Authors: Koethi Zan
A few minutes passed before the boy returned, now with a tall man in what must have been his fifties following behind. This had to be Noah Philben, for he was wearing not only a clerical collar but also a priestly black robe that extended down to his ankles. His hair, a scraggly blond fading to gray, just touched his shoulders. His eyes were a piercing blue. His face was perfectly controlled as he came toward me, a mask of impersonal calm.
As he passed the office, however, a lopsided grin broke out on his face when he greeted the girl behind the counter. She looked away shyly, appearing to be uncomfortable with this attention. A cold shiver went down my back. Maximum creepy, I thought to myself, but I forced my own smile as he approached. I tried to take a step toward him, but my legs protested by going wobbly on me.
Just at the moment he reached me, my phone started beeping. Probably Dr. Simmons, since it was my regular appointment day. I ignored it.
Noah Philben looked down toward my hip pocket, in the direction of the sound.
“You need to answer that?” He grinned that same grin at me.
“No, it’s fine.” I reached into my pocket to shut off the ringer. “Mr. Philben, I—”
“It’s actually
Reverend
Philben, Miss …” That was clearly my cue, but I stood there for a full three seconds, a little slow on the uptake. He was waiting patiently for me to tell him why I was there.
“I’m Caroline Morrow,” I finally forced out. “And I’m so glad you’re here. I don’t want to disturb your day, but I’m looking for someone, an old friend. Sylvia Dunham? I understand she is a member of your … church.” I looked over at the girl. Her head was still bent down over the mail. The boy was on the phone in the opposite corner. They didn’t appear to be listening.
Noah Philben raised an eyebrow.
“Interesting,” he said as he glanced at the front door, considering my words. “Shall we step into my office?”
He aimed his thumb down the hall, toward a door in back. No way was I stepping into some back office down the hall. Not with this guy. Not with anyone. Anything could happen. I tried to smile sweetly, as I pointed over to a bench in the entry hall.
“Oh, I don’t mean to take up much of your time. Maybe we could talk for just a moment, right over here?”
He shrugged again and lifted his hand toward the bench, “Whatever you say. After you.”
I eased myself slowly onto the seat, never taking my eyes off his face. He remained standing. I immediately regretted sitting, for now he was towering over me. He folded his arms and leaned against the wall, ignoring the bulletin board beside him with the words
Come worship with us
in stenciled, multicolored construction paper that flickered from the air he had stirred.
“How do you know Ms. Dunham?” he asked, with that slow grin still sliding across his face.
“I knew her growing up, and I’ve been traveling in the area. On business. I heard she was one of your parishioners.”
“Yep,” he stared straight at me. Clearly he wasn’t planning to volunteer anything.
“I’m trying to reach her. She doesn’t seem to be home. I thought maybe someone at her church might know where she is.” Again, my faux casual voice. I could never have been an actress. I could feel a blush running up my throat as I thought how woefully unsuited I was for this task.
Noah leaned forward. I thought for just an instant that I detected a hint of menace in his eyes, though I told myself it was just in my head. The grin was gone now. I leaned back against the hard bench, almost overpowered by the force of his gaze. Then he stood tall and smiled again. I couldn’t tell whether he had noticed the effect he was having on me.
“No idea. Haven’t seen her in a few weeks. It’s not like her to miss … services. Only
the Lord
knows where she is. But, um … if you hear from her, let me know, all right? I naturally have a great deal of concern for my parishioners, as you say. I’d love to know where she is.” Noah leaned back against the wall again, relaxed and cold as ice.
“Sure, sure, I definitely will. Well, thanks anyway.”
Something about the look in his eyes made my stomach clench up, and a cold sweat break out on my skin. I felt the air start to catch in my chest. Something in my body clicked into automatic gear, something all too familiar. I knew where this was headed, and for some reason I was desperate not to let this man see me panic. Almost involuntarily, I shot up from my position and backed toward the door, reaching into my pocket for my car keys.
