FOURTEEN
Craft-beer enthusiast Brian Zollinger called me back as I drove home and told me he’d moved to Wisconsin in April of his junior year and he never saw anyone from Belmont again. He’d gotten a phone call from my father after Mallory Evans was found—owing, he said, to his troublemaker reputation in town—but he couldn’t provide any info since he never knew her well and he hadn’t even seen her in nearly two years at that point anyway.
So it seemed that Frank had a good reason for talking to Brian Zollinger, Michael Timpton, and Brad—their own troublemaking reputations—as well as logic behind crossing the first two off the list. All I could do was hope that Brad could tell me why his own name was crossed off, that it somehow made perfect sense, and that seeing Brad’s name in my dad’s notes about Mallory’s murder was nothing but a coincidence, not a clue.
I really didn’t want it to be a clue.
Once I got into my apartment, I poured a drink and stood in my dining room and looked out the window onto the alley. It was six o’clock but it was already midnight-dark. The wind rattled a loose can along the fence but otherwise, it was still quiet. In the reflection in the glass, I could see the state of the room behind me and it wasn’t good. I wasn’t sure that I’d ever eaten a meal in this room. It was mainly the room I walked to in order to get to the kitchen. The table was piled high with dirty clothes and unopened mail. I turned away from the window and walked back into the hallway, willfully not looking directly at the mess.
I took my drink into my office and pulled my computer out of its bag. The metal finish was cold to the touch from sitting in my car all day. I opened it, then closed it immediately when I saw that Pam Gregorio was up on the open browser tab.
“What do you want,” I muttered to my empty apartment.
That was easy enough. I wanted to figure out if Mallory Evans’s death was somehow related to the Cook murders, or if I was just stuck on this because of a theoretical appearance of my father’s ghost. The crimes were connected, obviously, by location, and also by murder weapon. There was something weird about Brad here too, based on Kenny’s sudden change of attitude. But beyond that, they weren’t even similar. A young woman with a history of trouble, raped and stabbed and buried in the woods; a middle-aged couple stabbed to death in their home. And then there was Sarah, who was neither here nor there. I didn’t know what it meant. But it felt very much like it all meant something.
The last thing I wanted to do was sit at home all night, thinking about what it all could mean, waiting for Camo Jacket to show up, waiting for the creepy phone calls to start again. I leaned back in my desk chair as far as it would go and let my head hang off the back of it, taking in the upside-down view of the hissing radiator and the blank square of the window above it, waiting for something else to happen. Finally, something did. The phone rang, and I nearly fell over. Then I saw that it was Catherine calling.
I knew better than to answer, but I did.
“Hey,” she said, like she’d been trying to reach me for weeks.
“Hey you.”
“I was wondering if it did any good,” she said. “The sketch.”
I looked up at the ceiling. If not for the sketch and the fact that it led me to Jillian Pizzuti, I’d still be out there obliviously looking for Sarah on the streets of Belmont instead of tangled in the archives of another crime. “I think it did,” I said. “Or it might have made things worse.” A little like Catherine herself, always.
“Well.”
“Yeah,” I said.
“And,” she continued, because there was usually an and where Catherine was concerned, “I wanted to tell you that a friend of mine is having a party on Wednesday, and you should come.”
Catherine had an endless circle of friends who had parties on any night of the week and never cared who got invited. “And why is that?” I said.
“Because last I heard, you like parties,” Catherine said. “And because I’ve been thinking about you.”
I felt myself smiling, some of the defeat of the day slipping off me.
“So, are you free?”
“I’m free right now,” I said.
Now Catherine was quiet.
I got a terrible idea. My heart started beating faster. “You should have dinner with me,” I said.
“And why is that?” Her tone was gently mocking. Anyone else and I would have just hung up.
“Because it’s Saturday night and you already got to W in your phone book,” I said. “And, last I heard, you like passing the check.”
She laughed. She had a dirty laugh, impossibly big for her quiet, demure voice. “So where are we going?” she said.
*
When I got to the Pearl, Catherine was already there, seated at a pub table in the window with a glass of red wine and a charcuterie board in front of her, nibbling at foie gras on a piece of bread. She was dressed all in black—a loose shift over leggings, moto boots with a tangle of silver chains around her ankles. Her blond hair was messy around her shoulders. She didn’t look like she was waiting for anybody at all. I sat down and she put her hand on my thigh under the table without speaking.
“Are you going to say anything?” I said after a minute.
“I just want to have a nice evening,” Catherine said. “I’m not sure talking needs to be involved in that.”
We looked at each other across the table, her expression vaguely challenging. Somehow in the hour between the phone call and this moment, tension had sprung up between us. Her eyes looked a little tired, and her mood was a little prickly, and I didn’t think she was on her first glass of wine when I walked in. That, and I was already feeling frustrated and unsettled. Every time someone walked by on the other side of the window, I involuntarily looked up, half expecting to see Camo Jacket staring back in at me like I had the other night. None of this was a recipe for a nice evening. But I felt a little better just being near her. So we ordered oysters and drinks and I told her all about Brad Stockton. She had always liked hearing about my cases, the small shows of bad behavior, the mysteries people thought were worth solving. She told me about a job her husband was interviewing for this weekend, in London. I’d never met him, though Internet stalking had yielded many photos of an unsmiling man always wearing a scarf of some kind, his sole personal expression to the world.
“You don’t seem especially happy about that,” I said.
“I’m not especially anything,” Catherine said. Her hand was back on my thigh. “It’s up to him if he wants to go to London or Prague or Tallahassee, Florida. I’m just not going with him this time.”
“And why not?” I said. I shouldn’t have. I wanted her to say something specific and she’d never do it. “Trouble in paradise?”