He checked the trashcan again. It contained only a discarded wrapper from a black ink cartridge. Nothing else.
Apparently, Rachel had printed this document, seen the low-quality of the text, and had then replaced the cartridge. After which, she presumably reprinted the page.
There was a two-drawer filing cabinet on the other side of the room. He opened the drawers, found the expected files: documents for their home, insurance, tax returns, marriage certificate, financial investments. Nothing suspicious.
He examined the page again. He’d at least learned why he’d glimpsed the word “penitentiary” on her laptop last night—she was researching the Illinois prison system.
But why?
He needed more information, and he could get it only from her computer.
On the screen, the pulsing cursor mocked him.
A painful idea occurred to him: if he knew his wife better, he would know her password. If they were truly soul mates, as he believed, he would understand how her mind worked, would be able to figure out the secret pass code she would create.
And the realization brought a more painful truth: if their marriage was stronger, she wouldn’t be hiding anything like this from him in the first place.
The phone on the desk rang. According to Caller ID, the call was coming from Rachel’s salon.
Shame burned his face. He grabbed the phone off her desk, and left her study for the hallway.
“Hey, love,” she said. “Whatca up to?”
“Just working.”
“You okay? You sound kinda weird.”
“I’m fine. Just been busy this morning.”
“I won’t keep you then. I wanted to let you know that my appointment with the OB-GYN is for two o’clock. You wanted to meet me there, right?”
“Definitely. Where’s the doctor’s office?”
She gave him the address, and told him to call her if he didn’t think he’d be able to make it. He assured her that he would be there. They talked a couple more minutes about inconsequential things, and then hung up.
He returned to her study and replaced the phone on the cradle. He’d left the piece of scrap paper on her desk. He balled it up again, and tossed it in the trash. Then he turned off the laptop, too.
At the doorway, he gave the room a once-over, to make sure he’d left nothing out of place. The study looked exactly as it had before he’d entered.
Too bad that he didn’t feel like he had before he’d stepped inside. He had hoped to find answers that would put his mind at ease. But with no clear answers, he felt worse than ever about his wife’s deception. Like a man sinking in quicksand.
Chapter 10
At a seedy, used-car dealership on the South side, Dexter paid two thousand dollars, cash, for a 1994, black Chevy Caprice Classic with ninety thousand miles on the odometer. The salesman didn’t bother asking for Dexter’s ID, but he gave Dexter the requisite pink slip, which was all Dexter needed.
The Chevy’s cloth upholstery was ripped as if a pack of feral cats had been trapped inside, the heater coughed like an old man with emphysema, and the exterior passenger door was riddled with what appeared to be bullet holes, but the eight-cylinder engine was in good working condition. For his purposes, he didn’t want an eye-catching car. The old Chevy Caprice, long associated with police officers, ironically, was so obsolete and plain it was all but invisible on the streets.
Navigating the slushy roads, Dexter left the city and took I-94 West. Pre-incarceration, he had sped around town in a Mercedes convertible, driving fast and recklessly. Now, he was careful to keep the Chevy under the speed limit. With his expired license and duffel bag full of cash and deadly cutlery, he couldn’t afford a run-in with the law.
Around ten o’clock in the morning, he arrived in the city of Zion.
Although Dexter had grown up in Chicago, forty-five minutes south, until he’d met his wife he’d never visited Zion. There was little there worth seeing, in his opinion—it was one of those dull Chicago suburbs that restless teenagers fantasized about escaping as soon as they graduated. The so-called downtown was a miserable mess of mom-and-pop stores and mainstream establishments. Ugly, split-level homes and featureless ranches dominated the neighborhoods. There was a church on almost every corner, and most of the streets had Biblical names: Enoch, Bethel, Ezekiel, Gabriel, and the like.
His wife had told him that, until a few years ago, they hadn’t even allowed the sale of alcohol within city limits. It was no wonder that she had left this shit hole for Chi-town, where he’d met her and they had lived in a glitzy downtown high-rise.
