After Nightfall

by A. J. Banner

  “She didn’t have any enemies,” he says, following my gaze.

  I turn to look at him, the sun falling in the sky behind him, his shadow elongating across the area rug. “Why was she so adamant about talking to me about something important? About you? Don’t you think it’s strange that the next morning she was gone?”

  “Coincidence,” he says, but his voice falters. “If there was any meaning in what she said, the police will find it.”

  “What if they don’t? The police aren’t omnipotent. They don’t know everything. So many cases remain unsolved.”

  He steps closer, blocking my light. The angular coffee table plunges into shadow. “It’s not your job to solve their cases.”

  “I don’t care what you think my job is,” I say, surprised at the edge in my voice. “Lauren was my friend, and I’m going to do what I can to help.”

  Nathan moves a little to the left, a pale shaft of sunlight escaping past him, onto the couch next to me. “It will kill you to play this guessing game,” he says. “What if you never find an answer? Some things aren’t explainable. We don’t always know why people do things.”

  “You’re assuming she killed herself. Still. But anyone around her could’ve been harboring a secret hatred for her.” My voice rises, and I wonder, briefly, if I’m talking about myself. If our attempt to recapture our friendship had always been doomed.

  “Who could possibly have hated her? She got drunk and flirted, but she was a nurse. She made a life of taking care of others.”

  I lean back against the cushion. “What about Brynn? Lauren was going to send her to boarding school . . . I don’t know why. And she told me that everything is the end of the world when you’re sixteen. When I went out to the gazebo to talk to Brynn, she seemed aloof. Her mom had just died but she couldn’t cry.”

  “People grieve differently.”

  “But Brynn seemed cold, closed off. Like something was missing inside her.”

  “You’re not suggesting that Brynn would resort to murder to avoid boarding school, are you? She wouldn’t kill her own mother.”

  “It’s been known to happen.”

  “I could see it happening if a kid is abused or disturbed—”

  “Maybe Brynn is mentally ill. Do we really know her? Or maybe she got into an argument with Lauren and accidentally pushed her.”

  “You don’t really believe that.”

  I grab a throw pillow and hug it to my chest. “Oh God, I don’t know what I believe. I’m losing my perspective.”

  “Who wouldn’t?”

  “I need to go home . . . take some time,” I say, although in truth, I don’t know what I need or what to do. My shadow bleeds out next to me, diffuse, unformed. The more I look at it, the more I see Lauren’s face, her opaque eyes. I’m shaking all over again, fighting off tears.

  “Go if you need to. Just stop trying to figure out who killed her,” he says. He picks up a pile of magazines from the coffee table, starts tossing them into the wicker recycling basket next to his armchair.

  “I’m never going to stop, Nathan. You know that.”

  He looks up at me. “But you’re driving yourself crazy. Take a step back and let the detective do his job.”

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  On the winding drive along the bay, the trees lean in, forming a narrow tunnel over the road. And on the waterfront strip, the quaint shops seem to watch me, their window eyes lit by antique streetlamps. I pass through the old section of town, a patchwork of ramshackle apartments growing between stately Victorians and boxy cottages from the early days of the fishing and logging industries.

  I’m relieved to turn onto quiet Juniper Lane, where my cottage sleeps in pale blue and white, the curtains drawn. The porch light casts a faint glow across the front steps. The newspaper is propped against the fence. There is no headline yet about Lauren—maybe there will never be one. Maybe she’s not a front-page story, even in a small town. I don’t yet know. But maybe she made the internet. Internet news, real or fake, pops up at lightning speed. On the front porch, a bouquet of autumn flowers waits for me in a vase on the welcome mat. Flowers. At a time like this. They can’t be condolence flowers. I’m not family. These . . . What are they?

  A card is tucked in between two of the sprigs of fern, written in an unpracticed hand by someone at Vase of Flowers.

  Welcome home, is all the words say.

  Welcome home?

