Once You Go This Far Page 7

  “For sure. Do you know why they split up?”

  “Well, I’m not completely sure. I don’t even know that she would have told me, as in confided in me. But she actually was worried about her job—we’re a Christian school, and some people on staff are less than open-minded.”

  “About divorce?”

  “You’d be surprised.”

  “But isn’t the stat something like fifty percent of all marriages end in divorce?”

  Sharon shrugged. “Sad, but true. And necessary in so many unhappy cases.”

  “So you’re plenty open-minded.”

  “In my opinion, Horizons is a modern Christian school. Nothing rigid can stand.”

  “What doesn’t bend, breaks,” I said, quoting Ani DiFranco.

  She didn’t appear to get the reference, but she nodded.

  I said, “So she mentioned that she was getting divorced and hoped that she could still keep her job. Then what?”

  “I think I just said I was sorry to hear that and asked if she was doing okay. She said it was all for the best and that you can’t expect people to change after you marry them. But looking back, I’m not sure if she was talking about Keir, or about herself.”

  * * *

  Lindy, Keir Metcalf’s secretary, was done up in a lime-green tunic over pleather leggings. “You’re back,” she said, less than thrilled to see me. She was filing her nails with an emery board that matched her top.

  “Is he in?”

  “No.”

  “Yes, he is, his car is here.”

  She stared at me. We had reached an impasse. But then I heard Metcalf’s voice from down the hall. “You can come on back.”

  Lindy resumed work on her nails without another word.

  In Metcalf’s office, I sat in the same chair I had occupied yesterday. “I can’t figure you out,” I said. “Are you being cooperative or just trying to confuse me?”

  “I’m a cooperative guy.” He leaned back in his chair, both thumbs hooked through empty belt loops. “What do you want?”

  “I wanted to know if you ever met Rebecca’s first husband.”

  “Nope.”

  “Know anything about him?”

  “Nope.” He rocked a little in the chair, relaxed as anything. “He ditched her to shack up with some French-Canadian model before they’d even been married two years.”

  “So you do know something about him.”

  “That’s the sum total of what I know.”

  “So you didn’t know that he works at a casino in Windsor?”

  “Nope.” He shrugged.

  “Or that he’s also in the security business?”

  “Really?” Metcalf sat up. “Heh. How about that.”

  I didn’t like him, but I had to admit that I believed him. I said, “You and Rebecca ever go to Windsor?”

  “No, why would we?”

  “Detroit?”

  “Occasionally, when Cleveland played the Tigers. Oh, and we saw Paul Simon once, at the Fox Theatre. Great show.”

  “Ever hear of the St. Clair Club?”

  “Nope.”

  “Why’s Maggie hate you so much?”

  The change of tone caught him off guard, like I hoped it would. “Pardon me?”

  “Yesterday when I told you why I was here, you practically bristled when I mentioned her name. And you kind of relaxed when the subject changed to your dead ex-wife. I’m just curious as to why that is. Since you’re such a cooperative guy.”

  He shook his head. “I can’t help you. I have no idea what happened to Rebecca and that’s the truth.”

  “Why does Maggie think you did?”

  His face began to pinken up beneath the tan. “She and I had a disagreement a long time ago. That’s it.”

  “What kind of disagreement?”

  “It doesn’t matter.”

  “Maybe it does to me.”

  “I told you yesterday, she’s unstable.”

  I said, “The more you tell me it doesn’t matter, the more I’ll want to figure it out. So if it truly doesn’t matter, you’ll just tell me and save us all a lot of time.”

  “You’re a pushy little bitch.”

  “Yes.”

  Metcalf got up and closed the door. He was wearing a different pair of cowboy boots, these ones bone-colored with steel tips. He said, “I’ve played guitar my whole life. I used to lead a youth ministry at our church. A devotional rock band, I suppose you could call it. Maggie wanted to be a singer when she was in high school. That was how I first got to know Rebecca, because Maggie was in the group.”

  I waited.

  “Maggie likes drama. Attention. I kept finding myself alone with her—her doing. She had this whole thing in her head, that we were going to be together someday. I had to be firm with her. Very firm. I didn’t intend to embarrass her, but I think I did. She never liked me after that.”

  “So she hires me to prove that you killed her mother because ten years ago she had a crush on you?”

  “I told you, there’s something wrong with her.”

  “And you didn’t do anything to lead her on.”

  “No, of course not.”

  It wasn’t hard to imagine Keir Metcalf leading someone on. I’d seen flashes of that myself—last night at dinner, the piercing eye contact that had felt almost like foreplay. But of all the reasons that Maggie had for believing that her mother’s death was not accidental, I found her belief in her former stepdad’s involvement to be the least convincing.

  There were still plenty of other questions that required an answer.

  CHAPTER 10

  When I got back to my motel room, I inserted the key into its slot but nothing happened. I tried it again, flipping the key over—no dice. Figuring I had demagnetized the card in my pocket somehow, I went down to the lobby and got a replacement from the deeply apathetic clerk and went back up to the second floor.

  Once I got the door open, I froze.

  The shower was running.

  I definitely had not left the shower running that morning.

