“What does that mean?” I asked. I liked the rhythm of the words. I liked the way each word fell to the ground with its particular weight but how the meaning seemed to hover somewhere just above me.
“Think about it.”
I did. I thought about it a lot.
“YOUR MOTHER’S NOT here, dear,” Fred said, stepping aside and sweeping me into the house with a strong arm around my shoulder. I saw him looking at the bandage on my head, but he didn’t mention it, as though he thought that might be rude. “She’s off for some pampering with her girlfriends at Canyon Ranch.”
“I know,” I said, letting him take my wrap, avoiding eye contact.
He laid it over the settee in the triple-height grand foyer. The entry was bathed in a sunny wash from the skylights above. The sunlight caught on the million tiny crystals in the chandelier and cast rainbow flecks around us on the floor.
If my mother had been home, there’d be noise-a television, music, the sound of her chatting on the phone. The sound would bounce off the high ceilings, the marble floors, seem to come from everywhere and nowhere. She couldn’t stand a quiet house, or a dark one. There must always be sound and light. Today it seemed to echo with her absence with Fred’s thoughtful, quiet energy.
“What’s happened to you, Isabel?” he asked finally, turning me gently to face him with hands on my shoulders. “Who did this to you?”
“I-” I started, trying to think of a lie. But then I didn’t have the energy. “I don’t exactly know.”
“Let’s sit you down somewhere,” he said, again moving me along with that strong arm. I felt myself rest against him, the weight of it all just too much suddenly. He brought me to the large plush couch in front of the fireplace, which was lit but dwindling to embers. I sank into the soft chenille, the cushions seeming to fold around me like an embrace. I told Fred what happened to me, withholding nothing, from Marcus not coming home two nights ago through my visit to the ATM.
“I need to use the computer, figure out how much he’s taken from me. I need to try to do some research into this other missing Marcus Raine.”
Fred sat on the hassock in front of me. He’d paced and frowned during my surprisingly calm and distanced telling of events, then came to sit there and put a hand on my arm.
“What you need is rest, Isabel.” His tone was gentle but firm. “I’m going to call our lawyer and some people we know in the police department, and they’re going to handle this mess. You are going to take a bath and get into bed.”
“Fred, I can’t do that-” I started to say. But the couch was so soft and the room was so warm. He lifted my feet from the floor and placed them on the hassock where he’d sat a moment before. I sank deeper into the cushions. The room around me started to get blurry and I thought of how that ER doctor had told me I needed to rest or suffer the consequences. I wondered if this sudden fading of will and awareness was what he meant. I felt the weight of a blanket on top of me.
“Don’t worry, Isabel. We’ll figure this all out.”
“I just need to use the computer,” I said, but it didn’t sound like my voice, the words thick in my mouth.
“I’ll bring you the laptop,” he said. “We’re wireless now, after Trevor and Emily complained during their last visit.” I thought he might be humoring me but I suddenly lacked the strength to say so. The gray air darkened and swallowed me.
WHEN A HARD, loud crack, like a thick branch snapping, brought me back, I felt myself swim up through layers of deep sleep before I broke into the bright light of the room. The sound still echoed in my head, though now there was only silence. I listened to the quiet noises of the house-the ticking of the clock, the hum of heat through the vents-my whole body tense and tingling, my breathing heavy.
Like a honeycomb, all the rooms downstairs in Fred and Margie’s house connected by small hallways and pocket doors, creating a kind of circle of adjacent rooms around the foyer-the parlor led to the dining area, which flowed into the kitchen. Another exit from the kitchen led to a short, narrow passage that drifted into a massive library and study with a second-floor landing. That room reconnected to the foyer.
The sliding doors that led from the parlor to the foyer were closed, but the doors that connected it to the large dining room were open. I heard a soft click, like the sound of a lock turning.
I almost called out Fred’s name but something stopped me. Instead I slipped from the couch and let the blanket that covered me fall to the floor. I walked quietly over plush carpet toward the dining room in time to see three bulky shadows drift across the far wall. I felt a deep thump of dread in my chest, and suddenly the air around me, time itself, seemed thick and toxic with the energy of my own fear.
I scanned the room quickly for anything I might use to defend myself, and my eyes came to rest on the wrought-iron fire poker on the hearth. I grabbed it too quickly, sending the stand and the other tools toppling loudly to the stone. In the aftermath of sound, even the house seemed to hold its breath. There was a deafening stillness where my mind raced through various options, none of them particularly appealing.
I DIDN’T GROW up in this house. Fred and my mother moved here shortly after I left home to go to NYU. Until then we’d stayed in the other house, a large, rambling, rundown old place, because my mother felt we’d lost too much to leave the only home we’d ever known. The studio where my father died was torn down and replaced with a garden my mother tended with care. “She spends more time out there than she ever did with him,” my sister observed bitterly. It was true, of course. And seeing her out there, on her knees in the dirt, pulling weeds and planting new bulbs in the spring, was not a comfort to us as the gardening must have been to her.
My sister and I could have left that house easily, every room, every creaking floorboard, every water stain akin to some memory of my father. Maybe it was my mother who wasn’t ready to leave it behind. Fred contented himself with laborious repairs and renovations that he could have easily hired out. Over time, he managed to update the plumbing and electricity, replace the roof, strip and stain old floors. There was painting and wallpapering, new carpets. By the time Margie and Fred left, the old house was fully renovated and sold to a young couple starting a family who wanted to leave the city. Fred told me later that it was therapy for him to restore that old house. There were a lot of things my father left behind that he couldn’t heal, places in the other man’s wake where he wasn’t wanted. But that house responded to his ministration, let him patch and repair its broken places. Like my mother’s memorial garden, it didn’t chafe with the attention, didn’t struggle, rebuff, or withdraw.
This house, this new house built to my mother’s specifications, was familiar but not native. I didn’t know which boards creaked. It didn’t have the hidden passages, old dumbwaiters, and storage cubbies. In this house, I couldn’t hide. I’d have to fight.
Luckily, terror is a shot of adrenaline to the heart. I’ve never been more awake or more alert as I moved carefully toward the dining room. But as I turned the corner, poker raised like a baseball bat, I found the room was empty. I paused at the entryway and listened, wondering for a moment if I was being paranoid, imagined the things I’d heard.
I moved quickly around the circle of rooms, wondering if I’d come upon a serene Fred sitting in his study. He’d be surprised to see me wielding a fire poker. But all the rooms were empty until I came to the foyer.
It took a second for the scene to register. Fred, that kind and good man, who’d cared for us all with patience and respect, lay still and white on the marble floor, an impossible amount of blood pooling from beneath his head. His arms and legs were slightly akimbo, as though he was preparing to make a snow angel. I dropped to my knees beside him, let the poker clatter to rest on the floor.
I didn’t have time to weep or scream. Those bulky shadows rose on the wall in front of me. I wasn’t alone. I spun around to see three men move into the foyer from the study. I realized that they must have been following me around the circle of rooms. I reached for the poker, but one of them kicked it away from me.
In spite of his tremendous size-six foot four at least, and well over 250 pounds-there was something sickly and almost fragile about this man, something unwell around the eyes. He was pale to the point of being gray. He held a ridiculously large gun, which he raised slowly, almost reluctantly, in my direction. I held very still, tried to take in all the details.
