56 Days

by Catherine Ryan Howard

  Praise for the Author

  “56 Days is a terrific novel written by an author who is certain to become a distinguished voice in crime fiction. You won’t want to stop reading until the very end.”

  —Karin Slaughter,

  New York Times and internationally bestselling author

  “Catherine Ryan Howard is a gift to crime writing. Her characters are credible, her stories are original, and her plotting is ingenious. Every book is a treat to look forward to.”

  —Liz Nugent,

  internationally bestselling author, on Rewind

  “Catherine Ryan Howard brings crime writing to a new level.”

  —Sam Blake, bestselling author of Little Bones, on The Nothing Man

  “The queen of high-concept crime fiction.”

  —Jane Casey,

  author of the Maeve Kerrigan novels, on The Nothing Man

  “Howard structures her novel as a clever sort of countdown, dishing out slow reveals about each of the characters, until the shattering ending that I might label Tarantino-esque if it weren’t so intimate.”

  —CrimeReads

  “Each new twist, dispensed with surgical precision, will keep you hooked, nostalgic for the days when COVID-19 was the worst threat.”

  —Kirkus Reviews

  “[A] captivating tale from Edgar finalist Howard…Readers will find themselves rooting for these flawed characters no matter what their past indiscretions or crimes. Howard continues to impress.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  Also by

  Catherine Ryan Howard

  The Nothing Man

  Rewind

  The Liar’s Girl

  Distress Signals

  Copyright © 2021 by Catherine Ryan Howard

  E-book published in 2021 by Blackstone Publishing

  Cover design by Kathryn Galloway English

  All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  The characters and events in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.

  Trade e-book ISBN 978-1-9826-9467-8

  Library e-book ISBN 978-1-9826-9466-1

  Fiction / Thrillers / Suspense

  CIP data for this book is available from the Library of Congress

  Blackstone Publishing

  31 Mistletoe Rd.

  Ashland, OR 97520

  www.BlackstonePublishing.com

  To Iain Harris,

  because I couldn’t think of what to get you for your fortieth and also, just because

  Today

  It’s like one of those viral videos taken inside some swanky apartment complex, where all the slim and fit thirtysomething residents are doing jumping jacks behind the glass railings of their balconies while the world burns. But these ones stand still, only moving to look down or at each other from across the courtyard, or to lift a hand to their mouth or chest. Their faces are pale, their hair askew, their feet bare. Dawn has barely broken; they’ve just been roused from their sleep. No one wants to film this.

  The residents look like they could’ve all been in school together except for one. Number Four is older than her neighbors by a couple of decades. She owns while the others rent. The patio of her ground-floor apartment has a bistro-style table and chairs surrounded by carefully arranged potted plants; most everyone else’s is used to store bikes or not at all. Last Saturday night, she threatened to report Number Seventeen’s house party to the Gardaí for breaching restrictions unless it ended right now, and when it didn’t she stayed true to her word. She is a glamorous woman, usually well dressed and still well preserved, but this morning she is unkempt and barefaced, dressed in a pair of baby-pink cotton pajama bottoms and a padded winter jacket that swings open as she strides across the courtyard.

  She is also the only one who knows the code that silences the fire alarm. It went off five minutes ago—that’s what has woken them—and the residents assume they have her to thank for taking care of it.

  There has never been a fire here but, in the last few weeks, three fire alarms—four if you count this one. The residents have complained repeatedly to the management company that the system is just too sensitive, that it must be reacting to burnt toast and people who smoke cigarettes without cracking a window, but in turn, the management blames them for triggering it. The noise no longer signals danger but interruption, and when it went off a few minutes ago they all did what they usually do: went outside, onto their balconies and terraces, to see what they could see, to check for flames or smoke, not expecting any and finding none.

  But this time there was something unexpected, something interesting: two uniformed Gardaí standing in the middle of the courtyard, looking around.

  So they stayed out there, watching and wondering.

  The woman from number four stands with the Gardaí while remaining the regulation six feet away. She’s pointing at one of the ground-floor apartments—the one right in the corner, at one end of the complex’s U shape. They have little patios instead of balconies, marked off with open railings instead of solid glass perimeters. No one is on that patio. Its sliding door is closed. But from some vantage points, the glowing orb of the living-room’s ceiling light is visible through the thin gray curtains.

  What’s going on?

  Whose apartment is that?

  Nobody knows. The Crossings is a relatively new complex and interactions are mostly limited to pleasantries exchanged at the letterboxes, the trash cans, the parking structure. Sheepish smiles during that window on Friday and Saturday evenings when it seems like everyone is going down to the main entrance to meet their food-delivery guy at the same time. The residents are used to living above and below and beside other people’s entire lives while pretending to be utterly unaware of them; hearing each other’s TVs and smelling each other’s cooking but never learning each other’s names.

