to leave her.
I’ve told Lucy everything will be okay, because it will be somehow, but I don’t believe it will be okay the way we hope, the way we wish, the way it should be in a perfect world. We don’t know anything, I’ve reminded my niece, even though I have no hope. I just don’t feel it. Jaime isn’t answering her cell phone or apartment phone or e-mails or text messages. We haven’t heard from her since Marino and I left her at around one o’clock this morning, but there could be a logical explanation, I’ve said to Lucy. While we have to take every action possible, that doesn’t mean we are assuming the worst, I’ve reassured her repeatedly.
But I am assuming the worst. What I’m experiencing is painfully familiar, like a sad old friend, a grim companion who has been a depressing leitmotif on my life’s journey, and my response is a feeling I know all too well, a sinking, a solidification, like concrete setting, like something settling heavily into a deep darkness, a bottomless lightless space, out of reach and over. It’s what I sense right before I walk into a place where death quietly and finally waits for me to tend to it as only I can. I don’t know what is going through Lucy’s mind. Not this same feeling or premonition I’m having but something confusing and contradictory and volatile.
During the twenty-minute ride here she was logical and held together, but she is pale as if she is sick, and she looks both terrified and angry. I see the shadings and flares of her emotions in her intense green eyes, and I heard her internal chaos in a comment she made during the drive. She said that the last time she talked to Jaime was six months ago when Lucy accused her of getting into something for the wrong reason.
“You go ahead,” Benton is saying to Marino.
“She been having problems or something?” one of the cops asks Marino. “Personal problems, financial trouble, anything like that?”
“Nope.”
“Bet she just went out somewhere, maybe sightseeing, and didn’t tell anyone.”
“That’s not her,” Lucy says. “No fucking way.”
“And left her phone or the battery’s dead. Know how many times that happens around here?”
“She doesn’t fucking sightsee,” Lucy says behind my back. Marino wipes his wet face on his sleeve, his eyes darting around, the way he looks when he’s extremely upset beneath his imperviousness, his rudeness. The elevator doors slide open, and all of us crowd inside except Benton and Lucy, as the police keep offering possibilities, trying to talk us out of our growing sense of urgency when they have no reason to talk us out of a damn thing.
“She’s probably fine. I see it all the time. Someone visits from out of town, and if you don’t hear from them? People get worried.”
They are beat cops, and this is really nothing more than what’s known on the street as a welfare check, maybe a more dramatic one than usual, with a bigger, more official posse showing up, but a welfare check nonetheless. The police do them daily, especially this time of year, when it’s the height of tourist season, vacation time, and the schools are out. Someone calls 911 and insists the police check on the welfare of a friend, a family member who isn’t answering the phone or hasn’t been heard from for a while. In ninety-nine cases out of a hundred, it’s nothing. In the one case when it’s something, it isn’t tragic. Rarely does it turn out that the person is dead.
“I’m going with you,” Lucy says to me.
“I need to go in first.”
“I have to go with you.”
“Not now.”
“I have to,” Lucy insists, and Benton puts his arm around her, pulling her close to him in what’s more than a comforting hug. He’ll make sure she doesn’t bolt for the stairs and try to force her way inside the apartment.
“I’ll call as soon as I’m in,” I promise Lucy in the narrowing space of the closing doors, and they shut completely and she is gone, and the ache inside my chest is indescribably awful.
The elevator of gleaming old wood and polished brass lurches as it lifts, and I explain to the police that no one has heard from Jaime Berger and she didn’t come to Savannah to sightsee. She’s not here on vacation. It may be nothing, and I certainly hope it’s nothing. But it’s out of character for her, and she was expected to show up at some point at Dr. Dengate’s office today, and she hasn’t appeared and hasn’t called. An ambulance should have been requested, and it would be a good idea to call for one now, and all the while I’m saying this I realize it’s repetitive, it’s perseverative, and the officers, both of them young, have their own theory about what is going on.
It’s clear they assume that Marino lives with this out-of-town woman who’s not answering her phone or contacting anyone. Why else would he have keys? Most likely this is a messy domestic situation that nobody wants to talk about. I reiterate that Jaime is a prominent prosecutor from New York, or actually a former one, and we have reasons to be worried about her safety.
“When did you see her last?” one of the officers asks Marino. “Last night.”
“And nothing was out of the ordinary?”
“Nope.”
“Everybody getting along?”
“Yeah.”
“You didn’t have words?”
“Nope.”
“Maybe a little disagreement?”
“Nope.”
“Maybe a little fight?”
“Don’t even start that shit with me.”
“There are some unusual circumstances,” Chang tells the officers, as the elevator bumps to a stop, and there is only so much Chang or any of us is going to explain.
We’re not going to mention Kathleen Lawler or suggest that she may have been poisoned. I have no intention of volunteering information about Lola Daggette or the Mensa Murders, and I’m not going to share that Dawn Kincaid, who was locked up in a state hospital for the criminally insane, is brain-dead and perhaps was poisoned. I’m not going to comment right now that a woman on a bicycle showed up last night with sushi Jaime probably didn’t order. I don’t want to talk or explain or speculate or imagine. I’m frantic, and at the same time already know what awaits us, or fear I do, and we are out of the elevator, rushing down the hallway, to the end of it, where Marino unlocks the heavy oak door.
“Jaime?” his big voice booms as we enter the apartment, and I notice instantly that her burglar alarm isn’t set. “Fuck!” Marino glances at the keypad by the door, noticing the same ominous detail, his tanned face flushed and slick with sweat, his CFC khakis a grayish tan from the rain. “She always sets it. Even when she’s here. Hello! Jaime, you home? Shit.”
The kitchen looks exactly as it did when I left last night, except for a bottle of antacid on the counter that I know wasn’t there when I washed dishes and put food away, and her big brown handbag isn’t on the back of the chair where I saw her hang it by its shoulder strap when she came in with the take-out food from the Broughton and Bull. Her bag is on the leather couch in the sitting area, its contents scattered over the coffee table, but we don’t stop to see what might be missing or what she might have been digging for. Chang and I follow Marino’s long stride down the hardwood hallway that leads to the master area in back.
Through the open doorway I see a sleigh bed and rumpled green and brown covers, and Jaime in a maroon bathrobe that is untied and disarrayed. She is facedown, with her hips twisted to one side, her arms and head hanging off the bed, her position inconsistent with someone who died in her sleep and similar to Kathleen Lawler’s,
