Once in a while she will do something off the beaten track, like taking coffee with that handsome but smug Realtor the day before. She knows full well that he is using her to gain advantage in what passes for his career—knew it the moment he came strolling toward her with his hand outstretched—and she doesn’t care. She wants to redecorate, and has known the Thompsons long enough to understand that it would be easier to levitate than to influence their behavior. Phil could do it, having known them longer and better and being no stranger to bloody-mindedness himself, but Phil ain’t around no more.
So fine, let the boy wonder Realtor see what he can do. Hazel doubts he’ll achieve much. At his age, Tony and Phil were already very wealthy, men of action and result. It might be amusing to watch Tony Thompson wearing the little asshole down to dust, however, dust that Marie will then disperse with a single smoky exhale.
It’s something to do.
And maybe, Hazel realizes, she’s still playing games after all—albeit small and lonely ones of her own.
The evenings aren’t bad. She’ll take a glass of wine in the bar and eat something. A little television, a spot of reading, and early to bed. The evenings, oddly, are okay, possibly because the essence of the evening is the promise of the end of the day.
It’s those endless afternoons . . .
Hazel has fallen into the habit of spending them in the condo. In high season, because it’s hot and humid outside and the resort is too busy and she finds she no longer enjoys being among groups of people. At other times of year . . . perhaps because she fears, below the level of conscious choice, that if she spends too much time in the world, there’ll come a day when she’s used it all up. Better to mete it out. Doing nothing of consequence feels less like defeat than deliberately doing something arbitrary, to fill the time.
She reads. She watches boxed sets of TV shows. She enjoys a few rounds of Sudoku, so long as she can stop herself remembering how pointless it is. She and Marie discovered the craze together, back in the old days, though Marie was always much better at it. She chats with the maid who comes in every other day.
The afternoons do pass, in the end. There has never been one yet that hasn’t eventually come to a conclusion—though there have been a few that felt like they might not, as if time had actually stopped and might never start again—leaving her alone forever, sitting in her chair, in a dry, cool room.
But they drag. They really drag, which is why, when Hazel hears the knock on her door at a little before three, she’s happy to get up and go answer it.
A man is standing outside. The walkway is much brighter than her room, and he’s initially presented to her in silhouette.
“Afternoon, ma’am,” he says.
His voice is polite, deferential. He’s dressed in dark jeans and a new-looking shirt. Trim build, broad shoulders, short hair touched with gray in the temples. Hazel alters her position against the glare and sees that he’s kind of good-looking, with a nice open smile.
Once in a blue moon Hazel feels the shallowest of stirrings when confronted with a good-looking man: it has to be an unexpected encounter, as if to bypass her mind and go directly to the biological core. It’s not something she’s ever going to act upon, but it’s pleasant to experience all the same—a reminder that only one of the Wilkinses is actually buried in the ground, so far.
“Afternoon,” she says. “Can I help you?”
“I hope so. Looking for a man called Phil Wilkins.”
And just like that, her mood collapses. “You’re too late,” she says, not a woman, merely a widow again.
“Too late? What time will—”
“Six years too late. Phil died.”
She’s looking at the man’s face as he receives this information, and it’s as if his eyes go flat, matte, like a pond icing over. It’s fanciful, but she catches herself thinking that this is a man who also knows what it is to wait, and who has just discovered it isn’t over yet.
Welcome to my world, she thinks.
“Dead, huh?” he says.
“Yep.”
“I’m sorry to hear that.”
“You and me both.”
He nods, looking pained. Rather too late, it occurs to Hazel that he looks familiar, as if he’s someone she saw in passing once or twice, long ago.
“Then I guess it’s you I need to talk to,” he says, stepping inside.
An hour later Hunter is sitting in his car. His door is open. He has driven to a location at the northern end of Longboat Key. When he last saw it the place was nothing more than a couple of acres of scrubby woods, swampy in parts, a reminder of the true nature of these half-sea, half-sand islands—an example of the kind of wilderness that still exists down at the southern end of Lido Key. He discovered it by accident when he came to live in the area. For someone raised on the alien plains of Wyoming, there is an endless fascination about this borderland between water and land.
It is no longer how it was. Some developer has bought and cleared it, cutting down the trees and carting off their carcasses, filling in the boggy parts, laying down swatches of crabgrass until it looks like a golf course. Anything that was natural has gone. Even the ocean now lies in an artificial relationship to the land, its edge trammeled, made convenient and beautiful according to the values of leisure development. Somewhere, perhaps in Sarasota, maybe New York or Houston or Moscow, someone owns this land. Hunter wonders if they think of it, beyond seeing it on a balance sheet with the words Not Yet scribbled next to it by an underling. He wonders if God keeps these kinds of records, too, and how many people have those same words noted by them.
He feels tired and dispirited and angry. He has spent a portion of every day for the last decade turning down the static of thought and character, letting a simpler John Hunter simply be. It has been far harder since he’s been back out in the world, but he had been holding steady.
