Sliver of Truth (14 page)

Of course, Max always had a staff of people following him around, cleaning up after him, but he held those people to such exacting standards that turnover was always high. Personal assistants, maids, cooks, came and went, a parade of polite and distant strangers, always nervous around Max, always replaced in a matter of weeks or months. Only Clara, who acted as maid and part-time cook and sometimes babysitter for me and Ace, stayed through the years, never seemed rattled by Max or his demands. What did this say about Max? I didn’t know. It was just something that came to mind as I sifted through the apartment. Maybe it didn’t mean anything. Maybe nothing did.

After a while, frustrated and unsatisfied, I sat on Max’s bed, a gigantic king swathed in 1,000-count Egyptian cotton sheets and a rich chocolate-brown raw silk comforter, piled high with coordinating shams and throw pillows. I leaned back against the plush surface and tried to think about what I was doing there, what I was looking for, and what I intended to do once I found it.

After a minute, I got up again and walked over to the recessed shelving in the opposite wall that held a large flat-screen television, another legion of photographs (mainly of me), objects he’d collected in his travels around the world—a jade elephant, a large Buddha, some tall giraffes carved delicately in a deep black wood. My eyes fell on a familiar object, a hideous pottery ashtray formed by a child’s fingers—a pinch pot, I think we called them in kindergarten. It was painted in a medley of colors—purple, hot pink, evergreen, orange. In the center, I had painted,
I LOVE MY UNCEL MAX,
and my name was carved on the underside. I didn’t remember making it but I did remember it always being on Max’s desk in his study. I wondered how it had wound up in here. I lifted the piece of pottery and held it in my hand, felt a wave of intense sadness. As I was about to put it back down, I saw that it had sat on top of a small keyhole. I quickly searched the shelving for a drawer or some clue as to what might open if a key was inserted, but it seemed to be a keyhole to nothing. I resisted the urge to hurl the little piece of pottery against the wall.

I walked back over to the bed and flopped myself down on it.

That’s when I smelled it. The lightest scent of male cologne. Not a sense memory of Max but an actual scent in the air, or possibly in the sheets. It made my heart thump. I got up quickly from the bed, my eyes scanning the room for something out of place. The small clock beside the bed suddenly seemed very loud, the street noise a distant thrum.

A haunting is a subtle thing. It’s not flying dishes and bleeding walls. It’s not a mournful moaning down a dark, stone hallway. It’s odors and shades of light, a nebulously familiar form in a photograph, the glimpse of a face in a crowd. These nuances, these moments are no less horrifying. They strike the same blow to the solar plexus, trace the same cold finger down your spine.

As I stood there, my nose to the air, my limbs frozen, I took in the scent of him. Max. Whatever the alchemy of his skin and his cologne, it could be no one else. Like my father, rainwater and Old Spice, or my mother, Nivea cream and something like vinegar . . . unmistakable, unforgettable. I listened hard to the silence. A sound, soft and rhythmic, called me from where I stood. I walked over the carpet and into the master bath. Another huge space, embarrassingly opulent with granite floors and walls, brushed chrome fixtures, a Jacuzzi tub and steam-room shower. I paused in the doorway and noticed that the shower door and the mirrors were lightly misted. I walked over and opened the glass door to the shower. The giant waterfall showerhead that hung centered from the ceiling held tiny beads of water in each pore, coalescing in the center and forming one enormous tear that dripped into the drain below. My mind flipped through a catalog of reasons why this shower might have been recently used. This was a secure, doorman-guarded building. My parents, the only other people with access, were both away. I reached in and closed the tap; the dripping ceased.

My breathing was deep and there was a slight shake to my hands from adrenaline. Once a month, I knew, a service came in to clean. But I was sure they’d already been here this month, and I’d never known them to leave a faucet to run or surfaces wet.

I went to the cordless phone by Max’s bed to dial the doorman.

“Yes, Ms. Jones,” said Dutch, the eternal doorman, whom I’d passed on my way in.

“Has someone been in this apartment today?”

“Not on my watch. I’ve been here since five
A.M.
,” he said. I heard him flipping through pages. “No visitors last night or all day yesterday. Not in the log.”

