Chapter 34
Chapter Thirty-Four
The morning is calm, which is how I know something is coming.
The lake lies still under a low sky, and every house along the road looks innocent.
It shouldn't.
Nothing is over. The Ericksons are dead. Lena is dead, with a funeral no one's held yet. Julia is still missing. Chris is a closed case with a gun beside him. And the hospital badge logs are waiting somewhere with David's name inside them.
All week the Point has told itself the worst is past.
The pressure behind my eyes says otherwise.
David didn't sleep in the spare room, which I half expected. He slept beside me, both of us on our backs in the dark, neither touching nor pretending to be asleep.
Near morning, staring up at the ceiling, he said he'd understand if I couldn't get past it. He didn't reach for me. He didn't make it pretty. He said the hard thing and let it lie there.
For one worn-out hour, I almost believed we could carry something this size and stay standing.
Then it was light. He got up, dressed, and went to see a lawyer, because the news has started circling him and he needs one now.
After he left, the house went quiet again.
I text him mid-morning, when the quiet gets too loud to sit in.
Forget last night. I'm not going anywhere today. Do what you need to do.
It isn't warmth. It's a white flag run up by a woman too tired to keep firing. He sends back one phrase, Thank you, and I sit a while with how strange it is to be thanked by my husband for not leaving him.
Then I do the only thing I have left. I work.
I pull up the photographs on my laptop and open my notebook beside it. The Oregon dead stare back at me in their columns of small print. After an hour, I reach for my phone and call Cassandra before I can talk myself out of it.
"Mal," she says, pleased and wary at once, because I don't call. I never call. "Tell me you're ringing to file something."
"Remember the Oregon thing I mentioned." I hear my voice drop into a register I haven't used in two years.
"Wealthy couples killed in their homes, a whole run of them, ten years or so.
The police called it the Cascade Killer and then the file went cold.
I told you back then there might be something under it. There is. I think I found the thread."
"Tell me," she says.
"It's the real estate. And before you say it, I know how that sounds.
I chased it once already, and it came apart in my hands.
The houses sold after the deaths, sure. Different little agency every time, no two names the same.
By itself, that's nothing. A normal market doing a normal thing.
" I turn the notebook toward the window as though she can see it.
"But I never went under the agencies. I did this week.
I pulled the filings and ownership records and traced the holding companies behind them.
The ones I can trace so far all run back to the same place.
The names on the doors are different, but behind the doors it's the same ownership chain, buried under firms that are supposed to have nothing to do with each other. "
There's a silence on the line, the good kind, the kind an editor makes when a pitch has a floor under it.
"Say that again," Cassandra says. "The part about them running back to one place."
I say it again.
"There she is." She says it softly, and something in me tips over, because I haven't heard that voice pointed at me since before the water.
"That's the writer I know. The one who follows the money while everyone else chases the body.
" She goes quiet for a moment. "You sound like yourself again, Mal. You know that?"
There's warmth in her voice I haven't earned in two years. I let myself have it for a second before I continue.
"There's one more thing," I say. "The early coverage, back when this was still news down there.
A few of those pieces feel like the writer saw more than they printed.
I can feel it. Maybe there were notes that never ran, names they couldn't use, something held back.
I've been trying to find the writers, but the bylines go nowhere.
Old emails, dead mastheads, editors who don't answer or don't remember. "
"That can happen on the ugly cases,” Cassandra says, unsurprised.
"Crime work can get a person hurt. Freelancers use pen names.
Sometimes the outlet knows, sometimes only one editor does.
Send me the bylines, but I'll tell you now, public bylines won't get you far.
Pen names are built to stay clean from the outside.
You can search all day and only ever see the name on the piece. "
As she pauses for a drink, I jump in.
“So you didn’t edit any of these?”
“I get around, darling, but not that much.
They were before my time with you, and some ran through outlets I've never touched.
But I know people who'd know how to trace them.
Freelance work leaves private trails. Contributor files.
Payment records. Syndication notes. Old editors who remember who they actually cut the checks to.
If those bylines were pen names, somebody in the industry knows who was actually being paid.
Leave that part to me. Those are calls you can't make from a search bar. "
I think of the deposits I found from those years, back when I first tried to reconstruct what I'd been before the accident.
They were generic freelance payments. A publication name sometimes, sometimes not even that.
