Chapter 31
Chapter Thirty-One
Ihaven't gone south since the crash. The driver doesn't know that. He can't understand why I sit in the back of the hired car with my hands folded hard in my lap as Oregon draws closer.
The rain starts again somewhere past Olympia.
It isn't the fat summer rain of home. This is thinner and more determined, rain that means to stay all day. It turns the interstate into a long gray mirror, and the tires start making the sound I can't stand, that wet tearing sound of rubber losing its grip.
I close my eyes, and it gets worse.
I open them and watch the wipers instead. I do the thing Kane taught me. Name five things I can see.
I get to three before my mind drifts back to Henry.
To the things Henry shared, back when I still thought he was the one giving me the truth.
A man like that doesn't stop because he's finished, Henry said.
He stops because something stops him. He's caught.
He's dead. Or something in his life closes over the need for a while and holds it down.
Then that life cracks open again. The marriage ends.
The money runs out. The boredom gets too loud.
And the need comes back even stronger. He thinks he remembers how to be careful.
But the hunger is older than the caution. So he makes mistakes again.
The Oregon murders stopped a little over two years ago. Henry told me that like it was a fact he was sad about. The Cascade Killer went quiet, and the counties exhaled, and the podcasts moved on.
Two years ago. That was around the time David closed up his life in Oregon, met a broken woman in a hospital bed, married her, and took her north for a fresh start and a promotion.
I make myself stop.
It's becoming an obsession. I know that. I know what a real pattern looks like, and I know how easy it is to force one where there isn't one.
But this one won't leave me.
Two people are dead on my road, drugged and arranged too neatly for rage. Julia is gone. Every question I ask keeps turning me in the same direction.
South.
Toward Portland. Toward David's old life. Toward the night that took my memory and left me with this.
It dawns on me that I don't even know where Chris is from. Did he ever live in Portland? I can't answer that either. That frightens me too. How little I know about any of the men in my orbit. How much have I taken on trust?
I squint out the window.
Oregon Health & Science University sprawls across Marquam Hill above Portland in the rain, a cluster of pale buildings overlooking the city. The aerial tram crawls up from South Waterfront through the wet.
Once I’m inside, it takes me twenty minutes and David's name to get where I'm going.
I tell Richard Thomas’s office I’m David Grant’s wife, and that it’s urgent—personal. Something in that gets me a fifteen-minute window, then a bench outside the surgery waiting area on the ninth floor.
He comes out in scrubs with his cap still on. He’s in his mid-forties. I can tell he’s wary before he sits down.
"Thank you for seeing me."
“Not a problem. So…Mrs. Grant," he says.
"Please. Call me Mallory."
He nods. "You've come a long way."
I nod.
"Is David all right?"
"Not exactly," I say, because it's true, and right now the truth is all I have.
"I don't quite know how to put this. A woman on our road went missing two days ago. She's a close friend of mine. Before she disappeared, her boyfriend accused David of having an affair with her. I didn't believe him. I still don't know what I believe."
Richard doesn't move.
"But there have been things in my marriage that don't make sense anymore. Things David won't explain. His ex-wife called me and said you might be able to fill in some of the blanks."
"What blanks?"
"About his past. About what happened in Portland. About whatever really ended their marriage."
"Elaine."
Richard Thomas closes his eyes for a second. When he opens them, something has given way behind them. I recognize it. He's kept something buried for years, and he's just realized I'm here to dig it up.
"I told David,” he says, almost to himself. “The past doesn't stay buried. It waits."
"What does?"
He looks at me. "I gather David doesn't know you're here."
"No, and I'd prefer to keep it that way."
Richard looks away, as if weighing what he's about to share. "You didn't hear it from me. Okay?"
I nod.
"David was someone I considered a close friend.
" He says it like a defense and an apology at once.
"He was the best surgeon I have ever worked next to.
I liked him. I covered for him, and I'm not proud of the second one.
" He looks at his hands, surgeon's hands, scrubbed pink.
"There was an intern. Years ago, when he was still married to Elaine.
Bright girl, quick, everybody's favorite for about a year.
David had everything, a wife, a daughter, a career the rest of us would have killed for.
But he loved the attention. He couldn't leave it alone. "
"Her name?"
He hesitates, and the hesitation is its own confirmation. Then he gives me the thing I already have, but hearing it out loud still takes the floor out from under me.
"Lena," he says. "Lena Holloway."
The name lands where I've been keeping it all week.
Now that Richard has placed it here in Oregon, four years deep, I can't pretend it means nothing anymore.
"It got complicated," Thomas says. "These things do. And David is a man who cannot survive being complicated in public."
He looks down at his hands.
"So he used what he had. He held a senior position. She was nothing yet. By the time it was done, there was a note in her file and a bad reference following her around. She was out of the program, and David was still David.”
A quiet beat follows.
"His marriage came apart quietly after that. He never got so much as a hearing over any of it, because that is what money and standing and a good reputation buy you."
He meets my eyes.
"I helped him look clean. I wrote one of the letters of support. We all just wanted it to go away. And it did."
He goes still for a moment.
"Then he did."
Richard exhales like he's been holding that breath for years.
"I'll tell you the truth, Mrs. Grant, because you came four hours in the rain for it."
He stands, because our time is up and a body is waiting for him behind a door.
"After Lena," he says, "everyone was relieved when David left quietly. We stopped asking questions about him the day he stopped being our problem. I've wondered since whether that was a mistake. I suppose you're here to tell me it was."
I say nothing.
He sniffs. "I'm not sure that's the answer you were looking for. But if you wanted to know whether David's back to his old games, I wouldn't put it past him. Now I'm afraid I have to go."
Then he's gone, back through the doors into the part of the building where they fix people. I remain on the bench with my phone in my hand.
I look down at the screen and type the name into a search bar.
Lena Holloway. Portland, Oregon.
It doesn't take long. It never does. That's the thing about looking for someone now. The wall between a name and an address is thinner than people want to believe.
An address appears beside her name. An east-side house. I search it next and find the old rental listing, a little single-story place with photos three years out of date.
I write the address under Richard Thomas's name on the same envelope, in the same unsteady hand. Then I sit very still on the ninth floor of a hospital in the city where my husband learned to bury things, and I understand that I'm not going home yet.