Without further delay, the walking begins. Every so often there’s a shrill piercing of the silence. Everyone comes to a complete stop, waiting in place to see if the search is now over because the whistle means someone has found Charlotte’s corpse.
Of course, I’m the only one there who knows that each whistle is a false alarm. But I stop like all the rest and look around anxiously.
After one whistle stoppage, the man to my left tells me he’d never met Charlotte, but had a case with her father once. “It’s so weird, right? I mean, you don’t want it to be her, and yet . . . there’s this odd sense that maybe it would be best if they found her already. You know, to give her family some closure.”
“I guess it depends on whether you think there’s any chance she’s still alive,” I reply, because I assume that’s what someone like me would say if he didn’t know for a fact that Charlotte was dead and at the bottom of the East River.
In all, there are probably seven or eight whistles. After the first three or so, I no longer see the anxious looks—the fear in people’s eyes—that a gruesome discovery is at hand. Now it’s more like when a penalty is called in a football game. Just a break in the action.
By the time the volunteers are corralled back to Ninety-Sixth Street, I have worked out in my head what I’m going to say. I find her greeting the volunteers as they enter the refreshment tent.
Ella looks shocked to see me. Shocked, but happy.
“Dylan?” she says before I can say anything to her.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
There are things that are too strong even for death to steal away.
I suppose I always knew that. It’s a common lover’s refrain to profess that you’ll love each other forever. Matthew and I would say that to each other. I’ll love you for all eternity. That kind of thing. I think he said it half in jest, as if we were characters in some melodrama on Lifetime. But I meant it. Jason never used such language, but I’m certain he thought it was true. He could never imagine an existence in which his love for me was not the defining feature. Marco, of course, never made such a sweeping pronouncement, nor did I toward him. It wasn’t true for him, and if I’d said it, he wouldn’t have hesitated to call me a liar.
It’s not to any of my lovers that I’m still bound after death. It’s only to Emily that I feel such a magnetic pull. In fact, my connection to my sister now feels stronger than ever, as it’s undiluted by any other.
I take comfort in the knowledge that my father will survive my death, although whether he’ll be the same man on the other side is unclear to me. I hope that he is, and at the same time, that my death changes him too. A contradiction permitted to those no longer of this world.
It’s ironic that, in my life, I parceled out my time to three men, and now, with eternity stretching before me, I have no interest in such meaningless pursuits. Even I am struck by the absence of any need for revenge. It is not present in me at all, no matter how deeply I search.
That’s because I’m more convinced than ever that there is no such thing as justice. Many things happen—some good, some bad, some tragic, some retributive—and if you try to match them up against one another, you can convince yourself that there’s some balance, especially if you eliminate the ones without any logic to them whatsoever—the thirty-year-old mother of three who is mowed down by a hit-and-run driver, the terrorist who kills scores of children—as merely part of God’s unknowable plan, but the truth is that there’s a terrible randomness to life, and no cause and effect to give any of it meaning.
Even if I could whisper the identity of my killer into Emily’s ear, letting her believe that it came to her in a dream, I would not do so. I keep my silence not out of any complicity with my attacker, but because I refuse to devote even that much energy toward him.
It no longer matters. Nothing of that kind matters any longer.
But I know it matters to Emily. For her, it’s all that matters now. She will not rest until my murder is avenged.
In the end, if I could whisper anything to her, it would be to let go of that pursuit. To honor my life by being happy. And I’d tell her that my greatest fear is that, if she is not careful, my murderer will end her life too.
PART TWO
DAY FIVE
SATURDAY
Christopher Tyler
32.
“Hello, Ella,” I say like I’m James Bond.
Everything about the woman standing before me is the opposite of Cassidy: her hair is pulled back, her clothing hangs loosely, and aside from lip gloss she appears not to be wearing any makeup. Nevertheless, I can see Cassidy clearly. She’s behind Ella’s eyes—that dead-on stare that signals she won’t be denied what she wants.
“I’d wanted to get in touch with you, but I’m such an idiot,” I say in my best, aw-shucks way, just as I rehearsed it. “I never got your number the other night, and you never gave me your last name. I thought about dropping by your apartment building, but that seemed kind of stalkerish. I was just about to leave you a note at Lava, when I saw you on the news and decided that I’d come here to see you. I hope that was okay.”
I know I’m playing with fire with this gambit. More than that, I’m doing so while wearing a suit made of gasoline. If somehow Ella learned that Dylan Perry, do-gooder doctor, was actually Christopher Tyler, and that Christopher Tyler knew Charlotte . . . that would be all she wrote. But I’m convinced the potential rewards outweigh the risk.
When I made the decision to seek Ella out at Lava, it was because I needed to know why Charlotte’s death hadn’t been on the news. I figured that if Ella were singing at Lava, then that would mean that no one knew Charlotte was dead.
My approach today is the next logical step. I need to learn what the police know, and Ella is in a position to tell me.
I’m certain Charlotte never imagined that when she shared with me a little gossip that a high-school friend had been at open-mic night at Lava and said that one of the performers looked like Ella in heavy makeup it would lead to my seeking her sister out at the lounge. But it’s long been a firm belief of mine that information isn’t just power, as the expression goes. It’s freedom. It’s money. It’s knowledge. It’s . . . everything.
There’s a tremendous irony in the fact that I suspect Charlotte only shared the story about Ella’s secret life with me to assuage her own guilt. Here she was keeping secrets from everyone in her life—McDouche, the J-man whose name she called out the night I strangled her, me, and, of course, Ella. She must have felt some comfort in knowing that everyone keeps secrets, even her perfect older sister.
I’m fixated on an entirely different secret, however. Did Charlotte tell anyone about me?
She swore that she hadn’t, but I can’t be certain of that. The one thing I know for sure is that if she had shared, it would have been with Ella.