Chapter 12
Chapter Twelve
The house makes a sound at ten past eight in the evening. I stand still in the middle of the hallway, trying to work out whether it was real.
That's the new arithmetic. It's been going on all day.
Every noise arrives and I have to do a small piece of mathematics on it.
Which side did it come from? Was it the good side?
If it was the good side, then it happened.
If it came from the right, then it's already halfway to being something I invented.
Don't panic. It's just the ice maker. It's always the ice maker.
I check the front door.
It's locked.
I knew it was locked, because I locked it, and because I checked it forty minutes ago. I check it again anyway. I stand there with my hand on the wood, going through the same worn-out argument with myself I have every night.
David is upstairs on the phone. He's been up there since we ate.
The heat hasn't moved. It's been sitting on this house for days and tonight it's worse than it's been.
The AC is on its highest setting, doing nothing except making a noise on my good side that I keep mistaking for a car in the drive.
Out on the lake the water hasn't stirred, not a ripple on it, just black glass.
The air feels like it's waiting for something.
Next door, the house still has tape across the drive.
I go to the window and look for it through the cedars.
I can't see much. That's the thing about this street, the thing everybody pays for.
Forty feet of trees between one life and the next.
Even now, a day after they carried Peggy and Brant out of it, all I can make out is a scrap of tape lifting in a wind that isn't there.
One light the police left burning still glows in a downstairs room.
I stay at the window longer than I mean to, and my mind does the thing I can't stop it doing.
How does someone get into a house like that?
No broken door, no smashed glass. That house has cameras and a gate, and still somebody walked in and back out.
And under that, the worse question keeps circling. Why them?
I prop my phone against the fruit bowl and open the laptop beside it. The original clippings are with Henry, where they belong. But I have every one of them here, dozens of pictures I took before I carried the package up the road.
I told myself I wouldn't do this tonight. I told Kane I wouldn't do it at all, and then I told Cassandra I would, and somewhere between those two is the woman I've stopped being able to predict.
The photos are open on my phone, swiped into the order my hands sorted them into a week ago.
Beside them, the laptop has a county paper's archive loading in one tab and a map in another.
I write on the backs of envelopes because I can't find a notebook.
Counties. Dates. How he got in. That's the one I keep coming back to.
Douglas County, four years ago. A husband and wife. They'd installed an alarm system eighteen months earlier. It never tripped.
Deschutes County the year before. Nothing forced. Nothing broken. In the fourth paragraph, the reporter slips in the only line that matters, the one they probably weren't supposed to write.
Investigators have not ruled out that the victims were known to their killer.
There were no signs of a break-in.
The archive tells me they did connect them in the end, though the papers never spoke to each other. Roseburg and Bend are a hundred and eighty miles apart. They had no reason to.
It took years. Then somebody put the assaults together and gave the killer a label. After that came a task force out of Salem, four counties in it, a consultant flown up from Quantico. After the task force came a great deal of nothing.
No suspect. No arrest.
Then he stopped two years ago, and the murders stopped with him. The file has been sitting in a basement ever since, waiting for a man who never came back.
That's what I keep turning over. Not that nobody looked. That everybody looked, but they all looked the wrong way.
And now, here, next door. No forced entry, Rodriguez said this morning, sitting on my sofa. He'd made it sound significant. He has no idea I'm looking at dozens of cases.
I sit back on the stool.
My hands are shaking, but I'm not frightened. I want to be honest about this, because I've been lying to a therapist for two years. I'm not frightened.
I want more.
David comes down at half past ten with his phone in his hand and his face rearranged.
"That was Helen."
"At this time of night?”
"There's a thing." He's already moving toward the hall, patting his pockets, doing the little pantomime of locating his keys. "The Hendricks patient. The numbers are wrong. The resident's panicking, and Helen wants me to look at him before she has to make a call she doesn't want to make."
"Now?"
"It's twenty-five minutes each way, Mal. I'll be back by one."
He finds the keys, and then he sees the island.
David stops. He looks at the open laptop on the kitchen island, the newspaper page glowing on the screen, the envelopes covered in my handwriting, and the wine glass at my elbow. He says nothing at all for about three seconds.
He frowns. "Mallory."
"Don't."
"What?"
"I already know what you're going to say."
