Double Dexter (12 page)

So he had been here, in my space, on my computer, strictly as a part of his private program to Demolish Dexter—but right here at work? Why? As far as I knew, he had always confined his attempts to “get” me to general surveillance, and he had never actually snooped through my things before. What had brought on this new and unwelcome escalation? Had he finally slipped over the line into a kind of hostile insanity, permanently focused on me? Or did he really have some reason to think he was onto something specific, and he had a chance to prove me guilty?

It seemed impossible, on the face of it. I mean, of course I really am guilty, of many somethings, all of them lethal and very enjoyable and technically not quite legal. But I was extremely careful, I always cleaned up nicely afterward, and I could not imagine what Doakes thought he might come up with. I was fairly sure that there was nothing there to find.

It was puzzling, and very unsettling. But at least it jolted me out of my stupid good cheer and back into general gloominess again. So much for Chinese food: Half an hour later you’re grumpy again.

Deborah, however, was even grumpier when she slouched into my office as I was getting ready to go home.

“You took off early,” she said, “from the Torch.” And she made it sound like she was accusing me of stealing office supplies.

“I had to go to
work,
” I said, and I did what I could to match her surly tone.

She blinked. “What the hell has gotten into you lately?” she said. I took a breath, more to stall for time than because I needed air. “What do you mean?”

She pursed her lips, cocked her head to one side. “You’re jumpy
all the time. You snap at people. Maybe a little distracted? I don’t know. Like something’s bothering you.”

It was a very uncomfortable moment for me. She was right, of course, but how much could I tell her? Something
was
bothering me; I was convinced that someone had
seen
me and recognized me, and now I had caught Sergeant Doakes looking at my computer. It was nearly impossible to connect the two things in any way—the idea of some anonymous witness to Me at Play teaming up with Doakes to get me was ludicrous—but taken together, the two separate things had knocked me for a very uneasy loop. I was in the grip of illogical emotions, and I was not used to that at all.

But what could I say to her? Debs and I had always been close, of course, but that was partly because we
didn’t
share our feelings with each other. We couldn’t; I didn’t have any, and she was too ashamed of hers to admit she had them.

Still, I had to say something, and when I thought about it, she was probably the only one in the world I could really talk to, unless I was willing to shell out a hundred dollars an hour to talk to a shrink, which seemed like a very bad idea; I would either have to tell him the truth about myself, which was unthinkable, or make up some plausible fiction, which was certainly a waste of good money that might be put toward Lily Anne’s medical school tuition.

“I didn’t know it showed,” I said at last.

Debs snorted. “Dexter. This is me. We grew up together; we work together—I know you better than anybody else in the world. To me, it shows.” She raised an eyebrow encouragingly. “So what is it?”

She was right, of course. She
did
know me better than anyone else—better than Rita, or Brian, or anybody I had ever known, with the possible exception of Harry, our long-dead dad. Like Harry, Deborah even knew about Dark Dexter and his happy slashing, and she had come to terms with it. If ever there was a time to talk, and a person to talk to, it was now, with her. I closed my eyes for a moment, and tried to think of how to begin. “I don’t know,” I said. “It’s just that, um … a few weeks ago, when I was—”

Deborah’s radio squawked, a loud and rude electronic belch, and then it said quite clearly, “Sergeant Morgan, what is your twenty?” She shook her head at me and held her radio up.

“This is Morgan,” she said. “I’m in Forensics.”

“You’d better come down here, Sergeant,” a voice said over the radio. “I think we found something you need to see.”

Deborah looked at me. “Sorry,” she said. She pushed the button on the radio and said, “On my way.” Then she got up and started for the door, hesitated, and turned back to me. “We’ll talk later, Dex, okay?”

“Sure,” I said. “Don’t worry about me.” Apparently it didn’t sound as pitiful to her as it did to me; she just nodded and hurried out the door. And I finished closing up shop for the night and then headed to my car.

T
HE SUN WAS STILL BRIGHT IN THE SKY WHEN I GOT HOME
. It was one of the very few benefits of summer in Miami: The temperature may be ninety-seven, and the humidity well over a hundred percent, but at least when you got home at six o’clock, there was still plenty of daylight left, so you could sit outside with your family and sweat for another hour and a half.

