about this situation before I can determine what happened to your husband.”
I nodded and finally decided it was time to lie back. He reached to help me but I held up a hand. I didn’t want him to touch me.
“Is there family we can call, somewhere or someone he might have gone to without telling you?”
I shook my head. “Marcus doesn’t have any family. His parents died when he was a boy. He was raised by his mother’s sister in the Czech Republic. He came to the U.S. as soon as he was able to after communism fell in 1989, earned a scholarship to Columbia and worked various jobs as he went to school, got his master’s in computer science.” I found myself smiling a little. I had always been so proud of Marcus, of his intelligence, of his strength and fearlessness, of his machinelike drive toward getting what he wanted. Even when all these things had worked against us as a couple, I was still proud of him.
“Was he having any problems with anyone? Colleagues? Clients?”
“Not that he mentioned,” I said. Then: “Well… the earlier break-in? Whoever it was had a key and knew the alarm code. That was strange.”
“A disgruntled employee?”
I nodded. “There was an investigation. Still ongoing, I think. The police were looking at a programmer Marcus had fired a few weeks earlier. He’d made some threats. I don’t remember his name.”
“I’ll look into it.”
I was staring at the ceiling, willing myself to be strong, to be solid. But I kept seeing dark spots in front of my eyes, feeling that fuzzy, light feeling that comes right before you pass out. I tried to measure my breathing.
“You okay?” I heard the detective ask.
I opened my eyes and glanced toward the two of him-the solid one and the blurry, shadowy figure behind him. “Do I look okay to you?”
“No,” he said, shaking his head. “Not really. I’m sorry.” He put the cap on his pen, let his hand drop to his lap.
“If those people weren’t FBI agents,” I said when he didn’t say anything else, “then what happened to Rick Marino? He was there with me; they took him away. I thought he was being arrested.”
“Rick Marino is dead,” he said simply. His delivery could have used a little work. I could tell he thought it was better not to soften the blow, that it was a policy he’d decided on long ago. He continued speaking into the stunned silence, where I was having trouble processing the information and forming an appropriate response.
“We found his body in the office along with the bodies of two other employees-Eileen Charlton and Ronald Falco.”
I tried to visualize their faces, to think of the last time I’d seen them. The company party we’d had at our apartment last year. Eileen was a game designer and artist. She was petite, bookish with round wire-rimmed glasses. I remembered Ronald, a sound engineer, as lanky and shy with a mild stutter. Were either of them married? Did they have kids? I couldn’t remember.
“I’m sorry,” he added, an afterthought.
“What’s happening?” I asked, my voice catching in my throat, coming out in a raspy whisper.
“We’ll find out,” he said, putting away his pad and pen. I could see he believed it but I already had the sense of a yawning black abyss opening in my life. I was about to tumble in and I really didn’t think Detective Grady Crowe was going to be of much help. I could already see he was out of his depth. I just didn’t realize yet that I was, too.
WHEN I TOLD my sister that Marcus and I were getting married, I didn’t get the reaction I expected. She didn’t know Marcus well yet, it was true. Our courtship had been short and intense. But I had fallen, hard and headlong. And he seemed to have, as well; he proposed just a few months after we’d met.
He took me to Prague and we stayed in the Four Seasons near Mala Strana. We’d rented a car and driven about an a hour to the small town where he’d been born and had lived until he left for good. There was no family for me to meet. His mother’s sister, the aunt who’d raised him, had died a year earlier, he explained, after suffering from ovarian cancer.
But we wandered through the quaint cobblestone streets with the tourists, stopping in shops and having a local beer at the pub. He knew everything about the history of the town, Kutna Hora, once the second most important town in Bohemia because of its silver mines, now just a side trip tourists make while visiting Prague.
He spoke with the locals in Czech, explained to me how things had been during the communist era. How there were lines around this block for oranges that had come from Cuba, how this thriving store once was just a hollow space with empty shelves, how the communist propaganda had been taught in that tiny school.
On the way back to the city we stopped at a small Bohemian restaurant which, with its heavy oak tables, wood paneling, and thick ceiling beams, could have been plucked from the Middle Ages, if it weren’t for the jukebox and the young thugs smoking cigarettes and drinking enormous glasses of beer at the bar. The waiter brought a giant cast-iron platter of meat and potatoes. We ate until we were stuffed.
He’d been quiet all day. Not sullen or morose; just contemplative, maybe a bit sad. I just assumed that it was hard for him to be back in the place where he grew up, where so much had been lost-his parents, his aunt. I didn’t press him to talk.
“Isabel,” he said when we were done with our meal and waiting for our dessert. His accent was heavier than I’d ever heard it, had been since we’d arrived in the Czech Republic, as if being home, speaking his native language, reconnected him to a part of himself he’d neglected, even tried to quash. “I never thought I’d bring anyone here. Never thought I’d want to.”
“I’m glad you shared this with me,” I said. “I feel so much closer to you.” He was looking at me attentively; I felt heat rise to my cheeks. He wasn’t handsome, not beautiful in the classic sense. But his intensity, the hard features of his face, had a kind of magnetic power that lit me up inside. He dropped his eyes to the table.
“I want to share
I opened the box to see a gleaming, cushion-cut ruby in a platinum setting. It was breathtaking.
“Isabel,” he whispered, grabbing both my hands. “This is my heart. I’m giving it to you. I’d die for you. Marry me.”
I remember being stunned but nodding vigorously, tearing as he put the ring on my finger and came to kneel beside me and take me into his arms. People around us looked on; one woman, another American-I could tell by her Tommy Hilfiger sweater and khaki pants, but mainly by her sneakers-clapped her hands and released a happy little cry.
What had I expected to feel in that moment? I didn’t know. You see it from the outside, stylized and engineered to sell in films and commercials. You hear the stories your sisters and girlfriends tell. But you only know how it’s
“I DON’T UNDERSTAND,” my sister said. “You barely know him.”
Marcus and I had announced our engagement over dinner at my sister’s, and Linda and Erik had made all the appropriate noises; embraces were exchanged, there was the excited chatter about plans and when and where. But later in my sister’s bedroom while Marcus, Erik, and the kids tried out a new computer game Marcus was testing, Linda and I had the real conversation. I knew it was coming, of course, I’d seen her shoulders tense, noticed the brittle quality to her smile, the worried eyes.
“When it’s right, you know,” I said with a shrug. “Right?”
That’s when she started to cry, just tear a little, really. But still, it was enough to cause disappointment, and not a little anxiety, to wash over me.
“I thought you liked him,” I said, sinking onto the bed beside her.
