“Ms. Pierce,” Unger said, reaching out. “Won’t you sit down while we sort this out?”
I glared at him, smoothed back my hair, and glanced away haughtily. “I’m fine standing, thanks.”
After a few minutes, Cynthia hung up the phone. The click echoed into a long silence.
“Well?” I barked.
“Did you receive a call from someone, dear?”
“My name is Lilith Pierce. Call me ‘dear’ one more time, I dare you. Where is my sister!”
“Calm down,” Unger soothed, and for it nearly received a black eye. “How did you find out that your sister passed away?”
“I didn’t fly all the way from California for my health!”
“I understand that, ma’am,” he said, trying not to shout at me. He turned a dark eye on Cynthia instead. “What did he say?”
“She was brought in this morning.”
“What!” we all said at once.
“The clerk said she was brought in two hours ago, suspected suicide. They were just going to call . . . her next of kin.”
My heart stopped beating. In that one instant, not only was I free, I was free-falling. My mind lost the faculty of forming the simplest of queries. This was impossible. This was unacceptable.
They were experiencing something similar, but for them it was an odd clerical error and I was a basket case.
I think it was my knees that went, but when people say that, what they really mean is that the whole leg sort of slackens, like I was instantly a paraplegic. They caught me, inexpertly, and I fell without a complaint. Sitting on the hard ground, I looked at their shiny shoes and wondered what was going on.
“Who’s the lead on it?” he asked around.
“Mitchell and Thomas. They dropped by on their way to lunch, but it was a pretty definite suicide. Apparently, there were witnesses. I can call them now if you want and have Thomas email . . .”
“God damn it, yes! Tell them I’ll take over and figure out what the hell is going on.”
Had it all been a dream? Was I so mentally overwhelmed that I had mixed up the ride from the airport with the ride from her house that had happened two days later?
Then I thought of the plane ticket. Opening my bag without a moment’s hesitation, I rummaged for it, and produced it. Unger took it from my shaking fingers and read the time stamp on the luggage tag.
“She flew in today. She was on a plane when . . .”
His voice sounded odd, like he was in a car and being carried away from me at an incredible rate of speed.
I woke up on the ground, a wet paper towel on my head, someone shining a light in my eyes. I sat up, finally understanding how important it was to breathe on a regular basis.
“Where is she?” I gasped.
“You can’t see her, dear,” Cynthia said. “She’s too badly hurt.”
“Right now,” I raged. “I want to see her right now!”
They pulled me upright and Unger took only enough time to give his coworkers a vengeful look, as if they had somehow caused it.
“I’ll take her,” he said and helped me to my feet.
It was the same as it had been the day before, the same journey to the bowels of the building, the same grey hallway, the same dusty blinds. A heated conversation was going on inside the room. I spent the time staring into space, wondering if I had lost my mind.
When he came back, he seemed a bit frazzled. The shades were jostled.
“Are you sure this is what you want? She’s . . . she hasn’t been cleaned or . . .”
“Now!” I hissed.
He gave a final sigh of concern and tapped the glass.
The blinds went up.
There she was, for certain, inside a dark rubber bag, still wearing a pin-stripe suit and pink blouse. Her head was at an odd angle and was slightly misshapen. Blood had congealed at the back of it. She was pale, a mottled, darkish tide-line surrounding her ears and the back of her neck. One of her earrings was gone, and even though it was covered, her right leg was obviously broken.
My God, I thought, I was only a few minutes too late. I could have saved her!
I think he saw it in my face. The blinds dropped.
“I’m sorry for your loss.”
I turned to look at him, my touchstone to reality. It was obvious he was a good man.
“You already said that,” I breathed.
He managed a hard swallow. “Did I?”
“I just talked to her,” I murmured vaguely, glancing around. “She had an argument in an alley. Make sure you look closely at her arm. I don’t know where they came from. May I have her keys?”
I don’t think he knew what to make of me, really. I was speaking in riddles, but in his eyes, I was either the worst criminal in the history of assassinations, or I was a psychic. He apparently had enough faith in his ability to decode it.
He pulled out one of his cell phones and spoke briefly with someone about the search of Eva’s apartment. Evidently, his coworkers had been and gone, finding nothing to lead them to believe her death was anything beyond self-perpetrated. He hung up and, in a few moments, retrieved the keys from the evidence clerk. As I walked away, he scribbled notes, following close behind me. He didn’t leave my side until I got to the rental car.
“Ms. Pierce?”
I froze with the key in the lock.
“Did you really . . . see me?”
“I wouldn’t make something like that up.”
“I can see that. I don’t know what’s going on. I . . . I’ve seen some strange things . . . nothing like this . . . I promise you, I’ll do my absolute best.”
I could hear the sincerity in his voice, peeking through the disbelief. “Thank you.”
“Do you have a cell number?”
“No.”
“Then, I assume you can be reached at her home?”
I nodded, prepared to leave, but as I stared at my reflection in the window, I knew there was more to be said. “She didn’t commit suicide.”
“How can you be sure?”
