Since We Fell

by Dennis Lehane

  He sped up.

  She sped up.

  He sped up some more. She sped up some more. He pushed the nose of his car toward hers. She held her lane. He sped up again. She accelerated, eyes forward. He beeped his horn. She held her lane. In a hundred yards, his lane ended. He sped up and she gunned it, as much as a Ford Focus could be gunned. He dropped away so fast it was as if his car came equipped with a parachute. It appeared seconds later on her rear.

  She noted the Mercedes-Benz symbol on his hood. Made sense. He flipped her the bird and blared his horn. A balding specimen behind expensive wraparounds, cheeks just beginning to turn to jowls, thin nose, nonexistent lips. She watched him rant and rage in her rearview and definitely made out the word fuck several times and cunt a couple more. She assumed his dashboard was speckled with spit by now. He wanted to jerk his car into the passing lane and race up on her side, then cut her off, she assumed, but the traffic to their left was too heavy, so he just kept his hand on his horn and thrust his middle finger at her and screamed in his car about what a cunt she was, what a fucking cunt.

  She tapped her brakes. And not a light tap. Dropped her speed a solid five miles an hour for a moment. His eyebrows shot up over his sunglasses. His mouth froze in a desperate O. He gripped his steering wheel as if it were suddenly electrified. Rachel smiled. Rachel laughed.

  “Fuck you,” she said to the rearview, “you nothing man.” She wasn’t sure the words made a bit of sense, but they felt good to say.

  A mile more and traffic had spaced itself out enough that the Mercedes driver could swerve into the left lane and come abreast of her. Normally she would have looked straight ahead—normally? There was no normal. Three days ago she never would have gotten behind the wheel of a car—but today she turned her head and looked at him. His glasses were off, his eyes as small and lightless as she would have expected. She looked at him steadily, hurtling down the highway at seventy miles an hour. She looked calmly at this little man until the rage in his eyes became confusion and then guilt and then he went for something approximating disappointment, as if she’d morphed into the teenage daughter who’d stayed out past curfew, came home smelling of schnapps and Scope. He shook his head, an impotent scolding gesture, and turned his eyes to the road. After one last look, Rachel did the same.

  Back home, she returned the Focus to the Zipcar lot and took the elevator up to fifteen. Walking toward her door, she felt lonelier than an astronaut. Unmoored. Untouched. Floating past frontiers with no way someone could hook her and bring her back. It didn’t help that of the four units on fifteen, her and Brian’s was the only one regularly occupied. The other three were owned by foreign investors. Every now and then they’d run across an older Chinese couple or the German financier’s wife, three children, nanny, and their shopping bags. She had zero idea who owned the third unit. The penthouse above was owned by a young man they’d dubbed Trust Fund Baby, a boy so young he’d probably been learning to read about the time Rachel lost her virginity. As far as she knew, he used the place to indulge a penchant for hookers. The rest of the time, Rachel and Brian never heard or saw him.

  Most times she preferred this quiet and the privacy it afforded, but walking down the hall right now, she was a castoff, a mark, a fool, something amputated from the herd, an idiotic dreamer who’d been awakened via assault. She heard the cosmos laughing at her.

  Didn’t you know, silly girl, that love is not for you?

  The condo overwhelmed. Every wall, every angle, every view. This had been them, this had been theirs. It was all the places they’d made love, all the spots in which they’d talked or argued or shared meals. It was the art they’d picked out, the rugs, the dining set, the lamp they’d found at the antique store in Sandwich. It was the smell of him on his bath towel, the newspaper with the half-finished crossword puzzle. It was the curtains and the lightbulbs and the toiletries. Some of these she’d carry into her new life—whatever that new life would be—but almost everything else felt too much them to ever comfortably become hers.

  To give herself a moment away from it, she took the elevator back down to the lobby to retrieve the mail. Dominick sat at his post behind the desk reading a magazine. Probably a tenant’s; might even be hers. He looked up and gave her a nod and the kind of bright smile that had absolutely nothing behind it and went back to his magazine. She walked into the mailroom behind him and opened her and Brian’s box, pulled out the stack inside. She added the circulars and junk mail to the recycling bin on the floor and was left, in the end, with three bills.

