“What happened to those weeks?” she wants to know.
“That’s part of what I’m trying to find out.”
“How long ago are they?”
“Not long. Six months back.”
“The subject is dead, though, you said?”
“Dead.”
“Well, that does make it easier.” Silvie leans back a bit, takes a look at her watch. She told me I had five minutes, and five minutes I shall get. “Talk to Mr. Willis,” she says, “and he’ll take the information, fill out a ninety-four B.”
“Silvie. I could have done a ninety-four from my desk.”
“Perhaps you should have.”
“Silvie.”
“Laszlo.” A smile flickers at her lips at this old game, batting back and forth, but she stops it up, remembers to glare at me. “When days are lost, there is a process, and the Office of Contingent Reality Reassembly is happy to execute our duties. Fill out the form and we will get to work on it.”
“I don’t want help from the office in general,” I tell her. “I want help from you.”
“And you didn’t think it would be uncomfortable, to come to me of all the people in this Department?”
“I knew it would be uncomfortable,” I say. “But you’re the best.”
“You are trying to flatter me.”
“Well, yeah.” I smile, trying to smile with my whole face, put the smile into my eyes, my fat cheeks. “But also, it’s true.”
Silvie rolls her eyes, but I’ve got her, just a little bit I’ve got her. There’s small measure of happiness blooming on her face. The bells are ringing—coming from somewhere, from below and around us—and we are at Forest Lawn, turning to notice each other, standing with no umbrellas while the bells ring for Charlie. She is saying “Oh, wow” when I tell her who I am. Who I’m related to. Every time she smiles I am thrown back to the beginning.
Now a moment has passed into a different moment, we have reverted to an old way of being, and it’s almost worse. It is: it’s worse. We were in love for a long time, or whatever it was we were in, and for a second, another second, it feels like it would be the easiest thing in the world to pick up right where we left off.
Except all the rest of it would pick up too: the shadows that never left us alone for long, the pressure of the past on all our present moments. The ghost of a question that was in the room with us every time we were alone.
The ghost of my dead fucking brother, whose heavy bootsteps I can hear even now—even now—descending the spiral staircase, as he comes and finds us, who even now I can see slipping into Silvie’s neat clean office and making himself at home. In his blacks, grinning on Silvie’s clean white sofa, his confident feet kicked up on her coffee table, to remind me why it would never work. Why it never worked and could never work in the future.
The same miserable trick he pulled the whole time we were together.
Silvie writes in her Day Book as I tell her what I have. Mose Crane. The address on Ellendale. The most recent employer and the place and manner of death. This is a big project I’m dumping in her lap, and we both know it. She’s going to have to seek out people who crossed paths with him and take doubles off their pads, find the roads he drove and the paths he walked and dub off the stretches, find the stores where he shopped and pull receipt copies. Build a picture from scratch, off whatever scraps of starting and ending evidence I can give her.
“I’ll need to know what proportion of his totals the missing days represent,” she says.
“Okay.”
“So—how many boxes did he have? Total, I mean.”
“Six.”
“Six?” She looks up. “Six and what?”
“Six. Five and a quarter, actually.”
She leans back. “No shit.”
“No shit, sister.”
“And there’s no documentation of some kind of destructive incident? A fire, or—”
“Nope. No fire. I don’t think there was one, Sil. I don’t. I think…”
“What, Laz?”
I leave it there. I don’t know what I think, I don’t know what I’ve been thinking, but a truth has seized me, a truth I can’t see but I can feel, a forearm wrapped around my throat from behind, like a kidnapper’s. Something shy of speculation: a suspicion. An instinct. A fear.
Silvie sets down her pen. Looks up at the capture in the right-hand corner of her office, then back at me. She can see inside my head, has always been able to see inside my head.
“Mr. Ratesic,” she says. “I am going to formally suggest once again that you pursue this matter through the appropriate channels.”
“Mrs. Ratesic. I am going to formally decline. Respectfully. I am after a speedy resolution of this matter.”
“Our work takes time for a good reason. The whole point of this department is to provide accuracy.” Like she needs to tell me that: the whole point of the whole world is to provide accuracy. All our departments, all our endeavors. All our work together and as one. “What is the deal with this case, Laszlo?”
“I am trying to resolve an anomaly, that’s all,” I say. “And it’s not even mine. My partner.”
“A partner?” An amused glimmer in her eyes. “You have a partner?”
“It was Arlo’s idea,” I say, and leave it there. “But this partner, she thinks that the owner of the house maybe had crossed paths with this roofer at some point in the past, and that his presence on the roof that day was not coincidental.”
I don’t need to mention who owns that house, and I definitely don’t need to mention who he was sleeping with when his wife wasn’t around. Maybe Silvie knows about Elena and the judge, and maybe she doesn’t. Everybody squirreling away their small scraps of truth. Just because everything said must be
