He ran into Lindsay Crowley at the garage as he waited for the Saab, loaded with boxes of Caroline’s stuff. Lindsay had been walking by their townhouse often, waving Porter down any chance she got to ask about Caroline.
She did so now. “Don’t tell me you’re moving?”
Porter grimaced. The woman’s voice was loud, attracting the attention of everyone within earshot. “Just some spring cleaning.”
“And here it isn’t even springtime,” Lindsay drawled. “Isn’t Caroline the lucky girl? I can’t get my husband to pick up his own socks!”
The customers in line behind them laughed.
Porter stared straight ahead, ignoring the look Lindsay gave him.
“Is Caroline back?” Lindsay stared pointedly at Caroline’s purse, which Porter had grabbed on his way out the door. It was balanced now on top of a moving carton, vulnerable to Lindsay’s prying eyes.
His neck muscles contracted involuntarily. Porter felt his cheeks flare, aware now that everyone within earshot was awaiting his reply. “Probably tomorrow.”
“Probably? You mean you’re not sure? Is she driving or flying?”
It was a dig, he was certain of that. A small reminder that her husband could pull Caroline’s flight records any time he wanted, if he so chose. But he hadn’t. “She hasn’t made up her mind.”
Lindsay looked ready to say more but her Mercedes sedan wheeled into view. The attendant jumped out and held the door, waiting.
But Lindsay Crowley stayed put.
Now the attendant was watching them, too.
“How is Caroline? Is she doing any better?”
Porter held his ground. “Fine.”
Lindsay didn’t move.
Porter shifted his weight and swallowed.
“Well,” Lindsay said finally. She dug inside her purse, jotted something on a business card, and leaned in close enough to envelop him in fruity perfume.
He wrinkled his nose.
Lindsay’s voice close up was soft and lilting. But the look in her eyes was hard enough to match Porter’s own. “You tell that wife of yours she’s missed. I’d be grateful if you would ask her to call me as soon as she gets back. Here’s the number to my cell phone.” She flipped the card with one perfectly manicured hand so that it landed on top of Caroline’s purse.
Porter’s only response was a quick nod. Relief washed over him when his Saab pulled into view.
He popped the trunk and laid the cartons inside, crumpling Lindsay’s business card. He slammed the trunk.
The Mercedes horn blared, too loud in the confined space, making Porter jump.
He glared at Lindsay.
Lindsay Crowley leaned out her driver’s side window, smiling sweetly. “You remember what I said, I need to speak with her as soon as she gets back, you hear?”
She peeled off in a squeal of tires.
The phone on Police Officer Mike Hartung’s desk was on its third ring.
The woman seated across from him, outfitted head to toe in top-of-the-line Nike tennis attire, flashed him a helpful smile. “If you need to answer that, you just go right ahead. I’m not in a hurry.
“Well, not too much of a hurry,” she added after a tiny pause.
Long enough, Officer Hartung guessed, to give him time to reflect on the information she had given him about herself. That she was married to the head of a powerful federal agency and lived “right around the corner” from Police Service Area 2 on Idaho Avenue, N.W. Code, meant to inform him that she dwelt in one of the priceless town homes in this part of Georgetown, an area that Officer Hartung had taken a solemn oath to protect and serve.
Hartung let the call go to voice mail. “I understand your concern, Mrs. Crowley. But in all likelihood, your neighbor is on vacation like her husband said.”
The woman in the tennis skirt kept smiling but shook her head. She placed one manicured, suntanned hand on the surface of his desk.
Hartung wondered if all those diamonds got in the way of her tennis serve, and decided they did not. She was used to them.
“Ah told you,” she repeated, letting her Southern accent show through. “He was carrying boxes of her things to get rid of, to put into his car, and her purse was right there on top.”
Hartung shrugged. “Guy’s allowed to clean his closets.”
“Are you married, Officer Hartung?”
The question caught him off guard. Hartung shrugged. “Everybody’s married.”
Lindsay Crowley beamed as though he showed real promise. She shifted around in her little tennis skirt, and Hartung had to admit that for a woman of a certain age, she had terrific legs.
He looked away.
Lindsay Crowley leaned in close so he got a whiff of her perfume.
Something imported, he’d bet.
“I will tell you something about women’s handbags, and you can check this with your wife when you return home to her this evening,” Mrs. John Crowley said. “That purse was a Louis Vuitton Alma.”
Straightening up, she recrossed her shapely legs, as though nothing more needed to be said.
But Officer Hartung suspected Mrs. John Crowley wasn’t finished with him, not by a Texas mile.
“You see, Officer, the Alma will never go out of style. Never.” Her blue eyes darkened with concern. “No woman would give her Alma away, not if she could help it.”
She let her words hang in the air.
In any other city, Hartung thought, neighbors with a beef would be put through to Dispatch and that would be the end of it. But D.C. had adopted a warm and fuzzy approach, breaking its force down into PSA units so residents could get up close and personal with cops, even implementing a “ride along” program for concerned citizens. “Okay, Mrs. Crowley, here’s what I can do,” he said at last. “I’ll take a walk over there and talk to the guy, see what I can find out.”
