“I agree, no argument there. But I can’t see Wrob doing, like, a home invasion. He waited till we were out, right? That tells you something.”
“Yeah, like he has us under surveillance.”
“Well, we already knew that,” I pointed out.
“No, we suspected. Now we know.” Simon pulled the door open, pointing. “And look—the lock isn’t broken. That means somebody let him in, somebody with a key: not security, even; the concierge, the building manager, someone on the maintenance staff. Hell, he probably bribed them to.”
“Makes sense. So?”
“So?” Simon flung up his hands, voice rising. “So, if we’ve established our home is now a place any random rich asshole can walk in off the street and take stuff from, I don’t like the idea of our son sleeping here anymore! Or you, for that matter. Or me.”
I scoffed. “He’s not gonna do it again, Simon. There’s nothing left to take.”
“What, are you planning to just tell him that? And he’ll believe you, of course. . . .” He flipped open his own phone, began to type something into a search engine, then stopped and shoved it back in his pocket. “You know what? Forget that shit. I’m going downstairs—email me a picture of Wrob, if you’ve got one. Any good face shot will do.”
“If you’re still thinking of the police . . .”
“No, we don’t have enough proof for that yet, like you said. But if I report this in-house, maybe somebody’ll recognize his face, and then we will have something to take to the police. Or we can at least get him banned.”
“All right, fine. If it means that much to you.”
“Would’ve thought it’d piss you off just as much, frankly. If not more.”
“I’m—sorry, I guess?—if I can’t take Wrob as seriously as all that, not compared to . . .” But here I caught myself, not ready to say what really came to mind: a ghost, a god, legends, and fables. A flickering face on a freezing screen, bright enough to burn out a whole camera. “. . . other stuff,” I concluded, at last.
Taking a few shots of every interview subject was second nature for me, even now, so I found the brightest-lit one of Wrob and passed it on without difficulty, accompanied by the typical “swoosh!” of a sent email; Simon heard the chime, nodded in thanks and then left, yanking the door closed behind him, hard enough to rattle it in the frame. The sound drew Clark, who stuck his head out of his room, wide-eyed.
“Oh, you don’t have to bang!” he scolded, giving his own door a couple of swats, before ducking back inside. “No banging, Mommy!”
I laughed, despite myself. “No banging,” I agreed, and went to make some bacon.
Simon returned looking unexpectedly frazzled some forty-five minutes later. Things had resolved more quickly than he’d expected, he said; the concierge recognized Wrob from the photo, remembered seeing him talking to one of the maintenance staff, and called our building manager Janice at home. Janice told them said staffer—who also happened to be a resident—had just that day settled up some outstanding financial issues with the building, in cash, and rang off to check up on her. Within twenty minutes, Janice called back to fill both Simon and the concierge in: the staffer had broken down when confronted, admitting having let Wrob into our unit; he’d given her the same story he tried on Val Moraine, that he was working on a project with me, and I’d supposedly given him permission to pick up material. “Janice fired her right then and there, on the spot,” Simon added, voice subdued.
“And you’re feeling guilty, is that it?”
“I was angry at Wrob, not some janitor lady trying to make ends meet who made a mistake.”
I nodded, hugging him, holding on till I felt him begin to relax. “I get it . . . but that was her choice, man, not yours; she knew the stakes. Not to mention how Wrob’s still the one to blame.”
“I guess so, yes.”
“I know so.”
He nodded again and went off to say goodnight to Clark. While I thought, at the same time: Yeah, Lois, that’s the way. Just say it loud enough; it might even become true, eventually.
I started to make dinner.
That night, while Simon snored beside me, I returned to Mrs. Whitcomb’s notebook, determined to read it all the way to the back if I could, in order to answer any extra questions Jan might have for me tomorrow. Much like my own adolescent flirtations with diary-keeping, she mainly seemed to return to her memorandum book under stress, so its pages read like a litany of loss: Hyatt first, then “poor Art,” then (debatably) her own mind.
He is gone, my sweet fool of a boy. And everything I did, all I tried to do, to draw Her gaze away—useless, from the very beginning, seeing Her hand was laid upon him even before the start. I knew it when we drew those papers away above his crib, revealing the hole he had somehow scratched for himself in our walls—that tiny church, barely fit to crouch in, within which he crawled on bended knee to worship at Her shrine and sketch out Her blazing face, again, again, again. . . .
Oh Christ, why did I ever let Arthur persuade me? I should have
Another massive smear engulfed the rest, much like in Mr. Whitcomb’s honeymoon account. I studied it closely, trying to see if there was anything inside the mess of greyscale that gave some hint what she’d been trying to cover up. It was like deciphering one of those 3D optical illusion puzzles—unfocus your eyes, shift slightly in your seat, move the paper at an angle. What emerged was a sprawl of half-sized letters, so close-cramped they bled together, reading—
(but perhaps it would have been better to not be born at all, for him and me both)
I felt a cold thread curl up between my shoulder blades then shook myself slightly, dispelling it. Listened to Simon snort and growl on my one hand, while simultaneously straining to make out Clark’s similarly raucous throat music as it filtered down toward us from behind his bedroom door.