  Even in these last few weeks, when they’ve all been at home all day every day, they’ve studiously avoided acknowledging each other when they take to the outside spaces—the balconies, the terraces, the shared courtyard—in an effort to maintain some pretense of privacy, to preserve it. The crisis-induced camaraderie they’ve been watching in unsteady, narrowly framed short videos online—someone calling bingo numbers through a megaphone at a block of apartments; a film projected onto the side of a house so a cul-de-sac of homes can have a collective movie night from their driveways; nightly rituals of hopeful, enthusiastic hand-clapping—never really took hold here. They have kept their distance in more ways than one. No one wants to have to deal with a familiarity hangover when normal life returns, which they are all still under the impression will happen soon. A government announcement is due later today.

  One of the guards twists his head around and looks up at them, these nosy neighbors. He pulls his face mask down with a blue-gloved hand, revealing pudgy cheeks at odds with a weedy body. They say that the Gardaí looking young is a sure sign you’re getting older, but this one actually is young, midtwenties at the most, with a sheen of sweat glistening beneath his hairline.

  “False alarm,” he calls out, waving. “You can go on back inside.”

  As if any of them are standing there waiting to see a fire.

  When nobody moves, he shouts, “Go on,” louder and firmer.

  One by one, the residents slowly retreat into their apartments because none of them want to be pegged as rubberneckers, even though that’s exactly what they are. This is the only interesting thing that
has happened here in weeks—if you discount the fire alarms, it’s the only thing that’s happened.

  Are they really expected not to look?

  Most of them leave their sliding doors open and elect to drink their morning coffees just on the other side, so they can see without being seen. The couples mutter to each other that, really, they have a right to know what’s going on. They live here, after all. The solo occupants wonder if there’s been a burglary or maybe even something worse, like an attack, and if something happened to them now, with things the way they are, how long would it be before anyone noticed, before anyone found them?

  This apartment complex is not far from Dublin’s city center. Before all this started it was buttressed by a near-constant soundtrack of engine noise, squealing breaks, and car horns coming from the busy road that runs alongside. But in these last few weeks the city has slowed down, emptied out, and shut down, in that order, and, occasional false fire alarms aside, the loudest noise lately has been the birdsong.

  Now, the sound of approaching sirens feels like a violence.

  56 Days Ago

  “Go ahead,” are the first words he ever says to her.

  They are both on the cusp of joining the line for the self-service checkouts in Tesco. It’s Friday lunchtime and her fifth time this week coming in for yet another unimaginative meal deal: a colorless sandwich, a plastic bag of apple slices, and a bottle of water, which she’s just noticed is the type with the sickly-sweet fruit flavor added. This realization has stopped her in her tracks, paused by a stack of Easter eggs (Easter? Already?), and wondering if she can be bothered to go back and change it when she almost certainly won’t drink it anyway.

  That’s when she looks up and sees him, politely waiting for her to make her move, leaving a space for her to join the line ahead of him.

  He’s taller than her by some margin. Looks about the same age. Neither muscular nor soft, but solid. His dark hair is thick and messy, but she has no doubt it took forever to pomade into submission, to perfect. He wears a blue suit with a navy tie and a light-blue shirt underneath, but the sleeves of the jacket are creased with strain, the shoulders bunched, and the back of the tie hangs longer than the front. The top button of his shirt is open, the collar slightly askew, the tie pulled off-center. He looks a little red in the face, his cheeks pink above patchy stubble.

  And he’s so attractive that she knows instantly the world he lives in is not the same one in which she does, that he can’t possibly experience it the same way. A face like that affords a different kind of existence, one in which you arrive into every situation with some degree of preapproval. But you don’t know it, don’t realize that you’re being ushered into the priority lane of life every single day.

  She wonders what that does to a person.

  There’s an intensity to him, too, something simmering just beneath the surface. She imagines for him a whole life. He’s a man who works hard and plays harder. Who has a circle of friends he calls exclusively by inexplicable nicknames while they sit around a table in the pub necking pints and watching The Game. Who runs purely to run off bad calories. Who has someone somewhere that knows a completely different version of him, someone he is unexpectedly and devotedly tender to, who he only ever looks at with kind eyes.

  “It’s okay,” she says, waving the bottle of water, starting to move away. “I’ve just realized I’ve got the wrong one.” She turns and heads back toward the fridges, feeling his eyes on her as she walks away.

  And the beat of her own heart, pulsing with promise.

  The second thing he says to her is, “Nice bag.”

  She has just come out of the supermarket, onto the street, and doesn’t know who’s talking or if they’re talking to her.

  When she turns toward the voice, she sees him standing in the next doorway, looking right at her. The sandwich he’s just bought is tucked under his arm, getting squished by the pressure. There’s the hint of a grin on his face, tinged with something else she can’t readily identify.

  She stops. “My . . . ?”

  “Your bag,” he says, pointing.

  He means the little canvas tote she’s put her purchases in. He must, because her handbag is across her body and resting on her other hip, the one he can’t see from where he’s standing.

