I WOKE IN the dark from a choking dream. In my sleep, there had been a word, a long word running on and on, coursing its way across a field of blue: white script across an ashen sky. The script’s loops opened up into wide nooses, flicking around my neck and yanking me up, out of bed, and into the dark. My ceiling became a gallows. Awake, I sat up gasping, my hand at my throat. There was a figure in the doorway.
“Mom,” Joshua said. “Your phone keeps ringing.”
I fumbled to the door and down the hall, still inside the dream. Still expecting the unending word trailing along behind me to loop around an ankle to drag me back. The predawn light at the living room window reminded me of some other emergency, long forgotten, in one of the old houses we’d lived in—Wisconsin. Some gray morning, bad news. The past, the dream—I couldn’t imagine who would be on the other end. I picked up the phone from the counter. “Hello?” I croaked. I had to clear my throat and repeat myself.
“Ms. Winger?” A woman’s voice. I was in no condition to place it. My head shrieked at me for being upright, for daring to open my eyes.
“Yes.”
“This is Pamela Harris. From Riordan.”
“Oh.” Riordan was—a company. A client? I could not make these pieces fit together. Anachronisms at six in the morning.
“I know it’s early. Very early, but we have a problem. I’m sure they’ll call you eventually, but—I thought you should know.”
“Yes?”
“The chief executive of the company,” the woman said, helping me come awake, because I suddenly knew what the call meant.
“The man who got the threat,” I said. “Is he—?”
“He’s dead,” the woman said, her voice clipped. “They found his body outside his car in the office garage last night. Shot.”
“Oh, my God.”
“Yes. You’ll be happy to know that they didn’t literally skin him.”
“I’m so sorry.”
“He had a wife. Three kids,” she said. “And business partners and employees who actually didn’t mind coming to work every day. I know you don’t think about those people when you wave your wand, but I wanted to make sure that you heard it from someone—” Her voice broke. “We trusted your strange mumbo jumbo, and look what it got us. We might as well not have bothered. Someone high up in security will be calling you at a normal hour, I imagine. They’ll be polite, but I’m not going to be. You need to quit selling your snake oil, Ms. Winger, before someone else gets hurt.”
The phone went dead. I put it down, waited.
I checked on Joshua, but he was back to sleep, his head shoved under his pillow. I pulled his door closed and returned to the front room, wide awake and shaking.
He was dead?
Snake oil?
The gray light at the window drew me. I stared out at the sleeping street, at the row of hazy houses on the other side. I felt as though I were the only person awake in the world. The time was a gift. I had time to process. I had time to look the whole thing over, to be ready for the next call.
Still I sat and watched the walls turn gold as the sun rose. I had the feeling that the phone call had interrupted me in the middle of running a race, a marathon, and that I was obligated to get back to it, to start at the exact spot where I had stumbled out for the phone. The dream? But the dream had been nonsense, just another thrilling ride in the human psyche.
I lay on the couch with my back to the window, a throw pillow under my head. The gold wall—
The walls painted yellow for me were long in the past by the time I went to say good-bye to my parents. I don’t know why I bothered. The terrible place they lived—the last place, as I thought of it, an old diner not quite turned into a house—was squalid and stale-aired, a mess. He wasn’t right. His hands shook, his eyes rolled. Something in his coffee? Something in his head. I was less worried about his hands by then, because he had trouble raising them.
But I hadn’t come for him.
“Come with me,” I’d said. Though I didn’t forgive her. In some ways, I hated her more than I’d ever hated him. For putting up with it, I supposed.
“You’ll be back. What’s out there?” my mother said.
“Something else,” I said.
“Everywhere has troubles,” my mother said. “Don’t believe that the grass is always greener.”
But how did she know? She’d never been anywhere else. None of us had.
“I’m going to have a baby,” I blurted. I hated that anything of the baby would stay here, even the words spoken. Here, the mice in the walls and the crickets clawing the air after the lights went out. A last effort to get her to come with me. Out there, she’d be away from him, and with her grandchild. With me.
It should have been enough.
But this time she turned her back on both of us. Why had I always felt so guilty leaving her, when she was the one who left me, right there in that diner?
I heard Joshua’s alarm sound, the strike of his hand to silence it. It jangled and cut out once more before I heard his feet hit the floor. He stomped to the shower and through his routine while I waited.
At seven, my phone rang. I was ready.
“Ms. Winger.” The sheriff.
“How did you get mixed up in this?” I asked.
“What are you talking about?”
“I was waiting on a call, and I thought—”
“You were waiting this early? Business must be thriving.”
“We’ll see,” I said, wondering if I would ever get work from Kent again. Things got around. You started to collect—for lack of a better word—an aura around you, if you made mistakes or if jobs you worked on didn’t somehow end the right way. I’d seen it happen.
“I need your help with a little policing today, if you can make the time.”
“Policing?”
“Well, it’s right up your alley, I think. It’s a busy day, but maybe I could meet you at the crime scene and get your thoughts?”
Crime scene. I felt sick. “Is it Aidan?”
“No, no. Aidan’s still out there. Nobody’s hurt. This scene’s not even a little bit bloody. Here, let me give you the address.”