I went back to the bag and, watching Hillary, slowly opened it. Inside, a set of clothes sat folded. Underneath, a thin wallet. I went through it quickly but only found the expected identifications and credit cards. More credit cards than necessary, in my opinion. Tucked into the currency area with a few bucks there was one photo of the two of them, Malloy grinning like a king. He really had been a remarkably handsome guy, though a little too wholesome, if I was being honest. Pilgrim and farmer. Not my type.
Besides the photo, a couple of receipts for gas, fast food. One for a department store I recognized and the item listed seemed to be some kind of lingerie. Malloy would have gotten so lucky this weekend.
Or maybe he had, before he got very unlucky indeed.
Luck. The word signified a certain amount of happenstance, but I wondered. Malloy had said the trip hadn’t been his idea, but Hillary had planned to make the most of things—meeting his friends, prancing around in something tiny that would remind Malloy not to spend all night out looking at the stars. Whose idea had this trip been? In the end, maybe luck had had nothing to do with it.
Other than the wallet, the bag held little of interest, just some pens, a few forgotten throat lozenges, a ring of keys attached to an ID card with Hillary’s photo. I studied the image—her hair darker, her chin thrust out almost defiantly—and looked for any hint as to what the keys might open. Probably doors and cabinets at that job she was so good at, according to Malloy. The keys to the car they’d driven in from Indiana-Ohio-Wherever were presumably under police protection. I put the keys back quietly, glancing Hillary’s way.
I’ll help. That was what I’d promised myself. Yeah, I didn’t think she’d see this as helping anyone but myself.
I put the clothes back, making sure they appeared as neatly folded as they had been found. But then I felt something moving inside the bag and yanked my hand out. A square of blue lit up through the weave of a folded sweater. A cell phone, ringing. I was sure we’d all had our phones taken, but maybe Hillary had used her wiles to keep hers. I pulled out the phone and looked at the screen. Angel, the screen said, over a photo of Hillary and a teen girl, their arms thrown around each other’s neck, their other hands up in peace-sign V’s.
I touched the screen, accepting the call, and put the phone to my ear.
“Mom?” a young woman’s voice said. “Mom, what’s going on up there? I saw something online—Mom?”
“Your mom is sick right now,” I said, after giving the situation a moment.
“Who is this? Where’s my mom?”
“She’s sleeping,” I said. “Wait. Your mom is Hillary, right?”
The girl went silent.
“Her boyfriend was murdered,” I said.
“No,” she said. “No, that’s crazy—Malloy?” The girl started to cry. “This isn’t some joke, right? He can’t be.”
“Were you close to him?”
She went quiet, sniffed. The true situation was beginning to reveal itself to me. A second phone? “You aren’t supposed to exist, are you?”
“Well, I do,” she said. “Put my mom on the phone.”
“She’s sleeping,” I said, “and before that, she was—she really needs to sleep. I don’t think we should wake her right now.” I glanced over at Hillary. Her hair still hung over her face. “Why didn’t she tell him about you yet?”
“She was going to tell him this weekend,” she said, her voice thick. “After . . . after I don’t know.”
“When he was in a good mood, hanging with all his friends,” I said. Or after he got tired of all their problems and wrote them off? After that negligee was revealed?
“I guess,” she said. “She didn’t want to wait until—”
Until. Until? A nearly adult daughter seemed like a first-date topic, to me. “Until . . . until he proposed?”
“Maybe.”
“Did she think he was doing that soon?”
“She hoped,” Angel said. She snuffled and then blew her nose. “We both did.”
“But you hadn’t met him,” I said.
“Well, no, but he made her so happy,” the girl said. “Things just seemed to be going her way finally.”
Yeah, that part of her life was over. “How old are you, Angel?”
“What business is it of yours?” she said. “Who are you?”
Fifteen or so. “So, your mother had you in . . . high school?”
“Look, save your judgments for the church bulletin—”
“Just working out the math,” I said. “Your mom must have been dedicated to her education to finish school and raise you at the same time.”
