Chapter 2
Chapter Two
He's leaving, and I hate it.
David's suitcase is by the door, and it's been there since last night. It's packed and zipped and pointed at the world outside, which is how I always know how my week will go before anyone says a word.
I've slid the clippings back into their envelope and left it face down at the far end of the island. I'll decide what to do about them later. That's what I tell myself. Later.
My husband comes down the hall in the good shirt, the pale blue one I like, checking his watch against his phone against some third clock only he can see.
David moves through our mornings like a man being timed.
Forty-two years old and he still takes the stairs two at once.
He still has a surgeon's hands, steady the moment they touch anything that matters.
When he sees me at the island, his face softens, and for a second I remember why I married him.
"There you are," he says. "Did you go out?"
"Yeah, to the audiologist. That follow-up in Seattle.
" I don't tell him I took a car service the whole way there and back rather than ask him to shift it to a day he could drive me.
He doesn't ask, because we long ago stopped counting the small accommodations of my not driving. "What time's your flight?" I ask.
"Eleven forty."
"Have you eaten breakfast yet?"
"I’ll grab something at the airport."
"I don't understand why you don't just drive. Portland is only four hours south on I-5."
He crosses to the coffee machine and I watch him not look at the envelope, because there's no reason for him to look at the envelope. I feel absurd for even clocking it.
"Oh, just four hours?" He laughs. "That's four hours if nothing happens.
It's August. Something always happens. I'd sit outside Tacoma for an hour, get in late with a headache, and be no use to anyone.
So no, fifty minutes in the air and a car at the other end, and I walk in like a human being.
" He shrugs. “Anyway, the hospital's paying. I'm hardly going to complain.”
“Nice for some.”
“Please.” He almost smiles. "The conference wraps Thursday. I’m taking Sophie to dinner that night and then I fly back Friday morning. She picked the place. Some ramen thing she and her friends are obsessed with."
"Send her my love."
"I always do." He says it lightly, and it's true. It’s also the closest we come to the thing we don't discuss. Sophie is nineteen and lives with her mother in Portland. She has never once let me all the way in, and David carries the low, constant ache of it between us.
He pours more coffee. "You'll be okay, right? It’s just two nights."
"I'm a grown woman, David."
"That's not what I asked."
I look at him. There it is, the real question under the polite one, the one about the wine and the pills and the long nights and the locks I check twice. He asks it gently. He always asks it gently, which is somehow worse than if he snapped.
"I'll be fine," I say. "Julia's around. I've got Luna. I've got a whole list of nothing to do."
He comes around the island, sets his coffee down, and takes my face in both hands. He kisses my forehead and I let myself have the moment. I breathe in the smell of soap and the cedar of his aftershave.
Two years ago I never thought I'd be married. Then the crash happened, and it all moved very fast. It probably helped that he was my surgeon. He was the one who explained the damage, the hearing loss, the memory gaps, the things I might get back and the things I might not.
Everything was a blur of appointments and phone calls that stopped being about appointments.
It was a whirlwind few months. Then a small ceremony with almost no one in it.
After that, we left Oregon and came here for David's job in Seattle.
People who took their time falling in love would call that reckless.
Maybe it was. Some marriages go bad long before anyone leaves.
I have written about a few of them. Ours is not one of them.
Ours has damage in it. Things we don't know how to talk about. Places neither of us knows how to touch without hurting the other.
But it’s not dead.
When he holds me, I still believe him.
That has to count.
"Call me tonight," he says, his lips pressed into my hair. "Not text. Call."
"Yes, Doctor."
He almost laughs. Then his phone buzzes in his pocket. He steps back to read it, and whatever was about to show on his face disappears. He thumbs the screen dark and puts it away.
"Work?" I ask.
"Always work." He picks the coffee back up. "Helen wants numbers before the board meets. If I make Chief I'll never sleep again, and if I don't make Chief I'll never sleep again. But someone has to pay for this lifestyle."
He says it lightly. He says almost everything lightly. It lands anyway, and neither of us picks it up.
