Dead Silence Page 8

  Are you ever, really?

  He never misses them when he’s away, nor when they are, even during the long months they spend in Paris. On the contrary, their annual summer sojourn is a welcome reprieve.

  He unlocks the back door and crosses the shadowy kitchen to the refrigerator. Opening it, he’s engulfed in a pool of light and a repulsive stench.

  Damn Cecile.

  Stomach churning, he slams the door shut and turns to the pantry cupboard, rooting around the white wire shelves for a box of dry cereal. He pours some into a bowl and stands in the dark, eating it dry. The milk, along with everything else in the refrigerator, will be permeated with the stink of Époisses, the smear-ripened French cheese his Parisian wife insists on buying.

  He tosses the plastic bowl into the sink for Cecile to wash in the morning and climbs the stairs. He needs to shower, scrub off the stink of cheese and any traces of blood he might have carried home with him.

  On the second floor, the three bedroom doors are closed. So, however, is the bathroom. He pauses beside it and knocks softly.

  The bathroom door opens a crack. A face peers out.

  For a brief, horrible instant, it’s the boy, back from the dead.

  The Angler can only gape, wondering how . . .

  But of course, it’s merely Pascal, hardly looking his usual robust, impish, handsome self. His blue eyes are sunken in a wan face, neatly combed side part lost in a blond tousle above his forehead. He looks so much like . . .

  “What are you doing up at this hour?” he asks sharply.

  “My tummy hurts. I’ve been sick.”

  He sees the other child, the one in the root cellar, blue eyes blinking up groggily into the flashlight’s beam. He, too, had been sick, vomit caked around his mouth and oozing on the dirt beneath him.

  “My tummy . . .”

  Pascal. Not a ghost, haunting, taunting him.

  “Go back to bed.”

  “I need Maman. Can you get her?”

  “No. She’s sleeping.”

  Cecile won’t ask questions; it isn’t that. Unemotional and independent, his wife had once told him that she preferred the company of her father’s mistress to her own mother and made it clear that she doesn’t care whether her own husband sleeps around, or with whom. She’s content, as long as his paychecks go into their account and he allows her to make the parenting decisions.

  But if he wakes Cecile, she’ll make a fuss, up and down all night, turning on lights, maybe even calling the pediatrician.

  “Please, I need Maman!” Pascal raises his voice, urgent. “My tummy—”

  “All right, all right.” The Angler pushes into the bathroom, closing the door behind them, and opens the medicine cabinet. “I’ll find medicine.”

  “But Maman said—”

  “Shush!”

  The boy sinks onto the closed toilet seat, huddled in misery as the Angler rummages through the plastic bottles crammed along the glass shelf. Many are orange prescription bottles bearing Pascal’s name.

  He can’t bear the way Cecile coddles their son. Their daughter, too, but to a lesser extent. Renee doesn’t require—or desire—attention.

  She’s like me. She wants to be left alone.

  But the boy . . .

  If Cecile continues to treat him like the heir to some foreign throne, he’ll grow up a spoiled, imperious man.

  “What is that?”

  Pascal points toward his jacket pocket. The forgotten filet knife has torn a jagged hole in the waxed canvas, honed steel tip poking through, smeared with darkened blood.

  “Oh, that’s . . . it’s . . . I was fishing.” He reaches into his pocket, giving the handle a hasty tug so that the blade no longer protrudes. He forces himself to let go when all he wants to do is—

  “My tummy h—”

  “I heard you!” He spins back to the medicine cabinet, yanks out a bottle, heart racing. He untwists the plastic top, connected to a measured dropper. Pumping the rubber knob a few times, he fills the tube with viscous liquid and turns to the boy. “Open your mouth.”

  “What is that?”

  “Medicine.”

  “But it’s purple. I don’t have a cough. I have a tum—”

  The Angler thrusts the dropper into the child’s mouth and squeezes.

  Pascal gurgles, gulps.

  “There. Go to bed.”

  “Maman . . .” Pascal says miserably.

