The Dark Room(26)

“You found this where?”

“In his study.”

“How old were you?”

“Ten.”

“It wasn’t just sitting out,” Cain said. He switched off his light and put it away. “He wouldn’t leave this in plain sight.”

“It was under his desk. Upside down, on the floor.”

“Why did you take it?”

“Why wouldn’t I take it?” she asked. “Look at it. It’s wrong. It scared me—and attracted me, too. I wanted to know more.”

“After you took it, did he ever say anything to you about it?”

“Of course not.”

“But he must’ve asked if you’d been in his study.”

“Never.”

“He was normal, that day and the next few?”

“That day, he’d gone to Washington—to his apartment in D.C. I didn’t see him for two months. By then I was back in school, and I’d mostly forgotten about it. I’d found other things to do.”

“He’d left that day?”

“That morning.”

“What’d you think, when you found it? The first thing you thought.”

Alexa looked up at the sky, used one fingertip to trace her throat.

“That he’d dropped it when he was packing his briefcase,” she said. “It slid under the desk and he didn’t see it.”

“That’s what you thought then? When you were ten years old?”

“Then, and now, Mr. Cain,” Alexa said.

“The desk, how many drawers does it have?”

“Four,” she said, right away. “The big one’s on the bottom right.”

“Are they locked?”

“Just the one—the big one.”

“You’d never seen inside it?”

“Not then, and not now, either.”

“He still has the desk?”

“In his study,” Alexa said. “Upstairs.”

“Does he lock the room?”

“Not so much anymore.”

“But back then?”

“More often—but I knew where he kept the key.”

“Where?”

“His medicine cabinet,” she said. Again, there was no pause at all. “Behind the Clive Christian cologne.”

Cain wondered if it was possible to keep a secret from your own child.

“Why had you gone into his study?”

Her finger had traced down from her throat to the neckline of her dress.

“He had a Playboy collection in there, on the bookshelves. The old issues, from the fifties—you know the ones. I didn’t read them for the articles.”

“You didn’t—what?”

“Marilyn Monroe. Jayne Mansfield. Yvette Vickers—I wanted to see what a woman looked like.”

She reached behind her neck and undid something on her dress, then opened it from the back and slipped out of it. It only took her a second, and then it was hanging around her waist. She splayed her fingers into her hair and arched her back, presenting her bare breasts to him.

“Miss Castelli.”

She closed her eyes, turned her face toward the nearly dark sky.

“Yes?”

“Cover up.”

She dropped her hands to her hips, thumbs under the waistline of her hanging dress, and opened her eyes as if she’d just been struck with the greatest idea she’d ever had.

“Let’s go swimming!”

“No.”

“You don’t need a suit on this beach. Especially not at night.”

She pushed the dress off her hips, then flicked it at him with a kick of her toes. He stepped aside and it brushed past his face. He heard it hit the wet sand behind him.

“The water’s so cold, it makes you feel every part of yourself. You know—I mean, you know for certain—that you’re alive. You could dive under, when the water’s this cold, and breathe it in. You wouldn’t even know you’d drowned.”

“I’m keeping this,” Cain said. He put the photograph back into the plastic bag. “We’ll finish this conversation. Probably in an interrogation room.”

“Swim with me, Gavin Cain.”

“Good evening, Miss Castelli.”

He walked along the sand and then caught the concrete path up the hill to his car. He didn’t look back to see if she’d gone in the water.





10


“THAT WAS IT,” Cain said. “The last straw.”

He slid the fifth photograph onto the table, next to the other four. He’d told it to them chronologically, starting with Lieutenant Nagata’s call while he was at the exhumation in El Carmelo.

“I mean, keep in mind she answered the door in a towel. She’d known I was coming and she was waiting for me like that. Don’t forget that. And then for some reason, I still went and met her on the beach.”

“What are you saying?”

“I’m saying I shouldn’t have gone down there to begin with. But when Carmen Sternwood tossed her dress and asked me to go skinny-dipping, I finally got it. I took this, and I left.”

“Wait,” Grassley said. “Who’s Carmen Sternwood?”