But Dexter believed that she had returned to Zion. She had grown up there, and her aunt, her closest surviving relative, still lived in the town. While he was incarcerated, and the letters that he mailed to her at their condo came back as undeliverable, and his attempts to call her revealed a disconnected number, he was positive that she had moved back here to be near her family.
Several times, he had attempted to collect call her aunt from prison, to learn his wife’s whereabouts. The old bitch had refused to accept the calls, an insult he never forgot.
Her aunt lived on the west side of town, in a quaint neighborhood of brick ranches with large yards, winter-stripped elms, and towering, ice-mantled pines. Dexter slowly cruised past her house.
Like the other homes in the neighborhood, hers was a brick ranch, accessible via a long, snow-covered walkway flanked by naked elms. A Christmas tree stood in the front window, merry lights twinkling.
Briefly, he wondered if the old bitch might have moved—perhaps into a nursing home or a grave. Then he saw the wooden plate on the mailbox that stated The Leonards in scrolling script, and he knew she still lived there.
There were no newspapers piled on the porch. He remembered she’d been a stickler for following the daily news. The lack of a paper outside meant that she’d already plucked it off the ground, which meant that she was probably home at that moment.
He parked a couple of doors down, shut off the engine, and waited. He wanted to stake-out the house for a while. Prison had taught him many things, and chief of all them was patience.
Occasionally, a car grumbled past, tires spitting up snow. A few houses down, a kid came outdoors with a golden Retriever, and child and dog tumbled through the snow until a woman yelled at them to come back inside.
Two hours later, no one had emerged from the house. It was another freezing day, however, and old folks tended to stay indoors in such weather, their brittle bones unable to withstand the low temperatures.
He pulled his hat low over his head.
He already had a knife clipped inside his jacket.
He climbed out of the Chevy and crunched through the slush. A white delivery van rumbled down the road, and he waited for it to pass before he crossed the street.
He trudged toward the house. Thick, hard snow carpeted the walkway. Someone needed to get out here and shovel. She probably paid a neighborhood kid to do the dirty work, and hadn’t gotten around to it yet for the most recent snowfall.
It gave him an idea.
A short set of concrete steps, caked with ice, led to the front door. A half-full bag of salt stood nearby, next to an aluminum snow shovel.
He reached inside the bag and got a handful of salt. He tossed the granules across the steps.
Then he picked up the shovel. Returning to the end of the walkway, he began to scrape snow and ice off the pavement, tossing it aside into the yard.
When he had gotten deep into his work and had cleared off half the path, the front door finally creaked open.
Back turned to the house, he continued to shovel, as if he were only a good neighbor concerned about the snow piling up on an elderly lady’s property. But he slowly worked his way backward along the path, drawing closer to the doorway.
“Excuse me?” she said. Her voice retained some of the authority of the elementary school teacher she’d been before her retirement. “Excuse me, sir?”
&
nbsp; He kept his back to her, kept shoveling, kept inching backward.
He heard the door creak open wider.
“Excuse me, sir,” she said. “I appreciate your shoveling off my walkway, but do I know you?”
Only a couple of feet from the porch, he spun around.
Aunt Betty stood in the doorway, bifocals perched on the edge of her nose. She wore a white sweatshirt and matching pants and held a coffee mug.
When she saw his face, the cup slipped out of her fingers and shattered on the porch steps.
“I’m a little offended, Aunt Betty,” he said. “How could you ever forget me?”
“Dexter . . .” Terror had knocked her breathless.
“Long time no see, bitch,” he said, and slammed the shovel blade against her head.
Chapter 11
At Belle Coiffure, Rachel was cutting a client’s hair when a sharp pain burst in her head, as if she’d been bludgeoned.
Her client was a regal, forty-something black woman named Maxine. Maxine was a principal at a high school in College Park, and she had a standing weekly appointment with Rachel to get her hair washed and styled, or trimmed.
