Chapter 37
Chapter Thirty-Seven
I've watched the last video message Julia sent me so many times, her words have stopped being words. Nothing's come since. I keep opening it as though it might reveal something.
It doesn’t.
In it, she is in a dim bathroom, the phone held too close to her face, with the rest of the room out of frame. The bruise over her left eye looks worse than I remember.
I scroll up the thread, past the video, past the unanswered calls and the texts that delivered and were never read. I stop at the last ordinary thing we said to each other, before any of this.
She’d asked me when the renovations would be done. I sent her a photo of the sealed wing and wrote, next spring, at this rate. She wrote back that she'd bring the wine to the unveiling. That is where the thread stops, in the plastic and a joke about wine, and tonight I can't stop looking at it.
I switch off the video as thunder rumbles overhead.
The storm has been climbing all evening.
By ten it is on top of the house. The thunder is no longer a rumor out over the water but a thing that shakes the glass in the frames.
The power has been stuttering since nine.
The lights dip and come back, dip and come back.
Each time the house goes dark I hear the storm move through the house, the plastic at the end of the west hall lifting and settling like something breathing in its sleep.
David still isn't home. He texted to say he'd be late.
I didn't ask late from what. I have stopped being able to ask him anything, because every answer he gives me I take apart looking for the lie inside it.
I did text him back to say Detective Rodriguez had been by and wanted him to call. David never replied.
At half past ten, the power goes out and stays out.
The dark is total for a second. Out here, surrounded by trees, dark means dark. Then lightning flashes through the windows, and the house rearranges itself into shapes. I sit still and wait for the hum of everything coming back.
It doesn't come.
I switch on my phone’s light and go to the kitchen for the candles in the drawer.
“Shit.”
There is a box of matches, a dead lighter, and a rubber band, but no candles. Then I remember the storm candles and the flashlight are out in the garage, on David's shelves.
I cross the dark hall and open the door to the garage. I’ve barely set foot in that part of the house since I stopped driving.
The garage is cold and smells of oil and cut grass. The car David bought for me sits in the middle of it, waiting for the day I decide I'm ready to drive again. I edge around it with my little beam.
I see the flashlight on the shelf where I remember it. I switch off my phone light to save the battery. When I turn the flashlight on, it throws a broad yellow beam across the garage, a mercy after the thin white glare of my phone.
I’m reaching past it for the candles when the beam catches a shape I haven’t seen on that shelf before. I might have left it alone if it hadn't looked so bulky.
I move several paint tins aside.
Behind them, pushed back to where the shelf meets the wall, there's a duffel bag.
I've never seen it before. It’s plain, dark, and zipped.
I unzip it before I can talk myself out of it.
Inside, on top of a pair of David’s hospital scrubs, is a small glass vial and a capped syringe still sealed in its wrapper. I have watched him carry things like that in and out of this house for years without once being frightened of them.
Beneath the scrubs is a roll of white medical tape.
None of it should frighten me until I reach for the notebook beneath it.
It’s ordinary and black, the kind you could buy in any shop. I open it before I can tell myself not to. The pages are filled with tight handwriting, page after page of dates, times, initials, and makes of cars. The same names run through all of it. The Ericksons. Lena Holloway. Julia.
Tucked into the back are three loose sheets. Somebody has drawn rough floor plans of three homes, marking rooms, doors, windows, staircases, kitchens, and squares I know are alarm panels.
I recognize the paper. It's the pale hospital stock David brings home in his coat and never uses up. The writing is all hard capitals and figures, tighter than anything I've seen him write at home. It looks more like a chart than anything he leaves for me on the counter.
I can’t believe what I’m seeing.
I bring up Rodriguez's number.
My thumb sits over it and won’t press down. To press it is to say the thing out loud, to hand it to someone else, to let him write it down, and to make it real.
Some cowardly part of me is still on the threshold, still telling myself there’s a version where I’ve got it wrong. One where I’ve misread the vial, the tape, the names, and my husband hasn’t been keeping this on a shelf beside the storm candles.
That’s when my phone lights up in my hand.
One word appears.
Mallory.
What the hell?
For a second I don't understand what I'm seeing. Then I see who sent it.
Julia.
The garage goes still around me.
I type back, my thumb missing the letters twice.
Julia? Where are you?
Nothing comes.
I try again.
Where are you?
The message sits there, delivered and unanswered, and something in me breaks open so fast I can barely breathe around it. I don't think. I hit call.
The call goes through.
And somewhere off in the dark of the house, thin and terrible, a phone starts to ring in the west hall.
I’m through the utility door before I have decided to move. In the hall, the ringing goes on, coming from the far end.
Luna won’t follow me. She stops at the mouth of the hall and stands there. I shine the light down the hall. No one is there.
Against my better judgement, I press on.
The hall ends in the plastic, stretched from floor to ceiling and taped at the edges. It looks a dirty yellow in the light. The contractors haven't touched it in months. Fine plaster dust still coats the boards from the last day they worked.
The ringing stops.
And then I see the light that isn't mine.
It's low, near the floor, at the seam where the plastic meets the wall. A small rectangle of cold blue, dimming even as I look at it, the screen going back to sleep.
My heart is in my throat before my mind will name it. I kneel and pick it up from the grit. The screen is a spiderweb of cracks under my thumb.
I know whose it is before I turn it over. I know it the second my light catches the pink case, the one with the chip out of the corner she never got fixed.
It's Julia's.
I tap the screen before it can lock. The phone wakes to an open message, unsent, with no name attached because it was never addressed to anyone. Three lines. Half-finished words from someone typing fast in the dark.
in the room. the renovation. I was right about
And there it stops, on about, the cursor still blinking after it.
I put my hand over my mouth. The picture assembles itself without my permission.
She was here.
In this hall.
She got as far as three lines and the word about. Then the phone left her hands.
I think of Rodriguez. The card he left on the island. The marked car idling at my gate today with nobody getting out.
They’re coming for David.
I can feel the whole slow machine of it grinding toward this house, one badge-swipe record and one surveillance camera at a time. But that machine moves at the speed of paperwork, and I am done waiting for it.
I get to my feet with my hand still closed around Julia’s phone. That’s when I feel it.
Air.
Air moving, a draft from the other side of the plastic, cool against my face, carrying the smell of raw wood and something underneath it.
There shouldn’t be a draft here. The far wall is the only place weather could get in. It’s supposed to be sealed, the rough opening covered with plywood and weather membrane until the window goes in. But cold air is coming through anyway, slipping past the plastic and into the hall.
The membrane has been pulled back. Someone must have opened it from the outside.
And then the thought lands.
Is she still here?
On the other side of the plastic. Only feet away. In the dark I have refused to look into.
I should run.
Every animal part of me says get out, get to the car, call the cops from the road, and let them handle it.
Instead, I reach for the plastic where its edge has come loose.
And I go toward the breathing dark.