“In an alley?” I ask faintly.
“Yes.”
I can’t believe what a close call that was. I took Strad’s cell phone into my bedroom right before the cuckoo scared us at ten. If I’d waited another ten minutes, Strad would have answered the call and gone.
Strad glares at me. “The second message was from someone saying there’s a leak from our music store to the basement apartment and that if I don’t get there in the next hour, they’ll have to get a locksmith to force the door open because the super’s not there.”
We don’t comment.
“The third message is from someone who says he’s a friend of my friend Eric, and that they’re both at a party and just met this chick who’s unbelievably beautiful and who wants to meet me because they’ve been talking me up to her, but I’d have to go there right away because she’s only staying ten more minutes and doesn’t want to leave them her number. So he tells me to hurry on over. The message was left an hour ago. That woman might have been my future wife. And now she’s probably gone.”
I’m all too aware that each scenario could have led Strad to a probably deserted place, perfect for slaying him. If we’d accompanied Strad to the location, the killer among us would have committed the act personally by grabbing a weapon that was possibly stashed ahead of time at the scene or along the way. If we’d let Strad go alone, some hired killer might have done the deed.
Strad gets ready to leave, but as he begins putting on his shoes, he cries “Argh!” and withdraws his foot immediately from his loafer. His toes have something gross-looking on them. Hard to tell what. He slides his hand into the shoe to investigate and extricates a smelly mash, which I recognize as sardines from our dinner. There’s no mistaking it, thanks to a little sardine tail sticking up in the air.
“Why is there fish in my shoe?”
No answer from anyone.
“Who did this?” he asks.
I apologize profusely and say, “One of us has a serious mental problem and likes to leave this kind of gift for people he or she likes. Like a cat who brings a dead rat to its owner.”
“Which of you?”
“We don’t know.”
He dumps the sardines in the trash, washes his hands, cleans out the inside of his loafer, and leaves me his dirty sock.
About to plunge his other foot into his other shoe, he thinks the better of it and checks it with his hand. Instead of sardine mash, he pulls out a little piece of paper that he reads aloud: “If I could have, I would have.” Strad looks at us, clearly waiting for an explanation and a quick one.
“God only knows,” I say, shaking my head. “I’m sure it was meant in the nicest possible way. But as I said, serious mental problem.” I circle my temple with my finger, hoping that will be enough to satisfy Strad.
“If I had to guess, I would guess it’s you.” He approaches me, searching my face. “You’ve been acting like a lunatic all evening.”
“That was necessary,” I say. “But this wasn’t me.”
He sees it’s pointless to argue with me. He grabs his things and his engraved gifts, which I’ve turned over to him. We say our goodbyes and he departs.
As soon as I close the door, I grab Georgia’s arm to get everyone’s full attention, especially hers. I hiss at them alclass="underline" “My compliments to whichever one of you is responsible for those voice messages he received. But it’s now after midnight. I hope it is understood that nothing, nothing bad will happen to Strad at any of these locations he may go to. Or anywhere else, for that matter. Now or ever. One of you is clearly a psycho, but I hope even psychos can have a sense of honor. You gave Gabriel your word that Strad would not be harmed after midnight tonight, KAY.” I look at one after another. They stare back at me.
“Well, I’m not the killer,” Georgia says, “but if I were, I would absolutely keep that promise. And I tend to think the actual killer will have that same decency.”
The others nod uncertainly.
She says, “I think we should get back on the horse immediately and have one of our Nights of Creation as soon as possible. Say, tomorrow night. I’m free.”
We look at each other but no one answers.
She says, “If we don’t make a big effort to regain a sense of normalcy right away, things could stay awkward between us forever. And that would be a shame because I love our group. I know we all do.”
So we agree to meet the next day for a Night of Creation.
Chapter Twelve
The following morning, Lily calls and thanks me for the “unbelievable amount of effort” I put into protecting the man she loves. She says she’ll never forget it.
I’m glad I didn’t schedule my dinner with Peter Marrick for tonight. I need this whole day to rest and unwind, though I did some Internet research on him and learned he’s thirty-five and won the Emmy for local news five years straight. In addition to anchoring the local news, he anchors the national news when the usual anchor is out, and he does regular special reports for Newsroom Live, the weekly current events show. As I already knew, he got a huge amount of attention nationally when he saved the three children from the fire. Soon afterward, he appeared on The Ellen Show, Letterman, and The View. He (along with his singed hair) was in People magazine’s 100 Most Beautiful People. The article under his photo talked about his “inner beauty.” He did a series last year about poverty in America that won a Polk Award, after which Time magazine selected him as one of the hundred most influential people in the world. All of this is a little intimidating. I love talking about current events but I’ve never had to hold a conversation with someone this well versed in world affairs.
Not wanting to get any more nervous than I already am about my dinner with Peter tomorrow night, I decide to distract myself by going to Strad’s store to find out if I was right about the voice messages being part of an elaborate plan to kill him. I bring him his sock, which I’ve cleaned twice to get rid of the sardine smell. I ask him if everything turned out okay with the leak from his store.
He places his palms on the counter and leans toward me. “You’re not going to believe this, but it seems that every single one of those messages was a prank.”
“Really?” I say, trying to look surprised.
He tells me there was no flood in the music store, no audition in an alley, and no beautiful woman at a party. In fact, no party.
This grim information chills me, even though it’s what I expected.
I must stop obsessing about Strad’s near murder. It’s in the past, he survived.
This evening, during our Night of Creation, I’m too tired and stressed to work on the hat. Instead, I read a script for a film I’ve been asked to costume design — not sure I’m interested. But it’s hard to tell, because I have a hard time concentrating. The fact that one of my friends is a killer is something I have to live with — not comfortably, but I have to endure it, because the alternative is worse. We all have to endure it. We don’t talk about it.
Nevertheless, I do watch my friends. And I notice them watching one another, too. I wonder if we’ll ever find out which of them did it. I wonder if we can live with never knowing. In truth, that may be the only way we can live with it.
We are all completely crazy to have decided not to tell the police. We are spending large amounts of our lives with a homicidal maniac who could, at any time, decide, on the spur of the moment, to kill anyone, kill all of us, kill strangers. We are crazy and I assume my friends realize this. I wish I could express it to them, but I don’t want to because I’m afraid my argument will be too convincing. I don’t want them to decide we must tell the police.