“Okay,” I said.

“Something wrong?”

“No. Nothing. Thanks, Dutch,” I said. I pressed the button to end the call before he could ask me any more questions.

The phone rang while it was still in my hand. I answered without thinking.

“Hello?”

There was only static in my ear.

“Hello?” I said again.

The line went dead.

Sometimes I think it’s not the ghosts themselves but the dark spaces where they might reside that are the most frightening. I was filled with dread as I continued my search of the apartment. I approached each space with a kind of reluctance, a turning away, wanting to cover my eyes like I might if watching a horror movie by myself at night. Looking back, I guess it was more that I was searching to find
nothing
than looking for something in particular. I wanted to do my due diligence so that if the worst were true, I could leave self-blame off my list of emotions. I wanted to know I hadn’t closed my eyes the way Elena had.

The sky outside had turned dark blue in the twilight, and I was starting to feel tired. The scent had deserted the apartment and the bathroom was now dry as a bone. I was already starting to wonder if I’d imagined the whole thing. I flipped on some lamps to chase back the gloom that was settling on me. As I did, something caught my eye.

In the light I saw a small corner of white peeking out from beneath the coffee table. I got down on my knees and retrieved a matchbook. I turned it in my hand. There was an opalescent symbol embossed on each side, which could be seen only when it was held at a certain angle to the light. Three interlocking circles within a larger circle. There was something familiar about it, but I couldn’t place it. I felt my stomach start to knot; a light nausea crept up in my throat. I flipped the matchbook open. Inside a single note had been scrawled:
Show this at the door. Ask for Angel.

In my dreams, I sit with him and ask him all my questions. He sits beside me like he did our last night together. The tears fall and he is talking, answering me with pleading eyes, his hands on my shoulders. His lips move but I can’t hear what he’s saying. He touches me but he is behind some invisible barrier. I can’t reach out to him and I can’t hear his voice. I try to read his lips but I can’t until he says the words
I’m sorry
,
Ridley
. He reaches for me again and I back away. The anger and the hatred I feel in these dreams are more intense than anything I’ve felt in my waking life. I realize there’s a gun in my hand.

That’s when I wake up, feeling desperate and helpless. I never believed in recurring dreams before. But any shrink will tell you that it’s your mind’s way of resolving something you haven’t been able to resolve in your waking life. Doesn’t take much to figure that out. Too bad it didn’t seem to be working for me.

9

In my mailbox at home there was a postcard from my father, sent apparently from their port of call in Positano.
Having a wonderful time!
it read in my father’s sharp, scrawling hand.
Thinking of you as always.
The thought of them traipsing around Europe snapping photographs and mailing off postcards, frankly, made me sick. I threw the postcard in the trash, poured myself a glass of wine from the half-empty bottle on the counter, and played my messages. I had an uneasy feeling, found myself looking around my apartment, peering through the doorway into my dark bedroom.

“Hey, it’s me.” Jake. “Can we get together tonight? Come to the studio around eight if you feel like it. We’ll go to Yaffa. Or wherever.”

I looked at my watch. It was six-thirty. I was hungry and lonely and considered heading downtown to meet him.

“It’s me.” A low male voice, smoky and depressive. Ace. “Haven’t talked to you in a couple of days. I’d like to see you. I have some things on my mind.”

Great. Another catalog of indictments his shrink was encouraging him to bring up against my parents—and me, I’m sure.

“Yeah,” I said to my empty apartment. “Looking forward to it.” I suddenly had the horrible thought that I’d liked my brother better when he was a junkie. Though he’d been equally depressive and blame-laying, he wasn’t nearly as self-reflective.

“Hey, there, it’s Dennis. It was nice to hear your voice. Give me a call back when you can.” That
Times
sportswriter I dated briefly. He sounded enthusiastic. I knew he worked late usually, so I took a chance, went into my office, looked up his number, and gave him a call. I forced myself to sound light and flirty when he answered, gave him the same spiel I gave Jenna about wanting to return Myra Lyall’s call.

“A very weird, scary thing,” he said when he’d finished telling me basically all the same stuff Jenna had revealed.