  She came out behind Dominick’s chair and shot him a “Take care” as she did.

  “You too, Rachel.” As she reached the elevator bank, he called, “Oh, I got something for you, sorry.”

  She turned back and he was going through a bin of oversize mail. He handed her a yellow manila envelope. She didn’t recognize the sender—Pat’s Book Nook & More in Barnum, Pennsylvania—but then remembered the VHS she’d ordered the other night. She hefted the envelope in her palm; that’s exactly what was inside.

  Back up in the condo, she opened the envelope and pulled out the tape. The box was battered, some of the cardboard missing from the corners. Robert Hays and Vivica A. Fox stared back at her with happy smiles, their heads tilted to the left. She was opening a bottle of pinot noir to accompany her when she realized she didn’t have a VCR. Who did anymore? She was about to go online and see if she could buy one when she remembered they had one in storage over in Brookline. She’d have to rent another Zipcar, drive a couple of miles in rush-hour traffic. And for what exactly? A movie that a drunk had told her to watch. She now knew her husband had another wife in another state. What more could she learn from an obscure movie from 2002?

  She drank some pinot and flipped the VHS over, confirmed that the description of the film on the back was indeed the same one she’d seen posted on eBay. Above the description were two small photos. One was of Robert and Vivica talking on a sidewalk, giving each other big toothy smiles. The other was of a young man leaning over a young woman in a wheelchair, the young man’s lips to her neck, her head thrown back in delight. This must be the two supporting players, she thought, poor Kristy Gale and the guy, what was his name again? She checked the credits—right, Brett Alden.

  She put her wineglass on the counter for a moment, closed her eyes.

  Alden Minerals Ltd.

  That’s why it had struck a chord.

  She looked closer at the thumbnail photo in the top right corner. Brett Alden’s face was half obscured by the angle it took when he leaned into Kristy Gale’s neck to kiss it. You could only see his hair (dark, voluminous, and unruly), his forehead, the left side of his face—one eye, one cheekbone, half his nose, half his lips.

  But she knew those lips, that nose, that cheekbone, that blue eye. The hair had receded some, the skin near the temple had sprouted wrinkles.

  But it was Brian. No question.

  21

  P380

  What if he came back?

  She’d been lying on the couch with her eyes closed when the thought sat her up.

  What if he walked through the front door and he knew she knew? Polygamy was against the law. So was impersonating someone else for financial gain. However little she understood of it, Rachel was witness to a series of crimes. She suspected that men who led double lives didn’t react well when exposed.

  She went to their walk-in closet and reached up on the high shelf where he kept some of his shoes. And behind the shoes, he kept a gun. A P380 subcompact, slightly larger than a cell phone but a pistol he assured her would put down any home invader not wearing Kevlar.

  It wasn’t there. She stood on her tiptoes and reached back on the left side of the shelf until her fingers touched the wall.

  She heard a click from the front of the apartment. Or did she? Could have been the front door opening, could have been the AC kicking on. Could have been nothing at all.

  So the gun was gone. Which meant . . .
>
  Nope. There it was. Her fingertips closed over the black rubber grip and she pulled it out, knocking one of his loafers off the shelf as she did. The safety was on. She dropped the clip out of the gun and into her hand to confirm it was loaded and then slid the clip back until she heard a click. They used to practice at a range on Freeport Street in Dorchester, Brian joking that if there was one place in the city where the locals didn’t need help learning how to shoot—or dodge—bullets, it was Dorchester. She enjoyed the range, the crack crack crack of rifles in the neighboring bays, the pop pop pop of the pistols. She was less enamored of the brrrrapt of the assault weapons because it called to mind dead schoolchildren and dead moviegoers. It could feel like a fantasy camp for overly aggressive children in there, most of the shooters well past the point where they needed to practice their shooting; several just wanted to fantasize what it would feel like to actually kill that burglar, that abusive ex-boyfriend, mow down that dark horde of gangbangers. They let her try other guns besides the P380, and she proved a good shot with a pistol, less so with a rifle, but the P380 was a perfect fit for her. Soon she could put all seven bullets—six in the mag, one in the chamber—center mass. After that, she stopped going to the range.

