At the minimum, she’d been missing four days before her body was found. At the maximum, over a week — say, ten days.
I’m not the only one on the stalk. Olafson and Candide have set up a table in the corner and are systematically interviewing people. But most folks don’t like to talk to cops, even if it’s for a good cause. Probably I’m gleaning more than they are. Olafson gives me the stink eye once, but otherwise ignores me. By eavesdropping on people after they leave the interview table, I learn that the detectives are mostly trying to establish a time of death. They don’t appear to be asking for alibis, or treating her death as anything more than a tragedy to be investigated. They just want to know when she was last seen.
After gleaning what I can, I leave before they decide to call me over. I had walked down from my house to the church, and I decide to walk back. Without saying anything to anyone, I cross the parking lot and head for home. I shiver and check the temp on my phone again: down to forty-two degrees, but it feels a lot colder, the damp wind from the river biting through my jacket. I bury my hands in the pockets and wish I had worn a hat.
I wonder if making a video of the ceremony had been all Chandler’s idea, or if Olafson had suggested it. It’s a good idea. Despite my antipathy, I’m impressed. It’s surprising how often a murderer attends the victim’s funeral. The recording might pick up something useful.
But. It’s not necessarily a murder.
Sure about that?
Oh hell. I’m not sure of anything. Just that I feel a connection to the dead woman and that I had a strange vision of her death on the little riverside beach. And a weird flashback when I was hiding in Harkness’s apartment. I’m fusing everything together. Creating links where there are none. In a word, craziness.
But maybe I am still crazy. Insane people always think they are rational, don’t they?
I cross Marine above the roundabout and proceed to Florence, paved with old concrete and heading straight up the hillside. I feel the pull of the ascent in my knees and calves.
Daniel Chandler is a dark horse. Claire keeps telling me he didn’t want to go to the police. I smell a fish, and it isn’t the mudflats. There’s something going on there.
At the dogleg, I turn left up the even steeper Agate Street, puffing a little. When I reach the intersection with Alameda, I stop to catch my breath and look out over the big river. The New Youngs Bay bridge glitters with headlights, the prongs of the drawbridge blinking with red warning beacons. A smudge of faded sunset still remains in the west over the scattered lights of Warrenton. It’s pitch black, and here among the houses, street lamps are few and far between.
“It’s nice out here, isn’t it?”
I turn at the unexpected voice, half-reaching for my gun — that’s twice in one evening someone has sneaked up on me — and behold Phoebe with Delilah tugging at the end of a green leash.
“I come out here every night, rain or shine, unless it’s really storming. Wouldn’t want Delilah to blow away! It’s the best view in town.”
I agree with a nod.
“You looked like you were thinking hard.”
Delilah twines her leash around our ankles as she looks for a perfect spot to do her business.
“I’m trying to decide what to do about something.” The words pop out involuntarily.
“Your investigation?”
“Yes.”
“It’s not always clear, is it?” Without looking, Phoebe unwinds Delilah as though she has done it a thousand times before, and expects to do it a thousand more.
“No. It’s not.”
She continues in a musing tone, “I always ask myself, ‘what’s the worst that can happen, if I do X?’ and then, ‘what’s the worst that can happen, if I don’t do X?’ That usually helps to crystallize the problem. Sometimes the barrier isn’t what to do, but just giving ourselves that initial push.”
The worst that can happen? I could wind up in the psych ward again. Or, a murder might remain unsolved, a killer allowed to go free to enact violence on someone else.
Phoebe’s voice is warm but impersonal, calming. “Sometimes there’s another alternative, one that only becomes apparent when we make a choice and move to a new perspective. Like this place here. We have a wonderful view from our house, but neither bridge is visible. If I didn’t know better, I might believe that the river was uncrossed and uncrossable. But here, I can see the bridge to Warrenton. And when I walk the other direction, I can see the Megler Bridge over to Washington. I’m not marooned after all.”
What I wouldn’t give to not be marooned, looking out from my island at the endless unfriendly sea. I’m confused again, conflating my own situation with the case at hand. I can’t seem to separate the threads into their discrete patterns. Victoria’s disappearance; my own voluntary retreat from everything familiar; secrets hidden under the veneer of normality.
Put a sock in it, Lake. Crying in the dark don’t make things any better.
Yeah, I get it. The only way I’m going to discover my way out of this darksome place is to blunder around until I find the light switch, or the door.
Phoebe and I walk back together along Alameda and up our own Rhododendron. As I stop at the top of the stairs that lead down to my front porch, I say: “You must be a heck of a shrink, Phoebe.”
She smiles, reaching down to pat Delilah. “Thank you. I like to think
