Say No More

by Hank Phillippi Ryan

  People hardly ever looked up. Most kept their eyes forward, or down, or focused on the screens of their cells. She took a deep breath, smelling the green of the summer leaves, and the hot gray pavement, even a faint pink scent from some distant garden. Being outside, even this far, made being alive bearable. She could pretend she was part of the world. Watch the seasons change, see the different light, feel the rain in her hair.

  She relied on her binoculars. The ones she’d once happily carried to symphony performances and the Boston Lyric Opera, the time they sang Otello on the Boston Common. Even sitting far back in the students’ cheap seats, the binocs had allowed her to perceive the love and joy on the performers’ faces, the intensity, the power. Being in a crowd like that now? Even the idea made her kinda queasy. She balanced herself against the wobbly railing again, recovering. She was fine.

  Now without her binoculars, she watched the world in real size. How the pedestrians moved in a flow, the rhythm of the morning. Fifteen stories below, the traffic light changed, a horn honked, cars surged forward. The world was going on. Without her. Was that fair?

  Because her situation, her solitude, was not her fault. Should she call Jane, that reporter? She’d been chewing on that question, mulling it over, imagining outcomes, ever since their phone conversation yesterday. Jane had been … persuasive. And it was verging on possible that what she’d said was true. Maybe, if Isabel talked to her, talked to anyone, it would help her feel safe.

  She lifted the binoculars to her face again, canceling reality, more comfortable in her own private experience. She could make out faces now, her once-classmates, and strangers. And, yes, she did, she looked for “him,” every day. She’d marked the days on her calendar, a red dot under the black X’s, with the exact time, on the days she’d caught a glimpse of him. Alone, or in a pack of guys, or his arm linked with some girl’s. She’d see him all the time, going into the library or Java Jim’s. Nothing he ever did was predictable. So she had to keep watch.

  “Keeping watch,” she said out loud. Then sang the words, “Keeping watch!” Trilling a full C octave, “Sorvegliare!,” imagining Tosca from her balcony.

  Tosca. Should she call Jane?

  Wait. On the street.

  Isabel adjusted the focus of the binocs, twisting the ridged plastic dial, not moving the lenses from her eyes. Clearly—two hundred times more clearly than her regular vision, to be exact—it was Edward Tarrant, strolling up Brookline Ave. Behind him, a woman with long blond hair wearing a black dress, carrying a huge tote bag.

  Tarrant. She narrowed her eyes, watching.

  His office, in Colonial Hall, was across the street from her building, next to the yellow bricks and flower-filled stone pots of Adams Bay’s Endicott Library. Not that Isabel hadn’t tried, once, maybe twice, to see into his window, but the angle was wrong. She’d never seen him walking up the Ave, hadn’t seen him in person since that day in his office, last May to be exact, last May twenty-first, to be even more exact.

  He stopped now, at the crosswalk in front of the drugstore. The woman was right next to him, and he waved her to go ahead as the walk light changed, and she lifted her hand like, thank you, as they crossed the street. Were they together? But the blonde went through the big revolving doors and into Endicott Library. Tarrant entered Colonial Hall. Lucky woman. Edward Tarrant was someone she’d be better off not knowing.

  “He’s going to his office, Fish,” Isabel said. “Ready to ruin someone else’s life.”

  JANE RYLAND

  Jane had to get back outside. Into the sunshine. Out of the dingy half-light of ENG Receive, away from the sirens and blood and destruction. And away from that three-word note she’d received, even though it was probably nothing. Any good reporter got such things. After all, their jobs required them to make some people unhappy.

  But the crash video—there was no uncertainty about that. She and Fiola could turn it off, fade it to black with the click of a button, but they still had to handle the reality. The man, bloodied and motionless, was certainly not the same man she’d consoled at the fender bender.

  Now she and Fiola were approaching Cuppa Joe’s, brainstorming it.

  “You think it could be coincidence that there’d be two accidents, hit-and-runs?” Jane held the coffee shop door open. “Both with Gormay trucks? How can that be?”

  Fiola shrugged. “Why would the driver think he—or she—could get away with it?”

  “Large skim iced latte,” Jane said to the barista. She turned to Fiola. “You? My treat.”