“That’s terrible, Dennis,” I said. I let a beat pass. “Do you know her assistant well? I got a call from her as well—what’s her name again?” Lie.

“Sarah Duvall.”

“Right.”

“Yeah, she comes out for drinks every once in a while with my crew. Nice girl. She’s a bit adrift at the moment. No one knows if Myra is coming back, but no one wants to admit that she isn’t, so Sarah’s in a kind of professional limbo. It’s been weird for her.”

There was an awkward silence on the phone. I remembered how Dennis and I went out together one night and he got so drunk over dinner at Union Square Café that he halfway passed out against the wall at a club we visited later. I literally had to support him as we stumbled to the street and deposited him in a cab while he tried to lick my neck. It was a bit of a turnoff.

“So . . .” he said finally. “Feel like getting together?”

“Sure,” I said. “Let me look at my schedule next week and I’ll give you a call back.”

“Great,” he said. “I’ll look forward to it.”

We hung up, both of us knowing that I had no intention of doing any such thing.

I had a strange sense of unease as I hung up the phone, as if there were eyes peering at the back of my neck. I spun around in my chair and confronted the emptiness behind me. I walked through my apartment, but there was nothing I could point to, nothing I could say might have been moved. I wondered if I was being paranoid, but something just didn’t feel right. The energy was off and I couldn’t wait to get out of the apartment.

I headed downtown, deciding to walk. So I went south on Park Avenue South and cut through Madison Square Park at the point of the Flatiron Building, to Broadway. I went down Broadway, and then east on Eighth. I do all my best thinking in motion through the city. It energizes me, the noise and all the different personalities of each neighborhood. And as the self-conscious fanciness of Park Avenue South morphed into the bustle of Broadway and then into the familiar grit of the East Village, I thought about my time at Max’s apartment today. I tried to put my head around things, like the red website and the book of matches, the ghostly scent of Max and the wet bathroom, the call from Myra Lyall and her disappearance, the wiping of the
Times
servers, the things Jenna had told me. It gave me a headache, ratcheted the tension in my shoulders. The more I thought about these things, the foggier my head got, the more nebulous and vaguely menacing it all seemed. And then there was Agent Dylan Grace, his strange and threatening appearances, his hasty retreats.

“What’s happening?” I asked, saying it aloud without realizing. My own words startled me but no one on the street around me seemed to notice. The sky had gone dark and the air had grown colder. I wasn’t dressed warmly enough, as usual. I felt my phone vibrate in my pocket and I withdrew it with a stiff, cold hand gone pink from exposure. There was an anonymous text message. It read:
The Cloisters. Tomorrow. 8PM. Trust no one.

I was still shaking when I pushed through the studio door. I hadn’t stopped to think why it might be open as I bolted up the dark, narrow staircase and stepped into the large loft space. I felt as if someone was pursuing me, though I’d seen no one suspicious on the street. I could barely control my breathing and had to stop a minute. The studio was dark, the only light coming from Jake’s small office off to the left. I felt for the switch on the wall to my left and tried to turn on the lights but nothing happened. The space was an old warehouse, nearly windowless and bare; the electricity failed as often as it worked.

“Jake,” I called when I had my wind back. No answer. I moved past the large covered forms of his sculptures; they were as familiar to me as a gathering of friends—the thinking man, the weeping woman, the couple making love—though tonight each of them seemed weird and angry. For a moment I imagined them coming to life beneath their white sheets.

I moved past them quickly, toward the light coming from Jake’s office. I expected to see him hunched over his laptop, headphones blasting over his ears, oblivious to my arrival as usual. But the small room was empty. His laptop hummed. I walked over to the desk. A cup of coffee from the pizzeria downstairs was cold.

I sat down in the chair and rested my arms on the desk, my head on my arms. I could still feel my heart beating in my throat. But in the familiar space, I started to feel safer, calmer. After a few minutes, I sat up to take my phone from my pocket and look at the text message again. In doing this, I jolted Jake’s laptop. The shooting-stars screen saver vanished and it took me a second to register what I was seeing. It took another second after that to believe it.