Why was he not thinking about the paper in the kitchen the night before, and the open door?
He knew at least that he had not imagined or dreamed that incident, because the pile of paper was where he’d left it after gathering the pieces from the kitchen, on the lower shelf on the table in the front hallway. He wasn’t sure whether it would have been better to have imagined an inexplicable incident so clearly that it felt real, or for it to have actually happened, and felt rising hysteria when he tried to make the choice.
In daylight it was easier to see that the sheets of paper didn’t look like they’d been sold recently. They were dry and slightly yellowed. He knew why that was. That didn’t help him understand them any better.
He took one of his childhood books back out of the bookcase where he’d just stacked it, a bookcase that would—six months from now—hold author copies of his own work. This morning that did not feel like anything to be proud of. The book he picked was I Sing the Body Electric. It was a paperback, and obviously well read. He didn’t remember it, however. He knew it was his, could recall owning it, but it got cloudy after that.
He flicked through the pages, smelling old paper. Old paper in books, old paper in a pile. All he had was old paper and secondhand words.
Something caught his eye near the end of the book. It was another piece of paper, folded over, wedged between the pages. He unfolded it.
Something was written in pencil, faint and scratchy. It wasn’t David’s handwriting, even as it had been back in his early teens. It wasn’t in either of his parents’ hands either. It looked like the work of someone struggling to manipulate a physical object.
David held it up and squinted. It said:
He dropped it in the trash and left the house thinking firmly about other things.
He could tell something was off from the moment he walked into the coffeehouse. Dylan was behind the counter, failing to cope. Nobody was tutting or giving him grief, however. Dylan was nineteen and, as Talia put it, “dozy like a fucking mouse”—very much the barista B or C team, drafted in only when one of the main servers was sick. Regulars tended to feel able to give him a certain amount of goodnatured ribbing in recompense for the guaranteed inaccuracy and scaldedness of the coffees they’d receive by his hand. This afternoon everyone in line seemed subdued, and silent.
As David got closer to the counter he noticed Dylan wasn’t merely being slow. His hands were shaking. Sylvia, the owner, was back there too, turned from the room, on the phone.
“You okay?” David asked. He was reconciled to the idea that his coffee would be completely wrong.
Dylan looked at him. “Shit,” he said, after a moment. “You don’t know?”
“Don’t know what?”
“Talia’s dead.”
“She’s … what?”
“Yeah.” Dylan started nodding and swallowing compulsively. “They found her a couple hours ago.”
“Where?”
“By the creek. The cops came by a while back to let us know—Sylvia called me in when Talia didn’t show and wasn’t answering her phone.”
“Well, did she fall, or …”
“I don’t know, dude. That’s all they told us.”
David pushed back from the counter, unable to process this information. He’d stood right here and blurted out his and Dawn’s news to Talia only two days ago. How could she be … “Jesus.”
“It’s fucked up,” Dylan agreed.
David walked stiff-legged out of the coffeehouse. When he hit the cold outside he became aware his mouth was hanging open, and shut it. He should call Dawn—she’d known Talia longer, having been born and bred in Rockbridge—but he didn’t know what he could say to her. The news would arrive at the school soon enough and probably she’d call him. He wasn’t sure what he’d say then either. Quite apart from her having been a friend, he’d spent a lot of the last week buried in her novel. The idea that the mind that had created it was now gone doubled the effect. She’d taken a world with her.
“I want to talk to you,” someone said.
It was George Lofland. His face was red and he wasn’t wearing a jacket, despite the chill.
“What abou—”
Then George was right in his face. His breath smelled of stale alcohol. He shoved a hand into David’s chest, knocking him backward.
“Hey,” David said. “What’s the—”
“What’s the problem? Have you heard about Talia?”
“Dylan just told me. But—”
“Someone killed her.” George had stopped trying to push David back down the sidewalk and was standing hands on hips. When he was in front of you like that you realized he was kind of a big guy.
“What? What makes you even say that?”
“I’ve just been up to her place,” he said. “The cops are there. One of them is Bedloe’s son. I’ve known him since he was a kid.”
“Are they saying somebody killed her?”
“No. But they didn’t know her like I did. Talia was never going to kill herself, and even if she did, she’d have left instructions about her cats. And plenty of food. Which she did not. I just fed them myself.”
“But no one’s saying she killed herself, are they? Surely it was an accident.”
“An accident she got herself dressed up for, in fancy clothes?”
David was uncomfortably aware that someone would be able to tell that a confrontation was going on from right across the street. “What are you talking about?”
“The Bedloe kid told me how she was found. At the bottom of the creek, neck broken. Wearing a dress smarter than anything else they found in the trailer, something that didn’t even fit. That make any sense to you?”
It didn’t, but nothing about Talia’s death had made sense. He could tell Lofland was one step from taking a swing at him, however, so he tried to speak calmly.
“So … what do you think happened?”
