by Mason Cross
“Who is it?”
“It’s him.”
The receiver was picked up.
“Hello? Jake Pelletier speaking.”
The voice had changed a little in the two months since Gage had last heard it. More thoughtful, less babyish. He was going to be six soon, after all. A big boy.
“How’s it going, champ?”
“Trenton! Where are you?”
Gage winced a little. The compromise. Courtney would allow him to see the kid every once in a while, plus the odd phone call, but she would never make it official. Never tell him who “Trenton” actually was.
“I’m out west,” he said, keeping his voice light. “In a really big city called Las Vegas. Have you heard of it?”
“Sure, where they have all the signs that light up?”
“All the signs,” he agreed. “How you been?”
“I’m going to be six in two weeks, did my mommy tell you?”
“She may have mentioned it.”
“We’re having a party, are you going to come?” There was a pause, and Gage could picture Courtney shaking her head vigorously. “What?”
“I don’t know about that, Jake. But if you tell me what you want, I’ll make sure Santa hears about it.”
“Santa’s only for Christmas.”
“Oh really? Who handles birthdays then, the Easter Bunny?”
“You’re silly.”
“I’ll tell you what, I’ll make sure the Easter Bunny makes a special trip, out of season. What’ll it be?”
There was a pause, and Gage could picture the furrowed brow, the calculations about what it was okay to ask for.
“A PS4?”
“Jake!” his mother’s voice.
“I’ll see what I can do.”
The voice in the background again, telling him to say goodbye.
“I have to go now, Trenton.”
“Well it was great talking to you. I’ll see you soon, okay?”
“How soon?”
Gage hesitated. “Well, that’s the sixty-four-thousand-dollar question, isn’t it?”
“Oh. I don’t have that much money.”
Gage smiled. “Don’t worry about it. Put your mom back on.”
The kid said goodbye and Gage said the same. The smile faded as Courtney came on the line again, her voice low as she watched Jake retreat back to his room.
“Why do you keep calling, Gage?”
“He likes to speak to me.”
“He’s five, he doesn’t know what the hell he likes. Why don’t you do the both of us a favor and just forget we exist?”
“You get my last letter?”
Sigh. “Yeah I got it. This isn’t about money, Gage. I’m not the same person I was. I can’t be. He deserves better.”
“Listen, I’m working on a job.”
“I don’t want to know about it.”
“I have some money saved. In a year or two, maybe I can ...”
“No.”
Gage said nothing. He had a hundred ways of forcing somebody to do what he wanted, but none of those ways would do him any good with Courtney Pelletier.
“Gage, we could be moving soon. There might be a job out of town.”
“Where?”
“I think ... I think maybe it would be good if I didn’t tell you where.”
Gage gripped the phone and kept his voice even with an effort of will. “I’d like to come and see him before you go. The birthday party, okay?”
She didn’t say anything for a long moment.
“Okay, but after that we need to talk.”
“I’ll see you in a couple of weeks.”
Gage closed his eyes as the call ended. He pictured Jake and Courtney standing in the hall, probably talking over the call. He forced the image to the back of his mind, and brought back the face of the man he had been paid to look for. When he opened his eyes again, he saw the sun had set behind the mountains.
11
SUMMERLIN
The blue Ford had been on the road for some time, judging by the road-dirt streaked all over its sills. The man behind the wheel seemed to hesitate for a second before opening the door. And then he raised a hand in acknowledgment and got out.
In contrast to his vehicle, the man looked like he had weathered the journey well. He was six feet tall, wearing shoes and black suit pants and a white open-necked shirt with the sleeves rolled up. Like an executive on his way home after a day at work. As he approached the house in the fading light, Sarah realized for the first time that she didn’t know the man’s name. He had replied to her email an hour after she had sent it, suggesting they met in person and that he could be there the following evening. There had been no name at the sign-off. Up until this moment, he had been an anonymous email account. A last desperate try for information on Rebecca that had brought two perfect strangers together, for ... what exactly?
Break glass in case of emergency.
“Sarah, right?”
She nodded after a pause. “Rebecca’s friend.”
He was holding his hand out. She shook it carefully, wondering if he was going to even tell her his name. It seemed like he was hesitating a little on this, just like he had on getting out of the car.
“I’m Carter Blake,” he said after a pause. “I knew Rebecca, years ago.”
A very slight hesitation before he said the word “Rebecca,” like he had been about to say another name. He made it sound like he hadn’t seen her in a long time. And yet here he was. Sarah looked beyond him to the dirt-streaked car.
“I didn’t know if you would actually come. Was it a long trip?”
“Louisiana.” He said it matter-of-fact, like he was saying he’d come from two blocks away.
She looked back at him. She couldn’t hear any Louisiana in his accent, so she doubted he was a native. It seemed like every word he spoke sparked off another series of questions in her mind. He might not have seen Rebecca in years, but something had compelled him to come all this way at a moment’s notice. Who was he? Who was Rebecca?