  “Caramel mochaccino,” she said. “And a chocolate croissant.”

  Jane pulled out her cell, thumbed in a search as the barista waved them to the waiting line. “Hit-and-runs,” she typed. “Unsolved.”

  “Look at this,” she said, showing Fiola her phone screen. “This says last year in Massachusetts? Almost eighty thousand hit-and-runs. And most are unsolved.”

  Their coffees arrived, Fiola’s huge croissant taking up all the room on a section of waxed paper.

  “Your coffee,” Fiola announced.

  “Thanks. Drunk drivers, unlicensed drivers, texting drivers.” Jane stabbed a straw into the lid of her plastic cup, intent on her search. “Lots of reasons to run from an accident. That’s why the DA is going crazy over it.”

  “Maybe someone was out to get Gormay,” Fiola theorized as the door to the coffee shop slid shut behind them. “Or the drivers.”

  “Huh.” Jane played out that scenario, taking her first icy hit of caffeine. “Maybe that’s why our Gormay driver looked so frightened.”

  If she were a street reporter, she’d call Gormay—silly name—and get a comment. She jiggled her ice, thinking. Two hit-and-runs on the same company’s vehicle? And now one of the drivers might be dead?

  “If we could get the victims’ names,” Jane said as they walked, “maybe we could figure out who’s behind it. Whatever ‘it’ is.”

  “And maybe our opening-of-school documentary could go on the air next year instead.” Fiola was frowning. “You sure you’re up for this, Jane? Maybe you want to go back on the street? I’m sure Marsh and I could arrange it.”

  “No, no.” Day two, and her producer was already second-guessing her commitment. “Can’t wait to do the Tosca interview. If she calls. Here’s to that.” She toasted Fiola with her coffee as they waited to cross Cambridge Street.

  “I’m curious, too, though, gotta admit,” Fiola said. At a break in the cars they scurried across, ignoring the light, got safely to the sidewalk. “If the second guy lives,” Fiola went on, “he might be able to describe the car. Or the driver.”

  Middle-aged, Caucasian, widow’s peak … Jane stopped, mid-sidewalk, so quickly Fiola almost slammed into her. Luckily their coffees had lids.

  “Listen. What if I identify the guy this afternoon?” Jane’s stomach flipped as she remembered her two o’clock obligation. “If they have the right guy for our hit-and-run, all they have to do is find where he was, or where his car was, last night at eleven twenty-two.”

  Fiola nodded. “I see where you’re going.”

  “If the same driver caused both accidents…” Jane tried to figure out what that might mean. Wondered whether anyone at Gormay had gotten a note warning “SAY NO MORE.”

  “Maybe an insurance fraud thing?” Fiola said. “McCusker’d eat that up.”

  “Yeah,” Jane replied. McCusker. Which reminded her, again, of the journalism quicksand she’d landed in.

  “Thing is.” Jane held the door for Fiola as they went inside. “It’s not only the stupid letter. Now I also have to decide whether to tell McCusker we’ve got video of that second hit-and-run.”

  The door slammed behind them, and they were back on the job. No more stalling.

  “You know what, Fee?” Jane tossed her empty coffee into the security guard’s wastebasket. “Getting involved stinks.”

  ISABEL RUSSO

  Should she get involved? Isabel “took a walk,” as she calle
d it, to figure that out. Circling her apartment, fifty-one times, she’d decided, was sufficient exercise for each morning. She did yoga, did stretches, she was still in fairly good shape, even without going to the gym, like she used to. Or running, like she used to. Now, wearing her running shorts and shoes and purple Nike top, she did “circuits” of her apartment. Sometimes, before dawn and before anyone could possibly be awake, she’d put on her running shoes, go out in the hallway, and run, very softly, thirty-five times, up and down. No one had ever seen her, but it made her heart beat so fast to do it she almost couldn’t, and avoided it until her body cried out for motion.

  But today she would stay inside. She started at her refrigerator, then took the seven steps to the living room, trotted between the couch and the coffee table, turned right at the TV, passed the couch again. Thinking about Edward Tarrant, on his walk, outside, able to go wherever he wanted.

