And Then You Were Gone

by R. J. Jacobs

  I shifted in my chair. Three detectives made you more than just a person of interest.

  “You understand that everything you say becomes a part of the official record of this case,” Mason began.

  It wasn’t really a question, but I nodded anyway. “Yeah, of course.”

  That previous meeting had been like preseason. Now we were in the playoffs. “It’s obviously been a very intense night. I want to talk to you about Ms. Harrison and about what happened earlier. Are you okay to do that?”

  I nodded.

  “Sorry, is that a yes?” Slightly aggressive.

  I could hardly keep my face composed; my heart was thunder. “Yes.”

  “How did you know Ms. Harrison?”

  “She was one of my … she was a coworker of my boyfriend’s.”

  “She was a coworker of Mr. Fererra’s?”

  “Yeah.”

  “And how long had you known her?”

  “We met at a party about ten months ago. I want to tell you about a guy named Matt Cianciolo. Can I do that?”

  This was a barrier to my understanding the legal trouble I was suddenly in: the person who most wanted to discover exactly what had happened to Paolo and now to Sandy was … me. I couldn’t tell if the police questioning me wanted to wake me up to a different reality, or if they took my eagerness to redirect them as some sort of ruse.

  It felt like impatience was going to burn through my skin.

  White Shirt looked at High Bun, but Mason looked straight ahead at me. He nodded in the patronizing way people address the elderly when they seem to not understand. Slow-blinking, deep chin dip. My chest had reached a rolling boil.

  “We want to hear every part of what you have to say, but we want to keep the order straight. We want to not get confused about just how things happened earlier. I know that may be frustrating. So … let’s back up. Tell me about the holiday party where you met Ms. Harrison.”

  I seriously hope Allie never went to bed with you.

  “It was a holiday party.” I tried not to sound as exasperated as I was. “At the head of their lab’s house in Belle Meade. There were maybe forty people there. I met her for all of about three minutes. I didn’t see her again until the day before yesterday. She called me and said she wanted to schedule an appointment for counseling, and—”

  “You said you work mainly with children? Did I get that right?” He flashed genuine confusion.

  I held up my hands. “She called me. I’ve worked with adults, too. But it didn’t matter because she didn’t really want therapy. She wanted to talk to me about one of their coworkers. She thought he killed Paolo.”

  Real perplexity swept the room now. Tight Bun made a note.

  I leaned over the table. “That’s what she wanted to talk about. She wanted to tell me about Matt—”

  “Another coworker?” Mason asked.

  “Yes! Named Matt Cianciolo. She thought he’d developed … I don’t know. She thought he somehow slipped something to Paolo before we went onto the boat. They work with sedatives, drugs for euthanizing animals. I didn’t understand, but in a way it all actually makes sense. I was sick, too; I woke up sick. She said maybe I ingested some of it. He lives at 1440 Chestnut Street, Apartment 2C. I know I sound—”

  I knew exactly how I sounded. I sounded like Sarah Connor in Terminator 2, trying to be convincing about robots from the future. Not that I could stop myself.

  “We’ll look into Matt Cian …?”

  “Cianciolo.” I started spelling out the name. I noticed Tight Bun set down her pen halfway through.

  This pace, I thought, is going to kill me.

  “You said Ms. Harrison called looking for a therapist. Did she actually schedule an appointment with you?”

  “Well, yes but no. She came to my office, but it was clear that it wasn’t an appointment from the very beginning. She wasn’t my patient.”

  “She didn’t fill out any paperwork for you? No intake form, nothing like that?”

  “I mean, she wrote down the basics. Her name and phone number. Her address.”

  “Why nothing else?”

  “I’m telling you. She didn’t really want therapy.”

  “But she came to your office and filled out forms? Why would she do that?”

  Right. Why had she? I thought for half a second, needing them to understand that I’d not just shown up at a patient’s home. My thoughts were a dizzying swirl. “Because I needed her phone number. I didn’t have it. I’d only met her once.”