The pseudo-praise seemed to settle her down. “She worked hard to finish her GED,” she said.
“And then when did she go to—”
The phone was wrenched from my hand. Hillary stood, haggard, glaring at me.
“Your phone started ringing,” I said.
“You and I are not actually the same person,” she said, her voice raw. “You know that, right?”
We both listened to Angel’s disembodied voice asking for her. “Mom? Mom?”
“Answer your kid,” I said. “She’s scared.”
“I’m a little scared, myself.”
“You don’t have anything to fear from me,” I said.
“Don’t I?” She put the phone to her ear, her face immediately crumpling at the sound of Angel’s voice. “Sweetheart, hold on—”
“I’m leaving,” I said.
“Wait! Can you not—”
“Not mention your secret phone? Or your secret kid? A motive, by the way. I won’t mention it to anyone,” I said. “Unless you don’t. You have to tell the cops tomorrow, or I will.”
“Fine,” she said, but it was not fine. The look she gave me was deadly. “Get out.”
OUTSIDE, IT WASN’T quite dark, but the distance to my room loomed, just a few feet too far. I hurried, feeling shadows at my back. At the door, I fumbled with the key, dropped it. When I reached to pick it up, the movement at the edges of my vision made me dizzy. The air felt thick around me, closing in. I opened the door and, from the outside, reached for the light switch. When the light was on, I entered and shoved the door closed, locked the dead bolt, and lay against the door with all my weight, breathing in, breathing out.
When the rising feeling of panic finally fell away, I raced around the room, adding the bedside lamps’ glow. Low-wattage, all of it, and my pack of lightbulbs hostage back at the guest house.
Still a little fuzzy in the head, I went to the bathroom and splashed my face with cold water, staring at my reflection in the bad light there. Looking at yourself in multiple mirrors and hoping for different results—was that a psychosis? I heard the sound of Paris’s voice in my head. Maybe I was a special kind of psychopath.
No, I was not the one wielding screwdrivers here. The question: Who was?
Hillary’s secret kid—what did it mean for Malloy’s death, especially given that he hadn’t seemed to know about her?
He wouldn’t have needed to, if someone else did. To his friends, Angel would have been just another person wanting a slice of Malloy’s time. I thought again of my revelation in the bar. They all loved him so much, he had to die. Wasn’t that what we were dealing with? An irrational person. An irrational person whose love was so bright that it blinded him or her to reality.
There was a logic to the illogical situation, which was not as comforting as it should have been.
Or maybe it had just been a break-in, after all. That mystery figure in the back hallway, running away from the scene. Couldn’t we leave the mantle of responsibility hanging from that person’s neck?
But—neck.
To stab someone in the neck seemed so personal. A stranger could have stabbed Malloy in the chest and gotten away. Even if he had lived, a stranger might never have been tied to the crime. The screwdriver in the jugular was too intimate. Too brutal.
Pried from the neck of the bottle Dev had tried to open,
and thrust into the neck of the only person in the house everyone loved without reason. It made no sense.
I tried to picture the scene. The screwdriver was the problem. Surely there had been better weapons in the kitchen, one drawer pull away. Hadn’t the wine opener, far sharper, been just as close? The screwdriver was the weapon of a crime of passion and reaction, not a plan. So it must have been already pulled from the bottle, to be the thing to grab.
I sat down on the edge of the tub and closed my eyes. I tried to remember. The wine bottle tipped over, dripping. The wine opener sitting in the puddle. His lips, wine stained. The only reason to pull the screwdriver from the bottle would be to serve the wine.
A late-night drink between friends, a private moment ruined by a rush of anger and betrayal.
Of possession.
No stranger, then. A friend.
I couldn’t get the idea out of my head once it was there. I knew what it felt like to want to be the one, the only—and to have those hopes dashed in a particularly public way. I knew. It was the kind of feeling that made you want to kill someone.
