Chapter 25
Sylvia Reed needed some convincing. Her brother hadn’t allowed her into the place for months. After he died, when the detectives came, she’d stayed in the house. She hadn’t wanted to watch them pick through Geoff’s things. She knew she’d have to go up there eventually, but she wasn’t ready.
“I understand why you wouldn’t want to come with us,” June said. “But we’d really like to look. We won’t take anything, I promise.”
Sylvia narrowed her eyes. “Why are you asking all these questions, anyway? I told you everything I know about Geoff. Why do you need to see where he lived?”
“We just want to understand him better,” June said. “Seeing his apartment will help us with that. Maybe it will help you, too.”
Sylvia sighed. But she rose from her seat, took a set of keys from a drawer, and opened the back door. Outside, she led them across the yard to the garage. The rain fell steadily. The unmown grass bent under the weight of accumulated droplets.
As they climbed the sagging wooden steps to the second-floor apartment, the roar of another jet began to rise.
Sylvia stopped at the landing with a hand on the rail, as if to steady herself against the noise.
As the plane’s white belly flashed overhead, the engines were deafening.
The light fixture over the door vibrated, flashing on and off.
Peter hoped the house had been really cheap.
When the sound subsided, Sylvia tried keys from the ring one by one.
“To be honest, I’m afraid of what the place will look like.
The last six months, Geoff wouldn’t even let me come over to clean the bathroom.
” She found a key that fit and turned it, then pushed the door open into the darkness and stepped aside to let them pass.
Peter went first, finding a switch on the wall and turning on the lights.
It was a single room tucked under the eaves.
Kitchenette on the left, one corner walled off for a tiny bathroom.
In the alcove behind it, an unmade double mattress lay on the floor by a bookshelf.
A sagging sectional sat against the far wall with the seat cushions set aside in a heap.
On the right under the front window, an expensive gaming chair sat by a cheap folding table that held a giant computer monitor and a tangle of orphaned cables.
A partial case of Monster Energy drink sat on the floor below.
There were no dishes in the sink. The trash can was empty. There was a faint smell, maybe dirty clothes, maybe body odor. But otherwise the room seemed pretty clean.
Sylvia peeked over June’s shoulder. “Huh. The police must have tidied up.”
Peter and June exchanged glances. The police never left a place neater than they found it. Maybe Geoff had known he wasn’t coming back. Maybe he’d been planning to kill himself all along and hadn’t wanted to leave a mess. Some suicides were thoughtful like that.
Sylvia walked in and turned on a few more lights. The walls had been patched repeatedly and without regard for appearances. Two of the four windows had bad seals and were fogged between the panes. The kitchen cabinets were shabby and the Formica countertop was peeling.
“I wish I could have made it nicer for him,” she said.
“I couldn’t afford to. I can barely afford the house payments.
It’s not like he paid rent.” She sighed.
“The worst thing is, I really thought he was getting better. I thought I might get my life back. Now that he’s gone, part of me is relieved.
It was so much work, taking care of my brother.
The worry, the appointments. I couldn’t even date, not really.
Then I catch myself and think, you’re a monster.
Your brother was mentally ill and now he’s dead. ”
Peter had plenty of friends from the service who were caring for partners wounded at war. The invisible wounds were often the most difficult to care for. “You’re not a monster, Sylvia. It’s hard taking care of someone else. Especially over the long haul.”
She swiped angrily at her eyes. “Tell me about it.”
June gave her a moment, then said, “Where did Geoff keep his cassette tapes?”
“With his books.” Sylvia walked into the alcove and stared at the shelves. “They’re gone.”
“How did he listen to them?”
“He had a cheap little player by the bed, but that’s gone, too.”
Peter said, “Did you ever listen to the tapes?”
“He played me some of the music on his phone. Old-timey music, fiddles and banjos.” She made a face. “I can’t abide a banjo.”
“But that was on his phone. Did you ever listen to one of the actual tapes?”
“No,” she said. “I guess I didn’t. But where did they go? The police didn’t take them. They’re not on the inventory sheet they gave me.”
Peter looked at June, knowing what she was thinking. That maybe Reed had disposed of them or given them to someone else in case he was captured or killed. Because if the police had the tapes, the investigation wouldn’t go away.
“Peter.” June stood looking at the wall by the desk. It was covered with images and computer printouts tacked up haphazardly. “Come look at this.”
He walked over. The images were captioned photos printed from news stories.
Many showed houses and businesses in various stages of destruction.
Some had been wrecked by wind or water, others were blackened and burned.
The captions told of hurricanes and tornadoes and wildfires.
More photos showed melting electrical wires in Texas, the riots in Portland and Minneapolis, people breaking down the doors of the Capitol building in D.C.
There were articles about climate change.
Artificial intelligence. A half dozen wars.
Famine in Africa. Some of the text had been marked up with stars and circles and arrows.
June started taking pictures with her phone. “Peter, what do you think?”
“He seemed very concerned about the state of the world.”
Sylvia came to stand beside them, hand to her mouth. “I’ve never seen these before.”
“He didn’t talk about this stuff with you?”
“Never.”
To one side, a glossy brochure was taped to the wall.
The brochure was for a company called Resilient Systems, something to do with renewable energy.
It was folded over to show the picture of the company founder, a middle-aged white guy with strange eyes that seemed to bore through the camera lens to somehow stare directly at you.
June took a photo of it. “How about this brochure?”
Sylvia sighed. “A few years ago, he got obsessed with putting solar panels on the garage. Even if I could afford it, which I can’t, it rains nine months a year here, so it really never made financial sense.”
Another plane flew overhead, drowning all conversation.
Peter stepped back to the big bookcase. The particleboard shelves were sagging under the weight of the contents, jammed in there every which way.
Programming manuals covering six different computer languages.
Thick textbooks on electrical engineering and industrial power systems. How-to books on farming and hunting.
Animal husbandry. Log home construction. Build your own drone.
A lot of interests, as his sister had said. The kind of brilliant self-taught person who went on to become an inventor. Or something else.
The how-to books were all together on one shelf. They were smaller than the textbooks, but a few of them stuck out a few inches. Peter pulled them from the shelf. Tucked into the space behind was a narrow stack of what looked like pamphlets. Peter reached in and extracted them.
They weren’t pamphlets. They were old paper maps, the kind you used to buy at gas stations, held together by a rubber band. He flipped through the stack. It looked like all fifty states.
He’d seen a similar collection of maps in the Toyota’s glove box.
He put the books back where they had been. Using his body to block Sylvia’s view, he tucked the maps into his jacket.
June had told Sylvia they wouldn’t take anything from the apartment.
If the maps turned out to be nothing, he’d bring them back with an apology.
Somehow Peter didn’t think they’d be nothing.