Ayers chews her bottom lip and peers into the restaurant. Is she looking at Cash? he wonders. That’s just impossible.
“Seriously,” Baker says. “I can do breakfast or late drinks. Or late dinner. How about tonight, after you get off?”
Ayers looks hesitant. She’s wavering. There’s no way she’s into Cash; Baker rejects the very idea.
“Please,” he says. “Just tell me what time.”
“Ten o’clock,” she says. “I’ll be done by ten and we can go to De’ Coal Pot. They serve Caribbean food.”
“Perfect,” Baker says. “I’ll be back at ten.”
Ayers nods and hurries inside, and Baker watches her go.
Just please don’t invite my brother, he thinks.
IRENE
What is she doing?
What is she doing?
What is she doing?
She is throwing away the rule book, she thinks. And it feels okay.
For the first fifty-seven years of her life, Irene stayed on script. She was a dutiful daughter, a good student in both high school and college. She got married, had children, took a job that was suited to her.
She had been a good mother, or good enough. The boys were fine.
She had been a good wife.
Hadn’t she?
It’s only at night, after Irene has taken one of the pills that Anna prescribed, that she allows herself to indulge in self-doubt. Where did she go wrong? She feels like she must have done Russ a huge, terrible injustice somewhere along the way for him to engage in a deception so wide and deep.
But she comes up with nothing.
She wasn’t sure what to expect when she arrived here; the villa and the island are as foreign as Neptune. What she finds surprising are the small flashes of her own influence that she stumbles across. All of the beds, she’s noticed, have six pillows, along with one oversized decorative pillow against the headboard, one small square decorative pillow in front, and a cylindrical bolster. This is exactly how Irene dresses the beds at home; she had no idea Russ had ever noticed. Also, the wine Russ keeps on hand—cases of it, on the ground floor—are her two favorites: Cakebread and Simi. It’s almost as if Russ expected her to show up for a drink one day.
She wouldn’t say these details made her feel at home, although they do provide a connection. This was her husband’s house. Her husband’s house. And now her husband is dead. These pieces of news that were, initially, so difficult to conceive, she’s now finally processing.
This is Russ’s house.
Russ is dead.
She’s also becoming acclimatized to life here—the temperature, the surroundings, the particulars of the villa—kind of the way one gets used to the thin air at altitude after a few days. Irene remembers when she and Russ used to visit Cash in Breckenridge; she would suffer from shortness of breath, headaches, strange dreams—and then these symptoms would gradually fade away.
She supposes this goes to show that one can get used to anything.
Seeking out Captain Sam Powers—Huck—had been a bold move, Irene knows. She had desperately wanted to hold someone accountable. She can’t confront Rosie, but why not Rosie’s parents? Huck had been nothing like what Irene had expected. First of all, he was not Rosie’s biological father but her stepfather, married to Rosie’s deceased mother. Secondly, he was kind—gruff, yes, at first, and unenthusiastic about talking to her (can she blame him?), but he seemed to understand that they were in the same boat (so to speak). Irene had stunned herself by asking to go fishing, and Huck had further stunned her (and likely himself) by agreeing. He could easily have told her to go away and leave him alone. He owed her nothing. He had lost a daughter, and Irene could see that his pain equaled her own; he deserved a day out on his boat by himself. That they had enjoyed such a cathartic and successful outing and that this dinner had evolved from that says… what? That misery loves company, she supposes. That they are not enemies but rather casualties of the same sordid circumstances.
Huck likely has as many questions for her as she does for him, but of course, she has no answers.
She’d had such an easy time finding Huck first thing Monday morning that she tries to track down Todd Croft. Cash had checked with Paulette, who had no contact information for Croft. Paulette dealt only with Marilyn Monroe and with pilot Stephen Thompson—an associate, she said, from the British Virgin Islands.
Irene tries Marilyn Monroe’s number again, but it’s still disconnected.
She tries the Ascension webpage, but—just as Baker had claimed—it won’t load. Someone took it down.
Russ’s cell phone isn’t in the house, though Irene has called it several times each day. Every time the phone starts ringing, her heart tenses in anticipation. Will today be the day that Russ answers? Is he alive somewhere? No: after two rings, it clicks over to generic voicemail. Irene doesn’t even have the luxury of hearing Russ’s recorded voice; if she did, she would likely scream at him each time.
She tries to access Russ’s cell phone records. She knows his phone number, of course, but the phone bill was paid by Ascension, and she has no idea which carrier he uses—she tries contacting AT&T, Verizon, and T-Mobile but gets nowhere. She wonders if he uses a carrier out of the British Virgin Islands, but here she grows frustrated. Even if she figures out the carrier, she doubts they’ll give her access to his call log without a court order.
Russ said that he’d been acquainted with Todd Croft at Northwestern, so Irene calls the Northwestern alumni office to see if they have contact information. They don’t. Irene could potentially ask one of Russ’s other friends from Northwestern—Leo Pelusi or Niles Adrian—but she hasn’t seen either of them since their wedding thirty-five years earlier. She has their mailing addresses—they exchange Christmas cards every year—but not phone numbers or email addresses. Russ doesn’t go to reunions. The last time he went to Northwestern was eight years ago, for Baker’s graduation.
A garden-variety Google of the name Todd Croft, paired with the name Ascension and then separately with Miami, yields nothing fruitful.
Irene grows frustrated. In this day and age, everyone has a digital profile. Someone just told her that, but who? Mavis Key! Mavis Key had explained to Irene and Irene’s boss, Joseph Feeney, that with some new software they could learn a lot more about their subscribers’ purchasing habits.
Irene is just desperate enough to do the unthinkable. She calls Mavis Key.
“Hey, Irene,” Mavis says. She sounds both surprised and concerned. “I heard you had a family emergency. Is everything okay?”
Everything is the opposite of okay, Irene wants to say. My husband is dead and he had a secret life. She should have thought this conversation through before she dialed. She needs to convey that the family emergency is real without disclosing even a hint about what has happened.
“Things are difficult right now,” Irene says. “Very difficult. But I can’t get into it. I called you because I need help finding someone.”
“Finding someone,” Mavis says. “I’m at the Java House getting a chai.” Before Irene can think that of course Mavis Key is downtown on the pedestrian mall, where all the hip university students hang out, ordering a “chai,” whatever that is, Mavis adds, “Let me sit down with my laptop. I love detective work.”
Irene feels herself relax. Mavis sounds self-assured. She’s thirty-one years old, roughly the age of Irene’s children, and she exudes both confidence and competence. Irene cherishes competence in everyone, even Mavis Key.