Chapter 17
Chapter Seventeen
I'm holding two jars of the same thing, reading two labels that use the same words in a different order, when a voice behind me tells me which one to buy.
"The one in your left hand separates," it says. "Looks fine on the shelf. When you open it in a month there will be oil on the top and a brick on the bottom."
I know the voice before I turn.
"Henry."
"Mallory." He has a basket over one arm with a few items in it—milk and bread and a bag of the good coffee. "I promise I'm not stalking the aisles handing out reviews.”
I put the left jar back. I don't decide to. My hand just does it. He watches it happen and has the grace not to smile.
Julia is near the bakery, working through a list of her own, because she drove me here without once making it a favor.
"I suppose we're doomed to keep meeting over condiments," Henry says. It lands lightly, and I nearly let it.
Then it occurs to me once the jar is back on the shelf.
This is Bellevue, miles off the point, the morning after David had been rude to him at the table.
Still, here’s Henry in front of me, holding a basket, as though the aisle was the most natural place in the world for us to be.
Then again, everyone from the point ends up at this store sooner or later. It's the nearest decent one for miles.
Henry sets the basket down on the floor between his feet, and his face changes into something more careful.
"About last night," he says. "I hope I didn't cause you any trouble. When I pushed on the Oregon thing in front of your husband, I didn't know about the accident. If I'd known, I wouldn't have gone near it."
“Don't worry."
"But I do. The last thing I want to do is create waves."
"It's fine. Really." And it is fine. I keep talking, which is the thing I do when a silence needs filling and I've decided a man is safe.
"David gets like that. He was my surgeon, before he was my husband, so he sort of thinks my recovery is a project with his name on it.
It's not really about you." I hear myself, and I don't stop.
"The truth is I've been circling the idea of working again for months and getting nowhere.
My editor thinks it would be good for me.
My therapist thinks it would set me back. David thinks it's out of the question."
"That's a lot of voices," Henry says. "What do you think?"
"I think I'm good at listening to all of them instead of answering the question."
He laughs once, like I've surprised him. "Fair enough."
Henry doesn't push it. Standing there, I realize he asks and then leaves the door open and doesn't put his foot in it. He picks his basket back up.
"So, look, I was going to grab a coffee before I brave the parking lot," he says. "There's a place by the entrance that's better than it has any right to be. You're welcome to join me, if you've got twenty minutes."
"I can't, I'm afraid. I've got a whole to-do list, and Julia's my ride, and I've been promising David I'll be useful today." It comes out easily, all of it true.
"Of course. Another time." He says it without a flicker, no pressure in it at all, and he lifts a hand and turns to go, and it's the ease of it, the way he takes the no and means it, that undoes me.
"Henry."
He turns.
"Actually…" I say. "The list can wait. Coffee sounds good."
I text Julia that I've bumped into a neighbor and I'll be twenty minutes. She texts back a single word. Which? Henry, I send, and after a pause, she sends back, of course it is, which tells me she's already halfway to an opinion.
The café is a partitioned-off corner near the entrance, six tables and a fancy espresso machine. Henry comes back with two cups and sets mine down without asking how I take it. He saw it at my table last night, over coffee after dinner, and he remembered. I file that and don't examine it.
I wrap both hands around the steaming cup and I get there before he can.
"You're wondering about the crash," I say. "Everyone does. It's fine, I'd rather say it than have it sit there."
"You don't have to tell me anything."
"I know. That's why I'm going to." I turn the cup a quarter turn on the table, a thing I've apparently picked up from watching him do it.
"I don't remember the crash. Any of it. What I know I know from the reports and from what David's told me since.
There was a storm. A bad one, the kind they'd been warning about for days.
There was a young woman on the road, Kelsi Taylor.
" I take a breath. "She died, and I lived, and I can't tell you a single true thing about how that happened because the night it happened isn't in me anymore. "
Henry says nothing to that. He's very good at it.
"The part I can't get past," I say, "is that I don't know what she was doing out there.
On that road, in that weather. And I don't know what I was doing either.