Rachel had been Maxine’s stylist for over a year, and they had developed an easy, though superficial, camaraderie. That afternoon, they were discussing holiday plans—or rather, Maxine was discussing her plans for the holidays. Rachel kept her own business private, an ingrained habit, but she listened closely and asked good questions.
Although Rachel’s listening skills made her a client favorite, she had difficulty following Maxine’s stated worries about planning Christmas dinner for her extended family. Rachel was consumed by her own troubles: worry about her ever-growing number of lies to Joshua, natural worry about her pregnancy.
Most of all, worry about him—the man from her past whom she refused to think of by name, as if doing so would conjure him out of the atmosphere like an evil spirit.
Surfing the Web late last night, she’d confirmed his recent release from prison in Illinois. It didn’t require psychic talent to predict that he would be looking for her.
He blamed her, after all, for his incarceration.
Although she’d heard that some people who went to prison learned forgiveness, he did not possess a heart that had the capacity for such an emotion. Actually, she was convinced that he didn’t possess a heart at all. He was as cold and soulless as an android in a sci-fi movie: a machine that mimicked humanity, but didn’t hold genuine feelings for anyone.
Except to hurt them.
“—and I was hoping you could give me your recipe before I leave today,” Maxine said.
“Recipe?” Rachel lowered her scissors. She’d missed Maxine’s last few sentences. “Recipe for what?”
There was a wall-length mirror in front of them. Maxine frowned at Rachel’s reflection in the glass. “For your pound cake, girl. Of course.”
“Right.” Rachel laughed. “Sure, I can—“
Then the pain hit. Like a mallet cracking against her skull.
Rachel gasped. Her scissors popped out of her fingers and clattered to the floor.
Maxine twisted around in the styling chair to look at her. “Are you okay?”
The salon had fallen silent. Every stylist and client looked at Rachel, alarmed.
Rachel felt the area of her head where the pain had erupted. She glanced at her fingers, expecting to see blood. But there was none.
It’s not me. It’s Aunt Betty.
The knowledge rose in her, and she knew it was accurate. She been exposed to such phenomena her entire life and had learned to accept it without question.
In seconds, the ache passed, but it left behind questions. Was the pain a premonition of something soon to befall her aunt? Or had Rachel experienced the pain in real-time?
She wasn’t sure, but of one thing she was certain: he was responsible.
“Rachel?” Tanisha came to her side. She touched Rachel’s arm. “What’s wrong?”
“I’m sorry. I need to go in the back. Can you get someone to finish Maxine’s cut?” She glanced at Maxine, who stared at her, concerned. “I hope you don’t mind, Maxine, and I promise to get that pound cake recipe to you soon.”
“I’ll take care of it,” Tanisha said. “You sure you’re okay?”
“Migraine,” Rachel said. “Hit me all of a sudden. I’m going to take an Advil and lie down for a little while.”
Although Tanisha frowned, clearly disbelieving her story, she didn’t question Rachel further. Rachel made a beeline to the back office and shut the door, locked it.
Hugging herself, she sat at her desk. Stared at the telephone.
One of the rules of running away and starting a new life was simple: never contact the loved ones you’d left behind, except under the most carefully controlled conditions. For three long, lonely years, Rachel had managed to abide by that critical rule.
She’d last spoken to Aunt Betty earlier that year, on her aunt’s seventieth birthday. She’d phoned her aunt with a calling card she’d had one of her stylists purchase while on vacation in Orlando. Rachel had used the card only once, and then she’d cut it up. Being super careful had become a way of life.
But she didn’t have time to take those extreme precautions. Her aunt was—or soon would be—in grave danger, and every second was crucial.
She closed her eyes and whispered a prayer. Then she reached for the phone.
Chapter 12
The office of Rachel’s OB-GYN was located in College Park, just off Old National Highway. Joshua’s parents lived less than ten minutes away, so he decided to visit them before he met Rachel for her two o’clock appointment.