  She confirmed with a glance that she’d hooked the chain on the front door, so whatever sound she had heard from the closet, it hadn’t been Brian returning. In the kitchen, she opened her laptop and looked up Alden Minerals Ltd. It was a mining company headquartered in Providence, Rhode Island, that owned a single mine in Papua New Guinea. According to the recent assessment of that mine by a consulting firm, Borgeau Engineering, the mine was sitting on resources in excess of 400,000,000 troy ounces. A recent item in the Wall Street Journal made reference to a rumor that the dominant mining concern in Papua New Guinea, Houston-based Vitterman Copper & Gold, was contemplating a friendly takeover of Alden Minerals.

  Alden Minerals was family-owned and family-run by Brian and Nicole Alden. Rachel found no pictures of them. She didn’t need pictures. She knew what they looked like.

  She called Glen O’Donnell at the Globe. She and Glen had come up together, first at the Patriot Ledger, then at the Globe. She’d worked in investigative features, he covered business. After five minutes of pleasantries in which she learned he and his partner, Roy, had adopted a daughter from Guatemala and bought a house in Dracut, she asked Glen if he’d research Alden Minerals for her.

  “Sure, sure,” he said. “I’ll get right back to you.”

  “Oh, you don’t have to do—”

  “Be my pleasure. I’m not doing shit now anyway. Call you right back.”

  Another glass of pinot later, she sat in the living room by the picture window and watched night find Arlington, Cambridge, and the river. As the world turned brass and then blue, she considered her life without him. The panic attacks would return, she suspected, as soon as the numbness wore off. All the progress she’d made in the last six months would vanish. Not only would she go back to zero, she feared that this series of shocks—oh, your husband has another wife; oh, your husband has another life; oh, you might not even know your husband’s real name—would plunge her into free fall. Already a ball of mild hysteria clotted her windpipe when she imagined interacting with the world again, with people, with strangers, with those who could not rescue her, who would run from her pain the moment they smelled it. (Thin the herd, thin the herd, thin the herd.) One day she wouldn’t be able to board the elevator again; the next she’d need to have her groceries delivered. She’d wake up a few years from now and realize she couldn’t remember the last time she’d left the building. She’d have no more power over herself or her terrors.

  And where had that power come from? It had come from herself, yes, of course it had. But it had also come from him. It had come from love. Or what she mistook for love.

  An actor. Her Brian was an actor. He’d practically rubbed her face in it during the argument after his “return” from London when he’d made reference to Clark Rockefeller. Which meant not only was Brian not Brian, he wasn’t a Delacroix. But how was that possible?

  She went back online, searched for “Brian Delacroix.” The bio that came up matched what Brian had told her—forty, employee of Delacroix Lumber, a Canadian lumber concern with holdings in twenty-six countries. She clicked “images” and found only four, but there he was, her Brian—same hair, same jawline, same eyes, same . . . not the same nose.

  Her Brian had that bump just above the septum at the beginning of the nasal bone. Unnoticeable head-on, but discernible in profile. Even then it could escape notice if you weren’t looking for it. But if you were, it wasn’t up for argument—he had a bump on the bridge of his nose.

  Brian Delacroix did not. Two of the photos were profiles; no bump. She took a longer look at the head-on shots, and the longer she looked into Brian Delacroix’s eyes, the more she realized she’d never looked into them before.

  Her Brian Delacroix/Brett Alden was an actor. Andrew Gattis, his inconvenient friend from the past, was an actor. Caleb knew both of them quite comfortably. It seemed a rational leap that Caleb might be an actor too.

  As the dark settled over the river, she texted him.

  Got a moment to swing by?

  A minute later, he responded.

  NP. What do you need?

  Tiny bit of muscle. Rearranging a few things b4 B gets back.

  See u in 15.

  Thx.

  Her cell vibrated. Glen.

