information.
'Sunnyvale. California. A listing for Michael and Dana Langford.' As she waits to be connected Caroline's attention drifts to the top of her desk and a photo of her parents on their wedding day. It is the only picture she has on her desk, and the only picture she has of them together – a small three-by-five in which her mother rests one gloved hand against the black tuxedo on her father's chest. It is such a sweet, simple moment – her mother's got something funny to tell her father, and he can't wait to hear it. She's tried to imagine it a million times, what her mother might've said at that moment, and she still has no idea. All she knows is that after fifteen years that's the only thing she would take from her desk.
A woman answers on the fourth ring, 'Hello?' Airy and easy at three-thirty in the morning. Either Dana is alive or her husband moves on quickly.
'I'm trying to reach Dana Langford,' Caroline says.
'This is.'
'My name is Caroline Mabry. I'm a police detective in Spokane.'
There is a pause and Caroline hears footsteps and a door easing closed, as if the woman has gone into another room. Then Dana says, in a hushed voice, 'Look, I have no interest in pressing charges. You can't do anything if I don't press charges, right?'
'Actually, we don't need the victim to press charges, no.'
'Please,' Dana continues. 'It was just a misunderstanding between friends. No one was hurt. Did my husband call you?'
'No, your husband didn't call.'
'I just don't want anything bad to happen to Eli,' Dana says.
'Anything bad,' Caroline repeats, and thinks, She doesn't know he's dead. 'Look, Ms. Langford, if you could just answer a couple of questions-'
'I won't get Eli in trouble?'
'You have my word,' Caroline says. 'We won't be charging Eli with anything.'
Dana starts slowly and Caroline has to draw her out with questions. But soon enough, she's just talking, telling the story of herself and Eli and a friend named Clark Mason, who all went to school together. As Caroline jots down notes, Dana explains Stanford and Michael, how they recruited Clark to find high-tech companies, how Eli's interactive game, Empire, came to be one of their companies. It is a strange feeling, hearing Clark's story from this angle, and as Dana begins to describe what happened the day Eli tried to kidnap her, Caroline imagines that her scribbled notes are a kind of staccato ending to Clark's long confession:
'And that was essentially it,' Dana says.
Caroline looks back at her notes. There seems to be so much missing, and yet she's not sure what it could be. 'Did you talk to Clark at some point that evening?'
'Yes,' she says. 'He called right after I got home. He must've heard from Eli. He was quiet. He seemed concerned. I asked him to make sure that Eli got some help, and he promised that he would.'
So Clark didn't tell her that Eli was dead, or about the plan he'd set in motion between Eli and Michael.
It seems funny to her: Clark is sure of what he knows, and Dana is sure of what she knows, and yet we all live in a world that is partly imagined. We see some things, and the rest we fill in – motives and reasons as imagined as a joke shared between newlyweds on a wedding day forty years ago.
Caroline sets her pen down. 'Can I ask you something personal?'
Dana hesitates. 'Of course.'
'Why didn't you and Clark get together?'
There is a long pause; Caroline is sure this woman must be wondering what kind of police officer would ask such a question.
'I don't know,' Dana says. 'Maybe it was timing. Or maybe it was just safer to imagine that we could have been good, without actually taking the risk. Sometimes I think we blew our only real chance back in high school.'
'Why – what happened in high school?' Caroline asks.
There is another hesitation. 'It was at the prom,' Dana says. 'Eli and I went together, but at the end of the night Clark and I ended up kissing in a hotel room.'
'Eli was jealous,' Caroline says.
'Clark and I just felt so badly that I think we stayed apart. It seems kind of ironic now, that Eli kept us apart and then later brought us together.'
'Do you think that's why Eli let you go on Friday?' Caroline asks. 'Because he still had feelings for you?'
'For me?' Dana seems confused. 'Eli doesn't have feelings for me.'
Now it's Caroline's turn to be confused. 'But I thought-'
'Eli loves Clark,' Dana says. 'Always has.'
And suddenly there it is: Eli turning Empire into a computer game to appease Clark; pushing Clark into politics to get close to him, then trying to defeat him when Clark married Susan; and the cruelty of that final note, on Eli's e-mail when he returned from taking Dana to the airport.
'Did Clark know how Eli felt?'
'I don't know,' Dana says, and she chooses her words carefully. 'Sometimes Clark could miss things like that. It's another reason we never got together, I think. He doesn't always see what's right in front of his face.'
When they are done Caroline thanks her, and hangs up without telling her that Eli has killed himself and that Clark tried to engineer the death of her husband. By all rights she should tell Dana, but something – maybe just fatigue – prevents her from doing it.
She thinks about how many times as a police officer she's had to deliver news like that, telling parents that their children aren't coming home, telling a wife that her husband has been in a car accident. For a while she would just blurt out the bad news because she couldn't stand the look in their eyes as they tried to think of some good reason that a cop would come to visit. Then she learned to go slowly, to let the person gird himself for what was coming. But this time… hell, she just doesn't want to do it.
When she sees Spivey go to the bathroom, Caroline walks into his office and takes the four yellow legal pads. Then she returns to her desk and takes the picture of her parents. Caroline stares at it for a moment, her mother's hand on her father's chest, everything she dreamed as a little girl, and then she slides the photograph into her bag and walks out the door. Spivey has just returned from the bathroom; she hears his voice behind her. 'Caroline?' But the door closes and she is outside.
It's still dark, an hour before sunrise, and the air has a February chill, but it will be warmer this morning than yesterday, and warmer, she supposes, tomorrow. She climbs in her car, starts it, turns off her radio and cell phone, drives quietly through the dark city and up the South Hill to Eli's house. She parks on the gravel between the house and the garage. The scene has been processed, the body removed; she imagines it in the slick plastic bag, cold and dark. Everyone has gone home. Police tape still blocks off the stairs to the carriage house. By tomorrow, even that will be gone.
She goes past the carriage house and walks up to the main house, shines her flashlight on it and catches dark wood and gabled eaves. The back doorknob turns in her hand and Caroline steps inside. She's not sure what she's looking for, just that there is one shot to account for. Her footfalls echo in the empty house and she shines her flashlight around – dusty hardwood and old flowery wallpaper, bookshelves and pillars. She comes into the living
