Chapter Five
Jenny
I wake at six on Monday morning and the apartment feels different.
I lie in bed for a moment trying to identify what's wrong.
The heat is running. The window is closed and the curtain is still.
Nothing has moved. Nothing has been touched.
But there's a quality to the air in the room that doesn't belong to me.
A coolness that has nothing to do with the temperature.
The faint sense of a room that's been entered and exited very recently.
I sit up slowly. The blanket falls to my waist. I look around the room in the gray half-light.
Everything's where I left it. The stone on the nightstand. The jasmine in its paper cup on the desk, the petals beginning to drop now that it's been three days. The clothes on the floor. The textbooks in their accusing pile. The violin case in the corner.
Nothing.
I get up and cross to the window and check the latch. The latch is closed. I check the closet. The closet is empty except for my coats. I look under the bed even though I haven't looked under a bed since I was eight years old.
Nothing.
I stop in the middle of my room in my T-shirt and underwear and feel like I'm missing something I can't name.
The kitchen is empty. Lisa's bedroom door is open and the bed is unmade — she has class at seven on Mondays.
The coffee maker is full from her morning brew.
I pour myself a cup and stand at the counter and look out the window above the sink at the parking lot below.
Snow has fallen overnight. My car is buried under another inch.
I drink my coffee. The cold edge in my apartment is gone, or it's faded enough that I can't feel it anymore. I tell myself I imagined it.
I get ready and drive to the mall.
The shift is normal. Tammy is on. We have a steady stream of lunch customers from the offices nearby and a few mall walkers who come in for coffee and stay too long. Tammy and I work through the rush and into the slow afternoon and I almost forget about the morning.
Almost.
There's a moment around three-thirty when I'm wiping down the counter and Tammy is in the back doing the inventory and the food court is empty, and I look up from my work and the food court suddenly feels enormous.
The ceiling has gone higher. The empty tables have spread further apart than they were a moment ago.
I have the sudden, foolish thought that someone's watching me.
I look around. There's the woman at the Orange Julius with her face in a magazine.
There's the man at the pretzel place who's on a phone call.
There's the security guard who replaced Craig — a short woman named Diane who hasn't introduced herself but who I've seen walking the same route Craig walked, in the same brown uniform, at the same hours.
No one's watching me.
I shake it off. I finish wiping the counter. Tammy comes back from the inventory and complains about Dale's penmanship on the order sheets and the moment passes.
I close at nine. Tammy and I walk out together. The wind has picked up and the new snow is starting to blow across the lot in low drifts. I drive home, park in my usual spot, cross the lot, climb the stairs, and let myself into the apartment.
The apartment is warm. Lisa is at the kitchen table. She looks up.
"Hey."
"Hey."
"There's leftover stew on the stove. Help yourself."
"You made stew?"
"Dee made stew. She came by between classes and said she wanted to remember what her kitchen looked like." Lisa shrugs. "She left it for us."
I look at the pot on the stove. The lid is on. The pot is warm to the touch.
I don't know how to respond to two acts of kindness from my roommates in a week. I'm not sure what's happening. I ladle some of the stew into a bowl and eat it standing at the counter. It's good. The beef is tender and the broth is rich. Dee can apparently cook. I hadn't known.
"Thanks," I say.
Lisa doesn't look up. "Tell Dee."
"I will."
I rinse the bowl and go to my room.
I sit on the bed and look at the cup of jasmine on the desk. The petals are dropping. I should throw it out. I'm not going to throw it out. I should ask one of my roommates if they put it in my car as a joke. I'm not going to ask. They'd tell me they didn't. I know they didn't.
I look at the stone on the nightstand. Black and smooth. I pick it up and roll it between my fingers. The weight is familiar now.
I put it back. I get into bed.
I lie on my back. I look at the ceiling. The streetlight outside throws a thin pale line across one corner. The wind pushes against the window glass.
I'm awake.
I shouldn't be awake. I should be tired enough to sleep. I'm tired enough to sleep. But something in me is listening, the wary attention of a deer in a clearing it doesn't trust.
I roll onto my side. I close my eyes. I'm still listening.
I don't hear anything.
I lie there. The wind dies. The pipes in the wall click once and go silent. Somewhere in the building a door closes. I keep listening.
