Infinite(35)

I sighed. It wasn’t uncommon for my grandfather to get his days mixed up. On the other hand, I was also suspicious that the police had arranged this call for me as a trap. “Stay put, I’ll be there in twenty minutes,” I told him. Then I added, “Was anything happening at home when you left?”

“Like what?”

“Like police in the neighborhood.”

“Well, yeah, a cop said they were trying to find you.”

“What did you tell them?”

“I told them I didn’t know where you were.”

“Did you say you were going to meet me?”

“No. What you do is your business, not mine. You’ve made that pretty clear over the years.”

He wasn’t wrong about that.

“Okay, Edgar. I’ll be there as soon as I can.”

I hung up the phone.

Meeting Edgar felt like an ordinary day in an ordinary life, but nothing about my world was ordinary anymore. I walked briskly toward the museum, along sidewalks I’d taken throughout my life. It would have been faster to take a cab, but I wanted to preserve my cash for when I really needed it.

When I was back in the heart of the city, I cut through Millennium Park, passing the Pritzker Pavilion, where the wide-open stretch of green grass was crowded with people eating picnic lunches. On the sidewalks, every bench was taken. I passed an old man who was reading a copy of the Chicago Tribune, and he’d left the front section on the bench next to him. My eyes went to the headlines automatically, and I spotted a notice on the very top of the page about the Cubs completing a three-game home sweep of the Phillies. That made me stop in surprise. Not just because the Cubs had swept anybody. No, if there’s one thing I keep a close eye on, it’s Cubs baseball, and I knew they weren’t supposed to be hosting Philadelphia until next week.

Then I glanced at the date on the paper and saw that it was next week.

It was Thursday, just as Edgar had said. I didn’t understand how that was possible. Somehow, I’d lost almost an entire week of my life after my encounter with Eve, and I remembered none of it.

I thought about her question: Have you been having blackouts, Dylan?

Up until that moment, I would have said no, but I’d sat next to Eve Brier on Navy Pier in the early hours of Friday morning. Now it was six days later, and I had no idea what had happened in between.

The old man on the bench looked up from the sports pages. “Help you?”

“I was wondering if you’d finished the front section of the paper.”

His eyes narrowed as he studied the state of my clothes, but then he shrugged. “Yeah, take it. I’d just throw it away.”

“Thank you.”

I took the front section with me and kept walking until I found an empty bench. I sat down and ripped through the pages, not even sure what I was looking for. Somehow, I wanted to believe that I’d made a mistake. Or maybe I hoped I would see a news article that would trigger my memories of the past several days. Instead, the stories confirmed that events in the world had gone on without me. Nearly a week had passed, and I hadn’t been here to see it.

With my headache getting worse, I closed the paper.

That was when I noticed an article in the lower left corner of the front page. The headline jumped out at me: Woman Stabbed to Death in River Park I didn’t have to read far to discover that the murder had taken place two days ago, barely a hundred yards from my apartment. The body had been found in the dense trees on the riverbank by a couple of teenagers who were exploring the trails, the way Roscoe and I used to do.

The victim’s name was Betsy Kern. Twenty-seven years old. She was an IT programmer who’d gone out for a nighttime run and never come back. The boys had stumbled upon her body the next day.

There was a picture of Betsy Kern accompanying the article. I didn’t know this woman, but I spotted the resemblance immediately.

She looked just like Karly.



I felt a strange nervousness walking into the Art Institute. Part of me expected to find a seething mass of Dylan Morans inside, the way I had in my drug-addled dream. Instead, all I found was the usual crowd of visitors. Even so, when I climbed the grand staircase to the second floor, I had a vision of jumping from the balcony that felt so vivid it seemed like more than a nightmare. I even noticed that I felt a sharp pain in my ankle, as if I’d sustained some kind of fall in real life.

Upstairs, Edgar was waiting in the gallery. He had his hands cupped behind his back, holding his cane, his pants hiked high on his waist, in the way that old men do.

“Hey, Edgar,” I said.

He harrumphed at my late arrival, and we both stared silently at the characters populating Edward Hopper’s diner. After a while, Edgar’s mood improved enough that he told me his usual story about Daniel Catton Rich, which I listened to as if I’d never heard it before. As we stood there, other people came and went to admire Nighthawks.

“So you said the police were looking for me?” I murmured when we were finally alone again. “Did they tell you why?”

“Nope. They just said that you were missing. I wasn’t worried. I figured you’d turn up sooner or later.”

“Did they say how long?”

Edgar shrugged. “Couple of days.”

My brow furrowed. “That’s all? Not like a week?”

“How could it be a week? We had dinner on Monday.”