Playing Dead (20 page)

It was disturbing that the girl who shared my Social Security number was so easy to unearth. It certainly didn’t bolster my confidence in WITSEC, but then again, thirty-two years ago when I was born, who could have imagined this stuff would be right at your fingertips?

The last printout, a single page, was different. No website marking, no hint at all of where it came from. The page listed people named Adams as if it had been ripped out of a phone book, except that instead of addresses and phone numbers, it gave their Social Security number, date of death, and a file number with an asterisk. The asterisk was explained at the bottom of
the page. Police case files. Suspicious deaths? I wondered. Had this info been hacked out of a government file?

Susan Bridget Adams, born in 1977, was highlighted in yellow marker right beside her police case file number. She died a three-year-old toddler. It was shocking to see the nine-digit number I’d recited automatically for years at doctors’ offices and banks beside the name of a little girl on an official death list, to know that her premature dying somehow brought me protection.

After swallowing the last drop of Dr Pepper, I headed back inside to my computer, praying the wireless internet gods were shining on me. And they were. I connected immediately and typed the zip code of Susan Adams’s last known address into the search engine. The zip code matched someplace on the south side of Chicago. More links to the Windy City.

Then I searched “Adams and genealogy.” With such a common name, I didn’t expect much but was rewarded twenty minutes later at a website ranked fourteen on Google’s list. A fuzzy black-and-white photograph of an angry-faced man named Uncle Eldon welcomed me to his surprisingly sophisticated page for the Adams Family.

I clicked “family tree” and almost immediately found “Susie” Bridget Adams and the single word description of her death:
fall
.

Her father still lived in the same Chicago zip code, possibly in the same home; her mother died in the late 1990s of cancer. It consoled me to see that she gave birth to five other children after Susie, all still living when the site was updated two months ago.

This page shared a link to “Southlawn Cemetery Records.” Once there, I typed in Susie’s name, all the while thanking Uncle Eldon for his overzealous details.

In seconds, the screen displayed a crude hand-drawn map, studded with coffin-shaped rectangles. I don’t know why it bothered me so much. I’d seen a similar computer-generated map two
days before we buried Daddy. In little Susie’s case, someone scanned in the original pencil rendering in the old family plot where she rested.

Each rectangle bore a number. The numbers were assigned to ten names, all Adamses, all listed in old-fashioned, respectful calligraphy at the bottom of the page. It wasn’t hard to find little Susie’s coffin, a rectangle half the size of the others, crammed at an angle in the corner.

Grave number 426—Susie’s grave—wasn’t expected. Grave diggers had made room.

She had been reduced to another number, a piece of geometry on a page. I hit the “print” button and listened to Daddy’s machine down the hall clear its throat.

Frustration gnawed at me, mostly because I knew that I was only working on the periphery of my own story. Susie was a single, sad note that led to a Chicago gravesite, more proof of my family’s secrets, but little else.

An hour later, I lay on the couch wrapped in my old fluffy Peter Rabbit comforter. I was sailing on a highway with no speed limit after tossing five milligrams of Xanax from Daddy’s bottle down my throat and chasing it with a whiskey. The Rangers/Yankees game hummed pleasantly on the 42-inch TV nestled in the corner.

I closed my eyes and pictured my little place at Halo Ranch. The Tahitian beach scene that hung over the fireplace, the bright Mexican rug that covered the beat-up pine floor, a friend’s photograph in the tiny kitchen of a heart-patterned quilt blowing on a clothesline in a West Texas landscape as bare as the moon. I’d have to arrange to move all of it back home. And harder, I had to break the news to colleagues and kids at Halo that I wouldn’t be coming back.

I dozed and when I opened my eyes again, a large shape was slouched in Daddy’s chair.

And he had something gripped in his hand.

“You had me worried there for a second,” Jack Smith told me. “I knocked. Called your name a couple of times.”

His eyes lit on the prescription bottle on the coffee table and the empty glass. “How much did you take?”

“Not enough to kill me.” I tried to claw my way out of the fog. How did he get in? The object in his hand appeared to be a small vat of blood.

Jack transferred the prescription bottle out of my reach, onto the mantel.

“I make an excellent doctored-up Prego.” He held up the jar. He had a new sling, I noticed. Bright blue. “Are you in for dinner? I came by to do a little more research with you.”

Well, I was in no shape for that.

But, to my surprise, I was ravenous.

“Go for it,” I said, my eyes drifting closed.

He didn’t seem to expect any assistance in the kitchen and I was incapacitated enough not to give him any. He efficiently turned out a Caesar salad, warm French bread, and a decent “doctored” sauce piled with a mountain of snowy Parmesan cheese. He brought our plates out on two old metal Beatles TV trays he found in the pantry.

I didn’t want to think too deeply about where Jack learned to provide such a simple, warm act because then I’d have to accept Jack as a human being with actual feelings. One-dimensional asshole Jack was enough for me.

He hinted that he could spend the night so we’d be ready to get to work in the morning. In my chemically induced haze, this seemed perfectly logical. Like a civilized divorced couple, we agreed he could take over the guest room downstairs for the
night. I told him where the sheets were. Making his bed seemed a little too intimate and I wasn’t sure how steady I’d be on my feet. He insisted on cleaning up the kitchen by himself and later, while I cuddled with Peter Rabbit and kept my eyes half-open to the game, he texted his boss.