But now, today, he has broken the spell.
He has Hazel Wilkins’s keys in his pocket. He will have to return to her apartment after dark. Before that, he needs to focus, regroup, and gather himself. He does not want to make any more mistakes.
He doesn’t want to break anything else.
He sits staring out through the windshield at a place made anonymous and dead. After a time he stops seeing this and sees it instead as it was, hears the laughter of a woman he used to come here with, and feels the ghost of her hand in his.
He is not aware of the tears as they run down his face, and by the time he returns to the present, they have dried away in the heat.
As he is driving back down the key, he sees something on the side of the road that interests him. He pulls over, into the front parking lot of the Italian restaurant.
He watches for half an hour. He sees two police cars arrive, along with an unmarked white truck. He sees a third car leave, and then return.
It seems unlikely to him that this level of activity can relate simply to a missing person.
He drives away, knowing that his life is getting more and more complicated. That he must be strong, and fast, and that time is already running out.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
I got home in twenty-five minutes. You can’t do it quicker than that, midafternoon, no matter how fast you’re prepared to drive—and I drove fast. I parked in the street outside the house—or stopped the engine and jumped out of the door, at least—and ran up the path.
The front door was locked. The interior of the house was also exactly as I’d left it. I ran around calling Stephanie’s name. I checked the ground floor first, then went through the whole of the upper floor. Nobody there, nothing that looked any different from the way it had when I’d left. I came back down, heart thudding. When I reached the living room I turned in a circle before suddenly finding myself in motion again. We had a portable phone, naturally, but because we both have cell phones the handset generally lives on the kitchen counter. I saw that’s where it was now, next to the base. I couldn’t remember whether it had been the
re when I’d left. It didn’t matter. Whoever had been in the house had evidently been standing right there.
I had a sudden thought and turned to look through the window out at the terrace and swimming pool. Nobody there, either.
Resisting the urge to pick up the phone handset was easy. Would there be fingerprints? Possibly. Would there also be a small black card with the word MODIFIED hidden somewhere in the house? Also possible.
Either would be a distraction from the main point, which was that someone had come into the house with the aim of screwing with my life. It wasn’t David Warner.
So who?
At five o’clock I was still standing at the counter, or rather standing there again. In the meantime I’d searched the house more thoroughly and found nothing. No little black cards, and no missing suitcases or clothes. I hadn’t seriously believed that Steph would just take off, storming down the path like something from act one of a romcom (trials and tribulations lie ahead, constant viewer, though expect reconciliation/redemption before the credits roll). But people do actually do that kind of thing in real life, apparently, and I was very glad not to see any evidence of it in my own home.
I’d thought about calling the cops, of course. I’d thought about it every thirty seconds since hearing the woman’s voice on my phone. I hadn’t done so, because I found it too easy to imagine what the response would be.
Your wife is a grown-up, sir. It’s still within business hours. Plus, you had an argument last night. So, uh, what’s your point?
I also felt that if I was going to talk to the cops for a third time in one day, then I needed to feel on firmer ground. A nonlocatable wife wasn’t enough. An alleged voice on my house phone line wasn’t enough, either. It could have been a wrong number, a mishearing, or I could have made the whole thing up for motivations of my own—which could only be suspicious, strange, and of possible terrorist intent.
Did I have any other evidence? There were the cards I’d received. Had I kept any of them? Of course not. I’d thrown each away as it arrived, dismissing the baby steps of chaos until it was too late.
He didn’t know that, of course—whoever he was, the person behind the cards and behind whatever was happening to me. I could have kept the cards. I also had a laptop in the car with folders—and a hard disk—that had been renamed to the same word. I had a copy of the e-mail sent out in my name, and a photocopy of the delivery notice for the book from Amazon. And, it finally struck me, there might have been something else, too: the booking at Jonny Bo’s for our anniversary dinner. Janine said I’d e-mailed her about it. That wasn’t inconceivable—I often gave her jobs when she was looking even more unoccupied than usual—but I couldn’t actually recall doing so. Someone had evidently been digging around in my digital identity even before this week, in order to place the Amazon order. The same person could have sent Janine the e-mail asking her to make a booking at Bo’s.
So it was possible I should add that to the pile, though doing so would mean accepting the idea that someone had a pretty in-depth knowledge of my habits. Why hadn’t I paid more attention to this at the time? How could I have been so wrapped up in my machinations at The Breakers that I’d let this stuff just flow by?
As I listed these pieces of evidence in my head I was also aware of how trivial they sounded—how easy they were to let roll by when your mind was on higher things. That was probably the whole point. Every one of them was like a tiny little chili that was not only perfectly possible for me to have eaten but seemed too small for someone else to have bothered with.
Except the pictures of Karren, of course.