“I . . .” But how could I say it? I knew because some wacked-out shit was happening to me: her dearest sister, her caretaker, the one who’d practically raised her. I was having some kind of weird psychic break and that was how I knew? “It just doesn’t make any sense,” I finished.
He touched my arm, and this time, he really meant to be comforting. Funny, how one unordinary thing could snap a person out of their routine.
“I’ll call you when I have something.”
I glanced at his elbow. “She had a stalker. I’ve spoken to him. He has a raspy voice.”
But had I, or had it been a needle-sharp lie amongst a haystack of truth?
He said nothing and handed me a card. “Are you alright to drive?”
I shot an acidic look at his face. “I got on a plane in a delusional state. Obviously I am.”
“I’m sorry, I really don’t know . . .”
I opened the door, got in, and pulled away before he could say anything else.
* * *
I went straight to her apartment without directions and was not the least bit surprised to find it looked exactly as I remembered it. The only difference was that I had never been there. The dishes reeked from the sink, the bed was still unmade, and the phone was slowly dying in the clothes pile clothes.
I picked it up by the antennae with thumb and forefinger, aware even as I treated it like an offender that it was not responsible for anything. As I set it in the cradle and stared at the sleek darkness of its pod-like construction, I knew why I hated it. It was an obelisk, an icon of an open line of communication that had broken down. It was the natural course of a relationship with so many stops and misconceptions, but it was our fault for letting it get to that point.
My finger hit the answering machine button.
“This is Eva Pierce. I screen my calls. Leave a number.” There was no recording of my call from the stranger.
“What happened?” I wh
ispered.
Had it really been a vision? I thought back to the notification call, to the first time I’d heard Unger’s voice, but it had never happened. When I focused hard on it, all I could recall was the feeling, not the place, not the moment, not even the phone in my hand. Maybe that was normal, but I had a feeling it wasn’t. So what happened to the time? What day was it really? What was going on?
I looked around. This time, I saw no reason to impose order on her decay. I just left it, stood in the center of it and looked around, trying to feel it as she had. It was either a symptom or a cause of her mental state, and that was just how I had to look at it, until she made more sense.
The color-coded journals called to me from their rows so antithetical to the rest of the home. I reached for one that was level with my eye and turned it over and over in my hand. Simple bindings concealing so much chaos, devoid of symbol or explanation; they were all I had left, but they were unreadable. The page I turned to had a date on it, and to my horror I realized the date was a recent one, only two weeks old.
“You were there again tonight. My Mad Maudlin. When I look at you, I don’t see those other things. I see me in my purest form, looking back. I see what I might be, not what I am. That’s why I’m afraid. What is that? Is it selfish? Is it evil to be selfish? How can it be? Because I find that I want . . . desperately, to live for something other than myself. I want to live for wind and rain, for terror and peace, for falling. I want to live. You teach me that so simply, but I have never been a good student. Perhaps you knew, all along.”
My diaphragm contracted so violently, I thought I might vomit.
“Oh, Ev.” In an attempt to stay apart from the blackness in front of me, I set the book down. As it left my fingers, my energy went with it and I felt more tired than I had ever been. I went to her bedroom, unburied the mattress, and in misery, pressed my face into her pillow.
I don’t know how long I slept, but I was troubled by nightmares, jumbles of the awful things I’d felt or seen, the things that confused me. I awoke with such a sharpened mind that I could have cut a man in half with a glance.
Hadn’t she said it? She was fated to die and I to seek the truth. I sat up and took a deep breath. It was time to make sense of things.
What, if any, part of my vision was real? Had the entire dream occurred in the car, waiting in the parking lot, or on the plane? Was it rational, stemming from exhaustion or . . . but that was too crazy to think about. It made no sense. But how else had I gotten the particulars so accurate? How had I known what would happen to her? What did it mean?
Everything means something.
I balled my hands into fists and squeezed my skull between them. An insistent headache was building behind my eyes.
“Okay, so,” I said to the room, “I don’t really know anything, right?”
The last echoes of my voice mocked me.
“If everything in the vision was false, then I don’t know anything. I can’t do anything. But if even one part was true”—I thought of her leap from the building—“doesn’t that mean it’s at least probable the rest might also be true?”
I don’t know what I expected. She didn’t seem to have had enough attachment to her home to visit it in the afterlife, whatever that might be.
I sniffed and tried to keep the tears from falling. “Where do I start, Eva?”
The phone trilled and I jumped. Nearly leaping from the bed, I rushed to it and hit the button as if tackling her off the roof’s edge.
“Hello!”
For a moment, no one spoke. I think my fervor caught them off guard. Then a throat cleared and I knew who it was.
“Detective.”
He gave a startled snort, realized how improper it was, and ended with another cough. “Ms. Pierce.”
“Yeah, I know, kinda intense that I can do that right?” I quipped, instantly livid that I had, for one brief moment, believed Eva’s pronouncement. Not everything meant something. It all just happened. Sometimes things meant something to someone, but lots of things went unnoticed and never meant anything to anyone.
