sometimes.”
And not just sisters, I thought. I nodded at him. “Is Holly still making a living as an actress?”
Deering thought about it a while and shrugged. “I don’t know. I don’t know that she ever made much of a living at it.”
“How does she pay the rent, then- waiting tables?”
“That’s never been her problem,” Deering said, shaking his head. “Her mom left some money.” He looked around and then looked at me. “You going over there? To Brooklyn?” I nodded. “Well…tell her hi if you see her.”
“Will do,” I said, and I dug in my jacket for the car keys. I found them and thought of one more question for Herb Deering. “Who is Fredrick Cade?”
Herb nearly dropped his wrench again. “Fred is Nikki’s dad- my father-in-law. Where’d that come from?”
“This used to be his house?”
Deering grimaced a little. “The girls grew up here. We- Nikkibought it from him a few years back.”
“And where did he go?”
“North of here, up to Brookfield. He’s in an assisted living setup. Why?”
“Do you think Holly might be in touch with him? Just in case this address is out of date.”
He blanched. “God, no. The one person Holly gets on worse with than Nikki is Fred. No way she’s in touch with him. And even if she was, he wouldn’t know it, not the way he is now.” Herb Deering tapped a forefinger to the side of his head. “Alzheimer’s,” he said.
I nodded and started to thank him, when a knob turned at the back of the garage. Nicole Cade was a rigid silhouette in the doorway, and her voice was colder than the air. “I thought we were finished, Mr. March- in fact, I know we were. What are you still doing here?”
“Getting directions back to town,” I said, “and a recommendation of someplace for lunch.”
“Well, we’re not the auto club, and Herbert has better things to do with his time, I’m sure.”
I smiled to myself and shook my head. The garage doors dropped before I made it to my car.
It was nearly three when I got home. Much of Sixteenth Street lay in shadow, and the slush had begun to refreeze underfoot. The lobby of my building was empty and the hallways were quiet. My apartment was filled with winter light, like a vast gray sheet over the furniture. Nobody home. I put my jacket on the kitchen counter and poured myself a glass of water, and started when I heard music from upstairs.
A lawyer moved in up there a year ago, on a two-year sublease. He’s generally pretty quiet, and even when he’s not his music is inoffensive, but I jumped every time I heard it. Every time, I thought of Jane Lu.
It was two years last November that she’d bought the place upstairs, and shortly after that we’d become lovers. It wasn’t even six months later that Jane had gone away, first on an extended vacation to Italy and then to another of her CEO-for-hire gigs, this time in Seattle. She’d wanted me to go with her, on the vacation part at least, and if I had, she might still be living upstairs. But I hadn’t gone and she hadn’t stayed and maybe it wouldn’t have made a difference, anyway. Maybe it was doomed from the start.
Certainly there wasn’t much left of me by the time I met her. By then it had been three years since my wife, Anne, had been killedshot neatly and precisely and left to die within yards of our front porch, the last of many victims of a man who wouldn’t live to see the end of that day. It was my biggest case by far as a sheriff’s investigator up in Burr County, and my last one, and I’d fucked it up from start to finish. My stupidity and ego had let Morgan Furness run loose for too long, and let him turn the investigation around on me and into an elaborately constructed suicide by cop.
For months afterward I was consumed by chaos- by anger and guilt and annihilating grief, and a hurricane of alcohol and drugs. When the storm passed, I was no longer a policeman and I’d succeeded in burning down most of my life. From the charred bits that remained I’d fashioned something else, something small and simple, made of work and running and solitude. It was modest craftsmanship, but it was all that I could manage.
It was nineteen months since I’d seen Jane last, and listened to her last scratchy message on my telephone.
“I can’t do this, John. I thought I could, but I was wrong. I tried to keep things at arm’s length- tell myself you were like Nick Charles or something, and your work was clever and glamorous, and somehow separate from you. But that’s bullshit, and I can’t pretend otherwise.
“There’s nothing amusing about being followed. There’s nothing witty about beatings and guns and emergency rooms. There’s nothing funny about getting shot. I don’t know why you want that in your life, John, but I know I don’t.
“Maybe it would be easier if I knew what you were looking for from all this- from us. Or maybe there’s no mystery to it. Maybe you’re not looking for anything at all. Maybe your life is already just the way you want it.”
Doomed from the start.
I ate some aspirin and drained my water glass. I took out my notes from Wilton and carried them to the table and started reading. I was dozing over them when the intercom buzzed and I jumped again. I went to the wall unit and watched the grainy image emerge on the tiny video screen. It wasn’t memory that disturbed me this time, but a more surprising visitor: my sister-in-law Stephanie. David’s wife.
5
I hit a patch of black ice coming off the curb at East Third Street, crossing Avenue B, and my ankle turned and I almost went down. But not quite.
“Shit,” I hissed as I caught myself, and the middle-school kids crossing the other way laughed. Not even four miles gone and I was panting like a hound. It served me right for laying off so long. A wet snowflake landed on my eye. I brushed it off and huffed forward, headed west and sometimes south.
The snow had made it that much harder to drag myself up the deep well of sleep that morning, and to drag my ass onto the road, but snow was only part of it. The night had been filled with dreams I couldn’t remember, but that left behind a nagging sense of something unfinished or mislaid or abandoned. And then there was the nightmare I couldn’t forget: Stephanie’s visit.
She’d stood in my doorway for a full minute, legs together, arms at her sides, hands jammed in the pockets of her navy blue coat. Her wiry hair was shorter than I recalled and bound precariously by a tortoiseshell clip. Her pale face was pinched and stiff, and her overlarge eyes skittered around me and all around the apartment. Her little mouth was twitching.
“Why don’t you come in,” I’d said finally. My voice made her flinch, but she came. Her steps were tentative and rigid, as if onto thin ice. I offered to take her coat but she seemed not to hear. She’d picked her way around the room, teetering first by the kitchen counter, then by the bookshelves, then the windows, and finally by the sofa. Then she sat. I sat too, at the table, and closed my laptop and my notepad.
I knew she was working again, as an equity analyst at a firm downtown, and she looked as if she’d come from the office- black pumps, dark hose, dark striped skirt, ivory blouse. She kept her bony knees together and kept her coat wrapped around her narrow body like a cocoon. Her eyes hopped around for another minute and she clutched her hands together and finally spoke.
“What are you doing to him?” she asked. Her voice was brittle.
“Stephanie, I don’t know-”
“Oh, don’t even bother to lie! Just don’t, John. What are you doing to him?”
“I’m not doing any-”
“Of course you are! Why else would he come here? Why would he visit you?”
I pulled a hand down my face and sighed. “I think David’s the person to ask about that.” But she wanted no advice.
“You’ve never liked me.”
Jesus. “That’s been mostly a two-way street,” I said.
She waved that away. “And you never made a secret of it, and now that I need something from you, you’re
