Playing Dead

CHAPTER 15

By the time I finished wiping a cold washcloth over my face for the third time, Lyle was rapping on the door to the bathroom.

“Tommie? Are you OK? I’m sorry. This is a little embarrassing. I’m worried. It’s been twenty minutes.”

I opened the door and pasted on a fake smile.

What does “trust no one” mean, exactly, Mr. Marchetti?

Does that include Lyle? Hudson?

“Sure,” I answered, flipping the wet cloth into the sink. “I’m good. Where’s Jack?”

“He took off. To do a little research.”

“That’s just great,” I said dully. “What do you think of him?”

“He doesn’t operate like any reporter I’ve ever met.”

“But you trusted him with Mama’s stuff.”

“Can’t hurt. Why antagonize him? Texas Monthly has an impeccable reputation. At this point, we just want answers, right? The more help, the better.”

I had to admit that Jack had been on his best behavior.

We moved down the hall, past the stern eyes of a black-and-white framed collection of ancestors. Daddy said they never smiled for pictures back then because it was considered too vain. Wonder what they’d think about “reality TV star” as a legitimate job title on a résumé and tweets like, “Hey gang! Let’s synchrofart at 20:00!”

“I feel like I’m getting nowhere,” I said. “That it’s hopeless.”

Lyle hesitated. He pulled a folded wad of paper out of his back pocket.

“I found the dead girl with your Social Security number. These are a few printouts. I’m trying to get your family’s FBI files… another way. And we’re working on tracking the anonymous email.” He hesitated. “At some point, we should consider talking to the FBI ourselves.”

I nodded, wondering who Lyle’s “we” included. Reporters suspected him of superior hacking abilities, although I suspected that Lyle was too smart for that. He just knew superior hackers.

“You don’t need to go over this right now,” he told me. “Or at all. Just know that my posse is on the case, too.”

“Do you know who Charla Polaski is?”

“Sure. A seventy-two-point headline. She found her husband naked and soaped up with their daughter’s gym coach, who happened to be the wife of a city councilman. Shots were fired to their hearts and genitals. A very messy scene in the middle-school shower. The story was a publisher’s wet dream.”

“Was she for sure guilty?”

“A slam dunk for the prosecutor. The jury deliberated twenty minutes. Polaski claimed she was set up to the bitter end. Why are you interested in this?”

“Just something I… heard.” I didn’t want to get into Charla’s bizarre phone call.

“I’ve got to get back to work and rip up the front page. The Dallas Cowboys’ star receiver broke his ankle in a team workout. It’s bumping Afghanistan off the front page. But I hate to leave you alone. I take it you haven’t hired protection yet.”

“Working on that,” I said.

As we reached the door, I could tell he was struggling with the decision about whether to hug me goodbye. I threw my arms around him first.

“Somewhere up there, Daddy is very grateful,” I said quietly, even though I knew Lyle was a staunch agnostic.

As soon as he left, I gave Sadie a call. Mama wasn’t speaking at all, she reported, still on IV fluids. The hospital wanted to keep her a few days for observation. Most important, she and Maddie were now tucked into a Worthington suite. I grabbed a Dr Pepper out of the fridge and headed to the porch swing with the four printouts from Lyle.

He’d found the girl with my numerical identity, Susan Bridget Adams, by simply paying a fee to a national genealogy website and browsing the Social Security Death Master File.

I had heard of the Social Security Administration index. Because of a cousin who was fanatically into that sort of thing, I knew it was widely used by genealogists. What I didn’t know was that it provided the Social Security number and date of birth and death for about sixty million people, plus the zip code of their last known address.

It was disturbing that the girl who shared my Social Security number was so easy to unearth. It certainly didn’t bolster my confidence in WITSEC, but then again, thirty-two years ago when I was born, who could have imagined this stuff would be right at your fingertips?

The last printout, a single page, was different. No website marking, no hint at all of where it came from. The page listed people named Adams as if it had been ripped out of a phone book, except that instead of addresses and phone numbers, it gave their Social Security number, date of death, and a file number with an asterisk. The asterisk was explained at the bottom of the page. Police case files. Suspicious deaths? I wondered. Had this info been hacked out of a government file?

Susan Bridget Adams, born in 1977, was highlighted in yellow marker right beside her police case file number. She died a three-year-old toddler. It was shocking to see the nine-digit number I’d recited automatically for years at doctors’ offices and banks beside the name of a little girl on an official death list, to know that her premature dying somehow brought me protection.

After swallowing the last drop of Dr Pepper, I headed back inside to my computer, praying the wireless internet gods were shining on me. And they were. I connected immediately and typed the zip code of Susan Adams’s last known address into the search engine. The zip code matched someplace on the south side of Chicago. More links to the Windy City.

Then I searched “Adams and genealogy.” With such a common name, I didn’t expect much but was rewarded twenty minutes later at a website ranked fourteen on Google’s list. A fuzzy black-and-white photograph of an angry-faced man named Uncle Eldon welcomed me to his surprisingly sophisticated page for the Adams Family.