He puts the keys down. He comes over. He does the thing where he crouches slightly so he's not standing over me. He puts his hand on the back of my neck, and it's warm, and everything in me wants to lean into it.
"Two people were just killed next door," he says quietly. "And you're at the kitchen table reading about murder. I'd have thought you'd want that as far out of your head as possible."
"These are from Oregon." I hear how fast I'm talking and I can't slow it down.
"That's the point, David. I think they might be connected.
Wealthy couples in their homes. No forced entry.
That's exactly what happened to the Ericksons.
What if it's the same person? What if whoever got in next door has done it before? "
He groans. "I know where you are going with this.”
"You don't."
"I mean, I know what it does to you." His thumb moves once against my neck. "You know what Kane advised, Mal. Diving back into this too soon could reverse all the work you've done. I'm not going through those night terrors with you again."
"That isn't the same."
"No," he says. “But your body doesn’t know the difference."
And there's nothing I can say to that because he's right.
His phone rings again in his hand. He looks at it.
“Look, I have to go."
"Okay."
"Lock up behind me."
"I always do."
"And go easy on the wine."
"Yes, Doctor."
He stares at me. "You know I love you, right?"
I nod.
He kisses the top of my head. At the door he stops, and for a second I think he's going to say something else, but he doesn't. He goes out into the heat. The car starts. Gravel cracks under the tires. Then it’s quiet.
I sit at the island in the enormous silence of the house. I look at the phone, the photos still open where I left them.
Then I pull my laptop toward me and I keep going.
The lights dip.
Not out. Just down, a brownout, the lamps going amber and swelling back. The AC coughs and drops into a lower note. The fridge starts up again.
It’s eleven-thirty.
I look up.
The house is dark past the kitchen. I haven't put a light on anywhere else because I've been sitting here for an hour. At the far end of the hall, past the stairs, the plastic sheeting over the renovation wing hangs motionless.
It isn't moving.
I watch it not move for longer than a sane person would.
Then there's a sound.
I don't know where. It's small and low, somewhere under me or behind me. It comes at the exact moment the AC changes note. It arrives on my right. That's the flat, dead, underwater country where I can't tell a door opening from Luna turning in her sleep.
I go completely still.
“David?”
Nothing.
I don't call again. I remain on my stool in the light with a wine glass and a pile of dead people. Then I turn my head slowly, giving my good ear to the hallway the way I've been taught to give it to a difficult room.
I listen so hard that my whole skull rings with it.
Nothing. The fridge. The AC. The blood in my ears. A boat far out. Nothing at all.
I let my breath out.
This is what it does, Kane says, in my head, patient as a metronome. Your body learned something and it's still trying to keep you safe with the only tools it has.
“Okay,” I say out loud, to my empty kitchen. “Time for bed.”
I close the laptop. I put the wine glass in the sink but I don't rinse it.
I go around the ground floor the way I do every night.
It's a ritual now. I start with the front door, then the slider off the living room, followed by the little door from the utility room to the side return.
I test each one. Locked. Locked. Locked.
I say the word in my head each time like it will make it stick.
The trouble with checking is that the certainty doesn't stay. It dissolves the moment I walk away. Then all I'm left with is the memory of having done it, and that's the one thing in my life I've been taught not to trust.
Off the utility room is the door to the garage. It’s mostly David’s now. His car, his shelves, his things I never reach for. If the power goes out, that's where the flashlight lives, with the storm candles and the batteries. I haven't set foot past that door since I stopped driving.
The terrace doors off the kitchen I leave for last. The heat is still in the house.
The air past the glass is dead and thick.
I stand there a moment with my hand on the latch, looking at my reflection laid over the black water.
I’m a woman alone in a bright kitchen at midnight.
And I think, not for the first time, that a person could stand ten feet away in the dark and watch me, and I'd never know.
"Luna."
She's in her bed by the cold hearth, chin on the rim, watching me with one eye the way she does when she's decided the day is over and I'm being slow about it.
"Come on, then."
She doesn't come. She sighs, the whole-body sigh of a dog being put out, and I leave her to it and go up alone. I don't put the hall light on because I know this house in the dark. I get into bed on David's empty side.
Downstairs, Luna still hasn't followed me up. She always follows me up.
I'm too tired to wonder why.