  “I said, go to bed.”

  His fingers itch to grab the knife again. Or at least, to unfasten his belt and whip the boy as his own father would have done.

  The child makes a whimpering sound and disappears.

  Left alone in the bathroom, the Angler closes the medicine cabinet and stares at his reflection.

  He may resemble his father, may have his blood running through his veins, may have been christened with his first name, but . . .

  I am not like him. I am not!

  “If not for you, my wife would be here with me,” his father would snarl. “For nine months, she was wretchedly sick, and then, the torture . . . She wasn’t right afterward. Her body, in her brain . . .”

  He’d told his son that she had run away, made a fresh start in a western province without them.

  How could she?

  A flashback: a dark stain soaked into old floorboards.

  How could she have left her own . . .

  Another flashback, more recent: a small, still figure, the boy, lying on muddy ground thick with decaying leaves.

  . . . flesh and blood?

  Flesh.

  Blood.

  Again, he looks down at his torn pocket. This time, he notices dark staining around the frayed fabric.

  Blood . . .

  It’s dried, and not his own, though he gives himself a quick once-over to be sure.

  No. You can’t stab yourself and not notice.

  But you can stab someone else, someone you’re carrying in your arms, their head dangling over your right arm, lifeless limbs dangling over your left.

  Lifeless?

  He remembers the boy’s filthy foot, streaks of red smeared in the grime. At the time, he’d been certain he was carrying a corpse, but that damned horse had clopped along before he’d had time to make sure.

  Can a corpse bleed?

  He hurries back downstairs to the living room and sits at the desktop computer, not bothering to turn on a light. Fingers bathed in the screen’s soothing glow, he types the question into the search engine and then waits for the answer.

  It takes some time. The computer is old, without enough room in the hard drive for a software update.

  He has plenty of time to decide that he’ll get back into the car and return to the orchard if he discovers a person must be alive to bleed. It will take all night, and he’s already delirious with exhaustion, but he can’t take a chance.

  The links pop up at last. He clicks the first, scanning forensic details that can’t quite pierce the fog of fatigue.

  He clicks another link and then another, searching for layman’s terms: a simple yes or no answer. He finds only inconclusive.

  There are too many variables to rule it out. It mainly seems to depend on how much time has passed since the time of death.

  He was dead. I know he was dead. I could feel it . . .

  Or maybe just feel it coming.

  How long could he possibly have survived in that remote location? Alone, drugged, and bleeding, with a cold front rolling in, accompanied by more storms . . .

  He’s dead now, in any case.

  The Angler pushes aside doubt, reminding himself that he’d escaped the scene—indeed, the country—without attracting suspicion. It would be foolish to risk going back there now. He wants only to sleep . . . preferably, straight through another night.

  It won’t happen if he stays in this house, with these people. He stands, rubbing his aching back, and heads for the door and the one place where he can recuperate, undisturbed.

  Chapter
Five

  Friday, September 30, 2016

  She wakes to the bleating alarm, and a spikey “Amelia!” from Aaron.

  She opens her eyes, caked with last night’s makeup, and sees him at the foot of the bed, showered, shaved, and dressed for work.

  She hits the snooze button. The room is bathed in soft gray; the window spattered with raindrops. Her eyelids close again. Eight more minutes . . .

  “Too much champagne last night?”

  Aaron again, pushing through the blackout curtains in her brain.

  Champagne? Last night . . .

  Right. The party.

  Aaron had rented a luxurious mansion, hired world-class caterers, and invited a few dozen family and friends who’d yelled “Surprise” when she’d unlocked the door. He’d thought of everything, from filling the room with her favorite flowers to hiring a classical jazz pianist to offering a toast he’d written on an index card.

  “Please raise a glass to my beautiful wife. She and I have gone through life together for a quarter of a century now, and if we’re lucky, we’re less than halfway through that journey. I know Amelia shares my gratitude to each and every one of you who came to help us celebrate tonight. You are the people who matter most to us in the world, and we consider you all a part of our big, happy family.”