  White Shirt spoke for the first time, abruptly. He squinted like I was bright. “How did Ms. Harrison contact you, initially? To schedule the meeting.”

  “She called my phone.”

  White Shirt’s eyebrow arched over the frame of his thick glasses. “Your cell phone?” he asked. His voice dropped an octave on the word cell.

  “Yeah.”

  He and Mason glanced at each other. “Your cell history didn’t record Ms. Harrison’s number?”

  “It came up as UNKNOWN. She said she thought it would be safer.”

  “She called from a blocked number, so you didn’t have her contact information. You had her write it down on your office paperwork.”

  “I had the paperwork on my desk, sitting out for when she came.”

  Two uniformed cops sauntered by, unabashedly curious as they passed. If I never defended myself in front of another committee in my life, I thought, that would be okay.

  The clock was ticking. Who knew where Matt had gone. I pictured the frustrated expressions at the scene, a downpour washing away evidence.

  Tight Bun spoke. She had exacting eyes. I could tell that she wanted to get everything right. It wasn’t personal. I understood. “Did Ms. Harrison consider herself to be your patient?”

  “Absolutely not.”

  “She came to you under a pretense, then?”

  Slightly different angle, reiterated as a consistency check.

  “That’s what she said. She was scared. She said she’d seen something on one of the computers in the lab—Matt’s computer.” My memory searched for a record of Sandy’s exact words. “Something like orders for chemicals to create a poison.”

  “And then?” Mason asked.

  “Then we agreed that she was going to go back to the lab and find it again, print it out, and we were going to bring it to you.” My eyes locked on Mason.

  “Why didn’t she print it the first time?”

  “I don’t know.”

  White Shirt’s head was cocked. “You mentioned a few things about the coworker.” His southern accent was like the crackle of fire. Slow and low. “His address. How did you come to know it?”

  “I found it on my own.”

  “Through an Internet search?”

  I felt like answering That’s how it’s done these days, but I said, “Yeah. I searched online—not too hard to find the basics.”

  Something about my brevity made White Shirt squint harder, like he was trying to tell what I’d left out. “That’s not far from your office,” he observed. “Have you been by there?”

  Looking worse every minute. I alternated glances between the three of them.

  “Yeah,” I admitted, “Of course. Of course I was curious. I wanted to know where he lived. Sandy wasn’t lying. I believed her.”

  Detective Mason switched his gum to the other side of his mouth. He asked me to tell him everything I knew about Matt Cianciolo, and so I did. Their expressions hardly changed through my soliloquy; they stayed so still and frustratingly unblinking that the truth felt like something I was making up. High Bun scribbled a few more notes. Mason checked some data on his watch.

  Finally, White Shirt cracked the knuckle of his thumb and made an expression halfway between a wince and a wink.

  He and Mason glanced at each other subtly, and Mason clicked his pen again.

  “So tonight, earlier—”

  “Wait,” I said. “What happens now about Matt?”

  “W
e’ll handle the investigation.” Mason’s tone was a stop sign. White Shirt was a rounded mannequin behind him, arms folded over his barrel belly.

  I shook my head. “Sandy told me she suspected a guy she worked with was a murderer. The same guy she thought killed my boyfriend. And now she’s dead. Now … I mean now, as in right now, don’t you …” I was caught between naivety and exasperation, searching for the words. “… need to go pick him up?”

  “This is helpful. I assure you we’ll follow every lead in this case.”

  I stared at Mason.

  “I assure you,” he repeated. “I want to get back to earlier …”

  Run.

  “… when you got the call from Ms. Harrison.”

  Deep breath.

  White Shirt squinted like he was calculating the time.

  I explained how I was at the gym, away from the phone when she called.

  “Any message?” Mason asked.

  “Yes.” I reached for my phone; their necks all craned. Then I laid it on the table and Sandy’s voice from two hours earlier filled the room.

  First, soft static, like a fire going out. Then her voice. Her terror seemed to expand the room, pushing the walls outward. The buzz of the overhead lights sounded like anticipation.