Nothing comes.
Eventually I sleep. I don't know when. I only know that when I wake the room is pale with first light and the listening has gone with the dark.
* * *
Farkas
The phone rings at one-fourteen in the afternoon.
I've been waiting at the kitchen table since I rose at noon.
The blackout fabric over the kitchen window keeps the daylight out but I can feel the sun on the other side of the wall, weighing down on the house.
My body is slow. My limbs feel heavier than they have for years.
I haven't been awake during the day in months. It isn't pleasant.
I lift the receiver before the second ring.
"Yes."
"Sir." Whitfield's voice is brisk. The line is clear. "I have what you asked for."
"Tell me."
"The parents. James and Eunhee Lin. They reside at 4218 Pacific Heights Drive, Omaha, in the Dundee neighborhood. Mr. Lin is in private practice. Internal medicine. His office is on Dodge Street near the medical center. Mrs. Lin works as a registered nurse at Methodist Hospital."
I let the address settle in my memory. I haven't needed to write anything down in a long time.
"And the faculty member."
"Dr. Margaret Reeves. She's sixty-two years old.
She's been on the violin faculty at the University of Nebraska — Lincoln since nineteen-seventy.
She supervised Miss Lin's audition placement when she enrolled in the fall of nineteen-eighty-two and she continued to coach her informally throughout Miss Lin's two years at the university, even though Miss Lin wasn't formally enrolled in the music program.
There are several pieces of correspondence in the music department files referencing the arrangement. "
"Her home address."
"Two-four-one-eight North Forty-Second Street, Lincoln.
A bungalow in the Havelock neighborhood.
She lives alone. Her husband died six years ago.
There are two adult children, both out of state.
She has a cat. She walks to campus when the weather permits and drives a 1981 Volkswagen Rabbit when it doesn't."
The detail is more than I need, but Whitfield is always thorough.
"Thank you."
"Sir." He hesitates. He's been hesitating with me twice now in three days. "May I ask the nature of the matter? Anything you wish me to anticipate?"
"No."
"Of course." He recovers smoothly. "If you require additional information, I'm at the number."
"I know where to find you."
I hang up the receiver.
I sit at the table. The address is in my head. The professor's name is in my head. Sixty-two. Lives alone. Husband died six years ago. Two children out of state. A cat. Drives a Rabbit.
She's known Jenny longer than anyone at the mall has known Jenny. She's watched her play. She's tried to keep her. She's failed.
I get up from the table. I cross to the room with no windows. I sit on the floor with my back against the wall and I wait for the sun to set.
* * *
The drive to Lincoln takes an hour and ten minutes in the van. The roads are clear and the night is sharp with cold. I keep to the speed limit. I don't draw attention. I haven't drawn attention from a state trooper in forty years and I don't intend to start now.
Havelock is on the north side of Lincoln, a neighborhood of old houses on streets lined with bare trees.
The bungalow on North Forty-Second Street has a porch light on.
The light in the front room is on. There's a thin column of smoke from the chimney.
The Volkswagen Rabbit is parked in the driveway with snow piled along its hood.
I park the van two blocks away. I walk back.
The house has a side gate that leads to a backyard.
I let myself through the gate. The yard is mostly empty — a clothesline, a covered grill, a wooden bench beneath a maple tree.
The back door of the house is white. There's a glass storm door over it and inside, through the glass, I can see the kitchen.
A light is on over the sink. A woman is moving in the kitchen.
She's small and gray-haired and she's wearing a long cardigan. She's holding a kettle.
I wait until she turns away from the door.
I open the storm door. I open the back door. Both are locked but neither is locked well. The back door swings inward without sound.
The kitchen is warm. The smell of tea and old paper.
Dr. Reeves turns.
She sees me. Her face goes through the same three expressions Craig's face went through, but in a different order.
Confusion. Recognition that something's wrong.
Fear, but not the same kind of fear. The fear of a woman who's lived alone for six years and who's thought about this moment in the abstract and who's suddenly having it.
She doesn't scream. She doesn't move. She stares at me with her hand still on the kettle.
"Be still," I say, the same way I said it to Tammy. "I'm not going to hurt you."
"Who—"
"Sit down."