“I told Danielle at the time, it just looked like some chick.”
My client had not mentioned that part. “So you don’t think it was her.”
Kenny bounced in his chair. “Look, Danielle’s really shaken up. About the date, the execution date. I mean, me too. That’s crazy. So I get it, she wants to do what she can do. And yeah, this woman we saw, she looked sort of familiar. But Belmont’s a pretty small world. Lots of people look sort of familiar. I would have recognized Sarah. But they’ve always said she’s dead. So how could it be her?”
“How well did you know her?”
“Well enough. She was a real sweetheart, good influence on Brad.”
I shifted in my chair. It was uncomfortable, clearly designed to discourage long conversations with the boss. “What do you mean?”
“Oh, we used to get into trouble together, me and Brad. Dumb stuff, kid stuff. You know how it is, bored in the suburbs. But when Brad started hanging out with her he mellowed some too. But that’s ancient history. Believe me, if I thought there was even a chance that woman was Sarah? I would have hired you myself. Brad doesn’t belong in jail.”
I nodded. So far I had three votes for Brad Stockton’s probable innocence. “So if Brad didn’t do it,” I said, “who did? You knew Sarah—do you think she could have?”
Kenny sat up and leaned on his elbows. “She volunteered at the food bank and shit. She was, you know, a good girl. And she actually liked her parents, unlike basically everybody else I knew back then.” He splashed some of the vodka into a tumbler and tossed it back quickly, wincing like he’d learned to drink from a movie. “So the answer is either no fucking way, or it’s no one knew her at all.”
*
I went home feeling a little frustrated. Danielle had conveniently avoided telling me that the other witness to her Sarah sighting disagreed with her, which gave it something of a different flavor. But it was her money, and I figured she could lie to me if she wanted to. I sat at my desk and ran a few database searches in case Sarah Cook’s fifteen-year absence had left an electronic trail, which, of course, it hadn’t. I did have a fax waiting for me though, a statement on letterhead from the law firm of Donovan & Calvert, authorizing me to act in an official capacity at the Chillicothe Correctional Institution. Peter Novotny worked fast. I liked that.
I closed the computer and stared at the wall of my office for a long time. The previous tenant had painted spirited colors in every room: a dark, shiny teal in the office, burnt orange in the living room, aubergine in the bedroom, bright yellow in the bathroom, chocolate-brown walls and red cabinets in the kitchen, cornflower blue in the long hallway that ran the length of the apartment. When I moved in, I asked the landlord to paint over the craziness, to make everything white. But he hadn’t, and then I grew to like it, and then eventually I didn’t see it anymore. Sometimes it still took me by surprise.
I got up and cracked a window. Even though it was cold outside, the ancient, overactive radiators in the building hissed and gurgled all day and night unregulated, causing the temperature in my apartment to spike to tropical highs. Almost every room in the place had a window open an inch or two, even in the dead of winter. But the heat wasn’t why I felt like I couldn’t get enough air. It was getting to be the time of night when the apartment felt like a tomb. Through the screen I heard the rustling of someone in the alley, dragging a sack of aluminum cans. “They all had their blank faces on,” he was muttering, “like Jesus Christ foretold.”
I put my coat back on and grabbed my keys.
*
The lobby of the downtown Westin was all marble floors and baroque-looking upholstery, and the doorman gave me a familiar nod as I passed him and cut to the right for the bar. It was medium-busy for a Monday after eight, a few clusters of businessmen with their ties loosened at the tables and an awkward couple that was either on a blind date or was about to break up, but there was only one party sitting at the bar itself and I sat down at the opposite end. Andrew caught my eye in the mirror behind the liquor bottles and broke into a grin.
My brother had tended bar in just about every hotel in Columbus by now. It was a good regular gig when you dealt a little bit on the side, because the hotel bar was the first place out-of-towners would check when they were in the mood to party. In-towners too, sometimes. He finished the drinks he was mixing and passed them to a server, who then carried them to the couple on the verge of breaking up.
“Have you seen our new fall seasonal cocktail menu?” Andrew said as he turned to me, heavy on the sarcasm. He was thirty-seven, three years older than me. We had the same blue-grey eyes, the same dark brown hair. Mine hit just below my shoulders and my brother’s shaggily grazed his collar. His tattoos were visible from under the cuffs of his shirt. He pushed a narrow sheet of ivory card stock in my direction. “If I have to make another mulled-apple-cider-tini I’m going to kill myself.”
I squinted at the menu in the semidark. “I’ll have the Winter in Paris.”
Andrew thunked two shot glasses down on the bar and filled them both with whiskey. “No,” he said.
“It doesn’t sound that bad. St-Germain and champagne? Maybe I’m feeling classy.”
“You’re not.” He slid one of the shot glasses to me and held his up. “Friends don’t let friends order cocktails invented by social-media interns.”
I clinked my glass against his and we drank. “Is Matt dating someone?” I said.
Andrew shrugged. “Like he’d tell me. Why?”
“He sent someone my way,” I said, “and I figured it was some girl he was trying to impress.”
“And?”
“And, I’m just not sure I’m up to the challenge of impressing anybody.”
“You’re the smartest person I know.”
“Christ, you need to meet more people, then.”
“Is this how you get when you’re feeling classy? I think,” he continued more softly as he refilled our glasses, “that after losing Dad, you just don’t want to pick back up and keep going.”
I didn’t respond right away. Then I said, “That’s not true.”
“It is.”
“Why?”
“You’re scared. That it would mean you’re as over it as you’re going to get.”
I swallowed my second shot and thought about that. Neither of us had a good relationship with Frank, but that didn’t make it any easier. In fact, it might’ve made it worse. “Aren’t you?” I said.
“Roxane, I’m fucking terrified.”