Nothing that told me which article, which byline, which version of myself had earned it.
I stopped looking. Kane told me to. David told me to.
And there was never a thread to pull anyway.
The money came under my own name, but it never told me what I'd written to earn it.
"Would you?" I ask, and it comes out smaller than I mean it to.
"Consider it done. Now send me what you've got on the real estate thread. Rough, I don't care. Just get it down."
"I will."
And that is when it comes.
I am not in my kitchen. I am somewhere dim and low, a bar, the light the color of weak tea.
There's a man across a small table. I'm leaning toward him, laughing, and every word out of my mouth carries a hook and a line.
I'm working him. I'm afraid of him. Both at once, in the same breath.
His hand is around a glass, and I'm watching the hand and thinking, cold and certain, that's the hand.
Then it's gone. The bar, the man, the glass, all of it gone before his face can arrive.
I'm standing at my island with my phone trembling in my hand, my heart slamming like I've run three flights of stairs.
"Mal?" Cassandra says. "You still there?"
"I'm here," I say. “Look, I have to go."
I put the phone down and stand very still, holding my breath, as if the thing might come back if I keep quiet enough for it.
I have never sat in a bar and played a man like a mark, laughing while every word pulled him closer. It isn't in me. At least not in the version of myself I can remember.
So I do what I have taught myself to do with everything that has nowhere to go.
I reach for David. I try to set his face on the man across the table, because David is the frightening one now.
David is where all the roads have started to run.
But the face won't take. The shoulders are wrong.
The fear is wrong. Older than anything David has ever put in me.
More mine than my fear of him has ever been.
I file it under him anyway. A thing filed is a thing I can stop holding, and my hands are full.
Then Luna comes in and drops her head in my lap, and it undoes me. One of the last times I saw Julia, she was crouched at her gate with Luna's face in both hands. But she's gone now.
Four.
Julia has been missing for four days, and I have spent too much of that time chasing my husband's secret instead of her.
I made the first call the day she vanished. I went when she asked me to. I found the door open, the water running upstairs, the house empty.
Then I handed Julia over to the police. To Rodriguez. To the news vans and their careful language. They carried her while I followed Elaine’s lead south, toward Richard Thomas and Lena Holloway.
I told myself that was reasonable. That the police had Julia and I had something else I needed to understand.
But four days is a long time to let someone else look for your friend.
For one clean, terrible minute I'm on my feet with my coat half on, ready to do something for her that isn't just waiting for somebody else to find her.
Then I sit back down.
Because the sum I keep doing has only one answer, and the answer is David. If David took her, then everything I learn about David is something I learn about Julia. If I break David open, I find her.
It has to be the same investigation.
If it isn't, then I chose Lena over Julia for nothing, and I can't hold that thought long enough to breathe.
So I tell myself I'm not abandoning her. I'm following the only road I can see, and right now that road runs through him.
All of it is a story. It's a good one. I've always been good at those.
The afternoon burns off while I sit with it. I get nothing down I can point to. Then I call Kane because I promised myself I would when it got bad. And it's bad.
I don't tell him what I think about David. I tell him I'm not sleeping, that the fragments are coming harder. One came today with a man in it, a bar, and a fear I can't shake. It felt like a memory and not a dream, and that's the part that frightens me.
Kane goes quiet. His silence costs him nothing and gives me room. Then he says the thing he has said since the beginning, gently, like a hand laid over a door I keep trying to open.
"Mallory. You've carried more in three weeks than most people carry in a year.
When you're this depleted, the mind hands you all sorts of things and dresses them up as memory.
I'd be careful trusting any of it right now.
" He takes a breath. "And I'd be very careful about digging into the old work.
We've talked about this. There's nothing back there but the worst night of your life.
You don't have to walk into it to prove you're strong. "
"So I let it go?" I ask.
"You let it go. For now. It'll keep."
I'm so grateful for the permission that I don’t question it. I let the man in the bar and the old fear go. I file it under David, where I file everything now. Then I push the drawer shut.
The problem is, it doesn't fit in the drawer. The fear is wrong. The hand around the glass belongs to no one I can name. Some part of me knows, even as I lean my weight on the drawer, that I have filed the most important thing that happened to me all week under the wrong name.
But the drawer shuts. It always does.