Watch You Die
Authors: Katia Lief
| Watch You Die |
| Katia Lief |
| 2012 |
Darcy was just trying to
be friendly to the new boy in the office. But it's gone horribly wrong.
At first it was just unwanted invitations but now Joe is sending her
abusive emails, calling her late at night, unwilling to take no for an
answer.
And every step Darcy takes to distance herself from him
is just adding fuel to Joe's obsession. And now he knows where she
lives...
Contents
About the Book
If he can’t have you no one will...
Darcy was just trying to be friendly to the new boy in the office. But it’s gone horribly wrong. At first it was just unwanted invitations but now Joe is sending her abusive emails, calling her late at night, unwilling to take no for an answer.
And every step, Darcy takes to distance herself from him is just adding fuel to Joe’s obsession. And now he knows where she lives...
About the Author
Born in France to American parents, Katia Lief moved to the United States as a baby and was raised in Massachusetts and New York. She teaches fiction writing as a part-time faculty member at the New School in Manhattan and lives in Brooklyn with her husband and two children.
Also by Katia Lief:
You Are Next
Hide and Seek
Five Days to Die
The 12th Victim
For Eli
‘When I hear music, I fear no danger. I am invulnerable. I see no foe. I am related to the earliest times, and to the latest.’
—
Winter
, from the journal of Henry David Thoreau
PROLOGUE
The phone rang at a quarter to six.
I was making dinner. Lemon chicken, sticky rice, salad.
Nat was doing homework at a friend’s house. Through the kitchen window I saw the green tips of crocuses pushing up through the late winter soil. A wind had started up that afternoon. I had left my husband Hugo a message to swing by after work and pick Nat up so he wouldn’t have to walk home in the cold. He had gone to school that morning in only a sweater, eager for spring, though the air was still bracing. Martha’s Vineyard, surrounded by ocean as it was, released winter stubbornly.
I figured it was Hugo calling me back. Felt it. I dried my hands on a dishtowel – a red rooster proud on nubby white cloth – and answered the phone.
“Mrs Mayhew?”
“Yes?”
I tossed the salad. Greek olives and carrot slices tumbled with ripped pieces of soft Boston lettuce, all glistening in an oily vinaigrette. So it wasn’t Hugo – it was not the first time my sixth sense had fooled me. I would try him again when this call was over.
“This is Tuesday Miller. I’m a nurse … I’m calling from the hospital.”
Tuesday
. What an unusual name. And today
was
Tuesday.
Tuesday. A quarter to six. Dinner was almost ready and the table still wasn’t set. I had rushed from my desk and started cooking immediately because Hugo had an eight o’clock deposition in town and we were loath, from years of habit, to miss a family dinner. I felt suddenly frustrated by this phone call. I didn’t have time for it and wanted to hang up. The feeling was quick and large and even at that moment I knew it was out of proportion.
I turned off the burner under the rice. Leaned against the counter.
“Yes?”
“I’m very sorry to have to give you this news.”
And then there was a moment, an abrupt chasm of time, an ocean of silence that opened between us. Between me and this woman Tuesday who had called me on the phone when I was busy, in the
middle
of something. I didn’t have time or patience for this woman who had called to interrupt me.
“Your husband is Hugo Mayhew.”
Not a question. A statement. An introduction? A
forewarning
.
“Yes.”
“Mrs Mayhew, I’m sorry to have to tell you this … he was in an accident, driving on Middle Road. I’m afraid—”
And then … and then a storm at sea. And the sea was my heart, my soul, my brain, my life. The dark, cold underbelly of the ocean rose into my eyes as I crumpled onto the kitchen floor, oblivious to the rich aromas of a meal no one would
eat
.
PART ONE
CHAPTER 1
HIS EYES WERE
pale brown with streaks of darker brown and flecks of green. I recognized them before I recalled any other element of his face. It was the three-dimensional luminescence of the green, like floating chips of granite, that made the eyes so memorable along with the right pupil, which hovered slightly off-center and stayed partly dilated regardless of how bright the light was. Once you noticed the pupil – and I had noticed it back on the Vineyard, in the office supply store where he used to make my copies – it established in your mind a sensation of off-kilteredness. And then you shoved that thought away because it was so unkind. He was just a young man with a gimpy eye doing a menial job – no need to judge him. He was always efficient and polite if a little over-friendly. I never knew his name.
All that came back to me now, looking into those eyes across my desk in the newsroom beside a window whose blue-skied view was halved by the vertical edge of a neighboring skyscraper. It was the second autumn since my life had been upended by Hugo’s death. How, I often wondered, could this be the same sky I left behind on Martha’s Vineyard, a sky that had sheltered, taught and broadened me over fifteen years of a comfortable life, a career as a journalist, the astonishing joys of motherhood and a happy marriage? But I couldn’t bury my husband there and stay on the island. I tried but found it impossible; the geography was too open. Here, in New York, constant boundaries buffered the sensation of emotional vertigo that follows an unexpected loss.
