Dead Silence Page 13

  It takes so long for his beer to reach his sweaty hands that he orders a second before he takes his first sip. It goes down easily, seeping sheer relaxation into his limbs.

  He eavesdrops on a group of middle-aged men gathered around an adjacent table. The one with his back to Barnes seems to be an American expat. Like the others, he has shaggy hair and a beard, and is wearing only a pair of shorts. If not for his friends teasingly referring to him as a yuma, Barnes would never have guessed at a glance that he isn’t a local. But now he notices the subtly accented Spanish, relatively fair coloring, and sun-damaged, thickly freckled shoulders.

  Maybe Barnes, too, could live here. Maybe that wasn’t just a drunken fantasy. Maybe he should give it a try.

  Funny. He’s been traveling for years, has never had second thoughts about going home to New York afterward to resume his life. But America is a hot mess right now with the election looming, and this is the country where his beloved abuela had been born.

  “Pride . . . You’re going to grasp your roots, and you’re going to understand who you are . . . in your blood.”

  He’s always felt profoundly American, but Rob was right—about Barnes, though maybe not about Kurtis. He does feel connected to this place, and these people.

  He sips his second cerveza and reluctantly orders a third, still thirsty, still starved, and hoping the food gets to the table before the beer goes to his head. Not likely, though. He still doesn’t have a napkin or silverware, though the table is equipped with a bottle of hot sauce and an ashtray filled with red-lipstick-stained cigarette butts.

  The sun has disappeared behind the palm trees and church steeple. Soft, warm light slips like a hug from the swooping, graceful arms of an old-world streetlamp. Salsa music, laughter, and conversation from a nearby nightclub float on the humid evening air. Passersby heading in that direction are younger and livelier, passing in groups. The women are scantily clad and wear towering stilettos; the men, guayabera shirts and linen pants. He keeps an eye out for Kurtis among the club-bound crowd.

  A troubled young man might find trouble around here, if he were so inclined. Or anywhere, really. Barnes should know.

  Been there, done that.

  Again, he glances over at the American seated nearby, wondering how he’d wound up here. Maybe he can strike up a conversation, ask for some tips.

  Yeah, and maybe you’re starting to get drunk again.

  He sets down the bottle and pushes it back . . . too hard. It slides right off the edge of the table and shatters on the cobblestones. Laughter erupts at surrounding tables, and a few onlookers raise their own bottles and glasses in salute, as though he’d offered some bizarre toast.

  If this were New York, waitstaff would come hurrying over with a broom and dustpan to pick up the shards before someone gets cut and sues the place. Not here. He bends over to pick up the largest pieces, but it’s shadowy down there. The first one he touches slices into his hand.

  Terrific.

  He sits up and checks the cut. Not deep, just a surface nick across his forefinger. If he had a napkin, he could wrap it and put pressure on it. Instead, he sticks it into his mouth and looks for the waiter.

  The word gringo reaches his ears from the next table, and he feels the group looking at him. Glancing up, he finds one of the men leaning over, offering something. A red bandana.

  “Aqui tienes.” The man smiles. He’s about Barnes’s age, with glossy dark hair, crooked teeth, and eyebrows like black caterpillars.

  “No, gracias.” Barnes shakes his head and tells him in Spanish that he can’t take it, that it’ll be ruined with blood, but the man insists. Barnes thanks him profusely and looks again for the waiter, this time to request a round of drinks for the man and his friends.

  Still no sign of the waiter. Barnes wraps the cut in the bandana, doubting its sterility. He doubts he’ll find antibiotic ointment and bandages around here at this hour. Maybe Rob packed some in his bag.

  And you think you’re going to relocate to Cuba?

  He’s barely made it through the first twenty-four hours—drinking all the rum in all the land, breaking a heart, puking his brains out, nearly dying in a plane crash, sleeping the day away, and now drawing his own blood.

  You’d make a lousy expat.

  He finds himself grinning, and then, feeling someone’s eyes on him, looks again at the next table. The American is watching him, and . . .