“I don’t know what happened, David. What I do know is she called me on the phone yesterday afternoon, asking questions about that guy I picked up in my car. A guy who disappeared into thin air—just like the guy you were talking with in Kendricks.”
“I … was there by myself. I told you that.”
“I know that’s what you said, but it was bullshit. I know I saw a guy sitting opposite you, and then he wasn’t there. Talia kept me on the line for twenty minutes trying to get me to remember things about the guy I picked up. Now, why do you think she would do that?”
“I have no idea.”
“Me neither. Then that same night she gets dolled up and goes out to meet someone and …” He swallowed. “And she doesn’t come back.”
David tried to get these pieces to fit together and couldn’t. “I don’t know what to tell you,” he said.
“I can see that. But I’ll tell you this. If I find your ‘friend’ had anything to do with what happened to her, anything at all, I’m going to come find you. Understand?”
David realized that George meant what he said and that there lurked years of pent-up anger and frustration in the man that would help him carry the job through. Denying anything—everything—wasn’t going to help.
He nodded. George stormed away.
David had no desire to go home. Home—the house he owned with Dawn, where they kept their stuff—did not feel like a place he needed to be. If anywhere, he felt he needed to go back to his hometown—something he’d never felt since leaving it years before. He didn’t understand why. There was nothing for him there. No closure to be had. Nothing that could be said or done. No parents.
No friends.
He knew this was the reality of Talia’s death sinking in. Where you live is not your world. What you own isn’t either. The people you know … that’s the world you live in, and that’s why living a life is like building a house on an emotional fault line. Places persist, but every living thing is going to die.
Die, or leave you.
He recalled an acquaintance who went
on a contract to a country eight hours’ time difference away; the guy said living that far out of sync with everyone he knew felt like being a ghost. Maybe that’s all being a ghost is—finding yourself out of step with everything and everyone you knew. David had never been sociable (total loner geek—thanks, Dad), so the few people he cared about loomed large. Talia had been one, even though they’d never gone for a drink, eaten together, even visited each other’s houses. Losing her was bad enough. That someone might think he was somehow involved or implicated … was terrible.
And how could he be? He thought back to the last conversation they’d had, outside Roast Me. She’d been talking very strangely, yes. He’d blown straight past the concern he should probably have felt for her state of mind because of the part where she reprised the story of George and the hitchhiker. Was there something he’d missed, something he could have talked her down from, a difference he could have made?
He tried to remember. There’d been something about how people when they died might not actually have gone, or something … Christ.
She’d got it into her head that the guy George picked up on the forest road was a ghost.
Not just any ghost, either. Talia had believed in signs and portents. It was all over her novel—there was even a mawkish and credibility stretching moment where one of her key characters, the slim and plucky heroine, was given fresh strength to continue life’s struggle after seeing a shooting star. Yes, this was fiction, but what people write reflects what they believe—fiction is where you go to tell or read the truth that people will stare or laugh at you for expressing in real life. She’d latched on to George’s hitchhiker story right from the start, telling David about it the same day in the coffee shop. It had spoken to her, and maybe something else had then happened that had given her some bizarre cause to add two and two together to make seventy-five …
The person George picked up must have been Maj, as he’d already realized. But how did that explain what had happened? There was no evidence Maj was in town now, or had been last night. What motive would he have for hassling other people, never mind setting up a situation in which one of them might die?
Except … someone had been in David’s house, hadn’t they? That was evidence of someone being on his case in however inexplicable a manner, even if it wasn’t Maj.
And if Maj or these others were unable to get anywhere with David, what might be the obvious next step?
Lean on his friends.
Isn’t that what the crazy or vindictive did in these circumstances—bring pressure on their victim in any way they can, threatening him from the outside? Talia wasn’t in a position to force David to do anything, though—and Maj had already made contact with David. Why would he resort to doing things secondhand?
What if it hadn’t been Maj, but someone like him?
It had been clear from the night in the city that Maj had friends, people who lived the same kind of life. Might he have sent some of them to try to lean on David? Or …
Maj also had enemies.
David remembered the people in Bid’s. The unfriendly looking guy in the old-fashioned suit and the fucked-up thin people who’d been with him in the bar. He recalled that, as he’d hurried away from the church later, he’d thought he’d been followed for at least some of the way to the train station. By whom, he wasn’t sure. He thought he’d lost them.
But what if he’d been followed all the way home?
When he got to the house he knew at once that someone had been inside again. The paper he’d stowed on the hall table had been thrown all over the hallway. He hurried around, picking them up. He knew where the paper had come from. He’d known last night. It was old stock from one of the boxes he’d unpacked in the study, one of the things he’d kept from the upstairs room in his parents’ house, his father’s much-discussed “study.” Paper his father had never typed anything on. A secondhand blank slate.
He had to get rid of it. He gathered the sheets and went back out the door to the side of the house where the recycling was kept. The paper felt like it was symbolic of everything that needed purging from his life, and he lifted the lid of the container and raised his arm high, ready to hurl the paper into it.
