But things are different when he gets down to the other end of the house.
Very different.
The kind of different that makes him clench his fists and makes him angry. The kind of different that answers the question of what he’s going to do once he finds Charlie Feldman, while at the same time dismissing the question as to whether there was any chance Feldman was innocent.
He spends ten minutes writing down every contact he can find that Feldman has. He walks back out of the house. His hands are shaking. He could probably wait inside hoping Feldman will return, but the way he can tell if a house is empty before approaching it, well, he’s not the only guy on the force with that skill. Same might go for Feldman. He doesn’t need any reason to scare the guy off. And if Feldman drives past and freaks, then he’s going to drive on, and Landry will never even know. So he decides to wait in his car.
He’s not sure if Feldman is going to come back. He must have come back during the night and he must have noticed his house had been broken into. Damn it, he should have staked the house out last night. This could have been over by now.
The day will be dark soon. He yawns again. He can’t help it. He adjusts his seat, opens a packet of peanuts, and begins calling the names on his list, starting with Feldman’s parents. He gets hold of the mother. No, their son isn’t in trouble. Yes, they’re just hoping he can assist in an investigation. No, it’s not important-something to do with one of his students who’s gotten into trouble. It turns out Feldman doesn’t even own a cell phone. The mother has no idea where Charlie may be-normally either at school or at home. Landry thanks her for her time. He can tell she’s worried. Then he hangs up.
He carries on through the address book. If he’s lucky, Feldman might just return home, or somebody might have an idea where he can start looking.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
The ghosts are back. They’re telling me this is no dream. I find it hard to believe.
I’m with Kathy and Luciana and they’re alive again, but in this dream I don’t even know they’re supposed to be dead. Do they know? I try to ask, but the words don’t come out. Kathy is leaning into me, my arm around her as I help her leave the pasture the same way we arrived-alive and in one piece. Her other arm is around my shoulders, her hand digging into my upper arm hard enough to make a line of bruises. We leave Cyris and his tools and my tire iron behind. Kathy knows Luciana is alive because I’ve told her, and she smiles at me knowingly and without words tells me this is soon to be a lie. I don’t tell her she’s wrong.
Luciana jumps from the car the moment she sees her friend and the two lock themselves in an embrace. It’s the embrace of close friends and even though I don’t know either of these women, I wish I was part of it. They hold each other tight and I look away, choosing to stare at my car instead, this car that I’m sick of seeing, this car that I want to trade in, but at the moment is the best damn car in the world.
The two women break their embrace to include me in it, and no, they’re not ghosts, not yet-that’s still to come. For now they’re very much alive, alive and grateful and warm to touch, and when I open my mouth to warn them the words don’t come out. I try to tell them they mustn’t go back home, they mustn’t take me with them, but the dream is a memory and is deciding to stick to what is true, and therefore has only one path it can take.
We pile into the car, Luciana in the back and Kathy next to me. I start driving to the police station. I make it a few hundred yards before Luciana says she’d like to go home first. Kathy agrees. They want to go home. They want to clean up. Put on some fresh clothes.
“You can’t do that,” I tell them. “You can’t wash away the evidence.”
Kathy nods. “That’s true,” she says. “Let’s at least go back to Luciana’s house and make a plan.”
“A plan?”
“We need a lawyer,” Kathy says.
I don’t understand. “What for?”
“Her husband, Frank, is a lawyer,” Luciana says.
I feel jealous at this piece of information. It’s stupid. “I still don’t know why we need one,” I say.
“Benjamin Hyatt,” Kathy says.
The name sounds familiar. It takes a few seconds for it to filter through layers of memory. “The lawyer from the news?” I say.
“Exactly.”
I tell them it’s not the same thing. They agree, they tell me it’s different, but they also tell me the result is the same. The circumstances don’t matter as much as they should when it comes to the law. We still killed somebody, but of course it was more I than we. We debate the merits of going. We debate it for only a minute when Luciana points out we can discuss it back at her house instead. She tells me she needs a drink.
She gives me directions to her house. I try to steer us toward the police station, but the world the dream is set in is set in stone, as much as I try to save their lives now, there can be no changing it. I manage to find the words to tell them they are going to die if we stay on this course. I know this because their deaths were front-page news, and what you read in the papers is true, the dream is real, the memory is real, because we are in the Real World. Even though the words come out, neither Kathy nor Luciana can hear me. It’s like one of those movies where somebody takes you on a journey into the past to see what a dick you’ve been, and nobody can see or hear you.
We drive past thousands of shadows. The roads are empty. A few wisps of cloud float in front of the moon, which is bright white and full. My mind is buzzing. My hands are shaking. I keep being amazed that it’s blood that has been coming out of me and not pure adrenaline. We make conversation, but mostly it’s the two women talking, and mostly it’s me just listening. Parts of the evening already don’t feel like they happened. Other parts are real. Too real. About as real as you can get.
We park the car outside Luciana’s home. It is a single-storey townhouse, and through the haze of a lost day and a half, the image of the house shimmers. I saw this at night and never fully took notice of it because I was too caught up in the people, not the places, so the dream struggles to fix an image. At first the house is made from red brick, but then from white, and the roof is steel at one point, but then tiled-the blanks are being filled in by other houses I’ve seen that look similar. The roses in the garden shimmer, then turn to weed. Nothing here is real. Everything is real.
We lock the car because any neighborhood is a bad neighborhood when you’ve just fought for your life. The back door is ajar and Luciana pushes it open. The air is warm inside. The girls tell me they were abducted from their own homes. I don’t see any signs of forced entry, but maybe Cyris broke in through one of the windows, or maybe the back door.
We all sit down in the lounge, and the moment we do all the conversation dries up. We spend a few seconds looking at each other, then a few more seconds looking at the floor. I have the urge to tell Luciana she has a nice house, but manage to resist it. Kathy smiles. Luciana stands up and says she’s going to take a shower. I tell her that’s not going to make the police happy. She tells me she’s sorry, but she needs to take one. She feels dirty. If she doesn’t shower, she’s going to be sick.
Kathy disappears and comes back later with a bottle of beer that is cold in my hot hands. Tiny beads of condensation start to run down it. I flick the edge of the label with my fingernail. I look around me. The couch and two chairs are leather. Expensive. No claw holes in the furniture or fur on the cushions. The carpet is thick and soft, red one second, blue the next.
Kathy has also carried a bottle of wine in with her and two glasses. She fills each of them up and sips at one and pushes the other toward the chair where Luciana was sitting. It seems surreal to be drinking wine, and I wonder if sauvignon blanc is the wine of choice when you’ve just survived being raped and almost killed.