Chapter 21
Chapter Twenty-One
David texts at half past eight to say he'll be late. A bowel resection that went long. Don't wait up. I read it twice, looking for the tells, and when I can't find any I feel foolish for looking.
So I'm alone with Oregon.
Henry left the maps and I haven't touched them. I make myself eat something, then I'm back at the island with the maps and the expensive houses where the couples were murdered. I tell myself I'm just looking. I've told myself that so many times now the words have stopped meaning anything.
At first I don't know what keeps pulling me back.
There's something in the pattern; I feel it before I can name it.
The houses, the dates, the empty stretches between one killing and the next.
It's the pull of a fact that matters before I can say why, and I recognize it from my old work.
I used to trust it, before the crash, before the water, before everyone around me started treating instinct as one more symptom to manage.
So I do the thing I used to do for a living, back when I had a self that did things.
I open the laptop and start pulling the addresses.
The first surprise is how easy it is. It's public, most of it. A house leaves a paper trail in a way a person doesn’t.
The Marches, Josephine County. I find their vineyard. Then I find that it sold eleven months after they died to a limited company out of Medford, through an agency I've never heard of. Fine. People die, estates sell, the world turns, Henry said so himself. I go to the next one.
The Hollises, the river house outside Bend. Sold. Nine months after. Different agency. Different town.
The Ackers. Sold, a year on. The Trevinos.
Sold. The Dawsons. Sold. The Pruitts, the gray-shingled house that could be mine, sold fourteen months after somebody walked into it in the dark.
Every single sale went through a different little agency in a different town.
No two are the same. I sit there in the light with my heart going too fast, and it isn't fear.
It's the old thrill, the one I used to chase, the one I'd almost forgotten I was allowed to feel.
Because here is what's still in me under everything the crash took, the thing nobody had to teach me.
My instinct. And it's telling me to follow the house.
People lie and forget and lawyer up and disappear.
Houses stay where they are. If you ask them right, they tell you exactly what happened around them and when.
And these houses are all saying the same thing.
Someone knew them. The man who did this didn't pick these homes off a map.
He knew when they'd be vulnerable. He knew who was home and who was traveling.
Just like the men who came into my house knew I was there.
The killings lead to empty houses, and the empty houses lead to sales.
It feels like one motion. Every house sold through a different agency, no name twice.
And the next question, the one my old self would already be asking, is who stands behind all of them.
Who do they really answer to? If I could just...
I grab my phone.
It's ten to nine. David is across the water with his hands inside somebody. Julia's voice is in my head, saying not in your kitchen with David gone. I call Henry anyway. He is the only person who will understand what I'm looking at, and tonight the wanting is louder than the fear.
He picks up on the second ring like he was waiting.
"I have something I want you to look at," I say. "Can you come over?"
When Henry arrives, he looks at it for a long time.
I've laid it all out. The addresses, the dates, the sales. A second little map has grown next to his. I walk him through it fast, too fast. The words tumble out. The houses, the periods they sat empty, the way the man must have known their routines and watched them before he ever came in the dark.
But there is one thing I don't show him.
Upstairs, the phone I took from the man in the apartment still won't wake, even after an hour on the charger. His last words keep playing over and over in my head. I'm already keeping things from him, and I don't let myself look at what that means.
Henry stands over it and doesn't say anything, and I mistake his stillness for being impressed.
"Do you see it?" I ask.
"I see a very tired woman who wants this to mean something," he says quietly, and my stomach drops.
"Henry."
"No, listen to me, because I've been where you are.
" He pulls out the stool and sits, so we're level.
Then he taps the listings, gently, one after another.
"Look at what you've actually got. Six houses.
Six different agencies, six different agents, six different towns.
Not one name repeats. If the man who killed these people was also the man selling their houses, you'd have a thread, wouldn't you?
One firm. One face turning up again and again.
That's what you're hoping to find, what your whole body's leaning toward.
I can tell." He shakes his head. "It isn't there.
What you've found says the opposite. It's six strangers who never heard of each other selling six houses after six tragedies in a good market.
A wealthy couple dies without children nearby, the estate sells the house, and it sells fast because houses like that always sell fast. That's not a pattern, Mallory.
That's just what happens after. It's the noise the world makes closing over a hole. "
I look at the six houses again.
I want to argue with him.
The answer feels close, but not close enough to touch. It's the same maddening nearness I felt in Henry's back room, staring at the funeral clipping while my body insisted it knew something my mind couldn't reach.
All I have are different agencies and no repeated name. On paper, Henry is right. The lead dies there.
But underneath it is another question, the kind my old self would have gone straight to before anyone could talk me out of it. Who really owns these firms? Who do they answer to? Do all these separate little names run back to the same place?
For one second, I almost have the answer.
Then it’s gone.
The room settles back into itself. Just the kitchen. Just the floor beneath my feet.
I'm a tired woman who hasn't slept properly in two weeks, standing over a pile of dead strangers' real estate at nine o'clock at night.
The man beside me is right. Different agencies are the least suspicious thing in the world.
It's a normal market doing a normal thing.
I can feel the case I built in the last hour start to give way.
By the time it collapses, there's nothing left but pins, paper, and the stupid hope that I saw something.
"You're right," I say. "God. I'm sorry. I dragged you over here for a hot property market."
"Don't." He puts his hand near mine on the island, not on it.
"Don't apologize for that. Do you understand how close you just came? That’s what is so maddening about this. I’ve done the same.
You looked at something the detectives looked at, and you went a step further than they did.
You followed the money out of the houses.
I never saw anyone do that in all the coverage, because nobody thought the dead couples' real estate was worth an evening.
" He holds my eyes. “It’s okay. You almost had something there. "
"Almost," I say.
He straightens, gathers my map with his, and folds them together. "Get some sleep. You've done enough. More than enough."
He lets himself out through the door he taught to lock. The alarm chirps its small green blessing. I sit alone among the papers with the feeling that I have failed a test I didn't know I was taking.
I don't know how close I just came. The woman I was before the road and the rain would have asked the ownership question without blinking, then chased each of those little firms back to whoever stood behind them until she found the answer.
But some part of me remembers these cases.
I'm certain I've stood here before, at the edge of exactly this question, though I couldn't tell you when or what it cost me. Only that it cost me everything.