Jonathan Dee - A Thousand Pardons

He ran his hand along the black hair at the back of her head, the silky spot that had always been there. “Nope,” he said.

HELEN SPENT THE NIGHT in the car, sleeping fitfully, waking with her head tilted back to watch the moonlit clouds sliding over the tree line. Hamilton slept inside, on a chair he had dragged in from the porch, under a blanket made of threadbare towels, as he apparently had for the previous few nights. He would not go near the bed, or even look at it. At dawn she walked up to the cabin that served as an office; it was empty and unlocked. There was no guest registry either. Maybe the whole operation was illegal; in any case, whoever ran it seemed to have other things on his or her mind, which was, for Helen, the first good break. She left cash to cover four nights, plus an extra sixty dollars, which she stuck under a flyswatter that lay across the countertop; on a piece of paper she found in her bag, she wrote, “Cabin 3—Sorry for the mess — Thanks!”

Then they were back on the road, pointed south again, but with no realistic destination in mind. Hamilton, who smelled repulsive, fell asleep almost instantly in the car, like a dog or a baby; he probably hadn’t slept much, under those towels, for days. The first thing she determined to do was to stop in town and buy a new charger for his dead cellphone. She took the phone from him and went into a Best Buy in the largest of the endless mini-malls. He was too recognizable to risk getting out of the car. In fact she wasn’t crazy about his exposure even in the car, so she parked behind the store, next to a dumpster. The Best Buy clerk, upon learning that Helen apparently didn’t even know the make and model of her own phone, sold her with maddening condescension a charger that came with an adapter for the car — she hadn’t even thought of that. They got back on the highway, waiting for the phone to wake up so Hamilton could check his voice mail. Finally he got enough of a charge and a signal to learn that his mailbox was full. It took almost twenty minutes for him to listen to the first few seconds of each message and delete it, tears forming in his eyes, until finally he repeated in terror the words the phone spoke robotically into his ear.

“That’s the last message,” he whispered, flipping the phone shut. “Nothing from her.”

“But she wouldn’t have your cell number anyway, would she?”

“No,” he said, no less gloomily.

Helen’s heart raced. “Anything from the police, though? Or any media?”

“No police. There’s always some media, but they never say what they want. Mostly it’s studio people, agency people, whatever, freaking out because they don’t know where I am.”

“So you’ve missed some appointments?” Helen asked.

“Probably,” he said. “Definitely, going by their tone of voice.” He stared out the window at the other cars, while Helen, her fingers tight on the wheel, tried to think of a way to ask him not to do that. “I’m hungry,” he mumbled.

The problem was that they couldn’t just walk into any restaurant anywhere, because someone would notice, probably within seconds, his face and his dissipated state. Outside of a small professional circle, he was probably not yet considered missing; those studio people were pretty good at keeping information private when they wanted to. But it didn’t matter. Wherever he went, people would react as if they’d found him; they’d pull out their phones, they’d need to upload some record of their public proximity to him. Helen pulled off the highway just over the Massachusetts border and tooled around a likely looking small town until she found an actual drive-in restaurant, the kind with picnic tables in the back and a big steel garbage can capped by a cloud of bees. She wasn’t about to risk even the picnic tables, though. She went to the window and a few minutes later brought back to the car an array of fried things on a red plastic tray. He tore into the food for the first few bites but then slowed down and grew morose again.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “It must be difficult to feel like you can’t show your face, even in a place like this where you’re a total stranger, or should be. But it’s only for a little while, until we get everything straightened out.”

He frowned. “It’s forever,” he said. “You’re always being watched by some unseen eye, everywhere you go, all the time, in your most intimate moment even. You’re always being judged.”

A car pulled into the space right next to them, on the driver’s side mercifully, and a beleaguered looking mother got out and began unbuckling kids from car seats.

“And this is why,” Hamilton said. “This is why they watch. Because they’ve been waiting for the mask to come off like this. They’ve been waiting for the real me to come out.”

Helen picked at the hot dog bun and rolled bits of it between her fingers. “So look,” she said, laboring to sound calm. “We’ve had a chance to get away from that place and take a deep breath and clear our heads a little bit. So let me ask you again, and you think about it again: what is the last thing you can remember?”

He shook his head. “I know you think things are going to come back to me, but they won’t. Trust me, I have been through this before.”

“Through what?”

“Well, through blackouts. But usually either I’m alone when it happens or there’s someone else there when I come around who can fill in the blanks for me. Not this time.”

“And so this time you’re afraid you’ve done what, exactly?”

He scowled. “Well,” he said after a long pause, “where is she, then?”

“You’re not saying you think you killed her?”

“There’s no other explanation,” he said sullenly.

“There are a million other explanations! But look, you admitted you don’t remember anything about it. So all you really have to go on is a feeling of dread or guilt—”

“And a missing person,” Hamilton said irritably, “and a bunch of bloodstains—”

“That blood could be months old for all you know. You think they really care, at that place? The cabin didn’t look like it had been cleaned in a year.”

“You can put whatever spin on it you want—”

“And your clothes. There is no blood at all on any of your clothes.”

“Maybe I wasn’t wearing them at the time.”

“And what do—” Helen said and stopped; she was going to ask him what he supposed he had done with the girl’s body, but that aspect of things was probably not worth bringing up. There had been rowboats and canoes pulled up on shore near the cabins; and to tell the truth the lake itself had creeped her out from the moment she got out of the car. “The point is you don’t know what happened,” she said firmly. “You don’t know. And it’s ridiculous to just assume the worst, because frankly I know you’re not capable of that—”

“You don’t know me.”

“I do,” Helen said, feeling herself start to choke up a little bit. “I do know you, Hamilton. So the situation, as I see it as your adviser here, is that we need to stash you somewhere, just briefly, while I figure out where this woman is. This woman whose name you can’t remember.”

“It’s not that I can’t remember it. It’s that she told me it wasn’t her real name.”

“But if I can produce this woman, then you will have to exonerate yourself, and then all we have to do is come up with some plausible story about where you’ve been the last few days, if anybody even asks. Right? We just can’t let it go on for too long. So: it can’t be a hotel.”

“No way.”

“It can’t be anyplace with any sort of doorman or any employee like that.” She could already feel where this line of reasoning was going, even as she thought it through, but she wasn’t ready to get there yet. “We’re too exposed, just sitting here,” she said, starting the car again. “Did you get enough to eat for now?”