Chapter Twelve
In the early hours of morning, the doorknob to my room began to rattle.
I sat up and pulled my T-shirt and jeans from the floor. My heart thudded in my chest. I reached for the phone, hesitated. Those damn extras.
The night before, I had pulled the desk chair across the room and lodged it under the knob, a precaution that had felt silly even to myself. But I had stayed in a house overnight—almost overnight—with a group of people who had sacrificed one of their own. One of the five of them was dangerous, and the locks on these old hotel doors were low-tech and ancient. A screwdriver, I’d mused to myself as I dragged the chair across the room. Yes, a screwdriver would do the trick. On the lock and then on me.
I tiptoed to the door and watched it shake in its frame. A rasping whisper came from the other side. “Martha,” the voice said. “Open the damn door.”
It was Sam.
I had been awake practically every second of the night and felt dizzy and exhausted. The few hours of sleep I’d gotten the night before were long gone. I rubbed at my face. “What do you want?” I whispered.
“My room has a mouse,” he said. “Let me stay with you. Come on. I brought wine . . . or a reasonable facsimile, anyway. Let me in.”
I yanked open the door. “Wrong room.”
Sam stammered, blinking into the light. He seemed a little drunk already, but then what else would any of them have done with their time? I’d been a little drunk myself not a few hours ago. Now my mouth was dry and thick.
“I thought— Oh, crap,” Sam said. “I don’t know which room she’s in and now I don’t know which room I came from.” He patted his pockets. “And I don’t have my key.”
Behind him, it was that gray hour of dawn. Not dark enough that I couldn’t deal with it, but still, I wasn’t comfortable. I hadn’t slept in a room with a man in nine months. Not that I hadn’t had offers. I simply chose not to be alone with a man, not to subject myself to the mess and noise of other people, to intimacy. The intimacy of boxer shorts hanging from the newel post. Sam looked at me hopefully. I gestured into the room.
“Thanks so much,” Sam said. “Yours is as dumpy as mine—but no mice, right?” He peered into the corners, nervously pulling at his beard.
“Not that I’ve noticed,” I said. “But I’ve been awake all night, so I’m pretty sure no, no mice.”
“Maybe all these lights are keeping them away.” He looked at me sheepishly.
“Dev told you,” I said.
“Well, he said—something. I’m not sure I understood it, but—can I be honest? I get it now. I couldn’t sleep tonight, and then that mouse chewing, chewing.” His eyes were bloodshot, haunted. “I should have left the lights on, except I was afraid I’d see cockroaches.”
Something new to consider. I went to the bed and sat on the edge to put my shoes on, before something ran across my toes. “You should have had more wine, I guess.”
“That’s the plan,” he said, walking into the bathroom and coming out with two plastic cups, still in the wrappers. He tore them open roughly, a kid at Christmas. The bottle had already been opened and, I thought, tipped back a few times. He poured the cups full and set one on the bedside table for me. “I should probably give it up.”
“That seems unlikely, given your line of work.”
He pulled the chair away from the door and sat. “Well,” he said. His first drink was not the sip of a connoisseur but the gulp of a parched drunk. “I’ve worked with wine my entire career, that’s true.” His entire career, which was only about five years long, but who was I to judge? Me, with no career to speak of. “But I’m ready for a change, so why not explore other interests?”
The line sounded rehearsed to me. “What are your other interests?”
He laughed. “OK, you got me. I live for wine. I have no idea what I’m going to do.”
I gave up on the laces of my shoes. They were harder to tie than I remembered. I was so tired. I didn’t need wine. My head was already spinning from exhaustion and whatever evil had been in that bottle downstairs.
“So why did I leave the job?” he said, prompting me. “I should work on what I’ll say when people ask.”
“Let’s pretend people just did.”
He searched the corners again, for time, it seemed, instead of mice. “I went up for a promotion and it didn’t work out.”
