However, he did hear footsteps coming down the halclass="underline" two people, he thought, but it was hard to tell, because sound and light were merging with the pain rushing through him, the pain that was engulfing every one of his senses and then blistering apart inside of his chest.
Reality itself was becoming fuzzy around the edges.
All so confusing.
And it hurt. It really, really hurt.
He grasped the handle to draw out the blade, but as soon as he moved it even just slightly, a new shot of pain ripped through him and he had to let go.
He drew in a weak breath and watched the handle quiver as he did.
The footsteps drew closer.
“Who’s there?” He tried to speak loudly, but the words were so soft that he was certain no one could have heard them — not even if they’d been in the room with him.
The pain grew tighter and sharper with each breath. Dying wasn’t turning out to be at all like they made it seem in the movies. This was no gentle escape into the unknown, this was more like a terrifying descent into a scream you’ve tried your whole life to hold back inside of you.
“Help me, I…” This time the words were even softer, barely louder than a breath—
A voice came from the hallway, strong, masculine: “He’s in here!”
A woman and a young man whom Corey didn’t recognize entered the living room and strode toward him. He wanted to tell them that he hadn’t meant to do this, any of this, that he just hadn’t been thinking clearly and had made a terrible mistake, and if they would only help him, he would be okay and—
The man knelt beside him and pressed a pair of fingers gently against the side of Corey’s neck to check his pulse. “He’s still alive.”
The woman watched silently. “Give it a few minutes. It shouldn’t be long.”
A cold gust of fear swallowed Corey.
The man moved back to his partner’s side.
No!
Corey tried to cry out for help but ended up making no sound at all.
And that was the last time he would try to speak, the last time he would try to do anything at all, because after that everything that happened was natural and inevitable and no longer a matter of the will. Nature ran its course, the universe claimed its next life, and at 5:57 a.m. Corey Wellington died in strangled, wet silence as the clock just above him on the wall ticked off the seconds, edging its way into the minutes and hours and years that might have been his to enjoy if only he had not chosen to murder himself.
The couple stood by until his chest was no longer moving. At last the man, who was twenty-five, blond and well built, checked Corey’s pulse again. “Okay.”
“Okay,” the woman said. At thirty-six she was still in stunning shape, had short, stylish light red hair, distinctive green eyes, and a steely, unwavering gaze.
The man stood. “Do you ever wonder what’s going through their minds when they do it?”
“I don’t think that’s something you would really want to find out.”
“No. You’re right. I… I just… I wonder sometimes.”
She turned from the corpse. “Check the medicine cabinet. I’ll look in the kitchen and the bedroom.”
“Right.”
After they’d retrieved what they’d come here for, as well as the two cameras that had been hidden in the home, the man asked his partner, “So, what now? Up to Boston?”
“No. We won’t be visiting there until next Thursday. First, we need to get back to Chennai — pay a little visit to the people at the production factory.”
“Back to India? I thought we were going to go to—”
“The time frame has changed.”
“I didn’t know that.”
“Now you do.”
Without another word, she led him outside to the car, and they left for the airport while Corey’s still-warm corpse lay on the living room floor soaked in blood, less than an hour after he’d awakened expecting to head to work for another ordinary day at the office after his shower and customary cup of strong, black, morning coffee.
1
“Of all the animals I would rather not be,” my eighteen-year-old daughter, Tessa, said reflectively, “I think a bird poop frog is at the top of the list.”
I glanced across the picnic basket at her. “A bird poop frog.”
“Yes.”
“That’s not even a real animal.”
“Sure it is.”
“You’re telling me there’s a species of amphibian out there that some scientist actually named a ‘bird poop frog’?”
“I’m not sure what the official scientific name is, but yeah, it’s commonly called a bird poop frog.”
“You’re being serious?”
“Look it up.”
I processed that. “Well, then I’d say being one of those would be almost as unfortunate as being born an albino chameleon.”
She gave me a slight head tilt of approval. “Actually, that was not a bad line, Patrick.”
“Thank you. I study under a world-class witticist.”
She knew I was talking about her and looked pleased. “I wish that actually were a word: witticist. It should be. I like it.”
As she took a sip of root beer, a swoop of her midnight-black hair fell across one of her eyes and she gently flicked it back. Today she had on her bloodred fingernail polish and dark eyeliner, and wore canvas sneakers, skinny jeans, and a faded gray T-shirt with an electric guitar splayed across the periodic table with the words METAL IS ELEMENTAL imprinted below it.
She was never the pink skirts and hair bow and bubblegum kind of girl. More tattoos and death metal and Kierkegaard. With her pierced nose, eyebrow ring, and the line of straight scars down her right forearm from her cutting days, she’d channeled a little of her inner emo.
However, when you threw in the PETA and Amnesty International buttons she wore, her hemp bracelets and the canvas messenger bag she used as a purse, and the cigarettes she sometimes snuck out, you could see she’d managed to merge it with a Greenwich Village, artsy vibe. She had a paradoxically hard-edged innocence about her, a bristlingly sharp intelligence, and a heart that had already seen too much pain.
“So what made you think of that?” I asked.
“Of what?”
“Bird poop frogs.”
“Just what happened to your sandwich a minute ago when you were texting Lien-hua.”
I stared at the sandwich on the picnic cloth. It looked clear of bird poop. “You’re kidding me.”
“Possibly.”
I investigated the sandwich carefully to make sure, and it looked fine, but I covered it with one of the plates just to avoid any actual incidents.
Despite the placid clouds and the fresh taste of spring in the air, only a handful of people were in the field on this end of the park — a young woman of Middle Eastern descent, early twenties, slight limp in her left leg, pushing a baby in a stroller on the path west of us; a Caucasian male, medium build, brown hair, mid-thirties, tossing a Frisbee to a border collie; and a college-aged couple about eighty meters away who, over the last few minutes, had become less and less interested in their own picnic than in staring longingly into each other’s eyes. Dinner did not appear to be on their minds any longer.
Five kilometers of walking trails wove through the woods beyond them. In February, a woman’s body had been found a hundred meters from the trailhead. Metro PD had asked the Bureau for help and I’d worked with them on it, but the case was still open. No suspects yet.
Scavengers had gotten to the corpse before it was discovered. I thought of that now, of seeing the disarticulated remains, and I tried to shake the images loose so I’d still have an appetite for supper.