I return to the living room. I look at her bookshelf. Carrie enjoys murder mysteries and bios and cookbooks, and — as in every apartment I’ve visited — she has a thousand-dollar collection of self-help and exercise books. Most, hardly cracked.
In the kitchen I find a bottle of red wine, an Australian shiraz. It’s a good one — and it features a screw top. (Those from Down Under, I recall from the formal and fancy meals of my childhood, my father lecturing, are not afraid to sell fine wines in easy-to-open bottles. And why should they be? It only makes sense.)
I dig for a crystal glass and fill it halfway. I sip. It’s quite decent. Then I correct myself. It’s quite good. “Decent” does not mean quality. It means only the opposite of indecent — that is, not obscene. Anyone who practices the science of locksmithing knows that precision is everything. A thousandth of a thousandth of a millimeter of error in the bitting of a key will render it useless — except for steadying a wobbly table leg.
I walk to the front bedroom, quietly open the door. I look in and see all the children’s toys. And the crib in the corner.
Children can make the Visits problematic. Waking up at all hours and screaming for attention.
I’ll get back to this room but for the moment I return to the bathroom outside Carrie’s bedroom.
There’s a lipstick on the counter that describes itself as Passion Rouge. I’ll use this to sign my calling card, the page from the Daily Herald.
I wonder what the police think of it. If they’re diligent, and they probably are, they’ll be considering the articles on the signature page, the ads on the reverse side, who the editors are, who the publisher is...
Are they thinking about more than that? Are they thinking page 3, the February 17 edition?
3
2/17
I suspect — no, I know — they aren’t.
Where should I leave the paper? I wonder.
I decide, unimaginatively: underwear drawer again. I’m sure that results in tears. Then the newspaper slips from my mind and, gazing around the cozy bathroom, I fantasize about another outcome for Carrie Noelle.
I’m recalling the famous murder scene in the movie Psycho. The victim is in the shower when the killer slips into the bathroom, holding high the knife with which he plans to slash her to death. The tension is unbearable...
I imagine a variation. I don’t leave the signed newspaper at all and slip into the darkness, as planned.
No, I’m standing in the bathtub, hiding behind the drawn shower curtain. There I wait — for Carrie to walk sleepily inside to start her morning routine... and make that pretty face all the prettier.
21
She awoke at dawn.
Some noise from the street broke her slumber.
Squinting at the bedside clock. Nearly 5 a.m. Damn.
Groggy from the pill last night, Carrie Noelle sighed. If I fall asleep now, I can still get one hour and twenty minutes.
Staring at the ceiling.
If I fall asleep now, I can still get one hour and eighteen minutes.
Noelle gripped the long pillow she embraced when she slept and rolled to her left side.
She gasped and reared back.
The eyes of a Madame Alexander doll — on its side as well — were staring at her.
While no one can dispute the artistry of these works, they are just plain fucking scary when they’re twelve inches from your face, and you don’t remember propping it on your neighboring pillow when you hit the hay at midnight.
Couldn’t help but think: Two glasses of wine and the Ambien before bed (I know, I know, not good).
She must’ve been picking up some of the toys and carted it in here without thinking.
Noelle pressed her lips together. Morning mouth — like she’d eaten sand, which she’d actually done, once, on a dare by a cute fellow middle-schooler.
She reached for the bottle of Fiji water on the nightstand.
Not there.
She looked around. Wait. It was on the left bedside table — the farthest from the side she slept on. Why did she leave it there?
It was full, so she hadn’t taken a sip in the middle of the night and then set it on the table after a fit of tossing and turning.
Noelle rolled upright and climbed from her bed. From the floor she retrieved the pair of jeans shed last night and a sweatshirt that was sitting on a small Queen Anne chair that was her de facto clothing caddy.
She gasped once more.
Beneath the sweatshirt, sitting spread out on the seat of the chair, was a bra. It was pink and decorated with tiny embroidered red roses.
The garment was one she had not worn for years — it was too small now. There’d be no reason for her to dig it out from where it spent its days, along with other skinny appareclass="underline" in a tied bag in the bottom of her closet.
Doll, water, bra...
What the hell were you doing, girl?
No more duets of alcohol and pharma. Period.
Maybe she’d been sleepwalking. It did happen. She’d read an article in the Times about the phenomenon. True, mostly adolescents and children were afflicted. But the condition did occur in adults sometimes.
Sleepwalking...
Or chardonnay-walking.
She turned to where her phone was — or was supposed to be: on the floor, plugged in and charging, beneath the bedside table.
No. Not there.
She’d probably kicked the iPhone under the table or bed after the jeans came off.
Well, look.
I can’t.
Deep breath. The childhood fears, the clichés about the boogeyman under the bed.
Get. The. Damn. Phone.
On her knees fast, truly expecting a sinewy hand to zip from the dust-bunny world and close around her wrist.
No one — no thing — attacked.
But there was no phone either.
She walked to the doorway that led into the living room. Noelle froze.
A gasp. The phone was stuck in the sand on the bottom of her aquarium, standing upright. The fish circled it like the apes examining the monolith in 2001: A Space Odyssey.
Heart pounding, sweat pricking her scalp, beneath her arm, she leaned forward. On the coffee table, before the beige couch that faced the aquarium, was a glass that appeared to contain the dregs of red wine.
Carrie Noelle did not drink red wine. A headache issue.
And even if she did, she wouldn’t have used this glass, her mother’s Waterford, which had been tucked away in the sideboard, under several layers of tablecloths and napkins, as inaccessible as the 32B bra.
Then she understood.
He’d been here!
The story in the news!
Some man had just broken into an apartment on the Upper West Side. Some psycho who called himself the Locksmith. He could get through even the most sophisticated security systems — even, apparently, the expensive top-of-the-line model deadbolt that Noelle had had installed.
She stepped into her Nikes and started down the hall.
But she stopped, fast, at the sound.