56 Days

by Catherine Ryan Howard

  She thinks that’s who it is, anyway. What she looks like up close matches what the woman on the balcony looked like from far away. Blond, late thirties/early forties, with a body only a gym could maintain. Unlike Ciara, she’s properly dressed—jeans, socks and sneakers, an oversized cardigan—and there’s no trace of sleep on her face.

  She’s smiling at first but then the smile starts to fade and Ciara realizes she hasn’t reacted to this woman’s presence at all, hasn’t said a single thing yet, just looked at her blankly, and now might be the time—

  “Sorry,” Ciara blurts. “Miles away there. I think I’m still half-asleep. And yeah. It was so loud in there, I couldn’t think.”

  “I’m Laura.”

  “Ciara.”

  “I would shake your hand, but . . . We can bump elbows.”

  Ciara thinks the other woman is joking until she raises an arm and proffers it for a bump.

  “Have you just moved in?” Laura asks then.

  “Oh, I don’t—I don’t live here. I’m just staying with a friend. For now. During . . . all this.”

  “Kind of like a lockdown buddy?”

  Ciara isn’t confident that this isn’t a euphemism, and Laura’s knowing smile suggests that it is. So she mumbles, “Something like that.”

  “I should’ve got one of those. I’m on my own and going a bit stir-crazy.” Laura looks back at the building, turning her body directly toward the nearest streetlight. It illuminates her features, including a thin, white scar across the base of her throat. She frowns a little. “He must be a very deep sleeper, this buddy of yours.”

  Ciara feels a ripple of dread at the prospect of having to talk to him, of having to go back in there, with him, after that.

  He pulled her into that bathroom and then physically prevented her from leaving.

  Or did he just do a very bad job of trying to get his point across?

  And who was texting him at four in the morning?

  Over Laura’s shoulders, Ciara catches a glint of light: a reflection on one of the glass doors as it swings open.

  Oliver steps onto the street, looking around, scanning.

  For her.

  But when he turns and sees her, he abruptly turns on his heel and goes back inside.

  What the . . . ?

  Laura turns around to follow Ciara’s gaze.

  “Everything all right?” she asks.

  “Fine,” Ciara says absently.

  “I wanted to—” Laura starts, at the precise moment the siren wail stops. “Oh.” She smiles. “Well, there we go. Hallelujah.”

  “Finally.” Ciara takes a step toward the doors. “I’m getting such a bad headache. Honestly, I wouldn’t have been able to take much more of it.”

  “I have some paracetamol if that’s any—”

  “Oh no. Thank you.” Ciara turns back, smiles gratefully. “I have something.”

  “Are you sure? I’ve got the good stuff.”

  “No, no. Really. Thank you, though.”

  “Is it Oliver?”

  Ciara stops.

  She’s sure she’s misheard.

  “Sorry?”

  “Is it Ollie?” Laura asks. “That you’re staying with?”

  Both women have moved from their original positions. Laura is now shrouded in shadow, while Ciara is excruciatingly aware that she is fully illuminated by the streetlight.

  She tries to keep her expression totally neutral while also trying to figure out what the hell she should say.

  Who is this woman?

  And how does she know Oliver?

  “If you ever need help,” Laura says then, “I’m in number fourteen. Anytime, day or night, just knock. Or buzz. Okay?”

  Ciara blinks at the other woman, confused.

  “If you ever need anything.” Laura is staring at her intently, as if trying to silently communicate something she can’t say out loud. “Anything at all.”

  Their exchange ends then on two odd notes.

  Instead of walking back inside with her, Laura stays exactly where she is, on the street, and bids her goodnight.

  And as Ciara walks away, she feels the other woman’s eyes on her back and then another feeling, a sense, that something isn’t quite right.

  There’s a different alarm buzzing now, a silent one, but she doesn’t know what set it off or how to make it stop.

  In the moments before the fire alarm went off, Oliver was sitting on the couch in the living room, swiping absently through the pages of an e-book on his phone. He kept finding himself lost in the text, having to go back and reread the previous paragraph or page, only to find himself lost again a few lines later.

  He couldn’t spare it any attention.

  His mind was on other things.

  And then the phone vibrated in his hand and the text message he’d been waiting for flashed on-screen—but it said the opposite of what he’d been hoping it would.

  From: RICH

  Don’t see another way for now. Too dangerous. Get out of there.

  Oliver was blinking at the words when a deafening wail started up from all directions: the fire alarm.

  Which meant—

  Panicked, he dropped the phone onto the table and hurried into the hall. Through the open bedroom door, he could see that Ciara was already awake and getting out of bed, pulling on clothes and sticking her bare feet into her sneakers.

  He didn’t move, didn’t know what to do, couldn’t think.

  It was as if Rich’s words had had some kind of immobilizing effect on him, a verbal stun gun.

  Don’t see another way for now. Too dangerous. Get out of there.

  He was sure Rich was wrong.

  But Oliver was equally sure that Rich could never be persuaded of that.

