Chapter 4
Chapter Four
Cassandra Jenkins hasn't called me in four months, and she's never once called just to say hello.
Her name sits on the screen and the phone buzzes itself in a slow circle on the counter. I let it go three rings while I decide who I want to be.
It’s barely four. The afternoon has gone white and heavy, the light off the lake coming through the kitchen windows bright enough to make me squint. There’s a glass of wine at my elbow. I’ve refilled it once already. I’m choosing not to think about that. Luna is asleep against my foot.
Spread across the length of the island, in four neat columns, are the clippings.
I don't remember deciding to lay them out. That's what stops me when I finally notice. Kane's face vanished from my laptop hours ago, and somewhere between then and now I've sorted every article in the envelope.
The left column holds the earliest dates. Next are the attacks with two victims, followed by the ones the reporters aren't sure belong to the same man. On the right are the outliers, the pieces I can't make fit anywhere even after reading them three times each.
I don't remember making those choices. But some part of me did. Some part looked at these articles and knew where they belonged before I did.
I pick up the phone.
“Cassandra.”
“Mal, you sound out of breath.”
“Yeah, I was rushing around.” I look down at the clippings spread across the island. “Actually, that’s a lie. I was standing right here.”
Cassandra laughs softly. “At least you’re honest.”
“Only when cornered.” I move away from the island, toward the window, as if putting some distance between me and the clippings might help. “How are you?”
"Old. Underfunded. Otherwise unchanged." Cassandra smoked for thirty years and quit twice out of spite, and her voice has never forgiven her for it. Fifty-three, unimpressed, and she’s still the best editor I've ever had. "How's the ear?"
Everybody asks about the ear. It’s the safe question. It’s the door you can knock on without opening everything else.
“Same on the right. No change.”
"And the rest?"
"That's a bigger question, Cass."
"I've got time."
I press my forehead against the glass. Out on the lake a boat drags a white seam across the flat water, and a kid on a paddleboard wobbles in the wake of it.
"The rest of it is fine. I sleep some. My therapist tells me over Zoom that my body is doing its best. David's away a lot.
I read. I walk the dog. Oh, and I get invited to parties by women who don't like me.
" I hear how it sounds and stop. "I'm fine, Cassandra. "
"Mm."
“You sound like my therapist,” I say.
“I wouldn’t try to psychoanalyze you. I can barely keep my own life together.
” Cassandra pauses. I can hear the office behind her, the murmur of somebody else’s deadline.
“Well then, I’ll get to why I called. I’ve got a hole in October, and I’d rather fill it with something that matters than another eleven hundred words on the ferry system. ”
“Then you rang the wrong person.”
“Yes, well, I disagree.” Her voice loses the joke. “You need to get back in the saddle. Get your feet wet.” A beat. “No pun intended.”
“Very funny.”
“I’m serious, Mal. I want to know if anything’s caught your interest. Anything at all. It doesn’t have to be a pitch. It doesn’t have to be finished. It doesn’t even have to be good yet. Just something you’ve been reading at midnight that you can’t put down.”
I turn around.
I don't mean to. My body does it before I've agreed to anything, the same as it did before.
The clippings sit in the afternoon glare, four columns of old newsprint I have no right to be looking at.
County names I've never visited. A husband and wife in Josephine County, found by their gardener. A husband and wife outside Bend, found by a daughter home from college.
No forced entry anywhere. Nobody who heard anything.
Years of it, stacked up, and not one of these reporters seems to know the other cases exist.
Somebody should have connected these.
The thought arrives in a voice I recognize, older than the life I have now.
"Mallory?"
"I'm here."
"You went quiet, which in my experience means one of two things." Cassandra waits. She's very good at waiting. It's how she's gotten thirty years of people to tell her things they meant to keep to themselves. "Either you're about to lie to me, or you're about to tell me something."
Kane's face swims up in front of me, on the laptop, with his glasses off. Can you promise me that? And I promised. It's only been a few hours since I promised.
"There might be something," I hear myself say.
The words are out before I can decide whether I meant them.
"Go on."
"I don't have it yet. I don't even know if it's a thing.
" I'm walking back toward the island now, and my free hand is already moving over the clippings, straightening a column that doesn't need straightening.
"It's old. It's Oregon. It's a lot of counties and a lot of years and I don't think anybody's ever put them in the same room. "
"Put what in the same room?"
"That's the part I don't have."
Cassandra doesn't laugh. That's the thing about her. Anyone else would laugh, and I'd have deserved it.
"How did you come by it?"
The truth is spread across my kitchen island beside a padded envelope with another man's name on it.
"It came to me," I say.
There’s a long pause on the line, and I can feel her deciding whether to push.
“You know what you sound like right now,” she says at last.
“Don’t.”
“You sound like you did before.”
“Cassandra.”
“I’m not trying to push you, I’m telling you what I hear.
That’s my job.” Her chair creaks. “Look. You’ve spent two years telling me you’re not that person anymore, and I’ve let you, because you had reason.
But I’ve known you a long time, and I know that voice.
It’s the one you get when you think there’s a story. ”
I stand over the columns with my hand on the counter, and my heart is going faster than it has any cause to. It feels like appetite. That's what frightens me.
“I’d need to make some calls,” I say.
“Make them.”
“I’m not promising you anything. I might get four days into this and find out it’s nothing, and I’ve bothered a lot of grieving people for no reason.”
"Then it's nothing and you'll have made some calls." A beat. "Or it isn't, and I clear October."
Down at the sealed end of the house, the plastic sheeting lifts, then goes still. Luna raises her head from my foot, looks toward it, then settles again.
"Send me what you've got when you've got it," Cassandra says. "And Mallory. Don't disappear on me."
She's gone before I can answer.
I stand in the kitchen with the phone still warm in my hand. The articles cover the island, and I have no business reading any of them.
I try to work out what I've just started.
My hands sorted these into neat rows while the rest of me was somewhere else. Now they reach for the phone. I photograph everything, every article, every page, because I already know I'll have to give it back.
Then I tape the envelope shut and set it by the door.
In the morning I'll carry it up to the Langford house and give it back to the man everyone keeps talking about but nobody has seen.