that I had lost the plot completely and believed he would answer, just that it got awfully quiet in that house. Some days the silence felt like an actual substance, thickening subtly but implacably with every hour, till it got hard to breathe. I emailed off the report to Mrs. Wozniak, along with DNA analysis results and scans of the most important diary pages, and didn’t open her reply.
It was worse after that. With nothing and no one to keep me on a schedule, my body clock went completely out of whack. I had gone from sleeping too much to sleeping way too little—the Xanax weren’t working any more, they just threw me into a nasty limbo where I couldn’t go to sleep but I was never quite sure whether I was actually awake. I wandered the house in half-light, between rooms dense with blackness and pale rectangles that could have been windows or doorways. Occasionally I got dizzy—I was never sure when it was time to eat—and had to sit down for a while. When I groped for something to tell me what room I was in, my hands found only unfamiliar objects: a table leg thick with carvings my fingers couldn’t decipher, a ribbed wallpaper pattern I didn’t recognize, an edge of curled linoleum when there had never been linoleum in the Ivy House. Things turned up in strange places, a heavy old 1949 penny on my pillow, Miriam’s purple psychic rock in the bathroom sink.
When I thought about Susanna and Leon it was, strangely enough, not with horror or condemnation or anger but with envy. They came to my mind drawn in strong indelible black that gave them a kind of glory; Dominic’s death defined them, immutably, not for better or for worse but simply for what they were, and it took my breath away. My own life blurred and smeared in front of my eyes; my outlines had been scrubbed out of existence (and how easily it had been done, how casually, one absent swipe in passing) so that I bled away at every margin into the world.
I think Rafferty knew. I think wherever he was, miles away, pulling out his notebook at some murder scene or raising the sail on a rugged little boat, he raised his head and sniffed the wind and smelled me, finally ready.
* * *
He came for me on a cold late afternoon that smelled of burning tires. It had somehow penetrated to my brain that it had been days or possibly weeks since I had seen sunlight, so I had gone out to sit on the terrace, and by the time I realized that dusk was starting to fall and it was freezing I didn’t have the energy to get up and go back inside. The clouds were dense and winter-white, unmoving; under the trees the ground was thick with sodden layers of leaves. A squirrel was scrabbling and dashing under the oaks and the gray cat was back, crouched in the rutted mud, tail-tip twitching as he slunk towards an oblivious bird.
“That your cat?” a voice asked, behind me and much too close.
I was up and hurling myself backwards across the terrace before I knew it, a shout ripping out of me, grabbing for a weapon, rock, anything— “Jesus, man,” Rafferty said, holding up his hands. “It’s only me.”
“What the fuck—” I was gasping for breath. “What the fuck—”
“Didn’t mean to startle you. Sorry about that.”
“What—” He looked taller than I remembered him, ruddier, strong high sweeps of jaw and cheekbone more sharply defined. For a moment, in the gray light, I wasn’t positive it was him. But the voice, rich and warm as wood, that was Rafferty all right. “What are you doing here?”
“I was knocking for ages, couldn’t make you hear. In the end I tried the door. It’s not locked. I thought I should check that you were OK.”
“I’m fine.”
“No offense, man, but you don’t look fine. You look in tatters.” He strolled closer, across the terrace. He made my adrenaline spike and keep spiking. There was something around him, a buzz and thrum, a vitality that ate up the air like fire and left me with nothing to breathe. “Can’t be good for the head, being cooped up here on your own. Would you not go stay with your folks for a bit, something like that?”
“I’m fine.”
That got a twitch of his eyebrow, but he left it. “You should keep that door locked. It’s a