  I send a text to Nathan. Thank you for the beautiful bouquet. When I said I needed to come home today, he must’ve ordered them for rush delivery.

  Flowers? He texts back.

  The bouquet, I text.

  Secret admirer?

  You.

  Nothing, then Thoughtful of someone.

  You.

  Again, nothing, and then Keith and Hedra?

  I frown. Welcome home? Why would they welcome me home after he’d proposed, and I’d agreed to move in with him?

  I snap a photograph of the bouquet and send it to him. The phone makes a whooshing sound.

  Wow, stunning, he texts.

  A mystery, I type.

  You okay?

  No, I text back. My eyes well with tears. I text him a heart, and he texts one back.

  I unlock the door and carry the bouquet inside. I love the creak of the hardwood floor, my cozy rooms lined with bookshelves, my comfy living room couch in a deep shade of indigo. Most of all, I love my Baldwin spinet piano, inherited from my dad when he passed away. I keep his photo on top, his hazel eyes twinkling, gray hair perpetually falling over his forehead. He resembled an exuberant sheepdog.

  As I arrange the bouquet of flowers on the table in the foyer, a faint perfume wafts toward me—an alteration in the air. The flowers? No. Maybe I left a window open, and a smell seeped inside from a neighbor’s house. Or has someone been in here?

  The living room appears untouched, but there’s a patch of dry dirt on the floor, almost like a footprint. Heart pattering, I tiptoe down the hall to the kitchen. A half-eaten apple sits on the countertop—did I leave it there? I race into my small home office. Nothing appears to be out of place, but the window is open—air wafting in. I shut it, my heart racing. I must have left it open. I’ve been scattered lately.

  But in the bedroom, a hurricane has struck. My clothes spill from the closet. Shards of glass litter the floor, liquid splashed across the wall. A bottle of perfume. Someone threw the bottle at the wall. Who would do such a thing? The other bottles line up on my dresser, untouched. I check through the drawers, the piles of clothing. Nothing seems to be missing. Except one thing. My vintage blue silk dress, the one Lauren gave me all those years ago, the one I was planning to wear at the wedding—it’s gone.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  “You say your door was locked when you got home,” the young officer says. She’s sitting next to me on my couch. Her fresh, round face looks familiar. Her broad shoulders rival Nathan’s. He hasn’t called me back. I left him a frantic message half an hour ago. Her partner, a young, wiry man who springs on the balls of his feet, disappears into the bedroom, maybe to look for evidence or dust for fingerprints.

  “Whoever it was came in through the window in my office,” I say.

  “We did see footprints outside, and we’ll try to pull prints off the sill,” she says. “Anything missing that you know of? Other than the dress?”

  “Nothing else. Everything’s still in my jewelry box. My filing cabinet is still locked.”

  She reaches out with a reassuring touch on my arm. “Are you doing okay?”

  I’m shaky, light-headed. “Not really.”

  “Is there someone I can call for you?”

  “I left a message for my fiancé. He’ll call me back soon, I’m sure.”

  She nods, looks around. “Do you keep any other valuables in the house, cash under the mattress, anything like that?”

  “I keep my money in a bank.”

  “Never know—I’ve seen it all. Any idea why someone wou
ld break in here to steal one dress and throw your clothes around?”

  “I have no idea. It must be someone who knows me, someone who’s angry at me.” Lauren and I found the dress together, so long ago. We both tried it on in the store, but she bought it before I could. She wore it a couple of times, then she gave it to me. It looks way better on you. It’s yours. In retrospect, I wonder if she gave me the dress out of guilt. As atonement for a sin I had not yet discovered.

  The officer narrows her gaze. “Anyone you can think of who might be angry with you?”

  “Maybe, but she’s dead.”

  She sits back, looks at me. “You’re the one who found Lauren Eklund.”

  “You recognize me, great.”

  “I was on the forensics team. Small town. You know.”

  “Oh,” I say, the word forensics punching me in the gut. I picture the police swarming her body, dusting her fingers, clipping off strands of her hair.

