The Book of Cold Cases(2)

My divorce was still new. I had no kids. My place was small, smelled of paint, and only contained the bare necessities of furniture. But it wasn’t the worst life I could have. I’d known since I was nine that I was lucky to have any life at all.

On the bus, I pulled out my phone, put my earbuds in my ears, and played the audiobook I was in the middle of listening to. A thriller: a woman in danger, most of the characters possibly lying, everything not quite as it seemed. A twist somewhere near the end that would either shock me or wouldn’t. There were dozens of books just like it, hundreds maybe, and they were the soundtrack of my life. The woman’s voice in my earbuds told me about death, murder, deep family secrets, people who shouldn’t be trusted, lies that cost lives. But a novel always ends, the lies come to the surface, and the deaths are explained. Maybe one of the bad characters gets away with something—that’s fashionable right now—but you are still left with a sense that things are balanced, that dark things come to light, and that the bad person will, at least, most likely be miserable.

It was dark comfort, but it was still comfort. I knew my own tally by heart: My would-be killer had been in prison for nineteen years, seven months, and twenty-six days. His parole hearing was in six months.

Work was a doctor’s office in downtown Claire Lake. I was a receptionist, taking calls, filing charts, making appointments. As I came through the door, I pulled the earbuds from my ears and gave my coworkers a smile, shaking off all of the darkness and death.

“Busy day,” Karen, the other receptionist, said, glancing at me, then away again. “We open in twenty.”

We weren’t bosom friends, my coworkers and I, even though I had worked here for five years. The other women here were married with kids, which meant we had nothing much in common since my divorce. I hadn’t talked to any of them about the divorce, except to say it had happened. And I couldn’t add to the conversations about daycares and swimming programs. The doctors didn’t socialize with any of us—they came and went, expecting the mechanism of the office to work without much of their input.

I took off my jacket and put on my navy blue scrub top, shoving my phone and purse under the desk. I could probably make friends here if I tried. I was attractive enough, with long dark hair that I kept tied back, an oval face, and dark eyes. At the same time, I didn’t have the kind of good looks that threaten other women. I was standoffish—I knew that. It was an inescapable part of my personality, a tendency I couldn’t turn off no matter how much therapy I did. I didn’t like people too close, and I was terrible at small talk. My therapists called it a defense mechanism; I only knew it was me, like my height or the shape of my chin.

But my lack of gregariousness wasn’t the only reason my coworkers gave me a wide berth. Though they didn’t say anything to me, a rumor had gotten out in my first week; they all knew who I was, what I had escaped. And they all knew what I did in the evenings, the side project that consumed all of my off-hours. My obsession, really.

They probably all thought it wasn’t healthy.

But I’ve always believed that murder is the healthiest obsession of all.



* * *



—

“Don’t tell me,” my sister, Esther, said on the phone. “You’re hibernating again.”

“I’m fine,” I said. It was after work, and I was at my local grocery store, the Safeway in the plaza within walking distance to Singles Estates. I put cereal in my cart as I shoulder-pinned the phone to my ear. “I’m grabbing some groceries and going home.”

“I told you to come over for dinner. Will and I want to see you.”

“It’s raining.”

“This is Claire Lake. It’s always raining.”

I looked at a carton of almond milk, wondering what it tasted like. “I know you worry about me, but I’m fine. I just have work to do.”

“You already have a job. The website isn’t paid work.”

“It pays enough.”

My big sister sighed, and the sound gave me a twinge of sadness. I really did want to see her, along with her husband, Will, a lawyer who I liked quite a lot. Esther was one of the only people who really mattered to me, and even though she gave me grief, I knew she tried hard to understand me. She’d had her own guilt and trauma over what had happened to me. She had her own reasons to be paranoid—to hibernate, as she put it. The difference was, Esther didn’t hibernate. She had a husband and a house and a good job, a career.

“Just tell me you’re trying,” Esther said. “Trying to get out, trying to do something, trying to meet new people.”

“Sure,” I said. “Today I met a man who has a hernia and a woman who would only say she has a ‘uterus problem.’?” I put the almond milk down. “I’m not sure what a ‘uterus problem’ is, and I don’t think I’m curious.”

“If you wanted to know, you could look in her file and find out.”

“I never look in patients’ files,” I told her. “You know that. I answer phones and deal with appointment times, not diagnoses. Looking in a patient file could get me fired.”

“You make no sense, Shea. You won’t look at patients’ medical files, but you’ll talk about murders and dead bodies on the internet.”

I paused, unpinning my phone from my shoulder. “Okay, that’s actually a good point. I get that. But does it mean that in order to be consistent, I should be more nosy or less?”