But, of course, my little family did no such thing. We were natives; tans are for tourists, and we preferred the comfort of central air-conditioning. Besides, since my brother, Brian, had given Cody and Astor a Wii, they hadn’t left the house at all except by force. They both seemed unwilling to leave the room where the thing sat, for any reason. We’d had to make some very strict rules about using the Wii: They had to ask first, and they had to finish their homework before they turned it on, and they could play with it no more than an hour a day.

So when I came into the house and saw Cody and Astor already standing in front of the TV with their Wii controllers clutched tightly in their hands, my first question was automatic. “Homework all done?” I said.

They didn’t even look up; Cody just nodded, and Astor frowned. “We finished it at after-school,” she said.

“All right,” I said. “Where’s Lily Anne?”

“With Mom,” Astor said, frowning deeper at my continuing interruption.

“And where’s Mom?”

“Dunno,” she said, waving her controller and jerking spasmodically with whatever was happening on the screen. Cody glanced at me—it was Astor’s play—and he shrugged slightly. He almost never said more than three words at a time, one small side effect of the abuse he’d received from his biological father, and Astor did most of the talking for both of them. But at the moment she seemed uncharacteristically unwilling to talk—probably a continuing miff over impending braces. So I took a breath and tried to shake off my growing irritation at both of them.

“Fine,” I said. “Thank you for asking, yes, I did have a hard day at work. But I already feel a lot better, now that I’m here nestled in the warm bosom of my family. I’ve enjoyed our little chat very much.”

Cody gave a funny little half smirk and said, very softly, “Bosom.” Astor said nothing; she just gritted her teeth and attacked a large monster on the screen. I sighed; as comforting as it may be to some of us, sarcasm, like youth, is wasted on the young. I gave up on the kids and went to look for Rita.

She wasn’t in the kitchen, which was a very large disappointment, since it meant she was not busily whipping up something wonderful for my dinner. There was nothing burbling on the stove, either. And it wasn’t leftover night; this was very puzzling and a little bit troublesome. I hoped this didn’t mean we were going to have to order pizza—although it made the kids happy, it simply could not compete with even the most casual of Rita’s efforts.

I went back through the living room and down the hall. Rita was not in the bathroom, and not in the bedroom, either. I began to wonder whether Freddy Krueger had grabbed her, too. I went to the bedroom window and looked out into the backyard.

Rita sat at the picnic table we’d put up under a large banyan tree that spread its branches over nearly half our backyard. She was holding Lily Anne on her lap with her left hand and sipping from a large glass of wine with the right. Other than that, she seemed to be doing absolutely nothing except staring back at the house
and slowly shaking her head. As I watched she took a gulp of wine, hugged Lily Anne a little tighter for a moment, and then appeared to sigh heavily.

This was very strange behavior, and I had no idea what to make of it. I had never seen Rita act like this before—sitting alone and unhappy and drinking wine—and it was disturbing to see her doing it now, whatever the reason might be. It seemed to me, however, that the most important point was that, whatever Rita was doing, she was not cooking dinner, and that was just the sort of dangerous inaction that calls for prompt and vigorous intervention. So I wound my way back through the house, past Cody and Astor—still happily killing things on the TV screen—and on out the back door into the yard.

Rita looked up at me as I came outside and she seemed to freeze for a moment. Then she hurriedly turned away, put her wineglass down on the picnic table’s bench, and turned back around to face me. “I’m home,” I said, with cautious good cheer.

She sniffled loudly. “Yes, I know,” she said. “And now you’ll go get all sweaty again.”

I sat next to her; Lily Anne had begun to bounce as I approached, and I held out my hands for her. She launched herself toward me and Rita passed her over to me with a tired smile. “Oh,” Rita said, “you’re such a
good
daddy. Why can’t I just …” And she shook her head and snuffled again.

I looked away from Lily Anne’s bright and cheerful face and into Rita’s tired and unhappy one. Aside from a runny nose, she also seemed to have been crying; her cheeks were wet and her eyes looked red and a little swollen. “Um,” I said. “Is something wrong?”