"Go," I tell him. "You don’t want to hit traffic on the bridge."
He smiles and gets his suitcase. At the door he turns, and he's just my husband in a blue shirt in the morning light, and I love him so plainly it frightens me.
"Lock up this evening," he says.
"I always do."
The front door opens, and Julia's voice rises from the hall, bright over the top of his. "Hello, David."
"Julia."
A car door slams, an engine turns over, and then it's just gravel.
Julia appears in the kitchen the way she always does. No knock. Already talking. Luna goes to pieces at her feet.
"Tell me there's coffee," she says.
She's in her running clothes, damp at the collar and the small of her back. She’s already clocked six miles while most people are still hunting for their slippers. At thirty-nine, Julia looks exceptional.
She drops onto a stool at my island and steals my unfinished toast without asking, which is one of the reasons I love her.
“Here’s that coffee," I say, handing her a cup.
Julia's eyes go to my bare wrist. “Mal, you're not wearing it."
"I'm not driving, either. Not much use for it if I'm not driving."
"Ugh. It isn't only for driving." She takes my wrist, turns it over, lets it go. "It's for when your head goes somewhere you don't want it to. You feel it on your wrist, you breathe, you come back. That's half of it."
"And the other half?"
"The bead, silly." She reaches over and picks it up from the bowl, showing me the little dull-gray ball threaded on the band.
"I went down a rabbit hole for hours after you told me about your accident.
Car-escape tools, grounding, all the cheerful things a person Googles at two in the morning when her friend nearly drowned in a river.
That bead's tungsten. You put it against a side window and pull the band back and let go.
Smash. The glass goes to pieces. One snap. It could save your life."
"So could an open window," I say.
"You were lucky your window was open. Luckier that someone stopped to pull you out." She says it gently, which is worse than if she'd said it any other way. "Put it on. Please. For me."
I shake my head, but take it from her and put it on. "Happy?"
"Getting there." She points the toast at me.
"You look pale, hon. Is it a bad morning?
" She doesn't wait, which is her mercy. She never makes me answer the direct ones.
“Anyway, have you been out yet? The weather is vile.
You can't breathe. The humidity is awful.
My phone's been screaming weather alerts since six.
" She fans herself with a napkin. "The weather people say there's a storm coming. A bad one. We are in for days of rain, if they’re right.
All this heat has to go somewhere, and then after that, it's outages, outages, outages. I’m telling you, if the whole point goes dark for two days, Chris will act like it's a personal insult from the sky.
" She rolls her eyes at the ceiling. “So. Where is David off to now?”
"Portland."
“Portland, again?” She takes a bite of toast and nods at the little brown skyline of packages I haven't finished with, the envelope face down among them. “That's a lot of mail. You running up David's credit card?”
“I wish.” I hesitate. It's only half a second, but Julia catches half seconds too, which is the trouble with clever friends. “One of them wasn't mine. Wrong address. I opened it before I looked.”
"Ooh, scandal. Whose?"
"Some guy up the road. The Langford house. He’s new. Henry something."
"The mystery buyer." She lights up. "Frank's been beside himself. Nobody's laid eyes on him." She has the envelope off the island before I can stop her, tipping it toward the window, working the top clipping halfway out with one finger. "What is it, love letters?"
I take it back. Not fast, just firm, and I slide the whole thing under a catalog.
She's already seen it. I watched her read the headline upside down in the two seconds she had it, and the amusement goes out of her face.
“It’s just newspaper clippings," I say. "Old ones. Dozens of them. Crime stuff. A string of unsolved murders from Oregon."
"The Cascade Killer," she says. "Ten years, give or take. They put about twenty-eight murders on him, forty-odd sexual assaults, and the best part of ninety burglaries."
"That's a lot to pin on one man," I say.
"That's just it. It's attributed, all of it.
Nobody ever counted it properly, because nobody ever caught him, so that's only what they think is his.
Could be more. The assaults are the one part they could prove, one man's DNA running through the lot, and it never matched a soul.
