Chronic fear

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

When Alexis found the house empty, her first realization was that she had nowhere to turn.

The wall of secrecy she’d built, and the fear of failure, had isolated her more than she’d let herself believe. She’d carried on with her regular research work and her teaching duties, but she’d become so obsessed with cracking Seethe and saving Mark that she’d created yet another Monkey House.

And it was the house in which she was standing, the one she shared with her husband. The relics of a past life that decorated the living room-degrees, awards, golfing trophies, photographs of happier times-served to mock her now. She couldn’t go to the police, she couldn’t trust the government, and she couldn’t even count on the one person she’d vowed to keep no secrets from.

Because their life together was a lie.

She didn’t bother trying his cell phone, because it was on the couch, the silent TV flickering with last night’s sports highlights. The BLET car he’d taken was still in the driveway, and she wondered if he’d been arrested for taking the college’s property.

No. Someone would have called.

Maybe the same person who threatened to kill me.

When her own cell launched into its “We Can Work It Out” ringtone, she fumbled it from her purse with held breath. The number was blocked, but that didn’t matter. “Mark?”

There was no answer for a moment, and Alexis paced the living room, ruminating on places Mark might have walked, or who might have picked him up. But she couldn’t imagine him leaving his phone while they were both under surveillance.

“Mark?” she repeated, going to the living room closet.

“Lex?”

She couldn’t place the voice at first, and images flickered through her mind-Sebastian looking down at the hole in his chest, Mark’s bloody sneer, Roland holding a gun-before her whisper seemed to fill the house. “Wendy?”

“We’re in trouble.”

Alexis opened the closet and felt along the top shelf. No gun. “I know,” she said, but she didn’t know how many people the “we” included.

“They’re listening.”

Of course they are. That’s what they do. It doesn’t matter if you e-mail, phone, or send by postal carrier, they get you whenever they want.

“They’ve got Mark,” Alexis said, not wanting to believe it but unwilling to imagine anything worse. Like suicide.

“You have to come now,” Wendy said.

“Where?”

“You’ll know. The summer of green dresses.”

Alexis was about to scream into the phone, tired of all the cryptic nonsense, but she couldn’t afford to surrender to rage. She had to be strong for her husband.

“Summer of green dresses,” Alexis repeated back.

“We have what you’re looking for,” Wendy said, her tone strangely flat, as if she’d rehearsed her lines and wanted to inject them with ambivalence.

“I’m looking for Mark.” Alexis noticed the assault weapon, that cruel, multi-chambered rifle she’d been afraid to touch, propped behind Mark’s dusty bag of golf clubs. She didn’t know if its presence was a good sign or not.

“What you’ve been looking for,” Wendy said. “Since the Monkey House.”

“Anita’s dead.”

“That’s…my God…it’s true. They’re after us.” There was no remorse. Wendy was a zombie, removed from it all, just the way she’d been that night The night that never happened.

But the images came again, of the rusty tool in her hand, the wet, slippery grip, the sickening but satisfying thunk as she drove the tip of it into Susan Sharpe’s face “It was part of the experiment,” Alexis said, pleading defense to an unleveled accusation. “We only pretended to kill. So Sebastian could measure our response.”

“Summer of green dresses.”

Then Alexis was holding the dead phone to her ear, staring past the walls of her house to a night that she could never fully remember yet never fully escape.

You didn’t kill Susan Sharpe eleven years ago. She died in a fall down the stairs. Everyone said so.

And last year…she couldn’t have killed again. She wasn’t a killer. Mark would never tolerate a killer.

She broke from the obsessive cycle by clinging to Wendy’s words. She’d only spoken to Wendy a few times since the Monkey House. Roland and Wendy had come over for dinner just before moving out of town, but they thought it was safest not to reveal their new location. Even back then, they were already sinking into mistrust and paranoia, with an unspoken agreement between the couples that they should distance themselves from one another.

Alexis had been one of the bridesmaids at Roland and Wendy’s wedding eight years before. Susan’s death had been far enough in the past that they could all ignore it, and the couple was determined to live happily ever after, even though Roland’s drinking had already become impossible to ignore.

The bridesmaids-Anita and Roland’s sister among them-had worn strapless dresses of emerald green. The ceremony had taken place on June 21, the solstice, and Roland had even joked that he was going to have to squeeze a lot of consummation into the shortest night of the year. He was well into the champagne before the wedding even began, and he didn’t slow down during the reception.

At one point he’d thrown his arms around Anita and Alexis, hugging them close together, swaying with his full weight on them. “Shummer of green dreshes,” he’d shouted in his slushy, drunken joy.

A lifetime ago. Frustration filled Alexis’s belly with heat. What did it mean?

Then she remembered. During their last dinner, she and Wendy had been going through old photos while the guys talked libertarian politics. One of the photos was of the bridal party. “Summer of green dresses,” Wendy had said with a mixture of embarrassment and nostalgia.

The photos were stored in a trunk coffee table. Alexis shoved away the magazines and lifted the table lid, pulling out the top photo album. She’d not opened the trunk since their visit, since most of her photos had been digitally scanned. She flipped to the wedding photo and saw the plastic film had been peeled back and the corner folded. She slid her fingernail under the film and removed the photo, glancing at their younger, more innocent faces.

She searched it for clues. She saw nothing to indicate the reason for Wendy’s veiled hints, unless the goal was to show how much they’d changed. Then she tilted the photo in the light and saw the raised creases on the surface, made by pressure from beneath.

She turned it over. On its back was written an address. 161 Roby Snow Road, Creston NC. Beneath that, in Wendy’s artful but barely legible scrawl: Just in case.

She couldn’t leave, not until she found Mark. But she wasn’t sure whether Wendy’s veiled invitation was for both of them. She’d said “We,” and Mark and Roland had never been close. Mark was from “after.” He wasn’t part of Sebastian Brigg’s original Halcyon trial like the rest of them, but it was unlikely they would have survived the Monkey House last year if not for his bravery.

Some may have forgotten what he did, but others hadn’t.

Surely you didn’t think we could let you live, after what happened?

Most importantly of all, she hadn’t forgotten. At least, not completely. While that night was a psychotic rollercoaster of rage and pain, the inescapable result was that Mark had risked everything-his career, his sanity, and his life-to rescue her, and she would do the same for him.

Alexis returned to the closet and grabbed the assault rifle. Mark had tried to teach her to shoot it, though she didn’t have the stomach for it. But she remembered his instructions, and the casual earnestness of his face as he’d spoken: “Just press the trigger as fast as you can.”

She made sure the switch was on “Safe” before propping it by the door to her office. She retrieved her paper records with their coded notes, shoving them in a backpack with her laptop. The assault rifle had a canvas strap, so she shouldered it along with the backpack, then went to the kitchen, feeling like a soldier shipping out to the front.

War of a different kind. The war between the ears.

She collected the Halcyon-spiked bottles of water from the refrigerator and shoved them into the backpack. She was heading for the front door when she saw him sitting on the couch.

“Where the fuck do you think you’re going?”