  The tote is blue and has a space shuttle on it, piggybacking on an airplane as it flies over the skyscrapers of Manhattan.

  She lifts the bag and looks at it, then back at him.

  “Thanks,” she says. “It’s from the Intrepid. It’s a museum in—”

  “New York,” he finishes. “The one on the aircraft carrier, right?” He says this not with smug knowingness but endearing enthusiasm. “Have you been?”

  “Yeah.” She doesn’t want to sound like she’s too impressed with herself, so she adds, “Once.”

  “Was it good?”

  She hesitates, because this is it. This is where she makes her choice.

  People think the decisions you make that change the course of your life are the big ones. Marriage proposals. House moves. Job applications. But she knows it’s the little ones, the tiny moments, that really plot the course. Moments like this.

  Her options:

  Say something short and flippant, move on, end this now.

  Or say something that prolongs this, stay longer, invite more, open a door.

  She keeps a screenshot on her phone of a quote by, supposedly, Abraham Lincoln: Discipline is choosing between what you want now and what you want the most. Maybe that’s true, but discipline has never been her problem. It’s fear she struggles with. She thinks courage might be choosing between what you want now and what you want the most, because what she wants now is to walk away, to shut this down, to close the door. To retreat. To stay in the place where she feels safe and secure.

  But what she wants the most is to be able to live a full life, even if the expansion comes with pain and risk and fear, even if it means crossing a minefield first.

  This one, maybe.

  Ciara grips the handles of the tote and imagines her future self standing behind her, pressing her hands into her back, pushing, whispering, Do it. Go for it. Make this happen. She ignores the heat rising inside of her, her body’s alarm. She reminds herself that this isn’t a big deal, that this is just a conversation, that men and women do this all day, every day, all over the world.

  “Yeah,” she says. “But not as good as Kennedy Space Center.”

  He blinks in surprise.

  He straightens up and steps closer.

  Moving aside so a woman pushing a double stroller can get past, she takes a step closer to him, too.

  “You know,” he says, “I’ve never met someone who can name all five space shuttles.”

  “And I still haven’t met someone who knows there are six.”

  She bites her lip as every blood cell in her body makes a mad dash for her cheeks. What the hell did she have to go and say that for? What was she thinking?

  “Six?” he says.

  She’s already ruined it.

  So she might as well make sure she has.

  “There was Challenger,” she says to the crack in the pavement by her right foot, “lost January 28, 1986, during launch. Columbia, lost February 1, 2003, during reentry. Atlantis, Endeavour, and Discovery are all on display—Atlantis is the one in Kennedy Space Center. But there was also Enterprise, the test vehicle. It flew, although never in space. It didn’t have a heat shield or engines, but it was the first orbiter. Technically. Which is actually what people mean when they say ‘space shuttle,’ usually. They mean the orbiter itself. The rest are just rockets. And Enterprise is the one that’s at the Intrepid.”

  A beat of excruciating silence passes.

  She forces herself to lift her head and meet his eye, lips parting to mumble some lie about needing to get back to work, foot
lifting in readiness for scurrying away from this absolute disaster, but then he says—

  “I was going to go get a coffee. Can I buy you one, too?”

  There are numerous coffee options on this street and the vast majority of them come served with a side of serious notions. There’s the café that roasts its own beans and makes you wait five minutes for a simple filter coffee that only comes in one size served lukewarm. It’s right next to the place that has spelled its name wrong and, inexplicably, with a forward slash: Kaph/A. The most popular spot seems to be a little vintage van in the service-station forecourt, the one with a hatch whose chalk-drawn menu lists not coffee blends but levels of depleted wakefulness: Fading, Sleepy, Snoring.

  Ciara is relieved when he directs her past all of them and into the soulless outlet of a bland coffee chain instead.

  “Is this okay?” he asks as he holds the door open for her.

  “This is great.” She steps inside, turning to talk to him over her shoulder. “I like my coffee served in a bucket at a reasonable price, so . . .”

  “I’ve passed the first test, is what you’re saying.”

  He winks at her and she laughs, hoping it didn’t come out sounding like a nervous one, although she is nervous.

  Because of the implication in the word first.

  Because she has to pass this test too.

  Because this is already the weight of one whole foot on the edge of the minefield and she has no idea how wide it is, how long it will take her to get all the way across, how long it will be before she feels safe and comfortable and secure.

  In the minute it took to walk here, he has told her his name is Oliver and that he works for a firm of architects who have the top floor of the large office building across the street. He is not an architect, though, but something called an architectural technologist. He explained it by saying that architects design the buildings and then architectural technologists figure out how they’re going to actually build them. He tried to dissuade her of the idea that it’s any bit as interesting as it sounds, promising that, in reality, it’s mostly spreadsheets and emails. When she asked him if it’s what he always wanted to do, he said yes, once he’d come to terms with the fact that he was never going to be an astronaut.