No Bad Deed

by Heather Chavez

  A short walk from downtown, Ozzy rented the upstairs granny unit of a century-old bungalow. Peeling blue paint. Broken brick leading up the walkway. Single-paned windows, one of which was covered with plywood. Healdsburg property values being what they were, such a home wasn’t labeled run-down, but historic.

  I knocked on his door. Despite the hour, Ozzy answered quickly. If I awakened him, he gave no indication. His greeting was alert, if guarded.

  “Hey, Ozzy.” I tried to smile but had no stomach for it. “I was wondering if you’ve heard from Sam.”

  Ozzy Delgado had grown up in Austin, and the drawl crept into his voice when he was tired.

  “I got your message earlier, Cassie, but I haven’t seen him.” He brushed a curl away from his face and opened the door just enough to show the left half of his body. He was wearing cargo pants and a floral-print, button-up shirt, his cold-weather attire. His summer look was the same, except cargo shorts instead of pants. So Ozzy hadn’t yet been to bed. I waited to see which way he would go with the door: open it so I could enter or keep me on his doorstep. It was late, but it was also chilly.

  He didn’t invite me in.

  “Seeing him and hearing from him aren’t the same thing,” I said, staring past him into the living room. I couldn’t make out anything in the darkness. The only illumination came from the back of the house, which I knew from past visits with Sam was Ozzy’s bedroom.

  Ozzy closed the door a little, only a third of him showing now, his lips pinched. “Haven’t heard from him either.”

  “No calls? No texts?”

  “I’m aware what ‘heard from him’ means.”

  I pushed. “So, no contact?”

  He swatted away another curl, his scowl and drawl deepening. “I’m sure Sam will be in touch.”

  “And I’m sure you’re being evasive.”

  A few seconds passed, and my steady glare brought only a sigh.

  “Sam took Audrey trick-or-treating,” I said. “When they didn’t come home, I went looking for them. I found her. Didn’t find him.”

  His eyes widened slightly. “He left Audrey alone?” Good. He was concerned now.

  “She was a few streets from our house, with two women I’ve never met.”

  His face relaxed. “Did Sam know them?”

  “He recognized one of them from carpool,” I admitted. I didn’t like the way Ozzy looked at me when I said that. Like he felt sorry for me. Like he knew something I didn’t.

  “Well, there you go.”

  “It’s odd timing, don’t you think? For Sam to walk away from our daughter on Halloween.”

  “Would there have been a good time for him to leave?” Ozzy exhaled deeply. “It’s late, Cassie,” he said, rubbing an eye for emphasis. “I’ll let you know if Sam gets in touch. Anyway, I hope you guys work it out.”

  He shut the door, leaving me stunned. What the hell had he meant by that last part?

  On my walk back to the car, I considered Ozzy’s final comment. I replayed my marriage to Sam and Sam’s role in it. I remembered the way he had tended my cut after the attack on the trail and the intensity in his expression when he had learned I had been reckless. He was playful, stubborn, affectionate, and sometimes he would retreat into himself if things didn’t go his way. He often thrust me into the role of disciplinarian with the kids, and he despised confrontation—so much that he would avoid talking about his desire to divorce?

  I rejected the thought as soon as it popped into my head. True, Sam had been secretive with his phone call that morning, but he was also the man who had paid for acupuncture for the classroom guinea pig. In high school, he had once stepped in when a group of guys was bullying a smaller, curly-haired teammate, ending up with a bloodied nose and Ozzy’s friendship. Sam was an optimist, but he was also a fiercely protective husband and father, the kind of guy who dressed up like a zombie to take his six-year-old daughter trick-or-treating.

  After considering everything, I couldn’t believe Sam wasn’t happy.

  The thought pricked at my consciousness before I could shoo it away: maybe it wasn’t that he wasn’t happy with me, but that he was happier with someone else.

  I started the car. Twenty-two minutes later, I turned onto Terra Linda Drive. In those twenty-two minutes, I had reassured myself that Sam loved me, he loved our children, and he wouldn’t have left without an explanation.

