The Request

by David Bell

  Dawn Steiner with a male friend?

  “I can’t think of anything obvious. I work in PR, and I own a stake in a bar. The most anger I encounter or hear about there is someone thinking we charge too much for beer.”

  Bill leaned forward, scratching his cheek thoughtfully. “But this guy who came to your house, the one who banged on the door and tried to get in after Amanda and Henry—he mentioned you and your friend Blake. The one you were talking about earlier. Is there someone who could have a beef with both of you?”

  “Big enough that he wanted to come to the house and act that way,” Amanda said, her voice low. “Like a maniac.”

  “We don’t work together. We don’t have any connections like that. We haven’t spent much time together lately.”

  “Someone like Blake has probably pissed a lot of people off in his life,” Karen said. And all the eyes in the room swiveled to her. The word “pissed” coming out of her mouth struck us all as a bizarre breach of decorum for Karen, who usually peppered her speech with phrases like “Oh, heck” and “Cussy darn.” She looked right back at all of us. “Well, he did drop my grandson.”

  “He didn’t drop him, Mom.”

  “Well, whatever he did, I don’t like him. He drank a lot at your wedding.”

  “What about the toast he made?” I asked. “Or the china he went out of his way to find after Amanda mentioned it?”

  Karen hesitated for a moment. “Well, I don’t like this. I don’t like any harm coming to members of my family.”

  But my mind quickly shifted, trailing off in a different direction. Karen was right—Blake had no doubt made a fair number of enemies in his time. If he’d been involved with Jennifer while he was on and off with Samantha, there was no telling how many other women he might have dated. And any one of them might have had a jealous boyfriend or husband. Any one might come trailing their own version of Kyle Dornan.

  But how did that connect to me? Why would a jealous or bitter boyfriend or husband decide to come after me? And why say something about the girl getting killed?

  “Excuse me,” I said, standing up. “I’m going to call him.”

  “Good,” Karen said. “It sounds like he needs to be asked some tough questions.”

  I ignored her and walked out to the living room, the line ringing and ringing as I moved.

  CHAPTER SIXTY-FOUR

  I hung up and tried again, and I kept expecting him to answer.

  He’d been there for me so many times. I’d counted on him for so much. Despite everything he had dragged me into with Jennifer, I still expected him to come through. To answer.

  Maybe I was a fool. But how hard was it to let go of the belief we had in people we cared about the most?

  How hard was it to believe he could be letting me down at the biggest moment of them all?

  I never would have let him in the house, never would have gone along with any of it except for the looming threat of the exposure of my role in the accident.

  I sensed someone behind me. I knew it was Amanda.

  I tried again and received no answer.

  “He’s not there?” she asked.

  “He’s not answering.”

  “He’s supposed to be at our house, Ryan. You left him there, using your computer. Shouldn’t he still be there?”

  “I don’t know. He didn’t tell me what all he was doing.”

  “You have to tell Rountree about that when she gets here. Tell her Blake was at our house. You said he looked ragged. Maybe she knows something else—”

  I put the phone in my pocket, felt its bulk against my thigh. “I’m going over there.”

  “Why? You should wait here for Rountree. We need to tell her about the man at the door.”

  “You can tell her,” I said, moving away from her. “You saw him, not me.”

  “But I need you here. I want you here. With me and the baby and our family. I don’t need you running around and not knowing where you are.”

  I wanted to stay. More than anything else.

  But I couldn’t.

  “I’ll call you when I can,” I said before I leaned in to kiss her.

  “Ryan. Don’t. Let Blake deal with whatever he has to deal with. This guy is out there. He could be back at our house, looking for you.”

  Amanda didn’t understand, couldn’t understand, that Blake and I were tied together by things I couldn’t talk about. Things she didn’t know.

  “Rountree will be here soon,” I said. “You’ll be okay here. If anyone comes to the door or sets foot in the yard who you don’t know, call nine-one-one. Immediately.”

  “Anyone like this woman you keep asking me about?”

  I ignored the question. “Just do what I said. Okay?”

  I stepped out the door into the light rain, which I barely noticed.

  CHAPTER SIXTY-FIVE

  When I reached our house, I stopped in the alley a few doors down from where we lived. I replayed the moment from an hour or so earlier when Blake had emerged from behind the garage, his face pale, his clothes dirty. I hadn’t seen his car. He’d simply appeared from behind the garage.

  I wanted to be cautious, to avoid announcing my presence in case someone else—the man who had already been to our house once that day, for instance—lurked inside, watching or listening for a car.

  I saw no other vehicles in the alley, nothing in our driveway. Cold, light rain continued to splat against the trees and the houses, but otherwise the neighborhood was silent. I approached the house, my shoes skimming through the standing water. Rain ran down my neck and underneath my shirt, mingling with the sweat that had already been there.

  The back door came into sight. It was closed, unmarred. Everything looked normal. I brushed a raindrop off my cheek.