  After a quarter of a century together, his words had somehow seemed impersonal, more about the guests than about their marriage. He’d talked about building this big, happy family, but when she’d looked around the room, she hadn’t seen all the people who matter most in the world.

  Not in mine, anyway.

  He’d invited colleagues, his second cousins, his parents’ neighbors . . . but not Jessie. How could he have overlooked her dearest friend?

  After the party, he’d had a black stretch limo waiting to drop him and Amelia back home on the Upper West Side and then deliver his parents to Montclair.

  “Man, you are just full of surprises,” she’d said, trying to seem as delighted as Aaron’s mother had been to see the car.

  But Amelia had been planning to tell him about Lily Tucker’s tiny gold and sapphire ring on the way home, and hadn’t wanted to mention it in front of her in-laws. Aaron had been feeling romantic for a change, so she hadn’t told him when they’d gotten back upstairs, either. He’d fallen asleep quickly afterward, and she’d lain awake until almost dawn, entangled in the past.

  “Amelia!”

  “Sorry.” She opens her eyes again and sighs morning breath. “What are you doing?”

  “Sorting my clothes for my trip Sunday.” He reaches into a basket of tee shirts and boxers she’d washed and dried a few days ago.

  “You’re folding them. I already did.” She’d been meticulous, aligning seams and creating neat rectangles.

  Not meticulous enough for Aaron. His seams are always straighter, rectangles more uniform.

  “Aren’t you going to be late for work?” he asks. His eyes aren’t bloodshot or mired in purple trenches, even though he’d drunk a lot more than she had last night, had likely had a better time, and had managed to get up at five for his morning gym workout.

  “I only have two appointments today, and the first one isn’t until ten,” she tells him. “Aaron . . . something really interesting happened yesterday.”

  “Mmm-hmm?” He grabs another white tee shirt, pinching the shoulders to unfurl it with a firm shake to rid the fabric of her clumsy creases. Morning has never been a good time for conversation with him, even when they’d had so much more to talk about. He’s always been too preoccupied, strategizing the day ahead.

  In a few minutes he’ll be out the door, and she can’t keep this from him for another day.

  Sitting up, she tells him about her appointment with Lily.

  He stops folding and looks at her.

  “Amelia. It can’t be your ring. Maybe it looked like yours, but—”

  “It is mine. It was identical.”

  “Okay, here’s the thing . . . the guy in the seat next to me on the plane home from Denver had on a watch identical to this.” He waves his wrist, and then gestures at the mahogany watch box on his bureau. “I’d left mine at home on this trip. But I didn’t see this guy wearing it and assume it was mine.”

  “Because there are tens of thousands of Rolexes in the world.”

  “And there are tens of thousands of baby rings.”

  “Exactly like mine? Same design, same gemstones, same initial engraved in the same font?”

  “Maybe. But let’s say it is yours. You lost it . . . when?”

  How could he have forgotten that detail?

  “March 7, 1987. Or maybe March 8—it was around midnight. Right after the nurse forgot my mother’s file in the room, and . . .”

  She pauses, remembering how she’d snatched up the paperwork, searching for some clue to how much time her dying mother had left. She’d found Bettina’s medical history, including the fact that she’d carried just one pregnancy to term, back in 1957.

  That was the year she’d delivered a son who’d lived for a few hours. Amelia used to visit his grave with Calvin and Bettina, now buried beside him.

  “I found out my mother wasn’t my birth mother about an hour before she died. I was wearing that ring when they found me. It was the only link to my past.”

  “I know all that,” Aaron tells her—not with impatience, but not with patience, either. “What about the boxes from your parents’ apartment that are sitting in the storage unit downstairs? They’re filled with stuff from the past.”

  “Not my past. I mean, that was my past, too, but . . .” She shouldn’t have to explain this. Not to him. Not after half a lifetime together.

  Sometimes, she’s tempted to visit her childhood belongings in the building’s basement, thinking she might pull out some old photographs to frame, maybe wear her father’s old plaid muffler on a cold day, even fry up some chicken in her mother’s cast-iron skillet.