  The officer gets up. “Listen, I’ll write up a report. You should install an alarm system. We’ve had a string of burglaries lately. But this one—”

  “It feels personal.”

  She tucks a pen into her pocket. “Could very well be. Do you have somewhere else to stay?” she says as she walks to the door.

  “I might go back to my fiancé’s place, or maybe to the neighbor’s house.” Part of me wants to rush out of here right now, to keep running until I’m miles away. But I look around at the cottage I so lovingly painted, at my potted plants and matching furniture and all my books and my piano. This is my home, where I have always felt safe, and I’m damned if some trespasser is going to scare me off.

  “Don’t hesitate to call 911 if anything at all happens, okay? When you’re here, lock your doors and windows.”

  “I certainly will,” I say.

  She steps out onto the front porch, and I close the door after her. In the living room, I pull aside the curtain, and as I watch her drive away, the streetlight flickers across the road. The neighborhood feels too quiet. I need a sound, music, anything. I sit at the piano and play a slow version of Beethoven’s “Für Elise” to banish my fear. To fill the void. To tell any burglar who might be lurking outside that I am not scared. My dad smiles soothingly from his photo, but I wish I could talk to him for real; he would know what to say, but he’s nearly ten years gone, his ashes scattered across the sea.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  “I’m coming over,” Nathan says on the phone.

  “But what about Anna?” I peer out at the empty street. “She needs you there.”

  “Then stay here. What if the burglar comes back?”

  “It could happen. But whoever did this made a point of making sure nobody was home. I hope they’re too cowardly to return.”

  “I’m on my way.”

  “Wait a bit. I left a message for Julie. She should be home from her conference by now.”

  “If she doesn’t stay with you, I think I should. I’ll see if Rianne will take Anna.”

  “Nathan, I—”

  “I’ll get back to you.”

  “No. Don’t. I’ll call you if I need you.”

  “You’re stubborn.”

  “Stubborn is my middle name,” I say.

  “There’s something I wanted to tell you—I know someone in the medical examiner’s office. He said so far Lauren’s injuries are consistent with a fall from a height. That’s all I know. But they’re treating her death as suspicious.”

  “You mean—I was right,” I whisper.

  “I wouldn’t jump to conclusions.”

  “Are they going to check her body for DNA?”

  “Your guess is as good as mine. But they don’t usually perform a complete autopsy when someone falls off a cliff. It’s not like on TV. They don’t comb through every hair and bag every molecule as evidence. They have finite resources.”

  “Suddenly you know a lot about this.”

  “Hey, I’m in the field. And I ask questions. In a case like this, something must clearly appear to be unusual. Like, if a woman falls half-clothed, they might investigate whether a sexual assault was in progress when she fell—or was pushed.”

  “So, they think something was unusual—”

  “They must. Otherwise they would assume it was an accident, especially since she had been drinking. But for some reason they’re paying extra attention. Maybe because of what Arthur said. Or maybe because of something else. If they’ve found evidence of foul play, they’re keeping it close to the vest.”

  Foul play. “You mean evidence of a struggle,” I say. “I bet it was something under her fingernails.”

  “Maybe. Did you notice?”

  “I was in shock,” I say. “It was hard to tell.”

  “Right. Yeah. You okay?”

  “I will be one day, I hope.”

  “I’m not feeling so hot either.”

  “Oh, Nathan—”

  “I keep thinking about her down there on the beach. I dunno, maybe I could’ve . . .”

  “You can’t save everyone,” I say.

  “I know, but I can try.”

  I hang up, feeling spooked about everything. The break-in. Seeing Lauren on the beach. Brynn’s cold eyes. Jensen so sad. Anna crouched in the corner of the broken-down tree house, telling me to go away.

