The Space Between

by Dete Meserve

  But Ben really earned his nerd cred when he texted me before our next class together . . . in Klingon: thlhIngan Hol Dajatlh’a’? he wrote, which means “Do you speak Klingon?”

  Hlja’, I typed back. Meaning yes. I’d actually bought and studied a book on how to speak Klingon, the language of one of the most prominent alien species on Star Trek.

  quSDaq ba’lu’’a’? he texted.

  I was stumped. And impressed that he knew more Klingon than I did.

  The next thing I knew, he was standing next to me, phone in hand, grinning. “It means ‘Is this seat taken?’”

  I don’t remember a single moment of that English class. I was brilliantly aware of him sitting beside me, his arm oh-so-lightly brushing up against mine now and then. I was seduced by his smell. Likely just Old Spice, but he wore it like an intoxicating potion. I tried to appear unruffled, but every time I glanced at him, I felt off-balance.

  Then, in the middle of class, he began scribbling something on a piece of paper. I peered over to see what he was writing, but he covered up the paper with his hand and flashed me a mischievous smile. My heart raced as he slid the paper in front of me.

  The page was filled with an incomprehensible jumble of letters. Definitely not Klingon.

  I felt the heat rise in my cheeks as I shot him a puzzled look. He smiled, then sat back in his chair, as if to say, “Figure it out.”

  While the professor droned on about Mark Twain, I scanned the string of letters, trying to make sense of them. Then I realized that he had written me a message in a code—a simple substitution cipher that relied on transposing all the letters in the alphabet so that the resulting alphabet is backward. The letter A was decoded as the letter Z, B actually meant Y, and so on.

  Ben watched as I decoded each letter of the phrase. It read:

  Can I make you dinner?

  DAY TWO

  Detective Dawson looks ill. His skin is ashen gray, and the hollows around his eyes look dark and puffy as though he hasn’t slept in days. You wouldn’t know it by his handshake, though. It’s a strong grip that jams my fingers together so hard I actually pull my hand back and shake off the pain.

  He doesn’t notice.

  It’s late—nearly eight at night—and his presence on my doorstep tells me he must have something important to tell me. And the minute he sees my friend Lauren sitting at the kitchen table with her laptop, he asks her to come back later. Polite. But there’s no doubt it’s not a request.

  “Could I stay?” Lauren asks. “She’s going through a lot—”

  “She’ll be okay with me,” he says with confidence, although I’m not sure I will be. I don’t know what the detective needs to tell me that can’t be said in front of my best friend.

  Lauren scoops up her things, wraps me in a quick hug, then heads to the back door. “I’ll be back whenever you need me.”

  The detective leaves the kitchen and makes a beeline for the Christmas tree again. He looks over the ornaments, and his eye settles on something.

  “Diamond Icicles,” he says, breaking into a smile. “My grandparents had these.”

  He lifts up a twisted metal “icicle” that’s about five inches in length.

  “Ben got them at a garage sale years ago. He has them in every color.”

  I can see his hand shake a little as he puts the icicle back. He’s nervous. There’s something he wants to tell me. Or ask.

  I’m not wrong. “You might want to sit down.”

  Oh god. Does he have bad news about Ben? I drop in slow motion on the couch and feel my body sink into its soft cushions, which suddenly feel like craggy rocks.

  “Have you . . . have you found him?”

  He shakes his head. “Your husband hired a bodyguard on Tuesday. A man named Antonio Spear. Did you know about this?”

  Nausea burns at the back of my throat and I feel light-headed. “I had no idea.”

  He speaks slowly as though that might lessen the blow. “Spear worked for World Intelligence Network, a private security firm. You heard of them?”

  I nod. “A few of the celebrities that come to Aurora use that service. I’ve met the owner a few times.”

  “Tuesday afternoon at five thirty, Spear picked up your husband at your home. Later that night, he was found shot to death in a security-company-owned Toyota SUV.”

