She had a pounding tension headache and her eyelids felt like they’d been abraded with sand. Emotion knotted into a ball in her gut, the strands of fear and anger and anxiety and agitation tightly wound with hunger and something equally primitive she didn’t want to acknowledge in the hot light of day.
The whole day promised to be awkward as hell, so she got to her feet, wincing when her body told her exactly where she’d made contact with the linoleum in her kitchen. The shoulder that hit the bar stool throbbed dully. iPhone still in hand, she rubbed the shoulder and wondered if she had enough ibuprofen in her travel bag to get her through the weekend.
Standing up put her gaze level with a simple wooden shelf holding a college education’s worth of textbooks and a framed family photo. A father, in suit and tie, hair cut brutally short. A mother in a green dress with a white collar, a smile on her face, tension in the lines around her eyes. A boy, a young man, really, standing rigidly behind his father, his expression an unconvincing copy of his father’s. A younger boy, seated between his mother and his brother, and wearing the only exuberant smile in the group. Both boys had their mother’s unruly chestnut hair. The younger boy must be Luke. Therefore the older boy was Matt, his expression already shuttered, dark.
She gazed at it until the voyeuristic feeling became too strong to bear, then set it down. Wedged deep between a stack of car magazines and another of biology and chemistry textbooks was another photo, visible only to the person who spent long hours at the desk.
The photograph was of a man dressed in fatigue pants, laced-up boots, and a khaki T-shirt. Forearms braced on his thighs, he sat on a cot in the middle of a large tent. The color scheme was an unrelenting khaki camouflage except for the wreckage of a package wrapped in red and green elf paper and the incongruous Santa hat on the man’s head. He held one of the earliest iPod models up for the camera and a broad, delighted grin stretched his face. Eve mentally added unruly chestnut hair and wrinkles around the eyes, subtracted about twenty pounds of muscle from the broad shoulders, and recognized Matt, a decade younger.
“Who are you?” she asked the picture. It didn’t talk back. If she wanted answers, she’d have to open the door and get them.
First she stepped across to the bathroom where she took care of basic necessities, washed her hands, then splashed some water on her face. She looked in the mirror after she dried her face and hands, saw anger still simmering just under her skin. Hiding in the bedroom in a sulk wasn’t her style, and it also wouldn’t solve any of the very large, very pressing problems they faced.
The house was a basic ranch, with living room, dining room, and kitchen at one end, bedrooms at the other. She was in the bedroom closest to the living area. At the end of the hallway she peeked into the two rooms at the end of the hall and found a complete home gym in one. The wall between the two bedrooms held a beautifully made shadowbox with some patches inside, stripes, rows of commendations, dog tags, service medals. While she couldn’t identify what hung in front of her, she’d seen similar boxes before, in houses of parishioners who’d served in the military.
The other room held a straight-backed chair, a simple wood dresser, and a queen-sized bed on a frame. An Eye Candy T-shirt hung over the back of the chair. A clear jar two-thirds full of change sat on the dresser, along with some haphazardly folded receipts and a worn brown leather wallet. Another set of dog tags dangled from one corner of the mirror; from her position in the doorway Eve could see the stamped name DORCHESTER MATTHEW R. and his date of birth. Seeing his full name like that, Matthew rather than Matt, gave him yet another identity, this one in a family life she knew nothing about. There was no quilt or blanket on the bed, and the rumpled sheets looked like they still held the warmth of the body that slept there.
His body.
She backed out of the doorway and turned resolutely to the living space. A navy plaid sofa and dark green recliner crowded around a large television on a self-assemble stand with an Xbox and some games underneath. Hundreds of CDs and a few paperbacks lined the shelves around the TV. Hardwood floors extended down the hall, through the living room, and disappeared into what Eve assumed was the dining room. More of the basic eggshell blinds hung in the windows, angled to let in a little late afternoon light without anyone being able to see in. To her left the living room opened into a tiny dining room with a nice maple drop-leaf table.