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by Konstantin

  “Holly,” I said. “I’m here about Holly.”

  Deering nearly dropped his hat. His voice grew softer and more anxious. “What about Holly?”

  A woman’s voice interrupted. It was deep and impatient and something like a wood rasp. It seemed to scare Herbert Deering. “Who is it, Herbert, and what do they want? I’m trying to get some work done, for chrissakes.”

  The hard footsteps grew closer and a woman came down the hall. I looked at her and looked for some resemblance to the Wren David had described. The height maybe, and maybe the hair. I didn’t speculate on the tattoo or the birthmark.

  She was north of forty, tall and gaunt, with angular shoulders beneath her green turtleneck and thin, hard-looking legs in snug jeans. Her face was bony and weathered, any prettiness there worn down by wind and sun, and carved into a wedge of suspicion. Her arctic eyes peered out from a thicket of lines, and her mouth was a bloodless seam beneath the blade of her nose. She pushed faded red hair behind her ears and folded sinewy arms across her chest. Nicole Cade looked several years older than her husband, and many times more formidable. She tapped a loafered foot on the floorboards and turned her gaze on Deering, who wilted beneath it.

  “This is Mr. March, Nikki,” he said, and he took his screwdriver from his pocket and retreated to the front steps. “He’s here to talk to you. About Holly.” With that, Deering scuttled off the steps and down the flagstone path toward the garage.

  Nicole looked me up and down and took in the paddock boots, the black cords, the gray sweater, and the leather jacket. She nodded minutely and glanced at the big runner’s watch on her bony wrist. Her mouth grew smaller. “What’s this about my sister?” she said.

  “Would you mind if we spoke inside?”

  “In fact, I would. Now what’s this about my sister?”

  I took a deep breath and told my little story again, about the accident and the witness. Nicole didn’t consider it long enough for belief or disbelief. “And what is it you want from me?” she asked.

  “I was hoping you could help me get in touch with Holly.”

  She looked at me for what seemed a long time, tapping her foot all the while. Her face was motionless and set in well-worn lines of distrust. “That assumes I know something about my sister’s life, Mr. March, and that I have some interest in helping you. But neither assumption is true, I’m afraid.” Nicole Cade looked at her big watch again and back at me.

  I almost smiled at her rudeness, and at how much it reminded me of David’s. “I suppose I should have called first.”

  “Of course you should have— that’s just polite— but it wouldn’t have changed my answer. I haven’t spoken to Holly in some time.”

  “Do you have an address for her, or a telephone number?”

  “I thought I’d made myself clear: I don’t know about my sister’s life, and I don’t care to. Now if you’ll excuse me…”

  “Sure,” I said. “Do you think your husband might know something more?”

  “Certainly not,” she said, and looked as if I’d asked about flying pigs.

  “How about any friends in town?”

  Nicole Cade pursed her thin lips and a hard light came up in her eyes. “Holly’s not in touch with anyone from Wilton,” she said evenly.

  “You’re probably right,” I said, “but it never hurts to ask. Maybe I could start with the neighbors.”

  The hard light turned speculative, and she tapped her foot for several beats. “Is that a threat, Mr. March,” she said quietly, “that you’ll make a nuisance of yourself, or embarrass me, if I don’t talk to you? Is that the kind of sleazy thing they teach at private detective school?” The anger in her voice was tamped down, and covered with a layer of satisfaction: I’d lived down to her expectations.

  I gave her my most innocent smile. “I’m just trying to do my job, Ms. Cade.”

  She checked her watch again, more elaborately this time. “You’re lucky I’ve got work to do, and no time for this nonsense,” she said. She walked down the hallway and took a left at the end, and she was back in under a minute, with a black notebook.

  “This is the last address I have for her. I have no idea whether it’s still good.” It was an address in Brooklyn and I copied it down.

  “Is she still acting?” I asked.

  She sighed impatiently. “Acting, writing, video— Holly’s dabbled in a thousand things, and as far as I know not one has taken. I have no idea what she’s doing now.”

  “She can support herself doing that— dabbling?”

  Impatience morphed into suspicion, and Nicole Cade squinted at me. “Ask Holly, if you can find her— though how it’s relevant to your accident case escapes me. And now goodbye, Mr. March.” The storm door swung shut and the front door closed behind it, and I was left standing in the cold.

  I made my way down the path toward my car. I rounded the corner and found all three garage doors open. There was an immaculate Volvo sedan in one bay, a filthy VW wagon in another, and Herbert Deering in the third, standing by a green metal tool cart and fumbling with a socket wrench. He looked up and dropped the wrench on the concrete floor. The clang made him wince.

  “Catching up on some chores?” I asked.

  He ducked his head nervously and made a small, rueful smile. “Plenty of time for that now— the wonders of outsourcing.” I nodded sympathetically. Deering opened a drawer in the tool cart and picked through whatever was inside. “You through with Nikki?” he asked.

