The Silent Hour

34

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The summer went down quietly. The heat broke and the humidity dropped and the kids went back to school. The Indians put together one of their classic late-season runs to ensure you’d spend the winter with that bitter oh-so-close taste in your mouth. The gym attracted a few new members. The PI office stayed closed and locked.

Joe came back to town in the middle of September. He’d been gone for more than nine months without a single trip back, and when he opened up his house and stepped inside and looked around, I couldn’t read his feelings.

“So much dust,” he said. He’d left Florida at the end of August but headed west instead of north, making the drive to Idaho with Gena. Just keeping her company on a long drive, he’d said. He spent two weeks there, though, and I wondered if it had been a scouting trip of sorts. He’d told me the two of them had not made any future plans but had also not closed any doors. I left it at that.

We reopened the office on the last day of September and devoted a morning to cleaning and reorganizing. We’d share the background check duties and the profits. It wouldn’t be enough to support both of us, but that was okay—we each had a supplemental income, mine through the gym and Joe’s through his police pension. The screenings provided extra cash as well as something to do.

By mid-October we’d developed a comfortable rhythm, spending a few mornings a week in the office together, processing reports and requesting local court record checks where we needed them. It felt good to have Joe back, good to exchange some of our old jabs and barbs. What we were doing was not detective work, not in any sense that I’d come to know, but it was important, too. We routinely discovered applicants with criminal charges in their histories, from misdemeanors to felonies. These were the kind of people you didn’t want in your employ, the sort who could bring real problems inside the walls of your company. In some circumstances, the charges were very old—ten, fifteen, twenty years—but we recorded them just the same. Old charges or not, there was a risk factor associated with the hiring of those people, and our new employer didn’t want to take that risk. Couldn’t afford to, they told us. Not in this day and age.

It was late October when I heard from Quinn Graham. He called the office and seemed surprised when I answered.

“I thought you’d quit.”

“Just case work. We’ve got some other things on the table.”

“I see.”

“What’s up, Graham? You got something?”

“No,” he said, and I could hear embarrassment in his voice. “Not the sort of thing you’re looking for, at least.”

“Then what is it?”

“Thought you might like to know that Joshua Cantrell’s parents won their case yesterday.”

“Alexandra’s legally declared dead?”

“Yeah, that happened a few weeks back, actually. Yesterday they came to a settlement. The house is going to be claimed by the estate and sold.”

“Money split between them and Sanabria?”

“No. Sanabria’s attorneys showed up and said he wanted no part of it. Went through whatever legal process they had to for him to waive his interest. It all goes to the Cantrells now.”

At least that bastard wasn’t taking the money. It wasn’t much, but it helped.

“They going to put the house on the market soon?” I asked.

“Immediately, is my understanding.”

We talked a little while longer, and he told me that a few weeks earlier he had made an arrest in the case of the murdered girls that he’d been working that summer. The perp was a thirty-year-old graduate student at Penn State who was working on a thesis about pornography. I was glad Graham got him. I was glad he’d told me about it, too. It was good to know these things.

Two days later a short article ran in the newspaper. It wasn’t much, but it explained the legal situation and announced the pending sale of the house. Asking price hadn’t been set yet but was rumored to be around four million. The Cantrell family was considering subdividing the land, though, so there would be a delay in the sale while they studied their options.

The morning the article ran, I stopped in the office and asked Joe if he could handle a few days without me.

“Where you going to be?”

“Sitting in the woods with binoculars and a camera.”

He looked at me for a long time without speaking.

“I know you’ll think it’s crazy,” I said, “but I want to watch that house.”

“The Cantrell house? You want to watch it?”

I nodded. “I want to see who shows.”

“What makes you think anyone will except a Realtor?”

“Because that place is sacred to people, Joe. Was, at least. I’d like to know if anyone comes to say goodbye.”

“Alexandra?”

“I don’t know. There might be a chance. Or maybe Dominic. Or Harrison. Or somebody else entirely.”

He frowned. “Even if someone does—and I have trouble believing that anyone will—what the hell will that tell you?”