Rita blotted at her eyes with the sleeve of her blouse and then turned around and took a large sip of wine. She put the glass back down again, behind her, and faced me once more. She opened her mouth to say something, bit her lip, and looked away, shaking her head.

Even Lily Anne seemed puzzled by Rita’s behavior, and she bounced vigorously for a moment, calling out, “Abbab bab
bab
!”

Rita looked at her with a small, tired smile. “She needs a fresh diaper,” Rita said, and before I could respond to that, Rita sobbed: just one small sob, and she strangled it off for the most part so that it
might almost have been a hiccup, but I was very sure it was a sob. It seemed like overreacting to a dirty diaper.

I am not comfortable with emotions, partly because I do not have them and so I generally don’t understand where they come from and what they mean. But after years of careful study and a great deal of practice I had learned to cope when others displayed them, and I usually knew the correct response when a human being was in the grip of strong feelings.

In this case, however, I admit I was helpless. Going by the book, a woman’s tears generally called for comfort and reassurance, no matter how phony—but how could I apply either of those things if I didn’t know what was causing Rita’s crying fit? I looked at her carefully, searching her face for some clue, and found nothing; red-rimmed eyes and wet cheeks, yes, but unfortunately no one had scrawled a message on her face outlining a cause and a course of treatment. And so, sounding almost as awkward as I was beginning to feel, I stuttered out, “Uh, are you … I mean, is something wrong?”

Rita sniffled again and wiped her nose on her sleeve. Once more she seemed about to say something truly momentous. Instead, she just shook her head and touched the baby’s face with a finger. “It’s Lily Anne,” she said. “We have to move. And then you.”

I heard those terrifying words, “It’s Lily Anne,” and for just a moment the world got very bright and spun around me as my brain was filled with an endless list of terrible maladies that might be attacking my little girl. I clutched my baby tightly and tried to breathe until things steadied down again. Lily Anne helped out by swatting at the side of my head and saying, “Abah-a-bah!” The clout to my ear brought me back to my senses and I looked back at Rita, who apparently had no idea that her words had sent me into a full-scale tizzy. “What’s wrong with Lily Anne?” I demanded.

“What?” Rita said. “What do you mean? There’s nothing— Oh, Dexter, you’re being so— I just meant, we have to move. Because of Lily Anne.”

I looked at the happy little face of the child bouncing on my lap. Rita was not making sense, at least not to me. How could this perfect little person force us to move? Of course, she was my child, which raised a few terrifying possibilities. Perhaps some vagrant strand of
wicked DNA had surfaced in her and the outraged neighborhood was demanding her exile. It was a horrible thought, but it was at least possible. “What did she do?” I said.

“What did she— Dexter, she’s only a year old,” Rita said. “What could she possibly
do
?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “But you said we have to move because of Lily Anne.”

“Oh, for God’s sake,” she said. “You’re being completely …” She fluttered a hand in the air, and then she turned around again and took another gulp of wine, bending over the glass and shielding it from me, as if she didn’t want me to know what she was doing over there.

“Rita,” I said, and she slapped the glass down onto the bench and turned back toward me, swallowing convulsively. “If nothing is wrong with Lily Anne, and she didn’t
do
anything wrong, why do we have to move?”

She blinked, and then wiped the corners of her eyes with her sleeve. “That’s just …” she said. “I mean, because look at her.” Rita gestured at the baby, and it seemed to me that her motor skills were not quite what they should have been, because her hand bumped clumsily against my arm. She jerked the hand back and waved at the house. “Such a little house,” she said. “And Lily Anne is getting so big.”

I looked at her and waited for more, but I waited in vain. Her words did not add up to anything I could understand, but they were apparently all I was going to get. Did Rita really think that Lily Anne was growing into some kind of gigantic creature, like in
Alice in Wonderland
, and soon the house would be too small to contain her? Or was there some hidden message here, possibly in Aramaic, that would take me years of study to decipher? I have heard and read many suggestions about what it takes to make a marriage work, but at the moment what mine seemed to need most was a translator. “Rita, you’re not making any sense,” I said, with all the gentle patience I could fake.