  “More like she’s through with me.”

  Deering smiled again. “I didn’t think it would take long, not when you said you’d come to talk about Holly.”

  “I guess they don’t get on too well.”

  Deering shook his head. “They have nothing to do with each other,” he said, and looked up at me. “Is Holly all right?”

  “As far as I know,” I said, and I trotted out my accident story yet again. I was getting to like it, and Deering seemed to have no complaints either. “Your wife gave me an address,” I concluded, “but she didn’t know if it was still good.”

  Deering nodded vaguely and opened another drawer. “Holly moves a lot, and like I said she and Nikki don’t keep up. It’s one of those things where one says white and the other has got to say black. It’s a thing with sisters sometimes.”

  And not just sisters, I thought. I nodded at him. “Is Holly still making a living as an actress?”

  Deering thought about it a while and shrugged. “I don’t know. I don’t know that she ever made much of a living at it.”

  “How does she pay the rent, then— waiting tables?”

  “That’s never been her problem,” Deering said, shaking his head. “Her mom left some money.” He looked around and then looked at me. “You going over there? To Brooklyn?” I nodded. “Well…tell her hi if you see her.”

  “Will do,” I said, and I dug in my jacket for the car keys. I found them and thought of one more question for Herb Deering. “Who is Fredrick Cade?”

  Herb nearly dropped his wrench again. “Fred is Nikki’s dad— my father-in-law. Where’d that come from?”

  “This used to be his house?”

  Deering grimaced a little. “The girls grew up here. We— Nikki— bought it from him a few years back.”

  “And where did he go?”

  “North of here, up to Brookfield. He’s in an assisted living setup. Why?”

  “Do you think Holly might be in touch with him? Just in case this address is out of date.”

  He blanched. “God, no. The one person Holly gets on worse with than Nikki is Fred. No way she’s in touch with him. And even if she was, he wouldn’t know it, not the way he is now.” Herb Deering tapped a forefinger to the side of his head. “Alzheimer’s,” he said.

  I nodded and started to thank him, when a knob turned at the back of the garage. Nicole Cade was a rigid silhouette in the doorway, and her voice was colder than the air. “I thought we were finished, Mr. March— in fact, I know
we were. What are you still doing here?”

  “Getting directions back to town,” I said, “and a recommendation of someplace for lunch.”

  “Well, we’re not the auto club, and Herbert has better things to do with his time, I’m sure.”

  I smiled to myself and shook my head. The garage doors dropped before I made it to my car.

  * * *

  It was nearly three when I got home. Much of Sixteenth Street lay in shadow, and the slush had begun to refreeze underfoot. The lobby of my building was empty and the hallways were quiet. My apartment was filled with winter light, like a vast gray sheet over the furniture. Nobody home. I put my jacket on the kitchen counter and poured myself a glass of water, and started when I heard music from upstairs.

  A lawyer moved in up there a year ago, on a two-year sublease. He’s generally pretty quiet, and even when he’s not his music is inoffensive, but I jumped every time I heard it. Every time, I thought of Jane Lu.

  It was two years last November that she’d bought the place upstairs, and shortly after that we’d become lovers. It wasn’t even six months later that Jane had gone away, first on an extended vacation to Italy and then to another of her CEO-for-hire gigs, this time in Seattle. She’d wanted me to go with her, on the vacation part at least, and if I had, she might still be living upstairs. But I hadn’t gone and she hadn’t stayed and maybe it wouldn’t have made a difference, anyway. Maybe it was doomed from the start.

  Certainly there wasn’t much left of me by the time I met her. By then it had been three years since my wife, Anne, had been killed— shot neatly and precisely and left to die within yards of our front porch, the last of many victims of a man who wouldn’t live to see the end of that day. It was my biggest case by far as a sheriff’s investigator up in Burr County, and my last one, and I’d fucked it up from start to finish. My stupidity and ego had let Morgan Furness run loose for too long, and let him turn the investigation around on me and into an elaborately constructed suicide by cop.

  For months afterward I was consumed by chaos— by anger and guilt and annihilating grief, and a hurricane of alcohol and drugs. When the storm passed, I was no longer a policeman and I’d succeeded in burning down most of my life. From the charred bits that remained I’d fashioned something else, something small and simple, made of work and running and solitude. It was modest craftsmanship, but it was all that I could manage.

  It was nineteen months since I’d seen Jane last, and listened to her last scratchy message on my telephone.

  “I can’t do this, John. I thought I could, but I was wrong. I tried to keep things at arm’s length— tell myself you were like Nick Charles or something, and your work was clever and glamorous, and somehow separate from you. But that’s bullshit, and I can’t pretend otherwise.

  “There’s nothing amusing about being followed. There’s nothing witty about beatings and guns and emergency rooms. There’s nothing funny about getting shot. I don’t know why you want that in your life, John, but I know I don’t.