  It feels like he has just driven an icicle into my heart. “Was Ben with him?”

  He draws a deep breath, closes his eyes for a second. “Three shots were fired, one of them killing Mr. Spear. We’ve analyzed the blood found in the car, and some of it belongs to your husband. Since Ben was no longer at the scene, we believe he was abducted by whoever shot Mr. Spear. We think they hopped back on the freeway to make their getaway.”

  I’m not one for hysterics, but I suddenly feel like I’m going to cry, or wail, or fall on the floor. Or all three. My body feels disconnected from my mind. Out of my control.

  “But it’s possible . . . Ben could’ve escaped on foot,” I say, even though I know the theory isn’t plausible.

  “We found no sign of that. But we did find his broken cell phone by the SUV.”

  The walls begin to close in on me then, and the room begins to spin. How will I tell Zack? “This can’t be true . . .”

  “Ben did manage to make a call that night. But not from his own phone. From Antonio Spear’s phone.” He flips through his notebook until he finds the page he’s looking for. “He made that call at 9:08 that night.”

  “Who did he call?”

  “I think you already know,” he says. “You.”

  I know exactly where I was at 9:08 Tuesday night, and I have a feeling Detective Dawson does, too.

  “I didn’t get a call from Ben . . .”

  He doesn’t believe me. I can see it his eyes. He thinks he’s caught me in a lie. “Would you bring me your phone?”

  I go to the kitchen and get my phone out of my purse and hand it to him.

  “There’s a voice mail, isn’t there?”

  “Not from Ben,” I say. “There’s no caller ID, and when I played it, there was a lot of white noise and I couldn’t make out any words.”

  “That’s the call Ben made from Spear’s phone,” James says. “Which explains the lack of caller ID. Ben made three calls in quick succession from his bodyguard’s phone that night. The first call at 9:06 was to 911, and dispatch records indicate that call was too garbled to understand. The second call was made to you, but it went unanswered. The third and last call was made to you again, and that’s when Ben left this voice mail.”

  His words drive a cold stake into my heart. Ben had called me. But what was he trying to tell me? If I’d picked up, could I have helped him?

  The detective’s voice brings me back to the moment. “The phone was issued to World Intelligence Network, who gave us access to his cell phone records and voice mail. Now our sound technicians are working to make out what Ben is saying, and I should have those results in the next day or so.”

  He flips through the pages of his notebook, then looks up at me, a stony expression on his face. “There’s more, Sarah.”

  The air leaves my body. What could possibly be worse than finding out your husband has been shot and abducted?

  “The belladonna poisoning we talked about doesn’t appear to be an accident. We’re investigating the restaurant where he had lunch that afternoon. The Parkway Bistro.”

  “We’ve been going there for years. I can’t imagine they’d be responsible.”

  “My point is, someone has tried to kill your husband—twice.” He looks down and taps his pencil on his notepad. “And the first place we need to investigate is whoever has the most to gain from killing Ben Mayfield. You’re the sole beneficiary of his life insurance policy and heir to his family fortune.”

  The breath stops in my throat. “What are you getting at? I can’t be a suspect. I wasn’t even in LA when my husband was poisoned.”

  “You’ve got a rock-solid
alibi, but that doesn’t mean you didn’t hire someone to do it.”

  My anger flares. “That’s ridiculous. I didn’t—”

  “What I’m constructing now is a timeline of where you’ve been, Sarah. Let’s start with what time your flight from DC came into LA that night.”

  My entire body tenses. I know where his questioning is heading. “I’m not sure the exact time. But I can check.”

  “Were you back in LA when Ben called you at 9:07 and then again at 9:08?”

  “Yes, but I never heard—”

  “We checked the airline schedules, and the last flight from DC arrived at 8:15 that night. So why wouldn’t you have heard his call? Where were you?”

  I’ve already told him I didn’t get home until one in the morning. Traffic in LA can be bad, but there’s no way it took five hours to get from LAX to Brentwood.