The look on her face told him she was not feeling the love. Hartung slid one of his cards across the desk. “Here’s one of my cards. There’s someone here to answer your call twenty-four hours a day. Your job is to call me if you see anything suspicious or tell me as soon as his wife shows up.”
Mrs. Crowley did not touch the card.
“And in the meantime,” Hartung said in his best community-first tone, “I’ll open a file and make an official log of your concern.”
She perked up at that.
Hartung opened a file and readied his fingers on the keyboard. “Now, what is this guy’s name?”
Her next words kicked Hartung’s Spidey sense into full alert.
“Dr. Porter Moross.”
The sixth day brought a fateful turn of events. Porter’s last patient of the day departed at half past three. He donned his walking shoes in the hope that he could wear himself out enough to sleep by nightfall. He headed out and left behind the noisy hubbub of Georgetown’s main streets, crossing Rock Creek on the main thoroughfare of L Street before dropping south on Twenty-seventh Street, staying clear of the western edge of the George Washington University campus.
Caroline’s alma mater. A place, Porter knew, he had no business venturing.
He headed east on E Street with its monolithic office buildings.
At Seventeenth Street he reached his destination, the Corcoran Gallery of Art.
He knew he shouldn’t do what he was about to do, but, like a child who picks at a scab until it bleeds afresh, he couldn’t stop himself.
He climbed the steps and went inside.
The smell that was peculiar to museums, Pine-Sol mixed with preservatives, hit him as soon as he walked through the door. He had met Caroline here for the first time on a September day not unlike this one, and he realized now with a pang they had never been back since.
The Corcoran was privately funded and not a part of the Smithsonian, and so was not filled with the hordes of tourists who lined up each day to enter the National Portrait Gallery barely half a mile south. That fact alone made the place attractive to Porter, not to mention the Corcoran�
��s permanent collection was noteworthy in its own right.
Nobody had loved the place more than Caroline, however, and it occurred to Porter now as he retraced their steps past canvases by Hopper, Cassatt, and Sar-gent, that he had been wrong to dismiss her taste in art as immature.
“I’m going to paint landscapes in oil,” she had told him. “Open spaces.”
“Landscapes don’t leave much room for pure emotion,” Porter had observed. His taste ran toward minimalism, works that were more likely to be found in New York’s MoMA or private galleries, and he’d wound up at the Corcoran that day by default, more in search of a quiet haven from the last of the summer tourists on the Mall than anything else. He hadn’t minded the Turner exhibit, and his decision to stay that day had changed the course of his entire life.
He wandered the halls now, fighting back tears, wishing he could sacrifice a limb for the chance to turn back time and try again to make Caroline happy.
But he could not.
Night was descending when he left the place at closing. He wandered the Mall aimlessly for a while as it emptied of tourists. He studied them, the parents with fanny packs and maps of the Metro corralling bickering children back to their hotels. Porter was filled with a yearning he hadn’t experienced in a long time, not since his own childhood long ago.
He walked back along Constitution Avenue and up into Foggy Bottom, eerily quiet except for the stealthy horde of homeless that set up camp each night on the sidewalk grates that billowed steam from the empty buildings above.
Porter knew most of them suffered from untreated schizophrenia, and odds were one of them might act out a paranoid delusion and end his life before help arrived.
But he was too despondent to care. He wandered north and west finally onto F Street, drawn back against his better judgment directly into the heart of the jostling urban campus of the George Washington University.
Porter knew coming here would only deepen his wound, reopen it right down to its core. But that pain represented a connection to her and to another, ancient wound that would not heal. And more than anything, Porter yearned for some connection with that wound. Anything. So, powerless over his subconscious urges, like his many patients, Porter wandered the crowded streets of Foggy Bottom, alone with his ache.
“Hello. Hey, sir, hello.”
Porter hunched lower into his sports jacket and kept walking.
But the caller was persistent. “Hey, mister, hello.”
Porter stopped and turned. He vaguely recognized the uniformed doorman who had rushed out onto the sidewalk from the lobby of an apartment building.
The man’s English was heavily accented. “Hello, sir. Where’s you wife? I seen you with her sometime but no more.”
Porter scowled and took a step back, signaling he was in a hurry.
The doorman paid no attention. He motioned with one hand near the ground. “And the leettle dog she no bring for me. Peepen, right?”
Porter gave a quick nod, more to shut the guy up than anything else. “Right.”
“I keep treats for him, when he come to stay when missy goes.” The doorman motioned with his chin, smiling, at the fortresslike building that took up the entire next block.
Porter grew very still.
“She finish her project?”
The man pronounced it pro-jhek. Porter became aware of a scratching sensation under his collar from the hairs on the back of his neck, which had begun to move. His wrinkled his nose at the suddenly too strong smell of exhaust from passing cars and nodded. “She did.”
“That’s good,” the man said, still beaming. “Tell her to come say hello. Bring the doggy.”
“I will.” Porter did a quick about-face and headed in the direction the man had indicated.
To the GWU Gelman Library.
A bored-looking guard stopped him at the entrance.