  “Maybe it would be easier if I knew what you were looking for from all this— from us. Or maybe there’s no mystery to it. Maybe you’re not looking for anything at all. Maybe your life is already just the way you want it.”

  Doomed from the start.

  I ate some aspirin and drained my water glass. I took out my notes from Wilton and carried them to the table and started reading. I was dozing over them when the intercom buzzed and I jumped again. I went to the wall unit and watched the grainy image emerge on the tiny video screen. It wasn’t memory that disturbed me this time, but a more surprising visitor: my sister-in-law Stephanie. David’s wife.

  5

  I hit a patch of black ice coming off the curb at East Third Street, crossing Avenue B, and my ankle turned and I almost went down. But not quite.

  “Shit,” I hissed as I caught myself, and the middle-school kids crossing the other way laughed. Not even four miles gone and I was panting like a hound. It served me right for laying off so long. A wet snowflake landed on my eye. I brushed it off and huffed forward, headed west and sometimes south.

  The snow had made it that much harder to drag myself up the deep well of sleep that morning, and to drag my ass onto the road, but snow was only part of it. The night had been filled with dreams I couldn’t remember, but that left behind a nagging sense of something unfinished or mislaid or abandoned. And then there was the nightmare I couldn’t forget: Stephanie’s visit.

  She’d stood in my doorway for a full minute, legs together, arms at her sides, hands jammed in the pockets of her navy blue coat. Her wiry hair was shorter than I recalled and bound precariously by a tortoiseshell clip. Her pale face was pinched and stiff, and her overlarge eyes skittered around me and all around the apartment. Her little mouth was twitching.

  “Why don’t you come in,” I’d said finally. My voice made her flinch, but she came. Her steps were tentative and rigid, as if onto thin ice. I offered to take her coat but she seemed not to hear. She’d picked her way around the room, teetering first by the kitchen counter, then by the bookshelves, then the windows, and finally by the sofa. Then she sat. I sat too, at the table, and closed my laptop and my notepad.

  I knew she was working again, as an equity analyst at a firm downtown, and she looked as if she’d come from the office— black pumps, dark hose, dark striped skirt, ivory blouse. She kept her bony knees together and kept her coat wrapped around her narrow body like a cocoon. Her eyes hopped around for another minute and she clutched her hands together and finally spoke.

  “What are you doing to him?” she asked. Her voice was brittle.

  “Stephanie, I don’t know—”

  “Oh, don’t even bother to lie! Just don’t, John. What are you doing to him?”

  “I’m not doing any—”

  “Of course you are! Why else would he come here? Why would he visit you?”

  I pulled a hand down my face and sighed. “I think David’s the person to ask about that.” But she wanted no advice.

  “You’ve never liked me.”

  Jesus. “That’s been mostly a two-way street,” I said.

  She waved that away. “And you never made a secret of it, and now that I need something from you, you’re just going to lord it over me.”

  I shook my head. “I don’t know what you’re talking about, Stephanie. I’m not lording anything over any—”

  “Then answer my goddamn questions,” she said. “What are you doing to him? What kind of thing have you gotten him involved in?” Her voice was like breaking glass.

  I bit back my first three answers. “You need to talk to David,” I said again. She ignored me.

  “It wouldn’t be the first time you dragged your family into the gutter, though, would it? But I won’t let you do it to David.”

  My breath caught in my throat and I think even Stephanie knew she’d gone too far. “You should go now,” I said quietly. But she didn’t. Instead she walked to the window and stood stiffly where David had stood.

  “Or are you saying he came to you for help of some sort? Is that it? But what kind of help would that be?”

  “The only thing I’m saying is that you should go,” I repeated.

  Stephanie bent her head and a shudder went through her back. I heard sniffling. Shit. After a minute, she hitched her coat higher on her shoulders, did up the buttons, and headed for the door. She paused when she got there and turned to me.

  “It’s about that woman, isn’t it, and those phone calls?” she’d said. She hadn’t waited for an answer.

  I had another mile and a half in by the time I came lumbering up Sixteenth Street to the wrought-iron steps of my building. I was still winded and soaked in sweat, but my headache was gone. I crawled up the stairs and into the shower, where I stood for a long time with the spray in my face.

  After Stephanie had left I’d phoned David, to tell him about her visit and about my trip to Wilton. We never got to the Wilton part; his questions were all abo
ut Stephanie. “How much does she know?” “How did she find out?” “Did that crazy bitch call her?” “Tell me again what she said.” After the third go-round I stopped answering.

  “I don’t want to be in the middle of this,” I told him. “I didn’t hire on to lie to your wife.”

  “Who’s asking you to lie, for chrissakes? I just expect some confidentiality.”

  “Slice it as fine as you want, I don’t want to be in that position with Stephanie again.”

  “Who knew you were so sensitive?” he said, and hung up.

  I fumbled for the faucets and turned up the heat.