  If someone watched from inside the house, they’d see me coming. But what could I do about that? I calmed myself by deciding that I was overreacting, that no crazy man was chasing after us, that Blake wasn’t answering simply because he was involved with whatever questions he was trying to answer. Once he had those figured out, he’d be his old self. Jovial, teasing, loyal.

  I took my keys out as I approached the back door. But before I put the key in the lock, I tried the knob, which turned freely. The door opened.

  I felt like an intruder in my own house, trying to sneak in quietly. But why? What if Blake sat at my desk, looking for whatever he wanted to find, my calls ignored for some innocuous reason?

  When I stepped into the kitchen, I called his name. I heard nothing, just the sound of my own voice.

  I closed the door behind me, and I couldn’t help but think of the night before when I had stepped into another house. It too had been quiet.

  My heartbeat quickened. As the rain on my forehead and the sweat on my back dried, it grew cool, and I felt a chill despite the humid air outside. I looked in the corner of the kitchen. The baseball bat sat there, and it was a no-brainer for me to reach over and pick it up. It brought a measure of comfort, and I was more than happy to take security wherever I could find it.

  “Blake?”

  Nothing.

  “Blake?”

  I took slow, cautious steps, trying to be quiet. But since I’d already called out, it didn’t matter. If there was anyone in the house, they either couldn’t respond or didn’t want to.

  Neither possibility was comforting. And I thought about turning around and leaving.

  But I didn’t.

  I turned the corner and went down the hall to the office. For some reason, the office door was closed. I closed the door from time to time when I worked in there and needed to block out the noise from Henry or Amanda’s book club. But if no one was in there . . . why was it closed?

  “Blake?”

  I took a deep breath and gripped the bat tighter with my right hand. With my left, I
turned the knob and pushed the office door open. As it swung wide, I braced myself, jumping into a batting stance, ready to swing at someone who might be on the other side preparing to charge at me.

  But the office was empty.

  I scanned the room, taking in every corner as quickly as I could. Under the desk. Behind the small file cabinet.

  Nothing.

  There were no closets in the room, nowhere else to hide. I even looked at the ceiling in case someone waited to drop down on me. But I saw nothing except the long crack in the plaster I needed to patch.

  My shoulders slumped, and I relaxed my pose a little while still gripping the bat. I tried to get my breathing to return to normal, hoped my heart would slide back down out of my throat and into my chest.

  I nearly yelped when my phone started to ring. I silenced it.

  Something on the desk caught my eye. Or the absence of something.

  The computer was gone. Along with Blake, the computer was gone.

  CHAPTER SIXTY-SIX

  I put the bat down, leaning it against my desk.

  The phone rang and rang in my pocket.

  I impressed myself by feeling calmer than I should have. My computer was gone. All my work. All my photos and personal items. Passwords, financial records.

  Maybe I was numb. Maybe I expected so little from Blake, this was just one more disappointment.

  I didn’t expect it to be Blake on the phone. And I was right. Amanda’s name was spelled out on the ID screen.

  “He’s not here,” I said. “He’s gone. My laptop is gone. He took my laptop.”

  “Ryan—”

  “He’s always been a loyal friend, but I think he’s involved with something I can’t understand. I think this might be more than I can understand.”

  “Ryan. Listen. Rountree is here and—”

  “There’s something else happening, something that doesn’t involve Jennifer—”

  “Ryan, I’ve got to tell you something.”

  Amanda spoke with such a harsh, almost frantic edge to her voice it froze me in place, cutting off my worries about Blake. My mind jumped tracks to worry about her. Had something happened there? Had the man shown up again?

  But she had mentioned Rountree. She had said the police were there at Karen and Bill’s house.

  “What is it?” I asked. “What’s wrong?”

  “The police are here,” she said. “They’re asking a lot of questions. Ryan, where were you last night? And I need you to tell the truth. The absolute truth. You said you were going to play basketball at the Y, and I called you there. It didn’t sound like you were at a basketball game. Where were you?”

  I stood in the center of my office, in the middle of my house. A house we’d lived in for several years. Perhaps the most like home anyplace had ever felt, with Amanda and Henry and the entire life we’d made there.

  But as I looked around at the walls and the furniture, it shifted and became unfamiliar to me, almost unrecognizable, as though I’d stumbled into a stranger’s life and house by mistake. Or else woken up there with no knowledge of how I’d arrived.

  Amanda’s voice, that tether that held me to the ground, sounded different as well. Her question, so sharp, so pointed, could only mean bad things for me. If the police were there and she was asking that question . . .

  “You clearly know I wasn’t at the Y last night.”

  “I do. And so do the police. They checked the records. You didn’t swipe your card. They can check that. And guess what. The guys you said you were playing with weren’t there either. In fact the whole league was shut down last night because there was a plumbing leak in the locker room. So where were you?”

