Did I? “I’m getting us a drink,” I announced, crawling over him. “Plus, this isn’t dating,” I called as I walked down the hall.
“Right,” Tom said from the bedroom. “It’s—what did you say? Helping?”
I swallowed a shot in the kitchen and finally closed that window, gazing out at the alley. Nothing was out there this time. “Exactly,” I said, loud enough for him to hear me. “And when it stops being helpful, either because of this Pam or you just get tired of wondering if your car will get boosted when you come over here, we’ll stop and it’s not a big deal. The last thing I want is to interfere with your life.” I did another shot and put the glass in the sink, then grabbed two clean ones from the dish rack.
“You know I like you, too,” Tom said when I got back to the bedroom.
“And I like you,” I said. This was a conversation we’d had before. “But that’s different.”
“How?”
I climbed back into bed and sat cross-legged against the wall. “It just is,” I said. I poured some whiskey into our glasses and took a sip of mine and tried to imagine it was my first of the day.
“Yeah,” Tom said finally. He looked at me in the dark and I looked back for a long time.
“So it’s fine, everything’s fine,” I said. I downed the rest of the whiskey and set the glass on the headboard. “It’s just sex. It’s not like you have to turn it into something just because we’ve fucked twenty-five times.”
“But who’s counting?” he said. He patted the mattress beside him. “Would you come here?”
I lay next to him and let him pull me into his chest. I was going to miss this. “It’s just that you’ve been the only good thing,” he said.
“Stop right there,” I said, but I didn’t move away.
*
After Tom left, I lay in bed and tried not to assume that every creak and sigh in the hundred-year-old foundation of the building meant that my visitor was back. The radiator was hissing again and I was hot, but I’d already closed all the windows and had no intention of opening any of them, no matter how hot it got. Finally, unable to sleep, I got up and dragged my father’s notebooks down the hall to my bedroom.
Tom had given me the key to deciphering them: they were numbered, a small numeral inside a circle drawn on the first page of each one. There were, it seemed, 243 of them in total. I went through them quickly, skimming through dozens and dozens of names.
Finally, in the middle of notebook number 71, I found the one I wanted. Evans, Mallory. I let out a long breath.
Missing 7 months frm hm, infant daughter Shelby. Last seen leaving hm after argument re: housework w husband Josh. *Incl MPR from Belmont PD 5/29 in IR. Hm w infant night of, cnfrm by 2 neighbors. J. Evans employed Meigert Auto, North Cbus.
His entries were written in a jerky shorthand. I had to think about some of the abbreviations: missing persons report, investigative report, home. He drew a line when his notes switched from one case to another, and I had to read through several other investigations to find the place where Mallory’s case picked up. He had a list of camping-supply stores in the area, because the tarp her body was wrapped in had been brand-new. Another list of registered sex offenders in the southeastern quadrant of the county, spanning six pages, most of the names checked off and a few crossed out. He had two maps of the woods where her body was found, one scribbled over and redrawn to be oriented north. It had a note in the margin that said FUCK YOU, HARPER. I remembered Wallace Harper vaguely; they’d worked together only briefly when I was right out of high school, before Harper dropped dead of an aneurysm in the elevator at the police department headquarters downtown. I had to put the notebook down for a second, spooked.
Ten pages later, the Evans thread resumed. I picked through the messy shorthand to get the gist of it: among the many useless, anonymous tips to the homicide squad, there’d been one report that one of Mallory’s former classmates was involved. If she hadn’t dropped out, she would have been a senior. I was just thinking that Brad Stockton would’ve been a senior too when I turned the page and saw his name, written out in my father’s handwriting.
I took a deep breath.
That was unexpected.
His name appeared in a list of three others under a heading that said Follow-up? Brad’s entry read: Suspended—retaliation? No charges. All of the names were crossed out. There was no further explanation for it, like there wasn’t for most of what Frank wrote down. I thought about what Sergeant Derrow had told me, about Brad slicing up a teacher’s car.
I didn’t like the sound of anything today.
I paged through the rest of the notebook and the one that Frank started after it was full, but there were no other mentions of Brad and few mentions of Mallory. The case got replaced by newer, easier-to-solve homicides and was eventually forgotten, at least in terms of active investigations.
I got out of bed again, this time for a bottle of whiskey and a glass. I forced myself to look again out through the kitchen window, but the coast was still clear. That didn’t really make me feel any better, though. Not about anything. I was beginning to regret falling down this rabbit hole in the first place. Frank had probably crossed out Brad’s name for a good reason. But less than a year later, two more people were dead and the murder weapon was found in his car. What did that mean?
“Shit,” I said.
Danielle was going to be pissed.
ELEVEN
I was dreaming about my father: a wren had flown into the picture window on the front of the house, and we were burying it in a Crown Royal bag. I woke up gasping, some kind of noise yanking me out of sleep. I listened hard for the source of it, then realized it was just the phone vibrating somewhere in the bed. Late-morning light streamed into the room. I dropped back to the pillow and covered my eyes with my hand. I hadn’t slept well, and I wasn’t keen to start the day with a call from the unknown breather. But I felt around under the covers for the device, finally locating it near my feet.
Danielle Stockton again.
I sighed toward the ceiling. I could still see Brad’s name written in my father’s handwriting. I still didn’t want to talk to my client, not when I’d all but proven she hadn’t seen Sarah after all and I’d also just found at least some kind of connection between her brother and another murder. But I had taken her money—I couldn’t hide from her forever. So I made a cup of tea and ate a handful of Goldfish crackers at my desk while I called her back and gave her the update she asked for.
“I’m not saying this means your brother belongs in prison,” I said, wincing at my own words. “But I am saying it seems likely that the person you saw wasn’t Sarah Cook. Two separate people looked at the sketch and identified her as this other woman, Jillian Pizzuti.”