56 Days

by Catherine Ryan Howard

  “I can’t connect you,” the guy says, “but I can give you her extension number?”

  “That’d be great.”

  “It’s 5-4-1-0.”

  He scribbles the number on a pad of Post-its by his keyboard, even though he doesn’t intend to actually call her. That would be taking his paranoia to unprecedented heights.

  “Thank you,” he says.

  “Thanks for calling Cirrus Ireland.” Click.

  Oliver is even more confused than before. Either this is, by far, the most elaborate scheme he’s ever been up against, or Ciara really is who she says she is.

  A nice girl with no agenda other than the age-old one. The normal one. Liking someone, wanting to get to know them, hoping that things will eventually turn . . .

  Romantic.

  The word seems foreign to him, borrowed from another language.

  And what if she is that? It doesn’t mean the threat is neutralized. It merely swaps one danger for another.

  Isn’t this just how the mess in London began?

  He should delete her number. Forget all about her and start bringing a packed lunch. Because nothing can happen. Even if—if—he managed to feign normality for a while, the truth would eventually come out. It’s too big to hide.

  Everything is so much easier when he stays away from other people. The only way you can lose your own shadow is to stand in the dark.

  The problem is, Oliver hates the dark.

  He takes out his phone and finds the text message she’d sent him for the purposes of giving him her number.

  For future ref: Enterprise, Columbia, Challenger, Discovery, Atlantis, Endeavour.

  His thumb hovers over it, ready to swipe to delete.

  That’s what he should do.

  But he doesn’t.

  Today

  Lee pushes the bathroom door back just enough to get past it, ignoring the horror that lies on the other side of it for now.

  She knows that that’s there. What she needs is to check if anything else is too, first.

  If anyone else is.

  She tells herself to ignore the smell that is tickling her gag reflex, to focus on the scene, to log the details—and to move fast because she isn’t going to be able to do that for very long.

  Three more doors lead off the hall, each one standing open.

  On her right, after the bathroom: a small, sparse bedroom. The narrow wardrobes are built-in—and empty—and the only furniture is a bare box-spring pushed up against the far wall and what looks like a dining table that has been commandeered as a desk.

  Sitting on it is a closed laptop, some loose papers and pens. The laptop wears a sticker that says KB Studios. A printer sits on the floor underneath the desk, unplugged.

  The roller blinds on the room’s single window are all the way up, offering a view of the courtyard.

  At the end of the hall, facing the front door: the master bedroom. The double bed is unmade, the charcoal-gray sheets thrown back from the side closest to the door but left undisturbed on the other. She opens the drawer in the bedside table and finds it empty except for dust. Inside the wardrobe sit two suitcases, one large and one small, empty going by the weight of them; a small pile of folded jeans; a row of hanging suits and shirts; a drawer of socks and underwear.

  All men’s, all a similar size. Someone in their twenties or thirties, she’d guess, going by the style. There’s also some running gear and a washbag with deodorant, men’s moisturizer, and a blue bottle of Acqua di Parma.

  She estimates that only about a third of the wardrobe space is being used.

  There is another window to the courtyard in here, a larger one, with its blinds pulled all the way down. A lamp by the bed is turned on.

  Through the door off the left of the hall: an open-plan living space. At one end is the kind of kitchen Lee is used to seeing in Instagram ads for new developments in Dublin but never actually in anyone’s home: smooth, white, and clinically glossy.

  It has an empty, unused look. She figures there must be fourteen feet of counter space in its L shape, but there’s nothing sitting out except for one of those George Clooney coffee machines, a lone oven mitt, and a set of keys with a plastic fob attached.

  The keys are on a ring printed with a Viva Property logo.

  A breakfast bar marks the end of the kitchen and the start of the living room, which is furnished only with a large, brown leather couch and a small coffee table. A flat-screen TV hangs on the wall above a faux fire. The walls are painted white and hung with the kind of meaningless abstract prints that chain hotels buy in volume, the type that achieve an exact balance of not drawing the eye but also sufficiently breaking up bare-wall blankness.

  The thin privacy curtains are pulled across the sliding doors that lead to the little terrace outside; when she makes a gap in them with a single finger, she sees a table and two chairs out there, and the remains of a citronella candle. The door is closed but when she pulls on it, it opens easily.

  One of the living room’s two ceiling lights is on.

  This survey has taken her about forty seconds and she figures she can do another twenty or so before the coffee she drank for breakfast threatens a reappearance.

  Lee goes back out into the hall and opens the bathroom door all the way so that it folds back against the hall wall, but doesn’t actually touch it, just in case there’s something of evidentiary value on the handle that they’ll need to collect in due course.

  As she does this, she glimpses what awaits her and feels something flex right at the back of her throat.

  She breathes in through her nose, trying to find any remnant of the mints, trying to convince her brain that menthol is all she can smell. Upchucking inside a face mask in the middle of a scene really wouldn’t be a good look.

  Let’s just get this over with.

  Lee looks down.