  “Hey.”

  “Hey,” he said. “What’s this company to you, Rachel?”

  “Nothing much. Why?”

  “It’s a rinky-dink operation that owns a rinky-dink mine in Papua New Guinea. However . . .” She heard him click his mouse a couple times. “Turns out the mine might not be so rinky-dink. Rumor has it a consulting firm did an assessment and found out Alden Minerals could be sitting on resources of up to four hundred million troy ounces.”

  “I came across something about that,” she said. “What’re troy ounces, by the way?”

  “Gold measurement. Sorry. It’s literally a gold mine. Won’t do them much good, though. The major competition in that region—the only competition they’d have—is Vitterman Copper & Gold and they don’t play nice in the sandbox. And Vitterman would never, fucking ever allow a mine to be sitting in that region on that kind of lode and not have their name on it. So at some point there’s going to be a hostile takeover. Which is why Alden has been trying to keep news of the consulting company’s findings hush-hush. Unfortunately for them, they needed more cash. They took several meetings with Cotter-McCann.”

  “Who’s that?”

  “A venture capital group. Last week Cotter-McCann leased several parcels of land suitable for commercial real estate near Arawa township in Papua New Guinea. What’s that tell you?”

  Rachel had drunk too much wine for it to tell her anything. “I don’t know.”

  “Well, it tells me Cotter-McCann gave Alden Minerals an infusion of cash probably for a shitload of shares in that mine. When it starts to pay off, they’ll push Alden Minerals aside and clean up. It’s what they do; they’re sharks. Worse than sharks, some say. Even sharks stop eating when they’re full.”

  “So Alden Minerals will probably fail.”

  “‘Fail’ is not quite the right word. They’ll be subsumed. Either by Vitterman or Cotter-McCann. They went from A ball to the major leagues overnight. I doubt they can handle the pitching.”

  “Ah.” She couldn’t put any of it together. “Thanks so much, Glen.”

  “Of course. Hey, Melissa told me you’re making your way back out into the world.”

  “She did?” Rachel swallowed a scream.

  “You’ve got to come out to the house, meet Amelia. We’d love to see you guys.”

  A wave of despair hit her. “We’d love that.”

  “You okay?”

  “Oh, yeah. Just got a cold.”

  For a moment it felt like he might press the issu
e. But then he said, “Take care, Rachel.”

  When Caleb rang the bell, she buzzed him up. She’d laid her evidence on the kitchen counter by a scotch glass and a bottle of the bourbon, but he didn’t notice it when he first came in. He looked distracted and worn out.

  “You got a drink?”

  She pointed at the bourbon.

  He took a seat at the counter. He poured himself a drink, didn’t even notice the other items on the counter. “Hell of a day.”

  “Oh, you had one too,” she said.

  He took a long pull on the glass. “Sometimes I think Brian was right.”

  “About what?”

  “Getting married. Having a kid. It’s a lot of moving parts, lotta balls in the air.” He glanced at the items on the counter and his tone grew distracted. “So what needs lifting?”

  “Nothing really.”

  “So why . . . ?” He narrowed his eyes at one of Brian’s plane tickets, the receipt from the shop in Covent Garden, a photo she’d printed up of the selfie Brian had “taken” outside the Covent Garden Hotel, the VHS of Since I Fell for You.

  Caleb took a pull from his drink and looked across at her.

  “You wrote the date wrong.” She pointed at the receipt.

  He gave her a confused smile.

  “You wrote it as month, day, year. In Britain, it would read day, month, year.”

  He glanced at the receipt, then back over at her. “I have no idea what you’re—”

  “I followed him.”

  Caleb took another drink.

  “To Providence.”

  Caleb was very still.

  The building was just as still around them. Trust Fund Baby was definitely not home; she would have heard his footsteps. The other tenants on fifteen weren’t there either. It was as if they sat atop an aerie in a forest at the far reaches of the earth.

  “He has a pregnant wife.” She poured herself more wine. “He’s an actor. But then you knew that. Because”—she pointed her wineglass at him—“you’re an actor.”