Ben Winters - Countdown City

I take out my notebook, flip to a fresh page.

“What time was he here?”

“Very early. I don’t know. Five? I don’t know. I was dreaming of him, believe it or not. I have this dream where he pulls up to the house in his old cruiser, the lights spinning. And he climbs out, in his boots, and holds out his hands to me, and I run into his arms.”

“That’s nice,” I say, seeing it in my mind like a mini-movie: the blue cop-car lights splashing on the sidewalk, Martha and Brett running into each other’s arms.

“But then, so, I woke up because there was this loud noise. Downstairs. It freaked me out.”

“What kind of noise, exactly?”

“I don’t know,” she says. “A crack? A thud? Some kind of noise.”

I don’t say anything, I’m remembering my own nighttime visitor, Jeremy Canliss, stumbling into Mr. Moran’s solar still. But Martha reads judgment in my silence, and she changes gears, her voice becomes brittle and insistent. “It was him, Henry, I know that it was him.”

I pour her a glass of water. I tell her to start at the beginning, tell me exactly what happened, and I write it all down. She heard the noise, she lit a candle, waited at the top of the stairs, breathless, until she heard it again. Not daring to call out, assuming it was a violent-minded intruder and preferring to be merely burglarized than raped or killed, she stared down the steps until she recognized him.

“You saw his face?”

“No. But his—you know, his shape. His body.”

“Okay.”

“He’s short, but he’s stocky. It was him.” I nod, wait, and she keeps going. “I called out to him, I ran down the stairs, but like I said, he was…” Her face collapses into her hands. “He was gone .”

All of Martha’s wild energy fades; she sinks back into the sofa while my mind runs through the possibilities, trying to give her what credit I can: It might have been a house thief, plenty of those, who chose at the last minute, for some reason, to leave empty-handed. Someone unhinged, bent on violence, suddenly frightened or confused by his prey.

Or, very possibly, it was nothing. The symptom of a desperately lonely and burdened mind, jumping at shadows.

I rove around the downstairs rooms, doing my policeman routine, crawling on hands and knees, looking for footprints in the shag carpet. I investigate the windows one by one, running my fingertips carefully over the frames. Undamaged. Unopened. No signs of forced entry, no scatter of glass on the carpet, no scratches on the locks. If someone came in, they came in with a key. I pause at the door, running my hand along the long column of dead bolts and chains.

“Martha, do you lock this door at night?”

“Yes,” she says, “Yes, we always—I do all the…”

She stops, bites her lip as she realizes where I’m heading here. Brett could not have come in through this door without her letting him in.

“There are windows,” she says.

“Sure. They are locked, though.” I clear my throat. “And barred.”

“Right. But…” She looks around the small house helplessly. “But it was his house. He installed all those locks, all the bars, and—I mean—he’s Brett . He could—I mean, he could have gotten in if he wanted to. Right?”

“I don’t know,” I say. “Of course. Anything’s possible.”

I don’t know what else to say. The expression on her face, of pure and fierce belief, untroubled by evidence or common sense—it’s maddening, in its way, and all at once I’m infuriated and exhausted. I remember Detective McGully, questioning my motives, teasing but not really: That’s not a kind of money . I hear Trish, too: Have you checked the alternate dimensions?

Behind Martha on the wall is a flat-screen TV, a flat cold rectangle, and I am struck by the object’s profound uselessness, a receiver for an extinct species of signal, a reminder of all that is already dead, a tombstone hung on the wall.

Martha is muttering now, rubbing the sides of her face with the flats of her hands, working herself back up. “I know that it was him, Henry,” she says. “I told you that he was going to come back, and he came back.”

I wander the apartment, try to focus my mind, see things from my client’s point of view. Brett comes back but doesn’t approach her, doesn’t stop to talk. Why? He’s not back, but there’s something he needs her to know. He wants to leave a message. I nod, turning this over, okay… so where’s the message? On the sofa, Martha Cavatone is clutching her face with both hands, her fingers covering her cheeks and chin and eyes like vines crawling up the wall of a house.

“He was here,” she’s murmuring, talking to herself now, “I know that he was here.”

“Yes.”

“What?”

I’m calling from the kitchen. I’m in the pantry. She rushes in and I turn around to stare at her. “Martha, you were right. He was here.”

Astonished, I detach the perforated cardboard top of the uppermost carton of Camels. “Here,” I say. Martha’s eyes are as wide as paper plates. “He left you a note. Hid it where he thought you’d be sure to see it.”

And I’m almost laughing, because this is what happens when you decide that a case is pure smoke—no solution, no chance. You find a clue, clear and incontrovertible. It’s got a date on it, for heaven’s sake. July nineteenth. Today’s date. I sit beside her on the couch to read what Brett Cavatone has written carefully in neat script.

17 GARVINS FALLS #2 // MR. PHILLIPS // SUNSHINE SUNSHINE MINE ALL MINE

Martha’s anxiety has drained out of her. She stands up straight, as steady as I’ve seen her, her brow untroubled, a gentle gleam in her eye. Her faith rewarded.

“Does this note make sense to you?” I ask.

“The last part does,” she says, softly, almost whispering. “Sunshine, sunshine, mine all mine. He would always say that to me. When we first got married. Sunshine, sunshine, mine all mine.” She takes the cardboard slip from me and reads it again, murmurs the words to herself. “He’s telling me so I know it’s him.”

“And the rest of it? Garvins Falls?”

“No. I mean—it sounds like an address, but I don’t know where it is.”

It is an address. Garvins Falls Road is a winding industrial street, east of the river, south of Manchester Street. An industrial section, unmaintained and gritty even before the beginning of our current environment.

“What about Mr. Phillips?”

“No.”

“You sure?”

“I don’t know who that is.”

Gently, I take the piece of cardboard from her hands and read it again. “Martha, I have to be sure of something. There was no one else who knew about this. ‘Sunshine, sunshine, mine all mine,’ I mean. This code phrase?”

“Code phrase?” she says.

Martha’s eyes focus on me and she’s giving me this pitying and perplexed expression, which I recognize from the old days, when I used to do things that surprised her—politely say “no, thank you” to a second glass of chocolate milk, or rise to turn off the TV immediately after our permitted half hour had elapsed.

“It’s not a code phrase, Henry,” says Martha. “It was just a sweet little thing that we said to each other. A loving phrase we used. Because we loved each other.”

“Right,” I say, slipping the piece of cardboard in my pocket. “Of course. Let’s go.”

Martha and I leave the bike chained to her cement birdbath and walk together from the Cavatones’ home toward Garvins Falls Road, skirting downtown, sticking to the quiet backstreets, the neighborhoods with active residents-association patrols. Marginally safer; nothing is safe.

My mind is buzzing with questions. If Brett really came back, if it was really him, then why? Why leave and then return? Who abandons his wife and comes back to leave a forwarding address?