The 22 Murders of Madison May

by Max Barry

She didn’t know what to say. He might search for years. He might search forever.

  Hugo glanced at his watch. “Are you done? I want to show you something.”

  He led her to the back of the restaurant and pushed through a door. In the narrow hallway, he filled the entire space, blocking out light. He tested the doorknob on the left, which turned, admitting them to a gloomy . . . staircase? Hallway? She couldn’t tell.

  “Do you have your bag?” he asked.

  “Yes,” she said, and as soon as the word came out of her mouth, she realized what was happening. “Wait,” she said. She heard the door close. “Wait, wait!” He had lied to her about how much time she had. She saw the faint blue glow of Hugo’s wristwatch, because he had silenced the alarm, of course. The twitch wasn’t tomorrow morning. It was now.

  “Hold it,” Hugo said, his voice rough. He pressed an object into her hands, something hard and smooth and bitterly cold. His hand enveloped hers.

  “No!” she said. “No!” There was a sensation of being crushed, of her breath being scooped out of her lungs. She lost her balance in the dark and didn’t know where she was.

  * * *

  —

  The door opened. In the low light, Hugo was standing in the doorway, a silhouette; she couldn’t make out his face.

  “Let’s go,” he said.

  She was still holding the egg. She was unsteady, but gathered her bag and pushed past him. She didn’t wait, but walked directly through the restaurant and out onto the street. After a minute, Hugo fell into step beside her. “Leave me alone,” she said.

  “You couldn’t stay there, Felicity. You—”

  She turned and pushed him with both hands. It was like trying to shift a refrigerator. “Leave me alone!”

  Heads turned. She began to walk and this time he didn’t follow. He didn’t want attention; the last thing he needed now, in a new place, was to attract police. She walked and walked and soon enough was alone. She wandered through the city like a tourist. At Battery Park, she hailed a cab. “Where to?” the driver asked, and without thinking, she said, “Home,” then laughed, because of course he didn’t know where that was, and neither did she.

  * * *

  —

  Outside her building, she asked the driver to wait until she’d made sure her key worked. There was a busted light in the elevator. The hallway was painted pale green instead of light blue. She eased her key into the lock, because it was almost midnight, and she knew how loud that sound could be. She slipped inside and closed the door.

  A hulking shape lurked by the blinds. She sucked in her breath before recognizing it as a cat tower. A very particular model of cat tower, which she’d almost bought online a few months ago. She exhaled shakily.

  Percival came bobbing across the floor. She bent and began to stroke him. Then there was a noise she hadn’t heard in a long time, and at first she couldn’t believe it, hadn’t even been thinking about the possibility, but it was Joey, meowing, which he almost never did, and she picked him up and held him close. “Joey,” she said, “Joey,” and it was so stupid, but she was crying, because she’d become so used to losing things, she’d forgotten she could get them back.

  * * *

  —

  She slept on the sofa beneath a throw rug. At five-thirty, she showered and dressed in clothes she found in the hamper. She hid her gun at the bottom of dirty laundry, wrapped in a pillowcase that never got washed. She did all this quietly, because there was a Gavin in the bedroom, she presumed. A new Gavin, whose long-term girlfriend had been silently extinguished in the night.

  She couldn’t think about that, so she sat at the table and began to research Maddie. She had done this so many times that she already knew where to look. First she brought up the website for Tagline Artists Group, but this time Maddie wasn’t in their listings. Instead, her name and picture popped up in the client list of a Los Angeles– based talent agency, Proximate Artists. There were no records of Maddie performing in L.A., though, whereas she had definitely headlined a community theater production of A Streetcar Named Desire, so she still lived locally, probably in the same apartment, which Felicity had identified from previous stalking. She tried Maddie’s phone number and was told by a robot the number wasn’t in service. Phone numbers were a problem, Felicity had noticed. They were different a lot.

  The bedroom door opened. Gavin emerged, wearing faded blue pajama pants and nothing else. No beard, Felicity was relieved to see. No fancy clothes. Nothing to suggest she was looking at a new Gavin. He rubbed his face. “Morning.” He went to the fridge and pulled it open. “What time did you get up?”

  “I don’t know,” she said. “Early.”

  “Did you go for a run?”

  That sounded like a convenient explanation: She had risen early to go for a run. But she wasn’t sure she had the physical evidence to support that. She shook her head.

  He poured a glass of chilled water. “Joey’s friendly this morning.”

  She smiled. Joey was under her chair. By his standards, this was audacious. She reached down and he nudged her wrist with his head.

  Gavin came and stood behind her. “Who’s that?”

  “No one. It’s for a story.”

  “She’s in politics?”

  Felicity shook her head. “It’s a crime story.”

  “You’re reporting crime stories?”

  “Just this one.”

  “Huh,” he said. “That makes sense, actually.”

  “Really?”

  “You get so mad when you expose some comptroller or politician and there are no consequences. Crime, at least they sometimes go to prison.” He kissed the top of her head and walked back to the kitchen. “You have to do something. You’re not happy where you are. Anyway, are we doing this?”