Malloy had helped him prepare for a move up the ladder. Hadn’t Hillary said Malloy had spent the time to give Sam a pep talk, maybe even when he hadn’t wanted to? Why hadn’t he wanted to? What kind of friends where these? They may have been close once, but I’d seen little evidence they still were. “You didn’t get the promotion so you quit?”
“Stubborn pride.”
“Very stubborn.”
He took a drink, wouldn’t look my way. “Unbelievably stubborn, would you say?”
“What really happened?”
Some of the overconfidence I’d seen in Sam and his friends returned. His face became a mask. “I don’t know you,” he said. “Why would I tell you anything?”
“Do you think you’d like to wait for the office to open, alone in the parking lot? I bet they have rats the size of—”
“Fine,” Sam said. He sat forward with his elbows on his knees and talked to his shoes. “I went after a promotion. Malloy gave me some pointers. We went over everything . . . my worth, what I’d brought to the company, all of it. He helped me script it out. I had a really good shot.” The confidence was gone, and in its place, Sam was just some slob slumped over bad wine. He picked at a loose bit of the fake leather on the edge of the chair’s seat. “At least I thought so, and so did Malloy. To hear him tell it. Malloy has—had a way . . . Have you ever known someone who could pump you up so full of life’s possibilities that you think you can do anything? That you think you might be someone else entirely?”
What had Malloy said? That he had a way of bullying people into things?
And, yes, I had known someone like that, in fact, though Bix’s good-natured manipulations had been engaged most often to get me to forgive him for being an hour late when he’d said he’d be gone five minutes. He’d had energy left over to try to remake me, to shape me into someone else. I wish I could say I’d been impervious to these efforts. “Did you want the promotion?
“Of course,” he said, coming back to himself. “Yes. More money, better title, more travel, managing a few people. It was a step up, a step toward owning my own business. It was everything.” He looked at the cup of wine with disgust and set it at his feet.
“But?”
“But I got passed over, of course.” He let his head fall into the palms of his hands, pulling his hair back against his skull, exposing how deeply his hairline had already receded. “By a guy with two years’ less experience. I trained him. He was younger than me, all talk, knew everything until, you know, you needed h
im to do something. That shit-for-brains was going to be my boss, so I . . . I quit.”
Interesting that the guy with nothing going for him had beaten him out, but I didn’t ask. I still didn’t understand why he couldn’t work in wine distribution somewhere else, but I had the feeling I was missing things that were perfectly clear. I blinked and felt the world pull back and slide into place in slow motion. Click-kuh. It was going to be a long drive back to Chicago, if I ever got the chance to do it. “What time is it?” I said.
“Late. Or early, I guess,” Sam said, spinning his watch around his wrist a few times. He had a large nautical device on his wrist, like Malloy’s. He studied the face of the watch for a long moment without revealing what time it read. “I’m not sure I’ll bother with sleep. We have to be back at the station in a couple of hours.” He shook his head in apparent wonder.
“What’s it like to think that one of your friends might have killed the other?”
He let the silence go on so long I thought he intended not to answer. And then: “It feels like the end of the world. Like the absolute end of the world.”
This was the correct answer. I shook my own head to try to clear my thoughts. “When you said Hillary had accused one of you of killing your best friend—”
“I said our best friend,” he said. He stood and went to the window. The sun’s rays were finding inroads around the thick, stained curtains. “All of us. We’re best friends.”
“But that’s not how best works,” I said. “Which of you was Malloy’s closest friend? Dev? You? Not Paris.”
He turned to me, frowning. “Why not Paris?”
“Just—never mind.”
“Well,” he said. “I guess the obvious answer was that none of us were, not really. Or he could have counted on making it out of this reunion alive.”
WE WAITED OUT the long hour in the room until the sun raged through the curtains. I couldn’t sleep in the room with Sam there anymore than I’d been able to before he showed up. “Do you mind if I turn on the radio?” I said, and found a soft, droning voice on the local station again. I dozed a little to the gentleness of it, waking to hear about the stars again.
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