Page 107 of Haunted

We sit with it.

“We don’t know anything,” I say finally. “We have got two seconds of a bad video and a thing I read in a newspaper when I was seventeen. That’s not proof of anything at all. There isn’t even a reason. Why would he?”

“I don’t know.”

“Then what do we do?”

He looks at the frozen frame for a long moment.

“We stop guessing,” he says, “and we give it to people who can actually look at it.”

Chapter thirty-seven

Lance

Jonny is at the desk rewriting Henry’s speech for the memorial. He’s been at it for two hours, crossing things out and starting over, muttering about tone and pacing. Alice’s words are good, he says, but the structure needs work. He is polishing a dead woman’s sentences for the man we spent last night deciding had probably killed his wife. Neither of us has managed to sit still since about eleven o’clock.

Van Hoek has not called.

That is the whole day. That is everything that has happened since we sent her that file at half past midnight: nothing at all, for seventeen hours, while a man in a golf shirt goes about his business four miles away and my partner corrects the punctuation on his speech.

He hasn’t mentioned leaving. Neither have I. That visa could clear tomorrow or in March, and by rights he should be planning his next destination—Istanbul, or Kathmandu, or wherever the visa runs take him next. But the spices are back in the cabinet and the Kermit bracelet is on his wrist and last night he let me inside him, and none of that sounds like a man who’s packing.

I’m afraid to ask. I’m afraid the answer will be “yes, I’m going,” and I’ll have to smile and say “of course, I understand,” and mean it, because that’s what a partner does. Not a handler. Not a commanding officer. A partner.

So instead of asking, I get the box down out of the closet.

He’s been through it twice. I have not been through it at all, not properly, because it was never mine to go through. The sketchbooks are out on the shelf where he can reach them. Everything else is exactly as he left it. At the bottom is the address book with the rubber band round it, the one clue we already know about.

“What are you doing?” Jonny asks, looking up.

“I can’t stand just sitting here, waiting. I have to do something and the bad thing about this place is that there’s only so much you can stress clean.”

“Yeah, this place is definitely ready for an inspection.”

“I just keep thinking of what the police will say. You know, that they’ll see something we didn’t and then, just you wait, ‘Enry ‘Iggins, just you wait.”

“What was that?”

“Come on. My Fair Lady?”

“Oh. I never saw it.” He looks back down at the speech. “Wait, what did you call him?”

“Henry Higgins. It’s the character. I was trying to make a joke.”

“No, but you called him ‘Enry. When Alice was dying, I thought she moaned. She said En.”

“Not exactly indictable,” I point out.

“Yes, but if you’re moaning, what sound do you make? Oh, and then oh, fuck.”

“Are we talking about sex-moaning or pain-moaning?”

“Either one.” He wrinkles his brow. “I wish I knew something.”

I take the two pieces of paper out of the back of the address book and lay them on the bed. “Well, maybe you can help me solve this puzzle. Your mother kept a newspaper clipping about your neighbor for ten years. Why?”

“Your mother kept a newspaper clipping about your neighbor for ten years,” I say. “Why?”