He stood in front of my desk, smiling as if he had found a long-lost friend.
“Darcy!”
Well, he knew
my
name.
“You work here too?” he asked.
“Staff reporter.” I nodded. “Metro section. They’ve got me on a new environmental beat. You?”
“Mailroom. Today’s my first day. I feel like I’m well positioned to go somewhere from here. Right place, right time, you know? I want to be a journalist just like you. I used to read all your pieces in the
Gazette
. You’re an amazing writer, Darcy.”
The way he said my name again, like he knew me. As if we’d met, actually met, and traded names. Had we? Had we introduced ourselves over the copy counter on the Vineyard? Had I forgotten his name? Or had I failed to listen in the first place? I smiled and nodded, feeling mean and dumb, finally managing a lame apology.
“I’m sorry; I’ve forgotten your name.”
“We never officially met. I’m Joe Coffin.”
I put out a hand and we shook. “Hi, Joe. Nice to officially meet you. Actually it
is
nice. I haven’t seen a soul from the Vineyard since we moved here. I miss it.”
“I don’t. I lived there my whole life and I feel liberated to finally be in America, you know, for real.”
America
was what the islanders called the mainland, which was essentially the entire rest of the country from the coast of Cape Cod to California. That’s how separate, special and isolated you tended to feel living on the Vineyard after a while.
“So, are you one of legendary Coffins?” It was one of the Vineyard’s oldest family names, dating back centuries, and you saw it everywhere – on street signs and roadside mailboxes. Another ubiquitous island name was Mayhew, Hugo’s family name, although in his case any connection had been lost long before we moved there.
“More or less. It’s my mother’s name, but she’s not that close to the rest of them. What about you? You’re a Mayhew—”
“My
husband
was a Mayhew. He did some research into his family tree once and it didn’t intersect with any islanders. Apparently his branch came a little later and landed farther north, in Plymouth.”
“Right, your husband. So you and I probably aren’t distant cousins. They say the Coffins and Mayhews intermarried a lot back in the old days.”
“Nope, no chance of us being distant cousins.”
I couldn’t tell if that disappointed or pleased him … and briefly wondered why it should matter at all.
“You know what?” he asked, and as he formulated his proposition his face came into focus in my memory. I had seen that face in exactly this pose of thoughtfulness, seen it, digested it and remembered it now: “I read all your articles,” he had said to me once before, handing me my collated copies over the counter at the Vineyard shop – Martha’s Ships, Clips & Copy Cats – a yellow clapboard house that had been transformed into the island’s only full-service office support center. “I’d like to be a journalist one day, too.” He had shared his intentions with me once before and I had failed to contemplate or even acknowledge them. I was always so busy being a wife and a mother and a freelance writer for the
Gazette
. And then, when I won that prize for my
series
on the wind farm proposed for the coast of Nantucket, I became even busier, writing for other papers, gaining the traction that had ultimately landed me here at the
Times
. I had failed to listen to this young aspiring writer once before when he had reached out to me and I had not an iota of time or attention for him … and here he was again, with that same look on his face. Some things are fate. This time I would listen.
“We should have lunch,” he said.
“Absolutely.”
“It’s such a nice day today. We could get sandwiches and eat them outside somewhere.”
I wanted to say
no, not today
, to plead deadlines and short hours, something with my son Nat this afternoon that would prevent me from catching up with my work later, but in fact there was nothing special on my agenda. The truth was, today was a perfect day to break for lunch. I was waiting for return emails and calls about a few different stories I was working on: an update on the touch-and-go resurgence of the Gowanus Canal in Brooklyn, rescheduling an interview with the deputy mayor about the city’s efforts to limit cars and therefore gas emissions in midtown Manhattan, and the start of an environmental cleanup of a lot in downtown Brooklyn where the site of a small chemical factory was being prepared for inclusion in the massive
Atlantic
Yards development for which hundreds of residential and business tenants had been displaced via eminent domain. This last one was a hotly contested urban renewal project that was already being covered by many reporters. My part was strictly the environmental cleanup element of this single vacated lot and I figured I could get about two stories out of it. Basically my work today was what I thought of as
mining
: like oil drilling, you stuck in some probes and saw what came up. These were all relatively small stories the
Times
had put me on to test my mettle as one of their newest reporters. I may have been a prize-winning journalist but to them I was still a freelancer they had taken into the holy fold. I would have to prove myself. And so, under the radar, as I worked on my assignments my antennae were up for a story I could really fly with. But today I was not under deadline pressure. I could have lunch with Joe; I just didn’t want to. However, I had been a bad listener, a poor human being, so I would do it anyway.