The Resident

by Francis Cottam

At two minutes past seven, a security technician called Tom Fanning was helping Juliet place the second of two miniature video webcams. They were tiny, inconspicuous by design and then deliberately concealed. The first of them had already been placed on a bookcase in her bedroom. Tom was attaching the second on a bookshelf in the hallway.

  ‘It’s like a Dictaphone with a voice activator,’ he said. ‘The record feature is triggered by movement.’ He moved his hand in front of the camera, then added, ‘It’s wireless and feeds directly into its own hard drive that can be played through your TV or computer.

  ‘These positions will cover as much of the apartment as possible with just two units. But it still leaves the kitchen and bathroom uncovered.’

  ‘That’s OK,’ Juliet replied. ‘As long as I’ve got the bedroom and the front door covered, I think I’ll be pretty secure.’

  ‘It has automatic night vision,’ Tom said. ‘So no need to leave a light burning. It’ll catch whatever moves.’

  Juliet nodded.

  ‘You gonna sublet?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Most people put these in for parties or if they’re gonna sublet, or for babysitters. Make sure no one misbehaves or messes up the place or steals anything.’

  ‘Oh, yeah,’ Juliet said. ‘I’m gonna sublet.’

  She still didn’t feel right. It was like there was a layer of insulation muffling her senses from the world. She was thirsty, had felt parched all day and had noticed Holstrom frowning at her from behind the glass of his office when she fumbled with a stethoscope monitoring a patient’s heart rate.

  She had measured her own pulse and it had felt sluggish and a bit thready. Her resting pulse rate was normally in the mid-fifties, low she supposed because of her fairly extreme exercise habit. But that morning it had been around forty-eight, which was lower than it ever was normally. She had felt worse than sluggish, she had felt almost sedated and she knew these were not the symptoms of a hangover.

  She stood at her door and watched Tom take the elevator down, after thanking him for his handiwork. She was still leaning on her doorframe five minutes later when the elevator doors opened and Max walked out onto their floor, a bag of groceries in his arms. Juliet gave him what she hoped was a friendly smile. She still had a lot to feel grateful to the guy for, even if she found herself liking him less since his petulant verbal outburst of the previous evening.

  He did not smile back. He looked if anything a little bit startled to see her there. He was not shocked enough to repeat his trick of the night before and spill the contents of his own grocery bag all over the floor, but she certainly seemed to have given him a fright.

  It didn’t matter, not really. What mattered were her plans for the night, a reciprocal dinner with Jack, who she felt sure would find a way to sharpen her dulled senses. She would pack a bag and stay over. There may be balance to strike between not rushing things and making up for lost time but really, all she wanted to do was be with Jack.

  She watched Max self-consciously juggle his burden of provisions and his keys as he unlocked his apartment door. It did not really matter if they were no longer friends. Their moment had come and gone without amounting to anything. He was a solitary sort of individual when all was said and done, even if he seemed to have expected more from her than she could give. But there was only room in Juliet’s heart for one man and fuzzy as her thinking might be, she was certain it wasn’t Max.

  Juliet went back inside. She packed a duffle bag, drank yet another glass of water and went to the toilet. She was starting to feel normal again, at last. She paused by her front door, sure for a moment that she had forgotten something. Then she remembered that she did not need to switch on her spiffy little surveillance cameras. They were motion-activated. They did all the switching on they needed to do, all by themselves.

  Thirty-four

  MAX CAME TO at 4 a.m., looking at his wristwatch to confirm the time, seated in the chair he used when he studied her from his array of bedroom peepholes. Juliet was not there. She had not returned from wherever it was she had gone. Where was she? This was not part of his plan. He had not predicted this random behaviour from her. The apartment he had leased her was her refuge from heartbreak and insecurity. It was her bastion against a cruel and sometimes hostile world and he could not imagine where she would go and be happier and more contented than there.

  And then he could.

