The Zero Night

38

A stalled car in the westbound lanes of the Superior bridge slowed Gavin on his way back to Duluth. When he finally pulled into their driveway, he noticed that the upstairs lights were off. The house was dark. He wondered if Chelsey had gone back to bed. He parked the car outside the garage, grabbed the pizza box, and went inside. Rather than call out to his wife, he climbed the steps in the darkness.

On the main level, he smelled the acrid waft of cigarette smoke. There was a breath of cold air through what must have been an open window. He could see the lights of the city glowing beyond the far end of the house, and when he headed that way, he saw Chelsey sitting in an armchair near the open door to the deck. She was almost invisible in the shadows of the porch. As he watched, she exhaled a cloud of smoke. Chelsey didn’t smoke often, but when she did, he knew that something was wrong.

“Sorry it took me a while,” Gavin said. “There was traffic.”

He reached for the light switch, but Chelsey stopped him. “No, don’t. I like it dark.”

“Okay.”

Gavin put the pizza on the counter of the wet bar. “I should probably heat this up before we eat.”

“It doesn’t matter. I’m not hungry anymore.”

“Oh. That’s fine.”

He went behind the bar and poured himself a generous quantity of gin. He inhaled the aroma of the drink, enjoyed a sip, then took it to the open patio door.

“Are you okay?” he asked.

“Actually, I’m perfect now.”

“Really? Well, that’s good news. I’m glad to hear it.”

“Are you going to get me a drink, too?” Chelsey asked.

“I can, but are you up for it? Maybe you should wait a while before trying alcohol again.”

“Vodka tonic,” she snapped, ignoring his warning.

“Fine.”

As he returned to the bar, she added, “Let me see you make it.”

Gavin stopped. “What?”

“I’d rather make sure you don’t put anything in it,” Chelsey explained.

“Are you kidding?”

“You did it once before. Ecstasy, don’t you remember?”

“Yes, I do. And I remember that it was your idea to try it, not mine. You asked me to get some. You said you wanted to see what it was like, see how it made you feel. Everything is drama with you, Chelsey.”

“Well, I need drama, darling, because life with you is so goddamn boring.”

He closed his eyes. A roaring filled his head. He breathed through his nose, his anger growing along with his humiliation. “Do we have to do this again? Now?”

“What? You were expecting me to come back as the devoted wife?”

“Hardly.”

“Did you think I’d get rescued and suddenly fall back into your arms?” she sneered.

“No. I knew you’d never change.”

“That’s better. What a fake you are, Gavin. ‘We’ll get counseling.’ ‘I’m so relieved you’re safe.’ Who do you think you’re talking to?”

He swore through clenched teeth. “God! You’re such a bitch!”

“There you go,” she retorted with a sparkling burst of laughter. “That’s the most honest thing you’ve said to me in years. Get it all out. Tell me how you really feel, Gavin.”

He was tired of lying. Tired of pretending. “I hate your fucking guts.”

“Good for you. It’s refreshing to see you show some balls for once in your life.”

He did feel better. He liked saying it out loud after all this time. “I hate the sight of you. I loathe waking up to you in my bed. You make me feel utterly worthless. Like a total failure.”

“That’s because you are worthless, darling. You are a total failure.”

“Stop it!”

“Oh, no, we can’t stop now. This is too good. Go on. Tell me more. What did you think when you found out I was gone?”

“I was hoping you were dead.”

“Of course, you were. I bet it was hard pretending to be upset when you talked to the police.”

“It was.”

“‘Oh, my loving wife! She’s gone!’ Good thing you’re such a fraud.”

“I’ve had plenty of practice.”

“But it must have been such a shock when they found me,” Chelsey said, making an exaggerated frown.

“They told me you were alive, and I wanted to puke.”

“Aw, you poor thing.”

Gavin stalked away to the patio door. His nostrils flared as he inhaled the evening air on the hillside. He downed his gin and wiped his mouth. Then, with a roar, he took his empty lowball glass and hurled it over the railing toward the trees. He turned back to his wife, and his lip curled with revulsion.

“We’re finally down to it, aren’t we?” he said from the gloom.

“Yes, we are. No more lies. All our cards on the table. It’s better this way, isn’t it?”

“You’re right.”

“Admit it. You’ve wanted to be rid of me for years.”