  The bathroom has no windows and the ceiling light is on. The body is kneeling on the floor. Face pressed against the tiles, arms by the sides, directly beneath the showerhead. Clothed in what looks like jeans and a T-shirt. Barefoot. Short, light-brown hair. Facing away from her. A male, she thinks, but she couldn’t swear to it: she doesn’t have a great view and won’t get one without disturbing the scene, and parts of the body are oddly misshapen. Bloated in some areas, sunken in others. An advanced stage of decomposition. No obvious wounds or blood, at least from her vantage point. A putrid sludge of fluid surrounds the body and connects it to the plughole like a speech bubble. The skin—

  She swallows hard, forcing back bile, and steadies herself.

  She can only see the skin on the soles of the feet, the back of the neck, and the nearest arm—the deceased’s right one—from the elbow on down, but that much is bad enough. It’s puckered on the feet and a deep purple color, and the arm is showing evidence of skin slippage: the top layer has become separated, as if peeling after a particularly bad sunburn.

  At least there are no flies, she tells herself. If that sliding door had been left open . . . she’d already be back outside, trying to find a not-terrible place to throw up.

  The bathroom is wet-room style, with an even floor of marbled black tiles throughout. A glass shower panel stands in a black metal frame next to the former site of a matching glass door, now in a thousand little diamond-like nuggets that lie strewn all over the floor. She can see a few pieces glinting in the deceased’s hair.

  She turns to look behind her.

  There’s a mirrored medicine cabinet on the wall. She opens it, scans the contents. It doesn’t take long; like the rest of the apartment, it’s mostly empty.

  Some disposable face masks, loosely stacked on a shelf. A bottle of thickening shampoo. A box of plasters and a blister pack of small, green pills.

  Careful where she steps, she moves closer to see if she can make out what’s stamped on
them. 542, she thinks it says, confirming that they are what they look like: Rohypnol, the date-rape drug.

  She closes the cabinet and turns to the sink.

  There’s a small shelf above it but otherwise no storage, so it doesn’t take long to determine that there’s nothing else in the bathroom except toothbrushing supplies (one toothbrush), a few rolls of toilet paper, and a bottle of hand soap. Plus one bath towel, hanging on a hook by the door.

  The smell is steadily drawing the coffee up into her esophagus.

  Lee turns back to the body. Moving any closer to it will disturb the glass on the floor and God knows what else, but she does her best to lean over to see if she can get a better look at the head and—

  She gags when this new angle reveals a fist-sized cluster of maggots wriggling in and around what looks like a head wound near the left temple.

  She wants to run.

  She wants to throw up.

  She wants to run out of here right now while throwing up, but she tells her brain to remain calm, just a few more seconds, that’s all she needs . . .

  She fixes her gaze on the wall tiles directly across from the wound and starts moving it upward in a straight line—

  There.

  At about chest-height, above the head: a smudge of brown. Dried blood.

  Contact.

  35 Days Ago

  Ciara does another circuit of the apartment, counting her steps as she goes. She starts in the little kitchen, standing at the counter with her palms flat on the only surface that isn’t stovetop or sink: a thick off-white slab of Formica whose smooth gloss has long been scrubbed away. Take three steps and she’s in the living room, which is also the dining room, which is also the bedroom, which is only separated from the kitchen by what she’s seen people on property programs call a breakfast bar.

  Five steps to cross the floor to the couch. Seven from the couch to the door. Two from that door to the front door. She turns back around and counts out the four steps it takes her to enter the bathroom.

  Oliver’s a foot taller than her. He’ll be able to do it in even fewer.

  She stands before the mirror above the sink and inspects the glass for smudges. She opens the medicine cabinet and tries to see the contents as a stranger would. She did this very thing already, not even half an hour ago, but on second thought the blister plasters might make him think of red-raw skin and seeping wounds, specifically her red-raw skin and seeping wounds, so she slides them behind a pack of soothing eye gels until they disappear from sight.

  Then, as an afterthought, she hides the hair-removal cream too.

  She once spent a summer in college working as a housekeeper in a seaside hotel and something from her training drifts back to her now.

  Sit where the guest will sit. Lie where the guest will lie. See what the guest will see.

  She puts the toilet lid down and perches on it, looks around.

  The bathroom is like the rest of the apartment: tiny and from the seventies. It has avocado fixtures, rippled linoleum on the floor, and a shower curtain attached to a precariously positioned tension rod. It’s already come down on her twice in the short time she’s lived here, once hitting her square on the forehead and leaving a red mark. At least the caulking has been redone recently, but its brightness only serves to highlight how much the wall tiles have yellowed over the years.

  She scans the floor for dust, wayward hairs, a dropped cotton bud sullied with wax.

  All clear.

  The bathroom has no window and no fan, only a narrow vent in the wall above the bath that she’s already excised the dust from. She’s bought a little canister of nonoffensive air freshener—Soft Cotton, it claims to smell like, although how you can smell something is soft is beyond her—but now she wonders if its current placement, sitting on top of the cistern, seems a bit passive-aggressive . . . Does it look like a demand? She puts it on the little shelf below the sink instead, turning the label out so it’s easy to find.

