Cause of death unknown.
No match to any known missing persons.
Yesterday.
I shoved the notebook aside and stared at the newsfeed on the computer. Those jottings had been what yesterday was all about, and they’d started from a banner on this screen. The new day’s headlines were scrolling by now, though, at their usual rate, and I wasn’t spotting anything more about the body. I’d have thought there would be more stories by now. More information. I used the trackpad to move backwards through the listing by time, but it seemed to have disappeared from the day’s radar.
Then, disrupting the intensity that had been building up to this moment, comes Chloe – right now, as I’m focused on all this and the beginnings of the workday blend into the present.
Chloe: my closest friend at the bookshop. She’s one of the few under-thirties here, as eccentric in her own right as the rest of us combined. I halfway suspect she chose to work here because she is simply too weird to be hired anywhere else.
Her head pops into my personal space with her typical intensity. She, who is always brimming with exuberance and wit, and whom I absolutely do not want to see at the moment.
‘Hey girl!’ she announces, taking no notice of my condition. Her head is not quite bobbing, but almost. The pitch of her voice is entirely too high, and she stretches out the two words to a span of time that could easily have accommodated an entire sentence.
‘I thought I heard you sneakin’ on in here!’ Her affected accent is as shocking as always. Chloe’s most conspicuous failure of self-awareness is her apparent belief that she can simply will herself to become a busty black woman with a drawl that makes ordinary phrases sound charming and profound. The phenomenon emerged precisely at the time she went on an Idris Elba fan binge on Netflix, re-emerging from that two-week stint more Southern and succulent than any character he’s ever played. I’ve tried, on numerous occasions, to remind her that she’s more than a decade younger than me, from Oakland, B-cup at the most optimistic, and on her very best day a pasty white that most bleach brands would set as a target for the ‘after’ of their comparison washing ads. But that’s just how she is. Chloe’s quirkiness is inflexible, and her friendship comes at you like an out-of-control freight train, or it doesn’t come at all.
At the moment, I’d give anything for the latter option. The tension in my neck is fierce, and with an as-yet unexplained urgency, I desperately want to get back to reading about … whatever this story of the woman in the water is.
‘What’s wrong, hon?’ Chloe flaps her lashes with the question, broadcasting the mildest irritation that I’ve not yet acknowledged her presence.
‘It’s nothing, Clo.’ A horrible abbreviation for her name, but I’ve never thought up anything better. ‘Just distracted with my own stuff. Can we talk later?’
Her look is unreadable. For a moment there are hints of disappointment, then pouty annoyance and the threat of an even poutier resentment. It eventually morphs into a tight smile, though she speaks through barely moving teeth. ‘Sure, if that’s what you need. If, you know, your stuff is so important.’
She stresses the words with mock disdain, but disappears behind a bookshelf and pretends to be busy with re-organising the stock there before I face the delicate task of replying.
The headlines on my screen have kept scrolling. There’s still nothing about the girl in the river.
In the river.
Last night bursts back into my head. And this morning. The way things weren’t supposed to be.
This morning, from the moment I awoke, David was different. His movements were different. He lingered longer than usual before he left for work, petering about upstairs, in his third-storey ‘home office’, with whatever it is he works on in there. Usually it’s only a few minutes – ‘Just grabbing my things, then out the door …’ – but not today. Today he changed his routine. And David is not a man who changes his routine.
I would swear he was trying to avoid me, hiding himself away in a spot he knew I didn’t go. Trying to move through our apartment unseen so he didn’t have to lay eyes on …
But I stop myself, because that’s such a very silly thing to think. Even if the thought has been with me since the day first began and the face in the mirror did its usual thing.
Every morning, as I stand in the bathroom and gaze into the mirror, my eyes look back and taunt me. The fact that their colour doesn’t match my name has always disappointed me, and it’s a bit like they know this and are so prominent on my face purely as a way to rub it in.
They teased from the mirror in their customary way, today, but I merely shrugged. I’m used to this, and I went about my ritual as usual. Mornings are a well-honed routine. The actions of each minute are tuned to fit into their allotted space just as they ought, and so I went through the steps in their customary order. My face was done, my hair was brushed, and my teeth were as clean as is ever the case for a heavy tea drinker. I was suitably polished up for the day. My feet, seemingly registering all this even ahead of my brain, were already moving me out of our teal-tiled bathroom towards the kitchen.
Like they’d lives of their own.
They pointed me down the stairs, the same as they might on any average day. Toe into the not-so-plush carpeting of each step, then heel, bend of a stiff knee above – not creaking yet, I’m not so old as that – and repeat. I let my body guide me. Like normal, like any other norma—
But I didn’t feel quite myself, it has to be said. And it’s an odd thing, to start the day feeling not quite one’s self.
The quarter-inch synthetic rag of the staircase drove its way between my toes in exactly the way it always does, and yet it … well, it didn’t. I’m not sure I can say it any better than that. And it wasn’t just the floor. Moments earlier, when my face stared back at me from the mirror, it was there, too. Something in my features I couldn’t pinpoint, something that in another context I might describe as pain. And a buzz in my ears. And a stronger edge to my eyes.
I felt, deeply, that I ought to know what brought me into this day in this state; that it’s strange, and somehow incomprehensible, not to know why one feels the way one does. But I woke without that knowledge, and like so many other things in life, I simply had to accept it.
One foot in front of the other, toes in the carpet, head on fire.
At the bottom of the staircase I’d rounded the corner into the kitchen, brushed my straw-coloured hair from my exposed neck and tried to rub away a bit of the firmness there, but I was pressing fingers into rocks. I’d gone to bed a woman. I’d woken up made of stone.
The lights had flickered when I switched them on – then a sudden burst of white. White. The memories came on strong, in the confused flurry that generally shapes morning thoughts.
The murder along Russian River. Not a dream. Work. Engaging, yet peaceful work. Long hours in front of my computer. Real.
The drive home. White lights in my vision, a face … The dreams pressed for their own.
But then – home. Passion. David. Tight embraces.
And then coldness and rejection. That wasn’t a dream, either. That was real, and horrible, and I was quite certain I wasn’t imagining it.
The evening had begun with passion. I may be hazy-eyed but I remember that clearly enough. All the signs of the red-blooded night every couple dreams of, and we were bringing that desire to life. But then it stopped, so abruptly. A single word, and everything ground to a halt.
There may have been more involved than that, but I just don’t remember. I didn’t remember this morning in the kitchen, and I don’t remember now at my desk.
I only remember …