I’m sitting here telling myself I was honest with Nico, and there’s nothing else I can do.
But she’s right, unfortunately. I love her, and I don’t want her to die alone.
Technically, I don’t want her to die at all, but there’s not much I can do about that.
It’s way past business hours, but I go inside and pick up the landline and dial the number anyway. Someone will answer. It’s never been the sort of office that shuts down for nights and weekends, and I’m sure that in the asteroid era the schedule has only gotten busier.
“Hello?” says a voice, quiet and male.
“Yeah, good evening.” Tilting my head back, taking a deep breath. “I need to speak to Alison Koechner.”
On Saturday morning I go for a jog, five miles along an eccentric route of my own invention: up to White Park, over to Main Street, and then home along Rockingham, sweat trickling down my forehead, mingling with the dusting of snow. My leg drags a little from the car accident, and there’s a tightness in my chest, but it feels good to be running, to be outdoors.
Okay. I could have forgotten to latch one of the chains on the tires, sure, I could see that. I’m hurrying, I’m anxious. Maybe I neglected to latch one. But all four?
I get home and turn on my cell phone and find that I have two service bars, and that I’ve missed a call from Sophia Littlejohn.
“Oh, no,” I mutter, pressing the button to play the voicemail. Forty-five minutes I’d been out, an hour maybe, and it was the first time I had turned off my phone in a week, the first time since I laid eyes on Peter Zell’s body in the bathroom of the pirate McDonald’s.
“I’m sorry it’s taken me so long to get back to you,” says Ms. Littlejohn on the message, her voice neutral and steady. I’m cradling the phone under my neck, flipping open a blue book, clicking open a pen. “But the thing is, I really don’t know what to tell you.”
And then she just starts talking, a four-minute message that does nothing but recapitulate what her husband told me at their house on Wednesday morning. She and her brother had never been close. He had reacted terribly to the asteroid, become withdrawn, detached, more so than ever. She is obviously disappointed that he chose to kill himself, but not surprised.
“And so, Detective,” she says, “I thank you for your diligence, for your concern.” She stops, and there’s a few seconds of silence, I think the message is over, but then there’s a murmuring, supportive whisper behind her—handsome husband Erik—and she says, “He was not a happy man, Officer. I wanted you to know that I cared for him. He was a sad man, and then he killed himself. Please don’t call me again.”
Beep. End of message.
I sit drumming my fingers on the warped tile of my kitchen counter, the warm sweat of my exertion drying and turning cold on my forehead. In her message, Sophia Littlejohn hadn’t mentioned the aborted suicide note, if that’s what it was—Dear Sophia. But I had told her husband about it, and it’s a safe bet that he told her.
I call her back on the landline. At home, and then on her cell, and then at work, and then at home again.
Maybe she’s not answering because she doesn’t recognize the number, so I try all the numbers again on my cell phone, except halfway through the second call I lose all my bars, no signal, dead plastic, and I throw the stupid thing across the room.
You can’t see it in people’s eyes, not in this weather: winter hats pulled down low, faces turned down to the sleet-covered sidewalk. But you read it in their gaits, in that low weary shuffle. You can see the ones who aren’t going to make it. There’s a suicide. There’s one. This guy’s not going to make it. That woman, the one with face front, chin up high. She’ll hold up, do her best, pray to someone or something, right up until the end.
On the wall of the former office building, the graffiti: LIES LIES IT’S ALL LIES.
I’m walking over to the Somerset for a bachelor’s solitary Saturday night dinner, and I go out of my way to pass the McDonald’s on Main Street. I eye the empty parking lot, the stream of pedestrians going in, coming out with their paper bags, steaming from the tops. There’s an overflowing black Dumpster along the side of the building, partially concealing the side entrance. I stand for a second, and I imagine that I’m a killer. I’ve got my car—it’s a WVO engine, or I’ve put together a half tank somehow.
I’ve got a body in the trunk.
I wait patiently for midnight to roll around, midnight or one. Well past the dinner rush but before the tide of late-night postbar customers starts to wash in. The restaurant is mostly empty.
Casually, looking around the dimly lit lot, I pop the trunk and pull out my friend; lean him against my body and walk with him, three-legged, like a couple of drunks supporting ourselves, past the barrier of the Dumpster and in that side entrance, right down the little hall to the men’s john. Slide closed the lock. Take off my belt…
When I get to the Somerset, Ruth-Ann nods hello and fills up my coffee. Dylan is playing from the kitchen, Maurice loudly singing along to “Hazel.” I push the menu aside, surround myself with blue books. Listing and relisting the facts I’ve got thus far.
Peter Zell died five days ago.
He worked in insurance.
He loved math.
He was obsessed with the oncoming asteroid, collected information and tracked it in the sky, learning everything he could. He kept this information in a box marked “12.375,” for reasons I have yet to understand.
His face. He died with bruises on his face, below his right eye.
He was not close with his family.
He appeared to have had only one friend, a man named J. T. Toussaint, whom he’d loved as a child and then decided, for reasons of his own, to make contact with again.
I sit in front of my dinner for an hour, reading and rereading my notes, muttering to myself, waving away the slow-moving cigarette clouds that drift over from neighboring tables. At some point Maurice wanders out of the kitchen, white apron, hands on his hips, and looks down at my plate with stern disapproval.
“What’s the problem, Henry?” he says. “There a ladybug in your eggs or something?”
“Just not hungry, I guess. No offense.”
“Well, you know, hate to waste the food,” says Maurice, a high-pitched giggle sneaking into his voice, and I look up, sensing a punch line coming. “But it’s not the end of the world!”
Maurice dies laughing, stumbles back into the kitchen.
I pull out my wallet, slowly count out three tens for the check and an even thousand for a tip. The Somerset has to abide by the price controls or get shut down, so I always try to make it right on the table.
Then I gather up my blue books and shove them in the inside pocket of my blazer.
Basically, I know nothing.
4.
“Hey, Palace?”
“Yeah?” I blink, clear my throat, sniff. “Who’s this?”
My eyes find the clock. 5:42. Sunday morning. It’s like the world has decided I’m better off on Victor France’s plan, up and at ’em no time to waste. The Advent calendar… of doom.
“It’s Trish McConnell, Detective Palace. I’m sorry to wake you.”
“That’s all right.” I yawn, stretch my limbs. I haven’t spoken to Officer McConnell in days. “What’s up?”
“It’s just—like I said, I’m really sorry to bother you. But I’ve got your victim’s phone.”