  White Shirt spoke first. “What did she mean when she said, ‘You can’t trust anyone’?”

  “She was talking about Matt.”

  “And you drove to her”—Mason rubbed the back of his neck—“on your restricted license?”

  A brief hesitation. “Yes.”

  “Because of the DUI arrest.”

  I guess he had to say it, but it felt excessive. “Yeah.”

  “You thought you could help her?”

  I started to answer but faced another question before I could.

  “You knew her address offhand?”

  I willed my voice back to calm. “When she wrote it on the paperwork, I knew where it was.”

  “Had you ever been to Ms. Harrison’s home before?”

  “No.”

  “Had you ever met her before, outside of work?”

  “Just at the party with Paolo.”

  More writing. “How well did they know each other? Ms. Harrison and Mr. Fererra?”

  I started to shrug.

  “Were they close?”

  “No.”

  “Had they been involved?”

  My head cocked. “What?”

  White Shirt’s look said You heard me. His jaw was set, patient.

  “No,” I said.

  “No?” His eyebrow arched over his glasses.

  Oh, I realized. I could tell by the way he asked. They’d gone through everything of Paolo’s. They had been involved.

  Tears pressed in on me. I thought I might fly through the roof and keep ascending into the night sky. Disappear forever. “No,” I said, “I really … I don’t think so?”

  I was now a jealous ex. A murder suspect—the only obvious link between two murders.

  I looked at Mason and asked, “Can I go?”

  * * *

  They let me go out the front door.

  The barrier that stabilized my life had snapped. Usually fortified by medication, support, responsibility, and fear, it shook away like a dead leaf on an autumn blanket. The lifelessness of Sandy’s eyes had dismantled it. They’d looked up, persistently up, toward nothing, toward the unseen place for which she’d departed this earth. Maybe she’d met Paolo there.

  I wondered if his eyes had looked the same beneath all that water.

  The whoop whoop of a car alarm called. From lower Broadway, the stomp of country music flew past the war memorials, through the haunted elms. It was the middle of the night. My ankle howled in pain, but I didn’t care. I was going to find Matt, find evidence against him. I was going to see him arrested for the murders I’d just been accused of. I’d bring this to an end—even if it meant not trusting a soul or myself, not sleeping till it was over. Even if it meant Paolo speaking to me from somewhere that wasn’t real. I’d finish it.

  Someday, my eyes would be dead, too. But not before I became a runaway train. If that’s what it would take, so be it.

  Despite myself, I knew who I was about to call.

  EIGHTEEN

  I was the first person in the West End Starbucks after it opened on Friday morning. The smell of strong coffee, the feel of it scalding my mouth. The nausea of zero sleep.

  Lamictal? The day before. Right? Right. Later, I’d take two, I thought. That’d be fine.

  Cal’s Volvo rumbled into the lot, a wisp of exhaust rising from the tailpipe. A minute later, he sat down across the table from me like the chair was hot, looking back over his shoulder. Neat beard, iron eyes. The blue collar of a dress shirt peeked out from under his brown field jacket.

  “Okay, you got me,” he said. “I’m sufficiently curious. I’m here. What’s so—”

  “Do you know Sandy Harrison?”

  A tiny hesitation. “Yeah,” he answered. “Sort of—”

  “She’s dead,” I reported, stopping him. “I found her last night.”

  His lips parted slightly, a glint of fear crossed his eyes like a spark on the iron. His hands rested on the table as if they might push off.

  It sounded otherworldly, I knew, the script of a life that was never supposed to happen.

  “How?” he asked, head snapping back. “How’d she die?”

  “She drowned. Drowned in her bathtub. She called me right before it happened.” I rubbed at my raw eyes.

  “She called you?” A slight catch in his voice.

  I told him the story, what I’d told the detectives—about the records Sandy found, how she’d come to me, what we’d planned. “We were going to meet again today,” I said. “This afternoon.”

