by Mason Cross
“Is that normal?”
Stansfield shrugged mildly. “No such thing as normal, Ms. Blackwell.”
She sighed. “Well what do you think?”
Stansfield looked down at her notepad again. She had been scribbling away as Sarah laid out the whole story, but Sarah suspected that was purely an exercise in projecting diligence. She was pretty sure that Officer Stansfield would never look at these notes again once she turned the page. After a moment, she picked up the piece of paper on which Sarah had printed the picture of Dominic and Rebecca at the barbecue, grabbed from Liz Bowman’s unsecured Facebook page. She gazed at the faces for a moment and shook her head regretfully.
“I’m sorry, but I really don’t think there’s a case here.” She looked up, her brown eyes calmly waiting for Sarah to object.
“What do you mean? I’m telling you that a woman I was concerned about disappeared saying she would call me and she never did. She hasn’t been heard from in weeks, and her house is deserted. Her phone is out of service. And the note was typed—why would you type a note instead of handwrite it?”
“A note?”
Sarah realized she had forgotten to mention the note. She felt a triumphant rush. “Wait a second, I’ll go and get it.” Sarah walked through to the kitchen and took the note from the drawer where she kept mail. It was still there, just a couple of lines typed and printed out. She walked back through to the living room and handed the note to Officer Stansfield.
“It was in my mailbox, the morning after they left.”
Stansfield gazed at the note for at least three times as long as it would take to read the message. When she had stared at the page for long enough, she looked back at Sarah. “You said you’d had no contact with her.”
“Well that’s right. Nothing since then, and how do we know this is from her? Why would she go to the trouble of typing and printing a note like that?”
“Perhaps she didn’t have a pen. Some people like using computers for everything these days.”
“Do you want to take it with you? Fingerprint it or something?”
Stansfield considered. “If you like, I could take it with me.”
Sarah felt a flush of anger. She was being managed, humored. “You don’t think this looks a little suspicious? Two people move into a neighborhood, they pay a year’s rent in advance, and then they just disappear in the night. And then a few weeks later some people come by and search the place in the middle of the night? People with guns?”
Stansfield was looking around the living room, as though she had only just noticed it was a nice house in a nice neighborhood. “Do you live alone, Ms. Blackwell?”
She bit her tongue. “Yes I do.”
“And what do you do for a living? If you don’t mind me asking.”
“I’m a writer.”
“What kind of writer?”
“I used to work at the Tribune, now I write novels. The Farrah Fairchild series.”
The corner of Stansfield’s mouth twitched almost imperceptibly, as though she had found the answer to the riddle, and Sarah realized she had said too much. “Must take a lot of imagination.”
“If you’re suggesting ...”
“Oh I didn’t mean it that way at all. It’s just ... there was no evidence of forced entry at the property.”
And no evidence you saw anybody at all, was the unspoken addition supplied by the way Stansfield was looking at her. Sarah sensed she had gone from being a minor waste of time to someone who was starting to make Officer Stansfield suspicious. Maybe she had faked the burglary report just to get somebody to pay attention. Maybe she had faked the note too.
Stansfield asked a few more questions and then left, taking the note. Sarah knew that most likely she would never see the note, or Officer Stansfield, again.
Maybe Stansfield was right to be dismissive. Subjected to cold logic, there wasn’t a whole lot to go on. Maybe the men who had gone into the house had nothing to do with Rebecca or Dominic. Maybe the two of them really had gone to visit a sick relative, and decided to stay wherever they had gone to.
But there was one thing that Sarah could not produce as evidence: the look on Rebecca’s face when her husband had whispered in her ear. In the course of her career, Sarah had had the opportunity to see people react to a wide range of shocks. She had delivered more than a few of those shocks herself.
Her instincts told her that Rebecca’s reaction hadn’t been that of someone concerned for a relative. It had been fear.
5
GRAND ISLE
How long is long enough?
