“I’ve known a lot worse.”
“I guess you would, being in the business you’re in.”
He thought, Right. The business of being human. “So that last Thursday night,” he said. “Thomas wasn’t as upbeat as usual? How would you describe his mood that night?”
“I don’t really know,” she said. “Kind of subdued? Pensive?”
“Like he had something else on his mind?”
“Exactly.”
“But you don’t know what?”
“I wish I did.”
“You sort of liked him, didn’t you?”
The question obviously took her by surprise. DeMarco waited out the silence.
“The truth is,” she finally said, “I did look forward to seeing him. He made me feel… I’m not sure if you can understand this or not.”
“Try me.”
“Most times I leave that place and I’ll come home and sit in the tub for an hour. Then I climb out and I still don’t feel clean. I mean, it’s not like I’m proud of what I do, you know? But where else can a girl make a thousand a week dancing? And that’s all I ever do. Unlike some of the girls there.”
“But with Thomas, you felt different.”
“I guess I felt like everything was going to be okay. Like I really would get my degree, get a job, end up with money in the bank instead of being in debt the rest of my life. And that someday I’d be able to forget all about this past year or so.”
He envied her optimism, her capacity for hope. He had hope too, but of a whole different nature than hers. She hoped for a happy life. He hoped for a good night’s sleep and an occasional dulling of the pain. “I appreciate you talking to me like this,” he told her. “I’ll try not to disturb you again.”
“Actually I don’t mind it at all now that I’m not scared anymore. You’re sort of like Thomas in that way.”
He said nothing.
“I just can’t believe he’s responsible for what happened.”
“You know,” DeMarco began, but left the rest of it, neither can I, unsaid. “You call me if you think of anything important. Anything at all.”
“I will,” she said.
He held the phone to his ear a few seconds longer, listening and waiting. Then he lowered it and hit End.
Despair
Thirty-Nine
This is Sergeant DeMarco, Nathan. Do you have a minute to talk?”
“Did he…? Have you found him?”
DeMarco stared at the legal tablet on his desk. Only seconds before telephoning the student, he had added Nathan’s name to the others. “Not yet,” he said.
“Christ, I’ve had this awful feeling lately.”
“What kind of feeling?”
“Just that something’s happened to him. Something bad.”
“I hope you’re wrong,” DeMarco said. “Meantime, I wonder if you could help me out with something.”
“Sure, anything.”
“What I’m trying to figure out are Thomas’s routines, patterns of movement, things like that.”
“I’ll tell you whatever I know.”
“For example, the way a writer works. The way he comes up with things, I mean. Thomas was working on a novel, and a novel is fiction. So he was making the story up, am I right?”
“Well, that’s the nature of fiction, yes.”
“But he can use things that actually happened too.”
“Sure. Real experiences are often the foundation for stories.”
“So he might take, for example, an actual meeting he had with somebody. The first time he met Annabel, let’s say. But for the novel he’ll change where that meeting took place.”
“Sure. I mean look at Hemingway. Most of his work was in some way autobiographical. A fiction writer takes what’s real but changes it around, makes it more dramatic, more intense and interesting.”
“But there’s no way of knowing which parts actually happened and which are made up.”
“Not unless the writer tells you.”
“Okay. That’s what I thought. A couple more things. As far as you know, was it Thomas Huston’s habit to be up at dawn, maybe take a drive somewhere, find a quiet place to sit and think? I mean he had a big, beautiful house, an office there and one at the university.”
“Sure, but… Can you hold on for a second? Let me just pull something up here on my computer.”
“Take your time.” While he waited, he looked over the names on the yellow legal pad. Danni, Bonnie, Huston, Moby, Tex, Nathan, Conescu, Denton. He drew circles around the first and sixth names, the only individuals he believed he could trust.
“Here it is,” Nathan said. “Let me read this to you, okay? Thomas sent me this note, must have been like the second week of the semester. I actually fell asleep in workshop one night, but he was very understanding about it. He just teased me a little and then we moved on with class. Afterward, I apologized and told him I’d been having trouble sleeping, story ideas rushing through my head all night, things like that. He didn’t say much at the time, but next morning I found this note in my campus mailbox. I scanned it onto my hard drive. Can I read it to you?”