Still Lives(51)

I look up statistics on stalking: One in six women have been stalked, and more than half of those before the age of twenty-five. The average duration of stalking is almost two years. Stalkers of domestic or intimate partners are more likely to use violence than are stalkers of strangers. Homicide occurs in only two percent of stalking cases, but when it does, the stalker is usually an intimate partner: a husband, a boyfriend.

As I read this, my head grows dizzy and dizzier, as if the oxygen in the room is draining away.

I scan the e-mails from my parents and brothers, asking me to return their calls. My mother writes three times: first casually, about wrapping chicken wire around the apple tree that she and I once planted so that the deer won’t eat the buds; then worried that I am letting the news overburden me; then forcefully reminding me that she is my mother and she has a right to know if I’m safe.

In my mind’s eye, I can see her furrowed brow, her blond hair wound up in rollers, her trimmed but unmanicured fingers clattering the keys. I picture her on the day I learned of Nikki Bolio’s death. I am hiding in my bed in my cramped Burlington apartment when my mother storms in, her mud-season boots thudding the floor. “Are you in danger, too?” she demands. “Because if you are, I’m picking you up in my arms and taking you home.” And then she did, without waiting for a reply.

I’m safe, I type now. I’m doing okay. Really.

John also sends me a sample itinerary. I can fly out on Friday if you need me. I tell him no. I love John, but I can’t translate my life for my family right now. I just need to press deeper into it.

I read about why med school applicants get rejected: no clinical experience, lackluster academics, badly written documents. I’ll offer to edit Don’s application if he tries again next year.

I look up Rachel Lord, Toronto. There’s a record of a Rachel Lord arrested for being a public nuisance. Nothing else.

I look up Bas Jan Ader, and there’s a photo of a young man holding his head and weeping. I’m too sad to tell you is written across the frame in a delicate hand.

I get an e-mail from Ray Hendricks, who wants to interview me at nine tomorrow morning. A Ray Hendricks was an almost-famous musician in 1930s and ’40s Los Angeles. He played with the Benny Goodman Orchestra. A Ray Hendricks once pitched a no-hitter for a minor league baseball team. A Ray Hendricks is mentioned in an obituary in an Asheville, North Carolina, newspaper as the surviving half brother of a Calvin Teicher, a young art history lecturer, who was found dead in a Los Angeles hotel; it appears he fell in his bathroom and struck his head. Teicher also left behind his mother, Willow Teicher, sixty-two; his son, Nathaniel, four; and an ex-wife who lives in Florida. I search “Ray Hendricks North Carolina” and find another mention, in an article about state police busting up meth labs in the Smoky Mountains. Special Agent Ray Hendricks, a Boone native now working for the North Carolina Bureau of Investigation, calls meth “a scourge in our rural counties.” No picture accompanies either article, but I can’t help feeling it’s the same Ray Hendricks who is working as Janis Rocque’s private investigator.

Special Agent sounds impressive. A big career for a guy from a small mountain town like Boone. Is he out here for his job or for his half brother? Either way, I don’t buy his sleepy, laconic mask; underneath it, there’s something else playing on a loop, some huge grief or desperation. I’m too sad to tell you.

It’s getting colder and I want to go to bed, but my mind is not tired and I won’t sleep. I sit in the dark, staring into a box of illuminated fog, and hope for the miracle of Kim Lord’s life—hiding out or locked away, waiting to be found—instead of the commonplace fact of her death.

One last peek at my inbox.

A note from Yegina: Don said he’ll come. (!)

A note from Evie, who says she has unearthed a perplexing pattern in the provenance of Kim’s work: I’ve never seen anything like this. I’ll show you the list tomorrow.





TUESDAY





18

Mind if I shut this?” Ray Hendricks says, and waits for me to nod before closing my office door. I have a small office. Shutting the door makes it shrink to a pay-phone booth, tight and muffled. In this space, Hendricks is bigger than I thought he would be—he barely fits on the other side of my desk, but he doesn’t look uncomfortable as he sits. He has an easy looseness in his limbs. His eyes scan my shelves, roving over the spines of catalogs and copyediting books, then flickering to my window, my wilting ficus. They touch anything and everything but me.

Hendricks’s watchfulness is something that has perturbed me since the first night I saw him, at the Gala, wearing that horrendous mustardcolored jacket. Most people look at the world, but they don’t watch it. They don’t try to see what’s coming at them. Hendricks couldn’t have known the fallen earring was mine unless it was somehow loose in my ear that night. He wouldn’t have brought it the next day if he hadn’t guessed I was an employee at the Rocque. He was curious about me. And knowing that he might be from the same eastern mountain chain as I am, that he’s a detective, that his half brother died here in L.A., makes me curious about him. And unnerved. For all the time I spent with Jay Eastman learning how to interview sources, for all that Hendricks and I must be close in age, I feel amateurish in his presence, almost precarious. It’s as if inside me there’s a plate teetering on the edge of a table, and one false move could make it fall.