August 10, 2017
Against her doctor’s advice, Rachel Grant had discharged herself from the hospital and was back at home under police protection (Officer Riordan on babysitting duty again) and attended by a private nurse, a dyspeptic Filipina with a small face and very large eyes, so small and well proportioned a woman that she looked like a specially designed miniature.
“I don’t like hospitals,” Rachel told Valerie. “Besides, I need to be with Elspeth.”
A hospital bed had been set up in the TV room, though Rachel wasn’t in it. She was reclined instead on the couch, wearing a white bathrobe over a pink T-shirt. Gray fur slipper boots. Her face looked as if she’d scrubbed it too hard. Or as if it had reached the phase where no more tears would come. The short coppery hair was greasy. The olive-green nail varnish was still on, an incongruous touch of goth glamor in the atmosphere of dreary convalescence.
“The nurse changes the dressings and keeps the pain meds flowing. I don’t need anything more than that.”
“How’s Elspeth doing?” Valerie asked.
Rachel closed her eyes for a moment. Opened them. “She’s in a nightmare,” she said. “She’s awake in the middle of a nightmare.”
Valerie groped mentally for something encouraging. Rachel Grant got there first.
“She’s strong,” she said. “She’s got strength like stubbornness. She amazes me. I thank God for it. I thank God for her.”
Valerie nodded, feeling sick. Along with her purse she had a manila envelope on her lap. Containing the photographs of Sophia. She’d bought Rachel Grant another day of innocence yesterday by checking the CCTV images with Adam Grant’s friends and colleagues—none of whom could ID the subject, nor knew that Adam had a relationship with anyone named Sophia. Now there was only Rachel left to ask. Obviously the best thing was to get it over with. But the celluloid evidence of Adam Grant’s secret life had refreshed the fact that she, Valerie, had been (however drunkenly and without consummation) a player in it. Again, the sense of her own bankruptcy needled her. She’d done the wrong thing in taking the case. The sort of wrong thing that expanded, fractally, around you, until as far as you could see in any direction there it was, wrongness, an inescapable matrix of your own making.
“Have you found him?” Rachel said.
“No. I’m sorry. Not yet. But we will.”
Rachel looked as if she believed her. The belief wouldn’t last forever. Right now it was fueled by grief and the need for vengeance. Soon, Valerie knew, it would turn to frustration, then anger, then cynicism, then a sort of nullity, an acceptance that this was not, after all, a world in which the good were rewarded and the wicked punished.
“Mrs. Grant,” she said, “this is going to be difficult. I’m sorry. I have something I need to ask you.”
“What?”
Valerie took out the photographs. Selected the best single shot from Will’s CCTV stills and handed it to Rachel. “Do you know this woman?”
Rachel’s force field shifted. There was no physical sign, but Valerie felt it. Fear, she thought. She already knows what I’m going to ask her.
Rachel studied the image. “No. I don’t know her. Who is she?” Her eyes were already on the other photographs, still held in Valerie’s lap.
“We don’t have her surname,” Valerie said. “But we think her first name is Sophia. It’s almost certain that she was involved with Dwight Jenner. As far as we can tell, they met regularly, at various hotels in the Bay Area.”
A lesser woman than Rachel Grant might have allowed herself the reflex response: So? So what? What’s that got to do with…? But Rachel Grant wasn’t that sort of woman. The inner calculations were being worked through. Her hand holding the print, Valerie now saw, was trembling. Her face was stark, the green eyes wildly alive.
Valerie chose what she regarded as the least explicit of the Adam Grant shots: Sophia sitting on the kitchen worktop, head back, body lit prettily by the window-filtered sun. She handed it to Rachel. “This is the same woman,” she said.
Then said nothing more. Instead watched Rachel Grant recognizing the kitchen, the fridge, the Post-its.
Silence. Valerie’s face was warm.
“You recognize the—”
“Yes.”
More silence. The nurse put her head around the door, big eyes inquiring.
“I’ll take the pills later, Tala,” Rachel Grant said. The nurse tutted and withdrew.
“I’m sorry,” Valerie repeated. (How many times was she going to say “sorry” to this woman, knowing that no amount of apologies would ever, if she knew the whole truth, be enough?) “The fact is I found this picture in Adam’s darkroom. In one of only two drawers that were locked.”
Rachel Grant stared at the image. Her effort not to succumb—either to rage or tears—was all but audible. The big window behind her showed a cruelly perfect afternoon. Blue sky and a flawless green lawn. A laburnum tree’s yellow blossom brilliant in the sun. Beauty carried on, regardless of human misery.
“How can you know it’s the same woman?” Rachel said, not looking at Valerie. “You can’t see her face.” She spoke quietly. A terrible forced calm. Valerie looked down at the next of the Adam Grant photographs. Sophia, blindfolded, tied to the bed. Rachel’s bed.
“Oh,” Rachel said. “You have other photographs.”
“I’m afraid so,” Valerie said. “Clearly the same woman, and clearly taken here in your home. I’m really—”
“Show me,” Rachel said.
“Mrs. Grant, it’s not going to—”
“Show me the rest of the pictures.”