  Ciara pushes past him and hurries into the living room. The touch of her body against his wakes him from his stupor, switching him into action mode, and he follows her. She seems frantic, wild-eyed, searching—

  For her phone, it turns out, which is sitting on the coffee table not far from his.

  Just as she bends to pick it up, the unthinkable happens: his phone lights up with Rich’s text message. He never actually opened it, so his phone is alerting him to it for a second time.

  Oliver thinks his heart actually skips a beat.

  But Ciara just picks up her phone and starts back toward him, toward the door. It seems like she didn’t even see it.

  “Where are you going?” he shouts over the din of the alarm.

  She points behind him. “Out!”

  And then she pushes past him for a second time, out into the hallway.

  This is his third fire alarm since he moved in, and his second middle-of-the-night one. The first time he did what he was supposed to do: he went outside. So did everyone else; the courtyard was soon filled with residents. He’d hung back in the shadows, head down, pretending to be enthralled by his phone. He’d avoided invitations to politely chitchat and ignored the opportunity to engage with any of his neighbors. He didn’t want to get to know any of them and he certainly didn’t want any of them to get to know him.

  Forty-five minutes passed. It turned out to be a false alarm.

  The second time it had gone off during the day, so he’d hesitated to leave. The door next to his own was a fire exit that opened onto the street; unless the fire was in his own apartment, he wasn’t in any danger. He figured the chances were there wasn’t one, and he was right. Another false alarm. He’d watched the courtyard through the curtains until the residents who could stand the noise started drifting back inside and the others rolled their eyes and folded their arms and put their phones to their ears, presumably ringing the absentee management company. Then he’d gone into the bathroom, where the siren wasn’t as loud, put on his headphones, and waited it out.
>
  There’d been no need to take another chance.

  But Ciara doesn’t have the same motivation to protect her privacy, to hide her face. If they go out there now, together, she could end up chatting to anybody. To everybody. Saying something careless. Pointing at him, calling him over, introducing him.

  He can’t let that happen.

  After Ciara leaves, Oliver waits four minutes. Five. Six.

  The siren continues to wail.

  He pulls back the curtains in the living room but can’t see anything in the courtyard except the other residents gathered there. He slides open the door and ducks his head out, but there’s no smell of smoke and no sign of fire. He studies the faces close enough for him to see but detects nothing on them except annoyance.

  Another false alarm, then. Just like he thought.

  He goes back inside.

  His phone is still lying on the table. He deletes the message from Rich, double-checking that he’s not only gotten rid of the message itself but the entire thread of their recent exchanges. He’d thought he was safe at this hour of the night, but he didn’t count on the fire alarm.

  He doesn’t think she saw the message, but he can’t be sure. What if she comes back in and asks him about it?

  Don’t see another way for now. Too dangerous. Get out of there.

  How can he possibly explain away that?

  That’s when he realizes that he didn’t see Ciara outside, in the courtyard. He goes back out onto the terrace, this time going as far as the railing, to scan for her, but there’s no sign.

  Where is she?

  He ducks back inside. The alarm continues to wail. He knows it’s purely psychological, but it does sound even louder now than it did when it first went off.

  Where did she go, if not out there?

  Maybe she’s just being careful and standing away from everyone else, in a corner somewhere.

  Or maybe she’s struck up a conversation and is telling one of the neighbors all about him.

  He paces in the hallway, willing the bloody alarm to go off. If it just went off now, she’d come back inside and he could set about repairing this absolute shitshow of a night . . .

  But the wail of the alarm continues, unabated.

  Eventually he grabs a mask from the bathroom floor and his keys from the hall table and goes out into the corridor. The siren wail kicks it up a notch. Oliver hurries to the lobby where, through the glass doors, he sees the residents huddled outside in little groups. They stand at varying distances from each other, shifting their weight from foot to foot, arms crossed against their chests. Everyone has the pale, puffy face of the deep sleeper suddenly disturbed and is wearing some combination of pajamas and winter coat.

  What no one is wearing, however, is a mask.

  He quickly pulls off his own and stuffs it into a pocket before anyone can turn and look—wearing one when no one else is would only draw attention, would only make him stand out when what he needs to do is blend in.

  Ciara isn’t among them.

  He turns and looks at the main doors, the ones that lead out to the street. Would she have gone out there? Maybe she would if she had actually listened to him, if she thought that the fictional senior partner at his firm posed a threat.

  He pushes through the doors and—

  Sees her, standing a little ways up the street.

  Relief, first of all.

  But then he sees the other figure in the shadows, the featureless silhouette. A woman. The woman that Ciara is talking to. She’s dressed in day clothes, but she must be another resident, trying to escape the siren’s relentless wail.

  Over this woman’s shoulder, Ciara’s eyes find him.

  But at the same time, the woman turns to see what Ciara is looking at, a movement which illuminates her face with streetlamp light and—

  Oliver abruptly ducks backs into the shadows of the doorway, out of sight.

  What the—

  It can’t be.

  That would be an astronomical coincidence.

  And it’s dark, it’s the middle of the night, he’s under stress and he only saw her for a fraction of a second . . .

