Thomas Perry - Dead Aim

She said, “I’m her sister. Carlson is my married name. Our parents are dead, so I’m all she had. Tell me what happened.”

Lydia glanced at Mallon. “Mr. Mallon spoke with her a few hours before she died. I think he can tell you more than I can.”

Mallon turned toward her to speak and felt alarm, but he took a breath and began, trying to say enough words to fill the void between them. He told the first part of his story honestly and fully, describing what had happened at the beach, their walk to his house, everything that had been said. He spoke without lying about anything. He did not try to make himself seem less than quick and brave in saving Catherine, nor did he pretend he had not felt a stupid vanity at the thought that he’d been a hero. He talked until he came to the point when she reappeared at the top of his staircase wearing his robe, then began to leave out parts of it. “After her nap she said she was hungry. She didn’t have any clothes with her that she was willing to wear to a restaurant, so I went out for food. When I returned, she was gone. I drove around the area searching for her, but never found her. I waited for hours, left the door unlocked and the lights on in case she came back. The next I heard of her was two days later, when the newspaper reported that she’d been found.”

Sarah Carlson asked, “Did they find a note?”

Lydia shook her head. “No. They always look for one, but it’s not unusual not to leave one.”

Sarah narrowed her eyes at Lydia, but did not say what she was thinking. Mallon knew it was something angry about Lydia’s way of talking. She implied that everything was something that had happened hundreds of times before. There was nothing special or new about what this woman’s only sister had done to herself.

Mallon tried to erase the impression by giving the same answer to her question more gently. “I’m sorry. If she left a note, they haven’t found it yet.” He paused. “We’d like to help you. Are there any other relatives we should speak to, or do you prefer to call them yourself?”

She seemed to be listening more closely to Mallon now, as though she had detected something surprising in his voice. “You feel terrible, don’t you?”

Mallon took two breaths before he answered. “Yes, I do,” he said. He hesitated for a moment, wanting to tell her about his own sister. But he concluded that the impulse was misguided: this was about her sister, her feelings, not his. “I tried to get her to see a doctor at the hospital, offered to take her to a different one if she wanted. She refused, and I let it go. I tried to remind her that life isn’t always the same, and that people get through bad times. I tried to convince her that if she let herself live for another day she might feel better. I failed. I didn’t say enough, or I didn’t say it well, or what I said was stupid and beside the point. I was the last chance, and my arguments weren’t good enough, or I wasn’t good enough. I’m very sorry.”

Sarah Carlson shook her head, tears still running down her face. He could tell that what she was going to say was costly. “It wasn’t your fault,” she said. “Nobody could have said anything that would have convinced her.” Mallon knew, rationally, that she could not possibly mean it. She must believe that if only she had been the one, it would have made all the difference.

He said, “I think you’re very generous to say that. I wish things had been different.”

“I meant it. See, Cathy had a problem with depression. Not a clinical imbalance or disease, where a doctor can prescribe something. It was sadness.”

Lydia visibly straightened, her head held still, as though if she moved she might miss a word, or startle Sarah into silence.

Sarah sighed. “It was one of those things that you read about in the papers, or see on television. It must happen to lots of other people, but it still doesn’t seem real to me. Cathy had a boyfriend. She was absolutely devoted to him, adored him. For about a year she was impossible to listen to. She wouldn’t talk about herself, or what she thought or did, because he was what she thought about, and trying to please him was what she did. If there was something to have an opinion about, it was ‘Mark thinks’ this or that, or even, ‘Mark knows about these things, and he says’ this or that.”

Mallon had lied. Neglecting to tell her about the sex made his whole story false. Mallon felt ashamed while he listened to her now, because listening this way was another act of deception, pretending to be receptive to every word, but really waiting to hear the secret reason that Sarah would divulge in a moment of weakness or misplaced trust. Or maybe she would report with such perfect accuracy that she would describe the reason without knowing it for what it was.

He decided that to dispel the feeling, he had to make her remember she was talking to strangers. “Who is he? Does he live in Pittsburgh?”

Sarah shook her head. “She met him in Los Angeles. I remember there was a class she took in the evening. She wanted to get a master’s degree in psychology, and this was an undergraduate class she wanted to make up. She met him at some coffee place on campus. He wasn’t in her class; he was just having coffee. About a month later she wrote and told me she had moved in with him. I didn’t think much of that, but she sent a picture of him in the letter, and I could hardly blame her. He was gorgeous. He looked like a model: tall and thin with black hair and blue eyes. He really did seem to be perfect, and she wasn’t my baby sister anymore, she was a grown woman. She was happy, so I was happy.”

“What happened?” asked Mallon.

“Everything was great for about a year. Then it wasn’t, or maybe she was just beginning to worry that it wouldn’t always be. She was kind of tense and irritable when I talked to her on the phone. About that time they moved to a different apartment. One day she left a message on my machine with a new phone number. A month later she called with another one. Then, six weeks after that, Mark was dead.”

Now Lydia stopped hiding her interest. “Dead? How?”

“Murdered. Shot dead in his car in a dark alley behind their apartment, where their garage was. She came to see me the next week, and she had a newspaper article about it. There was a lot of vague stuff about how he spent a lot of time in after-hours clubs and was ‘associated’ with people in the designer-drug scene, and all that. If the reporter knew what he was talking about, the article didn’t manage to convey it to me. People in their twenties go to clubs, and when they do, there are people who might be using just about anything. Of course, I asked Cathy.”

“Did your sister explain it?”

“She admitted that she had been getting nervous about some of the people Mark seemed to know. And now and then he would be out all night, and when he came in it was pretty clear he had been partying.”

“Other women?”

Sarah shrugged. “She didn’t know, and she said she didn’t want to know, but after all, he wasn’t out all night alone. He must have been with somebody and it wasn’t her, right?”

Lydia said, “Did he take a lot of drugs, or just know people who did?”

“She said she never saw him take anything. But she admitted that if he had wanted to, he could easily have fooled her. She didn’t care. She was absolutely in love with him. When she came and told me all this, she hadn’t slept in two days, and she talked just about all night, until she fell asleep. She woke up about fifteen hours later, and she had changed.”

“How?” asked Mallon.

“She never talked about him much after that, but she was always thinking about him. I waited for a month, but she was still that way-mourning him as though he had just died. One morning when I woke up she was packing. She thanked me and said she was going to New York.”