As the two men walked back through the outer office to the elevators, they did so in silence. Daniel knew he would never return here, and so another piece of Lindsay would be lost, left behind. Another piece he could never hope to retrieve.
Though he and Brad were the only two in the elevator, they descended to the parking garage without speaking. He wondered how many times Lindsay had ridden in the elevator with Brad, thought about the countless conversations they must’ve had on their way to or from the office, and tried to imagine the things they had talked about. Daniel looked at the double row of buttons, and thought of how her fingers had once touched them. Despite a strong desire to touch them too, to make contact with something Lindsay had once made contact with, he kept his hands at his sides.
They finally reached the garage and the doors opened.
As both men stepped out, Brad turned to him and offered his hand. “Danny, it was good to see you. I just wish it could’ve been under more pleasant circumstances. I’m sorry I couldn’t be of more help.”
“Thanks for making time to see me.” Daniel shook his hand. This time Brad’s grip was noticeably stronger and more assured. “I appreciate it.”
“Take care.” He headed for his car. “If there’s anything else I can do, don’t hesitate.”
“Brad?”
He stopped, looked back.
“One more question if you don’t mind.”
“Shoot.”
“Do you know if Lindsay had any clients in Ohio or Pennsylvania?”
Without hesitation Brad shook his head in the negative. “No, she didn’t handle any Midwest accounts, and we do very little business in Pennsylvania.”
“Would she have reason to interact with anyone in those states through work in any capacity?”
He glanced up at the fluorescent lights buzzing above them, as if distracted by something he’d found there. “Not that I can think of. Why?”
“Just curious,” Daniel said. “Thanks.”
Brad gave him a quizzical look but apparently didn’t have sufficient time or interest in pursuing the point, as he smiled and turned back in the direction of his car, a tall thin shadow bending along dull concrete walls.
A cold wind blew through the garage, as if to carry away whatever faint traces of Lindsay’s presence still lingered there as well.
Some time later, alone in his apartment, Daniel removed all his clothes and drew a bath. Despite the chill in the air, he sat naked on the edge of the tub like a child waiting for his mother to attend to him. Steam rose slowly from the bath, fogging the mirror and thickening the air.
She had premonitions.
“What was it that spooked you?” he asked the running water. “What gave you the nightmares, Lindsay? Why didn’t you tell me and let me help protect you? Who is the man on the phone?”
Lindsay was forever quiet now, like God, and Daniel could only hope both were at least still listening. Regardless, he thought, she’s never coming back. No matter what I do, who I talk to, what I find out, where I go, how much I need her or how much I want her, Lindsay’s gone and won’t be back. Not ever.
The memory of her face slipped past his mind’s eye then faded to black.
Although he hadn’t actually seen her body until after she’d been transported to the morgue, he’d been forced to identify her at that point, and had never been able to erase the look of her that day, the way blood had caked along her hairline, how the cement had burned her skin and scraped pieces of it clean away, how her eyes were open in a horrible dead stare and how he couldn’t understand why they hadn’t wiped her clean or closed her eyes. He remembered how he tried to close them and how they refused to stay shut, bile rising in his throat as the morgue attendant patiently explained the eyes of the dead were not always easy to close. “Sometimes, but not always,” he’d said, as if this thing Daniel was looking at in a long silver box could in any way be real, the living, breathing human being he’d held in his arms just hours before. He remembered it hadn’t truly hit him until a few moments later, when in the hallway he had collapsed into his sister Jeannie’s arms, burst into tears and begun to cry with a fervor he hadn’t experienced since childhood. That memory left him, replaced with his imagining how she must have looked lying dead in the road, mangled and bleeding, his precious Lindsay, his best friend, wife, companion, lover—his entire world—a crumpled mass of blood and bone scattered across pavement.
It’s not me. Tell him it’s not me.
Yes, baby, it was.
And this is me.
Anger welled in him, and he clenched his fists. He wanted to break something—anything—to smash something to pieces, to cause pain to something or someone, to destroy them, obliterate them the way his happiness had been so senselessly annihilated.
But like always, the anger soon gave way to crippling sorrow and guilt, wave after wave of it that pulled him under and held him there like a swimmer trapped beneath the water, his screams as useless as his life had become without her.
Eyes filling and body bucking as the pain tore through him like he knew it would, he slid to the floor and let the pain overtake him. Though he’d told himself this before, he again promised this would be the last time he’d allow this to happen. From here on out he would channel his pain into purpose. He would pull himself together as best he could and get to the bottom of what she’d been doing that night. He’d figure out what had happened, what was still happening. And nothing would stop him.
But in that horrible moment he wept uncontrollably, wrapped in rising steam, tearful memories, and the sobering knowledge that he had virtually nothing left to lose.
ELEVEN
Daniel slept fitfully, awakened numerous times in the night by odd dreams and frightening visions. Come morning, he lay in bed staring at the motionless ceiling fan above him. The beginnings of daylight snuck through gaps in the window shades, narrow beams crisscrossing the room and sprinkled with floating dust motes.
The city was quiet.
