Jotipala shook his head. “The line is not working now.” He said it firmly, as if their conversation had ended.
Duncan hesitated. He didn’t want to assert his authority, but he felt he had no choice. “I have to contact my boss,” he said. “I can easily go out to a shop. There must be one not so far away. But the gate is locked.”
“Yes.” Jotipala nodded.
Was the man a little dense? “Please unlock it.”
Jotipala’s eyes met Duncan’s briefly. Duncan thought he saw resentment in them. “No use,” he said. “It is also locked on the outside. There is a police guard.”
“What the . . . ?” Duncan said, reverting to English in his consternation. Then he stopped himself. All he had to do was explain. He switched back to Sinhala. “Look, Jotipala . . .”
“For sir’s protection,” Jotipala said, fingering one curled end of his mustache. “I am just doing what I am told.” The resentment was definitely there in his tone.
“This is crazy,” Duncan said. “I will be careful, but I have to be able to go outside.”
Jotipala said nothing, so Duncan made his way to the gate. It was still padlocked. He found it hard to believe that it was locked on the outside. He tugged at the gate, making it clang.
“Who is it?” a voice called in Sinhala.
“Duncan McCloud,” Duncan called back, thinking his name sounded rather ridiculous in response to that Sinhala question. And also in Sinhala, “Is the gate locked?”
There was a silence for a moment, and then, “Can’t you see?”
“Open the gate,” Duncan called.
Silence again, and then, “The gate has to be locked.” The tone of this voice was distinctly different from Jotipala’s. This was someone who had more authority.
“Who are you?” Duncan said.
“Police.”
Jotipala had come up behind him, with his wife in tow. She was looking anxious, wringing her hands. Her stringy graying hair was dripping onto a frayed towel draped around her shoulders.
“I told sir,” Jotipala called out to the person on the other side of the gate. “I explained it is for sir’s protection.”
“Good, right. The gate has to be locked,” the voice on the other side said.
“Then let me make a call,” Duncan said. He realized his voice was raised, and that it had turned confrontational. He lowered his voice and said, as calmly as he could, “Someone must have a cell phone.”
“No phone,” the voice said firmly.
When Duncan turned to Jotipala, the man opened his hands, shaking his head. The whites of his eyes flashed in his dark face. “I don’t have a cell phone, sir.”
There was a thick silence. Duncan debated his options. Bent had said he would contact him soon, and it was true that he had insisted Duncan not contact anyone. Maybe the danger was greater than Duncan had imagined. An intern had died, after all, and Bent had said something about foul play. He shuddered inwardly. What had he got himself into? And what should he do now?
The question was resolved by the sound of Janie’s voice from the big house, calling, “Duncan! Where are you? Duncaaaan!”
“Baba is awake,” Jotipala said, relief in his voice.
“I will finish making the meal,” Karuna said as she hurried back toward their quarters, toweling the ends of her hair.
Janie appeared on the portico, her hair askew and her T-shirt rumpled. “I’ve been looking all over for you, Duncan,” she said. “Can we go to the beach now?”
Two crows were still waiting on the balustrade, their heads cocked.
32
GRACE
Sunday
The boat was bobbing, engulfed in flames. Grace, running hard, had almost reached it when someone on board began ringing a bell, urgently, persistently. She was close enough to see the dark silhouette of a temple bell mounted on the boat. It was the kind of bell she had often seen in Buddhist temples in Sri Lanka. It was swinging back and forth toward the flames, the ringing reverberating in her consciousness. She jerked awake, thumping the snooze button on her alarm clock, but the noise didn’t stop. Groping on the nightstand, she saw that it was only ten minutes after eight. It was Sunday, she remembered. It could only be Gordy at the door, but this was early, even for him.
She sat up, realizing that she had fallen asleep in her work clothes. The events of the night before came back to her. Describing the mugging to campus security had taken a while, and she had arrived home, exhausted, only after one o’clock. She had tried to reach Duncan until she fell asleep. The doorbell rang again. She stumbled downstairs, realizing that the collar of her blouse was soaked with sweat.