As Jack settled in to watch the eighth inning of a Rangers blowout, I pushed myself up from the couch.

“Let me know how it ends,” I told him. “I’m going to bed.”

“I’ll go with you. Help you navigate the stairs.”

I shrugged and headed for the staircase, my comforter slung over my shoulder and trailing behind me, Linus-style. Jack caught me when I tripped on it a few steps from the top.

In my room, I kicked some clothes on the floor out of the way and fell on the bed, not bothering to untangle the sheets or say good night.

A wispy thought floated to the surface as I drifted again on that lovely sea.

Wasn’t it most likely that Anthony Marchetti was warning me about Jack?

Wouldn’t a reporter choose to do his research with a fellow reporter? Or by himself? Why the hell had I let my guard down?

Jack was busy at the window, checking the lock, pulling down the shade, before moving deliberately toward the bed.

He reached down, looming over me.

I wanted to protest but I couldn’t.

He grasped my wrist firmly.

He was feeling my pulse.

The last thing I remember is Jack’s silhouette, carved out by the hall light as he leaned against the doorframe.

I have no idea how long he stood there.

M
y eyelids struggled to open, and when they did, I was confused. Lights out, shade pulled, a glimmer of gray coming through.

Music drifted up the stairs.

Dreamy. Sad.

Mama playing.

Am I still asleep?
Thunder rumbled like distant drums, and the first drops of rain slapped the window.

I pinched my arm. It hurt for a full five seconds. Definitely wide awake. Still, the music drifted up.

Where in the hell is that coming from? Where
, I suddenly remembered,
is Jack?

I sat up abruptly. Last night’s clothes, still on. Thank God.

I stumbled to the hallway.

Chopin.

“Hello?” I called, moving tentatively down the stairs, the grand piano emerging into view like a black, shiny beast. I half expected to see Mama sitting there in her hospital gown.

The piano bench was empty, coated with a fine layer of dust.

The living room, empty.

The music still playing.

Nocturne No. 19.

One of three nocturnes my mother loved to perform.

Now its notes were filtering under the closed kitchen door.

Physically, achingly pulling me against my will.

I held my breath and threw open the door.

My eyes set on it the second I stepped onto the cold tile. Mama’s old radio by the kitchen sink, blaring. I thought it was broken.

I made four quick strides and flipped it off, whipping back to survey the room, getting my bearings in the sudden silence, trying to slow my heart. One of Granny’s pale green antique McCoy mugs sat on the table holding the dregs of cold coffee. It was next to a cheap fold-out driving map of Oklahoma I’d never seen before. The newspaper story of Jennifer Coogan’s murder was paper-clipped to it.

The louvered door to the laundry room began to slowly slide open.

Suddenly, the house wasn’t silent anymore.

It was filled with a bloodcurdling scream. Mine.

Jack emerged.

“What the hell is wrong with you?” he snapped.

“You purposely scare me,” I said, breathing hard. “Did you mess with the radio?”

He gave me an odd, pitying look.

“It’s a nice station. Classical. Out of Dallas.”

“Mama’s favorite,” I said dully.

“That’s where the dial was set when I turned it on.”

He stepped toward me and I lunged a step back.

“Is there anything that would calm you down? That’s not in the Xanax bottle?”

You getting the hell out of my house
.

“Dr Pepper,” I said.

I dropped into a chair because my legs had turned to rubber. Jennifer Coogan’s sweet face smiled up at me from the newspaper article, telling me I was overreacting.

“I borrowed your computer.” Jack handed me my drink. “Checked into the newspaper articles. My FBI source emailed me some information on that girl who was murdered in Oklahoma. Are you calm enough to hear more?”

I nodded, itching to slap his patronizing face, considering the possibility that he had done more with my computer than use the internet. Most reporters—hell, most
people
—wouldn’t be caught dead without their own laptops or smartphones. I dredged my brain trying to remember what would be on mine that I didn’t want him to see.

“I thought it was possible that Jennifer Coogan was a hit.” He pointed to the headline on the table:
WOMAN’S BODY FOUND IN LITTLE RIVER
. “The FBI was called in briefly on it because it was unusual. Two agents from Oklahoma City. Both retired now. Jennifer was raped and shot in the back of the head, then dumped here.” He took a pencil and circled a blue squiggle that represented the Little River.

“She was duct-taped to a jumbo can of hominy and a six-pound can of ready-made nacho cheese sauce from the restaurant where she worked. One was strapped to her feet, the other around her chest. But everything else about it looks kind of professional.”

“A can of nacho cheese sauce,” I echoed miserably.

“The cans are details not released to the press. The killer or killers weren’t too bright if they intended to send her permanently to the bottom of the river. Kids out fishing found her body around dawn three days after she went missing. She’d washed up between a couple of rocks in a tiny inlet. The thing is, the girl was no one. A college student home waitressing for the summer. No criminal
record. Conservative family. A career beauty contestant in high school. Runner-up in Miss National Teenager her senior year. Traveled very little outside the confines of her pageant schedule and her move to college. Not many girls her age lived a safer lifestyle.”

The idea that Jennifer Coogan was “no one” said volumes about Jack.

“How did you really get this stuff?” I asked.