  Down the hall on the right side, passing the too-small bathroom, into the bedroom. Down the right wall, turn past the bed, past the footboard, up the other side, along the back wall, down the hall again. Sometimes she sang, top of her lungs, doing her circuits until she sang an entire aria. Often “O mio babbino caro,” one of her favorites, so anguished, pleading for her true love. “Nessun dorma,” too, though a song for a man. Puccini made her feel strong, and even potentially triumphant. “Vincerò,” the final exultant word. I will win. “Vincerò”: I will win. Would she win this time?

  Sometimes she walked, making the time go by. Sometimes she marched, trying to laugh, trying to remember the days when life had no baggage. Sometimes, like now, she couldn’t resist, had to think about “him.” Like that day, just yesterday, how he’d looked, strutting up the street. How he’d probably not even recognize her if he saw her again.

  Not even recognize her?

  She’d recognize him. For sure. As her steps quickened, she remembered every Facebook posting she could. She’d scoured the Internet, sometimes staying up all night doing it, finding photos and videos, from Facebook and Instagram and sometimes Snapchat. She’d copied each one, with ritual and reverence, and saved it, with all her notes, to a special file. A file she labeled “Someday.”

  Someday. She felt her frown deepen as she began the next circuit, approaching the refrigerator, and the days-to-go calendar she’d magneted to the fridge door. She’d be out of here, soon, someday soon, soon she’d cross off today on her calendar and then Gormay would arrive and—

  She stopped, sank to the floor in the middle of the kitchen, feeling the cool hardness of the linoleum against her bare thighs. Her rainbow crystal caught the light, played it over her skin. As she looked up she saw not the crystal, but her cell phone, on the kitchen table, the black sliver of technology that could connect her to her future. Was Someday now? All she had to do was pick up the phone.

  She reached toward it, then let her arm fall back to her side. She wanted justice, no matter what Tarrant had instructed, no matter what her mother did, no matter what anything. But how could that happen without letting everyone know how dumb she was?

  “I wasn’t dumb!” She surprised herself as the words came out, so loud and biting and bitter in the silent room. But she was right. She wasn’t dumb. She was … harmed. And if she didn’t have the courage to say so? Whose fault was that?

  A scene began to emerge, the role she’d play, the lines she’d say and the lines she wouldn’t. It would be … embarrassing? Silly? Pitiful? To admit how she was not exactly stalking him, but keeping a special file. So she wouldn’t say that. She didn’t have to tell everything.

  She felt herself smiling, felt her posture changing to inhabit the role, become a … she selected each word, carefully. “Quietly suffering ingénue.” She smiled, adding one more. Quietly suffering but “crusading” ingénue. She would keep some secrets, thank you very much. About her personal life, she would say no more. That wasn’t—how had Tarrant put it that day?—relevant.

  Her face changed. She could feel the frown return and the muscles in her back stiffen. What was “relevant”—she spit out the word in her head—what was relevant was that she was raped, assaulted, drugged, violated. She piled the disgusting words on top of each other, building her case and her wall of anger and revenge.

  Tarrant had ordered her to stay quiet. She didn’t even want to remember the conversation he’d had with her, and later, with her mother. He’d ordered them never to mention “his” name. And she’d agreed.

  Well, she could do that. Exactly as she’d promised. And still win. The ingénue-feeling returned, and with it a tantalizing hint of the future, her happy future, her safe and powerful future. Her freedom. This would be her first truly starring role.

  All she had to do was call Jane Ryland.

  Call Jane and say yes.

  And, she thought, Vincerò!

  21

  WILLOW GALT

  Willow Galt pushed through the revolving doors of Endicott Library, smiled at the auburn-haired librarian behind the curved mahogany front counter. Her arms goose-bumped with the blast of air-conditioning as she entered the library’s main hall, and she clutched the tote bag tighter.

  Maybe this was risky. She’d imagined a dark enclave, musty shelves, an air of forgetting, and of the forgotten. But a bright-lighted display of “Books to Take to the Cape,” festooned with fishing net, took center stage of the first-floor great room, an array of pastel-covered novels with Adirondack chairs and flip-flops on the front, the kind she’d read—was it only last year?—as her final summer as Daniella ended three thousand miles from here. No time for that now, for froth or romance.