That was a bigger deal, harder to organize, and came with a heavier payload. They might be deemed worthy of being taken seriously. But . . . I could just have taken those myself, too. My “proof” that I’d been deliberately kept out of the house that evening—in order to set up the pictures—had disappeared the moment Melania told the cops she’d never spoken to me. Claiming otherwise now just made me look like a liar as well as a fantasist.
“Shit,” I shouted suddenly, the whole mess spilling out of my head to bounce off the walls.
The house said nothing. The house felt alien, like a friend you happen to glimpse from a distance one afternoon, sitting outside a café with another member of your crowd, some rendezvous to which you were not invited. No injury has been done to you. Yet something about the sight—as you stand becalmed on the other side of the street, traffic making a river of difference between you—demonstrates that you are not at the center of creation after all. The house was just a house, and a life was just a life. Both might feel like they belonged to me, but there were gaps in its fabric, and gaps mean entrances, ways for strangers to get inside. Life suddenly felt like a random series of events and people connected only by accident and happenstance. So your friends are out for a drink, and you’re there, too, and maybe it’s even your birthday: does that mean it’s actually about you? No. It could have happened by coincidence, or to watch a ball game. You could slip away midevening, and after five minutes of bemusement they’d buy another beer, close the circle, and it would be as if you’d never been there. You could die. Within weeks the same thing would happen.
You’re not the cause, the be-all and end-all, of anything. There’s no house. There’s no life. There’s just you. A point in space and time.
I shook my head violently, trying to break the train of thought. Of course it wasn’t the house’s fault that someone had been inside it. Everything was whirling around my head too fast. I knew the only way I was going to be able to regain control was by talking to someone about it. But Steph wasn’t here to talk to.
That was the whole point.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
Five thirty found me perched on a chair out by the pool. I had the sliding door behind me open—the one leading to the living room rather than the kitchen—so I’d hear the instant a key was inserted into the front door. I had my cell phone on my lap. I had the house phone on the table—I’d carefully carried it through, holding one corner with fingers protected by a piece of paper towel, feeling absurd but telling myself I’d feel far worse if it turned out I’d fucked up a set of fingerprints, if it came to that. Which it wouldn’t. Of course. My wife was not home yet, that was all. And had lost her phone. Or her battery had run down.
Or something.
There had been a whole lot of somethings in the last half hour. I had discovered in myself a vein of wild inventiveness that, when my life got itself back on track, I was determined to apply to my career. My current obsession was trying to convince myself it had actually been Stephanie on the phone when I called the house. That she’d said the word modified in an unusual tone to wind me up (the most convincing version of this fantasy had her frisky with drink, mischievous with the triumph of her morning’s meeting) and was now out shopping hard, to rub the point home. I could just about get the idea to work if I made myself believe she had a reason to know the impact of the word—but that was tough: she only knew about one of the cards, and I hadn’t made a big deal of it at the time or since. I was finding the story hard to let go of nonetheless, because as time went by the alternative explanations felt less and less appealing.
I’d put Deputy Hallam’s card next to the phone on the table. I’d also given myself a deadline.
Six o’clock.
At six thirty I hadn’t made the call. It was still only an hour after the point when Steph would normally be home, and I’d by then semiconvinced myself that were it not for all the other things that had happened I wouldn’t be worrying. I’d be checking blogs or refining the six-and-a-half-year plan or listening to podcasts while getting virtuously upside an extra gym session. It’s amazing what you can get yourself to believe, briefly, if you really put your mind to it. I’d also changed out of my suit into jeans and a shirt, presumably in the belief that looking smart-casual would help in some way, I don’t know.
Suddenly my cell phone rang. I saw immediately that it was the S
hore Realty office number.
“Who’s that?” I asked cautiously.
“It’s Karren. Look, I’m still at work.”
Normally I would have asked why, of course. Right now I couldn’t care less. “Okay, so?”
“The cops have been by again,” she said. “I think they were kind of looking for you.”
“Why? Why would they be looking for me?”
“They didn’t say, but I got the sense something’s happened with the David Warner thing. They made me go through my entire meeting with him again, play by play. They seemed very serious. Where are you, anyway? You just blew out of here and didn’t come back.”
“I came home.”
“Okay. Um, why?”
I had to say it to someone. “I don’t know where Stephanie is.”
“You supposed to be meeting her?”
“No.” Already I regretted saying anything. “She’s just . . . I can’t get hold of her.”
“At her office?”
“At her office, on her cell, anywhere.”
“Oh,” she said, and I stopped regretting. There was a marked lack of irony in her tone. “That’s weird. You guys are attached at the hip, communication-wise.”
“Well, yeah. We are.”
“She mad at you?”
I hesitated. “She may be.”
“That means yes. You want womanly counsel on the matter? That what you’re hoping for?”
“No. I didn’t realize you even had womanly advice to dispense.”
“I don’t put everything on show, my friend. The good stuff stays in the drawer for special customers. For this phone conversation only, you qualify.”
Killer Move Page 11
