yourself,” he says.
Freaked out. It strikes me as an odd turn of phrase, unprofessional and ever so slightly disrespectful.
“It was just the moment,” I say. “Today in the sun, it all seems a little silly, to tell you the truth. I’m kind of embarrassed about the whole thing-you all showing up like that. I almost wish there had been a real reason for the cavalry to come riding in.” I’m talking too much.
“That’s what we’re here for,” says the detective.
An uncomfortable beat passes. “I was wondering, though,” he says, “if I could ask you a few more questions.”
“Regarding?”
“Can I come in?”
I have a hard grip on the door; I can hear the blood rushing in my ears. “I don’t know what else we have to discuss,” I say. “I told you everything that happened last night.”
“It’ll just take a minute, Mrs. Powers.” His tone has shifted from friendly and chatty to slightly more serious. He has stopped nodding and smiling and has fixed me with his gaze.
I find myself moving aside to let him in, in spite of knowing that this is a mistake. But I don’t want to seem like I have anything to hide. So I force another smile and offer him a glass of water, which he declines. He seems to look around and take inventory as I escort him into the living room.
“If you don’t mind my asking, what kind of work do you and your husband do?” he says as he makes himself comfortable on the couch. Everything I liked about him last night is gone. I don’t see the kindness and the empathy I imagined in him. His eyes seem narrow and watchful now. There’s an unpleasant smugness emerging.
I have the feeling it’s a mistake to lie, but I do it anyway. Force of habit. “I’m a stay-at-home mom, and Gray is an insurance investigator.”
He turns up the corners of his mouth. “But that’s not really the truth, is it, Annie? Can I call you Annie?”
I don’t answer, just keep my eyes on him.
“Your husband and his father own a company, Powers and Powers, Inc. Isn’t that right?”
I give him a shrug. “It’s in the interest of our safety that no one around here is aware of that.”
“I understand. Can’t be too careful in his business.”
“Detective, what does this have to do with anything?” I ask. I have stayed standing by the archway that leads into our living room. I lean against the wall and keep my arms wrapped around my middle.
“It could be relevant. Your intruder last night might have something to do with your husband’s work.” He takes out a small notebook, flips through its pages. “They call themselves security consultants, but it’s a little more than that, right?”
“It’s a privatized military company,” says Gray, entering the room. He has been sleeping, but he doesn’t look it. He’s alert and on guard. The detective is clearly startled, like he expected me to be alone here. He rises quickly and offers Gray his hand.
“Detective Ray Harrison,” he says. “I answered the 911 call last night.”
Gray leans in and gives his hand a brief, powerful shake. “Thanks for taking care of things,” says Gray, his voice flat and cool.
My husband pins the detective with a hard, unyielding gaze, and Harrison seems to shrink back a bit. I notice that he looks past Gray, as if interested in something on the wall. We all stand in an awkward silence for a second, in which Gray crosses his arms and offers neither question nor statement, just a scowl of assessment directed at Harrison.
Finally the detective clears his throat and says, “When I learned the nature of your business, I wondered if it had something to do with the man who followed your wife.”
The detective is looking toward the door now. He hasn’t seated himself again, stands with his hands in his pockets. He does a little rocking thing, heel to toe, toe to heel. That Cheshire-cat look he had is long gone.
“I really doubt that has anything to do with it,” says Gray with a patient smile. “Most of the work I do is overseas. And in the unlikely event that someone developed a personal vendetta against me, I promise you we’d have more to worry about than someone lurking on the edge of our property.”
The two men engage in a brief staring contest until the detective averts his eyes and brings them to rest on me.
“Well, it was just a thought,” he says. He has a lot more to say, but he won’t say it now. “Sorry to have bothered you.”
Harrison walks toward the door, and Gray follows.
“There was just one other thing,” he says as Gray opens the door for him. “I noticed that Mrs. Powers was born in Kentucky. But I swear I hear New York in your accent, ma’am.”
Noticed where? I wonder. Did he check me out after he left here last night, look at my driving record or something?
“I was born in Kentucky but moved to New York with my family when I was a child.”
Kentucky, land of lenient birth-records release policies. Just a little easily obtained information-birth date, mother’s maiden name-and you’re on your way to a brand-new life. If he keeps asking questions and checks on my answers, these lies won’t hold. But he just gives me a half smile and a long look.
“We’ll keep you posted on the area break-ins and if we learn anything more about who might have followed you on the beach last night,” he says as he moves down the stairs. “Have a good one.”
We wave as he drives off. Gray has taken my hand and is holding it tight. I look at him, and he’s watching the detective’s SUV.
Detective Ray Harrison, on the day he began to suspect that I wasn’t who I was pretending to be, was in a bit of a mess. He wasn’t a corrupt man, not totally. Nor was he an especially honorable one. He was a man who’d made some bad choices, taken a few back alleys, and found himself dangerously close to rock bottom. One wouldn’t have known it to look at him. He drove a late-model Ford Explorer, had never missed a payment on his mortgage, had never in his career taken a sick day. But there was debt. A lot of it. In fact, he was drowning in it. He went to bed and woke up thinking about it, could barely look his wife in the eye lately. It was making him sick; he was vomiting up blood from his ulcer. But it wasn’t the kind of debt you could get help with; he didn’t owe money to Citibank or Discover. The detective had a gambling problem. The problem was that he lost, often and extravagantly. The day before Esperanza’s 911 call, a man to whom he owed money sent the detective a picture of his wife at the mall as she buckled their nine-month-old daughter into her car seat. On the back his debtor had scrawled, Where’s my fucking money?
That’s the hole he was in when he had a hunch about me, a vague idea that I might be hiding something. So he started doing a little poking around, not really going out of his way. A totally blank credit report was the first red flag. A driver’s license granted just five years ago was the second. Finally a birth certificate issued in Kentucky when he was certain he’d heard just the hint of New York in my accent.
Detective Harrison was the kind of man who noticed how much things were worth: our house on the beach, the ring on my finger, the secret I had to keep. He did a little calculating and decided to take a gamble, as he was wont to do.
I don’t know any of this as Gray and I watch him cruise away from the house. His visit is just another bad omen.
14
When I try to visualize Marlowe as he was when we were young, I can’t quite pin him down. The memory writhes and fades away; I can see the white of his skin, the jet of his eyes, the square of his hand, but the whole picture is nebulous and changing, as though I’m watching him underwater.
