The Hidden Things

by Jamie Mason

  Poor Roy. Poor Roy. The idea, the words, the lament of it, had been in a loop since back in the library when Carly described what she had seen the night before.

  But worrying whether Roy was all right had been on her mind since the second time he hadn’t met up with her at the gas station. She’d been concerned. A little more ill at ease as the hours went by. She knew something was wrong. She’d pushed too hard. She’d convinced him that he had to do it, that it was the right thing, the smart thing, and that he was the one to get it done.

  When she’d pressured him into taking the painting from Jonathan, she never stepped past the idea that Roy owed her. He did, it was true. But it wasn’t all that was true about this.

  She’d known him for about two hours in the diner, and also for less than one minute, years ago, in an alley while he shot her. He’d been easy to read both times. And he’d been easy to read again, beyond all hope, this afternoon in his truck.

  The pain of his life was just a fact of his face. He’d never had anywhere to hide it. Not even in death. Roy had only ever had one expression—the fear of high tide, always in up to his neck, stretching for air.

  When all of his troubles were over, even that didn’t give him the dignity of his face back. In the two hours and one minute she’d known him, she never saw what he should’ve looked like.

  His mouth had been frozen open in the truck. As if he were wailing. And he was still out there now, a ruin-faced stone until someone found him or until nature forced him loose, then took him apart.

  She settled in behind the wheel, hoping the darkness gave cover to her crumbling composure if anyone was watching.

  Jonathan wouldn’t be watching, though, the bastard. He wouldn’t risk it, no matter how much he might want to or even need to. He wouldn’t get caught looking out the window to see that she was gone.

  Whatever passed for peace of mind to him was impossible to imagine. Her sitting in his living room must have pressed on every fear he’d earned. But he’d kept his balance with barely a flicker of concern. He was a high-wire artist. She would give him that.

  She backed out from the driveway, nearly all of her concentration bent on getting to the road. In a normal evening, it would be automatic. Avoiding mailboxes and trash cans was easy when she wasn’t losing her mind. But it took all she had just to focus on lining up the car between the curb and the middle of the road, keeping the margins steady on both sides while she drove away.

  She made it a few blocks up the hill before she had to pull over. Her head was pounding, her mouth watering. She veered to the right and stopped in front of someone’s house, jarring the tire against the curb and grinding it along the concrete as she straightened the wheel. She rammed the gear selector into park and let her head fall back against the rest, eyes closed, one loose fist resting against her lips, willing herself not to be sick.

  It didn’t hold.

  Marcelline flung the door open and lost her wine all over the pavement. The retching made her eyes water, and once they started tears, they didn’t stop. She leaned over the steering wheel and sobbed.

  Roy had been teetering on the ledge for a long while. None of that was her fault. He may never have pulled himself away from the drop. But it wouldn’t have been yesterday, and it wouldn’t have been like that.

  If she hadn’t sent him to Jonathan’s house alone . . . If she hadn’t told him about the painting . . . Hell, if she’d never let him see her at all . . .

  Any of it might have been too much for him. All of it was nearly a guarantee. She should have seen that. She did see it. But he owed her.

  Poor Roy.

  The regret of it surged in quick cycles of calming down followed by a fresh fall of tears.

  In one of the deep, shuddery breaths, the absurdity of it lit up in her like a candle—she was crying over the man who shot her. The ridiculous light of it grew. Priceless. Pathetic. With survival instincts like that, maybe it was always going to end in tears and spewed wine for her.

  He shot her. He ruined her face. He nearly killed her.

  But that Roy had done it, and that she had been there to have it done to her in the first place, shared a common denominator. Something had brought Roy Dorring and Marcelline Gossard together, in a failure of free will to be sure, but both by the same guide.

  Although both she and Roy had been weak in the important moments, distracted by the hope and sparkle of their different wants, Jonathan had set it up, then held her arms away from her throat as she almost bled to death.

  If Carly was right, and Roy had already been dead before they dumped him in the ass end of nowhere, that piece of shit had watched over Roy dying, too.

  She had to move Roy’s gun to get a handful of napkins from the glove box. The cool weight of the metal left her fingers tingling. It had been years since she’d been to a firing range, and she never much liked the feel of a pistol anyway. She wiped her eyes and mouth.

  She put the car in gear and drove back and parked along the curb next to a shrub-topped retaining wall that faced off with Jonathan’s house. A silhouette moved back and forth behind the sheer curtains of the office at the front of the house.

  Marcelline took out her phone.

  We need to talk. You need to come up with a reason to leave. I’m across the street.

  The silhouette behind the curtain stopped walking.

  Can’t do it. Not tonight.

  Find a way. Or I will be a problem. Do you think Donna can take another night of nasty surprises?

  There was a long pause.

  Give me a minute.

  I’ll give you five.

  I’m going to have to take the car. I can’t just go out walking. She won’t believe that.

  Whatever. I’m up the block across the street. By the wall. Light brown Toyota. Park behind me.

  He was almost ten minutes in getting there.

  She sent a message she’d put together while she was waiting.

