Black Out

Gray is waiting for me at the kitchen table when I return home.

“Where’d you go?” he asks with false lightness.

I’m sure he knows I moved the things under our bed. I sense he’s worried about me and what I might do. What I love about him is that he always gives me my space, gives me the benefit of the doubt.

“To the store,” I say, putting a plastic grocery bag filled with things I didn’t need on the counter-moisturizer, shampoo, nail polish. He gets up and comes over to me. He sifts through the bag, and I know he’s not fooled by my pointless purchases. He takes my hand.

“Sit down a second,” he says, indicating a chair.

As I take a seat, he slides a poor-quality photograph printed from a color printer onto the table in front of me. The man in it has a pocked, fleshy face, with a bent nose and dead, mean eyes.

“Do you know who this is?” he asks.

My headache is so bad now it’s making me sick to my stomach. Something black starts to spread across the inside of my brain.

I rub my head. “No,” I say.

“Are you sure?”

I look again, but I feel like I can’t focus on the face. “I don’t think so.”

He sits down next to me and rests his eyes on the photograph, taps it with his finger.

“I went to the office and called your father from a secure line. I got a description of the guy who came to see him. Turns out he also left a name and phone number. The name is a fake, of course. The number is just a pager. But the name, Buddy Starr, is on a list of aliases for a guy called Simon Briggs. He’s a bounty hunter. Not as in bail bondsman, more like a private contractor. He’s the guy you hire when you want to find someone and aren’t necessarily worried in what condition. His list of criminal associations is long and colorful.”

“Why would he be looking for Ophelia?” I ask. The sun streaming in through the windows is way too bright. I cover my eyes.

“That’s what we need to find out,” he says. “The point is, though, that he’s likely working for someone.”

I stare at the picture, then close and rub my eyes again.

“Hey, you okay?” Gray says after a minute. “You look pale.” He puts his hand on my arm.

“I just have a headache.” I feel his gaze, but I don’t meet his eyes.

“Maybe you’ve seen this guy before and you don’t remember?”

“No,” I say, not wanting to admit that it’s not only possible but even likely, given my reaction to the photo. I put my head down in my arms. They come on hard and fast like this for me. If it gets any worse, I could be lying in a cocoon of pain for hours.

“I don’t know,” I admit.

I let Gray lead me upstairs. He puts me into bed and closes the shades. I hear him take my migraine medication from the medicine cabinet in the bathroom, run water into the glass by the sink. When he returns to me, I sit up and swallow the pills. He’s very good at taking care of me.

That afternoon Detective Harrison finally got lucky. A few telephone calls to the records office in the Kentucky town where Annie Fowler was born yielded a faxed copy of her death certificate. She and her infant son had been killed in a road accident when she was just twenty-one years old.

“A real tragedy,” the records clerk told him, over the phone. “She went to school with my son.”

“That’s terrible. How sad,” he said, trying to keep the excitement out of his voice. “Do you mind telling me what she looked like?”

“Red hair and freckles, sweet-faced, petite-maybe not even five foot two, and a little on the plump side. A lovely girl, though. Just really…pretty.” Nothing like the Annie Fowler he knew.

“I come from a small town myself,” the detective told her, though that wasn’t quite the case. It was just a way he had to lube people up, get them talking. “I know how hard a tragedy like this can be for everyone.”

“It’s true. It’s true,” the clerk said, sounding wistful and as though she were tearing up. “Her parents have never been the same.” Then, “I am curious, sir. What’s your interest?”

“I can’t say much, ma’am,” mimicking her polite tone. “But I have reason to believe that someone might have used her information to create a false identity.” He paused when he heard the clerk gasp. “Since her death have you had any queries at your office for her birth certificate?”

In fact, there had been. A young man came to the records office just a few months after Annie Fowler’s death, claimed that he’d been adopted, was searching for his birth family. He thought Annie might be his sister.

“He was distraught when I told him about her death. But I was acquainted with her parents. If there had been a baby given up for adoption, I’d have known it. Anyway, he asked for copies of her birth and death certificates. I wasn’t sure why he wanted them, but he had the required information and money to pay the fee.”

“Do you remember his name?”

“No, I surely don’t. But I might have it somewhere. Can I call you back?”

“I’d appreciate it.”

That afternoon Detective Harrison didn’t know that the real Annie Fowler had died just a few months before Ophelia March was killed in a car accident in New Mexico. He didn’t know who I was or what I was hiding, but he knew who I wasn’t. And he felt, as all gamblers do just before they lose it all, that he was about to have the biggest win of his life.

21

During the awkward dinner the four of us shared on Frank’s first night home, my mother doted, Marlowe stared at the table, and I watched Frank with a kind of numb horror as he piled food onto his plate and ate with gusto.

“We’re a real family now,” my mother said as she sat beside Frank around the cramped Formica table in our trailer.

“That’s right,” Frank said, patting my mother on the arm. She nuzzled up to him like a house cat.

I was too depressed even to be a smart-ass about it. All I could do was stare at Frank’s hands and think about Janet Parker’s mournful wailing, about the way her daughter had died. I’d never once believed that Frank was innocent. His trial had hinged on the charges against the investigating officer, the suppression of evidence that officer claimed to have found at Frank’s house, and the testimony of the ophthalmologist who the prosecutor claimed had been paid off. Basically, Frank got lucky. And the hands he’d used to murder an unknown number of women were now placing mashed potatoes on my plate.

Frank was a tall, quiet man with narrow blue eyes and long, slender fingers. His blond hair was going white, and his thin lips disappeared into the flesh of his face. He spoke softly, almost in a raspy whisper. I felt him watch me as I ate.

“I see a lot of your mother in you, girl,” he said, finally breaking the silence that hung over the table. His words sounded like a warning, and I felt the hairs rise on my arms. My mother shot me a black look. I made a mental note to draw as little attention to myself as possible.

Outside our trailer there were a few protesters, family members of Frank’s victims. In subdued but persistent voices, they chanted, “Murderer, murderer, murderer.” We all pretended not to hear.

“We’ll be leaving here by week’s end,” said Frank, getting up from his seat and walking over to the window. With those ghoulish fingers, he pushed the curtain back, releasing a heavy sigh as he looked out. The chanting grew louder.

I remember thinking, If he were innocent, he’d be angry. He’d be railing against the injustice of those people chanting outside his door. But he seemed simply annoyed, perhaps even disgusted, as though he looked down on their grief and their rage. They were emotions he didn’t understand. He turned and saw me staring. His eyes were flat, empty, rimmed by dark circles. They made me think of the sinkhole where Melissa Parker’s body had floated. There was nothing in his gaze that I recognized.