Мэтт Рихтел - Dead on Arrival

Jerry stood in the doorway with his arms crossed. “You’ve never been here?” he asked Lyle pointedly.

“Who even prints pictures anymore?”

Lyle took Eleanor’s meaning: everyone keeps their photos online.

“Someone who wants you to find it,” he muttered. “Everyone’s phone is off, right?” he said just a touch less absently.

Lyle looked up to find Jerry staring at him. “Now why would she leave us the photo, huh? You’ve got a lot of strange answers, pal. Maybe you’re trying to throw us off the scent.”

“Jerry…”

The sound of their back-and-forth reminded Lyle, somehow, of Steamboat. “There’s going to be more,” Lyle said obliquely. He walked out of the room and into the second bedroom next door. It served as an office. Now, all tenderness or care was gone from Lyle’s search. He swept things around on the desk, pulled out books from the shelf. He pawed through pockets in the two jackets hung in the closet and shuffled through plastic cartons holding files and folders. On the desk, he stared at a copy of the San Francisco Chronicle . It was from four days earlier. The headline on the lead story referred to the upcoming march on Washington. It was tomorrow, Lyle realized.

He stood to find Eleanor and Jerry looking at him. He closed his eyes and clenched his teeth. He thought about the note on his fridge, about how this person said she’d met her match. He brushed past them, through the linoleum and bad tile kitchen, down the stairs to a dark, damp garage. At the bottom, he found a string hanging from the low ceiling and pulled it to click on a lightbulb. It provided dim light but enough to make out a garage converted into storage space, no car, boxes, junk, a bicycle and a treadmill. Then he saw the flies. Bingo.

Lyle sidestepped crud until he got to the recycling, trash, and compost bins near the front of the garage where the bugs hovered. They told him these bins hadn’t been attended recently. Then he opened the compost and saw it was more foul than he thought. Inside, a bird, half eaten away by bacteria, maggots, and flies. He withdrew from the bacteria scent and closed the green lid. The trash held similarly little interest, as he poked through what looked like the detritus of a Dustbuster, fluff and dust bunnies. He heave-dragged the blue recycling bin over the piles and stacks until he came back to the stairs and the lightbulb above. Jerry and Eleanor stood there speechlessly watching. He tipped the tall bin and dumped. Half a foot of junk mail and assorted papers slipped out. Lyle picked through it. He paused on a scrap, held it close to his face, put it on the stair for further examination. Leafed some more, tossed most of it aside. Found another small scrap and scrutinized it. Then picked up the first scrap.

He started looking again with greater intensity.

“Lyle,” Eleanor said.

Lyle didn’t answer and she couldn’t be sure he even heard her, so lost was he.

“Hey, so-called doctor, what’s the deal?” Jerry said.

Lyle now looked intently at another sheet of paper culled from the pile. He stood and whisked right between the two flummoxed pilots and up the stairs he went, into the kitchen to the fridge. He pulled off the shopping list held by the pizza magnet—a magnet that matched his own exactly—and opened the sheet of paper, which had been folded in quarters. Inside was a grainy image of a mouse. It looked to have been printed in black and white on a not-very-fancy printer. Beneath the picture, a caption that read: “The deer mouse is three to four inches long with a brown back and a white stomach.”

Lyle closed his eyes and rocked on his feet, thinking. Then, suddenly, he walked purposely toward the door.

“Hey!” Jerry said.

Lyle, lost in thought, kept walking. Eleanor hustled behind him. She took his arm and gently spun him around. “Hello, Earth to Dr. Martin. What’s up?”

He looked up, seeming surprised he had company.

“I know where she is.”

Lyle kept walking. Eleanor wondered if he was muttering to himself. She resisted the urge to look back at Jerry because she didn’t want to encourage his skepticism. Truly, though, she felt some of it herself. She hustled up behind Lyle and walked next to him, hearing the sound behind her of Jerry shutting the door.

“You ever fly a plane, Dr. Martin?”

“What? Um, no.” He kept toward the car.

“It takes all the concentration in the world. Still, though, you have to pause now and again and communicate to the passengers, y’know, explain to them what’s happening.”

“Uh-huh.” He kept walking.

“Or they’ll storm the flight deck and tear you limb from limb. Unless, of course, you’ve given them Wi-Fi. Then they’ll be so distracted you can fly into the ocean.”

Lyle laughed. “Fair enough.” He opened the door and climbed into the back.

“Somebody tell me what the hell is going on,” Jerry said, standing with arms crossed in irritation. “Or we’re not going anywhere, capiche?”

Eleanor shot him a look.

“Give me a break and quit the lovebird crap,” Jerry said.

She held her arms up, like What the hell, where did that come from?

“Flight plan calls for Nevada,” Lyle said.

Jerry shook his head in disbelief.

“So-so start. This is the part where you need to communicate,” Eleanor said.

She climbed into the passenger seat and Jerry took the wheel. He put up the top of the sports car and Lyle explained what he’d found.

In the recycling bin were several receipts that caught his eye. He fanned four of them in his hand. One was a restaurant, another for an electric-car charging station, and a third for a hotel. The fourth was for a place called “Winter Place,” but left no other evidence what it was. The restaurant and charging station had come from three months earlier, well prior to the Steamboat flight. The Days Inn hotel was from the week before.

All of them had the 702 area code. The hotel had an address in “Hawthorne, Nev.”

“How do you know she’s there now? Why wouldn’t she be at work?”

“Fair question and easy enough to check. We can call Google,” Lyle said. “She won’t be there. She’s here,” he mused, and it sounded very much like he was talking to himself or the receipts. He realized it and looked up. He explained his reasoning. The receipts were from very different time periods. That wasn’t necessarily a big deal—after all, Jackie might have dumped receipts together over time and then cleaned her office and recycled them at one time. But Lyle suspected it was a clue for two reasons. One was that a bird had been left in the compost. This, Lyle thought, had been designed to draw flies and to attract their attention.

“To the compost? Give me a break,” Jerry said.

“I agree it sounds thin,” the pilot said.

“Or just dumb luck,” Lyle said with a shrug.

“Keep going.”

He showed the mouse picture and told them that the deer mouse had become a particularly nagging source of hantavirus.

“It’s a symbol of sorts, something any immunologist would recognize,” Lyle said. “Comes from Nevada. I think she was giving another gentle reminder, and it was held on the refrigerator with the same magnet I’ve got—the one where my own note disappeared.” He’d already told them that story.

“You’ve got to be kidding me,” said Jerry. “And you’re telling me you’ve never met her.”

“So, like, she’s leaving clues?” Eleanor ignored Jerry. “Why in the world would she do that? Why not just leave a note saying where she is?”

Lyle looked blankly at Eleanor. He had no answer for her.

“Fair enough,” Lyle said. His logic did sound thin . “We can call the hotel in Nevada and see if she’s checked in there.”