Chapter 25
Chapter Twenty-Five
David is already halfway up the road by the time I get my shoes on. I go after him in his coat because it's the one by the door. Outside the rain is thin. He isn't running. He's walking the way he walks into a conversation he's decided to have. Fast and level, his phone still in his hand.
"David. Hold up. Slow down. What are you going to say to him?"
"I'm just going to ask him why a system we paid all that money for has no idea who came through my gate today." He doesn't look back.
"Please don't lose your temper. He'll think we're accusing him of something, and it probably was the storm. Half the point lost power."
“The storm didn’t somehow reach into the backup storage and wipe the last two days off the record.
” He lifts the phone and shows me his call log.
Two recent calls, didn’t connect. "That's their support line.
I've rung it twice coming up the road. It goes to a voicemail that's full.
" He puts it away. "I don’t understand what the hell is happening. He said we could avoid this.”
“I know, but can you just stay calm."
5216 sits back off the road behind its cedars the way they all do, gray shingle, dark windows. The verge where the sold sign stood is bare now. There's a car in the drive I don't recognize as Henry’s.
David goes up the steps and rings the bell. We wait in the wet. I put my hand on his sleeve, and he lets me leave it there.
The door opens, but it isn't Henry.
It’s a woman in her late forties, wearing a sweater she looks as if she slept in. No makeup. She appears worn thin. She takes in the two of us on the step, me wrapped in David's oversized coat.
"Whatever this is," she says, waving us off. "Not today."
David breathes out.
"I need to speak to Henry. Is he here?"
The name does something to her face. Something clicks into place, and I watch it happen.
"No," she says. "He doesn't live here."
She starts to close the door.
"Wait," David says, stepping forward. "He's lived here for weeks. We had him to dinner. He put the security system on our house, just down the road."
"I don't know anything about that," she says. "And I have to go. I'm sorry."
"Please, what my husband is trying to say is that Henry Westburn lives here. I've been inside this house," I say. "I've stood in that hall."
"This is my mother's house."
The name comes to me before I have to reach for it.
"Eleanor Langford?" I ask. "Who are you?"
Her eyes land on me. "Diane Langford. Eleanor's my mother."
The rain comes down off the cedars. She stays in the doorway with her hand on the edge of it.
"Isn't she in Florida?" I ask.
"No," she says. "She's not in Florida. She hasn't been anywhere but a hospital, then a care home in Seattle, since March. She had a stroke that took her speech and her right side. She can't talk. She can't sign her name. She's not coming back."
The words land hard.
"I'm her only child," she says. "I live in Sacramento.
A few months before it happened, my mother told me there was a man helping her.
A realtor. He'd come by about the house, said he knew people looking in the area, offered to help with little things.
The yard. The mail. Whatever she needed.
My mother liked him. She said he was kind. "
Her voice thins.
"After her stroke, he called me himself.
Said he was the one who found her. Said I shouldn't worry about flying up, that his company could handle everything.
You know… clear the house. Manage it. Sell it.
" She lets out an exasperated breath. "I had power of attorney.
I was scared. I was hundreds of miles away, and he made it sound simple. "
She looks down at her hands, then back at us.
"I thanked him. I actually thanked him."
Then her face hardens.
"The man whose company took my mother's keys was not supposed to be sleeping in her bed."
“What? How did you find out?" I ask.
"A woman rang me this morning."
A woman?
The words catch somewhere in me.
"She wouldn't leave a name," Diane says.
"Said she didn't want trouble. Only that there was a man living in my mother’s house who had no business being there.
She thought somebody ought to check." She glances over her shoulder into the hall.
Behind her I can see it now. Boxes, dust sheets, a few things out of place in a house that should have been empty.
"So, I got on a plane. I let myself in with the spare key.
That's when I found a man's razor and shaving cream in my mother's bathroom and a bed that had been slept in.
I've spent the last three hours ringing the number on my contract and getting a voicemail that's full.
I was just about to call the police when you knocked. "
David and I look at each other, and I know we're thinking the same thing. The missing footage. The support line that goes nowhere. The system Henry put on our house.
"I don't understand," I say. "Henry told us he bought the house from your mother."
"Then he lied," Diane says. "He's not the owner. My mother is."
Something cold moves through me before I understand why. Then I do. I know what this is.
A house people believed was empty. A woman everyone was told had gone away. A man living there because no one knew enough to stop him.
I'm not recognizing it from Eleanor Langford, or from this house. I'm recognizing it from somewhere in the erased part of my life.
Before the crash, before the water, before the people around me started deciding which truths were safe for me to touch.
I reach for it, and there's nothing there.
That's the part that frightens me most.