The next night, he left a key for her. The lights were off in the house when he got home. After searching the rooms, he found her naked in his bedroom closet behind secondhand suits his wife had bought for him. She demanded that he bind her hands to the bed frame with his neckties. She demanded that he strap his bike helmet light to the bedpost. Her leather purse with its whorls and stitching sat on the bedside table. There was a fierceness to her that made him afraid. Her arms strained at the bindings, though he knew he’d tied them loosely enough for her to pull her wrists out. Sweat gathered between her breasts. She panted and shouted. Blood thrummed in his head. The bed narrowed, collapsed into the backseat of a car lit by dashboard lights. Kate’s eyes fixed on him but on some singular point beyond him, too. And then it was as if he were looking through her eyes at himself, his tensed and baffled face. And everything inside him grew hot, dark, and wet.
The next morning, Sam got up late as usual. She slunk into the living room in her robe, waved limply at him, rubbed her eyes. Jack was drinking coffee at the kitchen table when he saw her poke at something under the couch with her bare foot. She slid it out with her toes. A black lace bra. “Ooh-la-la,” she said.
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IT WAS LATE when they got back to the house, and the first thing Kay noticed was a light on in the kitchen. She and her husband, Bob, had been downtown in the Loop all day, a celebratory lunch with Elise at the Gage and then graduation, which had run late, with Senator Durbin’s speech going on and on. Elise’s boyfriend, Josh, had come. Tattoos everywhere. The illustrated man. The beard made him seem older, more sure of himself than he was. Still, she thought, he was pleasant enough. Had his charms. A fiction writing student (unemployed). He liked South American writers. They’d talked a little at lunch about the Chilean writer Roberto Bola?o. She would introduce Michael to them after he and Alice drove in tomorrow, something low-key. Try to get Michael to focus on something other than his impending divorce. Life went on, she thought, despite everything.
Coming up the back steps, she noticed the broken glass, the jagged opening where the pane in the door had been. She called to Bob. Over the summer, someone had broken into the garage, stolen their bikes. Even took the time to switch out one set of tires for better ones. “Don’t go into the house,” Bob said. “Absolutely do not go in.” He slogged through snow, went up on his toes, and peered through back windows. A short man, Bob, though she hardly ever noticed. At the back door, he poked his cell phone through the broken pane, shone it along the floor and wall. Glass on the floor, he said, maybe some blood. He stood there on the porch steps, chewed his lip. Detective Bob. Circumspect. Taciturn. Her protector.
Through the broken pane, she could see their home phone’s green message light blinking in the hallway.
They waited on the police for ten minutes or so. When the police finally pulled up in front, lights flashing, Bob said, maybe he should go in with them, take a look around. He started to say something else, something brave and useless, but she put a hand to his chest. He laughed.
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WHAT ROSA KNEW:
The man had worked at the Driskill Hotel for two years under the name Eugene Dudaev. He’d been a concierge for a time. Then he worked in hospitality, managing banquets and the like. Weddings, graduation parties, quincea?eras. Some people recalled that in the winter he wore a fashionable wool overcoat. Others said he was formal but not stiff. A few were struck by his knowledge of the hotel’s long history, Austin’s natural landscape. He seemed younger than he was, they said. A few others said there was some mistake, that the Dudaev they knew had a thick Russian accent, was in his fifties, and had immigrated from Chechnya during the height of the separatist war there. He had children, they believed, still living there and perhaps that’s why he left the hotel, to go back.
Still others on the hospitality staff (who refused to be quoted) said they had misgivings about him. That he’d taken up with two of the young Mexican housekeepers (he also spoke Spanish) and that both women had quit abruptly, without giving notice. Dudaev left the hotel soon after the second housekeeper quit five months before, leaving no forwarding address. When Rosa found a photo of Dudaev on the Internet, he was bearded, thick-necked, and balding.
The two young women, the staff said, were unlucky.
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