“Of course, I have. And I’m going to be rid of you, too. I’m going to take every fucking dollar in the divorce. All three million. There’s nothing you can do about it. You can go whore yourself out on the street for all I care.”

“Charming.”

The night seemed to get deeper. He couldn’t look away from his wife. He stared at Chelsey, and she stared back at him. His eyes had adjusted, and he could see now that she’d changed clothes. When he looked harder, he saw streaks of dirt on her hands and face.

“Did you go somewhere?” he asked, immediately suspicious.

“Yes, I did.”

“Where? What were you doing?”

She gave him a cold smile. “Geocaching.”

“What?”

Chelsey reached down to the brick hearth in front of the fireplace. For the first time, he noticed a padded plastic bag in the shadows there. It had been ripped open at the top. She lifted it and put it on her lap.

“Razrsharp sent you a message,” she said.

“Razrsharp? What are you talking about?”

“The police said you told them that an anonymous email account had sent you to the woods where I was found. That sounded odd to me, Gavin. Very, very odd. So I looked in your account and found that Razrsharp had sent you more GPS coordinates. I decided to see what treasure he’d hidden for you this time.”

He studied the bag. “What’s in it? What did you find?”

“Are you saying you don’t know?” She dug a hand deep into the bag and removed a semiautomatic pistol that she placed on the arm of the chair. It was a 9 mm Glock. “This is what was inside. Your gun, Gavin.”

He stared wide-eyed at the Glock. And then at his wife.

A chill rippled up his spine.

“What do you think, darling?” she asked him. “Is this the gun that killed Hink Miller? Because I think it is. I’m going to give it to the police.”

“I don’t know anything about that gun. I don’t know how it got there.”

“Do you really expect anyone to believe you, Gavin? The police already think you’re a liar. After they test this gun, they’re going to arrest you for murder.”

“Let them try. I’ll embarrass them in court.”

She counted off on her fingers. “Your gun. Your client. You scouting the woods in the middle of nowhere right where I was found.”

“Razrsharp did this. It’s him.”

“Who is Razrsharp?”

“I have no idea.”

She was quiet for a long time. “I’m betting the police will think it’s you.”

“That’s crazy.”

“Is it, Gavin? Without this Razrsharp, this mystery man, everything points to you. He’s your alibi for being in the woods. He’s your alibi for the murder weapon.”

“He’s the one. It’s not me.”

Chelsey pursed her lips in thought. The back of her hand grazed the butt of the gun on the armchair. “While I was waiting for you, I got a strange phone call.”

“From who?”

“Maggie Bei of the Duluth Police.”

“What did she want?”

“She wants to talk to me tomorrow. They’re looking into the hit-and-run again. Jonah’s death.”

“Jonah?” Gavin asked. “What does he have to do with anything?”

“Ms. Bei didn’t say, but I could read between the lines. They’re wondering if you had something to do with the accident that killed him.”

“Me? Why the hell would I—?”

“For the money.”

“Kill Jonah?” Gavin felt the walls begin to close around him, the ceiling to come down on his head. “Murder my own sister’s husband over money? And then wait for her to die? That’s the sickest thing I ever heard. No one will believe that.”

Chelsey shook her head slowly back and forth. He followed it like the swinging of a pendulum. “You’re wrong, darling. Everyone will believe that. You know they will. Just like everyone will believe you wanted me dead.”

His eyelids narrowed until they were practically closed. His teeth clamped together. His face flushed. He could feel the heat of his skin burning like the summer sun. He took a step toward Chelsey, but her fingers covered the gun.

Gavin stopped where he was.

They stared at each other. Husband and wife. The air crackled with violence. In his head, he measured the distance to the gun and the time it would take to get to it. She saw him making his calculations. Her body coiled like a taut spring, as if she knew exactly what he was planning. As if she were daring him to try.

“What now, Gavin?” Chelsey asked calmly. “What happens next?”

Serena drove through the open gate into the self-storage facility in Proctor. Delaney sat next to her in anxious silence. The facility wasn’t large, just a long warehouse next to the trees, with a row of white metal doors marking individual storage units. The area around the warehouse was unpaved. Serena drove down the length of the building and stopped outside the unit number that Delaney had given her.

She looked at the teenager. “Are you up for this?”

Delaney shrugged. “I guess I had to come here sooner or later. I’ve had the key for a long time, but I never used it. Gramps arranged for Mom’s stuff to be moved over here. If it had been up to me, I would have just given it all away. But he thought someday I might want to see it again.”