I've read everything there is online and it doesn't tell me the one thing I want.
" I make myself finish it. "I'm stuck on the life before.
Her family has to live the life after. Those aren't the same weight, and I try to remember that. "
"No," he says. "They aren't." And he leaves it there, which is the right thing. I'm grateful, and I move us off it because I've had enough of my voice.
I take a deep breath and let it out. "Anyway. The clippings. Have you had a chance to read them, since they came back to you? Have they been any use?"
"Some." He drinks. "There's a pattern. I've been sure of that for years. But the man himself is a ghost. Nothing sticks to him. It's like he just up and vanished."
“He's no ghost. If he hasn't been caught for some other crime, I'd put it down to human error. He's made a mistake somewhere. Someone just hasn't found it yet."
"How do you know that?"
"They all do," I say. I circle around what I'm about to say before saying it. "Do you think the Ericksons are his?"
"Do you?" he says, and hands it straight back to me, and waits.
I look out the window at the parking lot shimmering in the heat.
"I probably shouldn't tell you this. But after the break-in, the police sat with us.
They had footage of the two men on camera coming up our road.
So I asked whether they had the same for whoever murdered the Ericksons.
" I turn my cup again. "They don't. Whoever murdered the Ericksons came in off the water.
No road, no cameras. And here's the part I keep chewing.
The Ericksons had an alarm system. A good one.
According to the police, it was switched off the night they died. "
"Which tells you what?" he asks.
"That he knew it would be off. Or he was close enough to them to be let in."
"Or," Henry says, gently, "that they turned it off themselves, like half the people who own one.
" He takes a breath and lets it out. "Mallory, you'd be amazed how many families do it.
People spend a fortune on a system and then leave it dark because it goes off at three in the morning when a raccoon crosses the deck, or because they're expecting someone, or they simply forget.
" He sets his cup down. "You knew them. Which is it? "
I think about Peggy going down to the dock at the social, and the man who followed a few minutes behind her. I think about the kind of privacy a woman like that might want the cameras off for, and who she'd want them off for.
I don't say any of it.
"I don't know," I say. "She was a private person."
Henry lets that sit, and doesn't fill it, and I'm the one who breaks.
"Would you say it matches the pattern of the Oregon cases?"
He takes another sip. "No forced entry. A wealthy couple in an expensive home. Sure. But it's been two years since any reported murders."
"That we know," I say. "Here's my theory.
Killers don't stop without good reason. A man like this stops because he's dead, or he's in prison for something else, or he's settled down.
That's the usual list. But there's one more, and few people think of it, because it's the hardest to check.
" I lean in. "He moved. He picked up and went somewhere else, under a different sky, and the county that was counting bodies stops counting and thinks it's over.
The question is, has anyone looked at Washington? At whether we've had anything similar?"
Henry goes still, and then he sets his cup down and looks at me like I've handed him something.
"No," he says slowly. "I haven't. Twelve years of tunnel vision on one state and it genuinely never occurred to me to look over the fence." He shakes his head. "But this is what I'm talking about."
"What do you mean?"
"The day I brought the bird by. I asked for a fresh set of eyes and you said you would think about it.
" He turns the cup. "You see, Mallory, your memory might have been affected by the crash, but it hasn't touched the other thing.
Your instinct. That's what these unsolved murders need.
Someone who can see what others may have overlooked. "
I wave him off. "You give me too much credit."
"And maybe you don't take enough."
"You sound like my editor."
He chuckles. "Then it's clear your editor's right.
" He says it plainly. "Look, your husband loves you and means well, but he's wrong.
I think a mind like yours going quiet isn't safety.
It's damage, the slow sort." He holds up a hand before I can answer.
"I know you're going to say that David wouldn't have it. That your therapist wouldn't."
"They wouldn't."
"But do they run your days, or do you?" He doesn't sharpen it. He just asks. "David's out of the house, what, ten hours? Twelve? What fills that for you? Is any of it the thing you used to be?"
That one goes in. I don't let it show, or I try not to. I think he sees it anyway, because he softens at once and pulls back.