A dream he’d had that night came back to him in bits and pieces but didn’t make much sense. Something about being tethered to electrical devices, strange snakelike appendages attached to his hands that had coiled off into endless darkness and carried him away with them. When he’d tried to free himself he realized the wires had been fused with his flesh and blood, leaving him a profane hybrid of man and machine. He remembered struggling against these things, trying to free himself but being unable to, and how eventually he had given in and allowed them to drag him through the strange darkness. He saw himself spinning off weightlessly like an astronaut freefalling through space, until he hit something. A wall of sorts, it stopped his progress, and as he floated before it, the appendages somehow released him, revealing his hands, the fingers and skin pale and stretched tight across bone but otherwise intact. The sound his body made on impact with the wall was a particularly odd sound, similar to the kind tapping one’s knuckles against a plate of glass produces. But he was more focused on his hands, suddenly freed of wires now, and as he pressed them against the wall he felt its contour. It was bowed out but otherwise smooth.
And then lights. He remembered blinding multicolored lights from the other side of the wall, followed by horrible growling whispers, not in English, but something similar. He pushed frantically on the wall but it refused to budge. Even when he began pounding furiously, punching at it with both hands, it held firm.
When the whispers finally gave way to silence, he stopped and listened, his hands broken and battered, useless. From the thick darkness on the far side of the wall, a voice he recognized spoke to him, repeating the obscenities about Lindsay he’d heard on the phone again and again.
As the memories faded, Daniel lay in bed grasping at straws, trying to discern anything that might be of value from the nightmare. But concentrating on it only brought back another strange sound he’d heard just before he’d awakened, or perhaps just after, when he was still coming up out of sleep: the sound of water drip
ping then moving and flowing all around him in quiet intervals. And in the background, the steady rhythm of breath that seemed in time with his own but belonged to someone else.
He pushed it all away and rolled out of bed. Staggering to the window, he pulled the shade up so he could see the street. Nothing out of the ordinary, just the start of a clear, chilly day. “Thanksgiving,” he mumbled. Seemed blasphemous, if not wholly pointless, but he had family, other people he needed to be there for. Life goes on. How he loathed that expression.
The drive to Lakeville, where Jeannie lived, usually took about an hour, so he still had some time to get himself together before he had to leave. He made the walk down the hallway to the kitchen and switched the coffeemaker on. As it gurgled to life he paced about and replayed his conversation with Brad Shaffer. He wondered if Brad thought less of him after their meeting. Daniel knew he’d probably come off like some confused and bitter widower, demanding answers no one had—which in a sense, he was—but he didn’t particularly care at this point. The more he went over the things Brad had told him the more he believed him, as he could think of no reason why the man would lie. Just the same, Daniel couldn’t help but suspect Brad had held a few things back as well.
After two cups of coffee and more thinking in circles, Daniel returned to the bedroom and selected some clothes to wear for the day. Across the room, Lindsay’s closet stood before him, the door closed. Just like her bureau and the medicine cabinet in the bathroom, everything was exactly as she’d left it the last day of her life. He’d told himself numerous times he’d have to eventually pack these things up—her clothes and personal items—and do something with them, but removing them was the equivalent of eliminating any evidence that Lindsay had been alive and happy here in the first place, and he simply wasn’t yet capable of that. He wasn’t sure he ever would be.
Daniel took a long hot shower then dressed in the clothes he’d laid out earlier: comfortable old jeans, a pair of sneakers and a sweater Jeannie had given him last Christmas. After adding a brown suede jacket, he stood in front of the mirror Lindsay had always used before leaving for work each day and gave himself a good once-over. It was the first time he’d taken a long look at himself in some time, and wasn’t surprised to find he appeared tired and haggard. Dark bags hung beneath his eyes, his face was pale and his hair, still damp from the shower, was mussed and needed a trim.
“You look like shit,” he told his reflection. It stared back at him drearily.
He ran a brush through his hair then grabbed his car keys from the bureau and headed out the door.
Though traffic was fairly heavy leaving the city and on the highways, the drive to his sister’s was uneventful. After nearly an hour, Daniel arrived in Lakeville, a quaint and attractive town of a little over ten thousand people located in Plymouth County. Jeannie’s place, an old farmhouse style home, was set in a particularly rural part of town surrounded by miles of beautiful woodlands.
Eight years Daniel’s senior, Jeannie had turned forty not long ago and shared her home with her partner of twelve years, Michelle, an Art teacher at a junior high school a few towns away, and their nine-year-old daughter Aimee. An RN that had worked for years as a unit manager at a local nursing home, Jeannie had cashed in her 401K plan and left her position a year before when their mother Frances had been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s and deemed no longer able to live alone safely. Since supervised in-home care was still an option, Jeannie moved Frances in with her, and now worked from home providing professional care.
Their parents had divorced when Daniel was in elementary school, and only a few years later when he was still in junior high school, their father had passed away from colon cancer. It was the price of having older parents, he supposed, since his mother had been forty when he was born and his father forty-three. Daniel also knew Jeannie had been planned and he had not. Though he’d felt loved and wanted by his parents, he’d always been closest to Jeannie. His older sister looked out for him, stood by him, and in many ways had been like a surrogate mother, often attending to his needs and supervising him after school while their parents were at work. As a result, despite the age gap, a deep bond had developed between Daniel and his sister over the years, and since Lindsay’s death in particular, he found himself relying on her steady advice and thoughtful opinions even more than usual.
