Chapter 42

WHEN I WAKE I am lying on the bed, face up.

It’s dark out, the time on my watch barely five o’clock in the morning. An hour before the dawn. I’ve been asleep for more than ten hours. As usual when I wake up these days, I can see. Perfectly. Clearly. Without the need for eyeglasses, which I have never needed. Not even for reading, even after turning forty.

I reach around to the back of my head and feel for a lump, or an abrasion, or a cut. Something to indicate that I was hit over the head when I came back home by someone who’d been waiting for me. The overcoat man maybe. No, scratch that. For certain, the overcoat man.

I feel the back of my head.

There’s a lump that rises from out of the back of my lower head above the spine. It’s a bruise and tender to the touch. I pull back my fingers and examine them for blood. There’s no blood, but someone definitely hit me with something. A sap maybe.

My head throbs.

Whoever hit me was waiting for me inside my apartment.

Whoever hit me has a key to the place.

Whoever hit me doesn’t want me dead. He wants to antagonize me. Torture me. Prove to me that he has power over me.

Whoever hit me is holding Grace captive.

Whoever hit me wears a long brown overcoat, black eyes, and he is following my every move.

Why?

I have no idea, other than he is not satisfied with simply abducting Grace. He wants something more. But what exactly does he want?

Without a note or a phone call or an email detailing a list of demands, I haven’t the slightest clue. But there’s one thing I do know. I have no idea if my eyesight is going to last. Best that I take advantage of the sight I’ve got for now.

I start by checking the cell phone to see if I received any incoming calls while I’d been knocked out. But there’s nothing. I speed-dial Grace’s number and get the usual song and dance. Setting the phone back onto the table, I slip out of bed, turn on the bedside lamp, and in the dull glow of the lamplight, see something extraordinary. The furniture of the studio apartment has been put back in its rightful place. The couch and the harvest table take up the center of the room, the length of the table pressed up against the back of the couch. All the plates, cups, bowls, spoons, knives and forks have been returned to the cupboards, the boxes and jars of food replaced on the shelves. Grace’s unfinished painting remains undisturbed and ready for more brushwork, should she ever return to it.

I stare out the open French doors and feel the cool, fish-tainted air seeping in. In the distance I can make out the occasional electric light, but no voices or purring motors or footsteps. No Grace.

Stepping around the table and couch, I slide past the easel-mounted painting and I close the doors. Then I decide to take some aspirin and make some coffee. When it’s done I take it to the couch and try to figure out exactly what happened when I arrived home yesterday afternoon. Did the overcoat man hit me over the head, then leave? Or did he clean up the place, and if so, why the hell bother? Why didn’t I wake up on the floor or on the couch? How did I get to my bed? Or maybe I woke up on the floor and then, in a sleepwalking somnambulant state, cleaned up the studio and got in bed, fully clothed, and fell into a deep, dreaming sleep.

I think about finding the card of Santa Lucia on the floor yesterday morning.

If it hadn’t been placed there by the overcoat man, then how did it get there?

Maybe it had been inside the apartment all along, care of the previous tenant. Maybe when I discovered it, I immediately interpreted it as a clue. Maybe the overcoat man simply followed me to the church of Santa Lucia instead of the other way around: Me following him.

My mind is spinning with questions but I have no answers. Why am I not calling the police right now about being attacked in my own place? The police…the detective…they don’t trust me. They’ll think I’m lying. At the very least, they’ll use the attack to detain me inside a cell. For my own protection, they’ll insist. Grace is still out there somewhere, at the mercy of the overcoat man. I can’t allow myself to be locked away. I can’t risk it.

I sip my coffee and wait for the onset of dawn.

The coffee is hot but the unanswerable questions that buzz around my brain like flies around the dead fill me with an ice cold dread.

The coffee cup nearly slips from my fingers when the phone rings. I set the cup down, sprint to the wall phone, pick it up. I don’t utter a word. I just listen. The earpiece is filled with a near silent static. Like air blowing in through the line. Then I hear the voice.

“I. See.”

“What do you see?” I respond, as if at this point, I’m going to get an answer. “Tell me what you see.”

“I. See.”

His refusal to say anything but those two words are my cue to begin rattling off the obvious questions. Questions I know have no chance in hell of being answered.

“Do you have Grace? Do you wear a brown overcoat? Did you follow me to the Church of Santa Lucia? Have you been up in my apartment? Did you hit me over the head? For Christ’s sake, please answer me.”

“I. See.” is all he says. And then the line goes dead.

Goes. Dead.