There was something in there.
Something other than tin cans and cardboard and glass bottles that had held organic ice tea. He pulled it out, feeling the skin all over his scalp crawling. It was obvious what it was. He just didn’t understand it.
It was a laptop. He turned it over in his hands. It was battered, cheap-looking. He’d never seen it before. So what the hell was it doing in his recycling?
He hurried back indoors. Once inside, he popped the catch on the laptop and opened it. After a pause the screen blinked into life. There was so much unfamiliarity there—smaller screen, Windows instead of Mac, someone else’s lunatic idea of how to organize a desktop—that it took him a few moments to spot something he recognized. In the middle of the desktop (a fuzzy picture of a lot of cats) was a file called ALEGORIA II.
No no no …
Within a minute he’d confirmed it beyond doubt. This was Talia’s laptop. He closed the machine and put it on the floor, so hard he probably came close to damaging it, but he had to get it out of his hands.
He felt like vomiting.
He had a dead woman’s computer in his house. If he was right and someone had followed him home from the city, there could be no doubt that they were now systematically persecuting him.
Coming into the house.
Attacking his friends.
Even trying to implicate him in Talia’s death. What else would be the point of putting the computer here?
It had to stop.
He had to deal with it.
He stared at the machine as if it could leap up and bite him—knowing that, for now, job number one was finding somewhere in the house to hide it—and it randomly struck him that he didn’t have to finish reading Talia’s book now. The idea felt bad. He felt he owed it to her to get to the end, out of respect. Nobody else ever would. He also wanted to know what happened. On that most basic of levels the book worked, and worked well.
As he carried the laptop upstairs another thought dropped into his mind.
Had anybody else seen Talia’s book?
Anybody apart from him?
It was only when he straightened from stowing the laptop in his closet that he realized if he was right, and someone was attacking him through those closest to him, there was one obvious person they would target next.
Chapter 53
Lizzie went downtown first and left a message. After that she kept in movement, spiraling around the deed and building her concentration. If she was going to break her own rules it had to be worth it. She had to get it right.
With the girls it was hard to be specific and bringing something for the sake of it wouldn’t work—so she dropped the idea. Catherine was hard too, but in different ways. She had so much already. It seemed hard to believe she could want for more. We do, though. Lizzie understood that. There’s always something new to add to the pile. We want more stuff and the comfort that comes with it. We want to surround ourselves with a nest, a cocoon. It’s one of the reasons we have friends, and there’s nothing necessarily wrong with the arrangement … assuming you can get the stuff. If you can’t then all you have is no stuff, and after a while the lack of things starts to suffocate you.
She avoided the parks. She might chance upon Maj in one and, though she really wanted to see him, she knew he’d realize something was up. It was too late for her to be dissuaded and she did not want to argue with him.
So she remained in perpetual movement, as throughout her life. Walking, walking, with nowhere to sit down at the end of it. She realized how tired her feet were. Not physically, but emotionally. Her legs were the idea of tired. That’s all they really were if you got down to it, ideas and dreams, and while people poured so much time and energy into both they were also liable to drop them at a moment’s notice. Most
of the time it doesn’t matter whether dreams come to fruition. It only matters whether they cheer you up. Except, perhaps, to the dreams themselves, who might yearn to come true, to become more than a comforting pattern of thought that eventually lapses into an emotional line of least resistance.
That’s why change sometimes had to come to those who weren’t looking for it—who’d done everything they could to avoid it. They could squat there in their great big warm houses with their big warm lives, ignoring everything outside their window. You could do that if you had enough stuff inside with you, if you had an inside to start off with. That didn’t mean the situation couldn’t change. Lizzie had tried hard not to need, very hard, but after so many years it still hadn’t worked. If Kristina could take Lizzie seriously and seem to want to be her friend, what was to say others could not?
Was there any law that said dreams could not dream too?
Lizzie felt dumb and childish for having followed and watched and been a good girl. For accepting her lot. The time for being dumb and childish was over.
It ended this afternoon.
It ended now.
She was close to settling on Bloomingdale’s when she had a better idea. She hurried back down Fifth Avenue. Going to Bloomingdale’s would have felt too much like the bad old days. Instead she’d try the street where she’d followed Kristina the first time they’d spoken to each other. That felt appropriate. It was following the signs, and Lizzie was a believer in story-maker events. Why else would she have met Kristina—and come to believe in the possibility of a real friendship there—if not for the idea of today to come into her mind? You put thoughts out into the universe and God gives them form and sets them down. So Father Jeffers said, and on that he might even be right.
She walked along 47th, peering in windows. Within a few minutes she’d found a store that looked like a possibility. It had interesting things in the window and was a little larger than most of the others, which would make it easier too. She picked her moment, moving in a meandering figure eight over a forty-yard radius, waiting until she’d seen a few people enter the store—a couple of men who looked like dealers, a handful of civilians too.
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