  She had to be with him. She had returned to the arms of her creep of a husband. It was his embrace in which she would now be cradled, asleep and apparently safe from any further emotional harm.

  Max did not think that he could bear it, but he had to have confirmation before he could think about how to act, how to respond to this changed set of circumstances. His strategy, such as it was, had been predicated on her staying put in the apartment. She had a lease agreement to honour, for Christ’s sake! They had entered into a contract and he expected her to be principled enough to keep her side of their bargain. The place was a steal at the rent and she knew it. Even the husband had more or less intimated as much, the previous night.

  Max decided that he would have to follow her. He would wait until she left the hospital at the end of her shift that evening and see where it was she went. He could not simply wait for her to come home from work. That would be torture for him, unendurable because she might not do so. She might stay away for a second night.

  Facts had to be established. Suspicions needed to be confirmed. Threats, if they really existed, needed to be eliminated. He had to act decisively. He thought that August, his baleful and disapproving grandfather, would actually have been proud of this bold and decisive new Max. He had tapped into a vast reserve of resourcefulness and courage. He met challenges head on and with ingenuity too. He was a different person really, a more complete and able human being than he had ever been before, now that he had Juliet in his life.

  It was clear that Juliet needed him as much as he needed her. He was obviously the best thing for her, the person who, in the long run, could make her happiest and most content. He just had to convince her of the fact.

  Thirty-five

  JACK MET HER from the hospital and they went together to a Brooklyn deli where they sheltered from the rain and drank coffee at a table by the window.

  Condensation clouded the window; the past clouded their conversation. They should have talked about this last night, but going to bed seemed so much easier. Making love required no dialogue and told her the most important thing: they still loved each other. They both wanted a new beginning, but it would not be achieved without some discussion of how things had ended between them. And that was difficult.

  ‘I take responsibility,’ Jack said, ‘for everything.’

  ‘You don’t want to plead mitigation?’

  ‘I don’t.’

  Juliet sipped her coffee. The street outside through the steamed glass had a phantom quality, like a dream. She said, ‘You’re very magnanimous. Does the pleasure you got from your affair contribute to this generous frame of mind?’

  ‘Please, Juliet.’

  She sipped coffee. She did not feel the way she knew she sounded. She felt anything but lofty and detached. And the truth was that she found the moral high ground a lonely spot to occupy. It was short on home comforts. ‘Just trying to establish the facts,’ she said.

  ‘The fact is that I ended the affair.’

  ‘Because you grew bored with her?’

  ‘I was never really interested in her.’

  ‘You fucked her, Jack. You were making a pretty enthusiastic job of it when I caught you.’

  He did not say anything. He just offered a slight shrug.

  ‘So you didn’t like her sparkling personality or her book-group intellect or her drop-dead looks. So it was what? Friction?’

  ‘I’m not proud of having done it.’

  ‘What went through your mind when I caught you? What did you think when your injured wife poked her disfigured head through our bedr
oom door and witnessed the pair of you in action?’

  ‘I was shocked. Then I was ashamed and sorry.’

  ‘Not sorry enough, Jack.’

  ‘I called the hospital, to find out what had happened to you. They put me on to that martinet Holstrom. He wouldn’t tell me.’

  ‘He has a duty of care. So did you, to your wife. He happens to take his seriously. He has lofty ideals. He has a sense of honour and integrity. He’s loyal. If these are concepts new to you, you can find them in any dictionary.’

  ‘I called Sydney. She called me something unrepeatable and hung up. I called Mike at his office. He wouldn’t even come to the phone.’

  ‘Tell me truthfully why you ended the affair.’

  ‘Because she wasn’t you.’

  ‘She wasn’t me when you began it, Jack.’

  He was silent for a while, playing with his cup, twisting it between two fingers on its saucer. ‘You weren’t you either,’ he said eventually. ‘You’d become a stranger to me.’

  ‘We’d become strangers to one another,’ Juliet said. It felt like a concession, saying it. It also felt like the truth. She said, ‘And now?’