Valerie understood. Rachel Grant had received her first hit of horror through the murder of her husband—and horror was masochistically addictive. Now she wanted more, all of it. Now she wanted to know exactly how much shit the world was made of, and exactly how stupid she’d been to believe otherwise. There was satisfaction in it, experiencing your nude self, stripped of its delusions. If not for her daughter, Valerie thought, Rachel Grant was the sort of person for whom a brush with monstrosity would be more than enough to turn her into a monster herself.
She handed her the rest of the photographs. Observed first the shock then the quivering disgust as Rachel went through them. And beneath both shock and disgust yet another stratum of sadness, when she’d thought there could be no more. The death of your husband. Then the lie of your husband, so that even the grief couldn’t be clean. Valerie felt another “I’m sorry” burgeoning. Suppressed it. Pointless. And craven.
Rachel passed the photographs back to her. Elsewhere in the house the nurse opened and closed a cupboard door.
Then Rachel smiled. This, too, was one of horror’s demands, that you saw the possibility of laughing along with it. “I was going to say you still can’t really tell if it’s the same woman,” she said. “But where does that get me? One of these women was in my house. Being photographed by my husband. Being fucked by my husband, presumably, since that’s what you’re not saying.” Then she added, vaguely: “All these things we don’t say.”
“I wouldn’t have brought this to you,” Valerie said. “But there’s good reason to suppose this individual was one of the last to see Dwight Jenner before he went off the grid. She could be crucial to finding him.”
Rachel lay back on the couch and looked at Valerie, still with a slight smile. The saying was Don’t shoot the messenger. One of the dumbest sayings, Valerie knew. The messenger always got shot. And police were always the messengers.
“How do you do it?” Rachel asked her.
“Do what?”
“This. Every day. Bring people ugliness and betrayal and death. It must do something to you.”
Well, here was the messenger, getting shot.
At the last moment before Valerie replied, she changed what she was going to say. She’d been going to offer something professionally platitudinous. It’s part of the job, Mrs. Grant. The worst part. Believe me, if there were any other way … But Rachel Grant was looking at her from the calm eye of her hurricane as if she really, in her new state of raw curiosity where anything was permissible, wanted to know.
“It probably has done something to me,” Valerie said. “I’m not sure what. Pushed me past surprise, I suppose. Burned out some human circuits. But without being that way we don’t catch the people we need to catch.”
For a moment the two of them looked at each other. Rachel’s face was a fusion of exhaustion and energy, fascination and despair. Again, Valerie thought how easy it would be for this woman to surrender, to break down into madness, perhaps even death. If not for the daughter. I thank God for her. Maybe, Valerie thought. But loving a child was a vicious blessing: It took certain options off the table, no matter how much you were suffering. If you loved your child then you had to survive. You had to survive anything. For them. That was love’s price.
“Yes,” Rachel said. “I suppose it has to be that way.”
For a crazy moment Valerie thought Rachel Grant had read her mind. Then realized the response was to what she’d said. Burned out some human circuits, etc.
“I hope you’re right,” Rachel added. “I hope that being the way you are means you get him. Whatever Adam…” She didn’t finish. Just shook her head, looked away. Then said, still with her face averted: “Unless I’m supposed to care less now that you tell me he was fucking another woman. Is that what’s supposed to happen? Am I supposed to think it served him right?”
Rhetorical. And in any case irrelevant to Valerie’s purposes. But it didn’t stop her wondering. Did it make a difference? Did betrayal register at all in the din of loss? Maybe not now—but Rachel Grant would have the rest of her life for the emotional math to settle. Time’s subtle recalibration.
She got to her feet. There was nothing left here.
“I’ll call you as soon as we have anything,” she said.
Rachel didn’t answer.
“Oh, actually, one last minor thing.” She didn’t even know why she’d remembered it. Desperation?
Rachel exhaled. Rose above her contempt. Looked Valerie in the eye.
“Did Adam take a sleeping pill that night?”
At first Rachel’s look was just one of disbelief that the questions were still coming, that there really was no end to it.
But she rose above that, too. Shook her head, looked away. Didn’t care. “I don’t know,” she said. “It’s possible. Sometimes he took one of my Ambien if he was wired and had an early start.”
The nurse, Tala, appeared in the kitchen doorway when Valerie was on her way through the hall.
“Are you finished?” she asked, with distinct peremptoriness.
“Yes,” Valerie said.
“Good. We’re late with the meds.”
Tala went back into the kitchen. A sound made Valerie turn and look up. Elspeth was sitting halfway up the glass stairs, hunched with her arms wrapped around her shins, watching her. The girl looked exhausted. The big eyes were bright. One pale knee showed through a (designer) tear in the dark blue jeans. Her white T-shirt had a small brown smear on the left shoulder. An elf in the process of transforming into something much darker.
“Hello, Elspeth,” Valerie said. Mainly because the girl’s stare was discomfiting. She couldn’t, Valerie decided, have overheard the conversation with Rachel Grant. “You doing okay?”
Elspeth didn’t answer. Valerie couldn’t look away.
Suddenly Elspeth wrenched herself to her feet, turned and, with a strange, low mewling sound, ran up the stairs and disappeared.