“Okay.” They’d reached Nick’s Suburban, and he pressed the remote to unlock it.
“Cool. Enjoy your”-Eddie cleared his throat-“lunch.”
“You implying something, Eddie?”
“No umbrella or raincoat?” Eddie said. “Don’t you have a nice view out of your office? You musta seen it was raining.”
“I was too busy working.”
“Well, you don’t want to go out without protection,” Eddie said with a wink. “Not where you’re going.”
And he walked off.
66
When he arrived at Cassie’s, the rain had turned into a full-fledged downpour. He parked in her driveway and raced to the front door, rang the bell, stood there getting soaked. No answer; he rang again.
No answer. He rang a third time, looked at his watch. It was 12:40, so he was on time. She’d said between 12:30 and 1:00. Of course, that was ambiguous; maybe she’d wanted him to specify a time.
Drenched, shivering from the cold rain, he knocked on the door and then rang again. He’d have to change his clothes back at the office, where he kept a spare set. It wasn’t exactly cool for the CEO of Stratton to walk around headquarters looking like a drowned rat.
Finally he turned the knob and was surprised when it opened. He went in, called, “Cassie?”
No answer.
He walked into the kitchen. “Cassie, it’s Nick. You here?”
Nothing.
He went to the living room, but she wasn’t there either. In the back of his mind he worried. She seemed a little fragile, and her father had just died, and who the hell knew what she might do to herself?
“Cassie,” he shouted, louder still. She wasn’t downstairs. The blinds were drawn in the living room. He opened a slat and looked out, but she wasn’t out there either.
Nervous, he went upstairs, calling her name. The second floor was even darker and dingier than the downstairs. No wonder she didn’t want him going up here. Two doors on either side of a short hallway, and two at both ends. None of the doors was closed. He started at the room at the far end of the hall. It was a bedroom, furnished with not much more than a full-size bed and a dresser. The bed was made. The room had the look and smell of vacancy, as if no one had been in here for a long time. He assumed it was Andrew Stadler’s room. He left and went into the room at the other end of the hall, where a sloppily unmade bed, a discarded pair of jeans turned inside out on the floor, and the odor of patchouli and cigarettes told him it was Cassie’s.
“Cassie,” he called again as he tried another room. It smelled strongly of paint, and he knew even before he entered that this was the room Cassie was using as her studio. Sure enough, there was a half-finished canvas on an easel, a weird-looking picture, a woman surrounded by bright strokes of orange and yellow. Other canvases leaned against the walls, and all of them seemed to be variations on the same bizarre image of a black-haired young woman, naked, her mouth contorted in a scream. It looked a little like that famous painting by Edvard Munch, The Scream. In each one, the woman was surrounded by concentric strokes of yellow and orange, like a sunset, or maybe fire. They were disturbing paintings, actually, but she was pretty good, Nick thought, even if he didn’t know much about art.
Well, she wasn’t here either, which meant that something really was wrong, or they’d somehow gotten their signals crossed in the couple of hours since he’d sent his e-mail. Maybe she’d changed her mind, or had to go out, and had e-mailed back to tell him that, and the e-mail never arrived. That happened.
He tried the last door, but this was a bathroom. He took a much-needed piss, then took a bath towel and began blotting his shirt and pants. He put the towel back on the rod, and then, before he left, he took a peek in the mirror-fronted medicine cabinet, hating himself for snooping.
Apart from the usual cosmetics and women’s products, he found a couple of brown plastic pharmacy bottles labeled Zyprexa and lithium. He knew lithium was for manic-depressives, but he didn’t know what the other one was. He saw Andrew Stadler’s name printed on the labels.
Her dad’s meds, he thought. Still hasn’t thrown them out.
“They’re not all his, you know.”
Cassie’s voice made him jump. He reddened instantly.
“That lithium-that’s mine,” she said. “I hate it. Makes me fat and gives me acne. It’s like being a teenager all over again.” She waved an unopened pack of cigarettes at him, and he realized at once where she’d been.
“Cassie-Jesus, I’m sorry.” He didn’t even try to pretend he was looking for an Advil or something. “I feel like such a shit. I didn’t mean to snoop. I mean, I was snooping, but I shouldn’t have-”
“Would you snoop around to find out whether it’s raining? It’s pretty much staring you in the face. I mean, when you meet a person who was valedictorian of her high school, eight hundreds on her SATs, got into every college she applied to, and she’s basically doing fuck-all in the world, well, you’ve got to wonder. How come she isn’t pulling down six figures at Corning or working on signal-transduction pathways at Albert Einstein College of Medicine?”
“Listen, Cassie…”
Cassie made a circular gesture at her temple with her forefinger, the sign for crazy. “You just got to assume that this girl is a few clowns short of a circus.”
“Don’t talk that way.”
“Would you feel better if I put on a white coat and talked about catecholamine levels in the medial forebrain of the hypothalamus? Put my science education to work? Is that less offensive? It isn’t any more informative.”
“I don’t think you’re crazy.”
“Crazy is as crazy does,” Cassie said in a cornpone Forrest Gump voice.
“Come on, Cassie.”
“Let’s go downstairs.”
Sitting together on the nubby brown couch in the living room, Cassie kept talking. “Full scholarship to Carnegie Mellon. I wanted to go to MIT, but my stepdad didn’t want to spend a red cent on me, and even with financial aid it was going to be a stretch. Freshman year was tough. Not the course work so much as the classmates. My sorority house burns down freshman year, and half the girls are killed. Blew me away. I mean, I came back here and didn’t want to leave my room. Never went back to college.”
“You were traumatized.”
“I also got addicted to cocaine and Valium, you name it. I was self-medicating, of course. Took me a few years before I figured out I had ‘bipolar tendencies.’ Was hospitalized for six months with depression. But the meds they put me on worked pretty well.”
“Better living through chemistry, I guess.”
“Yeah. By then, of course, I’d wandered off the Path.”
“The Path? That some religious thing?”
“The Path, Nick. The Path. You went to Michigan State, studied business, got a job at the Vatican of Office Furniture, and you were pretty much set so long as you kept working hard and kept your nose clean and didn’t piss too many people off.”
“I get it. And you…?”
“I got off the Path. Or I lost my way. Maybe I was in the woods and a big gust of wind came and blew leaves all over the Path and I just headed off in the wrong direction. Maybe birds ate the damn bread-crumb trail. I’m not saying my life lacks a purpose. It’s just that maybe the purpose is to provide a cautionary tale for everyone else.”
“I don’t think the world is that unforgiving,” Nick said.
“People like you never do,” Cassie said.
“It’s never too late.”
Cassie stepped over to him, pressed herself against his chest. “Isn’t it pretty to think so?” she murmured.
67
Noyce called Audrey into his office and asked her to sit down.
“I got a call from the security director at Stratton,” he said.