Chapter 44
Night Seventeen
Zeke
Zeke was transfixed by the cityscape, working out how to call Sybil now that he was back in town.
Had been back for two days actually and still hadn’t figured out how to smooth things over.
He wasn’t used to fighting with friends, but as Lani pointed out as they drove around their town Christmas Eve because there was nothing else to do, he wasn’t really used to having many friends in the first place.
And maybe he shouldn’t go and fuck this one up.
And maybe he thought of her as more than a friend, she added, and that’s why the stakes felt so much higher.
He’d told her she was an idiot, that she’d seen too many rom-coms, then turned up the radio to that Chumbawumba song that they used to play whenever he struck out a batter in high school and veered onto the highway where he could floor it.
He pressed his forehead against the floor-to-ceiling window, which was cold, a buffer from the elements outside and his extremely pleasant always-seventy-two-degree living room. Twenty-nine floors below, Sybil was out there. Yet here he was, a grown man paralyzed about doing anything about it.
Someone was pounding on his door, and he jerked back from the glass.
He checked the time on his phone, nearly three in the morning.
He knew almost no one who would barge in at three in the morning other than, well, maybe Timothy, and two other people, neither of whom he dared to think could be in his hallway.
He peered through the peephole. And there she was. Sybil.
“Hey,” he said once he opened the door. He felt like a barely postpubescent boy, saying hi in chemistry class to a girl he’d had a crush on.
“I’m sorry I didn’t call,” she said.
“No, no, I was awake.” He glanced down, only now realizing he was shirtless, in flannel Christmas pajamas and barefoot. Pluto sniffed his feet, then licked his right big toe, and she unleashed him and let him into the apartment. As if that was that.
“I wasn’t sure if you’d pick up,” she said, and then he stepped aside as if to say Come in, please, I’ve missed you. Even though he didn’t say any of that out loud. He was a fucking idiot.
“I would have picked up,” he said, closing the door, bolting it.
“I came right from Julian’s.” She sat on the couch, more like fell into it, rested her elbows on her knees and placed her head into her palms. He was beside her in half a second.
“Julian’s? Why?”
She looked up at him, and for the first time that he could remember, even with all the sleepless nights between them, she looked so tired.
A new line between her brows, a new weariness in the way her lips pressed together.
He thought this made her even a little more beautiful than just five days ago when they’d last seen each other.
When they’d had their fight. He suspected this would sound ridiculous if he tried to tell her, but it was true nevertheless.
Rather than answer, she opened her purse and passed him a phone.
“Simone wanted me to have this. There’s a photo of Betty. A recent one.” She took the phone back, swiped, then set it on the coffee table, as if it were a specimen that they needed to examine in a lab. Zeke tilted over to look more closely.
“Okay. And?”
“I think it’s the night she met Caleb.”
Now Julian reached for the cell and brought the screen closer.
“You think Caleb is part of the reason why Betty left?”
Sybil sighed, dropped her head back on the couch.
He turned toward her, rested his hand—his good hand, even though now they were both working, but he still thought of it that way, good or broken, useful or worthless—on her knee.
Her own hand found its way to his, and they braided their fingers together.
“I actually don’t. I can’t explain it, but I don’t think Caleb has anything to do with her disappearance.”
“Okay.”
“But why…I guess what I don’t understand, if Julian thought Betty was responsible for the fire, what did he need us for?
He knew where she worked; he could have just…
I don’t know, arrested her or whatever the FBI calls it.
Indicted her.” She lifted the hand that was holding his and pressed her temples, like she was staving off a headache.
“But he didn’t,” Zeke said.
“He didn’t,” Sybil agreed.
“So then why was he following her?”
“The thing is,” Sybil said, “I am not even sure that he was. Someone sent this to him. It wasn’t on his camera roll.”
“So he had someone else follow her?”
“Simone thinks someone hit him intentionally. She also thinks he used us to befriend her, Betty.”
“Wait, what do you meant ‘hit him intentionally’? Like…the car accident?”
Sybil nodded. Zeke felt something flare in his gut, and he thought he might be sick.
He didn’t want to break in front of her; he couldn’t freak out in front of her.
She was already so much smarter, so much wiser, so much more together.
But he felt like he was a skein of yarn about to become totally unraveled.
“That’s—” he started, then stopped. He didn’t know what that was other than he wasn’t prepared to put his life at risk, their lives at risk to take this any further.
Sybil stood, more like heaved herself off the couch, and moved to the kitchen. He found her there staring at the evidence wall.
“Betty is in trouble,” she said when she heard him behind her. “And maybe Julian didn’t think she had done anything wrong. Maybe Julian was trying to help her steer clear of the danger she was running from.”
“Sybil,” Zeke started. “I think we’re out over our skis here.”
“Simone already told the police. About her suspicions. After the hit-and-run.”
“Right,” Zeke said. “So maybe we need to leave it to them.”
Sybil spun around, her face a mix of fury and disappointment. “We can’t ‘leave it to them,’ Zeke. They don’t know Betty, they don’t care about Betty!” Her tone was high and tight, and Pluto ran into the kitchen, like she needed an ally.
“Sybil, look, I know that you are a Dateline expert—”
“Do not say it like that. Do not patronize me,” she interrupted.
“I just think that this is over our heads. Four dead in a doomsday cult? A missing young woman? A man—our friend—run over outside his apartment in Queens?” Zeke didn’t want her to think of him as a coward, but someone had to be reasonable here.
“Shit, Syb, I mean, come on, let’s be honest. This is… not realistic.”
She pushed by him, and Pluto followed, as if neither of them could tolerate his presence. He trailed them like the runt of the litter.
“Syb,” he said to her back. “Please, I really don’t want to fight with you. I, I mean, I missed you. I hated not talking to you. I don’t want to…do this.”
He saw her shoulders rise then fall.
“Fight with me or find Betty?”
“Both. I don’t want to fight with you, and I don’t think we should find Betty.”
“You may not want to,” she said finally, still not turning to face him, “but I have to, Zeke. I have to.”
Zeke stared at the ceiling, willed himself to say the right thing.
His physical therapist had just lectured him this morning on skipping two days while he was in Oklahoma.
Forget that his PT took his own vacation.
Forget that his body didn’t have the rest it needed to properly recover from his workouts in the first place.
For Zeke, there could be no gasps, no gaps.
“Your life has to be tunnel vision,” his trainer had said as Zeke was easing his way into the Olympic-sized pool for a quarter-mile swim.
“There can be no distractions, there can be no women, there can be no days off, there can be no nothing. Then, you might have a decent shot at being ready in the spring. Anything else, it’s a snowball dropped in hell. ”
Sybil did turn now and held his gaze.
“I have to, Zeke,” she repeated. “And I’m going to find Betty, with or without you.”
He inhaled because he was being asked to choose: the rehab and his career or, well, Sybil.
“Okay,” he conceded. “I’m in.”