A simple question. Or maybe a complicated one. Two o’clock in the morning brings out the philosopher in me, I guess. I had spent two hours lying awake on top of the sheets pondering the question, before giving up on a bad job and going out onto the deck of my rented beach house. All of the beach houses here had quirky names, like “Tax Dodge” or “Daddy’s Escape.” The one I had taken was called “Stormy Weather.” I wasn’t sure if the owner was a Billie Holliday fan, or if it just referred to a fact of life on a barrier island.
“Storms roll in fast,” the man who had rented me the house had warned. A taciturn old guy who looked roughly a hundred, it had been the only piece of advice he had imparted, other than telling me you had to switch the shower on and off once to get it to work.
No storms tonight. I leaned on the guardrail and looked out at the Gulf. Ahead of me was a wall of black: it was impossible to tell where the water ended and the sky began. Along the shore to the southwest, the lights on the main road glinted back at me. I closed my eyes and let the still-warm breeze caress my face. I heard a light flutter from above me as a bat ran a flyby.
The dull ache in the knuckles of my right hand seemed to be throbbing with greater intensity. There would be bruising in the morning. I knew I should have put it on ice after the incident at Vansen’s Auto Shop, but I had been too preoccupied. After I left, I had parked up to replace the drive belt myself, and then I had driven around for a while, thinking.
It had been a long sabbatical. The task of tracking down Chris and issuing a rather physical cease-and-desist notice had been unexpectedly stimulating. But now it was as though I had flipped a switch on, and I was having difficulty finding the off position.
I wasn’t entirely sad about that, At the back of my mind, I had been starting to worry about getting rusty, about my physical and mental skills atrophying as I sat on the beach and watched the world go by. On the evidence of today, my concerns were unfounded. So what had been holding me back?
I ticked off the practical arguments. For one thing, I didn’t have anybody finding me work. A very well-connected man named Coop had been the source of most of my jobs for the past few years, but he had been killed by the people who had come after me. I felt some guilt about his death, but I knew it had been an occupational hazard that Coop fully understood. If one of my enemies hadn’t taken him out, it could have been a long list of other people.
Then, of course, there was the fallout from what had happened in a snowy corner of upstate New York two winters ago.
For several years I had worked for a US government initiative that technically had no name, but which was known to initiates as Winterlong. We had roamed across hotspots on four continents, operating with impunity and carrying out the jobs no one else could do. Unknown to me, several members of the unit had crossed a lot more lines than I had known about at the time. Torture, unauthorized hits, the indiscriminate murder of civilians. I had been approached by a US Senator named John Carlson. Carlson had shown me evidence of the kind of activities some of my teammates were indulging in, and recruited me with the idea of getting him the evidence he needed to shut Winterlong down.
It had not gone smoothly.
Winterlong had gotten wise to our plan. They came very close to killing me in Afghanistan, while simultaneously carrying out the assassination of Senator Carlson. It had been a meticulously planned job, and they had covered up well. Reluctan
tly, I had concluded that Winterlong was too big to take on alone, and so I had cut my losses: offered them a deal in return for staying away from me or anybody close to me.
Anybody close to me. That made me think about Carol for the first time in a while. I looked out at the inky void of Barataria Bay at night, thinking about the four simple words that comprised the last message I had ever received from her.
The deal with Winterlong had lasted for five years. Right up until I received an email with a picture of one of my former colleagues, dead in the Siberian snow. It was a very clear message: Winterlong had decided to take me off the board for good. But this time I was prepared, and it hadn’t gone so smoothly for them.
I had lost a friend, and my home, but Winterlong was finished. It had seemed like an opportune time to take a break.
So. How long was long enough? Maybe the exhilaration I had felt tracking down Emily’s tormentor was a signal. Maybe it was time to get back to work, find more challenging problems to solve.
