Following today’s run he stopped for a cup of coffee at Kahwa, the little coffee shop on his building’s ground floor, then went upstairs, entered his condo, and walked out onto the deck. There he sipped the coffee, shook a single cigarette loose from a pack of American Spirits, and lit it. This was the last part of the routine, and the one he liked least. He had hated his wife’s cigarette habit. It was the only consistent fight they ever had-he told her it was selfish to those who loved her because it could take her from them young.
Funny, the things you could be so strident about. So convicted of.
When she died and left a pack behind, he couldn’t bring himself to throw them out. He smoked them instead, like a Catholic lighting candles for the dead. Then he bought another pack, continuing the one-a-day ritual. There in the morning on the deck, in the smell of sweat and cigarettes, he could close his eyes and, for an instant, feel as if she were at his side.
Today he stubbed out the cigarette early and headed for the shower. He had a drive to make, and he’d been waiting too long on it already.
Lauren’s car had been returned to Mark nine weeks after she was buried. The title was in both of their names, so he was the rightful owner and the police couldn’t claim it was a crime scene any longer. No evidence was in the car.
Their condo building in St. Petersburg had been designed to feel spacious despite the constraints of reality, and the garage featured an admirable attempt to fit two cars into a single parking space. Hydraulic lifts hoisted one vehicle in the air so another could be parked below it. A seamless system-provided that you and your spouse worked in strict military shifts or were indifferent to which car you drove. Lauren was not indifferent. She loved the Infiniti, its look, speed, and handling. It was her car. Mark’s old Jeep-filled with empty coffee cups and notepads and the gym clothes he inevitably forgot to bring up and put in the laundry-was not an acceptable substitute. When she wanted to go somewhere, she was going to go in her own car.
He parked on the street. Problem solved.
Neither of them ever used the lift, but when the police returned the car to Mark, he put it up there. Lauren’s pearl-white Infiniti coupe had been sitting on the top of the lift, untouched, for nearly two years when he turned the key that operated the hydraulics. The system hummed and groaned and then lowered the car slowly, like pallbearers easing a casket into the ground. The tires were low, and the battery was dead. He used a portable generator to air up the tires, pulled his Jeep in the garage long enough to jump the battery, and then got behind the wheel, closed the door, and waited for the profound wash of memories.
He wanted to be able to smell her, feel her, taste her. He had a million memories of the car, and Lauren was in all of them, and he felt as if the vehicle should have held on to some of her. Instead, all he smelled was warm dust and all he felt was heat blasting from the air vents. It had been a warm day when she’d died but a cold one when he’d driven the car back onto the lift.
After he had listened to the engine purr for a few seconds, he backed out of the garage and drove toward Cassadaga.
Mark had never known anyone who was more emphatically opposed to capital punishment than his wife. For many years, as they lived and worked together, Mark had shared her beliefs. He preached them, and he practiced them. When Lauren was killed, he continued to do so-publicly.
He wasn’t sure exactly when he parted with them in his soul.
Maybe her funeral. Maybe when he saw the crime scene photographs. Maybe the very moment the sheriff’s deputy arrived to tell him the news.
It was hard to be sure of a thing like that.
The thing he was sure of now? The game was over. It had ended with Garland Webb’s parting words. And it was time to be honest-he’d never really believed in it like Lauren did. He’d wanted to, and maybe even convinced himself that he did, because it was the ideology of the woman he loved. He often assured her of his understanding of the world: No man should kill another, no matter the circumstances, no matter the sins. He’d meant it then, and he thought that was important-he’d meant the words when he’d said them.
Back then, he had a wife he was deeply in love with, a job that fulfilled him, and no reason to wish death on anyone.
Things change.
In the three months that had passed since Mark resigned from Innocence Incorporated, the death penalty-defense firm where he’d worked as an investigator and where Lauren had worked as an attorney, he’d been focused on only two things: regaining his health after injuries he’d suffered during a brutal case in Indiana, and replacing the rumors about Garland Webb with hard evidence.
He’d come along a lot better with the first task than the second. He felt as good physically as he had in a long time. As for Webb’s guilt, Mark had succeeded only in producing evidence that he could have been in Cassadaga, Florida, on the day that Lauren was killed there.
Evidence of any kind in Lauren’s murder had been hard to come by. She’d been working a case that-on the surface-didn’t appear to threaten anyone who lived within five hundred miles of Cassadaga, and her final notes supported that. There was no fresh information, no new names, nothing unexplained save for a three-word phrase she’d scrawled in the notebook that she’d left in the passenger seat of her car. Those words, rise the dark, had intrigued detectives initially, but nobody, Mark included, had ever been able to make any sense of them. As for Garland Webb, who’d allegedly claimed her killing, all Mark had was possibility. He didn’t yet have any proof that Webb had been there when Lauren pulled her car to the side of a lonely country road, stepped out, and began to walk along a trail lined with tall oaks and thick stands of bamboo. She was shot twice in the head sometime after that. The person who found her could say only that the car’s hood was still warm. The coroner said that Lauren was too. Dead, but still warm.
Whatever happened, happened fast.
Nobody knew why she’d stepped out of the car. A threat, maybe. Trust, perhaps. That’s how close the police were to ascertaining the truth of her murder: somewhere between trust and threat.
The last indisputable fact of Lauren’s life was where it had ended.
Mark had stayed away from that place for a long time. Too long.
5
While never allowing himself to see the actual spot, limiting his exposure to her death scene to the study of photographs and maps because he believed to see it would be too powerful, too devastating, Mark felt like he knew it well. Felt like he could give guided tours, in fact, of the strange little town that he’d never seen.
Turn your heads to the right, ladies and gentlemen, and you’ll see the Colby Memorial Temple. In New York in 1888, a Spiritualist named George Colby claimed he had been given a directive from a spirit guide named Seneca: Colby was to move south and start his own Spiritualist colony. So it had been decreed. Colby moved.
He settled in Volusia County, Florida. And the colony lasted. More than a hundred years later, the residents of the Cassadaga camp maintain the Spiritualist faith, and most are registered mediums…
There he would begin to struggle, because there he would be confronted with all that he hated about the place. His mother had been a con artist in the West, and pretending to have access to the dead was one of her go-to moves for extra dollars. The idea of an entire group endorsing such behavior, of a town filled with “registered” mediums, seers of the past and future, repulsed him.
He parked in front of the Cassadaga Hotel, a Spanish-looking stone structure where people could make appointments with many of the area’s mediums, including the woman who was the last known person to see his wife alive and who had once rented a room to a man named Garland Webb.