I clicked “family tree” and almost immediately found “Susie” Bridget Adams and the single word description of her death: fall.

Her father still lived in the same Chicago zip code, possibly in the same home; her mother died in the late 1990s of cancer. It consoled me to see that she gave birth to five other children after Susie, all still living when the site was updated two months ago.

This page shared a link to “Southlawn Cemetery Records.” Once there, I typed in Susie’s name, all the while thanking Uncle Eldon for his overzealous details.

In seconds, the screen displayed a crude hand-drawn map, studded with coffin-shaped rectangles. I don’t know why it bothered me so much. I’d seen a similar computer-generated map two days before we buried Daddy. In little Susie’s case, someone scanned in the original pencil rendering in the old family plot where she rested.

Each rectangle bore a number. The numbers were assigned to ten names, all Adamses, all listed in old-fashioned, respectful calligraphy at the bottom of the page. It wasn’t hard to find little Susie’s coffin, a rectangle half the size of the others, crammed at an angle in the corner.

Grave number 426-Susie’s grave-wasn’t expected. Grave diggers had made room.

She had been reduced to another number, a piece of geometry on a page. I hit the “print” button and listened to Daddy’s machine down the hall clear its throat.

Frustration gnawed at me, mostly because I knew that I was only working on the periphery of my own story. Susie was a single, sad note that led to a Chicago gravesite, more proof of my family’s secrets, but little else.

An hour later, I lay on the couch wrapped in my old fluffy Peter Rabbit comforter. I was sailing on a highway with no speed limit after tossing five milligrams of Xanax from Daddy’s bottle down my throat and chasing it with a whiskey. The Rangers/Yankees game hummed pleasantly on the 42-inch TV nestled in the corner.

I closed my eyes and pictured my little place at Halo Ranch. The Tahitian beach scene that hung over the fireplace, the bright Mexican rug that covered the beat-up pine floor, a friend’s photograph in the tiny kitchen of a heart-patterned quilt blowing on a clothesline in a West Texas landscape as bare as the moon. I’d have to arrange to move all of it back home. And harder, I had to break the news to colleagues and kids at Halo that I wouldn’t be coming back.

I dozed and when I opened my eyes again, a large shape was slouched in Daddy’s chair.

And he had something gripped in his hand.

“You had me worried there for a second,” Jack Smith told me. “I knocked. Called your name a couple of times.”

His eyes lit on the prescription bottle on the coffee table and the empty glass. “How much did you take?”

“Not enough to kill me.” I tried to claw my way out of the fog. How did he get in? The object in his hand appeared to be a small vat of blood.

Jack transferred the prescription bottle out of my reach, onto the mantel.

“I make an excellent doctored-up Prego.” He held up the jar. He had a new sling, I noticed. Bright blue. “Are you in for dinner? I came by to do a little more research with you.”

Well, I was in no shape for that.

But, to my surprise, I was ravenous.

“Go for it,” I said, my eyes drifting closed.

He didn’t seem to expect any assistance in the kitchen and I was incapacitated enough not to give him any. He efficiently turned out a Caesar salad, warm French bread, and a decent “doctored” sauce piled with a mountain of snowy Parmesan cheese. He brought our plates out on two old metal Beatles TV trays he found in the pantry.

I didn’t want to think too deeply about where Jack learned to provide such a simple, warm act because then I’d have to accept Jack as a human being with actual feelings. One-dimensional asshole Jack was enough for me.

He hinted that he could spend the night so we’d be ready to get to work in the morning. In my chemically induced haze, this seemed perfectly logical. Like a civilized divorced couple, we agreed he could take over the guest room downstairs for the night. I told him where the sheets were. Making his bed seemed a little too intimate and I wasn’t sure how steady I’d be on my feet. He insisted on cleaning up the kitchen by himself and later, while I cuddled with Peter Rabbit and kept my eyes half-open to the game, he texted his boss.

As Jack settled in to watch the eighth inning of a Rangers blowout, I pushed myself up from the couch.

“Let me know how it ends,” I told him. “I’m going to bed.”

“I’ll go with you. Help you navigate the stairs.”

I shrugged and headed for the staircase, my comforter slung over my shoulder and trailing behind me, Linus-style. Jack caught me when I tripped on it a few steps from the top.

In my room, I kicked some clothes on the floor out of the way and fell on the bed, not bothering to untangle the sheets or say good night.

A wispy thought floated to the surface as I drifted again on that lovely sea.

Wasn’t it most likely that Anthony Marchetti was warning me about Jack?

Wouldn’t a reporter choose to do his research with a fellow reporter? Or by himself? Why the hell had I let my guard down?

Jack was busy at the window, checking the lock, pulling down the shade, before moving deliberately toward the bed.

He reached down, looming over me.

I wanted to protest but I couldn’t.

He grasped my wrist firmly.

He was feeling my pulse.

The last thing I remember is Jack’s silhouette, carved out by the hall light as he leaned against the doorframe.

I have no idea how long he stood there.