  No. It can’t be.

  You’re drunk. You have to be. Because there’s no way that can possibly be . . .

  But it is.

  The barefoot, shaggy man is missing New York tycoon Perry Wayland.

  Chapter Seven

  Opening the door to the apartment, Amelia hears loud music amid the high-pitched whir of a wet saw. Vintage Eagles, one of Aaron’s favorite bands.

  She smiles. He must be home and blasting “Heartache Tonight,” because . . .

  Because he realized he’s going to miss you this weekend?

  Because your anniversary made him nostalgic, and he’s remembering the good old days?

  Because somehow, in the middle of a Friday afternoon, he’s not at the office?

  “Aaron?”

  She leaves her rolling bag by the door and pokes her head into the rubble-strewn kitchen, where a pair of workmen are installing the new backsplash. The music is coming from an iPhone plugged into Aaron’s high-end Bluetooth speaker.

  Spotting her in the doorway, a workman jumps to lower the volume. “Sorry about that, Mrs. Haines.”

  “It’s okay, Pete. I just stopped home to grab something. You can turn it back up.”

  He gestures at the section of white tile mounted to the wall between the white marble counter and white cabinets. “What do you think of the backsplash so far?”

  “You mean the bland-splash?”

  “Your husband likes it.”

  “No, I know, it’s fine. It’s beautiful,” she adds, and he looks relieved. “Nice job.”

  Aaron had talked her into the classic white subway tile. She’d have preferred a herringbone mosaic in metallic coppery shades.

  “We have to go basic, Amelia. Think about resale value.”

  “It’s not like we need to worry about that anytime soon.”

  “You never know.”

  She’d frowned. “You never know whether we’re selling our home and moving away? Didn’t we say when we bought it that we were going to live here forever?”

  “That was ten years ago.”

  “And . . .”

  “Never mind,” he’d said as if dismissing a half-witted stranger who hadn’t grasped an obvious truth.

  She opens the study door to find Clancy poised on the other side, tiny and expectant, tail in the air. She picks him up and he purrs. “Aw, somebody’s glad to see me.” Cuddling his warm, rumbly little body against the bare crook of her neck, she carries him to the bedroom, puts him on the bed, and picks up her phone.

  She’s missed several calls, all from Aaron.

  No time to change into jeans for the trip, but she kicks off her shoes and finds a pair of shearling-lined sneakers in her closet. She dials Aaron and balances the phone between her shoulder and ear as she pulls soft yarn socks over her punished feet.

  After a few rings, she hears Aaron’s harried, “Hey.”

  “Hey.”

  “I just stepped out of a meeting. Are you on the bus?”

  “I’m about to be. What’s up?” She pushes her feet into the cushy sneakers, the edges hitting below her blisters. Ah, relief.

  “I just wanted to let you know that I’m flying to California tomorrow instead of Sunday.”

  “What?”

  “Yeah, I figured, why stick around home if you’re going to be gone?” he asks as though he sticks around at all, lately, when she is here.

  “But . . . I was counting on you to feed Clancy. Didn’t you see my email?”

  “What email?”

  “The one I sent asking you to feed Cla
ncy!”

  “Why are you emailing me? Why not just—”

  “Because I forgot my phone when I left for work this morning.”

  A pause. “Well, you’re on it now.”

  She resists sarcasm. “I had to come home to grab it, and I’m going to miss the bus if I don’t get out of here. Aaron, please don’t go tomorrow. I need—”

  “I already changed the flight.”

  “Are you sure you didn’t see the email? Because I feel like maybe you read it and then changed your flight.”

  “Why would I do that?”

  “You tell me.”

  She hates her petty, petulant self, but this isn’t just about Clancy, or Aaron’s disregard this morning for Lily Tucker and the ring, or even about his failure to invite her closest friend to the party.

  “Amelia, what’s going on? Why are you acting so . . .”

  Because we’re losing each other. The things that are important to me don’t matter to you anymore. Did they ever?