  “I was having a drink at the airport with one of my CIT colleagues,” I say.

  “For four hours?”

  “We had a lot of catching up to do on the Trojan asteroid discovery and the NASA presentation.”

  “And you couldn’t ‘catch up’ during work hours?”

  “We were celebrating . . . it’s a major discovery—”

  “And your colleague’s name is?”

  I hesitate, wondering if I’m required to tell him and worried that I’ll be dragging Aaron into this investigation with me. But if I don’t tell him, I know it’ll look like I have something to hide.

  “Aaron. Aaron McCarthy.”

  “You two have more than a friendship going on?” He asks it casually, looking down at his notepad. “I mean . . . four hours.”

  “No.”

  “Is that your vice?” he says quietly.

  “My what?”

  “For some it’s booze, pills. For others, it’s gambling, overspending. Everyone’s got one. Some people cheat on their spouses. Is that your vice?”

  “That’s an inappropriate question, Detective Dawson. You realize I’ve been married fifteen years. Ben and I have a son. I’m an astronomer at the Carnegie Institute of Technology—”

  “Doesn’t make you any less human than the rest of us.”

  I swallow hard. “So what’s yours?”

  He looks up and fixes a stern gaze on me. “My what?”

  “Your vice.”

  “This isn’t about me.”

  “But it is. You come in here and make a declaration that everyone has a vice—without, I might add, any research or evidence to back that up—and then accuse me of cheating on my husband. If everyone’s got one, what’s yours?”

  He opens his mouth to say something. Then shuts it.

  “Just because my husband is missing and you’re wearing a badge doesn’t mean you can speculate about me and my vices. Not unless you’re prepared to talk about your own.”

  He stands, pretends he didn’t hear me. “So for the record, you were on a plane to NASA Headquarters the day your husband was poisoned with belladonna.”

  “That’s correct.”

  “And, for the record, after your husband was involved in a shooting that killed his bodyguard, he tries to call you at 9:08 Tuesday night. And you don’t answer. Because you are sitting in an airport lounge until well after midnight with a . . . guy from work. Is that correct?”

  I feel a pang of guilt but keep my voice steady. “I didn’t hear the call.”

  “If there’s something going on between you and this guy, you’d be smart to tell me now rather than wait for us to dredge it up later.”

  “There’s nothing going on between me and Aaron.”

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  After the detective leaves, I head up to Zack’s room and share the news with him. At first he looks at me as though he can’t understand the words I’m saying. Then his pale skin turns pink and tears well up.

  “Do they think that Dad got away?” he asks, full of hope.

  I stroke his hair, smoothing the cowlick at his left temple. “They’re not sure. They’re looking into whether the person who shot his bodyguard abducted him.”

  “Why would someone . . . abduct Dad?”

  I ache to have answers for him, Still, I resist the urge to give him ones that sound plausible yet may not be true. “They’re not sure. We’re going to find out, though.” My voice is full of hope, and even though my heart is racing, I’m able to summon a calm tone.

  My lack of answers troubles him as much as it does me. Zack likes things concrete and certain, which, like me, is why he gravitates to math and science, and the indefinite nature of everything that’s happened clearly unsettles him.

  He wipes his eyes, and suddenly he reminds me of Ben. The downward slope of his eyes, the strong cheekbones. I hug him, but unlike when he was little, I know that no measure of hugs is going to make this hurt go away.

  After he goes to take a shower, I head out to the patio. Beneath the starlight, my breathing usually slows and my thoughts flow more easily. But tonight as I gaze up at the night sky, the stars can’t work their usual magic on me. They look like dull, hazy dots in the sky.

  Unreachable, like Ben. Where is he? Is it too much to hope that he somehow escaped the shooting? Or was it more likely that he had been abducted? Or was even dead?

  Tears burn my eyes.

  I can’t escape the heavy feeling that I let Ben down. While I was drinking tequila with Aaron, Ben had been shot and witnessed his bodyguard’s murder. He had called me in crisis and I wasn’t there for him. If I had answered the call, maybe I could have done something. Maybe Ben would be here now.

