Time of Death

topic gently before our eldest sibling comes in and dances a jig on it: could this by any chance be—’

‘Something to do with my job?’

‘You said it! Thank the Lord.’

‘No is your answer.’

‘You haven’t gotten someone sent to Rikers to be ass-raped?’

‘Not to Rikers, no,’ said Ren. ‘But your doorbell could ring at any minute.’

Matt laughed. ‘Well,’ he said, the laughter trailing off into a sigh. ‘At least we can see the funny side.’

‘For now.’ Ren took a breath. ‘Matt, Helen’s gone missing.’

‘What? When?’

‘Last time I saw her was the last day she was seen: Monday, the day of my appointment. She didn’t show up at a conference next day.’

‘Oh, she’s probably running from all you crazies,’ said Matt. ‘I’d disappear if I had to listen to all the voices talking about all the voices.’

‘True.’ Smile through the fear. Smile through the fear.

‘Can you do anything?’

‘I’m hearing that quite a lot recently,’ said Ren. ‘I’ll find it hard not to try.’

‘She’ll be back.’

‘She better be,’ said Ren.

Because I have no idea what I will do otherwise.

14

Denver’s 16th Street Mall was a long, grim shopping street monopolized by cell-phone and electronic stores. Bright lights shone on dark slush. Everyone who passed Ren had their head bowed – a parade of hidden faces. Ren’s eyes and nose were streaming. She went into the nearest restaurant and ordered a rare steak and a glass of red wine. She pulled out her notebook and wrote Helen Wheeler on a clean page. She followed it with two question marks and let the pen hover over them.

Stop. Helen has probably broken up with her boyfriend and disappeared to a log cabin to get over it. Away from the loonies.

Then something tugged at Ren.

Her overwhelming compulsion to fix things.

The parking lot at the back of Helen Wheeler’s building had a dual role. In addition to accommodating forty vehicles, it marked the boundary between a good neighborhood and a bad one. From the back of the lot eastward, the landscape got more ragged and dirty, like the torn ends of jeans dragged through puddles. The front of the building led on to a street of designer stores, organic food markets, an independent bookstore, a stationery store and a restaurant/bar.

Ren looked around the parking lot and saw three broken security cameras. Surprise, surprise. The lot was prime retail space for the local dealers: close enough to drag their saggy asses up off their mamas’ sofas and go make a sale, just far enough for chickenshit middle-class kids to wander in the hope of scoring some blow.

When Ren visited Helen, she usually slipped in the back door. Every bone in her body wanted to break in there now. Instead she walked around to the front of the building. The sidewalk was shining, the curbs packed with dirty ice and slush. She circled the block, pausing on each corner, wondering which direction Helen Wheeler could have gone in, wondering how that mattered when there was no other information to attach it to. Wondering what the point of all of this was.

She left.

As Ren pulled up outside Annie’s, she caught a glimpse of net curtain flapping in the wind. For a second, she thought she’d left the window open, but as she parked the car, she could see that the window was smashed and the wind was sucking the curtain through a massive, jagged hole into the cold night.

Oh my God, Misty.

As she ran up the path, she could see razor-sharp shards of glass sticking up in the snow under the window. Broken from the inside out. Ren knew whoever did it wouldn’t still be in the house. No one would break a front window right on to the street and hang around. But that didn’t stop her drawing her gun before she unlocked the door and stepped into the hallway.

Adrenaline had kicked in. Mind-sharpening adrenaline. She took a right into the living room. It was ice cold, the curtain blowing in and out, blackened and shredded on the sharp edges of the glass. Ren felt sickened for Annie. Her antique lace ruined, her pretty picture window shattered. As she looked around the rest of the room – the dresser, the drawers under the coffee table – she realized she didn’t know where Annie kept her valuables. She didn’t know if she had a safe, if she kept her things at the bank. And it was not a question she wanted to ask Annie. She couldn’t let her know that the assumed security of an FBI agent staying at her home had no value.

Ren moved through to the dining room and back into the hallway. She paused and looked up to the second floor. There are too many rooms in this house. But she worked through them all and up until the final door, had found nothing changed – a house undisturbed. She had saved the best for last. Or at least the most relevant. She opened her bedroom door.

‘Misty!’

Misty lay motionless in the corner. Ren’s heart caught. She ran to her and laid a hand on her silky back. Misty woke up, licked Ren’s hand and rested her head back down.

‘Oh, thank God,’ said Ren. ‘Thank God. You’re safe, sweetheart. You’re safe.’ She hugged Misty close. ‘I wonder did barking cross your mind,’ said Ren.

Ren went quiet when she heard the sound of a door banging back and forth. A cold breeze seemed to come from nowhere and whip around her. She stood up from the bed. For a moment she was rigid. Then she walked across the floor to where the noise grew louder. Annie called it the back attic. Ren never knew if it was Annie’s own creation or the architect’s. She had forgotten about it. She remembered it as being the size of an average bedroom. It had black glossy floorboards and a little window that sounded and felt like it was the source of the noise and cold wind. Ren glanced at the wall beside her and the two-foot-six square door that led to the staircase. She remembered Annie telling the Bryce children that it was magical. Ren had been young enough to believe her, so she had made her tentative way up the stairs and thought yes, magical…when magic is black and creepy and has tentacles that wrap around your head, poke into your eyes and snake all the way up into your brain.

‘Misty, they must have come right by you,’ said Ren. ‘You poor, gentle soul.’

Ren glanced at the curious door. Thirty years on, she told herself: Do it. She opened it and crawled through, then crawled back out for a flashlight. Chicken. She had dealt with all kinds of crime scenes and tuned out the filthy conditions, but the ingrained childhood fear of the back attic was stalling her. She started over and went up the stairs. The light illuminated faint traces of footprints in the dust on the treads. Ren kept close to the wall to avoid them, pausing to shine the flashlight on one and get a picture with her cell phone. Just in case.

The closer she got to the top of the stairs, the colder the air. She took a chill breath before she climbed up into the room. The small casement window – banging back on its hinges. Ren looked around the room. It was a Victorian time-warp, as if Annie herself had been living in this house for over a hundred years.

To Ren, attics had always been eerie: dark, overfilled, disordered, but necessary. People discovered all kinds of things in attics, wanted and unwanted. But you had to be willing to explore an attic, because it was never inviting.

A bolt of panic shot through Ren. ‘The attic’ was the term she used for her mind. The attic: dark, overfilled, disordered, uninviting. And unknown as Ren’s metaphor to anyone but one woman.

Ren ran to the window and looked out as if she would see Helen Wheeler running across the rooftops with a black cloak spreading behind her into the night sky.