  Four steps back into the everything room, seven steps back to the couch.

  She sits down carefully so as not to disturb the placement of the throws or the plumped-up cushions, and systematically scans the room for dust, cobwebs, or any other offenses.

  She finds none. She doesn’t think the apartment was this clean on the day she moved in.

  She wonders, yet again, what he’ll make of it. She tries to see it as he will, as she did before she got a little used to it. For a studio in a crumbling tower block, it’s actually not that bad. A large window offers clear-sky views because she is on the top floor of the complex’s tallest redbrick block in a city where almost everything else is much shorter. Right now, the evening sun is filling the room with natural light and the room’s bare white walls are reflecting it, amplifying it. There’s a small, square dining table with two chairs and a battered, sunken couch currently hiding beneath a deep purple throw she bought at Primark—or three purple throws, because they were small and that’s how many of them it took to mostly cover it. A desk doubles as a dressing table. Most of one wall is taken up with what looks like a built-in wardrobe in beech effect but is actually a Murphy bed that folds down, its sheets and pillows kept in place by Velcro straps. A faded canvas print of a sunrise over Dublin hangs by the door to the kitchen, but it’s too big for the space and has been hung slightly askew and half a foot too high. Nothing matches and there are few personal items, save for the NASA mug that’s been demoted to a pen pot and the small stack of well-thumbed books lined up neatly beside it.

  She’s already carefully considered each spine and how it might make her look. The collection promises stories about the Apollo moonwalkers, a tech start-up that failed spectacularly, and the crisis aboard the space station Mir back in the nineties, as well as a pulpy thriller, a millennial literary novel that’s been on the bestseller charts for what feels like years, and a copy of Pride and Prejudice, brittle and yellowed from years of rereading.

  She’s hidden the book she’s actually reading—a historical romance—in one of the desk drawers.

  She’s also cut the anthers out of the pink lilies arranged in a vase on the dining table just in case he doesn’t know not to touch them, just in case he arrives in one of his knit sweaters with the little polo-player emblem embroidered on the left breast and leans down to breathe in their scent.

  She scans again but can’t find anything out of place. This should give her confidence but it has the opposite effect: the perfection feels exceptionally delicate, impossible to maintain, even just for these last few minutes.

  Her eyes flick to the digital clock on the TV.

  Almost eight. He’ll be here any second.

  Five steps back into the kitchen. She opens a cupboard and checks again that her two wine glasses are clear, no smudges or residue. That there’s ice in the freezer. That when you open the oven door you aren’t met with a chemical whiff of oven cleaner you might suspect will somehow taint the taste of cooked food, or the sight of a long-forgotten chip burned to black ash.

  “Do you think he put this much effort into prepping his place for you?” she asks the empty kitchen.

  Of course he didn’t. But his place is brand new. And enormous.

  She has to work to impress.

  The buzzer goes.

  She rushes to the intercom and says, “Hello?” into the microphone as if anyone at all might respond, as if the buzzer-presser is a mystery man, as if it would be anybody but him.

  Then she takes a deep breath and tells herself to calm the hell down.

  “Hey,” he says, his voice sounding tinny through the speaker. “It’s me.”

  She presses the button that releases the door lock downstairs and hears the corresponding mechanical click through the speaker.

  “Sixth floor,” she reminds him, even though she’s already told him this twice by text. The only response is the sound
of a heavy door left to slam closed.

  She releases the button and goes back into the main room. One last check of it. One last check of herself in the mirror.

  But by the time she’s done she still hasn’t heard the ding of the elevator or the clunk of the fire door swinging shut at the end of the hall, so she has time to check again. She finds a smudge of mascara beneath her left eye now. How did that happen? When did it happen?

  She licks a finger and carefully rubs it off.

  Ding.

  Clunk.

  Showtime.

  She opens her front door and sticks her head out into the hall. He’s in jeans, a T-shirt, and a black leather jacket. Carrying a brown paper bag by its handles and a bottle of wine by its neck. When he sees her, he smiles.

  Every time she sees him like this—up close, coming toward her, coming to her—she can’t quite believe that it’s really happening.

  That it still is, three weeks in.

  She smiles back. “You found me.”

  “This time.” He looks sheepish. “I may have gone to the wrong block first . . .”

  She laughs because this is exactly what she warned him would happen if he didn’t follow her instructions to the letter. There are several identical-looking blocks in the complex, no decent signs, and multiple entrances and exits.

  When he reaches her, she steps back inside so he can come in.

  He stops to bend down and meet her lips with his, lifting the wine as he does, absently pressing its cold glass against her side. The chill of it through the thin material of her shirt startles her momentarily, as does the reality of this tall, strong, male body being in the smallest, tightest space of her apartment.

  In the same moment, the lock turns in the door directly across the hall.

  Shit.

  The door opens a crack, no more than two or three inches, its rusting safety chain not even pulled taut. An elderly woman—her eyes narrowed, her white hair pulled into a tight bun, one blue-white hand of swollen knuckles and yellow fingernails holding a surgical mask over her mouth—appears in the gap with only gloom visible beyond.