tissue onto Laine’s skin. The scratch pulsed in new pain.
I’m sorry, she mouthed.
Laine forced a smile-forget it-and finally grabbed her phone and hit the green button. “Hello?”
“Mrs. Laine Boye?”
“Ms. Boye, yes.”
“Ms. Boye. Okay. This is Detective Sergeant Anne Waller from Police Headquarters. I need to ask you a couple of questions. Is now a good time?”
Rowena frowned as she pulled away the tissue. A flecked line of blood on the white gauze.
“One second.” Laine covered the phone with her hand. “I’m sorry, I have to go outside and…”
Rowena nodded. “Sure. But come back in and I’ll put some pawpaw ointment on that. I’m so sorry.”
Laine stepped outside. The door shut behind her. Rain tattled on the awning overhead.
“Sorry. Go ahead.”
“Ms. Boye, can I ask you about your movements last night?”
“What’s going on?”
“If you could please tell me what you did last night, and the times.”
Laine’s heart started thudding again. She turned around.
In the back of the store, Rowena was frowning, hands busily tidying.
“Ms. Boye?”
“I went to the Anglican-what do you call it? Parsonage?-here in Tallong about eight or so and was there with Reverend Anand till, I guess, ten?”
The detective asked a few questions to confirm the times, to confirm she drove straight there and back, to confirm what make of car she owned.
“And I have a Nicholas Close here,” said Detective Waller. “He wants to talk to you.”
Laine looked into the shop. Rowena was out of sight.
“Sure.”
She took the opportunity to slip away into the rain.
N icholas leaned against the cold black granite of the Police Headquarters building, wanting desperately to sit.
Rain was hitting Roma Street so heavily that he wouldn’t have been surprised to see the bitumen pit and dissolve. Only by pressing himself against the building could he get any cover from the high, clipped-wing awnings. The metal bench seats out front were all exposed to the rain and rang dully as the heavy drops struck them. Nicholas shut his eyes, figuring anyone passing would take him for a swaying vagrant too pitiful to charge.
For the last half-hour, he’d been trying not to watch a middle-aged man on the footpath in front of him reel under a barrage of invisible punches, fall to the ground, heave and jerk as he was struck by unseen kicks to his kidneys, his groin, his head. The man’s face was white and wide with terror and, under the steady bombardment of ethereal steel-tipped toes, caved in and bloodied. His eyes came out. His jaw snapped. His fingers bent and their bones broke through skin. Gradually, he stopped his voiceless wailing, spasmed briefly, and was still. Then there was a silent edit in the spool of his death and he was suddenly swaying whole and seemingly drunk beside the steel bench in front of Nicholas, his ghostly clothes dry despite the downpour… and the grisly replay of his murder began again.
Nicholas was too exhausted to lift his feet and find another spot to wait. It was now well after eleven. His hour and a half in the police building had been almost solid questioning, punctuated with short breaks when the detectives left him alone. He supposed the pauses were designed to allow him to panic and consider confessing. Instead, they gave him time to divine from the questions what might have happened to Hannah Gerlic’s sister, Miriam.
Detective Waller and that slim male detective had tag-teamed the interview. Each asked slow, deliberate sets of questions: some were repeated over and over; some were rephrased or amalgamated with others; some came out of the blue to catch him off guard. Nicholas’s favorite had been: “Why did Miriam take your cigarettes?” He’d chewed over the cleverness of that while he leaned against the ice-cold wall, recalling how carefully Waller had watched his response. “I never saw her,” he’d replied truthfully. He supposed Waller had been hoping for “I don’t smoke” or better yet, “I don’t know, but the little bitch has still got ’em.”
“When you picked up Hannah Gerlic, was she alone?” Waller had asked.
“Yes.”
Nicholas guessed that this was unusual and Hannah habitually walked home with Miriam.
“What were the two girls arguing about?” asked Waller.
“Hannah never spoke to me.”
The girls were having a fight. That explained their separation.
“Was Miriam still in her school uniform when you dropped Hannah home?”
“I never saw Miriam.”
Miriam had made it home after school, but she’d gone missing afterward-sometime in the night.
“You say you were at the presbytery with Reverend Anand and Laine Boye. Till when?”
“I don’t know. Ten or so.”
“Did you drive straight home?”
“Yes.”
“Did you stop at any shops? Gas station? Parks?”
“No.”
He was left alone in the room then for a quarter of an hour, before Waller came in again. Her voice was even, but her frown was heavy as lead.
“You’re free to go, sir. There’s a taxi stand at the Transit Center across the road.”
Without realizing why, he’d asked her to phone Laine Boye.
And so now he was hugging the police building’s front wall, trying to stay dry. He lifted his fingers to his neck. The wooden beads felt warm. His back against the stone felt frozen.
Eventually, to his surprise, Laine arrived.
T he car’s tires hissed on the road. Nicholas slumped in the passenger seat. They drove in silence for a long while. He looked at Laine. Her eyes were as gray as the sky.
“How do you feel?” he asked.
Laine glanced at him. Was that a flash of self-consciousness?
“What do you mean?” she replied.
“I mean, how do you feel?”
The rainy-day traffic was stop-start and the cars inched ahead like cattle toward a crush. She didn’t answer, so he spoke again.
“There are nights I still dream that Cate is lying beside me. And then I wake up. And at that moment when I… remember, I feel like I feel now. Heavy.” He watched the rainy world sliding idly by. “Like if you laid me on the ground I’d just sink into the earth.”
Laine drove, grim-faced.
“I used to feel like that,” she said. “Then Gavin killed himself.”
He looked back at her. Her profile was strong and fine. Hers was a face out of antiquity, anachronistic. She should have been born in a city of Renaissance sculptors, or the daughter of some Pharaoh, not today when culture was a thousand hits on YouTube. No wonder she was always angry.
As if feeling his gaze, she turned suddenly to face him. “Did you love her?” she asked. “Cate?”
Nicholas nodded. “Very much.”
Laine lifted her chin. “You said last night that you can see…” She hesitated. “That you see ghosts. Did you ever see her? Cate? After she died?”
Nicholas was quiet. For some reason, this seemed deeply personal, like a new lover’s questions about past partners. He didn’t want to answer. But his tongue betrayed him. “Yes.”
Laine drew a long breath through her nostrils. “You must be so sad.”
He thought about that. “I’m not sad. I’m angry.”
Laine smiled. “I was angry. Now I’m sad.” She flicked on the turn signal. “Aren’t we a pair?”
The car turned onto Coronation Drive, and their speed picked up.