“I can go in there by myself if you prefer.”

“No, I’ll come, too.”

They got out of the Mustang. The location of the facility wasn’t far from the interstate, and they could hear the roar of traffic on I-35 to the south. The night sky overhead was clear. Delaney took a small key ring from her pocket and fumbled with the keys in the darkness. Serena used her flashlight to make it easier. When the girl had isolated the correct key, she unlocked the unit, and Serena bent down and opened the door. Inside, she located a light switch, which illuminated a single LED bulb overhead.

The unit had a musty, shut-up smell. Cobwebs dangled from the corners of the ceiling. It was crowded with furniture, chairs balanced on top of sofas, mattresses and box springs propped against the walls, and boxes of clothes and kitchenware stacked high in precarious towers. There was almost no room to move among the remnants of a lost life.

Delaney hesitated in the doorway. She took one tentative step, then ran a hand across the dusty surface of an oak dresser. “I can still feel her here,” she murmured. “Like time was standing still, you know?”

“Possessions have a life force,” Serena said. “It’s like the memories inside them are frozen, and suddenly they thaw out.”

“Yeah.” The girl sniffled and wiped her nose. “I really miss her.”

“I know you do.”

“Do you miss your mom, too? Despite what she did?”

Serena put an arm around Delaney. “Actually, I do. It feels strange to say that, but I do. She was abusive to me in horrible ways. But I wish she was still alive, even if it just meant I could scream at her again.”

“I yelled at my mom once,” Delaney said. “I put her in a cold shower when she was drunk. I told her she had to quit, she had to get help, she was killing herself, she was killing me. I told her I... I told her that I hated her. I felt awful saying that. But she got sober for a few months after that. Then it all came back. It always came back sooner or later.”

“I know.”

“This man you talked about,” Delaney said. “Gavin Webster. Can you show me his picture again?”

Serena took her phone and found the best photograph she had of Gavin. She enlarged it to zoom in on his face. Delaney took the phone and stared at the man long and hard. Then she shook her head.

“I don’t remember him. He’s not one of the ones I found in her bed.”

“And your mom never mentioned his name? She didn’t talk about him?”

“I don’t think so.”

“Did you meet most of the men your mom dated?” Serena asked.

“No, there were a lot of nights when she didn’t come home.”

“She left you alone?”

“Yeah, but that was okay. I knew how to take care of myself.”

“How old were you when that started?”

“I’m not sure. Nine, ten.”

Serena shook her head. She wanted to say: No, that was not okay.

“I get what you’re trying to do,” Delaney went on, “but I think you’re wrong. I don’t see how the accident could have been anything other than what it was. It was our truck. Mom got drunk and hit somebody.”

“I’m not so sure about that,” Serena insisted.

“But why?”

“Because I think there was a connection between Gavin and your mom, even if you don’t remember him. That’s why I want to find the records that Nikki kept from the Fallon wedding. Maybe there’s something in there to tie the two of them together.”

“Well, we can look,” Delaney agreed, but she didn’t sound hopeful.

They squeezed their way through the storage unit. With her flashlight, Serena spotted dead bugs and mouse droppings on the concrete floor. Their footsteps disturbed the dust, and she had to cover her mouth as she coughed. They reached the back wall without finding any business records, and Serena was beginning to wonder if Delaney’s grandfather had jettisoned his daughter’s files when emptying the house. Then Delaney tugged on her sleeve and said, “There.”

Several bankers boxes were stacked like children’s blocks on a wooden kitchen table in a far corner of the unit. They were labeled in neat square letters with black marker. Serena illuminated each of the boxes until she found one labeled Susan & Jonah Fallon. She had to shift several other boxes to retrieve it.

“I remember that wedding,” Delaney commented.

“You were there?”

“Yeah, I was at the reception helping my mom. I told you, that was one of her first big jobs. She was really stressed about getting everything right. Mrs. Fallon rented out this beautiful private estate in Cloquet for the event. I think it belonged to an old lumber baron years ago. It was super elegant and old-fashioned. Mom did different themes for the food in each room. The whole thing was great. I was so proud of her.”

“Did you meet the bride and groom?”

“Sure. I liked Mrs. Fallon. Some of the women Mom did events for, they were pretty stuck-up. But Mrs. Fallon was sweet, easy to like. She said it was her wedding, but my mom was the food expert, and she wanted her to run the show. I thought that was cool.”

