Lisa Unger - Sliver Of Truth

I watched. It was night, the street lit by orange lamplight. People were dressed warmly, walking quickly. If the webcast was live, it would be after midnight. The people looked young, were mostly in groups it seemed, maybe heading home from the pubs, from late-night drinks after the theater. I moved my face close to the screen, looking for I don’t know what. I half-expected to see the shadowy form I had seen in the photographs that had started all of this. But there was nothing to see, just groups of jovial people, hurrying from one place to another in the cold evening.

After a while, I leaned back in the chair and rubbed my eyes, which had started to sting and tear.

“What am I seeing here?” I asked myself aloud. “Why would Jake have this on his computer?

A soft sound from the loft space was my only answer. That’s when it occurred to me that the door downstairs had been unlocked. In all the time I’d been coming here, that door had been unlocked only once. I felt my throat go dry as I got up slowly and walked toward the doorway that separated the loft and the office. I noticed that the high narrow window, the only window in the place, was open. The night had turned windy and the breeze blowing through the window rustled the white covers over Jake’s sculptures. It took only a second for me to identify with relief that this was the sound I’d heard. In the movement of the air the covered forms looked like a population of restless spirits, rooted to the ground but dreaming of flight.

I scanned the room and my eyes fell on something else: a large black kidney-shaped stain on the floor near the standing artist’s lamps that Jake turned on when he was working. Beside the stain was the hammer he used to bend and shape the metal. I walked slowly toward it, wary of the rustling shapes behind me, my right ear (my stress alarm) buzzing loudly. I reached up the thin metal rod that held the light, felt for a switch and found one. Though the ceiling lights hadn’t come on, this one did. The glaring white from the bulb made me blink. It took my eyes a few seconds to adjust.

When they did, I could see that the stain wasn’t black, of course, but deep red. Blood. Too much of it to be healthy for anyone. I stepped back. The room tilted unpleasantly.

There was thunder then, a distant and insistent pounding. I thought it might be coming from my own head, but eventually I recognized it for what it was: the sound of footfalls on the stairs. I was in a kind of shock, lost in a place of fearful imagining of the scene that might have left that stain on the floor, wondering whose blood it was, praying that it wasn’t Jake’s. I turned to see a man charging up the stairs, gun drawn. Every instinct told me to run, but there was only one way out of the loft.

And then I heard my name: “Ridley?” It was a voice I recognized.

When he stepped into the light, his face looked softer and kinder than I had known it; not arrogant, not full of some secret knowledge. Agent Dylan Grace.

“RIDLEY,” HE SAID, putting his hands on my shoulders. “Are you okay?” His eyes moved to the bloodstain on the floor. “Are you hurt?”

“No,” I said. “No.”

“What’s happening? Why are you here?” he asked. I wanted to break away from the intensity of his gaze. I started to struggle against the grip he had on my shoulders, but he held me fast, forced me to hold his eyes.

“Listen to me,” he said. “Esme Gray is dead. Witnesses place Jake Jacobsen at the scene around the time of death. Where is he?”

I shook my head. “I don’t know. There’s blood on the floor.”

I felt as if I was breathing through a straw. Esme was dead. There was a horrible amount of blood. Where was Jake? White spots bloomed before my eyes, a sickening fireworks display. I don’t remember much that happened for a while after that.

I HAVE TO ADMIT, I am prone to blacking out under extreme circumstances. It’s something I have recently learned about myself. If you’ve been with me since the beginning, you might remember this about me. It’s not a fainting or swooning. It’s more like a short circuit. Too much awful imput, too many terrified and confused thoughts, and poof!-lights out. But it’s not fainting. So stop thinking that.

My head was still reeling when I was aware of things again. I found myself slumped in the chair by Jake’s desk. Agent Grace produced a bottle of water; he cracked the lid and handed it to me. He looked sad, had dark circles under his eyes.

“Did you say Esme Gray is dead?” I asked, wondering if maybe I’d dreamed it.

He nodded. “She’s dead. Someone beat her to death with his fists.”

I thought about this; it brought to mind the horrors Nick Smiley had revealed, as well as my last encounter with Esme, her image of me with a sledgehammer, swinging at everyone’s life. That she was dead and that she had died so horribly were abstract concepts to me. It didn’t seem real and I felt nothing but a kind of light nausea.

“Not Jake,” I said.

He shrugged. “Jacobsen was last seen on her porch, pounding to be let in. About an hour later he was seen running from her residence.”

“When?”

“Earlier today.”

“Who called the police?”

“Anonymous caller.”

“But you have a positive ID?”

“Esme’s next-door neighbor recognized him from a prior visit. Apparently Esme had told her who he was, asked her to call the police if she ever saw him around when she wasn’t home.”

I shook my head. “If he was going to kill her, he’d have been more careful.”

“Unless it wasn’t premeditated.”

I shook my head again. I knew the heart of exactly one person in the world. Yes, I knew the sadness and the rage that dwelled there, but I also knew the sheer goodness of him. I knew Jake. No way.

It still hadn’t sunk in that Esme was dead. Later I would grieve her and everything she was to me once. Now all I could think about was Jake.

“Trust me,” I said. “I know this man. There’s no way he would ever kill Esme, especially not like that.”

He seemed to consider saying something, then changed his mind. I could almost guess what he was thinking: that I’d been wrong about people before, that maybe I wasn’t the best judge of character. He might have wanted to say that at one point nearly everyone I knew turned out to be someone different than I’d thought.

I stood and pointed toward the loft. “What about the bloodstain on the floor? Something’s happened here. Maybe the person who killed Esme hurt Jake, too.”

I thought about the red computer screen (hidden for the moment behind the screen saver), the street scene in London, the matchbook with its odd symbol and note still in my pocket. It was all on the tip of my tongue. But I remembered the text message: Trust no one. It seemed like good advice. I kept my mouth shut.

“What?” asked Agent Grace. His eyes were trained on my face as though he could read my thoughts there. “What are you thinking right now?”

I could almost believe that I might trust him, turn all of this stuff over to him to investigate or to dismiss. It is so easy to turn over power, to shift off responsibility and walk away. Maybe if Jake wasn’t missing (not that he was missing exactly, but we weren’t sure where he was at the moment), a bloodstain marring his floor, I might have been more willing to enlist Agent Grace’s help. Something deep told me to heed the advice of the text message, that Jake might be the one to pay if I didn’t.

“I’m thinking,” I said, sounding slightly hysterical to my own ears, “that something has happened to Jake. And I’m wondering what you’re going to do about it.”

He didn’t say anything, just kept those gray eyes on me.

“If someone killed Esme and there’s blood on the floor here”-I was yelling now-“doesn’t that seem like a connection to you?”