She had been a smoker all my life, but my father had hated the smell and always made her go outside. There was no one to stop her from smoking in the house now, but she still didn’t do it. She went out through the back door without a coat and I saw her through the window, shivering in the cold, a cigarette poised halfway to her mouth.
Upstairs, I jiggled the knob on my father’s locked office door and regarded the cheap wood grain of its surface. The house was small and my brothers and I had always shared bedrooms in various permutations, but this room had always been Frank’s office. I guess he needed a place for his record collection and his notebooks and his booze, even though all he did in there was drink and make late-night phone calls. Once, when I was nine, I picked up the phone to call a friend and I heard my father on the line, talking to one of his women. Her voice was breathy and she was crying. My father’s voice was just his voice, rough and flat.
He’d always kept the door to the office locked, and none of us had ever dared even to attempt to breach it. So this could have been significant. Should have been. I felt like a thief for robbing anyone else of the opportunity to witness this, the opening of the tomb. We could have left it sealed up for months, years, decades, opening it only on the twenty-fifth anniversary of his death, when all of us had dealt with it already. We could have toasted to him, shared an anecdote or two—remember the time he … But instead I jimmied the door open with the nail file from the Swiss army knife on my key chain and that was that.
The air inside the small room was dusty and cold and smelled just like my father, like whiskey and Aqua Velva. One wall was mostly taken up by a particleboard desk, the front right corner going gummy from years of a tumbler of melting ice sitting in the same place. A big, nineties-era computer monitor occupied the desk, plus a scratch pad with a single, indecipherable word written on it in my father’s hopeless handwriting. The other wall was lined with bookcases, haphazardly piled with random artifacts of his life: baseball glove, a framed picture of my grandparents, rows of cracked-spine Western paperbacks, records—mostly jazz, some in sleeves but some just stacked on top of each other—manuals to long-gone cars and appliances, someone’s graduation tassel, and, finally, a dozen whiskey bottles, arranged on the top like trophies from his proudest accomplishments. I took in the labels. He’d been holding out on us all this time, stocking the liquor cabinet downstairs with cheap stuff.
I grabbed a bottle at random and took a long pull and sat down in the black leather executive chair at the desk, opening drawers. A rubber-band ball, a roll of stamps, a matte black Smith & Wesson 327 revolver. I picked it up, expecting it to somehow feel different from the way my own 327 felt, but it didn’t. I set the gun down as my phone started vibrating in my pocket.
Danielle.
My stomach flip-flopped. I couldn’t answer, not yet. She left a voice mail asking me to call back with an update, which I also couldn’t manage. To my credit, I had only been on the case for four days. But to her credit, four days was a hell of a long time when her brother only had two more months to live. And four days had been plenty of time for me to debunk her version of events, but not nearly long enough to come up with a new theory. I put my phone away and continued the search.
I found what I was looking for in the filing-cabinet drawers on the other side of the desk: the notebooks I remembered him always carrying, little black Moleskines with pages soft from wear and dense with ink. There were dozens of them stacked in the bottom drawer. I pulled out a stack and thumbed through a couple. His writing was somewhat more legible here, probably—hopefully—because he was sober while working. But his entries didn’t appear to be dated, the notebooks basically just endless volumes of one giant list. I paused briefly on a page with an uneven crime-scene diagram scribbled onto it, stick figures like a child’s drawing, except they were dead bodies.
My phone rang again. This time the caller ID said Unknown. I answered, hoping that it was somebody calling to solve my case for me and not a ploy on Danielle’s part to trick me into picking up. But all I heard was the sound of breathing in my ear.
“Hello?” I repeated. “Who is this?”
The breathing continued. A creeping dread began to inch up my spine. I leaned on my elbow, trying to be logical about this, extract information from the sound. But there wasn’t anything—no background noise, no clues. Just the rhythmic breath, which got more menacing the longer I listened to it. When I couldn’t take it anymore, I hung up. But a few seconds later, the unknown number began calling me again.
“Hello?” I said.
There was no response, just the sound of the breathing.
“Who the hell is this?”
Breathe in. Breathe out.
I hung up again and slammed the phone down in disgust. Funny how a phone call could feel like an intrusion, a threat, even though the caller wasn’t anywhere near me.
Right?
I went to the window and lifted the miniblinds, looking out at the street. But nothing appeared out of the ordinary, no camo jackets or suspicious-looking breathers anywhere to be seen.
I glared at my phone and waited for it to ring again, but it didn’t.
I paged through a few more of the notebooks and then I went back to the kitchen to get a bag to put them in. In the thirty or so minutes I’d been upstairs, the plumber had put the sink back together, a shiny new faucet in place of the lopsided, rusty one that had plagued dish-doers in this house for years. I flipped it on; the water pressure was instant and even. My mother was sitting in the living room watching Dr. Phil fix everybody up. She didn’t look at me.
“Are you taking care of this?” the plumber said to me, holding up a pink invoice.
I took it from him and when I looked at the bottom line I about died. Seven hundred dollars. “Hang on a second,” I said.
I walked down the hall out of earshot and called Matt. “I’m at the house,” I said when he answered. “Who the fuck hired this plumber? It’s seven hundred bucks.”
There was a briefly stunned pause. “Well,” he said.
“Matt. I’m over here and someone has to pay the guy now.”
“So pay him,” my brother said, like the whole thing hadn’t been his idea. “We can sort out the details later.”
“We were supposed to split it. I don’t have that kind of money,” I said, lowering my voice even more.
“You can’t cover seven hundred bucks for a few days?” Matt said. “Didn’t Danielle just write you a big old check?”
I didn’t need any reminders about that. Nor did I need my brother’s judgment. I drew in a sharp breath. Then I hung up on him.