  ‘Now I want to make it up to you. I want you back,’ he said. He smiled. The smile was small, tentative, far more hopeful than confident. ‘I don’t really care if your friends continue to ostracise me; I don’t particularly need their approval. I’d like to win yours, though, however long that might take to achieve. It took the loss of you to teach me just how much I love you. What I’d like is the chance of a fresh start with you. I know I don’t deserve it, but I’d like that more than anything in the world.’

  A few minutes later Jack paid the check and they left the restaurant, kissing under the awning out of the rain and then hugging each other tightly before parting from one another on the sidewalk.

  Jack walked with his head down and his hands in his raincoat pockets. To Max, watching him from a doorway across the street, he looked oblivious to the downpour soaking his hair and seeping through the shoulders of his clothing. It was as though the weather could not depress his mood. He walked with the light tread of a man given a reprieve by a woman he had deceived and simply did not deserve to get a second chance with.

  Max raised the hood of his track top and followed. He heard Jack start to whistle. The tune was not one he recognised, but it certainly sounded jaunty, given the awful weather and the dismal vista of wet streets and gridlocked road traffic. Max closed the distance between them to a few feet. His own tread, in his rubber-soled boots, was silent. He was careful to avoid splashing in any of the sidewalk puddles on the route.

  Jack paused in front of him. He had reached the steps of his subway station. He was about to descend them when Max threw himself forward and collided directly with him.

  ‘You want to watch where you’re going,’ Jack said, sounding surprised and indignant, as though the impact had taken the gloss off his mood.

  ‘Fuck you,’ Max growled, from under his hood. He took an abrupt step forward and shoved Jack violently, catapulting him down the stairs.

  Thirty-six

  BACK IN HER apartment, as she sat and read a magazine on her sofa, for the first time in a long while Juliet felt both happy about her future and more relaxed about the present. There was a glass of wine at her elbow and music playing softly on her hi-fi over the faint hum of traffic from the bridge below. It was now forty-eight hours since she had had her surveillance cameras installed and in that time, they had recorded nothing she had not triggered herself.

  Obviously, paranoia had been getting the better of her. It wasn’t really all that surprising, was it? She had been emotionally bruised. The letter from the cop killer had jolted her into the realisation that sometimes there were violent and desperate perspectives totally in contrast to her own. Her assumptions had been undermined by that letter. It had proven to her that the world was not always the place it seemed to be.

  But at least she had her apartment. There was no intruder. The sense of being watched she had experienced had been a fraught combination of nerves and insecurity. She had thought she had got through the ordeal of separation and homelessness relatively unscathed, but the experience had obviously exhausted her and she was only now really recovering.

  She turned the page, absorbed in the article she was reading in her magazine, enjoying the luxury of her leisure time, making a mental note to start the novel written by Jack she had picked up earlier in the bookstore.

  In the kitchen, though, where the cameras did not see, an uninvited visitor lurked beside the open wine bottle on her counter there.

  Five minutes later, when she entered the kitchen to pour herself another glass, Juliet had her apartment entirely to herself. No sign remained of her intruder, no clue that anyone but her had visited her kitchen that night. Nevertheless, when drowsiness overcame her, she felt glad she had the surveillance cameras installed and ready to record any movement that might take place during the night.

  She was startled awake the following morning. Something was moving softly behind her curtains, shuffling against the window pane. She sat up and grabbed a handful of curtain fabric and pulled it aside. Movement exploded in the pale triangle of light and space and revealed the grey and white whirr of feathers. Juliet realised that pigeons on the sill had been responsible for the peculiar noise she had heard. There was something odd about the light; it was bright, the sun higher in the sky than it should have been, the shadows less oblique than she was used to seeing them first thing in the morning.

