He shook his head. “Must be yours. Mine’s right there.” He pointed his chin toward the slim black device on the granite countertop.
“It’s not mine. I tossed my phone.”
We both looked over at Camilla’s purse. It lay where I’d dropped it with my own on Jack’s leather couch. We looked back at each other. I dove for it. He dove for me.
“Don’t answer that,” he said, grabbing my arm.
“Why not?” I pulled away from him and reached for the bag. I rummaged through the contents, until I found it still ringing and vibrating at the bottom. It was hot pink, scratched and battered. The screen blinked, Blocked number. I flipped it open and turned to Jack, triumphant. He looked stricken, as though he’d just watched me walk over a ledge. Overreacting, as usual. I didn’t say anything, just listened.
“Camilla?” A man’s voice.
I thought about it a second. “Hi,” I said, after a beat. I tried to imitate her voice from what I’d heard in our brief conversation earlier. My voice just came out sounding strangled, strange. Jack was shaking his head, inching closer to me. I wondered if he was going to try to wrest the phone away from me. Then instead he blew out a breath and walked over to the refrigerator, pulled the door open angrily. It was completely empty except for a bottle of Gray Goose, a bottle of seltzer, and a bowl of limes.
“You’re late,” said the voice on the line.
His tone was gruff, accent thick. I didn’t say anything. I wasn’t trying to be crafty. I just didn’t know how to best lead the conversation. I issued a cough, just to fill the silence that followed. Jack mouthed, Hang up the phone. He made a wide circle with his index finger at his temple. This is crazy!
“Well?” said the voice on the other line. The sound of traffic was loud behind him. A siren wailed nearby.
“I’m having some problems.” I lowered my voice to a whisper, counting on him not being able to hear me well.
There was a pause and I thought he’d caught on, that he’d hang up.
“But you’re coming?” he said finally.
I decided on silence again.
“I’ll wait-but not much longer. By the Children’s Gate, yes?”
“Yes.”
“Do you have the files?” he asked then. “Am I wasting my time?”
I decided to end the call rather than respond. The voice on the line, harsh and unyielding though it was, had a desperate edge. Camilla had something he wanted; he was waiting, though she must have been very, very late. I thought of her lying there, bleeding out, of her cooling flesh.
Jack was drinking from a lead crystal lowball, ice chinking, eyes on me.
“What do you think you’re doing?” he said. I realized I was still standing, staring at the phone in my hand.
“Do you have my money?” I asked, snapping back into the present.
The phone call had given me a little juice. The lethargy that was settling into my bones dissipated. I took Camilla’s purse and emptied the contents out onto the low coffee table.
“He said something about files,” I said.
Jack sat down across from me. I could see the curiosity on his face, though he wore a deep scowl. He was an agent, a broker of story-he loved a good one more than anyone else I knew.
A cheap lipstick, a bottle of glitter nail polish, a half-smoked pack of cigarettes. Or half-unsmoked, if you’re an optimist.
“That depends,” he said, reaching for the tube of lipstick. He opened it and rolled the bottom until the little pink tip of makeup emerged. Then he recapped and tossed it back on the table.
Her tacky sequined wallet was overstuffed with singles and receipts-a nail salon, Taco Bell, a bookstore. A small black makeup bag containing more cosmetics-lip liner, mascara, a small black compact of blush.
“You have it or you don’t, Jack.”
A small plastic photo book, grimy in the way of something that’s been in your purse forever, well-thumbed. I flipped through the images, feeling a weight settle on me. Camilla smiled with an older woman, clearly a relative, probably her mother. Another young woman with Camilla’s eyes and nose, but darker, less pretty somehow, held a sleeping, wrinkled baby wrapped in a pink blanket. A little girl in pigtails and a blue corduroy jumper smiled, revealing an adorable gap in her teeth. There was a photo of a man I recognized as the missing Marcus Raine. He sat on a bed, holding a guitar, but looked directly at the camera with a smile. A man in love.
The rest of the contents-a bag of M &Ms, a cigarette lighter, a little notebook covered with hearts-littered the table. The detritus of a life. All the stuff she collected and bought and carried with her, things that were important to her. All now in the possession of a woman she’d never met, who’d stood over her dead body, touched her dead flesh, then took off with her belongings. If someone had told her that when she bought her M &Ms, what would she have thought?
I remembered the gun, took it from my pocket and put it on the table.
“Hey-whoa. What you doing with that?”
It was a small.38 revolver. I only knew this because a cop I’d interviewed once showed me a similar one. It was a gun cops often used as an off-duty piece, smaller, less conspicuous. It was light and perfect for a woman’s hand. My nephew would be pleased. You might need one, he’d warned, prescient.
“It was in her bag,” I said. “Are you going to answer me? Did you get my money?”
“So wherever she was going, she was going armed?” I could see it in his face: curiosity breaking and entering, making off with common sense.
He reached out and picked up what I’d thought at first glance was a small silver cigarette lighter. In Jack’s hand, I realized that it was a thumb drive, a tiny device that stored computer files. I reached for it quickly and he snatched it back.
“I heard the whole conversation,” he said. “I know what you’re thinking.”
He probably did know what I was thinking. It didn’t take a genius to figure it out. He held the thumb drive up in the air.
“But what’s your agenda, your goal for this meeting?” he asked. “How will you recognize who you’re supposed to meet, and what will you do once you’re there?”
I hadn’t really thought that far ahead. He should know this about me. He seemed to read it all on my face. He rolled his eyes, leaned back in his chair.
“Let’s look at that drive. See what’s on it,” I said.
“We don’t have time,” he said, standing up. “And maybe it’s better if we don’t know.” He walked over to the closet and took out a distressed brown leather jacket and shrugged it on, pulled a stocking cap over his hair.
“It’s never better not to know. Trust me.” I held out my palm.
He ignored me. “Do you even know what the Children’s Gate is?”
I gave him a look. Mr. I Know Everything About New York City. It was a hobby of his; he was always explaining, correcting, pointing out items of interest. Sometimes it was cool; more often after our many years of friendship it was annoying.
“There are twenty gates to Central Park,” I said. “That one’s on Seventy-sixth and Fifth.”
He raised his eyebrows in mock surprise, gave a deferential nod. “A-plus,” he said, zipping up his jacket. “We’re close. Let’s go and get this over with.”
How easily he slipped into the plot, became accomplice and co-writer.
“We have time to look at the drive,” I said. “If he waited this long, he’ll wait awhile longer.”
He paused another moment and I thought he was going to put up more argument. But instead he moved quickly to his office down the hall. By the time I caught up with him, he was already sitting at his computer with the drive in his USB port. It was a simple room, not yet finished. Just a shining glass desk and ergonomic black chair. Atop the glass sat an impossibly thin black laptop, a spindly halogen lamp. The walls were floor-to-ceiling shelves filled with books. He was the only one in the world with more copies of my novels than I had. They lined his shelves-U.S. copies, foreign editions, trade paperbacks, mass market editions. All my stories, my imaginings bound, translated into languages I wouldn’t understand, my millions of words offered in neat packages. I saw my name in myriad typefaces and colors: Isabel Connelly. Not Isabel Raine. No, I was never that in print. The place where I was most real, most alive, most myself-on the page-I was never Isabel Raine. I felt a strange gratitude for that now.