“And Jonah Fallon?”

“I only met him on that day. I don’t remember him very well. He was handsome, I think. A big man.”

“But you don’t remember Gavin? Susan’s brother?”

Delaney shook her head. “No. I’m sorry.”

Serena took the box in her arms. “Well, let’s look at this in the car, okay?”

She brought the box to the Mustang and helped Delaney relock the storage unit. Inside the car, she removed the lid and began to methodically examine the papers in the box. Nikki Candis may have been an alcoholic in her personal life, but she kept neat, organized records related to her business. Everything about the event was in a separate folder: menu and recipes, food orders, equipment orders, wine and alcohol, serving staff. As she pulled out the folders, she also noticed a computer thumb drive in the bottom of the box.

“Do you know what this is?” she asked Delaney.

The girl nodded. “Mom took pictures of everything. I helped her with that. She wanted a complete record of every event, so we got photos of the food, serving trays, decorations, everything. During the reception, I took a lot of pics, so Mom could see which rooms were crowded and which weren’t, what people liked and what they didn’t, that kind of thing. She was really serious about research. I mean, that’s what’s so frustrating. She was good at what she did. The business could have been huge. But—”

“But she had a disease,” Serena said.

“Yeah.”

Serena reached around to the back seat and grabbed her laptop. She booted it up with Nikki’s thumb drive in the USB port, then loaded the photographs and examined them one by one. The early pictures had been taken before the event began, showing elaborate presentations of gourmet food. Later, Delaney had taken photographs while the reception was in progress. The girl had gone from room to room in the Cloquet estate. The library. The formal dining room. The gallery. The screened porch. Then outside, in the nighttime garden, near an elaborate fountain. There was a large white tent on the lawn where a dance floor had been built and a small live orchestra played. Delaney had been thorough, capturing multiple shots in every location.

Serena saw several pictures of Susan and Jonah Fallon together, bride and groom. She wore an off-the-shoulder white dress and tiara; he was in a charcoal-gray tux. She had curly hair like her brother, and their faces had a family resemblance, although her eyes were brown, not luminous blue. Her smile radiated pure joy. Jonah Fallon looked as Delaney had described him, magnetic and handsome, with a fit build. Serena had seen him before, but only in pictures of his broken body by the side of the road.

“I always think it’s weird to see pictures like this, when people don’t know what the future holds,” Delaney commented. “And how bad it’s going to be.”

“At least they had a beautiful wedding.”

“Yeah, and a year later, he’d be dead, and she’d have cancer. Sucks.”

Serena nodded. She kept going through the pictures.

She spotted Gavin a couple of times. He was in a black tux, dancing with his sister, then sitting at a table with his parents. Chelsey wasn’t with him. And there was no sign of Nikki Candis in the pictures at all. There was absolutely nothing to suggest that Gavin and Nikki had met at the reception. If they’d had a relationship that started here, it had happened outside the camera’s eye.

“Where was your mother?” she asked.

“Mostly in the kitchen,” Delaney said. “Occasionally, she’d go from room to room and check on things, but not for long. That’s the thing, Serena. She was busy that whole evening. She didn’t interact with any of the guests. She didn’t have time for that. I don’t think you’re going to find what you want to find.”

Serena nodded. “Unfortunately, I think you’re right.”

But she kept looking through the rest of the pictures anyway. One by one. Studying the faces. Then she stopped. She saw a photograph; it registered in her brain; she moved on to the next one. But almost immediately, she backed up to see it again. With a click of the mouse, she enlarged the picture to zoom in on the faces.

She recognized both of them with a wave of shock.

Two faces. A man and a woman.

Two faces in a corner of the garden, near the bubbling water of the fountain, lit only by twinkling fairy lights strung over their heads. But there was enough light in the picture to see them stealing a secret kiss. It was a passionate kiss, full of erotic energy and desire, the kiss of two hungry people enmeshed in a torrid affair.

“Oh my God,” Serena murmured in horror.

She knew.

She knew what had happened and why. From then until now. From the beginning of the murder conspiracy until the very end. It was all there in that one picture.

And it wasn’t over.

Delaney stared at her. “What is it?”

“I was wrong,” Serena said. “All of us — me, Stride, Maggie. We were wrong about everything.”