  “Doing what?”

  “The shoes.”

  She didn’t know what “the shoes” meant. “I guess,” she said.

  “We don’t have to. I don’t want to, you know, force you to make shoes.”

  She squinted. “Did you say ‘make shoes’?”

  He nodded. “Seriously, it’s not mandatory. We can pull out.”

  She had an actor and a murderer to research. She had to figure out where they were and whether one was still a threat to the other. And then there was Hugo, whom she couldn’t even think about without getting angry. Who apparently intended to drag her through worlds, whether she wanted to move or not.

  She stared at him. “Okay.”

  “Yes?” He smiled. “I was lying. I actually really do want to make shoes with you.”

  “I’ll make shoes.” She was actually kind of interested now. “How do we . . .”

  “Make shoes?”

  “Yes,” she said.

  “I guess we’ll find out,” Gavin said.

  * * *

  —

  It was a shoe-making course—literally a class on how to make shoes—in a dusty second-floor workshop in Williamsburg. A wire-haired old man shuffled between tables, peering over his spectacles as they cut shapes from leather, cork, and rubber. There were ten other students, all of whom had a decade or more on Felicity and Gavin, causing the instructor, Herb, to refer to them as the young man and the young woman.

  Her phone dinged as she was trimming her feet. At the start of the class, they had created molds by sinking their feet into shoeboxes of pale blue alginate jelly, then fitting silicone rubber into the impression. Felicity hadn’t realized she had such a haughty middle toe. She extracted the phone from her bag and the screen read: It’s done. The sender was an unidentified number, but she could guess it was Hugo.

  “Look at how the young man is holding his cutting knife,” Herb said. “Very good. Pay attention, young woman. Yes, young man. Index finger along the blade. Push it straight down.”

  T
he cutting knife, Felicity thought. A strange thing to call a knife; weren’t they all for cutting? But she supposed some weren’t; they were for piercing, for stabbing.

  “Bravo!” cried Herb, as Gavin produced a shoe-shaped cut of leather. He looked at her, delighted.

  “Very good,” she said. It’s done. He could only mean one thing by that, surely.

  “Want me to cut your leather?” Gavin said. “Apparently, I’m kind of a natural.”

  “I can cut my own shoes.” That was the point of this exercise, she had gathered. To make shoes, for the simple fact of doing it yourself. Because clearly she could go out and purchase perfectly fine shoes that didn’t require eighteen hours’ work over three weeks and nine hundred dollars. Better shoes, even. But there was a self-sufficiency thing here. A reconnecting. Or a connecting in the first place. This must have been Gavin’s idea; it was the kind of low-key excitement he enjoyed.

  “I mean, you say that,” Gavin said, “but you are, actually, not cutting your own shoes.”

  “Watch me,” she said, and picked up the cutting knife.

  * * *

  —

  She replied to Hugo with a brief but pointed message: What does that mean? She watched her screen bobble with the symbol that meant he was reading her message, until, maddeningly, it disappeared with no reply. She spent the next few hours getting worked up about that, finally tapping out: What the fuck is happening?

  By nightfall he still hadn’t replied. Gavin suggested a movie on the sofa and she agreed, because she needed something to help her stop thinking. An idea occurred to her. “By the River Blue?”

  “What’s that? A movie?”

  “Yes.”

  He scrolled the TV. On her phone, Felicity found an article that suggested it hadn’t been made yet: It was still in preproduction. She skimmed but saw no mention of Maddie.

  “Or we could just go to bed,” he said.

  She felt herself flinch. “I . . . Not tonight. I have a headache,” she said, like a cliché, like the dullest woman in the world. “I had fun today,” she added.

  “Me, too.”

  It was awkward and she didn’t know what to do. This was a good Gavin, she felt; the closest yet to the man she remembered—although that was becoming hard to be sure about; they were blurring in her mind. Their similarities were greater than their differences. “I love you,” she said, because it occurred to her that she never said it first. It was always him prompting her.

  He looked at her. “I realized something about you today.”

  “Oh?” she said, instantly wary.

  “When we were making shoes.”

  His expression was solemn. She said, “What did you realize?”

  “You’re my sole mate.”

  She laughed.

  He put an arm around her and she curled into him. “This?” he said, nodding at a show on the TV, some kind of comedy, and she nodded and said sure, and they watched that.

  * * *

  —

  The morning brought a message from Hugo. She read it over and over even though it was short enough to memorize:

  All good. We’ll meet soon. I’ll let you know.

  She was glad he’d replied. But she also wanted to track him down and shake him until useful information fell out. She confined herself to a single word, when?, then put away the phone and forced herself not to look at it. A few hours later, it dinged with a new message:

  Available now? Bring token.

  “I’m going to reheat these leftovers for lunch,” Gavin called from the kitchen. “You want some?”

  “Um,” she said. “I have to meet a friend.”

  “For lunch?”

  “Yes.” She glanced up. He was looking at her. “Actually, I’m already late.” She gathered her bag and keys, feeling like a scarlet woman. “Is that all right?” she said, more aggressively than she intended.

