I came to with a start, cold, and hauled myself to my feet, and flushed the toilet. Suzanne came into the room just as I got to the bed. The left side of her hair was flat; she must have been taking a nap, too.
“Need some help?” She reached out, but hesitantly, unwilling to touch naked skin without permission. Or maybe she had just never seen healed knife and bullet wounds.
“No. Thank you.” I climbed onto the bed, trying to look as though it cost less effort than it did, wondering, even as I did so, why I bothered. Suzanne wasn’t a predator waiting to pounce at the first sign of weakness; she was a nurse.
“Actually, yes. You could help. My laptop. It’s on the dresser.” Four-word sentences were now easy.
She brought me the laptop, set it up—it didn’t take long; the signal here must have been better than at the Edgewater—and refilled my water glass. “Make sure you drink it,” she said, and left.
I had two e-mails. One was from Luz, one from Rusen: the information I’d requested. While it was downloading, I fell asleep.
When I woke up, it was dark again. After midnight. I was viciously hungry, but couldn’t face the idea of fruit. Rusen’s document blinked at me. I scrolled through it. The text bulged and shrank on the screen like a squeezed accordion. I found I was stabbing the keys so hard the casing creaked. I drank the water. The fact that I had to annoyed me. The nasty nylon laptop case, the fact that my laptop was there—that I was in bed in this room—that my clothes were laid out neatly on the chair, that some strange woman was sleeping in the room next door and that I had had no say in any of it made me want to hurl the glass at the wall. I wasn’t even sure if I could. I didn’t even know if the room was registered in my name. Was I being treated like a dependent, like a child? I was wearing Loedessoel’s pajamas. Even my skin smelled of him, the man who had married my mother. My mother, who had crooked her finger and said, Come, and I’d climbed obediently onto a plane.
I put the glass down. My heart squeezed and released, squeezed and released as my adrenal gland pumped hormones into my bloodstream and arteries widened and surface capillaries shut down. The muscles in my jaw pulled my teeth together, my thighs twitched, I was too hot. And somebody had done this to me. They had dumped a cup of powder in a coffee urn and turned my life inside out, like a sock.
They wouldn’t have been able to if that bloody woman, Kuiper, had been paying attention. And why did she think I was out to hurt her precious Rusen, anyway? No doubt she was laughing, laughing right now, telling a friend all the stupid things I’d said.
And then I was hunting for her information, and found it: Film Food, Kuiper, Victoria K. prop., 4222 Myrtle Avenue, in Wallingford, just four blocks from the Jitterbug, according to MapQuest. And it made perfect sense to get out of bed and put on those carefully selected clothes, collect the draped-just-so jacket, complete with wallet and car keys, and leave.
MURPHY’S, THE pub on the corner, was shut. Restaurants, bars, and movie theaters were dark. Lights changed at an empty intersection. It was so quiet I could hear the new leaves of the maple tree under which I’d parked hiss and shiver. The moon was small and bright. Wallingford slept. Well, Kuiper wasn’t going to.
Number 4222 was a small, wooden bungalow, original pre-World War I cedar shakes painted sage green, woodwork bright white. No light on the porch. No light on most of the porches; obviously a low-crime area. Sodium streetlights pooled like pale brass on sidewalks, whose concrete had been wrenched out of true decades ago by the growth of tree roots. Here and there it gleamed more palely, where the concrete had been replaced. Still silent, no tree frogs, no crickets—just the river of interstate traffic about a mile away. The scent of spring flowers, delicate as lace, there and gone again. Utterly unlike Atlanta.
From the path, three concrete steps—dark, with moss growing on the uprights—led to eight wooden steps, painted a darker green than the cedar shingles, to a wooden porch. The door had glass insets, and a brass lock plate that hadn’t been replaced for forty years.
Both sets of steps had rails, but added recently, sometime in the last five years, though not very competently; the right-hand rail wobbled. Cheap, gimcrack thing; aluminum painted black to look like cast iron. Out of place.
There was no knocker on the door, no doorbell. I banged on the white gloss-painted panel between the glass. The house boomed. The sound rolled up and down the silent street. I banged again, thumping the door panel with the meaty part of my fist, five times, putting some weight behind it.
“I know you’re here,” I shouted cheerily. Her van was in the driveway. Bang. Bang, bang. Not a single neighbor’s light flicked on. Polite, circumspect, incurious. Very Scandinavian.
“It’s me”—bang—“a victim”—bang—“of your coffee.” Bang, bang. “I don’t”—bang—“even like”—bang—“coffee.” Bang, bang. “Kuiper.” Or whatever she called herself. “Kuiper.” Bang. “Come out.” Bang, bang.
Between one bang and the next, the hot, tight clarity of adrenaline drained away and I found myself panting. Something in my peripheral vision fluttered. My palm squeaked as it slid down the glossy woodwork. I locked my knees.
“No,” I said. "You won’t. You will not.” And I hung there, between standing and collapse, smelling the mysterious flowers again, wondering what they were.
The porch vibrated briefly, and with an effort that made the scar near my jugular tighten, I pushed against my hands and swayed back onto my heels before a deadbolt rattled and the door opened.
Bare feet on a lovely, ribbon-work inlaid oak floor. They must be cold. White toweling robe to her knees, and hair trapped under the collar where she’d pulled it on in a hurry. Phone in her left hand. Didn’t she know that the time to call the police was before opening the door? I opened my mouth, but the graphite sheen under her eyes, her drawn face, shocked me silent.
“What—” she began, but the flutter in the corner of my eye turned to flapping, and I lost the lock on my knees. “Fuck,” she said, and grabbed me under the arms before I went down. The phone dug into my armpit. For a moment my face hung near the opening in her robe, and I breathed the soft, buttered-toast scent of sleepy, naked woman. Then she shifted her grip, stepped in close enough to lean my forehead on her collarbone, and stuffed the phone in her pocket. “Fuck,” she said again, and half dragged me across the living room to a three-seater sofa. She dropped me awkwardly, but the old leather was soft. Luz would have liked it.
She rearranged her robe, then leaned across me and switched on a table lamp. She looked down. The exertion had given her a bit of color. “Tell me why I shouldn’t call the police”—she bent and peered at me more closely— “or maybe an ambulance.”
“I’ll be all right,” I said, sitting like an abandoned rag doll. I was so very tired of feeling helpless.
“What are you doing here? No, never mind. Just keep still. I’ll call you a cab.” She straightened and turned this way and that, as though looking for something.
“No need. I have a car.”
“You’re not fit to drive.”
“I drove here.”
“Right. And that worked out so well for you.” She wasn’t really paying attention, still scanning the room for whatever it was.
“I’m fine.”
“Of course you are.”
The color was fading in her cheeks, and she looked ill again. “Did you take some, too?”