Killer Move

“Shit,” I shouted suddenly, the whole mess spilling out of my head to bounce off the walls.

The house said nothing. The house felt alien, like a friend you happen to glimpse from a distance one afternoon, sitting outside a café with another member of your crowd, some rendezvous to which you were not invited. No injury has been done to you. Yet something about the sight—as you stand becalmed on the other side of the street, traffic making a river of difference between you—demonstrates that you are not at the center of creation after all. The house was just a house, and a life was just a life. Both might feel like they belonged to me, but there were gaps in its fabric, and gaps mean entrances, ways for strangers to get inside. Life suddenly felt like a random series of events and people connected only by accident and happenstance. So your friends are out for a drink, and you’re there, too, and maybe it’s even your birthday: does that mean it’s actually about you? No. It could have happened by coincidence, or to watch a ball game. You could slip away midevening, and after five minutes of bemusement they’d buy another beer, close the circle, and it would be as if you’d never been there. You could die. Within weeks the same thing would happen.

You’re not the cause, the be-all and end-all, of anything. There’s no house. There’s no life. There’s just you. A point in space and time.

I shook my head violently, trying to break the train of thought. Of course it wasn’t the house’s fault that someone had been inside it. Everything was whirling around my head too fast. I knew the only way I was going to be able to regain control was by talking to someone about it. But Steph wasn’t here to talk to.

That was the whole point.

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

Five thirty found me perched on a chair out by the pool. I had the sliding door behind me open—the one leading to the living room rather than the kitchen—so I’d hear the instant a key was inserted into the front door. I had my cell phone on my lap. I had the house phone on the table—I’d carefully carried it through, holding one corner with fingers protected by a piece of paper towel, feeling absurd but telling myself I’d feel far worse if it turned out I’d fucked up a set of fingerprints, if it came to that. Which it wouldn’t. Of course. My wife was not home yet, that was all. And had lost her phone. Or her battery had run down.

Or something.

There had been a whole lot of somethings in the last half hour. I had discovered in myself a vein of wild inventiveness that, when my life got itself back on track, I was determined to apply to my career. My current obsession was trying to convince myself it had actually been Stephanie on the phone when I called the house. That she’d said the word modified in an unusual tone to wind me up (the most convincing version of this fantasy had her frisky with drink, mischievous with the triumph of her morning’s meeting) and was now out shopping hard, to rub the point home. I could just about get the idea to work if I made myself believe she had a reason to know the impact of the word—but that was tough: she only knew about one of the cards, and I hadn’t made a big deal of it at the time or since. I was finding the story hard to let go of nonetheless, because as time went by the alternative explanations felt less and less appealing.

I’d put Deputy Hallam’s card next to the phone on the table. I’d also given myself a deadline.

Six o’clock.

At six thirty I hadn’t made the call. It was still only an hour after the point when Steph would normally be home, and I’d by then semiconvinced myself that were it not for all the other things that had happened I wouldn’t be worrying. I’d be checking blogs or refining the six-and-a-half-year plan or listening to podcasts while getting virtuously upside an extra gym session. It’s amazing what you can get yourself to believe, briefly, if you really put your mind to it. I’d also changed out of my suit into jeans and a shirt, presumably in the belief that looking smart-casual would help in some way, I don’t know.

Suddenly my cell phone rang. I saw immediately that it was the Shore Realty office number.

“Who’s that?” I asked cautiously.

“It’s Karren. Look, I’m still at work.”

Normally I would have asked why, of course. Right now I couldn’t care less. “Okay, so?”

“The cops have been by again,” she said. “I think they were kind of looking for you.”

“Why? Why would they be looking for me?”

“They didn’t say, but I got the sense something’s happened with the David Warner thing. They made me go through my entire meeting with him again, play by play. They seemed very serious. Where are you, anyway? You just blew out of here and didn’t come back.”

“I came home.”

“Okay. Um, why?”

I had to say it to someone. “I don’t know where Stephanie is.”

“You supposed to be meeting her?”

“No.” Already I regretted saying anything. “She’s just . . . I can’t get hold of her.”

“At her office?”