The Key

52

Newark, New Jersey

The first thing Liv saw when they turned into her street was the incident tape flapping in the road ahead. The wind that came off the river had torn it away at one end and was whipping it from side to side like a black-and-yellow snake. Ski pulled up to the kerb, trapping it beneath the wheels of the cruiser, then cut the engine. In the sudden silence the tape chattered against the underside of the car.

‘We think the same guy who did the two homicides also did this,’ Ski said. ‘Good job you weren’t home, huh?’

Liv didn’t answer. She couldn’t. She had been so desperate to come home to try to make sense of everything, but now she had finally got here all she found was more chaos and destruction.

Her home was gone.

The white clapboard sides of the building were scorched above every boarded window and the glass that had filled them lay in glittering drifts on the ground. She popped the car door and stepped out into the freezing wind. She could still smell ash and charred wood in the air. Ski got out and joined her on the sidewalk.

‘What happened to the Da Costas?’ she asked, nodding at the cracked windows on the first floor.

‘They’re OK. They were at work when it happened. Fire started around three in the afternoon. The building’s been condemned. Everyone’s staying with family or friends, waiting for the insurance to kick in.’

Another piece of incident tape stretched across a plank of rough plywood that had been nailed in place where her door had been. It also snaked along the fence enclosing the tiny square of garden that had made her want the apartment in the first place.

When she’d moved in, the yard had been covered in concrete stained with oil from the previous owner’s Harley. She’d broken it all up herself, exposing the soil beneath and planting it with native seeds and shrubs, returning it to how it might have looked when man had first settled here. She had often laid on the patch of grass at the centre of her tiny garden, staring up at the sky — the ivy strategically blocking the view of one wall, the branches of the cherry tree the other — imagining she was lying in a long-ago forest, far away from her modern-day troubles.

Her apartment had been full of plants too, a remnant of growing up with an organic horticulturalist father who’d taught her to name all the plants at the same time as she’d learned her A-B-Cs. He’d always thought it weird that she’d ended up working as a big-city journalist, living in a concrete jungle when she had the earth in her soul. Maybe it had been her way of rebelling. Maybe she was just nosy. Either way, her apartment, with her plants and her flowers and the rich smell of earth and oxygen, was her sanctuary — her home.

And now someone had taken it all from her. She walked over and pulled some tape away, stepping through a broken gap in the fence and into her ruined garden.

Blackened pieces of furniture had been thrown in a large pile in the centre: a splintered table she had inherited when her dad died, some stubs of burned books, a mattress with a fitted sheet still clinging to it, and a few framed photographs, smoke-damaged but visible. She picked one up: it showed a vibrantly happy version of herself in a rowing boat on the lake in Central Park. Next to her was Samuel. For a moment she felt a rush of fury at him for bringing all this destruction upon her and leaving her alone in the world among the charred remains of her former life. But she was too tired to hold on to it for long. She was too tired to do anything and would have laid down right there in the mud had Ski not pulled her into a rough but well-meaning hug. She sobbed into his meaty shoulder, feeling wretched and alone, breathing in the comforting cop-car smell of him.

‘Come on,’ he said, stroking her back awkwardly, ‘let it all go. You got someplace to go, someone you can call, ’cept me?’ She shook her head. He held on and let her ride it out, working out what he might say that would make it better. Ski was no good at small talk at the best of times and this was far from that.

‘I’d let you crash at my place,’ he offered, ‘but to be honest my ma would drive you nuts with all her questions. She’s seen you on the news. You’d be like a celebrity. She’d probably invite her friends round and everything. Come on, let’s get in the car. It’s freezing out here. Crying ain’t going to bring none of this stuff back. Let me see if I can’t fix you up with something.’