Die For You

information beyond what I’d already learned from Detective Crowe. The rest were inaccurate links: Another Marcus Raine was looking for a girlfriend on a dating site, someone named Marcus who lived on Raine Street was selling a mattress, an old man left his dog Marcus out in the rain (misspelled raine) and wrote a ridiculous poem about it.

I was about to move on when a listing toward the bottom of the page caught my eye: What happened to Marcus Raine? I clicked on the link and it brought me to a site called forgottennycrimes.com.

“On television, the haunted cop works the case until he retires-and even then he can’t let it go. But in the real world, people disappear and no one ever finds out what happened to them,” some copy on the makeshift page read. “Someone goes out for groceries and never comes home, is never heard from again. Everyone moves on except for those of us who are left behind, haunted by loss, anger, and unanswered questions.”

Grainy images faded in and then faded out on the screen-school portraits, mug shots, vacation shots, candid and posed images.

I clicked on Marcus Raine’s name and saw the same image Crowe had shown me, except that the girlfriend had been cropped out. The blurb there, about how Raine was living the American dream when he disappeared, how he’d been raised by his aunt in communist Czechoslovakia, how his parents died, how he came to the U.S. and was educated, got rich, was my husband’s story exactly.

Camilla Novak, another emigre from the Czech Republic, thought he was acting oddly in the weeks before his death. He seemed paranoid, installing several new locks on the door, refusing to answer his phone unless she called him by coded ring, phoning once, hanging up, and calling again. “He believed he was being watched. But he wouldn’t say by whom or why. I was worried; mental illness ran in his family,” Novak said. “But I never thought he was really in danger.”

There was a phone number on the site, too. If you have any information, call 1-21-COLD- CASE.

On a whim, I entered the name Kristof Ragan into the search engine. But nothing useful appeared, just lists of names for schools and corporations that included “Kristof” or “Ragan.” I kept looking through page after page on the screen, just hoping, becoming more desperate with each bad link. Finally, I reached the end. And that’s when I lost it for the first time.

In my nephew’s bedroom, surrounded by Star Wars and Skater Boy paraphernalia, stuffed animals and sports posters-walls, ceilings covered with it all-bunk beds the size of apartments I’d had, I put my head on his desk and wept, feeling all my rage, confusion, and grief pour out of me in one mighty rush. I could have drowned in it. Two days ago, I would have turned to my imperfect husband for his intellect and calm in such a storm. I would have reached for him and he would have lifted me from the chaos of my emotions.

“Isabel, relax,” he’d say. “Clear your head.”

And I’d feel that fog-the one that descends over me in time of stress or high emotion, the one that inhibits logical thought-I’d feel it start to lift.

“There is no problem that doesn’t have a solution. There’s always a way,” he’d tell me. And I’d listen, know he was right.

I felt his loss so profoundly that I almost just crawled into Trevor’s bed and pulled the covers over my head. My friend, my husband, my lover was a liar at least, quite possibly a criminal as well. But still the thought of being without him nearly crippled me. For all the fractures in our marriage, all the things that caused me pain, I truly loved him, had the most basic kind of faith in him, even if I’d never really trusted him again after his affair.

For some reason, I found myself thinking back to my conversation with Detective Crowe. And love forgives? he’d asked bitterly. Love accepts, moves forward, I’d answered him. But maybe, in my case, love accepts too much, wants to live so badly that it creates what it needs to survive.

Next to the computer keyboard my cell phone vibrated, started shimmying along the smooth white surface of the desk. I looked at the little screen. Erik calling. I hesitated, then answered it but didn’t say anything.

“Don’t do this, Iz,” he said. “You don’t have to do this. Just come back and we’ll work it out together.”

I didn’t say anything.

“Or at least go to the lawyer’s office. You know where he is, right? John Brace and Son, on Park Avenue. He’ll know what to do. That detective said if we can’t get you to come back, he’s going to consider you a person of interest in all of this. A suspect, Iz. Let’s not have this get any worse than it already is.”

I pressed the End button on my phone and set it back down. It started buzzing again a second later. Linda calling. I let it shimmy itself off the desk and fall to the floor. Eventually it stopped ringing.

As I got up and walked away from it, it started buzzing again. That little phone, the fat silver weight of it, smooth and warm like a worry stone, had always been a source of comfort to me. Seemed like it was always in my hand, all the people in my life just one push button away. All those voices-my sister, my mother, my husband-at least as loud as my own, often louder. I left them all there calling after me.

I took an old coat from my sister’s closet and I was about to leave when I had a thought. I ran to the room Erik used as an office and went into their file cabinet, which I knew they left unlocked. It was easy to find their passports-and mine among them. Linda and I had traveled with the kids last summer, an impromptu trip to Mexico. In the melee of traveling with two kids, our passports got confused. I had Linda’s at my apartment, or did. She had mine. I grabbed it with a wash of relief and euphoria. I thought that sometimes fate smiled on you, even when she had been slapping you around in every other way like the abusive, narcissistic bitch she is.

* * *

GRADY CROWE HATED hospitals-not that anyone liked them especially. But he didn’t dislike them for the same reasons as other people. He hadn’t watched anyone die in a hospital; he didn’t feel uncomfortable around sick people. It didn’t remind him of his own mortality.

He just didn’t like the lighting, the stale decor, or the smell of an institutional kitchen. These things offended his aesthetic sensibilities, made him anxious and uncomfortable. And it annoyed him that people suffering from disease weren’t treated to a more pleasant environment. Wouldn’t it help them to feel better if they didn’t have to look at gray Formica and dirty white walls, if they didn’t have to look at themselves beneath the ugly glare of fluorescent lighting? And if their last days had to be spent here, shouldn’t a little more attention be paid to detail? Should the last thing they see be peeling wallpaper or a metal bed rail? Then again, maybe not everyone was as affected by these things as he was.

His phone rang.

“She’s moving,” Jez said on the other end. He heard a siren wailing in the background and she sounded a bit breathless.

“Are you on foot?” he asked.

“I am now. She took a cab to her sister’s apartment. I’ve been sitting here, waiting. She just left on foot, moving fast. I thought she’d hail another cab but she didn’t.”

“Where’s the vehicle?”

“Parked illegally across the street from the Books’ building.”

“Where’s she going?”

“I don’t know,” she said, drawing out the words as if she was talking to a toddler. “That’s why I’m following her.”

“Keep me posted,” he said, glancing up at Linda Book, then over to the two kids who both seemed pretty bored or unhappy or both. He’d been asking them questions in the family waiting area, getting nowhere.

“Where are you going?” Jez asked.

“I don’t know yet.”

“Then you keep me posted, too.”

In the first smart move he’d made in twenty-four hours, he had left Jez outside the hospital while he went