The Fall of Never (15 page)

When she’d finished reading the passage, she went back and read it again. And again. And again. Frozen by disbelief, she actually had to touch the print, trace the imprint of the letter with one finger. Doing so didn’t make it any easier to comprehend. The police had been right—there she was, her name right there in the middle of the page…and she flipped to the next Post-It marker and found her name
again…
and the next marker and
again.
And all without an ounce of explanation. Was it possible Becky had merely filled some sort of empty void? Had the girl simply created an idealized version of her older sister in her head? Was poor Becky losing her mind, thinking that her—

But something was there, caught in the web of her thoughts. Like someone’s name you just couldn’t remember—something that was there but just out of reach. Like fingers, barely grazing the tips of someone else’s.

What? What the hell is it?

But she couldn’t grasp hold of it, and the next second it was gone.

Another passage:
Spoke to Kelly about him today. She didn’t have much to say. She’s a good sister. But she’s so far away and it’s difficult to talk to her.

Who was “him”?

Kelly thought,
She’s a good sister.

Sorry, kiddo, I let you down. Really. I’m going to take the fall on this one, just lay it all down on me. I don’t know what the hell happened to you out there in the woods that night, but just go right ahead and put the weight on me, as the song goes. Take a load off, Becky, and put the weight on me.

She wished she could take it back, take it all back. And not just the event that lead up to Becky’s unconscious, bedridden state, but the
whole
thing, the whole goddamn mess she’d made by running away and never looking back. Never looking back for Becky.

I’m sorry. I can only say that so much.

“Sorry,” she whispered. Her voice cracked, and she found she was very close to tears.

In the darkness of the night, DeVonn Rotley—shivering against the cold—glanced up at the light that was Kelly Kellow’s bedroom window. He stared at the warm, glowing light for just a few moments before turning away and heading down the other side of the house toward the rear. He stopped here before a chain-link fence eight feet high and tipped with barbed wire. Behind the fence, a huddle of squat little doghouses stood in a line, as if at attention. The dogs were not out in the yard, agitated by the cold.

“Milky,” he half-whispered, peering into the darkness on the other side of the fence. He heard Milky or one of the other dogs wheeze from inside one of the doghouses. “Capri,” he called, “Dozer, Grizzle…”

Gordon Kellow owned the dogs, but Rotley trained them, named them. They were
his
dogs, really. It was his hand they ate out of, his face they lapped with their sloppy, flattened tongues.

There was a hose in the grass, attached to a well pump. He primed the pump and used the hose to refill the dogs’ water dishes. Again, he heard one or two of the dogs stir in the darkness. There were seven of them in all—Dobermans, all as black as the Devil’s asshole. Milky, Capri, Dozer, Grizzle, Humbert, Fenniwick, and Ophelia-Meringue. The cold air, now coupled with the splash of water spilling into the dogs’ plastic bowls, provoked the need to urinate in him. He finished off filling the bowls, tapped the hose out, and wound it back up against the well pump. Then he moved behind the pump, unzipped his fly, and relieved himself on a wedge of serviceberries.

He heard one of the dogs whimpering behind him. Without turning around, he called back, “You boys keep it down now. I don’t like the cold any more than you do.”

Finished, he shook himself off, zipped up his pants, and side-stepped the serviceberries. Heading back up to the house, he turned his head slightly toward the fenced-in community of Dobermans and said, “You good boys sleep well. We’ll all go running in the woods for a while tomorrow. You all just…”

His voice died in his throat. He froze in midstep, and it felt as though his heart had suddenly seized in his chest. Struggling to speak again, he managed a choked, “What are…” before he was silenced.

Moments later, and DeVonn Rotley was gone.

Chapter Eleven

Joshua Cavey got out of bed early, fixed himself some scrambled eggs, and ate them out on his fire escape while thinking,
To hell with the cold weather. It’s too beautiful out here.

Traffic was moving sluggish this morning. Even this early, with the mist of a fleeting dawn still hanging in the air, impatient commuters were laying on their car horns. He could hear a group of children laughing somewhere behind his apartment building, and could also hear the steam engine-sound of a bus’s air-brakes the next street over.

He’d dreamt of Kelly last night. And though he only remembered fuzzy selections of the dream, he remembered enough to leave an uncomfortable feeling in the pit of his stomach. Kelly…and an immense house that reached high into the night sky…the sound of barking dogs…a mysterious figure, maybe…

But he couldn’t really remember it. He rarely remembered his dreams. Except for a select few—dreaming of Sampers raising the gun, his eyes like chunks of granite, pulling the trigger, doing it over and over and over again. Those dreams had just been unsettling; the dream about Kelly seemed almost like some sort of premonition, something he should be watching for and worried about. Shoveling the last bit of egg into his mouth, he silently wished Kelly would call him as she’d promised. Surely she was all right—he was just being a big goon, really—but she
had
promised. Besides, was it a crime to want to put your mind at ease? He didn’t think so. Not yet, anyway.

After a short while the cold began to make his left shoulder throb, and he climbed back into his apartment.

There was no mistaking the absence of a feminine hand in the decoration of Joshua Cavey’s apartment. For the most part, the walls were completely barren with the exception of a large Andy Warhol print that hung on the wall opposite the windows. His furniture was functional and sufficient. An acoustic guitar stood on a stand in one blank, white corner while a fishbowl on a pedestal (the bowl, though filled with water, contained no fish—the pathetic things had died almost a year ago) stood in another.

His kitchen was of similar practicality. He owned only one pot, one pan, two plates, three glasses (all mismatched), and a handful of spotty silverware. The table in the center of the cramped kitchen boasted only a single chair. And to look inside his refrigerator was to look upon the shelves of a grocery store the day after a mean winter storm.