  I went over and sat on the small couch I kept under the window. It served nobly as a place to nap or read, and I often sat there with Henry in the morning, trying to give Amanda extra time to sleep. The walls, which had already started to feel unfamiliar and strange, seemed to continue shifting, moving toward me, making me feel dizzy.

  Words wouldn’t come. My mouth was dry, my throat blocked. I couldn’t say it to Amanda. I couldn’t tell her. Everything we’d built would shift.

  Everything.

  “I’ll make it easy for you,” she said. “You weren’t at the Y. They know that. And a man who was out walking his dog last night saw you in Jennifer’s neighborhood, just wandering around. He knows who you are. First, he described you to the police. He said he’d met you at the Pig before. You bought him a beer once. And then the cops showed him your picture. Rountree did. And he said he saw you walking near Jennifer’s house. They’ve taken fingerprints from everything at the crime scene. They’re going to turn the place upside down, looking for every hair or fiber they can find. If somebody sneezed in there, they’ll know. So where were you? Tell me. I’ve got Rountree and two other cops in the house in one room and Henry and my parents in the other. Tell me something. Okay?”

  “I don’t understand, though.” I forced the words out with great effort. Each one felt like a boulder I was pushing up a large hill. “They got Kyle Dornan. He’s the one who wanted to hurt Jennifer. He’s the one who resisted arrest. He’s the guy. What does it matter what I did?”

  “Don’t you know?” she asked, her tone blunt.

  “Know what?”

  “You’re always on your phone. Weren’t you checking? Did you miss all the breaking news?”

  “What news?”

  “Kyle Dornan had a rock-solid alibi. The police just announced it. At the time of Jennifer’s death, he was in an emergency sales meeting at work. With three witnesses. He was in the meeting for hours. He couldn’t have killed her. There’s simply no way.”

  “But he resisted. Like a guilty man. He was wanted for assault.”

  I replayed it all. The break-in at Blake’s house. The broken bottle. The running away from the police.

  “They think he was afraid because of the outstanding charges against him. He had a temper. He threatened you with a broken bottle. How do you think he responded to cops coming after him? Didn’t he run away when they came to Blake’s house and he was there? Maybe he decided not to run this time. Maybe he decided to fight.”

  If Kyle hadn’t done it . . . who had?

  “Okay, okay.” Again my mind turned back to the night before, when I was standing over Jennifer’s body. The watch with the cracked face and the frozen hands: twelve fifteen. “I have an alibi too. I was at work when she died. She died around noon. Right?”

  “No, she didn’t. The police can approximate the time of death to within a range of a couple of hours. They’re saying late afternoon or evening.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “It’s the medical examiner who figures these things out. Not me. Ryan, do you understand what I’m saying?” Amanda asked. “You’re a full-blown suspect in this murder now. They’re looking for you.”

  CHAPTER SIXTY-SEVEN

  Her words stung me deep in the center of my torso, like a shock applied directly to my internal organs.

  I popped up off the couch, ready to dash out of the room and out of the house. Away somewhere else, looking for safety or escape.

  But as quickly as I had risen to my feet, my fight-or-flight instinct engaged, I froze.

  Where did I think I was going to go? Was I going to climb into my car and drive five hundred miles away? Head for a city or state on the far side of the country? Was I going to start my life over?

  What would I be leaving behind?

  Everything.

  “Is Rountree still there? Did you say?”

  I couldn’t remember. My mind felt scrambled, like a radio with a busted antenna.

  “She’s here. She’s right here with two other cops. I told you that. And she wants to talk to you. Ryan, they’re asking me things about you . . . like they think you’re guilty. I wouldn’t be surpr
ised if there wasn’t a cop car on the way to our house already.”

  “You told them I was here?” I asked.

  “Of course. That was the first thing they asked me. I told them you went there to meet Blake. Was I supposed to lie?”

  “No,” I said. “Of course not. Can you . . . ?” I took a series of deep breaths, tried to focus my mind. The images and thoughts swirling there came into clarity. As I thought of what to say and do, a calm came over me quickly. “Look, just tell Rountree I’m coming over there. Tell her I’m on my way to Karen and Bill’s. I’ll explain everything.”

  “What do you mean? Is there something to explain, Ryan?” Amanda asked. “What could it possibly be? Can you explain it to me first? Your wife.”

  “I’ll tell you everything when I get there,” I said. “It’s Blake . . . but I can’t blame him for all of it. It’s me too. It’s really about me.”

  The other end of the line grew silent. I waited, listening to the silence that meant Amanda was gathering her thoughts.

  “Ryan, are you trying to tell me . . . Were you involved with Jennifer? Was there more to it than the Facebook messages I saw?”

  “No, not like that,” I said. “Nothing like that.”

  My phone buzzed. I held the screen out where I could see the identity of the new caller.

  Blake.

  I told Amanda he was calling.

  “I think I should take it,” I said. “I should see what he’s doing. He needs to know about Kyle. And that the cops are looking for me. All of it.”

  “Then you’re coming over here, right?”

  “Right,” I said. “I promise.”