Chapter 17 #2
"Mallory, you're an adult, you don't need anyone's permission," he says. "This isn't a job. You look at what I've got, you tell me honestly what I've missed, that's all it ever is. No one has to know but us."
"I'll think about it."
"You said that the last time," he says, mild.
"And I'm still thinking."
"Okay. Good," he says. He lets it go, and he shifts the conversation to something easier, and just like that we're two neighbors at a table again, and I can almost believe that's all we are.
Julia waits until we're back on the 520, looping under Yarrow Point, before she says it.
"So. Are you going to tell me? Was he shopping or stalking?”
I laugh. “Shopping.”
“Oh, sure.” She doesn't take her eyes off the road. "Henry drove to Bellevue for mayonnaise."
"People shop, Julia. And he bought more than that."
“I bet he did.” She glances at me and winks.
I roll my eyes.
She lets it go until we're at her kitchen table with the good bread and a bowl of tomatoes from her garden. The doors are open onto the heat and the cicadas. Then she comes at it from the side, the way she does.
"How are you?" she says. "Actually. Not the version you give Kane."
"I'm all right. Better than I was." I turn a tomato in my fingers, and she picks up on it.
"And?"
I smile. "Well... I've been thinking about looking at some of the old cases Henry has. Just looking. Giving him my opinion.”
Julia sets down her knife.
"And David's on board with this?" she asks.
"I haven't told David."
"Mallory."
"Listen, I know what you're going to say."
"No, I don't think you do." She isn't joking now, and Julia not joking is rare.
"I love a bit of true crime, you know I do, I'd happily spend a wet weekend on an unsolved anything.
This isn't that. This is a man none of us know.
I mean, do I need to state the obvious? He turns up on this road out of nowhere.
A package of his lands at your house, full of unsolved murders, and he still hasn't given a proper reason for any of it. "
"He has. His sister."
"Oh, sure. His sister. Have you confirmed that?"
"No."
"Anyway. Then days later, Peggy and Brant are found dead in their home.
I'm not saying a word about what that means.
I'm just saying it's a fact, and it sits funny.
And now he's turned up at your supermarket, thirty minutes from here, and bought you a coffee, and pitched you the same pile of Oregon murders.
" She spreads her hands. "Do you see where I'm going with this? You have to see it."
"I hear you, but it's what I used to do."
"Was it, though?" She asks as gently as she can, which isn't very. "From what you've managed to piece back together, love, you weren't exactly setting the world alight. You were freelancing. Scraping by. It wasn't a triumph you're getting back to."
It should hurt more than it does. Instead it lands like a key in a lock.
"Well, that's why," I say. "That's the whole point. I don't want it back the way it was. I want to be good at something again before I forget I ever was."
Julia looks at me a long time.
"And what about Dr. Kane?" she asks. "The lovely Giles. Does he know about all this looking?"
I don't answer.
"Right," she says. "That's what I thought."
She gets up and moves things around the counter that don't need moving, and when she speaks again it's quieter, and it's aimed somewhere past me.
"Just be careful, my lovely. That's all I'm saying. People show you a face, the one they've decided you should have. You go along thinking that's who they are. And then one day the light changes and you see the other one, and by then you're in too deep to walk it back."
I watch her not look at me.
"Why do I feel," I ask, "like we've stopped talking about Henry?"
Julia's mouth does something complicated. "You know me too well."
"We know each other too well."
That gets the grin back, at least, the real one, and she drops back into her chair and reaches for the wine she shouldn't be opening at lunch and opens it anyway.
"Now," she says. "I'm beginning to see why Peggy kept her options open."
I laugh, and I don't concede a single thing, because conceding would mean giving up the one new good thing in a bad year, and I'm not ready to hand it back.
David leaves for the hospital at seven, an evening he can't get out of. The house goes quiet around me the way it usually does, and I stand in it for a while and then I get my shoes.
I haven't lied to him. I want that on the record, for whatever it's worth to whoever's keeping it. I don't tell him I'm going, and he doesn't ask. So I let the not-asking do the work a lie would have done. I know the difference even as I lean on it.