  When the explanation came a minute later, it wasn’t what I had been expecting: a text from Sam just as I was pulling up to our home. Two words. I’m sorry.

  I parked in the middle of the driveway. There was no need to park on the right, the side usually reserved for me, because sometime in the past hour, Sam’s car had disappeared.

  9

  I entered the house and stood in the dark, the empty spot reminding me of all that might be lost. Closing my eyes, I saw Sam and me as we had been in those first months in this house. I saw Sam lifting an infant Leo in the air, standing in front of the living room window, both of them haloed in midafternoon sun. Then Leo vomited all over both of them. Sam laughed—because what else was there to do?—and then he looked at me, eyebrow arched, and asked for a “very large” towel. When I opened my eyes, the memory was near enough that I squinted in imagined sunlight and caught the scent of soured milk.

  I loved Sam then, loved him now, would probably love him always. Even if he had stopped loving me.

  When I flipped on the light, the first thing I noticed was the glass on its side in the middle of the living room floor. I puzzled over it a moment before I remembered: the Jerusalem cricket I had trapped before leaving the house. While I had been looking for Sam, he had entered our home, knocking over the glass, then had driven away.

  Now freed, the insect had likely found a dark corner to hide in, under a bed or inside a shoe. I could picture it out there, only inches away: its alien eyes watching me, mandibles twitching, and its prickly feet—used to burrow into things moist and decaying—preparing to scuttle across my path.

  I hated those little bastards.

  Zoe insisted that insects like crickets and lady bugs, even spiders, were good luck. But Jerusalem crickets weren’t true crickets, so its hidden presence felt like the opposite. Though I knew it was irrational, that the insect’s escape coincided with Sam’s disappearance felt like an omen.

  I grabbed a change of clothes for both kids before going into the master bedroom to pack my own bag.

  I was still thinking of that insect and of Sam when I saw it: on the nightstand, the dog made of folded paper. It might have been the dread still curdling my stomach, or my bone-deep exhaustion, but the origami creature seemed less innocent in near darkness than it had in that morning’s light. I walked to the nightstand, but hesitated before reaching out. When I touched the paper, I almost expected it to bite.

  Again, I blamed stress, but with its ears folded downward and its broad paper skull, it reminded me of a Labrador. I lifted it to my nose and sniffed. I thought I caught a hint of chocolate. My hands jittered as I unfolded the origami figure, spreading it into a sheet of foil-lined paper. Stamped on the coppery exterior was the brand name of the baking chocolate we sometimes bought.

  On the other side, a number had been etched in pencil.

  2.

  I remembered what Rico had asked me after the attack: Did the number three mean anything to me?

  Sometimes, we step across life’s thresholds without noticing. We say goodbye to a high school friend in June, not realizing she’ll move away over the summer. We sign up for the microbiology class that will change the direction of our careers, or, on a random Tuesday, meet the person we’ll marry.

  But this threshold came with blinking arrows and exclamation points.

  2.

  I didn’t know what the number meant, but I knew it meant something. Staring down at the square of paper, a question occurred to me: If Sam hadn’t been the one to leave the folded dog on my nightstand, how had the person who had left it gained access
to our bedroom?

  I hastily folded the paper in quarters and slipped it into my pocket.

  10

  Zoe lived in a Mediterranean townhome with a tile roof and Juliet balcony. Along the path leading to her door, succulents bloomed in bottle-brushed spikes and pink-tipped rosettes, and wispy grass and purple flowers bowed to the wind.

  When I got to Zoe’s, Audrey was sleeping. Zoe wasn’t.

  Zoe had unlocked the door when I had texted I was on my way. When I entered, my lavender-haired friend was on the couch, long legs tucked beneath her, the one-eyed Smooch draped around her shoulders like the world’s creepiest scarf. Earlier, I had been able to avoid Zoe’s questions. The stony set of her face told me avoidance wasn’t an option this time.