Some of the victims lived. That's how the stories survived too.
Then he stopped, and it all went cold, and nobody knows why. "
Long before anyone called him the Cascade Killer he went by other names. The Portland Prowler. The Willamette Valley Rapist. Different departments treated them as different men for years, until the evidence finally said otherwise.
"And let me guess," I say. "You know why he stopped."
Julia nods. Julia is a true-crime junkie, maybe a bit too much of one.
It's part of why we became friends, along with my background as a freelance crime journalist and the strange road that had carried me to Hunts Point.
She can recite case numbers at a dinner party.
She has opinions about podcast hosts and thinks, in another life, she would have made a good detective.
“I think our killer got married, settled down, had kids," she says.
"Possibly. Or he's in jail. Or dead."
She looks at me for a second with an expression I can't read. Then she grins, wide and wicked, and leans across the island toward me, dropping her voice into a stage whisper.
"The murders stopped two years ago. That's around when you and David moved here, isn't it?"
I grin, because I know exactly where this is going.
"No, hear me out," she says. "Your husband.
Handsome David. From Oregon originally, yes?
Travels constantly. He's always at some conference, in some other city.
Comes and goes at all hours because he's on call, which is very convenient.
Has surgeon hands, access to medical records, and a face people open doors for.
" She ticks it off on her fingers, delighted with herself.
"Has anyone ever considered that David might, in fact, be a serial killer? "
I laugh. It comes out easy and real, because it’s absurd, because it’s Julia, because this is the game we play—the two of us taking the frightening size of the world and making it small enough to hold.
"He can't even find the milk in the fridge," I say.
"That's what they all say. He seemed so normal." She grabs the last of my toast, stands, and brushes the crumbs off her impossible stomach. "So what are you going to do with the envelope?”
“Tape it up and drop it off."
She stops brushing. "Drop it off? As in, walk it over there. To his house."
"That's the neighborly thing to do."
"Oh, honey." Julia puts a hand on the island and leans in like she's about to explain gravity to me.
"Clearly you have not lived on Hunts Point long enough.
The neighborly thing to do is put it back in the mail and let the people who are paid to make this mistake un-make it.
You opened someone else's mail, Mallory.
Besides being humiliating, I'm fairly sure that's illegal. "
I laugh. "Don't be silly. That's only if you do it on purpose. It was a simple mistake."
"A simple mistake." She repeats it back to me slowly, rocking her head from side to side with each word, mocking me with her whole body.
"So seal up the simple mistake, write Return to Sender on it, or Not At This Address, and put it back in the box.
Don't go strolling up the road to hand-deliver it to a man nobody on this street has laid eyes on. "
"He might have been waiting weeks for it. If I put it back in the system it only delays it, and then it gets lost, and then what?" I shake my head. "No, I'll take it over tomorrow. It'll be fine. He'll be out working anyway. Everyone on this street is."
"I think you've lost your mind," she says instead. "I mean, doesn't it strike you as even slightly odd? Our brand-new neighbor has ordered himself the entire back archive of the Cascade murders."
"No odder than a woman who runs six miles every morning listening to two men in Ohio argue about decomposition rates."
"That," Julia says, with enormous dignity, "is educational."
From outside, a man’s voice calls her name. Once. Cold and hard. Not a question.
“Julia!”
It's Chris. Julia's sorry excuse for a boyfriend.
I don't see him. I never really see him. I only ever hear him, that voice arriving before he does. It’s a tone that turns a name into a leash.
Julia's face empties out for a second, then paints itself back into place, and she's already moving toward the door.
"Duty calls," she says brightly. "I'll come by later, we'll open wine, we'll solve the murders." She pauses in the doorframe with her hand on the screen and looks back at me, and the grin has gone somewhere quieter. "The David thing. I'm kidding."
"I know you are."
"Mostly," she says, and winks, and is gone, down the drive toward the voice with her ponytail swinging.
I stand alone in my kitchen. My husband's coffee cup is still warm on the counter, and an envelope of murders is hidden under a catalog. I don't laugh.