I had to blink back tears as I smiled timidly, nodding my thanks and waving a halfhearted good-bye as I pushed open the glass door that led out onto the parking lot. The two young people still didn’t look up. I wasn’t sure if it was my imagination or not, but I thought I heard Noah Philben laugh as I turned and walked away. It was a hard sound. Humorless and raw.
CHAPTER 10
I tried to sleep on the plane back home to stave off a panic attack about flying, but instead I kept going over the Sylvia Dunham disappearance in my head. I wondered if I should talk to Jim, let him take over and figure out where she was. But I knew that legally there wouldn’t be any cause for them to look unless someone who was legitimately in her life reported her missing. She could just be out of town, after all.
I had never been happier to see my building, after a six-block walk from the subway. I lugged my suitcase across the threshold and felt my whole body begin to relax. It was only at that moment that I realized how much the stress of this search was wearing on me.
Then I noticed Bob. He was gesticulating to me furiously. He put his finger to his lips and pointed to the back of a woman standing in the corner with a cell phone to her ear. Before I could comprehend
what Bob was trying to tell me, she turned around and saw me.
“Sarah?” she said, hesitating as she clicked her cell phone off. I could tell Bob was puzzled by the name.
“Tracy! You came,” I replied, stunned.
Bob looked at me, then her, unable to disguise his shock. I’d lived in the building for six years and never had had any visitors other than my parents, my shrink, and Jim McCordy. And here, standing in the lobby of the building, was a petite punk rocker, with dyed black hair streaked with hot pink, a leather-studded jacket, black tights, and black lace-up boots, with tattoos and piercings all over her face. And I knew her.
Seeing Tracy for the first time in a decade made everything come back to me at once. I had to lean against the wall for support. A flood of images flashed in my mind. Tracy’s eyes, as she hunched in the corner, recovering from pain. Tracy’s eyes, as she laughed quietly during those long hours when we had no one but each other to stimulate and entertain us, when our conversations were the only lifeline to the real world, and we were the only things keeping each other from losing our minds. And then the final image, as always when I thought of her, of Tracy’s eyes gleaming with rage when she found out what I’d done.
Was that look there in her eyes now, lost somewhere behind her glassy stare of incomprehension? I imagined she was struggling with her own memories as well, as we stood there in the polished lobby, on a bright May day, in the middle of millions of people oblivious to the monumental event occurring there. In my head, I ran the numbers on how many other great and meaningful reunions were taking place in the city at the same moment. But could anything else matter quite as much?
“Sarah,” she finally said again, her eyes slitting, with what kind of energy I could not tell.
I walked up just close enough, but not too close, to her so that Bob couldn’t overhear, and said quietly, “Caroline. I’m Caroline now.”
Tracy shrugged, threw her cell phone into her bag, and said, as if there were nothing extraordinary going on, “So can we go up?” She tilted her head toward the elevator.
I could sense Bob approaching on my left, ready to take a stand to protect me from what he clearly deemed to be some criminal element. He’d come out from behind the desk braced for battle.
“It’s all right, Bob. She’s an … old friend.” I stammered out the word and, without looking, could feel Tracy wince. I led the way to the elevator rather reluctantly. I’d hoped to meet somewhere on neutral ground, but it wasn’t working out that way. Bob returned to his post, but I could tell he was not comfortable with the situation. And neither was I.
We stood in silence listening to the old mechanism clink as we slowly rose to the eleventh floor, then Tracy said very quietly, almost to herself I thought at first, “I brought them.”
I knew exactly what she meant and felt a quick, sharp pang of regret for asking for them in the first place.
When we reached my apartment, Tracy walked around, looking at everything. Whether she liked it or not, I couldn’t tell. She smiled slightly as she dumped her bag on my coffee table.
“Overcompensating much?” she said with a smirk. Then she relented and added without looking at me, “Really it’s very nice, Sarah. Very … calming.”
Without sitting down, I gave her a quick recap of my trip to Oregon and my search for Sylvia. I skipped the fact that it had been my first trip anywhere in years and that I had specifically vowed never to return to that state.
Tracy took it all in stride, as usual. She clearly thought I was being overly dramatic about Sylvia’s disappearance.
