sound I’d heard. In the movement of the air the covered forms looked like a population of restless spirits, rooted to the ground but dreaming of flight.
I scanned the room and my eyes fell on something else: a large black kidney-shaped stain on the floor near the standing artist’s lamps that Jake turned on when he was working. Beside the stain was the hammer he used to bend and shape the metal. I walked slowly toward it, wary of the rustling shapes behind me, my right ear (my stress alarm) buzzing loudly. I reached up the thin metal rod that held the light, felt for a switch and found one. Though the ceiling lights hadn’t come on, this one did. The glaring white from the bulb made me blink. It took my eyes a few seconds to adjust.
When they did, I could see that the stain wasn’t black, of course, but deep red. Blood. Too much of it to be healthy for anyone. I stepped back. The room tilted unpleasantly.
There was thunder then, a distant and insistent pounding. I thought it might be coming from my own head, but eventually I recognized it for what it was: the sound of footfalls on the stairs. I was in a kind of shock, lost in a place of fearful imagining of the scene that might have left that stain on the floor, wondering whose blood it was, praying that it wasn’t Jake’s. I turned to see a man charging up the stairs, gun drawn. Every instinct told me to run, but there was only one way out of the loft.
And then I heard my name: “Ridley?” It was a voice I recognized.
When he stepped into the light, his face looked softer and kinder than I had known it; not arrogant, not full of some secret knowledge. Agent Dylan Grace.
“RIDLEY,” HE SAID, putting his hands on my shoulders. “Are you okay?” His eyes moved to the bloodstain on the floor. “Are you hurt?”
“No,” I said. “No.”
“What’s happening? Why are you here?” he asked. I wanted to break away from the intensity of his gaze. I started to struggle against the grip he had on my shoulders, but he held me fast, forced me to hold his eyes.
“Listen to me,” he said. “Esme Gray is dead. Witnesses place Jake Jacobsen at the scene around the time of death. Where is he?”
I shook my head. “I don’t know. There’s blood on the floor.”
I felt as if I was breathing through a straw. Esme was dead. There was a horrible amount of blood. Where was Jake? White spots bloomed before my eyes, a sickening fireworks display. I don’t remember much that happened for a while after that.
I HAVE TO ADMIT, I am prone to blacking out under extreme circumstances. It’s something I have recently learned about myself. If you’ve been with me since the beginning, you might remember this about me. It’s not a fainting or swooning. It’s more like a short circuit. Too much awful imput, too many terrified and confused thoughts, and poof!—lights out. But it’s not fainting. So stop thinking that.
My head was still reeling when I was aware of things again. I found myself slumped in the chair by Jake’s desk. Agent Grace produced a bottle of water; he cracked the lid and handed it to me. He looked sad, had dark circles under his eyes.
“Did you say Esme Gray is dead?” I asked, wondering if maybe I’d dreamed it.
He nodded. “She’s dead. Someone beat her to death with his fists.”
I thought about this; it brought to mind the horrors Nick Smiley had revealed, as well as my last encounter with Esme, her image of me with a sledgehammer, swinging at everyone’s life. That she was dead and that she had died so horribly were abstract concepts to me. It didn’t seem real and I felt nothing but a kind of light nausea.
“Not Jake,” I said.
He shrugged. “Jacobsen was last seen on her porch, pounding to be let in. About an hour later he was seen running from her residence.”
“When?”
“Earlier today.”
“Who called the police?”
“Anonymous caller.”
“But you have a positive ID?”
“Esme’s next-door neighbor recognized him from a prior visit. Apparently Esme had told her who he was, asked her to call the police if she ever saw him around when she wasn’t home.”
I shook my head. “If he was going to kill her, he’d have been more careful.”
“Unless it wasn’t premeditated.”
I shook my head again. I knew the heart of exactly one person in the world. Yes, I knew the sadness and the rage that dwelled there, but I also knew the sheer goodness of him. I knew Jake. No way.
It still hadn’t sunk in that Esme was dead. Later I would grieve her and everything she was to me once. Now all I could think about was Jake.
“Trust me,” I said. “I know this man. There’s no way he would ever kill Esme, especially not like that.”
He seemed to consider saying something, then changed his mind. I could almost guess what he was thinking: that I’d been wrong about people before, that maybe I wasn’t the best judge of character. He might have wanted to say that at one point nearly everyone I knew turned out to be someone different than I’d thought.