  Turn off the car. Throw the keys out of your window. Leave your seat belt on. I’m coming to you. I have a gun because I don’t trust you. That’s all. Not looking to use it.

  He didn’t reply right away, and Marcelline was typing a new message when the response finally came.

  I’m out.

  That’s a mistake. You might just have to be okay with not controlling everything for once. I’m not stupid. I don’t want attention any more than you do. But if you leave now, anything goes. What have I got to lose?

  He waited.

  He would be thinking of a way to make this his own. She didn’t have any choice but to let him try.

  The headlights went out behind her. The engine died. She heard the musical clatter of keys on the sidewalk.

  The rest of it she’d have to take as it came.

  The fear blended into the purposeful revving of the blood in her veins. She needed the painting, but this is what she’d wanted. The manic edge was effervescent, a dangerous flavor of wonderful. And all of it couldn’t entirely erase the ridiculous part. The gun felt outlandish.

  Where ludicrous meets necessity, in all likelihood, what’s happening shouldn’t be. She thought of Samantha in a pang of apology. She would seriously hate this. I’m sorry.

  And still Marcelline was out of her car and rounding to the passenger side of Jonathan’s. She held Roy’s pistol against her thigh to camouflage it as best she could in the suburban semidarkness.

  Jonathan noted the gun as she got in, but didn’t say anything.

  A moment of nearly blissful neutrality shimmered between them. Not “John” and “Emma” because those people didn’t exist. They were liars. Jonathan and Marcelline, here together now, were rather past the need for all that. She would have back the day she met him for anything. But that was impossible. Here they were. Her shoulders relaxed in the only seconds of freedom she’d had in four years. No need to pretend anything. No need to guard against discovery.

  He was the fulcrum of her entire life. She would hate him again in
a second or two. That inevitability was bearing down on her like a train. But the span of a few drumming heartbeats protected a moment of pure recognition. Like a disaster or a disease, he had changed everything.

  She would change it back.

  “Holy hell,” Jonathan said. But not about the gun. The comment seemed general—an inadequate caption for all she’d just been thinking.

  She didn’t have a reply for it. But the hate came back in a rush that wasn’t hot or cold or blinding or pounding. It was just the next irresistible thing. The next breath, the next blink, the itch on her cheek. She flicked her fingernails over the spot to scratch it.

  “Why didn’t you tell me?” he said. “Why didn’t you come to me when you found out where I was? Why didn’t you let me know you’re alive?”

  She cocked her head as she would if she were confused, which she wasn’t. “I did.”

  “Not like that. I don’t mean tonight. I don’t mean showing up at my house with no warning and giving me a heart attack.”

  “How would you like me to have done it? Please, tell me. I’ll take notes for the next time.”

  He drew a breath that suggested patience with her pain and pique. The gun warmed in her hand, reminding itself to her, as if it hated him, too.

  He sighed. “When you showed up in front of my family like that, I didn’t get any chance to tell you how glad I am that you’re okay. I would have. You didn’t give me that chance.”

  “Well, I didn’t get the chance to say, ‘Fuck you, Jonathan.’ We were both having to be so careful earlier, both of us just busting with so many things we wanted to say. But nothing’s stopping us now. So, fuck you, Jonathan.”

  “I don’t know what to say. I don’t know what you want me to say. You’re alive. You made it through. This is incredible.”

  “That’s certainly a word for it.”

  “There’s no way I could have known,” he said, oozing warm reason. “You know that. You don’t know how glad I am that you’re okay. You don’t know how it’s been for me all this time.”

  She breathed down into her middle and swallowed a scream. She imagined it was the feeling of a cat retracting its claws. “I’m almost afraid to ask how stupid you think I am.”

  “Marcelline, look. I was devastated over what—”

  She moved her gun hand into her lap. “We’re not going to get a lot of mileage out of this treadmill. I mean, you can say it again if you want, but it’s starting to piss me off.”

  “Well, what do you want me to say?” He went quiet, surrendered in both voice and posture for her to lead the way.

  She didn’t buy it for a second. It was a game for him. He’d use whatever she indicated she wanted for his own ends. He was well practiced in it. She was not.

  So she kept it simple. “First, I want you to tell me what you think you ought to do to make this better? I just want to know.”

  “Does Carly know who you are?”

  “You mean, does Carly know who you are?” Marcelline had forgotten the ring of a purely mocking laugh. “No. She has no idea.” She left it at that, though the desperate desire to say more vibrated in her teeth.

  Jonathan stared out his window, all but turning his back on Marcelline for long enough that it was getting awkward.

  “We can still sell the painting,” he finally said.

  The sentence and the sentiment were easy enough to understand, but somehow it jammed her signals. She couldn’t move. It was something in the way he’d pronounced we. The inflection he gave it. He was about to say something terrible.

  Marcelline relaxed her grip on the pistol, opened her fingers a little without being obvious about it, she hoped. She was buying an instant for her rational mind—giving it a head start on the reaction she could feel was on its way.

  He looked back at her lack of response. “What? We can. Why wouldn’t we? There’s no reason we can’t pick up right where we left off. In some ways, nothing’s changed. We’re in the same position we were four years ago.”

