There was an awkward silence on the phone. I remembered how Dennis and I went out together one night and he got so drunk over dinner at Union Square Cafe that he halfway passed out against the wall at a club we visited later. I literally had to support him as we stumbled to the street and deposited him in a cab while he tried to lick my neck. It was a bit of a turnoff.
“So…” he said finally. “Feel like getting together?”
“Sure,” I said. “Let me look at my schedule next week and I’ll give you a call back.”
“Great,” he said. “I’ll look forward to it.”
We hung up, both of us knowing that I had no intention of doing any such thing.
I had a strange sense of unease as I hung up the phone, as if there were eyes peering at the back of my neck. I spun around in my chair and confronted the emptiness behind me. I walked through my apartment, but there was nothing I could point to, nothing I could say might have been moved. I wondered if I was being paranoid, but something just didn’t feel right. The energy was off and I couldn’t wait to get out of the apartment.
I HEADED DOWNTOWN, deciding to walk. So I went south on Park Avenue South and cut through Madison Square Park at the point of the Flatiron Building, to Broadway. I went down Broadway, and then east on Eighth. I do all my best thinking in motion through the city. It energizes me, the noise and all the different personalities of each neighborhood. And as the self-conscious fanciness of Park Avenue South morphed into the bustle of Broadway and then into the familiar grit of the East Village, I thought about my time at Max’s apartment today. I tried to put my head around things, like the red website and the book of matches, the ghostly scent of Max and the wet bathroom, the call from Myra Lyall and her disappearance, the wiping of the Times servers, the things Jenna had told me. It gave me a headache, ratcheted the tension in my shoulders. The more I thought about these things, the foggier my head got, the more nebulous and vaguely menacing it all seemed. And then there was Agent Dylan Grace, his strange and threatening appearances, his hasty retreats.
“What’s happening?” I asked, saying it aloud without realizing. My own words startled me but no one on the street around me seemed to notice. The sky had gone dark and the air had grown colder. I wasn’t dressed warmly enough, as usual. I felt my phone vibrate in my pocket and I withdrew it with a stiff, cold hand gone pink from exposure. There was an anonymous text message. It read: The Cloisters. Tomorrow. 8 PM. Trust no one.
I WAS STILL shaking when I pushed through the studio door. I hadn’t stopped to think why it might be open as I bolted up the dark, narrow staircase and stepped into the large loft space. I felt as if someone was pursuing me, though I’d seen no one suspicious on the street. I could barely control my breathing and had to stop a minute. The studio was dark, the only light coming from Jake’s small office off to the left. I felt for the switch on the wall to my left and tried to turn on the lights but nothing happened. The space was an old warehouse, nearly windowless and bare; the electricity failed as often as it worked.
“Jake,” I called when I had my wind back. No answer. I moved past the large covered forms of his sculptures; they were as familiar to me as a gathering of friends-the thinking man, the weeping woman, the couple making love-though tonight each of them seemed weird and angry. For a moment I imagined them coming to life beneath their white sheets.
I moved past them quickly, toward the light coming from Jake’s office. I expected to see him hunched over his laptop, headphones blasting over his ears, oblivious to my arrival as usual. But the small room was empty. His laptop hummed. I walked over to the desk. A cup of coffee from the pizzeria downstairs was cold.
I sat down in the chair and rested my arms on the desk, my head on my arms. I could still feel my heart beating in my throat. But in the familiar space, I started to feel safer, calmer. After a few minutes, I sat up to take my phone from my pocket and look at the text message again. In doing this, I jolted Jake’s laptop. The shooting- stars screen saver vanished and it took me a second to register what I was seeing. It took another second after that to believe it.
It was the same red screen I’d been staring at on and off at my own computer. The same website. Except now there was a small window open in the upper right-hand corner of the page, some kind of streaming video of a busy street corner bustling with chic pedestrians. I leaned in closer. It only took the flow of traffic for me to identify the city-the fat black taxis, the towering red buses. It was London. The low brown buildings, boutique shop windows, and street cafes made me think it was SoHo, possibly Covent Garden.
I watched. It was night, the street lit by orange lamplight. People were dressed warmly, walking quickly. If the webcast was live, it would be after midnight. The people looked young, were mostly in groups it seemed, maybe heading home from the pubs, from late-night drinks after the theater. I moved my face close to the screen, looking for I don’t know what. I half-expected to see the shadowy form I had seen in the photographs that had started all of this. But there was nothing to see, just groups of jovial people, hurrying from one place to another in the cold evening.
After a while, I leaned back in the chair and rubbed my eyes, which had started to sting and tear.
“What am I seeing here?” I asked myself aloud. “Why would Jake have this on his computer?
A soft sound from the loft space was my only answer. That’s when it occurred to me that the door downstairs had been unlocked. In all the time I’d been coming here, that door had been unlocked only once. I felt my throat go dry as I got up slowly and walked toward the doorway that separated the loft and the office. I noticed that the high narrow window, the only window in the place, was open. The night had turned windy and the breeze blowing through the window rustled the white covers over Jake’s sculptures. It took only a second for me to identify with relief that this was the sound I’d heard. In the movement of the air the covered forms looked like a population of restless spirits, rooted to the ground but dreaming of flight.
I scanned the room and my eyes fell on something else: a large black kidney-shaped stain on the floor near the standing artist’s lamps that Jake turned on when he was working. Beside the stain was the hammer he used to bend and shape the metal. I walked slowly toward it, wary of the rustling shapes behind me, my right ear (my stress alarm) buzzing loudly. I reached up the thin metal rod that held the light, felt for a switch and found one. Though the ceiling lights hadn’t come on, this one did. The glaring white from the bulb made me blink. It took my eyes a few seconds to adjust.
When they did, I could see that the stain wasn’t black, of course, but deep red. Blood. Too much of it to be healthy for anyone. I stepped back. The room tilted unpleasantly.
There was thunder then, a distant and insistent pounding. I thought it might be coming from my own head, but eventually I recognized it for what it was: the sound of footfalls on the stairs. I was in a kind of shock, lost in a place of fearful imagining of the scene that might have left that stain on the floor, wondering whose blood it was, praying that it wasn’t Jake’s. I turned to see a man charging up the stairs, gun drawn. Every instinct told me to run, but there was only one way out of the loft.
And then I heard my name: “Ridley?” It was a voice I recognized.
When he stepped into the light, his face looked softer and kinder than I had known it; not arrogant, not full of some secret knowledge. Agent Dylan Grace.
“RIDLEY,” HE SAID, putting his hands on my shoulders. “Are you okay?” His eyes moved to the bloodstain on the floor. “Are you hurt?”
“No,” I said. “No.”
“What’s happening? Why are you here?” he asked. I wanted to break away from the intensity of his gaze. I started to struggle against the grip he had on my shoulders, but he held me fast, forced me to hold his eyes.
“Listen to me,” he said. “Esme Gray is dead. Witnesses place Jake Jacobsen at the scene around the time of death. Where is he?”
I shook my head. “I don’t know. There’s blood on the floor.”
I felt as if I was breathing through a straw. Esme was dead. There was a horrible amount of blood. Where was Jake? White spots bloomed before my eyes, a sickening fireworks display. I don’t remember much that happened for a while after that.
I HAVE TO ADMIT, I am prone to blacking out under extreme circumstances. It’s something I have recently learned about myself. If you’ve been with me since the beginning, you might remember this about me. It’s not a fainting or swooning. It’s more like a short circuit. Too much awful imput, too many terrified and confused thoughts, and poof!-lights out. But it’s not fainting. So stop thinking that.