I stood and pointed toward the loft. “What about the bloodstain on the floor? Something’s happened here. Maybe the person who killed Esme hurt Jake, too.”
I thought about the red computer screen (hidden for the moment behind the screen saver), the street scene in London, the matchbook with its odd symbol and note still in my pocket. It was all on the tip of my tongue. But I remembered the text message: Trust no one. It seemed like good advice. I kept my mouth shut.
“What?” asked Agent Grace. His eyes were trained on my face as though he could read my thoughts there. “What are you thinking right now?”
I could almost believe that I might trust him, turn all of this stuff over to him to investigate or to dismiss. It is so easy to turn over power, to shift off responsibility and walk away. Maybe if Jake wasn’t missing (not that he was missing exactly, but we weren’t sure where he was at the moment), a bloodstain marring his floor, I might have been more willing to enlist Agent Grace’s help. Something deep told me to heed the advice of the text message, that Jake might be the one to pay if I didn’t.
“I’m thinking,” I said, sounding slightly hysterical to my own ears, “that something has happened to Jake. And I’m wondering what you’re going to do about it.”
He didn’t say anything, just kept those gray eyes on me.
“If someone killed Esme and there’s blood on the floor here”—I was yelling now—“doesn’t that seem like a connection to you?”
“I’m looking at the connection, Ridley.”
Now it was my turn to go silent.
“My missing couple, Myra and Allen Lyall. A dead woman, Esme Gray. A large bloodstain on the floor of Jacobsen’s apartment, Jacobsen nowhere to be found, last seen leaving the scene of a homicide. What do these people have in common? What links all of them?”
You didn’t have to be a genius to figure out where he was going.
“I’m not the only thing that links them,” I said defensively.
“No,” he said slowly. “There’s Project Rescue. But you’re intimately linked to that as well.”
I sat back down in the chair. Agent Grace pulled the other chair close to me and tilted it back against the wall, balancing on its two rear legs. I wished he would fall backward, hit his head and look like an idiot.
“When’s the last time you saw your boyfriend?” He leaned on the word boyfriend with some kind of sarcasm or even hostility, maybe both. I thought about telling him that Jake wasn’t technically my boyfriend any longer, but I didn’t want to be disloyal to Jake. Or answer the questions that would follow about the current nature of our relationship.
“The night before last.”
“And the last time you heard from him?”
“He left a message earl
ier today. Asked me to meet him here for dinner around eight.”
“What time did he leave the message?”
“I don’t know. Around three or four, I guess.”
“How did he sound?”
“Fine.” The truth was I couldn’t quite remember what he had sounded like.
“Did he call you from the landline here,” he said, nodding toward the phone on Jake’s desk, “or from his cellular phone?”
“I don’t know. I think from this phone. I can’t remember.” He’d called me from his cell; I could tell by the background noise. At least I thought so; I would check my caller ID when I got home. In any case, I didn’t want Agent Grace to know that he’d been on his cell; it seemed incriminating somehow. I was dying to call Jake now but didn’t know if it was wise to do this in front of Agent Grace.
He continued with the questions, writing my answers in a little black notebook he’d extracted from his pocket. “Where were you today that you weren’t available to take his call around that time?”
I hesitated, thought about lying, decided against it. “I went to Max’s apartment.”
He looked up at me. “Why?”
I explained to him the reasons I sometimes visited that place. I could tell by the look on his face that he didn’t understand, thought my behavior was suspicious. Which, of course, it was.
“Can anyone confirm that you were there?”
“The doorman, Dutch.” I watched him write. “Is that the time around when she died?” I asked, deducing as much from his questions. “This afternoon around three or four?”
He didn’t say anything, just kept scribbling in his pad. I felt a tide of panic swell for Jake, a desperate worry aching in my chest.
“I have to be honest with you, Ridley,” said Agent Grace after a moment. “I don’t think you’re telling me everything you should be. I’m having a hard time trusting you right now.”
I tried for indignation but it didn’t take. I shrugged instead. “I really don’t give a shit what you think of me, Agent Grace,” I said, keeping my voice mild. It was true; I couldn’t care less. This was new for me; I used to be worried about what people thought, eager to please and play by the rules. But that was before. Before I knew I was Max’s daughter. “I don’t trust you, either.”