  “How’s Audrey been?” I asked.

  “Didn’t wake up once. Any word on Sam?”

  I sank in the overstuffed chair facing her, hugging a throw pillow to my chest. “He texted that he’s sorry.”

  “And . . . ?”

  “That’s it. He’s sorry. Oh, and his car’s gone now.” I shifted in my seat and released my grip on the pillow. I suddenly had no more energy to hold it, and it slipped to the floor. “When I talked to Ozzy, he said he hoped we could work it out.”

  Zoe’s face was a canvas, her emotions vivid brushstrokes impossible to misread. Currently, the color of choice was red. “What the hell did he mean by that?”

  “He didn’t say.”

  “You guys are solid.”

  But was that true? I thought hard on this. When Audrey was a baby and needed a liver transplant, I hadn’t handled it well. I had let myself slide back into patterns abandoned years before—I drank a little more than was healthy, I worked longer hours at the clinic, so I could feel like I was actually of use to someone—because, as a mom and medical professional, I had failed my daughter. It had taken jaundice setting in for me to recognize the symptoms, and by then she was sick. Really sick. And I was angry. Really angry.

  Sam, though—he took in my anger, and he took in our daughter’s pain, and he carried our family through the crisis. I could always count on him, even when he couldn’t count on me. But lately, I had been working longer hours again, and this time, Sam had pulled away. Just a little. Just enough for me to notice.

  Part of me had been waiting for him to say: I love you, but I can’t do this anymore.

  I filled Zoe in on Sam’s behavior that day and told her more about the assault I had witnessed the night before.

  When I finished, she said, “You’ve always had a savior complex.”

  Her comment surprised me, but then I remembered: she hadn’t known me before. She hadn’t known the Cassie who had watched while college psychopath Dirk abused his almost-girlfriend. I’d thought about that attack twice in as many days. Why?

  I answered my own question, “There are a lot of things in my life I could’ve done differently.”

  “Like what?”

  That night in college, I’d been the one to call 911 when that girl had gone over the balcony. But I had watched from above when the police came. Everyone had watched, at least those who hadn’t fled the party, focused more on hiding their inebriation than the fate of the girl on the ground.

  We were in shock, I had justified. Now I recognized that immobilizing emotion as guilt. If that girl had died in those minutes before the police came, she would’ve died alone.

  I ignored Zoe’s question. “I’m just grateful I was on the trail that night.” I changed the subject. “I think Sam was in the house. When I went inside to grab our things, the glass I’d used to trap a Jerusalem cricket had been knocked over. So unless it had injected steroids . . .”

  “I can’t believe you take the temperatures of bull mastiffs but are afraid of a bug barely bigger than your thumb.”

  “Yeah, I know, and spiders are good luck. There’s something else.”

  I took the chocolate wrapper from my pocket and showed it to Zoe.

  “What’s this?”

  “I found it on my nightstand this morning. It was folded in the shape of a dog.”

  “Like origami?”

  “Yeah. At first I thought it might be from Sam, but now . . .”

  I let her sit with that a few seconds, waiting to see if she would come to the same conclusion I had. I recognized the moment she did. As I had done, she sniffed the wrapper.

  “It smells like chocolate.” Her eyes and mouth widened, her voice breathless as she asked, “Lester?”

  “I thought so, but I have no idea what the number two would mean.”

  “Hmm.”

  “Hmm?”

  “Nothing. So it’s a two.”

  “After I witnessed that attack, the detective asked if the number three meant anything to me.”

  “Does it?”

  “Other than being the number between two and four, I haven’t a clue. But it feels like a threat, especially after what happened with Lester.”

  She paused, her face scrunching. “I thought you found it before Lester was poisoned?”

  “I did.”

  “Hmm.”

  “I should call Detective Rico . . . What?”

  “I know you’re upset.”

  “Of course I’m upset. My husband might’ve just ended our marriage with a two-word text.”