On the doorstep was Detective Mortensen.
“I am sorry if I woke you, Dr. McCloud,” he said. He edged forward a step. “May I come in?”
Grace let him in, then went to splash her face with cold water and change hurriedly into jeans and a T-shirt. When she returned to the living room, he was appraising a framed photo of Duncan that stood on the mantel. “I understand you have been trying to reach your husband, Dr. McCloud?”
“I still haven’t got ahold of him. I will today.” The events of the previous day were flooding her mind, making it difficult to think. “He should be back in his hotel room soon. Is there something going on at my husband’s company, Detective? At Cinasat?”
“We are investigating every possibility, Dr. McCloud,” Mortensen said. He moved his jaw, evidently chewing gum even at this early hour. “We are trying to piece together some information. We would like to talk to him.”
“Was Angie writing a story about Cinasat?”
“What makes you say that, Dr. McCloud?” Was there a note of suspicion in his voice?
“Just that you said a Cinasat intern died recently, and if Minowa Costa worked at Cinasat also . . .”
“It was very clever of Mr. Hashim to find that out.” Mortensen had taken out his little notepad. “Mr. Hashim is very concerned,” he added.
“Mo was very close to Angie,” Grace said. “He’s having a hard time dealing with her death, I think.”
Mortensen glided over to the sofa. “May I?” he said, and when Grace nodded, folded his long body onto the sofa. “You yourself were not close to her, is that correct?”
“No, not really,” Grace said, sitting down too. Her heart started to thump. Had they found Angie’s phone? Did they know what she had said in her voicemail?
“Is there something you want to tell me, Dr. McCloud?” He looked down at his notepad, to a page scrawled with tiny scribbles, and smoothed an invisible wrinkle on it.
“What do you mean?”
“I could be wrong, Dr. McCloud, but I have wondered for some time whether you have told us everything you know.”
Oh my God. They do have the phone, Grace thought. There was no way out now.
“Look, you’re probably still wondering why I didn’t tell everyone that Angie called me,” Grace said. Her voice wobbled, and she took a breath, trying to steady it. “I don’t think it’s really relevant. But I’m just going to tell you. It’s been sticking in my throat for too long.”
Mortensen leaned back and put his notebook down on his knee. He said nothing. His jaw moved rhythmically.
Grace took her phone out. “I still have the voicemail Angie sent me,” she said. “You can listen to it.”
She put the speaker on so that he could hear it.
Hey, I know we haven’t talked since that pregnancy test, but I really appreciated that you didn’t tell anyone about Bent. And I kept my end of the deal. But speaking of that, listen, I really want to talk to you. And your husband. .......... .......how you both feel about ........ ... ....for a .... a col......... I .......... .................. keep it secret. The first time, .......... miscarried. ....................................................... ................. that happened at Sinners... Palmer...... ......... sure Duncan knows.......... let’s talk soon. I’ll find you.
“And you’re saying this was t
he message Ms. Osborne sent you that morning?”
“Yes,” Grace said. She handed him the phone. “See? At 8:19 a.m.”
Mortensen examined the phone, and then played the message back. Angie’s voice sounded more urgent than Grace remembered. When he looked up, his eyes had narrowed. His voice was sharp. “This . . . Why didn’t you say that Ms. Osborne had mentioned Cinasat, Dr. McCloud? What do you know about your husband’s involvement?”
Grace stared at him, confused. “What are you talking about? This is the only message she left me.”
Mortensen’s chewing had stopped. “This is not what you told us previously, Dr. McCloud.” He flipped the tiny pages of his notebook. “You said the message had been about a conversation you’d had at a bar.”
“It is,” Grace said. “About what happened at Sinners in Palmer Square.” She took the phone back and played the message again.
A frown had grown on Mortensen’s face. “Sounds to me like she’s saying ‘that happened at Cinasat Pharmaceuticals.’ Something your husband knows about.”
“What?” Grace shook her head. “No, no, she’s talking about Sinners. The rest of the message . . . She’s talking about . . .”