  She never does, though. The scarf had moth holes even when Calvin had worn it. And Aaron doesn’t eat fried chicken. Nor does he like clutter. He grumbles that her books, magazines, and research materials take up too much space.

  He wouldn’t dare complain, though, about the two most meaningful possessions from her past or expect her to relegate them to storage.

  A tiny blue dress is mounted in a shadow box that hangs on the living room wall.

  A tightly woven sweetgrass basket sits like a prized trophy on an adjacent shelf.

  Calvin had confirmed that he’d first found her lying in the basket, wearing the dress—and the tiny ring etched with the blue enamel C.

  She reminds Aaron how she’d worn it on a chain around her neck until it had disappeared the night her mother died. “Losing the ring on top of everything else, all at once . . .”

  “It was hard, baby. I know.” A hint of the old, empathetic Aaron.

  “Not just hard. It seemed like some bizarre supernatural punishment. Like it had been snatched away by God, or the devil, or my mother . . .” Seeing his expression, she shrugs. “Look, I wasn’t completely rational about this stuff back then.”

  “Back then?”

  “Or for a long time afterward,” she concedes, but that’s where she draws the line. She’s rational now.

  He’s gone back to folding. “I don’t think the devil snatched your ring, Amelia.”

  “I know you don’t, and I know the devil didn’t. Okay?”

  “Okay. Sometimes I worry that you . . .”

  “Don’t worry.” She looks to the ceiling. “The chain was cheap and flimsy. I always fiddled with it when I was anxious. That was the most stressful night of my life. Of course, it broke. If I hadn’t been so distracted, I’d have noticed right away, and maybe I could have found it. But I guess it doesn’t matter now.”

  “Good. Then forget about it.” He adds a white undershirt to a clothing-store precise stack and reaches for another one.

  “No, the point isn’t that it broke. The point
is, how did it end up with Lily Tucker?”

  “How do you think?”

  She frowns. “How do you think?”

  He pulls his cell phone out of his pocket and stands, head bent, tapping his thumbs against the screen.

  “Aaron, I’ve asked you so many times to please not text while we’re—”

  “Here!” He thrusts the phone at her. “I wasn’t texting. Remember this?”

  She looks down at the advertisement they’d placed eight years ago. The headline reads $25,000 REWARD!

  That had been Aaron’s idea. “You want to grab people’s attention. Give them a reason to read on. They will, if they think there’s something in it for them.”

  “Is there?”

  He’d smiled and pulled her close. “I just want you to be happy, baby. And you said this is the only thing you want for your fortieth birthday.”

  “You mean my maybe-birthday.”

  Silas Moss had believed that milestones make people remember. Birthdays, anniversaries, holidays . . . if you’ve lost someone, you tend to think of them on those days. And they might be thinking of you in return.

  She and Aaron had been rolling in money back then, and he’d been so supportive.

  Man, how things can change in eight years.

  They’d put her story out there, accompanied by photos of her at various stages of life, including her first portrait. She’d been about seven months old, the closest to what she’d have looked like when she’d been abandoned.

  It pains her even now to see that black-and-white photo, snapped by a door-to-door photographer. Bettina and Calvin had scraped up the cash for a sitting, featuring a scowling Amelia in a droopy, stained, sad little dress.

  She’s always wanted, needed, to believe that her biological parents had spent every day of their lives wanting to find her. Even if they’d given her up as a baby—just left her there, all alone in the night—they might see that picture and regret it and reach out and—

  All right, or maybe they’d see that damned reward and reach out. Maybe, if she can’t forge a relationship with someone wonderful, finding an answer would be the next best thing. Even if her biological parents weren’t looking for her, then maybe someone else, someone who’d known them, would stumble across her photos and think she looked familiar. Maybe Amelia, at twenty-one, had resembled her birth mother at that age. Maybe at forty, she’d had her birth father’s smile. . . .