Lev Rosen - Depth

She let the photo go, now with a slight crease in it, and sighed. There were no obvious signs of where Linnea had gone. But there was still more to explore. She went back to Henry’s room and rifled through his touchdesk but didn’t find anything useful there. The bathrooms were all squeaky clean, and there were no notes in the pockets of any of Henry’s jackets or pants in the laundry room. There was a study another flight up, but the touchdesk was clean, except for some notes comparing the costs of tickets to the mainland by ferry and a few planes. Passage to the mainland wasn’t too difficult; there was one ferry that came in every morning and left every night. It was a long voyage—just over a day—but the ferry wasn’t cheap and didn’t hold more than a hundred, so it took some planning. It was why the mainland government couldn’t keep a steady grip on the city for more than a day or two. If you wanted to get away on the fly, you needed to hire a small airplane out of the Ohio , a decommissioned aircraft carrier that served as the city’s one airport, or a private boat sturdy enough to make it to the mainland and with radar up-to-date enough not to hit anything getting there. There were huge storms that rolled between the city and the mainland, tearing up any small boats or planes stupid enough to be in their way. And there were other, smaller cities between New York and the mainland, empty of even ghosts, with buildings that rose up to just below the water like hands eager to pull down anything they could grab.

The next flight up was an immaculate guest bedroom and what seemed to be a large storage room. It was the one room in the house where Simone needed to turn on the lights, but it was mostly just shelves lined with plastic boxes labeled “clothes,” “blankets,” and the like. Simone looked at the dust on them to see if any had been gone through recently, but they had all clearly been closed for at least a month or two. Except one. It was a plastic box on the floor, in the far corner of the room. It was empty, but there were handprints in the dust on top. Simone picked it up and turned it around, looking for impressions of what had been inside. There was a peculiar smell, like chlorine and smoke. And in one corner a whitish residue. Foam?

Linnea and Henry hadn’t seemed like drug users at all, much less MouthFoamers. But the box had definitely held Foam. The smell of it was unmistakable and brought back the memory of the one time she’d tried it, after her dad died and she found an old photo of her mom in his stuff. It had made her feel not numb, and not happy, either, but content. Like she’d transcended regular emotions and found some sort of Zen, Nirvana, inner-peace crap, and the ocean was a lake and the city was an opening flower, wilting as it floated. Then, a day later, she’d woken up in her dad’s bed, his old clothes woven around her like a nest, and the weird, sticky drool that the drug got its name from sticking her face to a jacket. And she felt not at all at peace. Not at all enlightened. Like she’d forgotten something important, like she’d forgotten how to be happy, had forgotten if it was even really possible to be happy. She knew then she couldn’t do it again. It was too good, too easy, and she knew she would just slip away like a stone into the water, and she was half terrified and half thrilled at how that idea made her feel. For a year, she’d avoided anywhere they bought and sold the stuff.

And if Linnea and Henry had had this big a box of it… Foam was a fine powder, smoked, and a box this big would have been a year’s supply and probably obscenely expensive. Or stolen. Could all this be some sort of drug-dealer trouble? Neither of them had had any of the signs of being MouthFoamers—dazed look, the white in the corners of their mouths. Nor had anything she’d seen suggested it was a drug deal. Unless The Blonde was their distributor, and they were chemists. But that didn’t make sense either. Making the stuff was a complicated affair that took constant supervision. They had lives. They didn’t run a Foam Lab.

Simone put the box back where she’d found it. She sent a note to a few of her contacts who knew the Foam business and asked them to keep an eye out for a woman of Linnea’s description. Maybe if they heard the name Misty, too. But it didn’t make much sense. She didn’t have any leads on Linnea or who killed Henry. She’d have to try Henry’s mother next.

Paradise was uptown, moored somewhere over where Central Park used to be, so Simone hired a cab to take her. She lay back in the taxi boat, feeling the spray from the waves it left as it rocketed over the water, dodging building tops and other boats. It was a nice day. Strong winds, less fog, cool air.

She tried to collect the facts of the case as she cruised through the city. Henry was dead, Linnea missing. Drugs—a lot of them—recently in their home, also missing. Someone had met Henry unexpectedly. And then there was Dash, looking for Linnea. And The Blonde, whose name was possibly Misty, who had met with Henry and Anika, and had been in Sorenson’s mission—for a meeting with him? And she’d met with Caroline.

What connected them? Or was everyone more innocent than they appeared? Did Caroline even know what The Blonde was up to? Simone remembered the way The Blonde had leveled the gun at her and then so easily pointed it at deCostas, as though his life—more innocent than Simone’s, surely—was completely unimportant to her. The Blonde was a whirlpool of trouble, and anyone around her was getting dragged in, or already drowning.

Simone shook her head and took a deep breath. What was Caroline into?

What was Simone into?

The taxi pulled up by a stand next to Paradise, and Simone paid and got out. Paradise was an old cruise ship, at least twenty stories tall, with tennis courts and two pools. The gangplank up to the boat was unguarded, but Simone didn’t know what room Henry’s mother was in, so she sought an attendant, who wore white scrubs with military pockets and epaulettes—half nurse, half sailor.

“I’m looking for Mrs. St. Michel,” Simone told her. The woman looked her up and down, her frozen smile melting to suspicion as she dealt with someone who wasn’t a resident.

“You’re a relative?” she asked.

“Her son’s lawyer,” Simone said.

The nurse nodded, understanding, and checked her tablet. “Room 423.” Simone thanked her and walked past the senior citizens playing shuffleboard, past the wave pool, empty except for one old woman in a swimsuit, sunglasses, and bathing cap, resting in an inner tube. She took the stairs up to the fourth deck, then followed the room numbers to 423.

Simone took a deep breath. She wasn’t good with mothers. She liked to think it was because hers had taken off, so she didn’t know how to act around them, but it was more that she didn’t trust them. Her mom had left when she was still a little girl—no two-sentence note on the dresser saying she loved Simone but had to go; she just wasn’t there one day. Her dad had told her the news softly, while Simone was still in her pajamas: “Your mom is gone. She’s not coming back.”

Simone had only vague memories of her now. Long red hair. Lots of freckles. A giant smile. She used to sing, too. And she had that mainland accent. Simone remembered imitating it sometimes and how both her parents would laugh at the way she drew out her vowels and tilted her head to the side to achieve the effect.

Mom had read to her every night and told Simone how she loved her. And then she’d gone. Which made Simone doubt there’d been any love there to begin with. She knew there were plenty of mothers who didn’t take off, who really loved their kids, but Simone suspected that more than admitted it would like to vanish, just like hers had.