Chapter 4
Chapter Four
The apartment was warm, and quiet, and hers.
She ate standing at the counter, straight out of the pan, because cooking a proper meal for one person was a performance she'd quietly stopped giving herself sometime in the last year, along with several other performances.
She didn't grade the stack of papers in her bag.
She poured a glass of wine that she then didn't drink, and she stood at the window with it and watched the street go dark, the streetlights coming up one by one and the last of the daylight draining out of the low clouds over the rooftops.
She thought about calling Rosa back. She got as far as picking up the phone, and as far as the thread — pick a small one to start — and she stood there with Rosa's name lit at the top of the recent calls and her thumb over it.
She could hear how the call would go. Rosa would answer on the first ring, pleased and immediately suspicious of being pleased, and she would want to know what had changed in the last two hours, and the honest answer was nothing, and Rosa would hear the nothing and be gentle about it, which was worse.
Elena set the phone down again on the counter without opening anything.
It lit up on its own a minute later, buzzing against the countertop. A voicemail she'd missed during the Hollis ambush, from a number she hadn't kept in her contacts for years and recognized on sight all the same.
Logan Shepard.
Her thumb was already moving toward the delete icon out of something like reflex. She stopped it, and let the message play instead.
"Elena. Hi. It's Logan." A pause, and then, faster: "Don't delete this — I can actually hear you reaching for the button right now, I can picture the exact face you're making, you've got the face on.
I know I'm somewhere near the bottom of the list of people you'd want to hear a voicemail from, and I know you've already decided that whatever I'm about to say is going to turn into a problem for you.
It might. I'll own that much up front, I won't pretend it couldn't. But I'm in Villahermosa right now — that's Tabasco, don't ask, it's been a very long month and I'll tell you the whole stupid story someday if you let me — and two days ago somebody put a thing in front of me that I cannot read and I cannot stop looking at. "
There was a pause, and when he came back the easy laugh had gone out of his voice entirely.
"It's a slab. Obsidian. Big — genuinely, worryingly big, bigger than the material has any right to allow in one piece, I keep waiting for someone to tell me it's resin — and it's incised edge to edge.
And whoever cut it knew things, Elena. I've been doing this long enough to know the difference between decoration and information, and this isn't decoration.
It's organized. There's a structure to it.
It is saying something, deliberately, and I cannot for the life of me tell you what, and it's driving me slowly out of my mind. "
Traffic moved behind him, far off and hot, the sound of a street in a place a long way south of hers.
"There's exactly one person alive who could look at this and tell me whether I've lost my mind or found something," he said. "One. And the thing about her is that she won't pick up her phone."
A breath.
"So. Just look at the photos. That's the whole ask, that's all of it.
I'm sending them right now, to this number.
You don't have to call me back. You don't have to get on a plane, God knows, you don't have to do a single thing except look at them with your own eyes for thirty seconds.
I figure you owe yourself that much, even if you've decided you don't owe me anything, which is fair. Take care of yourself, Elena. Really."
The message ended.
A second later the phone buzzed once more in her hand, and a thread of gray image tiles began loading into the message window, one after another, arriving in her kitchen whether she'd asked for them or not — placeholder squares filling in slowly from the top as the data came down the line.
Elena did not open them. She told herself she wasn't going to open them, and she stood there and did not believe herself while she said it.
She knew exactly what would happen if she opened them.
She would see the first tile, and she would tell herself she was only confirming that it was nothing, a poorly lit tourist piece, a modern reproduction with the tooling all wrong.
And then she would see the second one, and she would already have a pen in her hand, and by the third she would be sitting down.
She had done it before. She knew the shape of the fall from the top of it.
The radiator ticked in the corner. Down on the street a car went past with its window rolled down, the music inside it loud for a moment and then gone around the corner and gone. On the counter the last of the gray tiles finished loading, the whole column filled in now, waiting.
She set the phone face-down on the counter. She turned off the kitchen light. And she stood there a while longer in the dark, with the phone under her hand, not reaching for it — and not leaving the room, either.