He looked to her and she had expected many types of reactions, but not this one. No anger. No fluster. Just calm and collected. “No comment, Elaine. Like before. And I believe this interview is finished.”
She was suddenly thirsty, picked up the glass of orange juice and took a healthy sip. “No, Jason. It’s not. I have one more thing to ask you. And then you can tell me if the interview is finished or not.”
That was when it came clear to her, in doing that additional piece of research, that she had found a local connection to the Have a Seat diner and its spook owner. At first she had thought that she had stumbled onto a story that could even make a national publication — killer spook now makes killer omelettes, that sort of thing — but that damn thread of research led her to another place, and another place, and one early morning, having refused to sleep with Casey because of an earlier incident involving not enough gas in the car, which was followed by an arm twisting that still made her shoulder throb, the idea of the story was overtaken by something else.
She had sat in her office that morning, two a.m., the creature who was called her husband gently slumbering about six yards away, and she allowed a bit of hope to seep into her.
A bit of hope.
Another breath, not worrying now that Jason was seeing how nervous she was, for indeed, she was quite nervous. Four more sheets of paper were brought out, four more sheets that were fanned out in front of her.
Jason looked at them, and then looked to her. Not a word.
Elaine took a breath. “Henry Collins. Jake Winters. Robbie Couture. Paul Dudley. Four local men, four men who’ve died within the last eighteen months. These are their obituaries.”
Jason stared. Silent.
“I found their obituaries because they all appeared in the Montcalm Gazette, and because they all had one thing in common. All four were regular customers, the newspaper said, of the Have a Seat diner.”
Jason kept on staring.
“But I dug a bit further. There were other areas of commonality, as well. They were in their forties or fifties. They weren’t marathon runners, but they didn’t have any history of disease. They just... died. All four died, of apparent heart failure. What are the chances of that occurring, Jason, that four local men, four customers of yours, all died within a span of eighteen months?”
No change from Jason. She took a breath.
“But there was one more common thread. Took a bit of digging, but that’s what we journalists do. Find stuff out. And what I found out is that all four men, all four, had criminal records. For domestic violence. All four were men who abused their wives, abused their children, all four were bullies. And now all four of them are dead.”
He remained silent. She lowered her voice. “How do you choose them, Jason? Do you hear about them, in the morning, when the place is packed? Hear gossip about who’s beating his wife, how he’s getting away with it... Is that it? And you can’t stand it, can you? A man who’s dedicated his life to fighting bad guys, to being a good guy... you decide to do something about it. Something involving your old skills. Old skills that would allow you to get away with a death without any suspicions being raised.”
Jason looked down at the papers and looked up again. “This isn’t an article you’re working on now, is it? It’s something else.”
Elaine nodded. “Yes. It’s something else.”
“Blackmail,” he said. “What do you want? Eggs? Bacon? Money?”
She looked at him, and then reached over to a napkin dispenser and pulled out a white napkin. She moistened one corner of the napkin with her tongue and then started gently rubbing away the makeup about her right cheek and eye. She rubbed for a bit, until she was sure that the bruises were now revealed.
“Your help,” she whispered, tears coming to her. “I want your help.”
The other morning she had stood in the empty living room, watched the taillights of Casey’s SUV descend down the long drive-way, and she had folded her arms and wondered if she could actually do this, actually go through with it, and she touched her eye and her cheek and her jaw, and she had no doubt.
Jason sat silently for a moment, and then he reached over with a large hand. For one thrilling moment Elaine thought that he was going to gently grasp her own hand and say that it would all work out, but instead, he gathered up the sheets of paper and returned them to the file folder.
“I admire your research, Elaine, and what you’ve done.”
A pause. Her heart racing so hard that she thought he could hear it.
This time, Jason took a breath. “But I’m sorry, I can’t do anything.”
He stood up and said, “Write what you want to write. Or not. But I’d suggest a bit more research. We happy few do more than what you think.”
And he walked off, and she was alone, and her jaw and cheek and eye ached terribly.
And so weeks went by, miserable weeks, punctuated by brief moments of peace when Casey went off on yet another business trip to keep his new company afloat, and it got to the point that she didn’t particularly care anymore about anything. Twice he had struck her some more and it was as if she was above it all, gazing at how he was hitting her, as if it was some sort of out-of-body experience. She noodled about on the story about Jason and the diner — leaving out all the juicy stuff about his CIA past — and submitted the story, and Winslow, her former colleague, e-mailed back that the story was nice but the queue to be published was full, and the story probably wouldn’t appear for months.
Fine. Whatever. She kept up with her running, tried her hand at coming up with another nonfiction piece to write about, but she found herself being forgetful, or oblivious. A couple of times she had come home from jogging and found the side door unlocked. Other times laundry had remained in the dryer for a couple of days in a row. Though now a bear about housecleaning, she sometimes found bits of tape and plastic stuck in the corner of a room, and she redoubled her efforts to keep the house neat for Casey. An odd equation, but it worked: a clean house, clean clothes, meals on time meant the hitting would stop. An equation that would have horrified her back in Manhattan, but Manhattan was far away, and her bank account was so very thin, and she was so very scared, for Casey had once said that he would never allow her to leave, not ever, and she had no choice but to believe him. A few times she even had the sense she was being watched, and she suspected that Casey had hired someone to keep an eye on her.
So one November day she came back from a run, feeling the frost in the air, a part of her terrified that winter would soon be here, a type of northern New Hampshire winter where you could be housebound for days on end, roads and driveways blocked by drifts of snow, and she knew it would not last, could not last. If Casey were to live, well, she would do something so that he would live alone. And at least the pain would stop. Even jogging wasn’t fun anymore; she felt like her arms and legs were made of concrete, weighing her down, slowing everything.
She went into the house, breathing hard, and Casey was there, cup of coffee in his hand, looking at her, dressed in clean and pressed black slacks, white dress shirt, and red necktie. Her heart thudded some, looking at his eyes, trying to determine what was going on here, and he looked fairly calm. Not a guarantee — it was amazing how quickly his calm moments could spin into a vicious storm — but she would take whatever positive sign she could.