I turned and looked back into the beach house. The empty, unmade bed wasn’t calling to me yet. I laced on my sneakers and vaulted the waist-high guardrail, landing on the sand below. I jogged down to the edge of the water, where the sand was hard-packed, and started to run. I got all the way up to the pier at the state park on the eastern point of the island, turned and doubled my pace for the return journey. Five miles, give or take. I felt the burning in my lungs and pushed myself harder. I got back to the beach house as the sky was beginning to lighten on the eastern horizon. My limbs were on fire, my throat parched, my heart thumping as though it was trying to break through my ribcage.
I staggered into the beach house, drank some water and lay down on the bed, wondering why I still didn’t feel tired. And that was my last thought before sleep claimed me.
6
SUMMERLIN MONDAY, 00:15
The night after Sarah had spoken to the cop from Missing Persons, she made up her mind to cross a line. She had been considering this course of action for a few weeks, but it had taken Officer Stansfield’s visit to convince her that no one else was ever going to take an interest in Rebecca’s disappearance. If she wanted anything to happen, it was up to her. She waited until well after midnight, then slipped her bare feet into sneakers and walked out of her front door, across the front lawn and onto the lawn of number 32. She cast a wary glance at the windows of the houses across the street, but no one was looking out at her. Anyway, what would be the problem? She was just a neighbor, checking out the property in her friend’s absence. It was kind of true, in a way.
A few weeks after her new neighbors had moved in, Sarah had been working when Dominic—although she hadn’t yet known that was his name—arrived home one afternoon. She saw him pat the pockets of his pants, then knock on the front door. Locked out, obviously. After waiting a minute, he walked around the back and dug in one of the plant pots for a spare key. Sarah had forgotten all about it until she had seen the men go into the house. Of course, Rebecca and Dominic had probably taken the spare with them when they left.
She knelt down and examined the pot nearest the door. The plant itself had died weeks ago, with no one around to water it. She dug her fingers into the hardened soil and smiled as she felt something thin and metal. She drew the key out and dusted it off. She couldn’t decide whether the fact it was still there was a good sign. Maybe it meant Rebecca really was planning to come back; or maybe they had just forgotten about it in their hasty departure.
She examined the lock on the back door using the illuminated screen of her phone. There was no sign of damage, just as the police had said. Had the men last night known where to look for the key as well? Or did they just know how to pick a lock without leaving a trace?
The lock clicked at the turn of the key and she pushed the door open, pausing in the threshold and listening.
“Hello?”
This was stupid. She knew there was no one in the house. Rebecca and Dominic hadn’t been home in weeks. And yet it still felt transgressive, coming uninvited into someone’s home. Technically, she supposed, it was breaking and entering, even though she had used a key. There was no answer to her call, just a deep silence from the house.
“It’s Sarah. From next door.”
Nothing.
She had never been inside the house before, so she didn’t know what it had looked like when they lived here, beyond what she could see from her study. But when she had looked around the living room and the kitchen, she got the sense that there was nothing here that had not been provided by the landlord. The kitchen was stocked with all of the basic utensils you would need: not too expensive, but not bargain basement stuff. The refrigerator was almost empty: just some leftover Chinese, some celery sticks and a quart of milk gradually turning solid in the cold.
The living room was neat and clean, but again, Sarah thought that everything that was there had been in place before the current tenants. She moved through the rest of the rooms on the ground floor, her initial trepidation wearing off as she opened drawers and peeked in cupboards with a new confidence. The footprint of the house was identical to Sarah’s own, so she knew she wasn’t missing any nooks or crannies.
Something was wrong: the place felt almost as though it was ready for viewing by the next tenants, the ones who would come to view the place in December, or sooner if the landlord wanted to take advantage of the situation and temporarily double his rental income. But Rebecca and Dominic had left in a hurry. There had been no loading of a van or a truck on the night they left; Sarah would have heard it. So where was all their stuff? Even renting furnished accommodation, they should have had things they wanted to take with them. If they hadn’t had time, then those things should still be here, like the milk and the takeout and the celery sticks.
An uneasy feeling came over Sarah as she moved back into the hallway and stood at the foot of the stairs. She wasn’t sure what she had been hoping to find, but it wasn’t this. So far, there was very little to show that anyone had been living here for the past few months. It was almost as though she had imagined the whole thing.