She regarded him for another second. Up close, he looked tired. But there was something in his eyes that reassured her somehow. She couldn’t put her finger on it. A second later it hit her. Though Blake was probably younger than her, the look in his eyes reminded her a little of her father: the way his concern had been hiding just behind the smiles and bravado. Her dad’s concern had never been for himself; he simply worried about her worrying.
“Well, you must be tired,” she said. “Come on in and we’ll talk.”
She showed Carter Blake into the same living room where Officer Stansfield had made her feel like a paranoid moron a day and a half before and told him to take a seat, offering to make coffee, tea, whatever he liked.
“I’m fine,” he said, before reconsidering. “I’d love a glass of water if it’s no trouble.”
Sarah retrieved two cold bottles of water from the refrigerator and brought them back through to the living room. Blake took one and thanked her, taking a long swallow. They sat down opposite each other.
“Where in Louisiana?” she asked.
“A little place called Grand Isle. It’s on the Gulf. It’s beautiful.”
“You don’t come from there, though.”
He shook his head, and Sarah decided he wasn’t going to volunteer where he was from. Besides, as his next utterance showed, he was curious about something himself.
“Do you still have the notebook, Ms. Blackwell?”
“Call me Sarah. I never got used to being Ms. Blackwell. I would change back to my maiden name, but who needs the hassle, right?”
Blake smiled politely and then realized that she was waiting for him to reciprocate. “Oh, you can call me ... actually, just call me Blake. Most people do.”
She smiled, mentally adding “more comfortable with last names” to her list of observations. It might suggest a certain background, or type of occupation.
“Notebook,” she said, bringing the conversat
ion back around.
She reached for the notebook, which was lying on the table at one end of the couch she was sitting on. She leafed it open to the final page and turned it round so Blake could see it. “I don’t think she meant to leave this behind. It was the only personal item in the house.”
He made no move to touch it at first, just looked down at the doodle on the final page. The little frame with “[email protected]” neatly lettered inside. Sarah had seen a lot of anonymous emails in her time, and in her experience this kind of thing worked best: simple and untraceable. A color followed by some numbers that were probably entirely random, or perhaps helped the owner identify when and where or to whom this particular address had been given.
Blake’s mouth curled into a surprised smile as he read the sign above the frame.
“‘Break glass in case of emergency,”’ he read. He looked up. “You think that’s what this is? An emergency?”
Sarah considered before answering. She didn’t want to go through the same dead-end conversation she had had with the Missing Persons cop. “I don’t know. All I do know is I haven’t heard from Rebecca and I’m concerned about her.”
“She didn’t, though.”
“Didn’t what?”
“Didn’t break the glass.” Blake gulped the rest of the water—obviously he had been thirsty. He sat back on the couch. “I find people for a living. Sometimes those people don’t want to be found. What if she just doesn’t want to be found?”
Sarah sat back and folded her arms. “That’s entirely possible, I suppose. Did you come all this way just to suggest that?”
He smiled and leafed through some of the earlier pages, stopping to examine some of them for a few seconds before flipping forward until he got to the page with the single strange line on it.
“Any idea what this means?”
“‘Quarter by June?’” She shook her head. “Not a clue. It’s June now. Maybe she was planning to have a quarter of some sort of task done by now.”
“Or June could be a person.” He stared at the three words a little longer and then closed the book and looked up at her. “Why don’t you tell me it all from the beginning?”
Sarah couldn’t remember everything she had said in the email. She had kept it reasonably brief, knowing that anyone being at the other end of the email address was a long shot. So she started from the beginning. How Rebecca and her husband Dominic had moved in the previous January. How they had kept themselves to themselves to begin with. How the position of her study had meant that she had been unintentionally surveilling them for hours each day. At that point, Blake interrupted for the first time to ask what her job was.
“I used to be a staffer at the Tribune. Now I’m a writer. I write novels.”
“Have you written anything I might have read?”
“I don’t know, are you a twelve- to sixteen-year-old girl?”
Blake considered this. “Do I need to be?”
Sarah smiled. “So my publisher tells me. That’s my audience, apparently. YA. But you’re right, I don’t just write for your average teenage girl. That would be stupid, since there’s no such thing. I get all kinds of people getting in touch. I write the Farrah Fairchild series. She’s ... kind of a detective.”
“Like Nancy Drew?”
“Or Veronica Mars.”
“I’ll check it out.”
She didn’t know if he was kidding or not. “Anyway, I’m at my desk upstairs for hours every day. It looks out onto number 32. I can see the front door, the backyard, the side windows. And that’s how I first got curious about them.”
“What did you see?”
“Not a lot. They didn’t seem to go out much. Neither of them left in the morning and came home at night on a weekday, so I knew they didn’t have regular jobs.”
“Lots of people work from home these days,” Blake said. “Maybe they’re writers too.”
He was questioning her, looking for clarifications. But it didn’t come across as though he was trying to poke holes in her story; or belittling her concerns the way Officer Stansfield had done.
