"You have her same job," he said, studying my card.
"I have Ellen's job, yes."
"Do you know why she killed herself?" I was glad to see genuine interest in his eyes and not morbid curiosity.
"We're trying to figure out why. That's why I wanted to talk to you."
"Me?" His eyes widened as he handed the card back.
"I think you may have been one of the last people who saw her that last day."
He shook his head emphatically. "I didn't see her."
The invoice I'd found in Ellen's mail was in my organizer. I pulled it out and pointed to the PT entry. "Doesn't this mean she had a session with you that day? I took it to mean Personal Trainer."
He squinted as he studied the statement. "She was scheduled, but she canceled that afternoon. She just missed the cutoff by like a half hour and I had to charge her. It's club policy. She understood."
"When was her appointment?"
"Regular time, seven o'clock on Monday night."
"And what's the cutoff?"
"You have to cancel at least six hours in advance not to get charged."
Which meant she'd probably called from the airport sometime after one o'clock. "Did she say why she was canceling?"
"No. I asked her if anything was wrong, because she hardly ever missed, and if she did, she always gave me a reason. Not that I needed one. She was paying me. Anyway, she said something had come up and she didn't want to reschedule, but she'd call me later. That was it."
"How'd she sound?"
"What do you mean?"
"Well, she did what she did only a few hours after you spoke to her. I wondered if she might have sounded depressed or sad or, I don't know, anything out of the ordinary."
His face tightened as he seemed to consider for the first time his place in the sequence of events leading up to Ellen's death.
"She was maybe, I don't know, distracted. It was hard to tell."
A sharp outburst ricocheted out of the racquetball court and bounced around the small lobby where we were seated. Tommy, a man of few words, was staring at me waiting for the next question, and I wished I was better at this sleuthing stuff. I didn't know what to ask, or even what I was looking for. "What kind of a workout did she do?"
"It was a killer," he said, warming quickly to the new subject. "It would all be on her workout card in here."
I followed Tommy into the weight room, where two men and a woman were working through the Nautilus circuit and enduring the loud, pounding disco music that seems to be the required soundtrack at health clubs everywhere. While he searched a two-drawer file cabinet, I stood around feeling overdressed in jeans and a sweater.
"Here it is."
I looked down at the stiff pink card he'd handed me. Tommy was right. Ellen's workout had been a killer, with three reps of squats, leg presses, preacher curls, back extensions, lat raises, and lots more. She even did pull-ups. Twelve of them. On my best day I could maybe do three, and that was only with lots of grunting and cheating. "She worked hard," I said.
"No matter how hard I made it for her, she wanted more. And she did everything I gave her." He pushed the drawer closed and leaned against the cabinet with his arms crossed. "When I read about her in the paper, that's the part I couldn't believe. Why would she work so hard to stay in shape, to stay healthy, then… do that?"
I tapped the card with my fingernail. "I don't know," I said. But what I thought was that it was the same compulsion that drove her to work like a dog, to organize and label everything in her life, to try to be perfect in all things. Working out was just another way to try to achieve perfection.
Tommy's name came over the loudspeaker for a call on line one. He looked relieved to have an excuse to end the conversation.
I held up the card. "Can I keep this?"
"I guess. I'd just throw it away."
I thanked him, and while he found a phone, I headed out through the lobby and toward my car.
"Excuse me, miss?" It was Heather calling from behind the front desk, catching me just as I hit the door. "Is someone going to clean out her locker?"
The trainer was trying without luck to remove Ellen's combination lock with a set of jumbo wire cutters. They'd sent a female trainer into the locker room with me, and she was not familiar with the tool. The longer she struggled, the more I wilted in the eucalyptus-scented humidity from the sauna. When the cutters slipped for the third time, I reached up and held the lock steady, albeit with the very tips of my fingers. Using both hands, she found the right leverage and, with a mighty squeeze, sliced through the thick metal hook. The lock fell away, I opened the door, and we both looked inside.
"I'll see if I can find you some sort of a bag," she said.
I started at the top and worked down. On the top shelf was a tray well stocked with tubes, squeeze bottles, Q-tips, cotton balls, combs. Her brush still had strands of her red hair. Hanging on hooks on the walls were sweat pants, T-shirts, and a couple of baseball caps. An old, faded sweatshirt turned out to be from Wharton, Ellen's business school alma mater. In a strange way, I liked that it felt stiff when I pulled it out, and it smelled of dried sweat. Almost every other aspect of Ellen's life for me was past tense, but the fragrance of running was so familiar that I could imagine the living Ellen in that sweatshirt, just in from a long, exhilarating run through a bright New England winter morning. Or an evening jog along the Esplanade.
At the bottom of the locker was a pile of clean socks, a few running bras, and two pairs of neatly folded tights. When I reached down to pull the clothes out, my fingers scraped something hard, something that was definitely not wearable. I pulled it out. It was a video. A video? In her gym locker? And not just any old video. If the cover was any indication, it was pornographic-really pornographic. What in the world was she doing with this? And where was the actual video? When I picked it up, all I had in my hand was an empty box. I hoped to hell we weren't going to find some dark and twisted corner of Ellen's soul because I didn't want to. I had started to like Ellen, at least the parts of her that I could see, and the parts that I could see were helping me understand the parts I couldn't.
Somewhere out of the steam I heard the voice of a woman, then the response of her little girl. I stuffed the box underneath the stiff sweatshirt and dropped the whole thing in the pile on the floor.
There was more in the bottom of the locker, and as I shoved aside the rest of the socks, I felt a tingle, an all-over buzz because right there in the locker was a binder with the Nor'easter logo. It was Dan's missing procedures manual, and when I saw what was underneath that, the tingle turned electric. Bulging, well used, and fuzzy at the corners, it was Ellen's Majestic/Nor'easter merger file, the one that had been missing from her desk. I trolled around in the gym clothes, thinking the answering machine tapes might be in there. I was looking inside the socks when the trainer returned.
"This is all I could find," she said, holding open one of two brown paper bags.
"That'll work." I quickly stuffed the clothes and toiletries into the first bag, the files, the video box, and the procedures manual into the second. "Thanks for your help."
A bag under each arm, I backed through the swinging locker room door, walked past Heather at the front desk, and out into the morning air, cool against the eucalyptus dampness on my skin and in my hair. The bag of clothes went into the trunk, the files up front with me.
I didn't even wait to get back to Boston. I pulled into the first coffee shop I could find-they're called crumpet shops in Marblehead-ordered my morning tea, and started with the procedures manual. It was thick and dense and filled with pretty basic stuff, like how to load airplanes. I learned a lot about Nor'easter's ramp procedures, which hadn't been much different from everyone else's, and nothing about why Ellen had found the manual so interesting that she'd taken it with her to the gym. It wasn't exactly a book you'd prop up in front of you on the stair climber. Occasionally, I'd come across notes in the margins, but not in Ellen's handwriting. They always pertained to information on that page, and I assumed they were Dan's. But the first page of the Beechcraft section was marked with a paper clip. So was a diagram of the aircraft, which showed top and side elevations, positions of seats and the cargo compartments, forward and aft. But that was it. There was no indication of why it would be of interest to her.