Page 31 of 56 Days
She closes the cabinet and turns to the sink.
There’s a small shelf above it but otherwise no storage, so it doesn’t take long to determine that there’s nothing else in the bathroom except toothbrushing supplies (one toothbrush), a few rolls of toilet paper, and a bottle of hand soap. Plus one bath towel, hanging on a hook by the door.
The smell is steadily drawing the coffee up into her esophagus.
Lee turns back to the body. Moving any closer to it will disturb the glass on the floor and God knows what else, but she does her best to lean over to see if she can get a better look at the head and—
She gags when this new angle reveals afist-sizedcluster of maggots wriggling in and around what looks like a head wound near the left temple.
She wants to run.
She wants to throw up.
She wants to run out of here right nowwhilethrowing up, but she tells her brain to remain calm, just a few more seconds, that’s all she needs...
She fixes her gaze on the wall tiles directly across from the wound and starts moving it upward in a straight line—
There.
At aboutchest-height, above the head: a smudge of brown. Dried blood.
Contact.
35 Days Ago
Ciara does another circuit of the apartment, counting her steps as she goes. She starts in the little kitchen, standing at the counter with her palms flat on the only surface that isn’t stovetop or sink: a thickoff-whiteslab of Formica whose smooth gloss has long been scrubbed away. Take three steps and she’s in the living room, which is also the dining room, which is also the bedroom, which is only separated from the kitchen by what she’s seen people on property programs calla breakfastbar.
Five steps to cross the floor to the couch. Seven from the couch to the door. Two from that door to the front door. She turns back around and counts out the four steps it takes her to enter the bathroom.
Oliver’s a foot taller than her. He’ll be able to do it in even fewer.
She stands before the mirror above the sink and inspects the glass for smudges. She opens the medicine cabinet and tries to see the contents as a stranger would. She did this very thing already, not even half an hour ago, but on second thought the blister plasters might make him think ofred-rawskin and seeping wounds, specificallyherred-rawskin and seeping wounds, so she slides them behind a pack of soothing eye gels until they disappear from sight.
Then, as an afterthought, she hides thehair-removalcream too.
She once spent a summer in college working as a housekeeper in a seaside hotel and something from her training drifts back to her now.
Sit where the guest will sit. Lie where the guest will lie. See what the guest willsee.
She puts the toilet lid down and perches on it, looks around.
The bathroom is like the rest of the apartment: tiny and from the seventies. It has avocado fixtures, rippled linoleum on the floor, and a shower curtain attached to a precariously positioned tension rod. It’s already come down on her twice in the short time she’s lived here, once hitting her square on the forehead and leaving a red mark. At least the caulking has been redone recently, but its brightness only serves to highlight how much the wall tiles have yellowed over the years.
She scans the floor for dust, wayward hairs, a dropped cotton bud sullied with wax.
All clear.
The bathroom has no window and no fan, only a narrow vent in the wall above the bath that she’s already excised the dust from. She’s bought a little canister of nonoffensive air freshener—Soft Cotton,it claims to smell like, although how you cansmellsomething is soft is beyond her—but now she wonders if its current placement, sitting on top of the cistern, seems a bitpassive-aggressive... Does it look like a demand? She puts it on the little shelf below the sink instead, turning the label out so it’s easy to find.
Four steps back into the everything room, seven steps back to the couch.
She sits down carefully so as not to disturb the placement of the throws or theplumped-upcushions, and systematically scans the room for dust, cobwebs, or any other offenses.
She finds none. She doesn’t think the apartment wasthisclean on the day she moved in.
She wonders, yet again, what he’ll make of it. She tries to see it as he will, as she did before she got a little used to it. For a studio in a crumbling tower block, it’s actually not that bad. A large window offersclear-skyviews because she is on the top floor of the complex’s tallest redbrick block in a city where almost everything else is much shorter. Right now, the evening sun is filling the room with natural light and the room’s bare white walls are reflecting it, amplifying it. There’s a small, square dining table with two chairs and a battered, sunken couch currently hiding beneath a deep purple throw she bought at Primark—orthreepurple throws, because they were small and that’s how many of them it took to mostly cover it. A desk doubles as a dressing table. Most of one wall is taken up with what looks like abuilt-inwardrobe in beech effect but is actually a Murphy bed that folds down, its sheets and pillows kept in place by Velcro straps. A faded canvas print of a sunrise over Dublin hangs by the door to the kitchen, but it’s too big for the space and has been hung slightly askew and half a foot too high. Nothing matches and there are few personal items, save for the NASA mug that’s been demoted to a pen pot and the small stack ofwell-thumbedbooks lined up neatly beside it.
She’s already carefully considered each spine and how it might make her look. The collection promises stories about the Apollo moonwalkers, a techstart-upthat failed spectacularly, and the crisis aboard the space stationMirback in the nineties, as well as a pulpy thriller, a millennial literary novel that’s been on the bestseller charts for what feels like years, and a copy ofPride and Prejudice, brittle and yellowed from years of rereading.