I didn’t answer that. Couldn’t. Still, I wanted to see it. I was remembering Ken Merriman’s remark that day on Murray Hill. She had a damn epitaph carved beside the door. That place means something to her. So let me tell you—if she’s alive, I bet she’ll come back to see it again.

“If you feel it’s worth a shot, then knock yourself out,” Joe said. He paused, then said, “Hell, maybe I could take a day or two at it with you. Been a while since I did any surveillance. Old time’s sake, why not, right?”

We logged a full week at it. I spent more time there than Joe, rising early each morning and sitting until dusk each night, but he put in plenty of hours. I didn’t think it was wise to sit inside the gate, so instead we parked up the road and watched.

In the first two days, there was a decent amount of activity, but it was casual interest, people who drove up to the gate and then pulled back out and went on their way. The newspaper story had sparked some curiosity, that was all.

On the third day, someone drove a black BMW up to the gate, unlocked it, and drove through. I was intrigued by that one until the driver stepped out of the car, and then I recognized him as Anthony Child. Checking on the property one last time, maybe, before it was taken out of his care. He would probably be glad to see the hassle go.

The next afternoon there were more visitors. An old van arrived just after one and parked at the end of the drive. I watched through my long-range camera lens as the doors opened and two men stepped out—Parker Harrison from the passenger side and a rangy, gray-haired guy I’d never seen from the driver’s seat. The gray-haired guy was carrying a bouquet of flowers. He kept them in his hand as he and Harrison walked around the gate and began to fight their way up through the woods, just as I had in the spring. I snapped a few pictures before they disappeared into the trees, including one clear shot of the van and the license plate.

Joe had been out with me for the morning but left around noon. I called him at the office now. “Guess who’s here. Parker Harrison.”

“Really?”

“Uh-huh. Just showed up with another guy I didn’t recognize, and they aren’t in Harrison’s truck. You want to run the plate for me?”

I gave him the license number, and a few minutes later he called back and told me the truck was registered to a Mark Ruzity.

“Mean anything to you?”

“Yeah. He was another of Alexandra’s murderers. The first one.”

“What do you think they’re doing?”

“Paying respects,” I said. “He brought flowers, Joe. I’m telling you, the place is a damn memorial at this point.”

Ruzity and Harrison came back out twenty minutes later, sans flowers, and got back into the truck and drove away.

So now I had an answer. I’d seen what I told him I wanted to see, and yet I knew nothing more than I had before. Ken’s bizarre prediction—she’ll come back to see it—was as foolish as I should have known it was.

I stayed, though. For the rest of that day, and the three that followed. By the end of the week I was starting to lose my mind from sitting in one spot so long, and Joe was quiet on the topic, which meant he thought it was time to give up. Even Amy asked how much longer I intended to keep watch, and her tone made her feelings clear—it was time to call the surveillance off.

I told them I wanted one more day. Spent twelve hours watching that lonely drive and the gate and didn’t see a soul.

“You knew it was a long shot anyhow,” Amy said. “Time to let it pass.”

I agreed with her, told her the whole thing had gone on too long. Then the next morning I got up and took my camera and my binoculars and drove back and watched nothing. I did it the day after that, too, then came home and told Amy I’d spent the day at the gym. The next morning I rose before dawn and returned.

That was the coldest day of the fall so far, and by seven my coffee was gone and the sun wasn’t even up yet and the chill had already filled the cab of the truck and gone to work on my knotted back and shoulder muscles. It was time to quit, I realized. This was lunacy, or close to it.

I was parked just off the road beside a cluster of saplings and brush, squeezed in the back of the extended cab with blackout curtains hung in the windows. I’d now spent about a hundred hours in this position, the most surveillance time I’d logged on a case in years, and I wasn’t making a dime from it.

When the headlights crested the hill and slowed near the drive, I didn’t even lift my camera. I’d seen too many cars pass to get excited about this one. Then it came to a complete stop, and I sat up and pushed the blackout curtain farther aside and watched as the car—a small red sedan—turned into the gravel track and drove right up to the gate. I finally got my shit together then, reached for the camera and got it up and turned on as the driver’s door swung open. My zoom was good, but it wasn’t built for low-light conditions, and all I could see in the predawn gloom was that the driver looked like a woman, and she was walking around the gate and through the trees. She was walking toward the house.