The World Gives Way: A Novel Page 8

  Simpson walked ahead of him, looked back through the veil of people passing, and shouted, “Come on.”

  Tobias pushed through the crowd to catch up.

  “Nothing that kid told me leads me to believe otherwise,” Simpson said. “They always go to Palmer.”

  Tobias felt better later that evening once he was back in his apartment, just him alone with a tablet full of evidence, letters to sort through, and a puzzle to solve.

  Tobias had read through the letters a couple of times already, handling them delicately, the oils of his fingers barriered by standard-issue white evidence gloves. Even then, touching the antique paper felt like an indiscretion. He was astonished that she’d been ballsy enough to steal it. He sat at his tiny foldout table and spread the letters out as far as the surface would allow. Tobias’s apartment was an economical space, so every fork and plate and corner drawer had its purpose. New London didn’t allow for much living space unless you were as rich as the Carlyles. Barnes’s apartment had been similar when Tobias had moved in with him; he had taught Tobias to only hold on to the things he needed. Comfort could be found in people, in life, in a job well done, not in objects. David and Ingrid, by contrast, had been magpies, constantly collecting little baubles that they would eventually abandon in an escape when the inevitable landlord or loan shark came calling. Tobias looked around his apartment, its orderliness and calm, and felt mostly satisfied, though his thoughts strayed to Barnes’s warm wooden desk. He would get there someday.

  With the letters spread out as far as they were able to be on the small tabletop, Tobias tried to get a better sense of Myrra Dal, of the why of her. Something more than Simpson’s reductive reasoning. There had to be more than “She’ll go to Palmer.” He arranged the letters in order of date, lightly handling Jake’s papers at the corners and keeping scanned letters from Dal’s quarters up on his tablet screen. The content of their correspondence was actually fairly tame, nothing too salacious. Myrra Dal had kept it tame, knowing Jake was after something purer than just sex. He was looking for someone to save.

  The letters started halfway through their courtship, presumably after Myrra Dal’s tablet had been confiscated by Imogene. At the start the letters were mostly inquisitive, and they operated under the guise of friendship. She asked Jake about his family, his job, what books he liked. She made sure to remain constantly thankful for his attention and correspondence: “My world is so small… it’s so nice to be able to just talk to somebody, and not have it be about laundry or cleaning skedules.”

  Another letter, about a month in: “Your professer sounds like a pain in the ass. But you’re smart—if you do the work and do it well, in the end she’ll have to give you an A, right? I wouldn’t worry too much. Honestly, I’m just jealous of all the stuff you get to learn! I’m just happy that I learned to read… though you’ve been very kind to ignore my horrible spelling.”

  Tobias couldn’t quite tell if the misspelled words were honest errors or strategic. Always there was a hint of her less-than life, but blended with humor, to keep from alienating Jake.

  Shortly after that, Jake volunteered to tutor her. The letters got a little shorter—they were able to talk more in person. Snippets and references here and there to stolen conversations. They met before or after grocery runs, for short enough bursts that the Carlyles seemingly hadn’t noticed. It wasn’t long after that that the relationship shifted. There were three letters in a row from Jake, with no responses from Myrra Dal.

  Jake maintained some level of poise in the first letter: “Dear Myrra, I really apologize for what happened last week. I’m so sorry if I offended you. You ran off so quick, it’s hard to tell if I misread the moment… we didn’t really get a chance to talk. Will you be coming by the store this week? Maybe we can clear the air.”

  The next letter got a little more inquisitive: “Dear Myrra, You missed your usual Thursday grocery run. Is everything okay?”

  Then, “I’m getting worried—are you avoiding me, or did Imogene find out about us? I just wish you’d talk to me. Should I not have kissed you? Is it what you want?”