He parked and sat in the driveway a moment, preparing himself before going inside. These days one could never be sure what kind of shape his mother would be in. Daniel didn’t know much about the inner workings of Alzheimer’s, but he understood all too well that it was a degenerative disease from which his mother would never recover. It was destroying her, killing her. Slowly. At her worst she might offer an empty smile and look at him as if he was a complete stranger, and sadly, of late her best wasn’t much better. Daniel couldn’t even be certain his mother realized Lindsay had died.
As he sat in the car, one arm draped over the wheel, memories of Lindsay’s parents came to him. Remem-brances surfaced at the oddest times, he thought. Without warning things often popped into his mind, and this time it was Lindsay’s parents on the day of the wake and funeral. He remembered them standing out in front of the funeral home about half an hour before the wake began. While he had a reasonably good relationship with them, he’d never known them that well because the company Lindsay’s father Thomas worked for had transferred him from Boston to Dallas only about a year after he and Lindsay had been married. So other than special occasions or infrequent vacations, Daniel rarely saw them. Thomas, an electrical engineer, was a quiet man with stern features and a remote way about him. Regardless of the situation, he always struck Daniel as the kind of person who would’ve preferred to be elsewhere, and he often sensed from Lindsay that he was not someone who allowed others to get particularly close to him, even if that someone was his own daughter and only child. Still, Lindsay had always spoken fondly of her father and seemed bent on gaining his acceptance and attention even as an adult and a married woman. Not a week went by when they didn’t talk on the phone, though the onus seemed exclusively hers as she was always the one that called him. In fact in all the years they were married, Daniel couldn’t remember a single call initiated by her father. Not one.
Her mother Charlotte was far easier to interact with, inherently more sociable, but also rather dull. Though she’d worked briefly as an administrative assistant for a time, most of her married life had been spent as a housewife. She dabbled in various charitable organizations, volunteering her time now and then, but otherwise seemed uninterested in much else.
To that point, far as Daniel could tell, Lindsay was nothing like either one of them.
Earlier that day they’d all had their private time with Lindsay then gathered on the funeral home steps to get some air before people began to arrive. Daniel had spent nearly an hour with her, sitting next to the casket and rubbing Lindsay’s hand with his own. It was so cold and hard, so unlike her, but it was all he had. Put back together with makeup, thread and strategically placed clothing, the shell of his wife lay before him like an unspeakably offensive joke. She was so still, he remembered, so very still. And though Daniel was wrestling mightily with denial, that’s how he knew for sure this body before him was no longer his wife but instead a lifeless replica, a cheap imitation left behind for the living. Because even when she was sleeping Lindsay had never been that still, legs shuffling slowly, feet rubbing his, her arms draped across him one moment then gone the next. The real Lindsay had left this body and taken every trace of her essence with her, and for the first time that day the authenticity of her death became real to him. Yet even as he stood and gently kissed her forehead, his lips pressed against what felt more like wax or hard plastic than human flesh, somewhere deep inside him he still clung to the insane hope that this was all a cruel mistake and that Lindsay would walk back through the door and awaken him from this nightmare.
Later, out on the steps with Lindsay’s parents, Daniel stood in a daz
e gazing out at the parking lot and doing everything in his power to prevent himself from completely coming apart right then and there.
Though the police had claimed to be close to locating the man that had hit and killed Lindsay, they were still about a week from locating the car parked in a vacant lot in South Boston, the driver dead inside from an overdose of heroin.
The look on Thomas’s face that morning seemed quite different from what he imagined his own to be. There was no hope left in the man whatsoever, only barely contained rage. “What was she doing in the street?” he asked without warning, aiming the question at Daniel with a scowl. “What was she doing in that part of town at that hour? I keep waiting for someone to answer that for me and all I get is silence.”
Charlotte, who had already been sobbing quietly, patted Daniel’s wrist tenderly as if in apology for her husband’s timing and coarse approach, then turned and went back inside. That the woman who had given Lindsay life, and who now had to deal with burying her only child, could even begin to concern herself with his feelings, was both astounding and deeply admirable to him. Daniel never felt closer to her than he had in that extraordinary and unnerving moment. In a strange way he’d felt some sense of Lindsay there on the steps with him when Charlotte had done it, because he could see Lindsay doing something similar, offering a subtle, genuine and selfless gesture in the face of overwhelming sorrow.
“Well?” Thomas demanded.
“I don’t know.” Daniel shrugged. He’d never felt so absurd, so utterly useless.
Thomas drew a beleaguered breath and shook his head. “Unacceptable.”
“Yeah,” Daniel said, “sure is.”
For the first time since he’d known him, Lindsay’s father looked him in the eye for more than a few seconds, this time holding his gaze while countless conversations they’d never had but probably should have passed between them. “The police need to get off their cans and find out who did this.” Thomas looked away as his eyes moistened. “It’s no time for a pity party. Never took you for that type. Now I’m not so sure.”
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