Chapter 24
Chapter Twenty-Four
The storm came through in the night and left the world wrung out. I wake to gray dripping light, the bed cold beside me, and water coming off the eaves in long ropes.
I come downstairs still half asleep.
David is gone. There's a note on the kitchen island, written on the back of one of his hospital notepads.
Couldn't sleep. Gone in early to get ahead of Monday. Back by noon. Lock up. D.
No mention of the complaint. He has turned the worst thing in his life into an errand and left it beside the fruit bowl.
I make coffee I hardly touch and stand at the terrace doors, looking out at the lake.
The water lies dull under the low sky. The aviary sits at the edge of the lawn beneath the dripping cedar, but I barely notice it.
I’m thinking about the hospital. About the green dot that sat over it for the better part of three hours. About the man who died in a bed somewhere inside that building. About the complaint that came after.
I’m doing what Henry warned me not to do. I’m taking pieces that don't yet prove anything and arranging them until they start to look like an answer.
So when the knock comes I am almost glad of it.
Henry is on the step with the rain behind him and two coffees in a cardboard tray.
"You didn't sleep either," he says.
"No."
He doesn't ask what's wrong. He just holds out one of the coffees.
"Come in," I say.
I leave my cup on the island, cold and barely touched, and take the one he holds out.
He sets a folder on the island as if it's nothing, as if we do this every morning.
"I wasn't going to bring this today," he says. "Not after last night. But I found something, and I think you need to see it."
He opens the folder. It isn't the Oregon clippings this time. It's fresh paper, a photocopy of something official, dense columns under a county letterhead.
"This is the Ericksons," he says. "What the medical examiner found. What the police haven't released yet.”
“So how do you have that?"
"People talk when they think they're helping. A grieving family asks a question and somebody answers who shouldn't." He doesn't look up from the page. "You'd be surprised what people will share when they think it might belong to an older case that was never solved."
I think of Claire and I don't say her name, and he doesn't either.
"It wasn't in the news?" I ask.
"It wouldn't be. This is the part they hold back, so they can tell the real thing from the nutjobs who walk in wanting to confess to it." He turns the page to face me. "Look."
I glance down.
The medical examiner's language is dry. A sedative was found in the blood, in both of them.
Almost no defensive injuries, the bedroom barely disturbed, nothing overturned or broken.
And lower down, among the rest, there is a line about the mouths, taped and sealed with an adhesive the report calls consistent with medical tape.
"People fight," Henry says quietly. "When someone comes into your room in the dark, the body does things you don't get to decide. It claws, it runs. These two were still." He lets it settle. "I think that's because they were already under before they knew there was anything to be afraid of."
"They were drugged?" I ask.
"Yes."
“Like in Oregon," I say.
He nods. “In every case.” He is quiet a moment. “How do I know? I know because Claire was sedated."
The name stops me where I stand.
"It was never in the newspapers. Not the drug, not the toxicology, not the way they found her.
The police held all of it back, and I understood why, once I'd stopped being angry about it.
" He squares the edge of the page with one finger.
"But after I knew what had been done to my sister, I couldn't look at the others the same way.
So I started asking around. Widows, sons, the odd sister.
Each of them had been told one small piece and made to feel it was nothing.
I set the pieces beside each other." He looks at the folder, not at me.
"And the same absences kept repeating. No defensive wounds where there should have been a fight, rooms too whole for what had happened in them, couples found as though they had already been subdued before the worst of it began. "
"That's too clean," I say. "People wake up. They feel the needle. They fight, they knock things over."
"Some did." He says it easily, almost grateful I've asked.
"It wasn't always neat. There's a house where a lamp was thrown clear across the room.
Blood in one bedroom that couldn't have come from the wound that killed her.
A husband, early on, whose ribs were cracked before the drug took him under.
" He turns his hand over on the island. "He made mistakes, especially at the start. Then he got better at it."
"Then how does he keep two people still?" I ask. "Long enough for a needle to go in?”
"The way anyone controls two people." Henry's voice drops. "You make each of them responsible for the other. You threaten one to quiet the other. And once one of them is under, the fight starts going out of the room." A pause. "After that, it's just silence.”
He lets that sit for a moment.
"To do it," he says, "you'd need to know the drug. The dose for the body in front of you. How fast it works, and how long before a person can come back up and fight. And you'd need to be able to get your hands on it. Or to be close to someone who could."
He lets it lie there, and when I don't pick it up he does the thing he does, bringing me almost to the answer and leaving me to cross the last inch myself.
"Say it," he says gently. "You're already thinking it."
"You're describing someone with a medical background."
"I'm describing what the page describes."
"That's not an answer."
"No," he says. “Not exactly.”
He closes the folder, which is worse than leaving it open.
It means he's finished. It means he's going to let me hold it now.