  Finally a response from Dal—“I’m so sorry, Jake. I should have written to you sooner… you’re safe, Imogene doesn’t know anything. I just needed some time to get my head around my feelings for you. I don’t want you to think I’m using you or anything like that. I know some contract workers will do some pretty awful, desparate things to move up in the world, I just don’t want you to think of me like that. The truth is, I like you a lot, more than I should, and it worries me. I could get us in a lot of trouble, and I don’t want that for you. I think it’s probably best if we stop seeing each other. I think I like you too much, and it’s going to get us hurt. Maybe this will just be better if it stays something wonderful and perfect in my memory. Thank you for everything you’ve done. Sorry this is such a short goodbye, but I think it’s best—Myrra.”

  Jake chased her, didn’t take no for an answer, something Dal had undoubtedly counted on. It was a gamble, but it had paid off. The whole thing felt like a classic romance, hit all the right beats. From there the letters grew longer again, more romantic. Keepsakes of lovers instead of notes from friends.

  Tobias had to give her credit. Myrra Dal’s letters to Jake felt very sincere, from the first to the last. He felt his sympathy for Jake grow, just a little bit. If Tobias hadn’t known how the affair had ended, he wasn’t sure he would have seen it coming. There were a lot of personal things that she wrote to him, things that Tobias knew to be true from her files. Like how the smell of raw meat made her gag, ever since that stint working in a butcher shop. The horrid conditions she’d lived in while working for the laundry. She confessed that she still had a habit of sewing valuables into her mattress, after having so much stolen from her when she lived in the laundry dorms. Tobias made a mental note to go back and check Dal’s mattress one more time before leaving for Palmer. She likely had the skills to hide the stitching—it was possible that the techs hadn’t noticed anything in their initial sweep of the house.

  She wrote often to Jake about Charlotte, updating him on how she was growing, what toys she preferred, the little sounds she would make and what each sound meant. This, too, felt honest, though Tobias had to grant that it was hard to tell. But there was such an incongruity in taking an infant on the run—Myrra Dal had sense, she should have left Charlotte behind. The only conclusion Tobias could reach was that Dal loved her.

  It was fascinating to think of Myrra Dal holding a pen, pressing down with her other palm on this very piece of paper to steady it against the writing instrument. He was touching the same piece of paper she had touched. He placed his palm on top of one of the paper letters, as if to mirror the motions he imagined, pushing down as if he could push through his glove, through the paper, and touch her hand on the other side. His fingerprints overlaid with hers.

  There was one glaring omission in her letters to Jake, one bit of herself that she held back, and that was her mother. When Jake, in a later letter, asked about her family, she said she didn’t remember her mother at all. Tobias doubted that.

  He flipped through file pages in his tablet until he got to Dal’s family records. Ami Dal, removed from work orders at age thirty, the authorities citing mental instability. Myrra Dal would have been five. Young enough to forget, maybe. But her mother had been her only caretaker. Dal’s father had never been in the picture. Security had his name on the birth record, but he’d been transferred out of New London to a metalworking operation in Troy months before Dal was born. Tobias wondered if Myrra Dal knew anything about him at all.

  Myrra Dal, Myrra Dal. Whenever Tobias thought about criminals, he always referred to them by last name or full name. It was a convenient way to keep them distanced, to separate them in his head from friends, lovers, family, whoever else. Though to be fair, he never referred to his parents as Mom or Dad either. Always Ingrid and David. It was for the best.

  Without his meaning them to, they flas
hed through his mind—frequently drunk, frequently absent, now residing somewhere in a New London jail, someplace he never cared to check on or visit. The impermanence of too many hotel rooms, meals of restaurant leftovers. The sweet rotten smell of stale champagne and hangover sweat. Always some mix of powders and pills near the bathroom sink.

  Every action Tobias undertook, every choice and impulse, was weighed down by David and Ingrid. He knew, self-consciously, that he had fashioned most of his identity in direct rebellion against theirs. There was no escaping your upbringing, one way or the other. Tobias thought again of Myrra Dal’s childhood, different from his, and more terrible. How much could she remember about her mother, and how much did she let in? Then he wondered what was worse, to remember too little or to remember too much.