  I closed the door gently and returned to the car for my gun. Then I went back into the room and set my computer bag down on the desk and looked around carefully. Clothes tossed every which way. Muffin wrappers on the nightstand. Scraps of paper from the tiny motel notepad balled up on the desk and floor. All of that tracked, even though I’d only had the room for one night. I listened for sounds of splish-splashing or singing in the shower, but the only sound was the steady spray of water.

  Maybe a plumbing problem that had caused the shower to turn on spontaneously?

  It seemed feasible, but then there was the issue of the key card.

  I crept over to the bathroom, still listening hard.

  The bathroom door was closed, the lights off.

  Gun drawn, I opened the bathroom door slowly.

  I was greeted by a cloud of steam, but it was easy to see that the shower was empty, its dingy curtain pushed aside like I’d left it.

  I reached in and turned the water off. Then I hit the lights, and that was when I saw the writing superimposed over my foggy reflection.

  STOP.

  * * *

  “Hi again,” I said to the clerk, “somebody was in my room today.”

  “Housekeeping goes through between nine and three,” the clerk told me, answering a question I hadn’t asked.

  “They wrote ‘STOP’ on my mirror.”

  “Housekeeping did?”

  “I didn’t want any housekeeping. I had the sign up. And my key didn’t work.”

  “How do you know someone was in there if your key didn’t work?” He was devastatingly stoned.

  “I was just down here, you made me a new key? Like five minutes ago?”

  He nodded. “Right, right. So what’s the problem now?”

  “Somebody entered my room, turned on the shower, and wrote a message in the steam on the mirror.”

  “Housekeeping goes through between nine and three?” he r
epeated, more of a query this time.

  “I had the sign up. And the bed wasn’t even made.”

  “Did you want the bed to be made?”

  I set my computer bag down on the floor at my feet. Clearly this was going to take a minute. I tried a different tack: “Has anyone other than me come by to say they lost their key?”

  I was thinking that if I needed to get into a hotel room that wasn’t mine, I might try just that, especially in a place like this. Especially if they’re busy—or stoned—hotel employees sometimes code keys as blank master keys, which are designed to open the next room they’re inserted into, then programmed to that room.

  But the clerk just stared at me.

  “Nobody came through here trying to get into room two-fourteen?”

  “Are you, like, someone important?”

  “No, just someone who is distressed by someone breaking into my room.”

  “I just don’t know what to tell you, ma’am.”

  I sighed. “Would I be able to switch rooms? The, um, heater is too loud, if you need an official complaint.”

  This seemed to cheer him. “Yes, I can do that.”

  * * *

  My new room was on the third floor and looked over a row of rusting Dumpsters instead of the parking lot. I threw my stuff on the bed and sat down and sulked a minute. Stop what? It wasn’t the most helpful of messages, but if the object had been simply to unnerve me, it was a raging success.

  I had one tiny whiskey bottle left from last night, but it was only the middle of the afternoon, and I didn’t want to go there. Not yet.

  During the room-swapping saga, I’d missed a phone call. I used the little electric kettle in the room to heat up water for tea and listened to my voice mail while it rasped to life.

  “Hello, my name is Marliss and I received your media inquiry. I’m touching base on behalf of Constance Archer-Nash…”

  My thoughts snagged on media inquiry—it took me a minute to recall that I’d left a message last night for the woman Rebecca had called, invoking some lifestyle article that my journalist alter ego was desperate to write—and I almost missed the name Constance Archer-Nash completely.

  I listened to the message again. It said the same thing the second time through.

  I had thought there was a fair chance this gambit would get results, but I hadn’t been expecting it to be outsourced to the hissing woman’s media inquiry person, and I really hadn’t been expecting the homegrown lightning rod to be involved.

  I called the media coordinator back and got her voice mail.

  “You’ve reached Marliss Scott, media coordinator for Nora Health. I’m on the phone or away from my desk…”

  I’d heard of Nora Health in passing; it was Constance Archer-Nash’s company, but I wasn’t sure entirely what it was, so I looked it up now.

  What if health care was easy, affordable, and actually made you feel better? We bring real doctors and real care to you, exactly where you are.

  The website was all HDR photos and millennial pink.

  I read on:

  Nora Health is an innovative network of women’s health professionals dedicated to providing in-office and remote health care at reduced rates, because no one should go without.

  On the About page, Constance Archer-Nash smiled out at me, a woman in her late thirties with short, dark hair and a row of piercings around the outside of her left ear.

  But why was Rebecca Newsome calling her?

  I made a mental list of reasons the Christian school nurse could be harassing Constance Archer-Nash over the phone: anti–birth control, anti–liberal politics, anti-doctor? The bitter end of a torrid affair, a lease dispute, a plain old wrong number?

  I left a message for Marliss. The phone rang a beat later and I answered quickly, hoping it was her.

  But a shaky voice said, “Oh, hello, dear, this is Missus Arlene French.”

  Rebecca’s neighbor. “Hi there. What’s up?”

  “I’m sorry to bother you after business hours,” she said.

  I smiled. It was five thirty. “No problem. What’s up?”