  Hang in there, Mari, my dad whispers. I’m always with you. I miss his wild laughter. I inherited his laugh and his thick brows, but my brown eyes and my oval face come from my mother, who was born and raised in India. As undergraduate students, my parents met by literally bumping into each other in the library at Washington State University. They both became accountants, crunching numbers for a living until my mother took off, abandoning my father after I left for college. I should have recognized her wanderlust much earlier, but in my child’s mind, our home life was perfect. We laughed together, played endless rounds of Pictionary and Scrabble. For a while, Lauren practically lived at our house, since her father worked as a fisherman in Alaska, her mother long hours as a restaurant manager. My mother sometimes traveled on her own, but she always came back, until one day she didn’t. I can’t even call her to tell her about Lauren. I don’t have my mother’s number.

  “What’s going on, Dad?” I ask aloud. “Who would break into my house? Who would want the dress? And who would want Lauren dead?” He doesn’t reply, but I know what he would say. He would tell me to trust my instincts, and not to become cynical. You must always look for the good in this world.

  In my office, I page through old photo albums and extract the picture of Lauren in the blue dress. She and Jensen and I sit in a dimly lit restaurant, laughing. The Mediterranean. Wooden tables, a mirrored bar in the background. Deep-red walls. I’m struck by how young we all looked. In another life, and yet. Only yesterday. Lauren’s face was rounder, her lips full, her skin flawless. The look in her eyes—carefree. I wore heavy mascara, my expression tentative. She said I looked better in the blue dress, but when she tried on the dress in the shop, I watched her admiring herself in the mirror, mouthing Wow, like a hand-stitched garment held the key to everything good in her life.

  Is it coincidence that the burglar chose the same dress, the one I planned to wear at my wedding? I never liked the idea of the bride in white—generic, bland, the color everyone chooses. But the blue silk reminds me of the vast blue sky, of endless possibilities.

  I look up to see the curtain fall over the window of the house next door. Bee Mornay. The quintessential nosy neighbor. I pull on my sweats and head over to talk to her. I can hardly believe I found Lauren only this morning, and now night is falling, and my house has been ransacked. A lifetime has passed in this one endless hell of a day. As I approach, Bee peeks out her front door and waves. Like she only just now saw me coming. She’s retired from the social security office, where she determined who would receive benefits and who would leave empty-handed, all from her desk behind bulletproof glass. Now she spends her days knitting, pruning her garden into alarming submission,
selling antiques on eBay, and spying on her neighbors.

  “Evening!” she calls out, stepping out onto the porch.

  I force a smile. “Evening!” I weave past her espaliered hedges, chopped into unnatural shapes.

  She opens the door to let me in. “I saw the police out there. What was going on?”

  “Someone broke into my house,” I say, inhaling the smell of chocolate chip cookies. One good thing about Bee Mornay, she likes to bake. She’s perfectly made-up, as usual, although she rarely ventures out. She’s too busy keeping an eye on the neighborhood. She ushers me into a cluttered living room, furnished in quirky antiques. She collects ceramic cookie jars—they’re lined up on every available shelf and table.

  “A break-in,” she says. “How terrible. We are in a low-crime area, but criminals look for nice neighborhoods like ours. You must be so upset.”

  “I’m all right.”

  “Sit, sit.” She moves a pile of laundry from the couch to a chair.

  On the couch, the cushion barely yields beneath me. “I’m wondering if—”

  “I heard the awful news about Lauren Eklund.”

  “Yes,” I say, my throat tightening. On the mantelpiece, she has lined up photographs of her family—her late husband, her daughter, who lives in Hawaii, her toddler grandson. In one picture, surprisingly, Bee is decked out in scuba gear.

  “A terribly sad business,” she says. “You heard then?”

  “I heard,” I say. She doesn’t know I found the body. She doesn’t know.

  “Sordid things happen in this town. You wouldn’t think. I do watch out for you, not in a nosy, critical kind of way. I’m glad we don’t have a cliff anywhere near here.”

  “Yes,” I say. “I’m wondering if—”

  “I can’t believe someone broke in. I make sure nobody steals from your mailbox, if I’m watching. What did they take?”

  “A beautiful old dress. I’m wondering if you might have seen anything.”