“The closet,” she said. “Check it.” But she came all the way into the room to yank open the folding louvered door herself. There were only clothes and shoes in there, with cardboard boxes stacked on the shelf. They were women’s clothes and women’s shoes, mostly. The boy’s things took up about a quarter of the space. They moved to the bathroom next, another unoccupied space. The sill of the tiny frosted glass window over the tub was crammed with shampoos and conditioners. Kat took one of the containers and examined it: For Graying Hair. Her mouth curled into a frown and she glanced at herself in the mirror.
“Is she older than you?”
Kat shook her head. “Her mother was gray when we were growing up. I never thought about it. I guess I just figured she was old.” She laughed, looked at herself again, and pushed her hair out of her face. She asked herself softly, “How old could she have been?”
Mulligan thought reflexively of his own mother at home five hundred miles away, weathering there in as unremarked-upon a way as the very shingles of the roof, the sides of the chicken coop from when the place had been part of a working farm, the posts his father had driven into the ground in the 1970s to fence in what he’d seriously referred to as “the barnyard” during Mulligan’s brief 4-H experiment with keeping livestock. Crone of the plains. He couldn’t remember, didn’t know, if she’d dyed her hair. All he knew was that she had grown old suddenly, once his father was gone; as a couple they’d seemed vigorous, hale, steaming toward the end in keeping with the most optimistic of American schemes, but his unanticipated destruction had sheared off some great jagged chunk of her, too. Mulligan hadn’t talked to her in over a year.
Kat moved on to the other bedroom while he lingered. Then he heard her yell.
ONE DAY AGO
Dylan Fecker hung up on an editor who was trying to lowball him on a novel. He felt like he’d been having a conversation with someone hanging by his fingertips from a slippery ledge. With ten years at his house and rapidly waning authority, the editor was old at thirty-six. It depressed Dylan when he saw them bleeding out all their self-confidence like that, getting hesitant, second-guessing their own taste, coming back with offers that were designed to be noncommittal. That’s what had happened to him; why he’d jumped the fence and become an agent. He was leaning back gazing abstractedly at the shelves, lined with the glossy spines of all his authors’ books, when the phone rang. It was Gayatri, his assistant.
“I’ve got Monte Arlecchino.”
“Lucky you.”
“Please, Dylan. He’s not being charming today.” Gaya had a nice, round Oxbridge accent that usually made Dylan feel prosperous and civilized.
“Oh, does he have his military voice on? Big phony.”
“It’s about Sandy Mulligan.”
Fecker sighed. His problem child. Typical Monday morning news. He took the call.
“Good morning,” he said.
“Time’s up,” said Arlecchino.
“Seriously?” Dimly, he heard a commotion outside. He got up and went to the window that looked out on to Mercer. A bum wearing a black plastic garbage bag was in the middle of the street, bumping a shopping cart filled with empty cans and bottles over the cobblestones. “Where Ben?” he yelled. “Ben! Where he at? We going to the Coinstar!” Southbound traffic was backing up behind him and beginning to sound its horns.
“It’s a breach, Dylan,” said Monte. “I’d like to say my hands are tied, that it’s Stuttgart. But it’s me. You know, you put your faith in these children. You say to them, ‘let me support your creative efforts.’ But you know what I’ve figured out, finally? It doesn’t actually cost all that much to write a book. You can do it on a shoestring, damn it. I don’t know what we’re thinking, paying people for it.” He actually sounded indignant.
“Monte, really? He’s close. Give him some time.”
“Put a prima donna like Mulligan in his place,” Monte was panting, “and all the midlist nobodies will keep in line. I’ve got to get out of the buggy whip business. I’m going to learn how to blow glass. I’m going to go to art school and learn how and I’m going to make all my own colorful vases.”
Dylan breathed in, held it. He exhaled slowly, counting. At ten, he breathed in again.
“I’m not unsympathetic,” said Monte. “I’ve told him. I know that woman’s suicide threw him—”
“Susannah,” said Dylan.
“Susannah. I’m truly sorry. But what can I say? I didn’t tell him to bail on her when she was six months pregnant. And it was how long ago? Life has to go on.”
“Not for her it doesn’t. Maybe not so much for him, either.”
“Not my problem.”
“So now what?”
“Lawsuit. You’ll be named as a codefendant, by the way. I wouldn’t worry about it, you’re probably indemnified. It’s mostly leverage to get you to nudge him to return the advance. Good, no?”
“Thanks for the heads-up,” said Fecker.
Outside, two police officers, a man and a woman, had approached the bum and were trying to persuade him to move to the sidewalk. The din from the horns grew louder.
TODAY
They’d been herded into the second bedroom at the back of the house, the boy and his mother, and killed there. She cradled him in her arms, his head was buried between her breasts. There were spatters, drips, stains, puddles. The room smelled like a sackful of old pennies. Kat knew, instantly, that somehow she had led the killer to Becky.
“I have to get out of here,” she said. She felt like she was going to vomit.
Mulligan felt calm, focused. Once, when he was about twenty years old, he’d been driving home when an overcast sky had suddenly grown greenish and dark. Rain had begun to fall, hard, abruptly changing force and direction, hammering the car and moving laterally against it like a wave, blinding him so that he could only feel the car being pushed sideways. It turned out that a tornado had touched down directly beside the road and skipped over and across the roadbed like a top. Throughout the twelve seconds that it had taken for the event to occur, he’d felt exactly the same as he did now in Becky Chasse’s blood-spattered bedroom: clearheaded, alert, almost relaxed, in control if not of the situation then of himself, and knowing even as it was happening that this was a kind of consolation in any event. He took Kat by the arm and led her out of the room.
“Let’s call the cops,” he said.
“It’s my fault,” she said. “It’s my fault.”
“Your fault?” He followed her out onto the porch. “You didn’t do anything. It’s not—”
She attacked him, hitting him as hard as she could, clawing and kicking, calling him names.
“You’re right, I didn’t — you did! You told him! You told him and he found them!”
She hit him again and then it was over and she was on the other side of the porch, her arms wrapped tightly around herself.
“Salteau?” asked Mulligan. “You think Salteau did this?”
Kat ignored him and went back inside the house, leaving the front door open. She returned with the pack of cigarettes that had been on Becky Chasse’s breakfast bar and closed the door behind her.
“Let’s call the cops,” Mulligan suggested again.
“Call the police,” she said. “How fun. We can watch them screw it up.” She drew a cigarette out of the pack and lit it. She dragged on it and then suddenly ripped it out of her mouth and threw it as hard as she could onto the ground. She caught him staring at her.