  He didn’t say it. He couldn’t have. He had. Every loss she’d broken over and every hour of pain she’d endured rushed into her wrist. The hatred crowded down into her knuckles, forcing them to bend around the pistol’s grip.

  His gaze drifted to the right side of her face, lit by the streetlight across the road. She’d never not known, in four years, where the light was in a room and how it was hitting or hiding her scars. That ache flared into her trigger finger.

  A horrible sympathy mask took over Jonathan’s face. “I know that must be hard to hear in some ways, but if you just—”

  “Stop. Talking.”

  The gun was up and pointed at his middle, and although Marcelline hadn’t felt her hand move, the sense of being ridiculous was gone.

  “Okay,” he said mildly.

  “This is simple, actually. We don’t need to have a conversation. In fact, it’s better for everyone if you don’t say anything else. Give me the painting.”

  He just looked at her.

  “No, really. It’s that easy. Give it to me and I’ll go away and you can keep on making whatever it is that you’re making here, which I have to imagine is some shitty new scheme that will leave any number of people dying in your arms.”

  He put his hands up in something between a surrender and a shrug. “Can I talk?”

  “If you think you understand where we are in this, go ahead.”

  “I understand why you’re so angry. I get it. You hate me. You hate what all of this has done to your life. And you can believe me or not, but I never intended for you to get hurt.”

  “Oh? What did you intend for me, then?”

  A weariness dragged down over him. A deflation. But he refilled just as fast with resentment. A circuit of sinking down and rising up against his seat belt. He was tired and angry. Very. And Marcelline was suddenly keen to get out of the car.

  But it was too late to be anything but bold. She leaned in. “So that takes care of all the old business. I’ll go get in my car. I’ll follow you down the hill. You go in, bring me the painting, drink half a bottle of whatever it is you drink, nurse your hangover tomorrow, and get on with your life. Easy.”

  “No.”

  She replied only with an expectant look.

  Jonathan pitched toward her, snarling. “I fucking said no! Are you stupid or something?”

  Marcelline almost pulled the trigger in reflex. But his yelling broke it loose in her, too. “You son of a bitch, I will call the police and tell them where they can find you. And where they can find Roy’s body.”

  He hadn’t been expecting that, but Jonathan recovered his expression so quickly that she almost doubted herself that she’d rattled him at all.

  “Roy killed himself.”

  “That may well be. And when they get that all sorted out, I’m sure they will let you go. In the meantime, though, the FBI will find out where they can get their hands on Landscape with Obelisk.”

  Smarmy and angry were no surprise to her, but Jonathan’s going amused made the breath catch in her throat.

  “And that buys you what, exactly? Honestly, what does any of this? Sure, if you pull some stunt like that, I don’t have the painting, but neither do you. But you know what I do have? Even if they cart me off? You—all over my security system.

  “And right before I came out here to answer your hissy fit, I cut some nice clear clips together and set them in a timed email to a couple of people who will get it to the FBI if I don’t cancel it.

  “So you can shoot me, maybe kill me, or get the painting back to the museum. Or shoot me and get the painting back to the museum, if you like, but you’ll get pulled right into it either way.

  “You can run.” He looked her over. “You’ve obviously done a good bit of that. But after a break in the Gardner heist? After all this time? After what we did to the Anningers? And you a missing person, a seriously scarred hottie on the loose? Nah. I don’t think you know the meaning of the term lying low yet.”
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br />   Marcelline’s tongue felt paralyzed.

  He sucked in a big loud breath. “Well, this has been something, but I have to get back. The email, you know, and all the ticktock ticktock.”

  He moved his hand across his lap, and the zip and clatter of his seat belt sliding up into its slot startled her. He opened his door. She might as well have been pointing her finger at him. The gun meant nothing.

  Jonathan turned and straightened out of the car, then ducked his head back under the roofline to look at her as if she were an idiot. “Get the fuck out.”

  She switched the gun to her left hand to fumble for the door latch, minding that her fingers stayed outside the trigger guard of the stupid thing. Useless. Mortifying.

  They faced off across the roof of his car.

  He shook his head in disappointment. “I just want to point out that I offered to bring you back into this. I didn’t have to do that. I tried to do right by you. Because of what happened. I want you to remember that. This isn’t on me.”

  She couldn’t think of a single thing to say.

  “Go away, Marcelline. And leave Carly alone.”

  Jonathan got back in his car and keyed the engine to life. He rolled down the passenger window.

  “Or don’t. You know as well as I do that, in the end, I really don’t care.”

  • • •

  Marcelline drove in circles all night. She nearly drove her tank dry and filled it up again as the dark sky drifted into Saturday’s dawn. She caught her reflection in the window as she fought the gas cap with fatigue-numb fingers. The yellow light of the station’s canopy lit up the window and turned it into a mirror, and she wished it hadn’t. Jonathan was right. She looked haggard. Desperate. A little insane.

  I shouldn’t be here.

  It kept coming to her. Bitterly too late now. It felt true. It felt like the reason for every bad fact of her life, all the way back to the memory of the dirty-metal smell of the blood-soaked asphalt under her head.