  “Well, it’s just that the police are at Rebecca’s house again.”

  “Right now?”

  “Yes, dear.”

  Before I left the room, I rigged up a low-tech security system by crumpling up a bunch of pages from the tiny notepad. I went into the hallway and closed the door almost all the way, leaving a gap only as wide as my arm, and then I tossed the paper balls onto the floor just inside the door, like dice. Then, without moving the door, I snapped a photo of the random configuration of papers and made a mental note to do the same when I returned. If someone came into the room while I was gone, they’d move the papers just by opening the door. If no one did, my “before” and “after” pictures would be identical.

  It wasn’t exactly scientific, but it would work.

  There was a motto to put on my website.

  CHAPTER 11

  The cops were gone by the time I got over there, but Arlene French explained their appearance thusly:

  “Just one car this time, but two officers knocked on the door for probably five minutes. I was in the bath when I called you, you see.” She patted her damp hair. “Otherwise I would have gone out there and made them stick around for you. But by the time I got my shoes on and made it outside, they had already left. I’m very sorry.”

  “Don’t even worry about it,” I said. “You did great.”

  She beamed at me.

  I went into Rebecca’s house; nothing appeared out of place. But what would cause the police to show up again, over a month after she died? I wandered through the living room and immediately noticed that the phone cord was unplugged from the wall again.

  I crouched down on the carpet and examined the jack. It had been unplugged yesterday, but I’d plugged it back in when I hit redial. I hadn’t unplugged it again, at least not intentionally.

  I reached back to the baseboard and returned the jack to its proper place, noting that the faceplate had been painted over so many times that it seemed virtually impossible for the thing to become unplugged accidentally.

  I hit redial once more. I could already hear Constance Archer-Nash’s angry hiss in my ear, but the line rang three times and a voice said, “Marco’s Pizza, help you?”

  At this moment, someone knocked on the back door behind me. I practically threw the phone across the room. Hoping it was Arlene, I parted the curtains and looked out to see a pimply kid in a humiliating Marco’s hat.

  “What the actual fuck,” I muttered. I opened the door a crack. “What do you want?”

  I immediately felt bad, because the kid looked terrified. “I, um, I have your all-the-meats sub and a Mountain Dew?” His voice quavered like an opera singer’s.

  I let out a breath. “Why did you come to the back door?”

  Stricken, the kid said, “I’m really sorry if that was wrong. It’s just what they wrote down, is that not what you wanted?”

  “Wrote down where?”

  He thrust a grease-spotted receipt at me. It listed Rebecca’s address and phone number, the order the delivery kid had just rattled off, and a handwritten note: GO TO BACK DOOR ONLY. This last part was underlined twice.

  I tried to sound a little less intense. “Do you know who placed this order? Or when?”

  Wordlessly, the kid pointed to a string of numbers on the top of the receipt. “It looks like five oh three. We’re slammed tonight, I’m so sorry, um…”

  I gave him a twenty and told him to keep the change and I closed the door behind him. Then thought better of it and left it open a crack. I quietly opened kitchen drawers until I found Rebecca’s cutlery, and I picked out the biggest knife she had.

  There was someone else in this house.

  The basement steps were dark and rickety. I tried to go down them, but some animal instinct in me overrode my brain. It occurred to me that I hadn’t set foot in a strange basement since Jack Derrow’s house, and I w
ondered if I ever would again. Now I grabbed a chair from the dining room and wedged it under the doorknob, just like Derrow had.

  Exploring that particular corner of my psyche would need to wait.

  The house was small, and there wouldn’t be a ton of places to hide. I flipped lights on in the dining room, bathroom, and first-floor bedroom, went back to the kitchen, and started going through the rooms clockwise, starting with the dining room. It contained the table, a china cabinet, and a dry sink. Nobody was hiding in, under, or beside any of these.

  From there, I passed the steps that led to the second floor and stood in the living room. Sofa, armchair, television, empty. I kept going—bathroom, empty. I flung open the door of a hall closet and found it stocked with folded linens. Bedroom—empty. I even lifted the edge of the dust ruffle and peered underneath the bed itself.

  One floor down, two to go.

  Knife in hand, I went up the ivory-carpeted steps. I was either being very silly or very reckless, or maybe a combination. The second floor of Rebecca’s little house held two bedrooms and another bathroom. I checked the bedroom to my left first—empty. The bathroom was decorated in a beach-house motif, sand dollars and driftwood. I yanked aside the blue-and-tan-striped shower curtain—empty.

  I started into the second bedroom but changed my mind when I saw that the corner of the dust ruffle was snagged on itself, revealing a small section of bedframe and whatever was below it.

  Given how impeccable Rebecca’s housekeeping seemed to be, I doubted she had left it like that.

  I crouched down in the bathroom and pressed the back of my phone against my thigh while I turned on its flashlight function. Then I snapped my arm out and shined the light through the open doorway into the bedroom. From my position on the floor, I had a good view of whatever was under the bed, which turned out to be a stunned, blinking, young person’s face.

  He recoiled from the light, jerking up with such force that the mattress shifted. The figure scrambled to his feet and into the wall, blinking, one hand to the back of his head.