S Rozan - Absent Friends

I was very careful.

“Then why are you dead?”

The savagery of her anger rolled right off Harry. Ah, he said indulgently. That's the ticket to your Pulitzer, isn't it?

“My what?”

You can't not have thought of that.

“Thought of what?”

Tsk, tsk. The truth about what happened to Harry Randall: that's a very big story.

“You can't think that's why I'm going after it?” Laura was aghast. “Harry, I'm going after it for you. To get justice for you.”

Of course you are. You're going after it because, story or not, it's the truth and the truth matters.

“I don't like the way you said that.”

No, why should you? You're still dew-bedecked enough to believe it. But I was old enough to know better. In fact, until you came along, I did know better. My mistake was listening to you.

“To me?”

To you, quoting me. So really, it's all my fault, you see.

Laura didn't see.

For believing such claptrap in my own misguided youth, Harry patiently explained. And going on to fill young minds with it. Specifically, yours. So you could pour it on thick at a later date. Sucking me back under when in fact I'd escaped. Yes, my sweet octopus. My fault entirely.

“Harry?” Laura had only one thing to say, only one thing she meant. “Harry, please. Don't leave me.”

Too late. The familiar faint amusement and the unseen shrug. And silence.

And the tears of fury, then, like the cataclysmic breaking of a dam.

Now Laura stood lost, staring down at the river. She realized she was furious with it, too. Goddamn Harry, and goddamn the river!

Hating the river, she watched it flow, all that charging, hurtling water, not making a sound.

She coughed; she was thirsty, from the crying. She drank three glasses of water as she stood at Harry's ancient sink. Maybe, she thought as she gulped, maybe this water was like the river water, all water in the end the same. Maybe, once the water was part of her, its need for movement would teach her how to move.

She put her glass carefully in the dish drainer; it clinked on Harry's black mug. She squeezed her eyes against new tears. An enormous powerful need surged in her, the need to be gone, to get out of this place Harry was also gone from.

Fear rose in Laura, flowed around her, threatened to cut off her breath. She swallowed, walked tentatively back into the living room as though wading into a stream whose depth and speed she didn't know.

She could make a break for it: throw open the door, dash through the hall, circle down the stairs, and come bursting onto the sidewalk as she had done so many times.

And then what? Would she find anything, any words or ideas, lying on the sidewalk now, waiting for her to pick them up? And who would she buy cappuccino for, on her way back?

Would she come back?

Laura turned away from the door-she wasn't sure she could keep from plunging toward it, as long as she could see it-and pulled the chair up to Harry's desk. She sat at the edge of it, not her full weight, ready to leap up at any moment. Heart racing, she opened the first of Harry's files. She took from her bag a fresh new pad and two of her own new pens. She didn't touch Harry's sharpened pencils.

An hour later all she had was a list of names and numbers.

It wasn't really right to say there was nothing here. Harry's contact lists; pages torn from notebooks to preserve attributed quotes; Xeroxes of periodicals he'd researched and quoted or used for background. All these filled Harry's neatly piled files.

But what she was looking for: it wasn't here.

Harry's death hadn't been payback for anything he'd written: she was sure of that. Anyone ruined (or about to be ruined) by Harry's stories might have thought murderous thoughts, made muttered threats, nursed dark dreams. But once the cat was out of the bag, what was the point of going after the man who'd untied the string?

Poetic metaphors, Stone, the mark of an amateur, Harry would have scolded.

Laura smiled at that; then she froze as it hit her for the first time that there were people who had had nothing to do with Harry's death who were glad it had happened. People who right now, this moment, might be raising a glass to their hero, his unknown killer.

She hated them.

But those glitter-eyed vultures, feasting on Harry's death, they hadn't killed Harry. It was axiomatic in the news business: the safest time to be an investigative reporter, they told one another cynically, is the day your story runs. The story that's dangerous is the one you're working on for tomorrow.

And McCaffery's papers: that's what Harry had been working on. The new thing he'd found, just yesterday. Hot stuff, McCaffery's papers, Harry had said. That probably meant: dangerous to someone.

And Laura knew what was dangerous: the truth.

But about McCaffery's papers, there was nothing here.

She'd checked Harry's e-mail, his voicemail. She hadn't found his cell phone. Had he remembered, as he so often didn't, to take it with him? She'd studied every scrap of paper, each note she'd found. She'd gone through the pockets of the slacks and jackets left behind, in case he'd been planning to wear a thing and then changed his mind. These, of course, were his summer jackets, linen, seersucker. Harry's wool suits were in storage. Recently he'd said, as they walked home from dinner through an evening chill, that it was time to ransom them out.

When was that, that Harry had told her this? Three days ago. What had happened in between? She had no idea, except for brief, bright flashes: Georgie's face yesterday, reflected in the window above the river when she turned away from him, from what he'd told her. Herself staring at her computer screen while she waited for Leo to arrive this morning. Why hadn't she memorized every second of those days, Harry's last days, written them down, filmed and recorded them, drawn pictures, so she could have them now, so she could look at him, hear him talk, laugh with him? What had she been doing that was so damn important, what memories did she have now that she'd made in these last few days instead of the ones she ached to have?

Laura looked down at the notepad, names and numbers in a tidy list. Names on the left, numbers on the right, ruled blue lines between them like the rungs of a ladder waiting to be climbed.

Stone! she heard Harry howl. Stop that simile! Mash that metaphor! Annihilate those allegories! Fight, team, fight!

October 31, 2001

Almost always, when Sally spoke about Markie, Phil got the sense that where Sally was, the sun had gone behind clouds. The exception: when she was talking to Kevin. Then her eyes sparkled, and the stories she told her son about his father were funny ones, or tender. And Kevin, a child never happy unless he was in motion, would listen and be still.

“He gave me a kitten once, when we were little,” she said to Kevin when he was eight. Kevin asked if it was Socks. “It was Snowflake. Socks's great-gran.” It had been late on one of their excursion afternoons, the three of them returning from Manhattan, from the circus. Phil didn't like circuses, or zoos, not even aquariums: places where animals were confined to amuse people left him restless and impatient. But Kevin wanted to go to the circus.

“The first time we went, we were ten,” Sally told Phil. He'd just arrived on a late-night boat. The cat had been out late, too, and had followed Phil up the walk, meowing. “Before that there was a show that used to come. Spivey's Traveling Circus. It wasn't much, but when we were little, we didn't know the difference.”