  Hours later, around dawn the following morning, Tobias cut through the crime scene tape on the door to the Carlyle penthouse. The rookie in him bristled at this. Was he allowed here? Of course he was. He was one of the lead agents on the case. Barnes or Simpson wouldn’t hesitate. They’d take ownership of the whole thing.

  He’d leave a note for the techs, just in case. He put on his gloves and disposable slippers over his shoes, and, once properly outfitted, he stepped over the threshold.

  Even with the fabric of the slippers, every footstep rang out on the marble floor, and the sound reverberated off the walls. He was a trespasser here. The air was heavy, it was so quiet. There was something about crime scenes after the fact, they tended to absorb the horror and come alive. Tobias felt as though there were silent guardians in the air watching him from all sides, upset that he had come.

  He pushed past the feeling and made his way through the cavernous foyer. He had to pause and appreciate it. So much space, so much light, so much wood. Framed artwork hung tastefully along the walls. Tobias couldn’t help but stop to check and see if any were from his family’s collection.

  No go. The Bendel collection had been mostly work from the modern period. He recognized a few Turners and an early Matisse. No artists from the new world, no work from the modern period. Nothing under three hundred years old. The Carlyles liked everything old, very old. Classical.

  Tobias made his way down a hall behind the stairs to Myrra Dal’s room. It was hidden behind another elegant wooden door, but inside it was much more bare than the rest of the house, little more than a closet. A mattress and blankets on the floor, a plastic crate with clothes and rags folded inside, a broken clock and a lamp on top. There was one small window high on the wall, near the ceiling.

  There were very few signs of Myrra Dal trying to personalize the space. It was possible that the Carlyles had forbidden any extra decorating, but Tobias suspected it had been Dal’s choice. She had lived here for years. He pictured her sleeping on this bed, a tiny mass with thick black hair, curled up on the floor. He pictured her waking up for Charlotte’s feedings, rising early to make breakfast, and cleaning when she’d be most out of sight. Heading back to this tiny box late at night, maybe stealing a few minutes of alone time here in between errands in the afternoon.

  There were those who would have tried to make the best of it, add mementos to the room, a picture, what have you. But Dal had refused to do so; she wouldn’t do anything that would suggest she was putting down roots in such a place. To do so would mean succumbing to the lie that this was a home and this was a life. Dal seemed smart enough to know better. Maybe she had killed them, after all.

  He pulled the mattress back from the wall. There were no slits or tears. With a gloved hand, he felt along the bottom seam. Near the top corner of the mattress he felt it. The seams had been cut discreetly, a small incision maybe twenty centimeters wide, enough to hide a tablet or a rolled sheaf of paper. The techs had missed this. He pushed his fingers inside, feeling through the batting and padding of the mattress, and grasped something hard and square. It wasn’t a tablet, but it was a similar shape. He pulled it out and immediately experienced the same admiration and covetousness he’d felt for the inlaid wood doors and the artwork in the halls.

  It was a book. On the cover it read: “The World Is Round.” He opened the cover with care, worried about cracking the spine. It looked very, very old. Had she stolen it? Marcus Carlyle had an enviable antique library. The pages made a whispering, shushing noise as they brushed against each other. Tobias savored the irony that Myrra Dal, a contract worker, lived a life that allowed her ready access to such luxury, whereas he, who had freedom and a steady job, was toiling away in a studio apartment with collapsible furniture. It wasn’t the same, he knew. But still.

  He read the first line: “Once upon a time the world was round and you could go on it around and around.”

  Beautifully put, and not true nowadays. The world now was flat. But, Tobias mused, it did still spin around and around. Our feet stay on the ground now thanks to centrifugal force, he remembered learning in school. On the ground, around and around, he thought. But once, in another time and another place, people had stayed where they were due to gravity. Gravity was a force that Tobias understood on an academic level, but he had never really been able to fully grasp it.

  Tobias closed the book, almost sorry to have to deposit it in a plastic evidence bag. It ought to go to the lab, he thought, or be stowed in an evidence locker. He decided to take it with him to Palmer instead. It merited further study.