“Maybe,” she agreed. “But it was ... unusual. Unusual enough for me to wonder about.”
She went on, told him about the patterns she had begun to notice over the weeks. How they never seemed to go out at the same time. Sometimes the man would go out, sometimes the woman. Often one of them would go out in the evening, or late at night. She didn’t hear a peep from them until the night of the argument.
“It was a warm night, so the windows were open. Theirs and mine. I heard something breaking and then an argument. They were yelling about something.” She shrugged sheepishly. “Curiosity got the better of me, I guess, and I was at the window trying to hear more when Rebecca saw me—caught me eavesdropping red-handed. She slammed the window closed and I basically wanted the earth to swallow me up.”
Blake smiled. “Did they fight a lot?”
“That was the only time I heard anything,” Sarah said.
“What’s her husband like?”
Sarah shook her head. “I really never got to know him.”
“Did your ex-husband ever speak to him?”
Sarah had noticed Blake scanning the room, probably concluding from the furniture and decor that she had lived alone for quite some time now, but polite enough to let her tell him that. “We’ve been divorced for almost three years—Edward was long gone before Rebecca and Dominic moved in, so he never spoke to him either.”
Blake nodded. “Okay, what happened after the fight?”
“The next day, she showed up with a bottle of wine. Wanted to apologize if they’d disturbed me. I asked her in for a coffee and we got on pretty well. She started coming over every day or so.”
“So you got to know her.”
Sarah smiled. “Well that’s just it, Blake. Yes and no.”
He raised his eyebrows, but didn’t say anything.
“We got on pretty well. It was nice to have somebody new in the neighborhood I could talk to. But she never really talked about herself. Only the occasional thing, and never anything really specific. Like she would tell me she wasn’t in touch with her family, but not give me any reason. Or that she used to live in New York, but not what she did for a living. It wasn’t like she was constantly stonewalling me; I don’t mean like that. I thought she was one of those people who just don’t talk that much about themselves. To tell you the truth, I didn’t really think about it until after she disappeared.”
“Tell me about that,” Blake said. “About how she left.”
She reached for the Samsung tablet that was lying on the coffee table and tapped her fingers across the surface until she brought up the picture she had emailed him. Her with the mystery couple.
“She didn’t really socialize with the other neighbors. I didn’t blame her, to be honest. But I asked her to come with me to a yard party and she did. Her husband showed up halfway through. I had spoken to him a couple of times in passing. Always brief, always a little awkward. That day he was different, though.”
“Different how?”
She thought about it. “I guess what surprised me was I thought maybe he was shy, and that was why he kept himself to himself. But that day he was anything but. He showed up, found Rebecca and grabbed her arm. He said they had to go.
“Rebecca pulled away and told him to relax, that she would come in her own time. He got this look in his eye, like ... have you ever seen a mother who really wants to slap her kid in the supermarket, but can’t because of everyone watching? Like that. For a second I actually thought he was going to grab her again and physically drag her out of there. But he didn’t.”
Blake’s brow furrowed, and she knew what he was thinking. “What did he do?”
“He just leaned in and whispered something in her ear. I couldn’t hear what he said, but her expression changed like that. And that’s when the host took this picture.”
Blake looked down at the picture again, his understa
nding deepened by the story behind this snatched moment. He didn’t say anything for a while, lost in thought.
“She went with him right after that, and that was the last time I saw her.”
Sarah continued, telling him about the typed note, about the men she had seen go into the house, about talking to the police. And then she told him about her decision to use the spare key and do a little investigation of her own, coming up with nothing. Or not quite nothing, as Blake’s presence proved.
When she had finished speaking, Blake spoke after gathering his thoughts.
“It sounds like they always planned to leave in a hurry,” he said.
“How do you figure?”
“They disappeared overnight without you noticing. That means they didn’t spend time loading everything into a removal truck or a van, which means they can’t have had that much stuff in the first place. Maybe they had no more than you could fit in a suitcase.”
Sarah cast her mind back to the previous January and remembered that that held true for their arrival as well as their departure. Now that she thought about it, there had never been a truck when they moved in, either. They had arrived in a small car, and, so far as Sarah had considered it at all, she assumed their belongings had been delivered at another time. But what if they hadn’t been? It would explain why Rebecca had pointedly never invited her over. An empty house would raise questions.
“Why would they do that, though? What would make them have to be ready to leave at a moment’s notice?”
She could see that something she had said had struck a chord with Blake.
“What is it? You know, don’t you? You know what they’re running from.”
He didn’t say anything for a minute, the look in his eyes a million miles away. Then he seemed to snap out of it, remembered where he was and shook his head. “No, I don’t.” He got up and walked across to the side window, the one that looked onto 32’s front porch. “Everything you’ve said, it doesn’t necessarily add up to something sinister.”
Sarah felt a flush of frustration again, like the way she had felt talking to the police. “What the hell do you mean? They just disappeared like that, and then nothing—no phone calls, nada.”