56 Days

by Catherine Ryan Howard

  Karl closes the laptop and they sit in companionable silence for half a minute, digesting everything.

  “How did she find him?” Lee asks then. “Who was her secret tipster? That’s what I want to know. Oh.” She’s remembered the chocolate. She pulls it from her pocket now, grimacing at the soft substance she can feel give way to her fingers through the foil. She holds it out to Karl. “Sorry. You might want to—”

  “Give it to me. It’ll taste the same going down.”

  They lapse back into silence—or near silence, since Karl is a noisy chewer even when there isn’t that much to chew.

  Then something occurs to Lee.

  “Which one is the other KB Studios apartment?”

  Karl says something that sounds like, “What?” distorted by a mouthful of food.

  “Which one is the other KB Studios apartment?” Lee repeats. “They rent two, remember? Which one is the other one? What number?”

  “Dunno. Why?”

  “Because it’s owned by Oliver St Ledger’s brother’s friend’s neighbor’s dog or whatever it was. A connection going back years, potentially. Maybe even . . . ?” She waits for the penny to drop with Karl.

  “All the way to 2003,” he finishes. “Clever girl.”

  “Was there anything in the door-to-doors?”

  “I can check.”

  “Why don’t you call back your buddy? Kenneth Balfe. Ask him, it’ll be quicker.”

  Karl wipes his sticky fingers on his trousers—“Next, we solve the case of why you’re still single,” Lee says wryly, to which Karl snaps back, “And then after that, why you are, too,”—before taking his phone from a pocket, tapping the screen, and putting it to his ear.

  The device’s volume is loud enough for Lee to hear without the speaker-phone option.

  “Hello? Yes?” a voice says.

  “Mr Balfe, it’s Detective Sergeant Karl Connolly again. No further news, just a question for you, if you wouldn’t mind.”

  “Oh. All right.”

  “We were told that KB Studios rents two apartments in the Crossings. Obviously, we know one of them is apartment one. Would you happen to know the number of the second?”

  Kenneth Balfe answers right away.

  “Number fourteen,” he says. “Although it’s not one of our employees that’s in there at the minute, it’s a friend of the family’s. Well, my wife’s friend, really. She’s a nurse, but she lives with her elderly parents who are supposed to be cocooning, so we offered to let her stay there since it was empty anyway. Well, my wife offered and I do what I’m told. Happy wife, happy life, you know yourself.”

  Karl is grinning at Lee.

  She mouths name at him.

  “Would you happen to have her name?” Karl asks.

  There’s a rustling noise on the other end of the line.

  “Let me just ask my wife, she’s in the other room. But I think she said it was Laura something . . .”

  61 Days Ago

  Ciara is dreaming of Mill River. She doesn’t have many clear memories of the place but her subconscious fills in the details, making the river more of a trickling stream, lining its bed with tiny pebbles, and clearing its banks of trees, so you can see the water from the estate, and you can see right through the water to the pale limbs that lie—

  Her phone is ringing.

  Through the fog of half-sleep, Ciara reaches for her bedside table where it’s always plugged in overnight, but there’s no phone or bedside table.

  When she opens her eyes, she finds an unfamiliar scene: a small living room filled with mismatched furniture, grubby white walls that could do with a fresh coat of paint, sunshine streaming through paper-thin curtains. And she appears to be lying in a bed in sheets she doesn’t recognize right in the middle of it, which doesn’t make any sense until . . . The last dregs of sleep leave her like clouds parting in the sky, and she remembers.

  She couldn’t afford to stay in the hotel and keep paying her rent back home, so she’d found a cheaper alternative via Airbnb. The owner was surprisingly agreeable, happy to take cash payments and to let the place out week to week; it was the off-season, she figured, and he was probably happy with any level of occupancy. But then she’d collected the key, let herself in, and discovered the truth: the photos online had been taken at extremely generous angles and the guy was lucky to have anyone paying any amount of money to stay there at all.

  The ringing is coming from the tiny kitchen, tucked away on the other side of the room. Ciara throws back the sheets and hurries toward the sound, finding her phone vibrating angrily on the Formica countertop.

  SHIV, the screen says.

  Shit.

  Ciara knew that, sooner or later, she’d have to explain herself to her sister, but she was hoping for more of the later bit.

  “Hello?” Her voice comes out croaky and dry. She tries again, does marginally better. “Hello?”

  “Oh, so you are alive,” Siobhán snaps. She’s outdoors; Ciara can hear the sound of passing traffic and whipping wind. “Get up and let me in. I’m downstairs. Is your buzzer broken or something? I’ve been pressing it for ages.”

  Ciara can’t think of a single other Sunday when her sister randomly showed up at her front door, but of course she would do it today. The woman must have a sixth sense.

  “I’m not there,” Ciara says. “Am I supposed to be?”

  “Where the hell are you?”

  “In Dublin.”

  “In Dublin?”

  “I have a job interview.”

  “A job interview?”

  “Are you just going to repeat everything I say, Shiv?”

  “Yes, until you tell me what the hell is going on.”

