CHAPTER THIRTEEN #2
“A record we found in a thrift store on our first date,” she said, and Kate could tell she was smiling through tears as she spoke. “Terrible schmalzy old thing. Gene Autry, the Singing Cowboy.”
Kate braced the heel of her hand against the table. The room went very still except for the hum of old fluorescents.
"February 24th," her mother said. "I woke up… wrong. You know the way your body can tell you something before you know it. I called your father, and he said—oh, darling, he said not now, he was presenting, he'd change the world at eleven-thirty, could I be brave until lunch? He was like that, then. Starstruck to be on the team, convinced he would change the course of Western medicine… He learned better, later. But that morning…” She paused, and when she continued the tone had changed, anger softened by time into something you could handle. “Rosa from downstairs—Puerto Rican lady with six boys and a mouth like a railroad—took one look at me on the stairs and marched me to her doctor. Not the big hospital. Small practice on Second Avenue with Genghis Khan on reception. They couldn’t stop it. We lost her. We lost Jeanette.”
The name rung like something struck.
“I remember you being sad,” Kate said, hearing herself from somewhere above her own head. “One cold day. I brought you tea and you cried into it and told me it was silly to cry on a silly day.”
“It wasn’t silly,” her mother said. “But… after that, and until you left home, I used to go away on the anniversary. I’d go to see Claire, or Izzie, you know?
Your Dad, well… when he grew up a little, he blamed himself for the way he’d behaved that day.
And I didn’t want him doing that, and I didn’t want you to see the stupid danged grief of it every time I touched a calendar.
But it doesn’t sting so bad these days. I just buy some pretty fuchsias, and put them in a vase. I’m looking at them now.”
Two twenty-four, Kate thought, and the number stopped being a number, became a door swung open to a room with a great hole in the floor. Today. She glanced without meaning to at the clock again. 11:16.
“Mom.” Her voice came out too fast, a skipped stone. She forced it flat. “There’s another number attached to this. A ninety-six. Does that mean anything?”
“Oh, sweetheart,” her mother said, and this time she almost laughed, the ridiculousness of it like a bubble in grief.
“The 96 is my bus. To campus. I always take it. The parking situation is apocalyptic and besides, I see my students that way. What’s going on, Kitty?
Why are you asking me all these questions? ”
Marcus heard that and turned his head, catching her eye. She didn’t need to tell him; the words were all over her face. We are live.
"Listen, Mom,” she said, and she was surprised at how calm she sounded, given that her heart was a bell trying to ring out of her. "I can’t explain, but I will. Can you listen very carefully to me?”
“I will.”
“Do not take the 96 today. Don’t go to work. Lock your door. Don’t answer it for anyone who isn’t the police. I’m going to—”
“Kate,” her mother said, the smallest protest. “I have office hours at one. Henry Buchwalter is coming at one-twenty with a draft, and if I cancel he’ll spiral.”
“Cancel him,” Kate said. “Henry Buchwalter can spiral for a while. This isn’t negotiable.”
A beat. Kate could hear the shift in her mother’s breathing—the moment a person moved from arguing to obeying because the fear in the other person’s voice cut through everything else.
“Alright,” her mother said softly. “I’ll put the kettle on and tell Henry to go home and add commas.
I’ll lock the door. I won’t go anywhere. ”
“Good.” Kate swallowed. “I’m going to get a patrol car outside. If anyone knocks and says they’re police, ask them to show ID pressed against the glass, then call dispatch and confirm. No exceptions.”
“I know the drill,” her mother murmured, and despite everything there was a thread of wry in it. “I taught half of campus how to spot a con. Don’t treat me like someone who replies to those Nigerian princes.”
“Sorry,” Kate said, and sounded like she wasn’t. “I love you.”
“I love you more than the alphabet,” her mother said. “Go be ferocious.”
Kate ended the call. She didn’t sit. She didn’t breathe in a way that felt like a breath. She met Marcus’s eyes.
“Winters,” he said, already fishing his phone out. “Campus police. Local PD. We’re going to have a crowd on her lawn so fast the neighbors will think she’s won a prize.”
“Do it,” Kate said. It was a mess, because she was meant to be off the case, taking leave.
But it just had to be faced. She sent Director Winters a terse text with address, threat vector, code provenance; it was the kind of message that never looked like enough until you realized that people like Winters knew how to read the white space.
A reply pinged almost before she’d locked her screen: On it. Portland PD rolling. University security alerted via chief of police. No comfort, no hand-holding. No why aren’t you where you said you’d be… Blessed be.
Marcus was already giving a lieutenant a version of what could be given without handing the world to the press.
“—credible threat, specific identifiers, keep her residence under observation, we need an officer on the fourth floor outside three-oh-four, and yes, Sergeant, I know it’s Monday, no, I can’t fax you the affidavit because there isn’t one, that’s why I’m asking rather than ordering.
” He paused, glanced at Kate. “She says the 96 bus stop is directly opposite the south gate.” He listened. “Thanks.”
A knock on the glass. A flash of curls and a dark blazer—Torres, damp around the edges from a morgue that always felt like the inside of a steel drawer. She read the temperature in the room instantly. “What?”
“The markings at the Kellerman scene yielded some scary stuff,” Kate said. “Related to my mom’s routines and today’s date.”
Torres’s mouth flattened. “Shit.” She shoved the door wider with her shoulder. “I’ve got updates from the autopsy, but they can wait. If he’s poking at your family, we can assume he wants you looking, not panicking.”
When she’d gone, the room felt both larger and more difficult to breathe. Marcus lowered his phone. “Two cars en route,” he said. “One to track the bus route. One outside your mom’s.”
“Good,” Kate said. The word landed squarely. It didn’t feel like enough, but nothing ever could.
She reached for the handbook again, not because she needed to see anything in it, but because it was something to hold.
The eagle on the cover looked faintly ridiculous.
She thought about all the years Cox had spent constructing his theology out of fragments, how he kept making altars and calling them classrooms. She thought about the spotted calf, not golden, raised and fed and paraded until a knife made it into a lesson.
Whatever Cox was teaching, she refused to be the student.