She remembered the skeptical look on the faces of the two cops. The same look on the face of Officer Stansfield from Missing Persons. She banished the images. Rebecca had been here, all right. There was the photograph from the barbecue.
But that very thought, which should have reassured her, had the opposite effect. She remembered how uneasy Rebecca and Dominic had been when they realized they had been photographed. They had been leaving the barbecue already, of course, but that seemed to have spurred them on. And thinking about it, that photograph now looked like the single piece of evidence that Rebecca had existed. No worldly goods left in the house, a phone number that had gone out of service, a last name that was anonymous as could be.
The main bathroom at least showed signs of habitation. But only in the way a used hotel room will. Disposable razors in the trash, an unfinished shampoo bottle, aspirin in the cabinet. A nearly empty tube of toothpaste, but no toothbrushes.
The bed in the master bedroom was unmade, but there were no clothes in the closet and nothing in the chest of drawers. The closet had a shelf at head height, and Sarah could see a rectangular space in the dust where something wide and flat had lain until recently. A suitcase. They had packed everything away and gone. There was a desk beside the bed, nothing in the drawers but a phone charger and a spiral-bound notebook missing most of its pages.
There was even less to see in the other two bedrooms. Sarah doubted they had been used. The final room, the one Sarah used as a study in her version of the house, was entirely empty, not even a desk. She groaned out loud. A waste of time. They had left nothing, or at least nothing that had been overlooked by the men who had come in the night.
Frustrated, she went back through to the bedroom, the only room which showed some evidence that it had been occupied by humans, and went through the drawers and the closet again. Empty. She sat down on the edge of the bed, telling herself t
hat she had done all she could. Rebecca hadn’t called, the police weren’t interested, there was nothing here that might help. And then she remembered there was one obvious place left to check.
She got off the bed and got down on her hands and knees. There was a pair of worn men’s sneakers under the bed, but nothing else. Then she saw something stuck behind one of the rear legs of the bed, as though it had fallen down the back. She crawled under and stretched until her fingers contacted it. It was a small, rectangular object. It felt like a paperback novel.
She pulled it out and shuffled back out from under the bed, looking down at what she held in her hands. Not a novel; a square-bound notebook. It was thick, the pages distorted with use. Some kind of journal, or diary? She opened it and, at first, she was disappointed. The book was two-thirds full of handwriting. A neat, feminine cursive. But these weren’t journal entries. There were doodles, and scraps of poetry, and thoughts. There were pencil sketches and cartoons. It was like an idea book, Sarah knew people who kept notebooks like this for therapy. Most of the pages had a few written lines or a sketch. One was entirely covered with what looked like the same signature repeated, only each time the name itself was different.
Rebecca Smith, Sam Kelly, Jane Hawkins, Carol Langford ...
Sarah felt a chill as her eyes ran over the names. Who the hell was she?
She leafed through more pages. A pencil sketch of an old building; quite good actually, like she had spent a lot of time on it. A cartoonish sketch of a man’s profile that she thought was supposed to be Dominic. One of the last used pages had a series of numbers in it: 12, 14, 15, 16. The 15 was circled and underlined. Dates, perhaps? Sarah thought back. Rebecca had left town on April 14th. On the page after that, there was a single, cryptic line in the middle of the page:
Quarter by June
A quarter of what by June? What did that mean? Maybe nothing. It was like a line of poetry, or a fragment of a riddle.
The last thirty pages or so of the notebook were blank. In her rush to leave, Rebecca had obviously forgotten this just like she had forgotten to take the spare key. Sarah leafed through the blank pages just to be thorough, and found that the very last page in the notebook had been used. It was one of the doodles. At first glance, this one was a picture of a picture: some kind of frame with words inside. As she looked at it, she realized it wasn’t a framed picture at all. It was a glass-fronted box, like the kind fire alarm buttons are shielded behind. There was a neatly lettered sign above the box.