  “Sure,” Gavin said.

  * * *

  —

  Hugo had chosen a coffee shop wedged between a nail salon and a laundromat on Flatbush Avenue. He was wearing a clean red shirt she hadn’t seen before. He had cut his hair. She took the seat opposite, feeling slightly underdressed, since she’d run out of the apartment in chalk-pink shorts and a ratty white top. “Well?” she said.

  “Want to order?” Hugo said. “I’m just having coffee.”

  “No,” she said, but the server appeared, a dude with rolled-up sleeves. To make him go away, she ordered a sandwich. “Did you get a haircut?”

  He looked surprised. “I did. Why?”

  “No reason.” But really, how the fuck had he found the time to do that, while she was waiting to hear what had happened to Clay.

  “Do you like it?”

  “It makes your ears stick out,” she said. “Where’s Clay?”

  He smirked. Not a great look on him. Smug did not suit him. “We got him.”

  She refused to process this until she was certain. “What does that mean?”

  “What do you think it means? He came through, they were ready. It worked just like it was supposed to. Because you and I held him up long enough in the last place.”

  She felt light-headed. It was what she’d wanted to hear, but now that she had, she couldn’t reply, for fear of ruining it somehow.

  “Every other world out there,” Hugo said, “Maddie’s safe, because of you.”

  She nodded. She ducked her head, because all of a sudden, she thought she might cry. “How did . . . what did they do to him?”

  “You can hear it from them directly. They’re letting you in.”

  She looked up.

  “Thirteen minutes past eleven tomorrow morning. That’s when we move. All of us. Including you. You can see it, Felicity. You can come see what the world looks like when it’s not like this.”

  “Hugo,” she said.

  “I know. But if you see it for yourself, you’ll change your mind. Just give it a chance, Felicity. Make an informed decision.”

  “I made my decision,” she said. “One move ago.”

  He scowled. “You never met the person who was here before, and when you leave, you’ll never see anyone from this place again. It doesn’t matter.”

  “Is that really what you think?”

  “It’s the truth.”

  The server delivered her sandwich. She waited until he’d gone. Then she opened her bag, took out the egg, and put it on the table.

  He didn’t look at it. “Please,” he said, and then something amazing: “I don’t want to lose you.”

  She looked at the sandwich. This was a lot. On top of the news about Clay, it was a lot. She could feel Hugo’s gaze on her like the warmth of a midday sun, and she took her time raising her eyes to meet it, because for a moment she felt untethered, as if he could pull her along in his wake simply from the sheer force of being. Drag her forward forever, never looking back.

  “You don’t actually make better worlds, do you?” she said, because this had been bothering her awhile, ever since the woman in the tower, Henrietta, had talked about her favorite perfume. “You don’t change anything. Everything you bring with you was already there. All you do is move somewhere you like better.”

  Hugo was silent.

  “You only make the world better for yourselves,” she said.

  Still no answer. He didn’t try to lie, at least. There was that.

  “I’m glad we stopped Clay. I’m happy you can go places where they won’t always be trying to put you in prison. But I’m done.” She stood and gathered her bag. “And I’m taking this sandwich.”

  She thought he might say something as she walked to the door. But he didn’t. And she felt surprisingly okay about that. She pushed open the door and went out.

  * * *

  —

  She t
ook her sandwich into Prospect Park, where small children were hurling themselves around a playground. A soccer ball rolled by and she tried to kick it without standing up and missed. A boy picked it up and gave her a patronizing look. She had contemplated kids. Having her own, one day. But only in the abstract, because of what Gavin had said to her while driving back from the hospital in Carmel: I can’t tell if you’re happy. She had not been happy. But she could be, she thought. She had gained perspective. She could fix things, starting with herself.

  A girl screamed with laughter and her mother told her to be quiet, she was hurting people’s ears. This was real, Felicity thought. Everything around her was real, no matter how many different versions of it might be playing out in places she couldn’t see.

  She finished her sandwich. She was happy. She was done. She threw the napkin into the trash and began to walk home.

  * * *

  —

  She had a quiet, ordinary evening with Gavin, eating in and going to bed early. In the back of her mind was a clock ticking toward eleven-thirteen a.m., the moment Hugo and the travelers would leave, but for the most part she was able to ignore it. She fell into a doze. Then she woke an indeterminate amount of time later in darkness with terror clamped around her heart. She scrabbled for the lamp. “What is it?” Gavin said.

  Every other world out there, Maddie’s safe, because of you.

  She grabbed her phone and found Hugo’s number. She pressed it to her ear and listened to it ring.

  Every other world.

  “What’s the matter?” Gavin said. He looked around wildly, as if the room might be full of tigers.

  The line clicked. “Felicity?” Hugo said.

  “Is he dead?” she asked.

  She heard rustling. “Felicity, it’s two in the morning.”

  “Is Clay dead?”

  “He’s out of the picture. If you want me to say more, you know where to find me. Tomorrow morning, before eleven.”

  “I know where Maddie lives. I’m going there.”