“Why did you say you had deleted the message, Dr. McCloud?”
Grace drew a deep breath. “I didn’t want to have to explain about the pregnancy test . . . all of that,” she said. “No one knows about that. Except Angie. Only she knew.”
“Knew what?” Mortensen said, his voice grim.
“It’s difficult to explain, because it’s not very clear in my own mind, you know?” She looked at him for understanding.
Mortensen’s gaze was on her, his eyes more steely than she’d thought them before.
“It’s a long story,” Grace said.
“I have time, Dr. McCloud.”
“Duncan and I started dating when we were in graduate school in Chicago,” Grace said. “We were thinking of getting married, but we broke up. He wanted kids soon, and I wanted to wait until my career was settled. At the time, I wasn’t even sure I wanted kids. It was very bitter, the breakup. We both said a lot of things. I was very upset about it. Depressed. About six weeks after we broke up, Bent happened to be in Chicago, and he asked if I wanted to meet up at a bar in Palmer Square. Sinners. We had dated back in high school and college, and we’d stayed friends. When I got to Sinners, he wasn’t there—I only found out later that he had left a message for me, canceling. I ran into Angie at Sinners. I thought it was a coincidence at first, but once we got talking, it turned out that Angie was involved with him, although he had recently got married. He had told her he was meeting me for a chat, and she was going to surprise him by showing up—he didn’t know she was going to be in town.
“So Angie and I ended up having a drink together. I told her about Duncan, and how difficult the breakup had been. We had something to eat, and it made me sick. I told her I had been feeling nauseated a lot. She suggested I do a pregnancy test, and I agreed. She went out to the drugstore next door and bought a test, and I used it in the bathroom.” Grace looked at Mortensen, trying to gauge his reaction. He was watching her impassively.
“I hope I’m not shocking you,” she said.
“It is not shocking,” he said.
“So I was pregnant, it turned out,” Grace said. “I was pretty upset. Duncan was already seeing someone else, you see.” She felt like crying. “I don’t really remember much after that. Anyway, the next day, I started bleeding, and I had a miscarriage. You know, I had to have a D and C—the whole nine yards. The doctor said I had been at nine weeks.” Grace stopped. She had been too personal with someone she barely knew.
After several moments had passed, Mortensen said, “And what did this have to do with not mentioning Ms. Osborne’s call at your reunion?”
“When I got her voicemail, I was terrified she would just come up to me when I was with Duncan and say something about that pregnancy. Because she thought Duncan knew. That’s what she says in the message. We hadn’t been in touch since then, so I don’t know if she even knew I’d had a miscarriage. She might have heard from someone that we didn’t have kids. I don’t know. She could have thought I had had the baby . . . or . . . I don’t know what she might have said. Angie doesn’t . . . didn’t mince her words. She was an outspoken kind of person. I was trying to get ahold of her to tell her not to say anything in front of Duncan.”
Mortensen was still waiting, his eyes flicking from her to his notebook, his jaw still moving.
“Duncan and I got back together a couple of months later. I never told him that I had been pregnant.” The words kept spilling out. It was as if a box, long locked away, had fallen open. “I was afraid he would think I had done it on purpose. That I had got drunk, knowing that alcohol increases the rate of miscarriage in the first trimester. By a lot. I don’t really remember how many drinks I had that night after I found out.” She wiped the tears that had begun to fall. “A few years after we got married, we started trying to get pregnant, but we can’t. I’ve had six miscarriages since then. I was afraid that if I told you or anyone else about what she had said, Duncan would have found out about the first miscarriage. If that hadn’t happened, we might have a kid by now.”
Mortensen walked over to the side table and picked up the box of tissues that lay there. He offered the box to Grace. “I am sorry that this upset you, Dr. McCloud,” he said. He patted her knee awkwardly as he sat back down. “I am glad you decided to show me the message. But it’s not clear to me why Ms. Osborne would want to bring up an incident that happened years ago.”
Grace shook her head, wiping her eyes. “That’s what I’ve been asking myself. I have no idea why.”