It's only a few minutes up the road to Henry's. I can walk it. I text Julia before I go: Heading to Henry's, back by ten. It isn't fear. It’s just some careful animal in me that wants one person in the world to know where I am. She doesn't reply, which says enough.
Henry opens the door before I've knocked, which means he's been listening for my arrival.
"You came," he says, as if surprised I would change my mind.
Inside, the house is cooler than mine and smells faintly of other people.
It's furnished the way houses are when nobody has chosen anything for a long while.
There are good heavy pieces, a hall table with a bowl on it, and framed family photographs that I don't look at closely enough.
He walks ahead of me and turns on lights as he goes.
"Don't mind the mess. I'm still deciding whether to keep the previous owner's furniture."
"She left it?"
"Didn't have room for it anymore."
He's given a back room over to his sister, and it's smaller than I expected.
There's a folding table under the window.
On it are a laptop, three ring binders, a box file, and a map of Oregon spread out with pins pushed through the cork beneath.
Nothing is on the walls. It's organized the way I would organize it, by date down one axis and by county across.
I stand in the doorway and feel the vertigo of walking into a room and finding my own mind laid out on someone else's table.
"You've been busy," I say.
"I collected what I could over the years." He steps back to give me room. "You're the first person I've shown it to. Take a seat.”
We start with the dead. That's how he puts it. He takes me through the cases. I make myself look at each one.
The Marches, Josephine County, twelve years back. Their home was on a vineyard, no children close by, found by a gardener on a Monday. The Hollises, outside Bend, a river house, an alarm a year old that never sounded. The Ackers. The Trevinos. The Pruitts.
The list goes on, up to twenty-eight murdered across roughly fourteen households.
Middle-aged couples, mostly. They were wealthy, all of them.
Homeowners of big houses set back from the road, on water or nestled in trees.
The houses you buy so no one can see you, and then no one does.
Houses that make people wonder what you did to pay for them. Homes like those in Hunts Point.
"Tell me what you see," Henry says.
He's leaning against the window frame with his arms folded, watching me, not the table. I file it under loneliness, under twelve years of wanting one person to take this seriously, so I read on.
“Well, like you said. There’s no forced entry," I say.
"Not one broken window or door in any of it.
People like this lock up. The Hollises had an alarm and it never went off.
So the houses didn't keep him out, because the houses were never the problem.
" I move along the dates. "The scenes are calm.
The reports keep using the word contained.
Nobody fought much. It's as if they let him in. "
"Or someone let him in,” he says.
"Or it's someone they weren't afraid of." I turn a page back, and then another. "Dogs. Four of these households had dogs in the house. None of them were drugged, none were hurt. So either they didn't bark, or..."
"Go on."
"Or nobody heard them, which I don't believe, not in four houses. Or..."
"Go on."
"He'd already met the dogs."
"Good," Henry says. "I wondered whether you'd get there."
I stop at the Pruitts, a photograph of a gray-shingled house that could be any house on our road.
"That's what's wrong with all of it. These are careful, wealthy, private people, and every one of them opened the door in the dark.
So either he was very good at looking like he belonged, or he did belong.
He could stand on a doorstep in a good coat at nine at night and have the door opened to him without a second thought. "
I stop.
Henry hasn't moved. "What is it?”
"Or they never opened a door at all." I go back through the pages, faster now. "What if he was already inside. What if he'd been in the house before, on a day nobody was home, and gave himself a way back in. A window. A slider that looks locked but isn't."
"And the dogs?"
"The dogs had met him." I hear how certain I sound and I don't stop. "That's why they didn't bark. He wasn't a stranger to them. He'd stood in their home. He'd probably fed them something out of his own hand."
Henry drums two fingers against the windowsill. "Which would tell you what?"
"That he watches them first." I look back at him over my shoulder. "They aren't random. He picks them."
Henry smiles.
"Anything else?"
"Not without diving into each of the case files. That's as far as I get from scanning what's on the table." I turn back to the Pruitts. "He's familiar with the layout of houses like these. He's someone who could get close without neighbors asking questions."
"Someone with access," Henry says.