She had been hoping to stumble on something of Lydia’s, but there is nothing. Given the state of the house, that doesn’t surprise her, but there is a good chance that the condition of the apartment has deteriorated over the past month. Maybe Lydia had come here during better times.
Marcus has always been taller than her, and while he isn’t particularly athletic he does have a lean build. He never had much of a belly. Everything he owns, however, is decidedly too big for her. Nevertheless, she finds a slim black T-shirt that will work, a gray sweatshirt she can sleep in, some sweatpants, a pair of gold-rimmed aviator sunglasses, a mobile phone, and a dated but seemingly functioning iPod. Most important, though: an orange hard drive that has been rolled up inside a Rush T-shirt that displays the word SIGNALS above a photo of a Dalmatian sniffing a fake red hydrant on a tuft of Astroturf.
She flips the bag across her chest and heads downstairs.
In the kitchen Sigrid checks the fridge and freezer. In the living room she flips through the books—a collection of novels, environmentalist textbooks, popular nonfiction, and biographies. Nothing particularly personal remains, and the house is devoid of the small knickknacks and memorabilia that tend to accumulate around the aged, sentimental, or lazy.
There is one sign of life, though. In the corner of the living room, a meter to the left of the boarded fireplace, is Marcus’s acoustic guitar. It is the same one he played as a teenager. Sigrid does not know much about guitars, but this one is easy to recognize by its color. It is made of a beautiful mahogany and the headstock says MARTIN AND CO. EST. 1833. She bought it for him, used, the Christmas of 1981, when he turned nineteen and Sigrid was thirteen. The money came from a summer working at an adventure-tourism outfit, rigging ropes and cables from trees so that urban people could test their fear of heights and trust in one another.
The guitar is leaning at an unnatural slant on its stand. Scanning the room, she finds its hard case with its assortment of stickers from Marcus’s favorite bands and visited cities, as well as from airline security. Marcus wasn’t a particularly good guitarist but he wasn’t that bad either; he could strum a tune and carry a song. There has always been a warmth and sincerity to his voice that allowed him to find and share the simple melody at the center of a song and make the moment more complete. He played alone in his old bedroom when he came to visit. She would sit in the hall and listen, eavesdropping to feel closer to him.
Sigrid puts the guitar in its case and locks it. This is coming too.
Geared up, Sigrid steps outside into the shade and noise to find Juliet walking toward her while slotting cash into a wallet.
She’s chewing a piece of gum.
“Wouldn’t you prefer mouthwash?” Sigrid asks.
“I got gum.”
“Yeah, but . . . gum’s defining characteristics are that it doesn’t dissolve and it retains flavor.”
“What’s your point?”
“Marcus’s girlfriend was named Lydia,” Sigrid says. “Did you ever meet her?”
“No.”
“See her?”
“No.”
Juliet chews away and Sigrid cannot help but visualize what must be happening between her molars. All those tiny white heads—exploding.
“Do you want to help him?” Sigrid asks.
“How?”
“I’m alone over here, and I suspect Marcus is alone wherever he is, too. And something I’m sure about is that it’s almost impossible to do anything hard all by yourself. I might need help at some point. I’m going to give you some money in case something comes up. The idea is, I pay you now for help later. I’ll give you my number. What do you think?”
Juliet takes the money.
“Which way is the police station?” Sigrid asks.
Sheriff Irving Wylie
At the police station, a few miles down the road from Marcus’s house, Sheriff Irving Wylie is yelling into his phone at Roger Mandel. He is yelling because he likes to, because it is morally justified, and because he can’t help himself. Or he probably wouldn’t be able to help himself if he tried, but since he likes to yell at Roger he’ll never really know for certain whether he could have stopped or not.
Roger calls himself a journalist at WRGT, a local ABC news affiliate. Irving isn’t prepared for the word “journalist” to be so elastic as to stretch to Roger Mandel.
Irv is two years into his second four-year term as a Jefferson County, New York, state sheriff and he would have thought, by now, that he’d have trained the local journalists about what kinds of questions he is willing to answer and what kinds will get them ridiculed, humiliated, embarrassed, or yelled at by their producers, spouses, or mothers.
It still tickles Irving that these morons call him, time and time again, trying to get quotes about cases that are either ongoing, outside his jurisdiction, or ones he’s simply not in the mood to talk about. Law and order, he has explained during lucid rants, doesn’t mean the draconian oppression of the population or the cynical manipulation of public opinion to create a condition of tyranny. No. The simple idea is this: You follow the law to produce the order. That’s the part he likes. That’s why he took the job. That and the title. And the boots. And the pea shooter.
Irv says as much: “That’s why I took the job, Roger.”
“Yes, Sheriff,” says Roger.
Irving is sitting at his desk at the police station with his snip-toe cowboy boots, crossed and steady, up where they shouldn’t be. Roger does not require all of Irv’s attention, so he uses the reserves to tear open a white packet