  “Sorry. Just . . . go back to your meeting. I’ll call Jessie and tell her I can’t come after all.”

  “Bring the cat with you. They’ll never even notice with the menagerie in that house.”

  “Too late. I’ve already missed the bus. See you tonight.”

  “Yeah, I have that dinner, so—”

  “See you whenever, then.”

  He starts to respond, but she disconnects the call, flecks of misgiving dropping like singular hourglass grains, contributing to the rising lump in her gut.

  She looks at her watch. It’s 1:52. The bus leaves in twenty-eight minutes. Chances are she really will miss it, but it’s worth a shot.

  “Hey, Clance, how do you feel about road trips?” She scoops him up and he mews loudly. “I’ll take that for a yes.”

  At the Port Authority twenty-seven minutes later, she stashes her rolling bag in the luggage compartment and boards the bus with her laptop bag slung over one shoulder and Clancy’s small canvas carrier over the other. She’d grabbed a few cans of his food, his little bowls, and thrown some clean litter into an empty plastic takeout container to serve as a makeshift litter box for the trip.

  She makes her way toward the last available seat, against the window in the back row by the bathroom. The elderly man sitting on the aisle pretends not to see her, turning the page of his Daily News.

  “Excuse me.”

  He looks up with watery blue eyes sunken in a liver-spotted face, mouth set as though he’s just been force-fed a raw artichoke.

  “May I?” She gestures at the empty seat.

  He sighs and stands, allowing her to squeeze past. She plunks herself down with Clancy’s carrier on her lap, wedging her other bag under her legs.

  The man reclaims his seat, making certain that his slight build and open newspaper overflow onto hers. She resists the urge to scrunch herself closer to the window and validate his irritation.

  The bus starts moving, navigating the maze of sloping ramps to street level and the Lincoln Tunnel. The air is close and damp. It’s not raining in New York, but she doesn’t need a forecast to predict that it will be in Ithaca. When she looks back on her college years there, memories often feature dramatic weather.

  She unbuttons the khaki raincoat she’d thrown on as she’d left the apartment. She should have taken off the coat before she’d sat down. Now she’s stuck wearing it until her seatmate disembarks—at the first stop, with luck.

  The Burberry trench had been a gift from Aaron. “Timeless,” he’d said, when she’d protested the extravagance. “It’ll never go out of style, and it’ll hold up forever.” Fifteen years later, it’s held up better than . . . a lot of things.

  The old man taps her arm. “Is that a cat?”

  “A kitten. Yes.”

  “I’m allergic.”

  “I’m sorry. But he’s tiny, and pets are allowed”—she’s guessing—“and I won’t take him out of the carrier at all.”

  He glares. “How far are you going?”

  “Ithaca. You?”

  “Buffalo.”

  Stuck with each other. Terrific.

  He crosses his leg with his knee to the aisle, his lug-soled shoe bumping her leg. No apology. Jerk.

  She wriggles her phone from her pocket and sees that Aaron had called her phone twice while she’d been underground on the subway. He hadn’t left a message. Probably calling to apologize. With a twinge of guilt, she wishes she’d told him she was going away after all.

  She’s not one of those people who makes phone calls on public transportation, though it appears that everyone around her, save the old man, is wearing headphones. A quick, quiet call probably won’t disturb them.

  She takes out her phone and feels the old man’s shoe jab her leg again. She looks at him.

  He points to her cell. “You aren’t going to talk on that the whole trip, I hope.”

  “The whole trip? No.” Tempted to ask him in return if he’s going to be crowding her seat and kicking her the whole trip, she dials Jessie’s number and gets voice mail.

  “Hi, in case you didn’t see my email, I’m on the bus. It gets in at . . . I have no idea. Around six thirty, maybe? Or seven? Oh, and I’m bringing Clancy. Is that okay? I’ll call you when I get in.”

  She keeps her voice low, barely above a whisper. Yet her seatmate makes disgruntled noises and crackles his newspaper, his elbow digging into her ribs. She dials Jessie’s home number, but gets voice mail there, too. She leaves the same message and then sends a text to cover all her bases.