  “An opportunity came up,” Ciara says carefully. She has practiced this but needs to avoid making it sound that way. “We have a new property opening up here in the summer and they were looking for someone from Events to be on the opening team. I applied for it months ago. I’d forgotten about it, to be honest, until they sent me an email last week. I can’t see myself taking it, especially not now, with Mam. But I figured I may as well go along. For the experience. It’s first thing tomorrow morning but I came up yesterday to, you know . . .”

  “Abuse your employee discount?”

  That doesn’t kick in until she’s worked for the company for twelve months, but since it’s an easy explanation, Ciara says, “Exactly. Yeah.”

  A beat passes.

  “Are you sure about the not-taking-it bit?” Siobhán asks. “Because with Mam and everything . . .”

  “I’m sure,” Ciara says. “Why were you calling over?”

  “Because I made the mistake of drinking a liter of coffee before I left for my walk.”

  “Go buy another one at the café on the corner. Millie’s. You can use the bathroom in there.”

  “I think I’ll have to. It’s Situation Critical.”

  Ciara ends the call and immediately feels terrible about lying to her sister. She wishes she could tell her the truth, which is that the truth is what she’s chasing.

  But Siobhán doesn’t even want to hear Oliver St Ledger’s name, let alone that Ciara has been playing internet detective and has now temporarily moved to another city to see if she can accidentally on purpose cross paths with him and ask him questions about that day, the one that cracked open a fault line through the heart of their family.

  To discover the full horror of it, whatever it may be.

  So that their family—what’s left of it—can maybe find some peace.

  But lying, it turns out, is hard. She’s told her boss at work that she needs to take a few personal days because of her mother’s worsening health situation, and now Siobhán that she’s come to Dublin to interview for a job that doesn’t exist. She hasn’t even approached Oliver St Ledger yet and alre
ady it feels like there are multiple threads to keep hold of, to keep straight in her head.

  She won’t be able to do this. She’s just not cut out for this sort of thing.

  Ciara goes back into the main room and to the assortment of items laid out on the couch. She’d only packed a bag for an overnight stay but returning to Cork to collect more things was out of the question; there was the expense of another train ticket, but mostly it was Ciara’s absolute certainty that if she left Dublin now, she would never come back.

  She’s just about got the nerve to stay.

  She knows she doesn’t have enough to travel all the way back here, again.

  So she had to go shopping, on an extremely tight budget. The huge Primark on O’Connell Street had provided extra clothes and underwear, toiletries, a notebook. She takes the notebook now, opens it to a fresh page, and scribbles down in bullet points what she told Siobhán.

  Just in case.

  She’d had to go elsewhere to find the other things she needed. Eason’s for the blue lanyard and compact laminating machine. The Three store on Grafton Street for her pay-as-you-go phone. The stationers next to Oliver’s office for printing her new ID.

  There’d been a guy of about eighteen or nineteen working the counter at the time, and he’d handed over the envelope very slowly, staring at her with a weird look on his face. “It’s for a costume party,” Ciara had said to him, at which point he’d tried—and failed—to act like he had no idea what she was referring to.

  And then to one of the charity shops on South Great George’s Street for the thing she didn’t know she’d needed.

  She’d just happened to be passing by on her roundabout way back from O’Connell Street when she’d seen it in the window, artfully arranged as part of a themed display. There must have been a rash of space-themed donations lately, and the shop was taking advantage. There was a LEGO Saturn V rocket, already built but standing next to its pristine box; a stack of astronaut biographies; and a blanket, mug, and T-shirt sporting NASA logos.

  And a little tote bag, showing the space shuttle flying over skyscrapers.

  It was stamped with a logo that said “Intrepid,” which, when Ciara googled it on her phone, turned out to be a museum on an aircraft carrier in New York.

  Ciara knew absolutely nothing about who Oliver St Ledger was now, and only very little about who he’d once been. If she had to make a list of things that interested him she’d have to guess, and she could only really do it twice. Rugby, based on a photo from nearly two decades ago in a school newsletter—which, she’d have to presume, they didn’t offer the opportunity to do much of in Oberstown, the juvenile detention center. And space, based on the T-shirt he was wearing the day of the murder, the one that had ended up covered in someone else’s blood.

  It wasn’t much, and it wasn’t likely that either of those things still played any kind of role in Oliver St Ledger’s life. But it was all she had, and she knew absolutely nothing about rugby. She could at least fake the space thing a bit. Read a few Wikipedia pages, rewatch Apollo 13.

  And just because you were interested in it didn’t necessarily mean you knew every last detail about it. You didn’t have to be obsessive. You could just be the kind of person who was interested enough to have bought yourself a souvenir after a visit to a museum.

  Something practical, easily carried around, put on display without looking obvious.

  A conversation starter, maybe. Hopefully.

  Ciara makes herself a cup of tea and picks up another one of her purchases: the newspaper she bought yesterday that she ended up feeling too sleepy to read when she got back. She spreads it open now, across the piles of things on the couch, and scans the front-page headline.

  first irish coronavirus case confirmed.