“I forgot my ID,” Porter lied.
The Gelman Library was reserved for use by undergrads.
The guard shrugged and leaned forward slightly. Interested, no doubt, by the prospect of a confrontation. “Listen man, you either come back when you find your student ID or you come into the office and fill out the necessary paperwork.” The guard relaxed against the back of his chair.
No doubt he didn’t get many takers on the offer to fill out paperwork.
Porter looked past him through the entry doors. He hadn’t been inside the place in years. A large bank of computers took up much of the ground floor. “I, uh, just needed to get on a computer. Can I get Internet access here?”
The guard’s eyes narrowed. “Whole place is wired. You can bring your own laptop. But I can’t let you in without a valid student ID.” The man pushed his chair back and made as if to stand, signaling this tête-à-tête had come to an end.
But Porter had learned all he needed to know. Caroline could have talked her way past this guard easily enough, especially with an ID that had only recently expired. “Thanks.” Porter mumbled and left.
The walk home seemed to last an eternity, and a million possibilities presented themselves to him along the way.
A dim lamp in the foyer illuminated Porter’s way past the deacon’s bench in the downstairs hall. He activated the keypad, and his office door swung open. The place was silent, save for the ticking of a mahogany grandfather clock. He switched on the computer even before he turned on the brass desk lamp.
The machine whirred to life, flashing through startup screens. It held the key to his future. Anticipation made his skin tingle as though he was wearing it inside out. He scratched at the bumps that were already rising on his face. An excess of emotion always brought out Porter’s old enemy.
After what seemed an eternity, his desktop screen came into view. He clicked on his Internet browser and typed in the address for the Web’s most popular free e-mail account. It was the simplest, most obvious place to start.
His fingers practically shook as he attempted to sign on.
At the prompt for a username he typed “caro-linemoross.” He used “pippin” for a password.
The combination was rejected.
Porter tried using “porter” as password.
It was rejected.
He tried using their wedding date, then Caroline’s birth date.
No luck.
He slumped in his desk chair. But the hairs along the back of his neck were still vibrating with energy, spurring him on. Porter forced himself to slow his thoughts, considering things. He tried again, with a different username.
“Carolinehughes.” Her maiden name.
He entered “pippin” as password.
This time the server’s response was different.
Have you forgotten your password?
Which meant the username was correct. Of course, he thought dully, she would use her maiden name as an act of defiance.
He ran through the obvious passwords and each was rejected. Her birthday, their wedding anniversary, and their street address. But none of these worked.
Porter sat back, his desk chair creaking like a rifle shot in the dim silence. He drummed his long fingers on the mouse pad, thinking.
On a hunch he crossed the room and unlocked the filing cabinet where he stored his patient records and important documents. Flipping to the P’s, he located the one he wanted. The one labeled “Pippin.”
He carried the folder to his desk and opened it, rifling through the papers until he came to the American Kennel Club Certificate of Registry that listed the dog’s date of birth.
He swung around to the keyboard and entered the date at the password prompt. He watched, unbelieving, as the screen blinked once and a different screen took its place.
He was in.
The icon popped up for mail. The inbox contained a single saved message. The header consisted of one solitary word.
Wassup?
Porter stared. Behind the word was a voice demanding an answer. A masculine voice, Porter was certain. He double-clicked.
&nb
sp; I know the old house routine. We live at Home Depot. Good luck. My weekend was the usual bore, the Gymboree thing with the twins, etc. Tried to make a move on Lisa after we put them to bed while she was watching TV. She shut me down. We just can’t get off since the babies came. Happy Monday.
Happy Monday? From a man who was providing details about his sex life. Who was this? Without realizing it, Porter tightened his grip on the mouse until it lost contact with the pad, sending the icon careening drunkenly across the screen.
The message was less than three weeks old. It had originated from tf_activewearmodesto at a server in the Western United States. Porter and Caroline did not know anyone in Modesto.
But someone in Modesto knew them.
I know the old house routine.
The message had been sent in response to a message from Caroline. tf_activewearmodesto was familiar with the age of Caroline’s—their—home. Too familiar. tf_activewearmodesto knew how he, Porter Moross, and his wife spent their time.
The tingling in Porter’s neck grew stronger and slipped down his spine, chilling him to the bone. He shuddered.
There were no other messages in the inbox. Porter clicked on “Addresses,” then “Favorites.”
tf_activewearmodesto was listed in “Favorites.”
Tom Fielding.
Porter frowned, closed his eyes. Tom Fielding had lived on the same floor in Caroline’s dorm at GWU. Tall and gangly. WASPy with reddish blond hair, blue eyes, and a smattering of acne.
That acne that would have cleared up by now.
Porter pointed his mouse at the “Sent Mail” icon and double-clicked. There were several messages, all sent to Tom.
Hi.
It was the most recent, dated earlier on the same day as Tom’s “Wassup?” Caroline wrote about a movie they’d seen and the fact that he, Porter, hadn’t liked it. She described their visit to Restoration Hardware in search of electrical outlet covers for the new half bath outside Porter’s office.
A Dark Love Page 8