“What do you mean?”
“I found the address because I looked at his registration card. He had no reason to think I was going to do that. Why would I? He was coming after me, not the other way around. Why would he think I would end up looking at his address?” I ask.
“Unless he knew he was going to die.”
* * *
Eric’s words are still sitting heavily in my heart when the combination of the rum and many long, hard days at work starts pulling on his eyelids, and I tip him over to lay his head on the pillow and stretch across the couch. It’s not late enough for sleep to even be on the horizon yet for me, so I decide to unpack while he rests. I head into the bedroom and pick my suitcase up from the floor. Turning to my bed, I notice something I didn’t before. A small stack of mail is sitting on the blanket, close to the pillows. Creeping back into the living room, I grab my phone and call Bellamy.
“You home?” she asks.
“Yep. Got here a while ago, but I’ve been talking to Eric. Thanks for bringing in my mail. I appreciate it,” I say.
“I didn’t bring in your mail. Oh, no. Was I supposed to?” she asks. “Was that sarcasm?”
“No,” I say, reaching over to touch the stack of mail. “That wasn’t sarcasm. You didn’t bring in my mail?”
“No.”
“I’ll call you back,” I say.
The line clicks before she says anything, and I let the phone drop to the top of the bed. My hand shakes just slightly as I pick up the envelopes and folded circulars. Bellamy is the only person who has an extra key to my house. No neighbors. No strategically placed lawn ornaments. Eric doesn’t even have one. Only Bellamy. But someone else got in.
I slowly flip through the mail. Bills. A birthday card from Creagan. Junk mail. But in the middle of the stack, I stop. The plain white envelope has no address, no stamp, nothing but my name. The handwriting looks instantly familiar. I bring the envelope with me back into the living room and snatch up the necklace box, taking the note out of it and letting go of the rest. It falls to the table and skitters across the surface to tumble over the edge onto the floor. The sound jostles Eric, and he opens his eyes. He didn’t sleep for long, but it was enough to take the edge off his tiredness, and he pulls himself up to sitting.
“What’s wrong?” he mutters through a groan and rubs his eyes.
“Look at this,” I say, holding the envelope and the note out to him.
“Where did this note come from?” he asks.
I explain finding the jewelry box in the couch cushions.
“I thought it was probably just someone at work, and I didn’t recognize the handwriting right off. But look. It’s the same as the envelope. Bellamy says she didn’t bring my mail in, but it was sitting there on my bed, and this was in it.”
“Did you open it?” Eric asks.
I shake my head. “Not yet.”
Sliding my finger under the sealed flap, I open the envelope and take out the thick folded piece of paper inside. It’s only folded in half, and I lift the top. The words inside, in the same handwriting as the note from the necklace box, make my blood run cold.
Where is he?
Chapter Seven
Eric’s eyes burn into me. I can feel him staring at me before I even turn to look at him, and I know what he’s thinking.
“Emma…” he starts.
I nod, stopping him.
“I know. Go ahead.”
He picks up his phone and calls the police. I can hear the dispatcher’s voice through the line and his responding, but don’t register the words. My world has shrunken down, focused in, so there’s a tunnel around the paper in my hand. I set the birthday note and the new letter down on the table and use my fingertips to draw the paper with my name on it over beside them. Lined up for comparison, I look at them together and then individually. I isolate the letters, my mind pulling them up from the paper, and transposing them onto the other pieces of paper so I can see if they fit.
They aren’t the same.
“Officers are coming,” Eric says when he gets off the phone.
He looks down at the papers I’m comparing.
“The handwriting doesn’t match,” I sigh. “Obviously, it would take an expert doing a more in-depth evaluation, but…”
Eric puts his hand on my back to quiet me. I’m spiraling, burying myself in the technicalities of the case, and the cold, stark procedures of work rather than letting myself experience what’s actually happening. It’s happened before. Everything built up inside me as I pushed it down, shoved it away where no one would see it, until it cracked and spilled out, threatening lives and cases.
I can’t let that happen again.
“I don’t think you need to show them the note with your name on it. I don’t think it has anything to do with this, and it would just confuse things more,” he says.
“Are you suggesting I withhold evidence?” I ask, grateful for the brief moment of levity.
“I’m counting myself lucky you agreed to get the police involved in this at all. I’m not going to rock the boat. But I still think, at another time, you need to show that to somebody. It could mean more than you think it does.”
I nod but don’t directly agree. I know how Eric feels about transparency and doing things the right way. It’s why I didn’t give him all the information when I asked him to look up the dead man in the first place. It’s not that I wanted to lie to him or deceive him in any way. But he just doesn’t understand. It’s not his fault. It’s not that he doesn’t want to see this from my perspective, but he can’t. He’ll never be able to fully grasp what this is like for me and what it means. His childhood was easy and predictable. When he’s told me about it, he says that like it’s a bad thing. He doesn’t see the comparison. He doesn’t know that I peer into the looking glass of his eyes and see predictability with wonder. Possibly even envy.
Eric never questioned anything about his family or his place in the world. He never had to run in the middle of the night or wake up not recognizing the ceiling over his bed or the blanket pulled over him. He doesn’t have a list of stories chronicled in his mind, contradicting each other as they offered a series of explanations to death and disappearance. He can trace his life. There are no gaps in his mind where he doesn’t remember where he was or what he was doing. His parents appear in all his memories. He went to school in the same places and graduated with the same people rather than jumping from schools to tutors and graduating alone over a computer screen.
He’s never going to understand. But he doesn’t have to.
The police arrive with the exact attitude I expect from them. They smirk at the notes, nod condescendingly at the explanation. It’s nothing to them. Another overzealous person who has watched too many crime shows and has injected themselves into a storyline. They don’t realize they’re playing right into it. The questions come right out of a script.
“Are you sure your door was locked?”
“Did you post your travel plans on social media?”
“How many neighbors have extra keys?”
“Do you keep a key under the doormat?”
“Were any of your windows open when you left?”
“Could you have forgotten bringing in the mail yourself?”
“Who is the ‘he’ the note is talking about?”
That one grates at me. The others were annoying, even offensive, but understandable. The last one creates instant, irrational anger in me.
“If I knew that, you wouldn’t be standing in my house right now,” I tell them through gritted teeth.