  Am I responsible for Ben’s disappearance?

  I gaze again at the stars and try to draw a deep breath, but it feels like my chest is wrapped in a vise.

  I remember an Isaac Asimov story, Nightfall, about a planet where daylight is so pervasive that the stars were visible only once every two thousand years. So awesome was the sight of darkness and the stars that many people descended into ecstasy and madness when they viewed them for the first time. On Earth, where we can see the stars every night, we often glance casually at the cosmos and then quickly down again. Ignoring its rhapsody.

  But not me. When I gaze at the night sky, I often feel infinity, even though it’s a concept I don’t use. Despite its seductive allure, we have no direct observational evidence for infinity. And yet I’ve felt it.

  The night before Zack was born, Ben and I waited for my contractions to become regular before we headed to the hospital. It was after midnight and the air was particularly clear, swept clean by the Santa Ana winds that had blown fiercely earlier in the day. As we stepped outside on a moonless night, we both noticed the Andromeda constellation blazing in the sky above us.

  Some might call it a boring constellation, just two lines of stars. But tonight it seemed brighter than usual, and we could actually glimpse the fuzzy patch in the sky just to its side: the Andromeda Galaxy, home to one trillion stars.

  “Will you look at that,” he whispered.

  As we held hands under the canopy of stars and galaxies, waiting to become parents, the world seemed to swell, and it felt as though we were woven together in infinite time.

  “Mom,” Zack is whispering.

  “Mom.” More insistent now.

  I jolt awake, realizing I’ve fallen asleep atop my covers. Zack is standing over me, and even in the dim light of my bedside lamp I can see the terrified look on his face.

  “There’s a man sitting in a car in front of our house.”

  “What time is it?”

  “Midnight. I was about to go to bed when I heard a car door slam. I thought . . . I thought it might be Dad, so I looked out the window. There’s a guy . . . sitting there.”

  I follow him to his room, my heart beating like I’ve just drunk five cups of caffeinated cola. His bedroom light is off, which gives us the advantage of seeing clearly into our front yard and the street. There’s a black car, parked facing the wrong way, in front of our house. And a man sitting in the driver�
��s seat.

  For a moment I allow myself to think it’s Ben—that he’s home—but then I see the red glow of a cigarette in the man’s hand and realize it can’t be. Ben doesn’t smoke. And why would he just be sitting there?

  “Maybe it’s plainclothes police . . . ,” I say, but my voice is wobbly.

  “There was a guy sitting in a car in front of our house the night Dad went missing, too.”

  “What? Why didn’t you tell—”

  “I didn’t think anything of it at the time. But it’s the same guy. I know it. We have to call 911,” Zack says.

  “He’s just sitting in a car . . . they won’t come for something like that.”

  “Are the doors locked?” he asks.

  I try to recall. I’d fallen into a dead sleep on my bed. Around eleven? I remember letting the cat out through the front door, but I had not locked it, thinking I’d have to let her back in in five minutes anyway.

  We hear a dull metallic thud, coming from downstairs. We both freeze, listening. The silence in the house is deafening, booming in my ears. I don’t breathe.

  Then a sound pierces the silence—the steady and unmistakable click of someone trying to slowly turn the doorknob on the front door.

  “Call 911. Now,” Zack insists.

  We race into the office and lock the door. I yank my cell phone out of my back pocket, but my hands are so shaky that I enter the wrong passcode to unlock the phone. I try again, and then with trembling fingers I punch in 9-1-1, but instead of a live dispatcher, we get an automated response and we’re placed on hold.

  I slam my palm on the computer space bar and pull up the camera feeds. Except for the floor lamp in the living room, all the lights on the first floor are off. Even though the cameras allow us to see up to sixty feet in complete darkness, all I can really make out are vague shapes that could just as easily be a piece of furniture or a person down on the floor.