Leaving Time(51)

Ignoring him, I watch Jenna curl the necklace into her fist, squeeze her eyes shut. “Nothing,” she says after a moment.

“It’ll come,” I promise. “When you least expect it. You’ve got a lot of natural ability, I can tell. I bet you’ll remember something important when you’re brushing your teeth tonight.”

This is not necessarily true, of course. I’ve been waiting for years now, and I’m as dry as a bar in Salt Lake City.

“She’s not the only one who could use that to jog a memory,” Virgil says, thinking out loud. “Maybe the guy who gave it to Alice could tell us something.”

Jenna’s head snaps up. “My father? He can’t even remember my name half the time.”

I pat her arm. “No need to be embarrassed about the sins of the fathers. My daddy was a drag queen.”

“What’s wrong with that?” Jenna asks.

“Nothing. But he happened to be a very bad drag queen.”

“Well, my father’s in an institution,” Jenna says.

I look at Virgil over her head. “Ah.”

“Far as I know,” Virgil says, “no one ever went back to talk to your father, after your mom disappeared. Maybe it’s worth a try.”

I’ve done enough cold reading to be able to tell when a person is not being transparent. And right now, Virgil Stanhope is lying like a rug. I don’t know what his game is, or what he hopes to get out of Thomas Metcalf, but I’m not letting Jenna go with him alone.

Even if I swore I’d never go back into a psychiatric facility.

After the incident with the senator, I had a run of dark days. There was a lot of vodka involved, and some prescription medication. My manager at the time was the one who suggested I take a vacation, and by vacation, she meant a little sojourn at a psych ward. It was incredibly discreet—the kind of place that celebrities go to to refresh, which is Hollywoodspeak for get your stomach pumped, dry out, or have ECT. I was there for thirty days, long enough to know I would never let myself get that low again if it meant returning.

My roommate was a pretty little thing who was the daughter of a famous hip-hop artist. Gita had shaved off all her hair and had a line of piercings down the curve of her spine, linked by a thin platinum chain, which made me wonder how she slept on her back. She talked to an invisible posse that was absolutely real to her. When one of those imaginary people apparently came after her with a knife, she had run into traffic and gotten hit by a taxi. She was diagnosed as a paranoid schizophrenic. At the time I lived with her, she believed that she was being controlled by aliens through cell phones. Every time someone tried to send a text, Gita went ballistic.

One night, Gita started rocking back and forth in her bed, saying, “I’m gonna get struck by lightning. I’m gonna get struck by lightning.”

It was a clear summer night, mind you, but she wouldn’t stop. She kept this up, and an hour later, when a thunderstorm cell came sweeping through the area, she started to scream and rip at her own skin. A nurse came in, trying to calm her down. “Honey,” she said, “the thunder and the lightning are outside. You’re safe in here.”

Gita turned to her, and in that one moment I saw nothing but clarity in her eyes. “You know nothing,” she whispered.

There was a drumroll of thunder, and suddenly the window shattered. A neon arc of lightning staggered in, seared the rug, and burned a hole the size of a fist into the mattress beside Gita, who started rocking harder. “I told you I was gonna get struck by lightning,” she said. “I told you I was gonna get struck by lightning.”

I tell you this story by way of explanation: The people we define as crazy just might be more sane than you and me.

“My father’s not going to be helpful,” Jenna insists. “We shouldn’t even bother.”

Again, my cold reading skills shine: The way she cuts her eyes to the left like that, the way she is now chewing on her fingernail—Jenna’s lying, too. Why?

“Jenna,” I ask, “can you run to the car and see if I left my sunglasses in there?”

She gets up, more than happy to escape this conversation.

“All right.” I wait for Virgil to meet my gaze. “I don’t know what you’re up to, but I don’t trust you.”

“Excellent. Then we feel exactly the same way about each other.”

“What are you not telling her?”

He hesitates, deciding whether or not to trust me, I’m sure. “The night the caregiver was found dead, Thomas Metcalf was nervous. Antsy. It could have been because his wife and daughter were missing at the time. And it could have been because he was already showing signs of a breakdown. But it also could have been a guilty conscience.”

I lean back, crossing my arms. “You think Thomas is a suspect. You think Alice is a suspect. Seems to me you think everyone’s to blame except yourself, for saying in the first place that the death was an accident.”

Virgil looks up at me. “I think Thomas Metcalf might have been abusing his wife.”

“That’s a damn good reason to run away,” I say, thinking out loud. “So you want to meet with him and try to get a reaction out of him.”

When Virgil shrugs, I know I’m right.

“Did you ever consider what that might do to Jenna? She already thinks her mother abandoned her. You’re going to take off her rose-colored glasses and show her that her father was a bastard, too?”