  A moment after she hits Send, her phone vibrates. That was fast.

  But the incoming text isn’t from Jessie. It’s from Aaron.

  Been trying to call you. Can you take my gray suit to the dry cleaner? Need overnight rush for trip tomorrow.

  Seriously?

  She turns off her phone, shoves it deep into her coat pocket, and stares out the window at the black tunnel looming ahead.

  The Angler should be heading south, toward the bridge and New York State, and the dead boy in the orchard. Instead, he’s making his way toward the hospital in the western suburbs. The late afternoon sun is at just the right angle to produce a blinding glare, slowing congested traffic to a crawl.

  He curses his wife. There’s a name for this . . . this mental illness, or whatever it is that has her constantly worrying about the children. He’d recently seen something on the news about a woman who kept wanting to believe there was something wrong with her baby—or was it that she was actually making the baby sick?

  Yet he can’t alert the doctors to Cecile’s condition for the same reason he’ll never be able to extract himself from his marriage. He can’t have outsiders snooping into their private lives.

  Reaching the hospital at last, he parks in the emergency room lot alongside a sign warning that cars will be towed after thirty minutes. That will be plenty of time to resolve this mess, get Pascal out of here, and be on his way to New York.

  Hurrying toward the door, he passes a pretty brunette of about thirteen sitting cross-legged on a bench with a book. She’s dressed in a hoodie, black leggings, and sneakers, and twirls a wisp of dark hair around her index finger as she reads.

  He’s struck by the resemblance to his wife, the first time he’d seen her in a café. Cecile, too, had worn glasses. She, too, had been engrossed in an open textbook, absently toying with her long hair. She, too, had stirred a familiar, forbidden yearning.

  He’d assumed Cecile had been a teenager there to do her homework. He’d managed to drop several loose coins from his pocket as he walked past with his coffee. Cecile had glanced up, irritated by the rolling clatter, and he’d seen that she might be older than he’d thought. Sixteen, maybe seventeen?

  He’d asked about the large textbook she was reading, and struck gold. It was about European monarchies. He’d mentioned his genetic roots in the Capetian Dynasty, and with minimal seductive effort on his part, wound up in her bed that night.

  By then,
he’d discovered that Cecile was of legal age, a university exchange student from the Sorbonne. She wasn’t merely studying royalty; she was obsessed with it—and, in turn, with him.

  He was under no illusion that an attractive co-ed would have been attracted to a thirty-year-old industrial welder if not for her desire to stay in North America—and her naïve fantasy that his royal lineage might one day lead to some kind of recognition or riches.

  Marriage had been her idea, and for him, it had seemed the right thing to do. On the heels of an abnormal childhood, he’d needed to prove—to his dead father? His absent mother? Himself?—that he could be normal. That he could control his own destiny as well as his errant desires.

  He walks on past the young girl on the bench and finds the emergency room hectic. Reminding himself that Cecile is a twisted woman and could very well have lied about the doctor summoning him here, he looks around the waiting area, half expecting to see her and Pascal among the patients waiting to be seen.

  But they aren’t there, and when he asks the woman behind the desk about his son, she immediately checks his ID and buzzes him through the locked door.

  “Wait here,” she says. “A nurse will come get you.”

  He leans against a wall, arms folded, toe tapping. He doesn’t have time for this. He really doesn’t. Every minute that passes could be carrying him back to New York State to cover his tracks.

  Stupid, stupid, stupid . . .

  Medical personnel rush past, pushing equipment carts and wheelchairs. Machines beep, a baby wails, a man moans, a young woman unleashes a shrill stream of cursing, and sirens of a departing ambulance meld with those of an arriving one.

  A male nurse in green scrubs appears, asks him if he’s Pascal’s father, and instructs him to follow. He leads the way past the curtained treatment cubicles and into the main hospital, along a maze of hallways to a bank of elevators. He presses the button for the fourth-floor surgical unit.