“What are you doing, coming here in the middle of the night?”
For the first time he looked at Mark, apparently content that whatever danger he’d perceived from the house was no longer a factor. Just over Mark’s head, a snow-laden branch waved in the breeze, the long needles making faint, cold contact with his scalp.
“I didn’t expect you’d be awake,” Mark said. “Let alone standing guard. What’s going on with you?”
“Get the hell out of here before I call the police.”
The pine needles swept back and forth over Mark’s scalp, spreading its chill to him, stray snowflakes falling on his neck.
“Call them.”
Jay Baldwin was silent.
Mark reached for his cell phone. “I’ll do it myself, then.”
Jay stepped forward and caught his arm. His grip was strong. With his face close to Mark’s, he said, “Don’t do that,” and his eyes were fierce.
“Okay. Let go of my arm, I’ll put the phone down, and we’ll talk.”
“We’re not going to talk.”
“Then I’m making the call.”
A tear leaked out of the corner of Jay Baldwin’s left eye. “You don’t understand what you’re doing. Please just go. Please.”
The wind picked up and the pine boughs struck Mark’s head harder, and he did the natural thing and tried to step sideways, clearing himself out from under. Jay grabbed his arm again, and this time his grip was painful.
“Don’t step over there.”
Mark looked at him and then back at the house. “Are there cameras on you?”
No answer.
“You had a little plastic chip in your hand earlier,” Mark said, and Jay released Mark’s arm and stepped back fast, as if the statement had burned him. He opened his mouth but he didn’t speak, and Mark felt strangely close to him right then. He put the cell phone back in his pocket and took out the old dive permit and held it up.
“This belonged to my wife. She was murdered. I don’t give a shit about your power lines, Jay. I’m looking for someone with information about my wife’s murder, and that person might intersect with your issues. That’s my interest. I’m shooting straight with you. Why don’t you try to do the same?”
Mark was wholly unprepared for Jay Baldwin’s response. He slid down onto the pavement like something melting, fell on his ass, and began to cry without making a sound. The tears dripped down his cheeks and he stared past Mark at the empty street and he said, “Please, God, please, don’t do this to me.”
“Mr. Baldwin…what’s going on? Tell me, and I can help.”
He shook his head. His eyes had no point of focus. Whatever he was seeing was out beyond the visible. He said, “What would you do to get your wife back?”
“Anything.”
Jay nodded and drew a breath that shook in his lungs like dust blown down a dry street. “And if you had the chance to go back and save her? If you could have made a deal to keep from losing her? What would you have been willing to do?”
“Same answer. Anything. Whatever was asked.”
Jay blinked the tears out of his eyes and focused on Mark’s face.
“Okay,” he whispered. “Then leave me alone. Because, brother? I’ve still got a chance. If you leave me alone, I’ve got a chance. But you’ve got to leave, and fast.”
Mark knew without question that if he pressed Jay right then, he’d break. But instead, he said, “You really believe this? That whatever you’ve got in front of you right now changes for the better if I walk away?”
Jay nodded.
Mark turned and walked back down the empty street.
34
He went back to the motel, shaken, ready to wake Lynn so he could tell her what had happened. Then he opened the motel door and stepped inside and saw that she was gone.
The sheets were thrown back on the bed, and the imprint of her body remained. He wondered if she’d been annoyed to wake and find that he’d left, if she’d taken that to mean something he hadn’t intended.
You see, Lynn, I heard my dead wife’s voice, and she didn’t love the look of the situation, so I decided to take a walk…
He left the room and went back outside. Her own room was next door, still dark, as if she’d just changed beds and gone back to sleep alone, a silent suggestion for him to do the same, and he felt guilty for leaving now, for being gone so long.
When he was close enough, he saw a faint blue light on in the room-a computer monitor. She was awake, and working. He knocked and waited.
When there was no answer, he knocked again, louder, and said, “Lynn?”
Still nothing. He sidestepped from the door to the window, shielded his eyes, and looked inside. She wasn’t in front of the computer, and the bed seemed undisturbed.
He stepped back and looked at his own room as if he might have missed her in there. The bathroom? No. The room had been empty. That one, and this one. And the Tahoe was still parked in front of his door.
“No,” he said aloud, his voice calm and reasonable. No, she couldn’t be missing. He’d just left her. The small town was silent and safe.
Like Cassadaga?
He tested the door handle. Locked. The motel wasn’t of the key-card-and-dead-bolt variety, though. It was old-school, thumb lock and chain. Mark’s mother could have gone through it in three seconds.
It took him about twenty. On the fourth try he shimmed the lock with a credit card and stepped into the room and saw that the laptop wasn’t all she’d left behind.
Her purse was on the table, her computer bag on the floor below. On the nightstand was the folder with the printouts of photos of Eli Pate and Janell Cole that she’d shown the deputy and the post office clerk.
She went looking for you. That has to be it. She saw you were gone and went looking for you.
That was hard to believe, though. Mark had just walked the length of the town’s main street. If she’d been looking for him, he was hard to miss. And why wouldn’t she have taken the car?
He went to the desk and looked at the open computer. The screen was still lit because the laptop was open and plugged in. As long as there was a constant power feed, the computer didn’t need to conserve battery. There was even music playing, though the headphones were plugged in and so the sound was soft. The music would have helped to keep the computer from entering sleep mode. Between the wall plug and the running application, the computer thought she was still there.
He walked around the desk so he could see the screen clearly, thinking it might tell him something, give some evidence of whether she’d returned here after leaving his room, and then he stopped moving and his breath caught.
There was a photograph on the monitor-she’d been churning through an album of surveillance photos, and while this was one he hadn’t seen, he knew it all the same.
He was looking at his mother’s face for the first time in nearly two decades.
35
She was only in her midfifties now, and she didn’t look even that old. She could have passed for his sister instead of his mother. In his mind, he’d advanced the image and turned her into an old woman. In reality, time had treated her well. She wore long sleeves, so you couldn’t even see the tracks on her arms.
Mark sat down and looked at the computer and shook his head. He wanted to say no, to deny the image’s very existence, as he had when he saw Dixie Witte’s body under those basement steps. His mother could not be involved with this. The family he had left behind all those years ago, they could not have anything to do with the death of his wife, a woman they’d never known, never seen.
There was no way.
But the photo, just like Dixie Witte’s unblinking eyes, stared him down.