  “She thought Paolo …”

  “That’s right.” My voice cracked with disbelief. “No one wanted to mention to me that they’d been dating? It was a hell of a way to find out.”

  His eyes were downcast.

  “Was I the only one in the world who didn’t know? How big of an idiot was I?” It felt crazy, under the circumstances, but I had to know.

  Cal’s sigh was barely perceptible, but it was there. I could tell he hated spilling the beans on his best friend, even if he was gone. He squinted, resigned. “I’m not going to bullshit you. Yeah, they had a thing.”

  I looked past him, past my lonesome truck, out to the distance. Not for an answer; for somewhere to go. My stomach—which I thought couldn’t get any heavier—had turned into a shot put. Blood ran hot in my veins.

  How had I not known? This was everything at once. Too much. Calm and conflict were reduced to numbness. I caught my reflection—a ghost in the window looking as ragged as I felt. My hands tightened around the white cup in front of me.

  “It wasn’t serious,” he was saying. “Probably blinking out already when he met you. There might’ve been some overlap, but I don’t think it went on long.” His voice was deep and measured and gentle.

  I appreciated it.

  Cal sat back and went on. “I only met her … twice? Maybe three times? I don’t put myself in anybody’s business.”

  “Right.”

  “But you asked, so …” Cal lowered his chin. “They think you killed her,” he said suddenly. Law wasn’t his world, but he was quick to the bottom line.

  I started crying again. I hated it, but I did. Wherever I went, it felt like the walls were closing in on me. “They didn’t say it exactly, but I know I’m a suspect.”

  There was a new distance in his voice, a sudden and stark practicality. “You’ve … called a lawyer?”

  My eyes dropped. “No,” I admitted.

  “Mmm, okay. Well, you should. I know a guy. I’ll send you his contact info.”

  Cool air blew in as the door opened and closed. Someone getting in line. Cal snapped to look over his shoulder.

  “I know a lawyer, Cal.”

  “Right. Of course. Because of
the accident,” he said.

  I could tell he hadn’t meant to sound mean.

  “Look, I’m really sorry to hear this is happening. And I’m sorry you didn’t know about the other …” He meant Paolo and Sandy. The wooden chair squealed across the tile floor as he stood. “I hope things work out, Emily. I’m sure you’ll be all right.”

  “I need your help.”

  Cal’s lips were tight. He shoved his hands in his pockets. “I don’t think so. I’m definitely no legal expert, and—”

  “Cal, sit down. Please.”

  He looked at me. Another bolt of fear crossed his iron eyes, a quick ghost. But also, kindness—or at least the desire to not be a dick. He was measuring me. Could he help? Should he help? I must’ve looked like chaos across the table. I could tell he wanted stability, a professional life. He wanted no part of this. Paolo dying was more than enough turbulence; what I was saying went way beyond.

  The door whooshed open again. The breeze nudged his collar. He looked at the entrance, then turned back to me.

  “Please.” My voice was all tears. “Sandy came to me to tell me Paolo dying wasn’t an accident, that he was murdered. That he drowned because he was poisoned. I know it sounds crazy, but now Sandy’s dead, too.” My peripheral vision registered a head turning, but I didn’t stop. Couldn’t stop. “And there’s a detective right now who thinks I probably murdered two people. But since I know I didn’t, and you … you know this, too, don’t you? In your heart you know I didn’t?”

  “Yes,” he said.

  “And we both know what that means.”

  Cal took his hands from his pockets and rested them on the chair back. He couldn’t help himself, either. He pulled out the chair, sat back down. Despite his best intentions, his desire to leave me to live out my fate, I don’t think he could help what he was about to do.

  “We both know what that means,” I said again, wiping my sleeve over my wet cheeks. “The person who killed Paolo and Sandy is out there”—I motioned toward the window—“and I’ve already found where he lives.”

  Cal lowered his voice, but his eyes looked awake, even hopeful. “You told the police, I’m sure. They won’t waste any time.”

  I shook my head, rubbing my cold hands together. “I don’t know.”