  She turned right, determined, toward the elevator. Seconds after she pushed the “up” arrow, it arrived, onyx doors sliding open with a soft welcoming ping. Empty. Willow slipped in, pushed a black button to close the doors, then the white one marked “3.”

  She could almost feel heat from the book she carried in her bag, feel its power and its secrets.

  The rattle of the cables began, a smooth ride, past 2, and then, with another soft ping, stopping on 3. The doors opened. She and Avery had never been here together, though they’d talked of it. And now here she was, by herself, because of Avery. In so many ways.

  Floor three was designed for academics, Avery had explained, and for storage. One long metal table lined the wall nearest the elevator, a row of chairs, empty—hurray—along its edge. The rest of the room was crowded with ceiling-high gray metal bookshelves, each row double-sided and crammed face-to-face-to-face with bound manuscripts, maybe ten shelves deep, Willow estimated, crowded together and accessible only by turning a spoked metal wheel attached to each side.

  “A graveyard of blood, sweat, and fears where no one ever goes,” Avery had proclaimed, describing the student papers she’d read and evaluated, and how they were stored on the third floor of Endicott. “If I have to read another thesis on ‘Strong Women in Puccini’ I’ll…” Avery had laughed again, that laugh, taken another swig of wine. “Their parents pay all that money. But no one ever looks at them again.”

  No one ever looks at them again. Willow could hear that voice, almost as if, now, Avery was giving advice from the grave.

  She put her tote bag on the long table, then counted four shelves from the front, because Tom’s real birthday was in April. Clamped both hands on the stubby handle of the turning wheel, and cranked to the right, once, twice, saw the bottom edges of the shelves slide noiselessly across metal runners set into the floor. Two turns, then three, revealed a narrow mini-corridor, walled by hundreds of bound manuscripts. Each bore a catalog number of some kind, written in black or white ink, depending, on the lower spine.

  She stood, feeling the silence, thinking of needles in haystacks. Haystacks no one would even think of searching. She had no connection with Adams Bay, no reason to be in this library. There would be no record of her being here. This was a haystack in a haystack. She counted four sections toward the wall. There.

  She heard her heartbeat,
or felt it, or imagined it, as she unzipped the top of her tote bag and reached in. She felt the still-cool black leather, held it in her arms, clutched it to her chest. With a deep sigh, she imagined bougainvillea and California sunshine, neither of which she was likely to ever see again. Four rows in, four sections down, four rows up.

  Remembering to keep the manuscripts in order, she extracted two of them from their place on the shelf, then two more, then two more. Placing her treasure flat against the back of the shelf, she then replaced the manuscripts where they belonged. One after another she walled up her scrapbook behind all the other volumes, not even its top edge showing, obscured by the other books.

  She stared at the place where her scrapbook was, memorized the numbers on the spines of the one to its left and to its right. Whispered them. Then, fearing her sorrow and the distractions certain to come, pulled out her wallet and a pencil to write them … uh, where? On the back of her new Social Security card. She wrote the numbers, smiled, and returned it to its place behind her new driver’s license and her new health insurance card.

  “Stay safe,” she whispered the words to her scrapbook. “I’ll come back and get you when I can.”

  JAKE BROGAN

  “Where the hell is she?” Jake, muttering, used the side of one fist to bang on the front door of the Galts’ brownstone. They’d been heading for Adams Bay to follow up on Avery Morgan, but instead Jake turned their cruiser up Ionian Street to the Galts’. He needed to chat, one more time, with Willow—the woman who’d called 911, but wouldn’t discuss it. He scratched his head, waited for sounds from inside. Movement, or a television being turned off. Heard nothing.

  Maybe Ms. Galt was simply an innocent Good Samaritan. And he was making too much of it. But if that was the case, why all the mystery?

  “No car in the driveway,” D said, joining him at the top of the front steps. “Newspaper’s gone. They’re probably not home.”

  “I see why you get the big detective bucks,” Jake said. “So. My online search. At first run-through, picking the low-hanging social media fruit, there’s nothing about the Galts. So far.”