In my nephew’s bedroom, surrounded by Star Wars and Skater Boy paraphernalia, stuffed animals and sports posters-walls, ceilings covered with it all-bunk beds the size of apartments I’d had, I put my head on his desk and wept, feeling all my rage, confusion, and grief pour out of me in one mighty rush. I could have drowned in it. Two days ago, I would have turned to my imperfect husband for his intellect and calm in such a storm. I would have reached for him and he would have lifted me from the chaos of my emotions.
“Isabel, relax,” he’d say. “Clear your head.”
And I’d feel that fog-the one that descends over me in time of stress or high emotion, the one that inhibits logical thought-I’d feel it start to lift.
“There is no problem that doesn’t have a solution. There’s always a way,” he’d tell me. And I’d listen, know he was right.
I felt his loss so profoundly that I almost just crawled into Trevor’s bed and pulled the covers over my head. My friend, my husband, my lover was a liar at least, quite possibly a criminal as well. But still the thought of being without him nearly crippled me. For all the fractures in our marriage, all the things that caused me pain, I truly loved him, had the most basic kind of faith in him, even if I’d never really trusted him again after his affair.
For some reason, I found myself thinking back to my conversation with Detective Crowe. And love forgives? he’d asked bitterly. Love accepts, moves forward, I’d answered him. But maybe, in my case, love accepts too much, wants to live so badly that it creates what it needs to survive.
Next to the computer keyboard my cell phone vibrated, started shimmying along the smooth white surface of the desk. I looked at the little screen. Erik calling. I hesitated, then answered it but didn’t say anything.
“Don’t do this, Iz,” he said. “You don’t have to do this. Just come back and we’ll work it out together.”
I didn’t say anything.
“Or at least go to the lawyer’s office. You know where he is, right? John Brace and Son, on Park Avenue. He’ll know what to do. That detective said if we can’t get you to come back, he’s going to consider you a person of interest in all of this. A suspect, Iz. Let’s not have this get any worse than it already is.”
I pressed the End button on my phone and set it back down. It started buzzing again a second later. Linda calling. I let it shimmy itself off the desk and fall to the floor. Eventually it stopped ringing.
As I got up and walked away from it, it started buzzing again. That little phone, the fat silver weight of it, smooth and warm like a worry stone, had always been a source of comfort to me. Seemed like it was always in my hand, all the people in my life just one push button away. All those voices-my sister, my mother, my husband-at least as loud as my own, often louder. I left them all there calling after me.
I took an old coat from my sister’s closet and I was about to leave when I had a thought. I ran to the room Erik used as an office and went into their file cabinet, which I knew they left unlocked. It was easy to find their passports-and mine among them. Linda and I had traveled with the kids last summer, an impromptu trip to Mexico. In the melee of traveling with two kids, our passports got confused. I had Linda’s at my apartment, or did. She had mine. I grabbed it with a wash of relief and euphoria. I thought that sometimes fate smiled on you, even when she had been slapping you around in every other way like the abusive, narcissistic bitch she is.
GRADY CROWE HATED hospitals-not that anyone liked them especially. But he didn’t dislike them for the same reasons as other people. He hadn’t watched anyone die in a hospital; he didn’t feel uncomfortable around sick people. It didn’t remind him of his own mortality.
He just didn’t like the lighting, the stale decor, or the smell of an institutional kitchen. These things offended his aesthetic sensibilities, made him anxious and uncomfortable. And it annoyed him that people suffering from disease weren’t treated to a more pleasant environment. Wouldn’t it help them to feel better if they didn’t have to look at gray Formica and dirty white walls, if they didn’t have to look at themselves beneath the ugly glare of fluorescent lighting? And if their last days had to be spent here, shouldn’t a little more attention be paid to detail? Should the last thing they see be peeling wallpaper or a metal bed rail? Then again, maybe not everyone was as affected by these things as he was.
His phone rang.
“She’s moving,” Jez said on the other end. He heard a siren wailing in the background and she sounded a bit breathless.
“Are you on foot?” he asked.
“I am now. She took a cab to her sister’s apartment. I’ve been sitting here, waiting. She just left on foot, moving fast. I thought she’d hail another cab but she didn’t.”
“Where’s the vehicle?”
“Parked illegally across the street from the Books’ building.”
“Where’s she going?”
“I don’t know,” she said, drawing out the words as if she was talking to a toddler. “That’s why I’m following her.”
“Keep me posted,” he said, glancing up at Linda Book, then over to the two kids who both seemed pretty bored or unhappy or both. He’d been asking them questions in the family waiting area, getting nowhere.
“Where are you going?” Jez asked.
“I don’t know yet.”
“Then you keep me posted, too.”
In the first smart move he’d made in twenty-four hours, he had left Jez outside the hospital while he went inside. He couldn’t hold Isabel Raine; he knew he had no legal reason to do so. But one of them could stay on her, see where she went. Maybe she’d lead them to her husband. Maybe they’d see someone following her, like the alleged thugs who’d nearly killed her stepfather.
Isabel Raine was a runner. Not that he thought she was guilty necessarily, but she had an idea of herself that made her a flight risk. She was angry, she was arrogant, and she’d been betrayed. And she was looking for answers, thought she was better qualified than anyone to find them. She didn’t disappoint him, took the first opportunity she had to bolt. But, he’d noted, she’d waited until she knew her stepfather was okay, knew that he had family nearby, before she left. To him it said that she was a good girl at her core, if not a rule follower. Her staying when she could have more easily left was what they called in the business a telling detail. Not in the police business, in the writing business. The little quirk that spoke volumes about character.
He’d read this in one of the myriad books he’d read about fiction writing. It had stayed with him. He thought it was something that made sense in real life, too, in police work. The two professions weren’t really so different. You had to have the belly of fire, that drive to know and solve and speculate, to follow your hunches and go where incident and evidence impelled you. You had to have a terrible curiosity about character, about what made people do the awful, wonderful, terrifying, brilliant things they do.
He looked up at Linda Book, who was watching him.
“She went to your apartment.”
Linda nodded, as if this didn’t surprise her. “She has a key.”
She stood by the window, leaned against the sill and looked out, her arms wrapped tight around her body. He noticed that the skin on her hands was creamy white, her nails short, sensible squares. She wore a honker of a diamond, cushion cut, a carat and a half at least. She clenched and unclenched this hand unconsciously, squeezing the thick cashmere of her coat. He could tell it was cashmere, had always been good about identifying fine fabrics by sight or touch.