“It . . . it does make me . . . uncomfortable.”
“My sister’s dead, try it from my perspective.”
“I’m sorry.”
“I really hate it when you do that.” I sighed. The headache was intensifying.
“Huh? Do what?”
“When you apologize. You’re not very good at it.”
“That’s what my lieutenant says,” he lamented.
“I’m over it,” I declared. “Please, don’t treat me like a victim. Say what you called to say.”
He paused to take a breath and let it out slowly. No doubt, he talked to quite a few people in that way, balancing dexterity with nuance and falling short of either. But if he wasn’t good at dealing with survivors, he had to be good for something, or they wouldn’t have kept him around. Hopefully that something was turning over rocks and shaking trees.
“I’m sorry if I seemed to be handling you. I just . . .”
“I know, lots of emotions, empathy training, blah blah.”
“Are you sure you’re alright?”
“Yes,” I snarled.
“Okay,” he said soothingly in a tone that reminded me of my father. “I was calling to let you know you were right. She had some very odd circular marks on her wrist, as if she . . .”
“Yes, I know.”
“Right,” he hesitated. “And she did make a complaint.”
“Mmmhmm.”
“But seeing as how I’ve got a head start thanks to your . . .”
“Don’t say it,” I warned.
It sounded like he was tapping a pencil on his desk. “Yeah, well, I was able to do a little research. I tracked down her employer and spoke to him.”
Ah, here it is, I thought, a starting point.
“He said she was a diligent person, never late, never talkative, serious, but didn’t seem to be suicidal. In fact, he said that she went out a lot.”
“Went out?” I laughed. “On what planet? My sister didn’t go out.”
He cleared his throat again.
“Unger, don’t. I’ve known you longer than you’ve known me. I know when you’re holding back. Full disclosure.”
This time, he really did chuckle. Perhaps it was morticians’ humor, but I almost felt like chuckling too. Anything to lift this painful ache from my chest.
“Maybe your sister was turning into someone you didn’t know that well.”
“And maybe the sky isn’t blue. She’s been the same since our parents died. That’s why it’s called a chronic condition. She wouldn’t suddenly get over it.”
“True, but not impossible. Maybe the job was helping her focus on something else and her coworkers were pulling her out of depression. Her boss said she came in to work a few times a bit ‘depleted,’” he persisted.
I traced the spines of her journals with my fingers. “What is she, a bank account?”
“Hung over,” he translated.
“Also not possible,” I insisted. “My sister would never touch alcohol. Our parents were killed by a drunk driver. Substance abuse was something I almost wish she had been into. It would have made it a lot easier to figure out what was wrong with her.”
He sighed and I heard the creak of a chair as he leaned back. “Well, I’m still interviewing her coworkers.”
I couldn’t help it. Bitterness was welling up in me. Other people had experienced her in a new life apart from me, viewing her in a way I would never get to see her. She existed outside of what I thought of as our misery, but I never had. I felt betrayed.
“What did they have to say about the marks on her wrist, that she was cutting her losses?” I spat out.
“You’re reading my mind again,” he warned helpfully. “They said that she told them she got her arm stuck in her garbage disposal.”
I thought back to my vision-quest and glanced at the sink. “She doesn’t have one.”
“I se
e.”
“Nor does she have any bloody knives, circular saws, or wood-carving tools, in case you want to know.”
I could hear little sounds of acquiescence. “Well, then I’ll have to figure out who her friends were and how the marks got there.”
“Could the . . .”
“Nope, not hand cuffs.”
“That’s what you said last time, so I wasn’t going to ask about that. I was going to ask about the needle marks. I know she didn’t have anything in her system.”
He made a soft noise of surprise in his throat at the revelation of my complete knowledge, but he should have known better. “Sorry. We’re not sure. One of three things: something harmless went in, something went in that degraded in the body, or finally, that something went out. She could have given blood or plasma lately, but I doubt it. No one would have taken her blood with a cut like that on her wrist.”
“So you’re saying that she could have been drugged several days before her death and then cut, but if that happened, what would they have used? Pretty much any opiate or over-the-counter drug that induces drowsiness stays in the body a day or so. I mean, Diphenhydramine Hydrochloride wacks me out for at least twenty-four hours, so its half-life has got to be about that long. Which means that it would have been at least detected two days later. For that matter, why cut her up and then let her go? That’s not very rational.”
Unger paused. “What did you say you did for a living?”
“I’m a housewife. I read a lot of detective fiction.”
“Listen, I’ve got some cold cases, if you want to lay your hands on a few files and divine some new leads, now that you have a calling.”
Frowning, I cleared my throat. “Isn’t that remark slightly inappropriate?”
The uncomfortably diligent Unger reappeared instantly. The chair squeaked out an apology before he could get his voice to work.
“I’m kidding, Detective. It’s fine to make jokes. I’m an expert in black humor. Just add some hard details in here or there, okay? All I have are her diaries and I’m just awash, walking around in her head. I feel like I’m going nuts.”
“You’re telling me,” he murmured.
Craving Page 3