  21 Days Ago

  Oliver wills himself to get up from the couch and go into the kitchen, where he stands at the sink and gulps down several glasses of water without turning on any lights. His stomach is growling and upset, but he has no appetite. He can’t imagine eating. He fills his water glass again and goes into the bathroom to get a pill.

  There is a moment then, in the bathroom. In front of the cabinet, holding the blister pack in his hand.

  The pills are lethal, deadly if you don’t follow the dose. They’re what you do when you’ve exhausted all other options because they’re so damn strong. It’s why he only takes them, at the very most, once a month, and never ever exceeds the dose.

  He counts the pills now: seventeen between the two blister packs.

  He doesn’t know how much time passes, but—

  Oliver shoves them both back into the medicine cabinet and firmly closes the door. It’s not an option. He’d tried it once, not very hard, and was glad when it didn’t work. A permanent solution to a temporary problem, is what Dan says. Usually right before he says, This too shall pass.

  But will this?

  He goes into the bedroom and sees the bed is made, which at first he can’t figure out. But then he remembers: he hasn’t been in it since Wednesday morning, and Wednesday morning Ciara was still here. She must have made it. He spreads his hands across the sheets, trying to detect some trace of her decaying presence, but there’s nothing there.

  He climbs onto the bed, folds himself in under the blanket, imagining that it’s her arms he can feel, holding him tight, keeping him safe, and dreams of a cold river and a young boy’s eyes looking up at him, asking the same question over and over.

  Why are you doing this to me?

  Now, as then, Oliver doesn’t know.

  At some point on Saturday he forces himself out of bed and wanders into the kitchen to get something to eat, not because he’s hungry but because he can’t stand to listen to the incessant gurgling of his stomach juices anymore. He finds an open box of breakfast cereal and starts eating it dry and by the fistful, standing up. As each blast of sugar hits his bloodstream, more and more of his surroundings emerge from the fog of exhaustion and take on a solid shape.

  The curtains are closed, even though it’s the middle of the afternoon. The kitchen is littered with half-drunk glasses of water, the remnants of an uneaten lunch from—Wednesday? Has that been sitting there since Wednesday?—and the air is stale and smells odd, like sour milk. He should clean up, but his limbs feel heavy. All he wants to do is go back to bed.

  Well, what he really wants to do is talk to Ciara, but that’s not an option.

  Unless he can persuade her to come back, to listen to him just for a few minutes. To let him explain himself now that the shock may have subsided somewhat. Of course she reacted that way, he wouldn’t have expected anything else. But maybe now, with a few days’ distance, with the revelation having had a bit of time to lose its electrified edges . . .

  His phone. Where is it?

  He pushes aside the kitchen countertop’s detritus, searching, until he finds it under a government-issued COVID-19 advice booklet, dark and dead. Another search eventually turns up the charger; he goes back into the bedroom and plugs it in next to the bed.

  What is he supposed to say to her? What words could possibly convince her to come back and speak to him?

  At the buzz-buzz sound that signals the phone is charged enough to have powered itself back on, he picks it up and starts typing Ciara a text message. It goes through several drafts and deletions, but eventually he settles on:

  I know it’s over but I don’t want it to end this way. Can we talk? We can meet somewhere public if you prefer.

  He waits for the notification that it’s been delivered, but it doesn’t come.

  One minute passes.

  Two.

  Has she blocked him, he wonders, or is her phone just turned off? He chances calling her and gets his answer: it goes straight to voicemail.

  He doesn’t leave a message. Instead, he rolls over, burrows beneath the blankets, and cl
oses his eyes, desperate for sleep to come and save him from the torture of his own thoughts, the reality of this situation, what it might mean for his future, his regrets.

  Eventually he dozes.

  It gets dark again.

  A ringing sound, aggressive and electronic and out of place.

  Oliver jerks awake, sits up in the dark and thinks, My phone. But it’s not his phone, it’s the buzzer, pulsing out of the intercom in the hall.

  Someone is here.

  He’s confused by the light. What time is it? What day? He feels groggy and disoriented, yanked out of one time and dumped in another.

  Would Kenneth have come over? He doubts it. Which means that really, it could only be—

  Oliver jumps out of bed but his body isn’t ready for it, and he stumbles and falls hard against the wardrobe door, sending a shooting pain emanating out from his left elbow in all directions.

  The buzzer goes again.

  He scrambles to his feet, hurries out into the hall.

  It’s her.

  He can see her on the little square video display.

  “Ciara,” he says, pressing the Open button, not caring that her name has come out of his mouth sounding pathetically grateful and desperately hopeful.

  Her voice, tinny from the speaker: “Can I come in?”

  “Of course. Of course. Of course.”

  On the video screen, she disappears from view and there’s a clicking sound as the outside door opens.

  Oliver goes to open his own front door and stands on its threshold, one hand holding it open, facing down the corridor. He tries to rub alertness into his face with his free hand while he waits.

  What is he going to say to her? What is she going to say to him? When she rounds the curve in the corridor, her face offers no hints—at least until she reaches him, when her brow furrows with concern.

  “Are you okay?” she asks.

  This is promising, he thinks. That she cares.

  “I just haven’t slept properly,” he says, his tongue feeling thick.