  She glanced at her wristwatch. It was almost ten o’clock! She leaped out of bed and grabbed the land line. Despite her urgency and a bewilderment not far short of actual panic, she felt fuzzy again, her senses dulled. Where was her adrenalin when she needed it? Once again she almost felt sedated, insulated somehow from the sights and sounds and feel of the physical world.

  Once was an occurrence she was prepared to shrug off. But this was the second time it had happened to her. Twice was more than just coincidence; twice amounted to a set of symptoms.

  Someone answered her call. ‘Hey, it’s Juliet Devereau.’ Her mouth felt cottony and dry. She had a full water glass on her bedside table. As parched as she was, she did not understand why thirst alone hadn’t woken her before now.

  Something caught her eye. An object that should not have been there lay on the floor under the night table. She bent down and picked it up. It was a syringe cap. It was a familiar enough object to her but totally alien in that environment. How the fuck had it got there? She looked around the room, trying to figure it out, her dulled brain attempting deductive reasoning; as effective, the way she felt, as trying to sprint through fog over ice. Her gaze fell to the empty wine glass on the bedside table.

  From the phone receiver, a voice said, ‘Hello?’

  Juliet said, ‘I’m sorry I’m late, but somehow I’ve seriously overslept. I’ll be there as soon as I can.’

  She dropped the phone and started to dress. Her mind limped dully from what it was that was making her behave like this, to what would happen as a consequence of being late. ER doctors were not expected to be perfect, despite the popular perception. But they were expected to be totally reliable. If they were not reliable, they could not be counted upon and that meant they could not be trusted.

  This was an easy conclusion to reach, even in her dulled state, because she knew it already. On the rushed journey to the hospital, she put her slowly clarifying mind to the problem of how to find out the things that she didn’t know.

  It was her subway ride that gave her the idea. She was seated opposite a sleeping construction worker she assumed had just come off a graveyard shift. He was dust-covered with grime-rimmed eye sockets and hair matted from wearing a hard hat.

  He was cradling a lunch pail and with the eyes closed in his thrown-back head and a slackly open mouth, he looked about as alert as she felt. Then they rounded a bend and the carriage lurched. He slumped forward and the pail slipped fro
m his grip onto the floor where it opened up with a clatter that woke him.

  He leant forward, clearly embarrassed, scooping up the spilled contents of the pail, gathering an empty yoghurt pot, a half-full bottle of Pepsi Max, the remains of a sandwich wrapped in foil, an apple core and a bottle of pills with an upside-down label spelling the familiar word Demerol.

  Poor guy, Juliet thought, through her own slowly clearing stupor, having to take painkillers of that strength to get through the working day. Hope he isn’t working high up. Hope he isn’t working where he needs his agility and wits about him halfway sedated on that stuff.

  And all at once it occurred to her that that was how she felt; she felt like she had when she had just had her wisdom teeth removed and the dentist had written her a script for Co-Dydramol and she had taken two of them, dry-swallowed on an empty stomach before a glazed evening in front of a TV schedule she could not afterwards remember.

  She would take a toxicology test when she got to the hospital. The idea that she might have been drugged was outlandish. But the symptoms made it the obvious cause of how she was feeling, didn’t they? She needed to get to the bottom of this mystery and she was schooled in diagnostic discipline. Taking a toxicology test was as logical as it was crazy.

  It was only as she entered the main doors of the hospital, that Juliet remembered her surveillance cameras and, in her rush to get out of her apartment and into work, the fact that she had not checked to see if they had recorded anything new. She could not check her cameras, but she could check herself.

  She took the blood sample herself, extracting a vialful from her arm with a hypodermic. She took a urine sample too. She filled out a full toxicology screen panel, put everything into a Ziploc bag and handed the bag to an ER technician with a fully completed work order for a TR to be carried out urgently.

  On her break, Juliet ran into Sydney in the doctors’ lounge. She was far more alert now than she had been earlier in the day. Her head had cleared and she thought she was probably functioning at a level so close to 100 per cent that no one would notice the difference. No one except Holstrom, anyway.