“She’s probably on a trip,” she said as soon as I’d finished. “And if you really think she’s missing, isn’t the correct course of action to go straight to the police?”
“I’m not quite ready to trust my stellar investigative instincts yet, I suppose,” I replied.
Tracy smiled a little at that.
We set up in my dining room, each of us spreading out our letters in chronological order on the table. In each instance, the postmarks were only a few days apart. I brought out two empty notebooks and brand-new Uniball Deluxe pens. We sat down and pored over the pages.
At first I was disoriented by the sea of black ink swirling in my pristine white world, but I forced myself to concentrate. Only thinking can save us, I thought automatically, my mantra from the past.
I wrote out columns in my notebook, one for each of us, and we began to categorize the references as best we could. Under Tracy’s name I wrote, in the careful block letters Jennifer had always used in those other notebooks, N
EW
O
RLEANS
, C
OSTUMES
, L
AKE
. She glanced over at the page and quickly jerked her head away. I figured the word
lake
must have brought back some painful memories.
I carefully thumbed through Tracy’s letters, terrified at what I might find but eager as well. Finally, I came across what was clearly a reference to Jennifer and me: “A crash and then drowning, fast, in a sea of numbers.” Under my name I carefully set the words C
RASH
and S
EA OF
N
UMBERS
. Of course. The car accident that killed Jennifer’s mother. The journals. He had figured out so much, so easily, while we were his prisoners.
We studied the letters for nearly an hour, until my columns were two pages for each of us, when Tracy finally leaned back and sighed. She looked me in the eye, but without menace this time.
“They make no sense whatsoever. I mean, yes, the letters are
about us. Yes, he likes to torment us with how much he knows. It seems like he’s spending a lot of time in the slammer rehashing old memories for the thrill. But in terms of interpretive value, I’m going to have to give this a zero.”
“It’s a puzzle,” I said. “It’s some sort of word puzzle. I know we can break it, if we just use logic. If we just get these ideas organized. If we just—”
“—
do the math
?” Tracy interrupted with frustration. “Do you think that can really help us? You think all of life can be sorted and arranged and comprehended? That the whole universe is organized in accordance with some inner logic, and with enough statistical analysis, we can solve some sort of philosophical algorithm? Life doesn’t work that way, Sarah. I thought you’d learned that already. If three years in a dungeon didn’t teach you that, then nothing I can say will. Look what he did to us. Our heads are the puzzle, not these letters. He spent years mixing us up, and now you think you can overcome that, and apply the methods you used as a teenager to decode some hidden message? You think there’s invisible ink in there too?” She got up and stormed into my kitchen. I followed.
She opened my cabinets one by one until she found what she was looking for. I stared at her in disbelief. She had a box of cereal in her hands, and she started ripping it open.
“What are you doing?” I thought she’d gone completely mad. I backed away from her, quickly calculating the seconds it would take me to run to the door, flip all the locks, and get to the elevator.
“I’m looking for the decoder ring, Sarah. I’m looking for a secret spy tool that can solve this puzzle for us.”
She must have seen the alarm in my eyes, because when she looked at me, she put the box on the counter and took three slow, deliberate breaths. Then she put her hands over her face, her fingertips massaging her scalp. When she dropped them, she looked back at me, dry-eyed, and spoke with a new firmness in her voice.
“We can’t be the ones to go through these letters. Send them all back to McCordy, with your little chart. Let him put his agents on it. They have techniques and methods and strategies. We just have a lot of fucked-up memories that are only going to keep us twisted up inside the more we dwell on them.”
I stood beside her, staring past her at a small stain on the kitchen floor, the kind you can never get off, the kind you have to renovate your whole kitchen to make go away.
Tracy sat up and stared at me, dejected. “You got my hopes up a little bit, I admit. But this is a waste of my precious time. I gotta get out of here … I left the journal in the hands of the deputy editor. I’d better get back to my next issue.” She stood up slowly and started gathering her things, looking around the room again. “You know, all this white is actually pretty stifling.”