  “Remember when Bobby and I broke up, and I wanted to go see him?”

  “You wanted to put sardines in his gas tank.”

  “He cheated on me with my cousin. It wouldn’t have worked anyway. I would’ve had to pry open his gas tank, so he would’ve noticed that before the sardines could do any real damage.”

  “Because that was the flaw in your plan.”

  “Anyway, you stopped me. You knew I was upset, that I wasn’t thinking clearly, and you told me not to put sardines in Bobby’s tank.”

  “You really think me calling Rico about Sam and that wrapper is the equivalent of vandalizing your ex’s car?”

  “Not at all. It’s just . . . I’m sorry, Cassie, but you aren’t thinking straight. And you shouldn’t be, not with what you’ve been through recently, but as your friend, it’s my job to be the logical one here.”

  “The logical one, huh? Weren’t we just talking about your plan to slip fish into your ex’s gas tank?”

  Her expressive face split into a grin, but there was sadness at its edges. “Okay, so I’m not usually the logical one, but let me give it a shot here. First, the wrapper. When you showed it to me, I didn’t see a number.”

  “What then?”

  She turned it over and traced a section of raised foil, where the pencil mark on the other side had left it embossed with its mirror image. “The letter S. I guess it could be a two, or at least I can see where you’d think that. Power of suggestion. You were thinking of that detective’s question, so you saw a two, whereas I was thinking leaving an origami dog seemed like something Sam would do. So I saw an S.”

  “But you agree it smells like chocolate.”

  “I’ve been to your house. It’s a brand you use.”

  “You think it’s a coincidence?”

  “How would someone get into your house? Into your bedroom?”

  “Carver took my van, which had my keys. We didn’t get the locks changed until late yesterday morning.” I thought of the bug freed from its jar. “If it’s related to that night and he’s done something with Sam—he’d have the new house key too.”

  “It just seems a little—much. Isn’t it more likely that Sam left it for you as some romantic gesture that only seems sinister now that he’s gone?”

  I took the wrapper back but said nothing.

  “And isn’t it more likely that, given that text you received, Sam left because . . .”

  “Because?” But I knew where the sentence had been headed.

  Zoe flushed and reached out to rest her hand on my knee. “Because he wanted to.”

  “Then it would seem an inappropriate time for romantic gestures.”

  �
�So what I’m saying doesn’t make sense to you?”

  I twisted my wedding ring. “I think Sam’s been trying to tell me something for weeks, and I’ve missed it. Still, if there’s even a chance that his absence isn’t his choice . . .”

  Zoe finished my sentence. “You need to do whatever you can to find him.”

  Smooch slid from Zoe’s neck onto her lap. Zoe’s petting grew more aggressive as she considered her next words. Thanks to her remarkably expressive face, I could read what was coming. Finally, she said, “I hope Sam’s having an affair.” Having settled on an explanation that was both logical and meant Sam was safe, her voice grew more animated. “Sam’s been acting shady, he says you guys need to talk. Those women mention it looked like he was waiting for someone at that house where you found Audrey. That text he sent. And Ozzy’s obviously covering for him.” She paused to catch her breath. “I hope Sam hooked up with some bimbo and he’s just taking some time to figure everything out, because if that’s what happened, he’ll be back.”

  Even as the idea broke my heart, I thought: I hope so too.

  11

  I fell asleep with my hand on my phone and woke up the same way. I checked the screen. No more texts from Sam.

  From the kitchen, I could hear Audrey making breakfast with Zoe. Laughing. The morning before, that had been the four of us, in our own kitchen, Sam scrambling eggs and none of us realizing it might be our last breakfast as a family.

  I wasn’t yet ready for Audrey’s questions, so I pulled the blanket around me and called my son.

  “Hey.” Leo’s voice held the usual hint of teen impatience. “What’s up, Mom?”

  “Just checking in.” I forced a lilt in my voice. Everything fine here. “Did you and Tyler have fun last night?”