  But in bright light. And he’s been awake for a couple of hours already. And perhaps it’s no coincidence at all.

  The woman with the scar and the cigarettes. Whom Oliver had scared half to death, unintentionally, outside the rear doors of the Westbury. Three weeks ago, when he’d taken Ciara there for cocktails.

  Outside his apartment building at just after four in the morning, that’s who Ciara is talking to.

  Today

  “Mill River,” Karl repeats. “Shit. You think he’s one of them?”

  Lee holds up a hand in a stop gesture.

  “Roll it back a bit there, Karly boy. We’ve no ID. All I am saying is that the name on that envelope is a match for one of those boys, and their names were never released to the public. They’re legally protected. Still are. And this was back in, what? 2003? Pre-Twitter and Facebook. Before people started violating court orders while sitting on their arses at home thumbing their phones. So apart from friends and family, the school, and probably a few people in the locality, the general public didn’t actually know this name. I only know it because I was on traffic at the funeral. I’m not supposed to know it. I don’t, officially.”

  “Who did you call?”

  “The senior detective from back then.”

  “And he confirmed?”

  “Yup.”

  “Shit,” Karl says again. “Could it be a coincidence?”

  “Course it could. But I wouldn’t say that’s a very common name to find on an Irish twentysomething, would you?”

  Karl shakes his head, disbelieving.

  “So what do we do with this information?”

  “We be very, very careful with it,” Lee says. “The more people we tell, the more chance there is of it getting out. And we’re not just trying to keep it on the QT that it might be him in there, we have to protect the name itself. I don’t want to be responsible for putting that name in the public domain.” She chews her lip as she thinks. “Let’s just sit on it for now. I’ll tell the Super when I have a chance to do it in person.”

  “Which one was he? A or B?”

  “The name on the envelope,” Lee says pointedly, “is B’s.”

  “Where’s A these days? Could he have—”

  “He took his own life in detention.”

  “How come this dude—” Karl stops, starts again. “How come the name on the envelope isn’t still in there?”

  “He got a lighter sentence. Got out when he turned eighteen.”

  “I don’t remember hearing anything about that.”

  Lee shrugs. “You weren’t supposed to.”

  “But that’s a nice apartment,” Karl says, “in a nice place. I mean, what are we talking, two grand a month? And he’s an architect.”

  “Please tell me you’re not about to say he doesn’t seem like a killer.”

  “But he d—”

  “Most people who do bad things do so because a confluence of events has maneuvered them into that position and then pushed them to act, to do something out of character. How many times have we heard, ‘Oh, my Johnnie would never do that, he doesn’t have it in him, you must have the wrong house,’ or, ‘I’ve been best friends with this guy for years, I know he’s not a killer’? Yeah, he didn’t have it in him and he wasn’t a killer—until he did and he was. None of us know what we’re capable of, if the circumstances were right. Or wrong.”

  Karl raises an eyebrow. “Are you telling me you think you could murder someone?”

  “Well, I’m not planning to—”

  “Reassuring.”

  “—but I don’t know what’s going to happen to me. Like, imagine: one day you’re outside your
house, getting into your car, and—say—your mother is walking around to get into the passenger side.”

  “I can’t,” Karl says. “You know Nora would insist on driving.”

  “But before she can, a drunk, joyriding teenager plows into her, head-on, right in front of you, pinning her to the side of the car. And then starts laughing about it. Thinks it’s the funniest thing ever, doesn’t care. You can see him, pissing himself laughing, through the windshield. Imagine it. Really. The anger. The rage. The laughing. And you happen to have your sidearm, and there’s no one around and you know you can make it look like you fired on approach to try to prevent what happened from happening. What would you do? I mean, maybe you wouldn’t want to kill him, but wouldn’t you rapid-fire a couple straight into his balls? Wouldn’t you love to see the pain on his face that he’s just caused you? Wouldn’t you want to stop that goddamn laughing?”

  Silence.

  Then Karl says, “That’s fucking dark, Lee. Jesus Christ.”

  “All I’m saying is child murderers can grow up to be architects who live in nice apartments.”

  “What did Nora ever do to you?”

  “Dividing people into good and evil is just lazy.”

  “You really need to get a roommate.”

  “Detective Inspector?” The new voice comes from outside the car. When Lee turns toward it, she sees Garda Claire O’Herlihy, one of the uniforms who’s helping with the door-to-doors, standing a few feet away and bent at the waist so she can make eye contact. “Have you got a sec?”

  “Sure.” Lee gets out and then Karl does too, walking around the hood to join the women. “What’s up?”

  “We’ve got a resident who’d like to talk to you,” Claire says. “Only to you. ‘The guard in charge.’ She might be a bit of a nut, but I don’t get that vibe myself. She claims she has sensitive information about the resident in apartment number one and will only speak to the highest-ranking member on-scene about it. She seems a bit antsy. Nervous. She’s in fourteen.”

  Lee exchanges a glance with Karl.

  “Have you talked to her already?” she asks Claire.

  “She wouldn’t answer any of the set questions. Says she needs to talk to you first.”