Mortensen’s lips tightened. “It’s also not clear to me that what you say is . . . that the entire message is about what you say it is.”
“You heard it,” Grace said. “She talks about miscarriage. The first time. She wants to know how we both feel about it.”
Mortensen glanced at the phone. “‘Miscarried,’ she says. But that does not have to refer to a pregnancy. She could have been talking about plans. Or justice. And it sounds to me like she mentions Cinasat, not Sinners.”
He played the message again. Grace sucked in her breath. Now that Mortensen had put that idea into her head, it sounded different. She pressed the “Play” button again. That happened at Cinas... Pharma...... ......... sure Duncan knows. My God, she thought. Had she been so worried about Angie contacting her that she’d interpreted the whole message as if it were connected to the pregnancy? Had Angie been contacting her about something that had happened at Cinasat? Something she expected Duncan to know?
She noticed Mortensen watching her. “But what would she be . . . ? Duncan doesn’t know anything,” Grace said, her voice coming out in a whisper. “What did she mean by ‘keep it secret’? Why does she say, ‘the first time’?”
“She could have been talking about whatever happened at Cinasat,” Mortensen said. “May I ask . . . What made you decide to show me the message now?”
Grace blew her nose and wiped her eyes, trying to grasp the new possibilities. “With everything Mo has been saying . . . He thinks something is going on at Cinasat. Maybe he’s right. Maybe I’ve just been imagining . . . Maybe I’ve been blind. If Angie was writing a story about Minowa Costa, and she worked at Cinasat . . . God. Maybe that was why she wanted to talk to me and Duncan. Because Duncan was starting there? I don’t know.” Sure Duncan knows. Why had Angie said that? What could he possibly know? Better not to mention the email about Danibel Garwick yet, she thought. Mortensen would want to see it. If he saw that it had also been sent to Duncan, he might start barking up the wrong tree, thinking that Duncan was somehow involved. He’d asked her all those questions about Duncan’s whereabouts. She needed to talk to Duncan about everything before bringing it up to Mortensen. Then she remembered she had told Mo about the email. Would Mo tell Mortensen? It didn’t matter, she decided. She would talk to Dunca
n soon, and then she could tell Mortensen.
Mortensen was scribbling busily in his book, his face impassive again. She watched him, hoping he would offer what he knew, but he looked away, at the tip of his shoes. “Did Angie really die of a heart attack?” she said.
Mortensen examined her face. “Why do you ask?”
She thought of the bony woman the night before, talking about Danibel. Why had Danibel’s tongue been hanging out? “Just with all this going on. Do you know if something is going on at Cinasat?” she said again.
“As I said, Dr. McCloud, we do not have enough information. There are . . . inconsistencies. Questions. We are investigating those. Possibly, someone at your reunion knew something. Possibly more than one person.”
“Besides Angie? Duncan doesn’t know anything! You mean Bent?”
“Mr. Hashim has a connection to Novophil,” Mortensen said.
“Novophil? Yes, Mo is working on a big property deal with them, he said. But this is about Cinasat, isn’t it?”
“Novophil is a major competitor of Cinasat’s, Dr. McCloud,” Mortensen said. “They recently opened a new facility in Montclair. That is the property Mr. Hashim’s company has leased. There is some question at the moment about whether the lease will be renewed. That depends on the profitability of a new venture Novophil has initiated, it appears. I am surprised Mr. Hashim did not mention that to you.”
“He probably didn’t even know it was relevant,” Grace said.
“Perhaps,” Mortensen said. “Did he mention to you that Ms. Costa worked at Novophil?”
Grace blinked, confused. “No, she worked at Cinasat. We found that out—”
“Ms. Costa quit Cinasat seven months ago,” Mortensen said. “Shortly after that, she began working at Novophil. That was where she was working at the time of her death.”
Grace struggled to assimilate this information. “Mo didn’t know that,” she said. “The guard we spoke to said . . . Did he tell you we spoke to a guard who worked at Cinasat?”
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