Turning away from the window, Carey noticed for the first time that the house was silent. No TV blasting Saturday-morning cartoons. No sounds of people having breakfast. It was early, but Anka was an early riser, and Lucy was never far behind her, even on the weekend.
She opened the bedroom door and listened. She could smell coffee, but it was so quiet she could hear the downstairs hall clock ticking. The door to Lucy’s bedroom was open. She could see a corner of the bed, already made. The door to Anka’s room was closed. Carey knocked softly but got no answer.
She checked in the guest room, expecting the bed to be torn asunder. David had never made a bed in his life, or picked up a shirt or a sock. He left a room looking like it had been ransacked by thieves. There was no sign of his having been in the room at all.
“Hello?” she called down the stairs.
The house was empty. Everyone had gone, just left her without a word, probably assuming she would want to sleep in.
Even knowing that was the logical explanation, Carey felt apprehension and anxiety swell inside. Residual effects of the attack. Irrational fear even while in a safe environment. The sense of dread that the people she loved were in danger and would be hurt. The fear that she was alone and her attacker would come back.
“I’m coming to get you, bitch…”
The memory of that low, menacing voice was like a finger tracing down the back of her neck.
Carey shook off the sensation and slowly, carefully, painfully descended the stairs to the first floor.
In the den she found evidence of David. He had spent the night on the love seat. A gold chenille throw was lying on the floor. A heavy crystal tumbler-empty, save for a desiccated wedge of lime-sat on the end table without benefit of a coaster to protect the antique that had belonged to her father.
Carey picked up the glass and rubbed a thumb over the damp stain it had left. The glass had held gin. The slightly sour, astringent smell lingered.
She was the one who had been beaten and threatened, and he was the one drinking.
Exhausted from what little she’d done, Carey sat down in the leather executive’s chair behind David’s desk. The silence of the room rang in her ears, and dizziness swooped back in and around her head like a flock of sparrows. She waited it out, focusing on the items on the desk-the IBM flat-screen monitor, the telephone, the notepad.
During one of her wakeful moments in the night, she had thought she heard David talking to someone. The memory came back to her now, and she wondered if it had really happened or if his voice had been part of a dream. Who would he have been having a conversation with at three in the morning? Had Kovac stayed that long? She didn’t recall his voice. Only her husband’s.
She looked more closely at the notepad on the desk. David was a nervous doodler when he was on the phone. The top sheet of the pad was clean, but with some indentation marks. She couldn’t make out any words. But lying on top of the garbage in the leather trash container beside the desk was a wadded-up piece of the same paper.
There was no hesitation. Carey felt no twinge of guilt. She reached into the trash and retrieved the note, handling it with the same detachment she would have used as a prosecutor examining evidence.
Most of the scribbling on the page was of dark geometric shapes, boxes, rectangles, quadrangles. In the center of the page was a monetary amount, twenty-five thousand dollars, with three harsh lines drawn beneath it for emphasis.
Maybe he had found a backer for his project after all.
But if the note was related to the half conversation she believed she had heard, the call had come or been placed in the middle of the night. No business deals happened at three in the morning, unless David had suddenly tapped into investors in China.
Late-night conversations in hushed voices were between lovers, or associates whose business couldn’t be conducted in the light of day.
Twenty-five thousand dollars was a lot of money. Twenty-five thousand dollars in the middle of the night was a payoff, a bribe, blackmail…
Carey folded the note and tucked it into the pocket of her sweater, and wondered what the hell her husband had gotten into.
She stared at the telephone, considering the step she was about to take. She was about to open a door and walk through it onto a path that would very probably take her to the end of her marriage. But she had already conceded her marriage was over. There was no point in feeling nervous or hesitant or in dreading what she was going to find.
Without allowing herself to feel anything-no guilt, no sadness, no anger-she picked up the handset and keyed the scroll button to the last call received. The mystery number. The caller who had asked for Marlene. The same caller who had whispered over her cell phone: I’m coming to get you, bitch.
If David had been on this phone, the call had been outgoing.
She touched the redial button, waited as the phone on the other end rang unanswered, then picked up and played a recording of the operating hours of Domino’s Pizza.
Twenty-five thousand dollars was a lot of pizza.
David hadn’t used this phone for any late-night clandestine call. If there had been any such call, it had to have been made or received on his cell phone.
Carey opened the upper left-hand desk drawer. The drawer was a catchall for things they used day-to-day-extra check blanks, stamps, address labels, things they both used. It was where they kept tickets to events, and paper clips, and bills to be paid. No one using that drawer had an expectation of privacy.
She walked her fingers through the different divided sections of the drawer. Tickets to an ice show. Carey smiled just enough to pull at the stitches in her lip. Lucy’s current passion was figure skating. She was looking forward to taking her daughter out.
Had been looking forward to… The show was just two days away. It was doubtful either the bruises from the beating or the public resentment for her position on Karl Dahl’s prior bad acts would have faded by then.
The smile slipped away. She didn’t want to put Lucy in a position where she might be frightened or upset because of the way strangers felt about her mother. That wasn’t fair to her child. Carey would end up giving her ticket to Anka, and the Moore family outing would be comprised of daughter, daddy, and nanny.
Pushing the disappointment aside, Carey continued her search, methodically moving toward the back of the drawer, looking for David’s cell phone bill. She checked the amounts due on all the other bills in the drawer, looking for one in the amount of twenty-five thousand dollars. There wasn’t one.
There was, however, a note written in David’s hand with a list of phone numbers and corresponding names. Elite, First Class, Dream Girls.
Carey picked up the phone and dialed the last number, getting a sexy voice mail message.
“Dream Girls Escorts make your dreams come true. Leave a message at the tone, and we’ll fulfill your fantasies as soon as we can.”
Nausea churned in Carey’s stomach. Her husband was using the services of prostitutes, apparently on a regular basis. The fact that she shared a bed with him made her want to go and take a shower. The fact that she had no idea how long this had been going on or whether or not he had put her at risk made her angry. Their sex life had dwindled to nothing months before, but for all Carey knew David had established this habit long ago. Months. Years, even.
This is unbelievable, she thought. This had been going on right under her nose, and she hadn’t seen it. She hadn’t looked for it. The truth was, lately she hadn’t cared what David was up to. She hadn’t wanted the distraction of caring. And he had to have known it. Why else would he have felt so comfortable that he would leave this list in a desk drawer where she might have come across it on any given day?