The Better Liar(47)

I shuffled back out into the main part of the house and turned toward the old man’s study. There was an ancient IBM desktop, from the time when powered-off computer screens were gray, not black. At the very least, I bet I could play King’s Quest on it, no problem. I pressed the power button and the modem wheezed, rousing itself into a gradually increasing pitch, like an airplane taking off. The screen remained gray. I poked at the mouse and pressed a few sticky keys. Nothing. I felt around the back of it for the cord and followed it with my fingers down to the modem. It was plugged in, the computer was running, and yet nothing showed on the screen. I held down the power button and tried again. The monitor was dead.

    Okay. I glanced around the study. Dust motes drifted in the faint light from the blinds. Bookcases, mostly empty. Boxes here and there. A closed door on the opposite side of the room, maybe leading to the second hallway. An outdated globe, scattered office detritus: plastic in-and outboxes, chunks of Post-its. The wedding photograph was back on the desk.

There were a lot of little drawers in the desk—maybe in there. I opened them one at a time. Mostly they were badly organized documents, things that should have been in the filing cabinet across the room—mail from the bank, tax documents, the carbon copies of dozens of checks. Here and there I found household things like packs of playing cards and pencils and old spare keys, and one little drawer held nothing but a fragile-looking glass-blown Christmas ornament still attached to its gold hook. Another held a few childish construction-paper drawings of houses and cats. The longest drawer had a lock on it, and it wouldn’t open when I tugged. I looked closer.

The handle had no dust on it. No—one side had a wad of gray, as if someone’s thumb had dragged all the way across the handle, gathering up the dust as it went. And it was recent enough that I could still see the track.

That was it.

I tried the spare keys in the lock, but they were all too big. I stuffed them in my pocket in case I needed them in the rest of the house. There weren’t any other keys lying around the rest of the study that I could see, and most of the books were in boxes, so I doubted the drawer’s key had been in any of those. I crawled underneath the desk and craned my neck, but there wasn’t anything taped to the underside of the wood, and pushing on the bottom of the drawer from below did nothing but rattle whatever was inside.

    I stood up and opened the little drawer with the Christmas ornament, carefully removing the gold hook. I’d picked a couple of locks before, but I wasn’t an expert by any means, and I had no idea whether the hook would work. I fitted it into the lock and tried to feel for tumblers, jiggling it up and down.

There was a click. My breath caught.

The drawer slid open. What a shitty lock. I could have opened the drawer by yanking it hard enough, I thought—but then Leslie would be able to tell someone had broken in. This way was better.

Inside were more documents, crumby Hostess wrappers, a very nice Montblanc, and—

A cellphone.

My heart was pounding. I took out my own phone charger and plugged the phone in, waiting as the screen came slowly to life. It was a BlackBerry-style cell with a physical keypad, one of the ones you paid twenty bucks for at Best Buy. No password. I used the navigator arrows to select the text-message icon.

There was only one exchange in the phone, between the user and a number that hadn’t been added to Contacts. A 505 area code, local. I clicked on it.

It was definitely Leslie’s phone, not the old man’s. The last text message had been sent in late February, after he’d died. Leslie had said:


We met earlier this afternoon. Please use this number to contact me from now on.



The reply came several hours later:


OK to come by Sunday with the cash. If Ed is at front desk ask for me.



After that, the other person never responded again. Leslie had texted over the next several weeks:


Please confirm one more time so I can be sure.


Please confirm.


I need to hear back from you.


No one answering door. Please reply.


I need an answer.


Reply.


The store has been closed all week. What’s going on?


I want my money back.


I want my money back.


Give me my fcking money back.



I clicked slowly through the rest of the phone. No email. Nothing in the trash. When I clicked on the navigator, the navigation history loaded below the search bar. Just one address: 31 Piedra Roja Rd, Corrales, NM, 87048.

I copied the address and went back to the phone’s main screen to paste it into the Google search bar.

Google said it was a Curves—one of a chain of gyms that only allowed women and were decorated like the set of an infomercial.

But Leslie didn’t go to Curves. She went to Planet Fitness—I’d seen the messages on Facebook only this morning reminding her to re-up her membership. I thumbed through the reviews, of which there were three. One of them began, I’ve been going to this gym since it opened in April, and I’ve lost twelve pounds with the help of their lovely trainers!

Thank you, Carol Fernandez. I gave her review an anonymous thumbs-up.

    So Leslie had gone to the Curves before it was a Curves. I scrolled through all the Google results for the address, but I couldn’t find the name of the business it had been before it went up for sale.