  He fished around inside the mattress again, eager to see if any further treasures could be discovered. He pulled out a rolled sheaf of paper and an ink pen, her stash for writing to Jake, no doubt. There were also a couple of coins, and, buried deepest in the batting, a small religious icon made of faded blue plastic. It was a figure of a man with many arms. This surprised Tobias even more than the book. He didn’t imagine Myrra Dal to be a religious person, though he knew religion was encouraged among contract workers. All employers were required to allow workers one morning off once a week so they would have time for religious observance in whatever faith they chose. This was always advertised as benevolence on the part of the government, an affirmation of certain inalienable rights, but Tobias thought with skepticism that it was more of a carrot-and-stick trick than anything else. And anyway, it ensured that most people behaved themselves.

  He popped the icon into a smaller evidence bag and stowed it in his satchel along with the book. Best to keep this on him as well.

  The other rooms in the house were exactly as they’d been described in the bureau report. The only other room Tobias was curious about was the study.

  He’d examined the evidence very carefully. Imogene Carlyle had had very little need to keep personal records, but Marcus’s records were prolific. The techs had run through multiple hard drives: there were notes on the family’s finances, business logs, emails, diaries, shopping lists, invitations, blackmail threats, news articles, PR files, recipes, receipts, market research, bills, tax returns, tax evasion plans, and more. Tobias had read it all. Having been on the lowest rung on the bureau ladder for so long, he had learned how to review stacks and stacks of paperwork as efficiently as possible. He had read through every mundane detail. He read fast and he read thoroughly. And he had noticed that there was a gap.

  It was hard to see—it wasn’t as though there were any one significant thing missing in the time line of Marcus’s records. His tax information was all present and accounted for, his accounting books were all intact. But when it came to the last year, there just seemed to be less of everything than in previous years. In previous years he’d been engaged in campaigns for multiple congressmen, had been seated on multiple advisory boards for various state issues, had been consulted on a wide range of laws and federal measures. But in the past eighteen months, it looked as though every large corporate and government contract had vanished overnight. It didn’t seem feasible. The techs must have missed a file somewhere. He’d seen it happen before. Over the past two years Tobias had evolved into the techs’ number one fact-checker, constantly pointing out tiny gaps in the information, regul
arly requesting that they take a second look at the scene. People rolled their eyes when they saw him coming.

  Tobias entered the wood-paneled room and felt the quiet intensify. If the penthouse was now a guarded tomb, this was the heart of it. Tobias slid his gaze over to a side door just to the right of the desk. It was ajar, and through the gap in the doorway, Tobias could see into a white-tiled bathroom, part of Marcus Carlyle’s master suite. There was a white claw-foot tub resting on the white tile—Tobias could just make out one of the curved feet from where he stood. Tellingly, there were streaks of pink along the white sides of the tub, and a wider patch of tiles stained slightly pink just below. The new owners, whoever they were, would have to replace that tile.

  He took a few steps closer to the door and felt the air grow denser. He stepped back again, decided not to go in. That would be a morbid indulgence. He needed to focus on Marcus’s records.

  Tobias sank into the smooth leather of Marcus Carlyle’s desk chair—soft and smooth and rich—and sifted through every file he could find on Marcus’s tablet and on all supplemental hard drives.

  Something had to be missing, but nothing was missing. After an hour of searching, Tobias had found nothing that the IT guys hadn’t already dug up. He searched for other possibilities. Maybe Marcus Carlyle had deleted files before he died. He’d have to talk to Barnes. Maybe they could get an IT guy to come in and retrieve something.

  His hands lingered on the wood of the stair rail as he made his way back down to the entrance of the penthouse. The polished banister was cool and smooth but grew warm under the heat of his hand. Everything in the New London Security Bureau was metal and plastic. Someday, he thought again, and then wondered if Barnes would approve.

  A soft tinkling noise sounded above him. The chandelier was slowly spinning on its chain, the individual bits of crystal knocking against each other. Somehow his body cutting through the stillness, his footfalls on the floor, had been enough to cause such a disturbance, like the epicenter of an earthquake.