I shook my head. “I’ve got chores.”
I spent the afternoon erasing Holly’s backups and breaking DVDsnot easy to do with splints on. In between, I fielded phone calls. The first was from Ned.
“I’ve followed the story in the papers,” he said.
“They’re getting it about half right.”
“It sounds like this Holly was quite a disturbed person.”
“She was a lot of things,” I said. “Disturbed was one of them.”
“David’s lucky this worked out. He’s lucky he had you to help him. He owes you a huge thanks.”
I laughed. “I’m sure he’ll get around to it.”
“He hasn’t-”
“Don’t worry about it. Is he back at work yet?”
Ned was quiet for a moment. “He didn’t tell you?”
I sighed. “Tell me what?”
“David is taking a leave of absence. Six months.”
“Whose decision was that?”
“I thought it would be a good idea, and Stephanie agreed.”
“And David?”
“He came around eventually,” Ned said, and I laughed again. “Speaking of which, I’m hoping you’ll come around too- literally, I mean. Your nephews miss you, and so do Janine and I.”
“Sure, Ned, once things settle down, we’ll see.”
“I want to do more than see, John. I want you to come over.”
I took a deep breath. “Sure,” I said, and hung up.
Chaz Monroe called me not long after. He, too, had been following the stories in the papers, and there were sly undertones in his raspy voice. “I didn’t think you were really a buyer,” he said. “But not to worry, I forgive the lies. And at least yours were in the line of duty or something.”
“I’m relieved.”
“Indeed.” He chuckled. “So, it turns out she was an actress. Well, that’s no surprise, and neither is the fact that she was a playwright. I’m just amazed she never had more conventional success- she was fucking remarkable.”
“She had other things on her mind, I guess.”
“Apparently. And so do I, of course. These stories have brought buyers out of the woodwork, and I guess it’s more than Don Orlando can handle- or wants to handle- because my phone’s been ringing off the hook. So, if you know of anyone looking to sell-”
“I thought you knew all the owners of Cassandra’s works, or knew of them.”
Monroe hesitated. “I was thinking more of undocumented workanything you might have stumbled across… Prices are only going up.”
I almost laughed. “I’ll keep an eye out,” I said. I hung up and snapped another DVD in two.
I was erasing the last of Holly’s backup disks when Orlando Krug called. He sounded old and tired, and his accent was more pronounced. “It was really her brother-in-law?” he asked.
“It was,” I said.
“The police are sure? It wasn’t Werner?”
“It was Herbert Deering, Mr. Krug.”
“But why? The papers hinted at some sort of affair…” I didn’t say anything, and Krug got the hint.
“I understand, you can’t speak of it. It’s just that I read the newspapers, and the person they describe…it’s not the Holly I knew.”
“They don’t know her. They have column inches to fill, so they write things.”
I heard Krug sip at something. “I’ve wondered lately just how well I knew her myself.”
“You’re the one who told me that she wasn’t easy to know. She was complicated- not just one thing.”
“She was very unhappy,” he said.
“And angry, and lost.”
“And cruel, Mr. March. Not to me- never- but what she did to those men…”
“She was talented, too- maybe brilliant. And driven.”
Krug’s laugh was bitter. “ ‘Obsessed’ is a better word, or perhaps ‘mad.’ She just couldn’t let go.”
“She told Jamie Coyle there was a story she wanted to tell, and questions she wanted to answer.”
“Do you think she found her answers?”
“I’m the wrong guy to ask about closure, Mr. Krug. But I think, sometimes, for some people, the questions come to loom less large. The answers don’t matter so much.”
He sipped his drink again. “I wonder if Holly would have reached that point,” he said.
“She was happy with Jamie, I think. Maybe she was getting there.” It was the only comfort I could offer. We rang off.
I didn’t know if it was the fallout of Krug’s sadness and fatigue, or my own string of sleepless nights, or simply the dull light in the low, beaten sky, but a tidal weariness swept over me and filled my limbs with lead. I listened to the whirr of the disk drive- Holly’s work being whisked away- and looked at the shiny plastic shards in my garbage pail. Holly, Wren, Cassandra- all that anger and sadness, all that cruelty and control, all the searching, and for what? I lay down on the sofa, and as my eyes fell shut, I thought of something else Jamie Coyle had said: “Everybody does their own time, and they do it their own way.”
As I had every day since Sunday, I dreamed of Deering’s body. He was lumpy and twisted on the bricks, like a gutted scarecrow, and there was a terrible intimacy to the sound he made as he hit the floor. His face was deserted; the fear and surprise and everything else packed up and gone. Nicole’s words were the only lyrics-“It’s taking too damn long”- but the voice in my head was Holly’s.
Clare’s voice woke me. She was in the kitchen, talking on her cell phone and putting takeout in the oven. She spoke softly, but firmly.
“I said I’d think about it, Amy, and that’s what I’m doing.”
I went into the bathroom and splashed water on my face, and when I came out she was off the phone. “Your sister?” I asked, and she nodded. “How was Brooklyn?”
She shrugged. “Far. I’m looking at some places in TriBeCa tomorrow.”
“No rush,” I said, and Clare nodded again.
Jamie Coyle called after dinner. I recognized the soft voice immediately, though his reason for calling took me by surprise.
“I wanted to say thanks,” he said.
“For what?”
“I been reading the papers, and reading between the lines, and it seems like that asshole would never have got his if not for you.”
“I got lucky,” I said. “The cops would’ve found him eventuallythey just wasted time looking in the wrong place. I did too, for that matter.”
Coyle snorted. “You were the guy working at it, though. So, thanks.”
“And to you too, for the information. Without it-”
“Yeah, whatever,” Coyle grunted.
“What are you doing now?” I asked.
“Nobody’s looking for me for anything, so I’m back working for Kenny- but I’m not sure how long. A guy I know out in Vegas tells me there’s work there, and I can crash on his couch. I’m just waiting for the service…for Holly. She had a cousin down in Virginia that’s arranging it. I spoke to her yesterday.”
I glanced at the table, at the disk I’d made before I’d erased Holly’s backups: her hidden-camera interviews with Coyle. “I have something you might want- a keepsake.” He asked what it was and I told him. He was quiet for a while.
“I don’t know,” he said finally. “All I do is think about her. I get angry sometimes, and I get this pain…in my chest. It feels like someone carved me out with a spoon. I don’t know if I can listen to her voice.”
I thought of the hollow in my own chest, still there after five years, and of the gasping, suffocating feeling that still took me by surprise. I wasn’t going to tell him it would pass. “You might want it later,” I said.
“Send it, then,” Coyle said quietly. I mailed the disk that night.
On Friday, there were two more Mermaid stories in the tabloids, both featuring a come-hither headshot of Holly that someone had dug up from somewhere. One piece, relying on a leak from the coroner’s office, revealed that Holly had been beaten before she died, and that she had been pregnant. The other aired rumors that her sex tape costars had included some of the city’s more prominent real estate and financial types. No names were named, but it no doubt made a lot of people nervous.
I’d just finished reading the articles, and Clare had just left for TriBeCa, when my intercom sounded. Stephanie’s face appeared on the screen, with David fidgeting behind her. I buzzed them up.