His growing awareness of her deception simmered in the back of his mind. He wanted to do something about it—but he wasn’t quite sure what he could do without creating a more troublesome situation.
Old National Highway, the city’s main drag, was a winding, four-lane road of strip malls, fast-food joints, nightclubs, pawn shops, currency exchanges, barber shops, hair salons, and liquor stores. The dome of a mega-church rose in the distance, resembling a pro sports arena.
Farther along the highway, retail gave way to residential development. Builders had recently discovered the area and were busy erecting the same sprawl of cookie-cutter subdivisions that consumed much of metro Atlanta.
Joshua’s parents lived in an older section of town, in a neighborhood of Craftsman bungalows, ranches, and old Victorians. Oaks, elms, and maples stretched bare branches into the cloudy afternoon sky.
He parked in the driveway of their ranch house. Although it was mid-day, his parents were retired, and usually home.
The garage door was open, so he went in via that way. His father had his head stuck under the hood of a yellow Oldsmobile Ninety-Eight that looked as if it hadn’t burned gas in a decade.
“Hey, Dad,” Joshua said.
His father slid from under the hood like a man extricating himself from the maw of a whale. With skin the color of aged oak, he was a small, compact man, standing about five-six; Joshua had inherited his size from his mother’s branch of the family.
A dirty cotton towel peeked from a pocket of his dad’s jumpsuit, and he grabbed it and wiped off his hands. He had used to work as a mechanic at the local Ford plant before it closed, and though he had retired four years ago, he wore the oil-stained gray jumpsuit almost every day. It was a family joke that he would be buried in the uniform.
“What you know good, boy?” Dad asked in his gruff voice. A toothpick dangled from the corner of his mouth, dipping up and down when he spoke.
“I was in the area and wanted to stop by to say hello.”
Dad grunted, used the same soiled towel to blot sweat off his face. He nodded at Joshua’s Ford Explorer, brown eyes shining. “How that truck holdin’ up? ‘Bout time for an oil change, ain’t it?”
Joshua visited his parents every couple of weeks, and every time he saw them, his dad suggested that it was time for an oil chang
e. The mechanic in his father couldn’t resist the compulsion to fix every car he encountered; Joshua was certain that the Oldsmobile his father was currently diagnosing belonged to someone in the neighborhood.
“I’ll bring it by soon for you to work on,” Joshua said.
Dad grunted, and his eyes dimmed. “Mama’s inside,” he said, turning back to the car.
It was an ordinary exchange with his father. Beyond the subject of automobiles, they never had much to talk about.
Joshua went inside the kitchen. A gigantic pot seethed on the stove, filling the house with the delicious aromas of chicken, broth, dumplings, and vegetables.
Curious, Joshua lifted the lid off the pot—and hissed when the heat stung his fingers. The lid slipped out of his grasp and clanged onto the floor.
“That must be my baby in there,” Mom said, coming around the corner. “Clumsy as ever.”
“Hi, Mom.” Joshua kissed her on the cheek, which required him to barely bend at all. His mother was a shade less than six feet, her body as thick as a tree trunk. Gray-haired, she wore a shapeless blue house dress, an apron, and threadbare slippers. A pair of reading glasses suspended from a lanyard rested on her broad bosom.
Without the glasses, though, her dark eyes were as sharp as ever. They cut into Joshua with the precision of surgical scalpels, and he felt himself weakening under her gaze, swiftly regressing in age from thirty-two—to twelve.
“Pick that lid up off the floor, boy,” she said. “And don’t be a dummy—use a mitt this time.”
Obediently, Joshua grabbed the oven mitt off the counter and used it to pluck the lid off the tile.
“Wash it off ‘fore you put it back on my pot.”
Joshua took the lid to the sink, rinsed it with cold water, and then carefully placed it over the pot.
“Come in my kitchen snoopin’ and messin’ up,” Mom said. “Shoot, if you kept in touch with me like a good son should, you’d know I was cookin’ chicken and dumplins. Sit down.”
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