"I'm not accusing anyone. I'm just showing you what they kept out of the papers.
" His hand goes flat on the folder. "I'm telling you this is what they kept back about the two people killed next door, and it matches what was buried in Oregon.
Almost no one knows what's on this page.
I'd rather you were one of the few who did. "
The coffee is going cold in my hand. His gentleness is the worst of it. He's taken the thing I've been holding down and laid it out in the medical examiner's words. He has made it a fact I can read, and I can't un-see my husband standing inside it.
The tiredness comes down all at once, as if my body has been waiting all week for permission to stop and has just been handed it. I set the mug down on the island. Suddenly, staying on my feet takes everything I have.
"I'm sorry," I say. "I don't know what's the matter with me. I have to lie down."
"Of course." Henry steps back, giving me room. "You probably haven't slept in days. Go. I'll look in on you later."
He leaves the folder where it is. At the door he pauses. "Don't rush to judgement today, Mallory. You don't have to do one thing with any of it. Just rest."
I see him out into the rain and lock the door behind him. At least, I think I do.
I mean to go up to my bedroom, but I don't make it. The sofa is closer, and the last thing I know is how good it is to stop, and then there's nothing at all.
I come up out of it slow and wrong, my mouth dry, my neck stiff where it was folded against the arm of the sofa. One arm is dead under me. The light through the terrace doors has moved. The rain is still falling hard.
Then the house takes over, the way something wrong does, before I can even name what's wrong with it.
As I move, Luna doesn't come.
I say her name. I say it again into the quiet. Nothing. No nails on the floor, no soft weight arriving against my leg. I'm up and moving before I've decided to be.
The side gate is open.
I can see it from the terrace doors. The gate I know I latched is standing wide open in the rain. Past it, the aviary door hangs open too. There's nothing moving inside where there's always something moving.
I go out into the rain in my socks and I already know.
They're on the floor. All of them. The finches, and the little canary hen that never sang, the one Henry brought to my gate in those first days.
They're laid on the wire floor of the aviary in the wet.
There are feathers everywhere, torn loose in the catching.
But the bodies aren't flung or dropped. They're set almost in a row, cooling, like something a person had finished with and laid out on purpose.
Someone caught them, one by one, and then took the time to arrange them.
I stand in the doorway with the rain flattening my hair and I can't make my hands do anything at all.
“Luna?”
There’s no response. She isn’t coming.
I notice Luna's lead is gone off the hook by the gate. She’s gone. I get myself back inside, soaked through, and call David.
David gets home before noon and finds me wrapped in a towel on the sofa, not crying, which is worse. Just numb. The birds are still out there in the rain, because I couldn't make myself move them.
He is very good for the first ten minutes. He holds me. He goes out and looks. Comes back pale and soaked through, and holds me again.
"You fell asleep,” he says. "In the middle of the day?"
"I couldn't keep my eyes open," I say.
“Well, that’s to be expected. You’ve barely slept lately.” He looks at me, worried. "What with the pills and everything else... Mal, you can't keep going like this."
“Like what?”
“Running on fumes.”
Then the other thing rises in him, the thing that's been building since the party, and it comes up as certainty.
“Shit. This has to be him. Chris," he says.
I extend a hand to him. “No. David, wait.”
“No. He threatened us in front of forty people. He's telling everyone I assaulted him. And now our dog's gone and your birds are dead." He's up, moving, too worked up to stay in the chair. "This is a message. This is exactly the ugly, cowardly, drunk thing that man does."
"Julia left with him after the party," I say. "As far as I know they've been together since."
"So he waited for a gap, or he paid one of his gym buddies a hundred dollars to do it. I don't care which." He stops. "A man like that always has a way. He probably laughed when he snapped those birds' necks."
I don't answer. I'm thinking of the folder on my island. Of a sedative in the blood. A room left too clean. Bodies arranged after the fear had already been taken out of them.
Chris could hurt something, I believe that. Chris could smash a window, break a lock, leave blood and feathers all over the grass. But this doesn't feel like rage. It feels planned.
And I know the difference too well.
Then David goes still.
He's got his phone out, thumbing into the security app Henry's crew set up. I watch him scroll, and stop, and scroll again.
“That’s impossible. There's nothing," he says. "The camera on that gate. There's no footage from this morning. There's no footage from last night either." He looks up. "It should all be here. It goes to the cloud. It's supposed to keep even if the power drops."
"There was a power cut," I say. "Half the point went dark."
"Then it should have caught up when the power came back." He's still looking at the phone, at the blank where the footage should be. Something is working in his face that I don't like. "Whoever came through that gate, the camera was pointed right at them. And there's nothing."
He stands there a moment longer. Then he pockets the phone.
"Henry put this system in," he says.
The name lands between us.
"He'll know why it wasn't recording."
"David."
But he's already moving.
"I'm just going to ask him."