pages in my hand and went back inside.
30
__________
A my and I stayed for a week. We hung out with Joe and sometimes Gena, ate seafood, had drinks of fruit juice and rum, bitched about the heat. All the things you’re supposed to do in Florida.
I checked the office voice mail daily. There was no word about Ken. Many days, I played his last message again. I listened to words I already knew by heart, and I tried to imagine what had provoked them. I had no luck. You rarely do with that approach to detective work. The way it gets done is out on the street. I stayed on the beach.
On the day before we left, I ended up sitting on a chair outside Joe’s hotel, alone, while he and Amy made a run to the store. Gena was coming by for an afternoon cocktail before dinner, and she showed up before they got back and came down to join me. We made small talk for a bit. I found out that while she had lived in other states and, for one year, in Europe, she always came back to Idaho in the end. Both parents were still alive, and she had two sisters; all of them lived within a fifteen-minute drive.
“So are you going to move to Cleveland or make him move to Idaho?” It was supposed to be a joke, but her pause told me it was a discussion they’d actually had.
“Maybe either, maybe neither, maybe something completely different,” she said.
“Egypt?” I was still trying to keep it light, because I was caught off guard by the idea that they were this serious.
“One person moving to join the other is the obvious option,” she said, stretching out on the chair beside me and kicking off her sandals, “but there’s an element of it that could feel selfish either way, you know? We both have our own lives at home, so to have one person make the sacrifice seems unfair. So we’ve talked about a compromise. Moving somewhere new to both of us.”
“Oh,” I said. Can always count on me for insight.
She looked over at me, sunglasses shading her eyes. The wind was fanning her brown hair out. “Would I like Cleveland?”
“Probably not.”
“Really?”
“You live in a college town in the mountains, right? Well, the city’s a change. Most people head the other way. Leave the city for mountains.” I waved out at the water. “Or a beach.”
“I lived in New York for seven years. Never minded being in a city. Of course, I was twenty-five then, too.”
I didn’t say anything.
“Either way, it won’t be happening overnight,” she said. “Joe’s not the sort of person who rushes into things.”
That made me laugh. “No, he’s not.”
She smiled but looked away from me. “He’s worried about you.”
“Doesn’t need to be.”
“I couldn’t speak to that. I don’t know you well enough to say. I do know that he’s worried. He’s afraid that the way he left was unfair to you. That you’re carrying guilt about it when you shouldn’t be.”
“I got him shot, Gena. Seems to warrant a small dose of guilt. But that’s really not the issue, not anymore. He’s happy again, and I’m glad of that. Thrilled.”
“You’re not. Happy, I mean.”
“Happy,” I said, “seems like a hell of a subjective thing. I’m working on it. So is Joe. So is everybody. And I can tell you this—you’re good for him. I can see that so clearly, and you have no idea how nice it is. He’s been alone for a long time.”
“Had you, though.”
“Yeah, but he never liked my hairstyle as much as yours.”
She smiled. “There’s one thing I’d like you to know.”
“Yeah?”
“When we’ve talked about moving,” she said, “and the things that we’d miss the most, just hate the idea of being away from, I talk about my family. Joe talks about you.”
A call from Graham came later that night, and the message he left offered no sense of progress but some news—Joshua Cantrell’s family had won a preliminary legal motion to claim the house on Whisper Ridge.
31
__________
Life, or the lack thereof, always seemed to me like something that had to be established medically, not legally, through beating hearts and functioning brains rather than notarized paperwork. That’s not always the case. The judge had ruled that the Cantrells were entitled to post legal notice of Alexandra’s presumed death, which would run in a variety of newspapers, and there would be a ninety-day period to contest the claim. Either Alexandra herself could appear, proving it wrong while welcoming the approaches of police, or someone else could bring forward proof of life. If those ninety days passed without either occurrence, the Cantrells could begin maneuvering to claim their share of the estate. Graham’s understanding was that they’d have to split the estate with Dominic Sanabria.
“He probably killed their son,” I said when I called him back the next morning, “and now they’re going to have to share the money with him?”
“That’s what the law seems to say.”
When we got back to Cleveland, I bought a paper in the airport and flipped through it to the public notice section while we stood beside the luggage carousel. There was the first notice of Alexandra Cantrell, buried amid pages of fine-print legalese. It seemed too quiet a way to announce the end of a life.
“You should do an article,” I told Amy. “If anything’s going to produce Alexandra or proof she’s alive, it won’t be this notice. It’ll take more publicity than that.”
She agreed with me, and a day later so did her editor. The story appeared on the following Sunday, front page and above the fold. The TV news picked it up by that evening, and several Associated Press papers around the country ran shortened versions of the “missing, presumed dead” story in the days to come. The story never gathered the national steam I’d hoped for—CNN, talk show features, that sort of thing—but for several weeks, Graham, the newspaper, and the Cantrell legal team were flooded with tips. I called Graham to see if anything was coming of it. Just the tips, he said, most crazy, none credible. If Alexandra was still alive, there was no sign.
I wrapped up what case work I had left when I got back to the city, then put out a memo to our core clients explaining that Joe and I were stepping aside from field investigations. I referred them to other people in town, brushed aside inquiries, and waited for the outcry of disappointment and anger. It never came. Perry and Pritchard Investigations wasn’t the community institution I’d believed it to be, evidently.
I listened to Ken’s message daily for a while. Then, a month after he’d been killed, the voice mail informed me the message would be deleted from the system. It had been there too long, evidently. You couldn’t keep it forever. Eventually the computer decided that the time elapsed required the message to go away even if I didn’t want it to. By the next morning, it was gone.
I invested thirty thousand dollars into new equipment for the gym. I paid for a larger phone-book ad and hired a friend of Amy’s to create a Web site. I did most of the work on the gym by myself, largely because it kept me busy. When I wasn’t working on it, I was working out in it. That summer I took thirty seconds off my time in the
