Goodnight Beautiful(64)
“This is Dr. Statler’s wife,” Sheehy says. “I want you to show her the footage.”
The cop slides to the desk, turns a monitor so it’s facing Annie. She sees a frozen image of a blurry car, which starts to move when the cop hits the keyboard. It’s Sam’s Lexus driving into unit 12. A figure appears on the screen a few moments later. A man. He has his back to the camera as he slides the door shut and then takes an umbrella from under his arm and opens it. His face is obstructed by the umbrella when he turns to the camera, and the cop freezes the video. “This is the best we got,” the cop says.
“Can you make it any bigger?” Annie asks. The cop zooms in and then stands up to offer Annie the chair. She sits and leans close to the screen, her heart aching as she recognizes the jacket. A Brooks Brothers’ Madison Fit Wool Reserve Blazer in classic navy. The one she picked out for him, the one he kept at his office.
“Can you confirm that’s your husband?” Sheehy says. She nods, unable to speak.
Sheehy heaves a heavy sigh. “Sorry, Annie. I know this isn’t easy.”
The room feels claustrophobic. “Can you take me home?”
“Of course. Let me tell my sergeant.”
She stands up and walks outside. Two men in nylon jackets are standing near the gate, lighting their cigarettes from a shared match. “I knew this guy’s old man,” one says as she passes. “Guess it’s true what they say. Like father, like son.”
Chapter 45
Something buzzes in Sam’s ear, and he opens his eyes.
It’s pitch-black and cold.
He’s on all fours, in the middle of the street, just over the bridge. He can see Sidney Pigeon’s house, a hundred feet away. A light is on upstairs, and a figure is standing at the window. Squinting, Sam makes out bushy brown curls under a baseball hat. The window is open, and he’s waving at Sam. “You see me!” Sam yells, waving back, elated. “It’s me! Sam Statler!” He starts cackling, waiting for the kid to rush from the window and down the stairs, where he’ll spring into Sidney’s living room and find an adult to call 911. But the kid isn’t doing that. Instead, he keeps waving, and suddenly Sam realizes he’s got it wrong. The kid isn’t gesturing to him; he doesn’t even see him. He is clearing smoke from the joint in his hand and then he’s closing the window, turning off the light, and vanishing.
Sam rolls onto his back, tasting the sour tang of blood in his mouth. Headlights are approaching the hill; a car is coming. It’s going to be Sidney, on her way back from the gym. She’s going to spring from her minivan and ask him what on earth he’s doing on the pavement in weather like this . . .
The moths come at him again, and he opens his eyes, the bile rising in his gut, as he remembers the kick to his face and realizes he’s not outside. He’s back in the house, locked inside the room. He pulls himself up to sit and feels along the wall until he reaches the door. “Come out, come out wherever you are,” he croaks. His throat is sore and his mouth is killing him; he reaches up to his cheek and discovers a deep gash. “It’s time to change my clothes and give me a shave, Albert. You don’t want me to call Home Health Angels and report you for violating the first tenet in the employee fucking handbook—‘When you look good, you feel good!’ Do you, you deranged little shit?”
At last his fingers find the light switch. The brightness blinds him momentarily, but then he shakes off the fog, taking in the state of his clothes, the walls around him, the stacks of boxes near his feet.
He was wrong. He’s not in the room. He’s in the closet.
There’s a door within arm’s reach, and he leans forward for the knob. It opens, casting light onto the bed with the patchwork quilt, his chair. Sam sits back. This is the closet in his room. He takes a closer look at the boxes, two dozen at least, neatly stacked against the wall, “Agatha Lawrence” written in neat script across each of them.
Agatha Lawrence. The woman who died in this room.
Sam hoists himself up to a sitting position, sending a bolt of pain across his back. He reaches to the top of the stack and pulls down a box. It lands on top of his casts, the contents spilling on to the floor around him. He waits and listens. It’s quiet. He picks up a thick black book and turns it over. Charles Lawrence, 1905–1991. Inside, there’s a black-and-white photograph of a young couple and two boys, posing on the front porch of the Lawrence House.
He staves off a bout of laughter. Why did he put me in the closet?
Hmmm, let’s see. It’s Annie’s voice, fighting its way through the ache in his muddled brain. He put you in a closet with a dead woman’s boxes. Maybe because he . . . She goes quiet, waiting for him to speak. Come on, you dope. Think.
“Because he wants me to look inside them?” Sam says.
Annie is silent.
Sam drops the scrapbook and riffles quickly through the rest of the papers strewn across the closet floor—original architectural drawings, newspaper clippings from the 1930s about the founding of Lawrence Chemical, letters written from a naval ship in the Pacific. Box after box, he finds financial papers, bank statements, retirement accounts. A photo falls from one: a teenage girl with bright red hair. She’s wearing a cardigan sweater and jeans, a cigarette tipped between her fingers, and Sam recognizes her right away—that flaming red hair—as the woman in the framed photographs on Albert’s library shelf. That wasn’t Albert’s mother, as Sam had guessed. That was this woman, Agatha Lawrence.