Chapter 32
Chapter Thirty-Two
The house is smaller than the woman I've spent a week imagining.
That's the thought I have as I stand on the cracked front path in the last of the light.
I've spent a week making Lena Holloway enormous, a threat the size of my whole marriage.
And here she is, reduced to a single-story rental on a wet east-side street.
The porch light glows against the dark, and a child's chalk drawing is smeared on the concrete under my feet.
I had the driver wait at the corner. I've rehearsed nothing, though the woman I was before would have. I only know I've come a long way to find the woman David hid and hear the truth from her.
I hesitate for a second then knock.
A man opens the door instead. He's in his late thirties, broad-shouldered, with a dish towel bunched in one hand. There's something raw in his face, something he hasn't had time to hide.
"Yeah?"
"Hi, I'm looking for Lena."
His hand goes still on the edge of the door.
"Who are you?"
"My name's Mallory. I think she knows my husband." I make myself say it. "David Grant."
The name lands somewhere behind his eyes and his knuckles whiten on the wood.
"Is this some sick joke?"
"What? No," I say. "I..."
"You've got a nerve." It comes out low, almost wondering. "Coming here. Today."
"I only wanted to talk to her."
"You can't talk to her."
I take a step back.
Then he gives it to me, because there's no soft way to hand a thing like this across a threshold. "She's dead. She was murdered. Two days ago they found her."
The porch light hums. Somewhere behind him, a television plays low and a kettle comes to the boil. All the ordinary sounds of a house that hasn't caught up to the hole in it.
A woman calls out to him from inside.
"Jacob? Who's at the door?"
"No one important, Mom."
"Murdered," I say. The word comes out of me with no air behind it.
"In her kitchen. My baby sister." His jaw works.
"Twenty feet from where her kid was sleeping. And the cops have got nothing. They keep saying that. No break-in. No mess. Like she just lay down on the floor and stopped breathing.” He drags the back of his hand across his mouth.
"So no. You can't talk to her. Nobody talks to her now. "
No break-in. No mess.
I feel the world tilt under me. Not the porch beneath my feet, but the one I've been trying to make sense of since Henry brought me that folder.
There were almost no defensive injuries to the Ericksons.
The room was barely disturbed. Bodies found as though they had already been subdued before the worst of it began.
I put my hand on the door frame to keep myself in the world.
And it all comes back in the wrong order.
Lena’s name on David’s phone at seven in the evening.
The stillness in him when he saw it. Just work, he’d said.
Then, later, he was running out for party things, when there were never any party things.
There was only a green dot leaving our house, crossing the water, and stopping at the hospital for three hours.
And when I finally made him tell me why he’d been there that night, he gave me three words. Someone from Portland. He wouldn’t say who, or why. He shut the door on the rest.
Lena’s brother has just told me his sister lived here, in Portland.
Someone from Portland.
She is the someone he wouldn’t name. The night the man who broke into our home died in that building, David wasn’t there for a patient, and he wasn’t buying anything for a party. He was with her. With Lena.
And now the man in that bed is dead. Lena is dead. And I’m standing on her doorstep two days later, trying to make it a coincidence.
I can’t.
"When?" I hear myself ask. "When did she die? You said two days ago. Are you sure?"
"Tuesday." He looks at me like I'm slow. "They think she died on Tuesday."
Tuesday?
The day Julia disappeared. The same day.
I stand there trying to put my husband in two places at once, and I can't put him anywhere at all.
I don't know where David was on Tuesday.
I haven't known where David has been for weeks.
He goes out and doesn't say. He comes home pale.
He has an old life in Oregon, a dead woman in it, and a hole in every account of himself.
I can't swear he wasn't here, in this city, at this door.
I have to ask it. It's the question I came hours south to ask.
"Was she getting money from him?" I ask. "From David."
"You're damn right she was." The laugh has nothing in it. "Every month. For the kid he didn't want any part of. He paid to stay gone. That was the deal." He looks at me, and his face changes. "He never told you there was a kid, did he?"
A child? Suddenly the four thousand dollars a month makes sense. A year of payments. I'd let myself imagine gambling, paid sex, a whole second life. But it was for a child.
"I'm sorry," I say, which isn’t much. "I'm so sorry. I didn't know."
"Everybody's sorry." He starts to close the door, then stops and looks at me with something that isn't quite pity. "Go home to your husband, Mrs. Grant, and find out from him whatever you came down here to find out."
The door shuts. Through it I hear the kettle scream and cut off. A child asks a question. The man answers gently, and something in me gives way where I stand.
I go back down the path past the chalk.
My phone buzzes in my coat before I reach the car. It’s David. Three words appear on the wet screen. I read them standing in the road with the rain coming down.
They've suspended me.
I don't answer. My thumb finds the app instead, the way it always finds it now. The map opens, and there's the green dot, sitting still and bright over our home.
David’s at home. On our sofa, probably, in the lamplight.
Rodriguez told us to rip the system out and change the codes. I never did. Deleting the app meant I couldn't watch David.
Then something cold settles in me. I should have thought of it before I got in the car.
The app goes both ways. It always has. He saw me logged at Henry's once and told me the system was junk.
I let him. If I can sit here and watch him not move, then he can watch me.
He can see my dot, sitting on a street in Portland outside the house where he used to send four thousand dollars a month.
He knows where I am. Maybe he has known the whole time.
I look back at his text. He didn't ask why I'm in Portland. He didn't ask what I'm doing at her house. Had he even looked at the tracking app?
The driver sees me and gets out to open the door, and I don't move yet.
I look at the dot on my house. I think about the clean, quiet rooms the Ericksons died in. About Lena, dead in her kitchen. About Julia, missing.
My husband is home tonight, waiting for me. And I understand that I’m too afraid to get in the car and be driven back to him.