There were a few five-pound barbells on the floor of his bedroom, and he went to them now, sitting down on the edge of his bed. He grabbed one in his left hand, began working the weight up and down, up and down. This was no longer necessary—as part of his physical therapy following the shooting, he hadn’t needed to continue after what the doctors called a “complete recovery”—but he did it on occasion because it relaxed him. The arm and shoulder were still sore, but the weights did not cause a strain as they had when he’d first tried to lift them following a number of operations and an obscene selection of medication. Now, lifting the weights only gave him peace. On many occasions, he found they forced his mind to run blank and his body to completely relax. It was something akin to transcendental meditation.

But the barbells weren’t working this morning. He couldn’t stop thinking about Kelly.

And just what is it about her?
his mind spoke up.
Why should you even care so much about her, anyway? Are you falling in love with her? That would be bad.

Bad, he knew, because she did not feel the same way. He knew nothing of her past—like him, she chose to keep certain things to herself—but he knew there was something there, something she either didn’t fully remember or didn’t feel comfortable talking about. He never spoke to her about Sampers and about his injuries, mainly because he was afraid and embarrassed by them. So didn’t it make sense for her to withhold information about her own past for similar reasons? Perhaps an abusive boyfriend in her past, an old uncle who liked to touch her in places little girls should never be touched…

Now you’re just forcing yourself to think,
his head yammered.
Now you’re just insistent upon thinking about Kelly Rich, about keeping her picture inside your head. Are you doing this to yourself on purpose? Are you trying to drive yourself mad? She is practically a stranger to you; you had better friends at NYU who you don’t bother to keep in contact with. And now you’re sitting here worrying about her, hoping she calls, when she has every right in the world to do as she pleases, even if that means completely forgetting about you.

But the dream—something about her running through the woods in the dark, out of breath and frantic…and a dog chasing her…or something like that, something about a dog…

In that instant, he recalled what Dr. Mendes had told him about Nellie Worthridge, about one of the things she’d said to him:
We almost killed that fucking dog.
What that meant he didn’t know, but he surmised that he had dreamt about a dog because he had dogs on the brain (or, rather, had both Kelly and Nellie Worthridge on the brain, and his dream had simply incorporated recent details of both people—Kelly’s departure from the city, and Nellie’s comment about killing—or almost killing—a dog).

Strange how the brain operates,
he thought.

Stranger still, the telephone rang just as he set the barbell down, and it was Carlos Mendes calling about Nellie Worthridge.

At the hospital, Josh met Mendes in the doctor’s office—an institutional-looking room with lemon yellow walls and a single window behind a small oak desk, the filthy tin shade drawn. It was early and Mendes, seated behind his desk and fingering a cup of coffee he hadn’t yet taken a single sip from, looked just as haggard as he had on their first meeting. Josh wondered if the doctor always looked that way, the way some people always seem to have bags under their eyes, tired or not. On the corner of Mendes’s desk was an old clock-radio, turned on but turned low. Its dial was stuck between two channels, and the result was the intermittent sounds of a radio talk show and a jazz station, occasionally interrupted by bursts of static.

“I’m going to assume, since you are here now,” Mendes began, “that you care for Miss Worthridge?”

The question seemed oddly phrased. “I…well, of course I do. I wouldn’t want anything bad to come to her, if that’s what you mean. You know, if it’s something serious, I’d want to know about it.”

“Well, no,” Mendes said. “What I mean is that you are of no relation to this woman and have no obligations to her. You found her in her apartment and called the paramedics. Essentially, your job is done. If you want to walk, I wouldn’t say anything about it.
Couldn’t
say anything about it.”

For one brief, insane instant, Josh thought Mendes was going to hit him up for the cost of Nellie Worthridge’s medical treatment. He shook his head. “Dr. Mendes, I’m not following you here…”

“I just don’t want you to feel as though I’m wasting your time with anything I’ve got to say, anything pertaining to Miss Worthridge…”

“No,” Josh said, “you’re not wasting my time. In fact, I appreciate the call. Please, go ahead.”

Mendes lightly tapped the side of the coffee cup with a fingernail. “Nellie doesn’t play bridge,” he said matter-of-factly. “I asked her about that this morning—you know, opening her up with what she assumed was merely chitchat—and she said yes, she played bridge. I asked her the names of the women she played with and she gave them to me, first and last names. I asked where she played and she said their Wednesday night bridge game was always held in an apartment in the building next to hers. Just one building over. And I smiled and said something to the effect that it was good she was keeping active and she smiled too and said that it was fun and it kept her mind off other things. Like dying, she said. It kept her mind off dying.”

Josh just nodded. This was making no sense.

Mendes continued, “I looked up the names she’d given me and it turned out that one of the women, a Betty Shotts,
does
have an apartment in the building next door. I’d planned on phoning her to tell her of Miss Worthridge’s condition, and maybe find out a little about Nellie Worthridge myself, but when I called and mentioned Miss Worthridge’s name, this Betty Shotts had never heard of her. I asked if she was certain and she said of course, that she was old but she wasn’t
that
old. Then I asked if she played bridge on Wednesday nights and she admitted that she did—but no one named Nellie Worthridge ever played. No one in a wheelchair with no legs.”

“All right,” Josh said. “So she fibbed a little. She’s an old woman, that’s no big deal. Maybe she just knew of the game from one of the other women who played.”

“Right,” Mendes said, “that’s what I figured too. So I got in touch with them as well. And guess what?”

“Don’t tell me—none of them have ever heard of Nellie Worthridge?”

“Nail on the head,” the doctor said. He brought the cup of coffee to his lips with a shaking hand, took a sip, then set it down. “I’m sorry, I didn’t offer you any—”

“I’m all right, thank you.” Josh thought about what the doctor had just told him. “I see why this is strange,” he said, “but I’m not really sure what this means.”