Killer Move - Michael Marshall [46]
I also felt that if I was going to talk to the cops for a third time in one day, then I needed to feel on firmer ground. A nonlocatable wife wasn’t enough. An alleged voice on my house phone line wasn’t enough, either. It could have been a wrong number, a mishearing, or I could have made the whole thing up for motivations of my own—which could only be suspicious, strange, and of possible terrorist intent.
Did I have any other evidence? There were the cards I’d received. Had I kept any of them? Of course not. I’d thrown each away as it arrived, dismissing the baby steps of chaos until it was too late.
He didn’t know that, of course—whoever he was, the person behind the cards and behind whatever was happening to me. I could have kept the cards. I also had a laptop in the car with folders—and a hard disk—that had been renamed to the same word. I had a copy of the e-mail sent out in my name, and a photocopy of the delivery notice for the book from Amazon. And, it finally struck me, there might have been something else, too: the booking at Jonny Bo’s for our anniversary dinner. Janine said I’d e-mailed her about it. That wasn’t inconceivable—I often gave her jobs when she was looking even more unoccupied than usual—but I couldn’t actually recall doing so. Someone had evidently been digging around in my digital identity even before this week, in order to place the Amazon order. The same person could have sent Janine the e-mail asking her to make a booking at Bo’s.
So it was possible I should add that to the pile, though doing so would mean accepting the idea that someone had a pretty in-depth knowledge of my habits. Why hadn’t I paid more attention to this at the time? How could I have been so wrapped up in my machinations at The Breakers that I’d let this stuff just flow by?
As I listed these pieces of evidence in my head I was also aware of how trivial they sounded—how easy they were to let roll by when your mind was on higher things. That was probably the whole point. Every one of them was like a tiny little chili that was not only perfectly possible for me to have eaten but seemed too small for someone else to have bothered with.
Except the pictures of Karren, of course.
That was a bigger deal, harder to organize, and came with a heavier payload. They might be deemed worthy of being taken seriously. But . . . I could just have taken those myself, too. My “proof” that I’d been deliberately kept out of the house that evening—in order to set up the pictures—had disappeared the moment Melania told the cops she’d never spoken to me. Claiming otherwise now just made me look like a liar as well as a fantasist.
“Shit,” I shouted suddenly, the whole mess spilling out of my head to bounce off the walls.
The house said nothing. The house felt alien, like a friend you happen to glimpse from a distance one afternoon, sitting outside a café with another member of your crowd, some rendezvous to which you were not invited. No injury has been done to you. Yet something about the sight—as you stand becalmed on the other side of the street, traffic making a river of difference between you—demonstrates that you are not at the center of creation after all. The house was just a house, and a life was just a life. Both might feel like they belonged to me, but there were gaps in its fabric, and gaps mean entrances, ways for strangers to get inside. Life suddenly felt like a random series of events and people connected only by accident and happenstance. So your friends are out for a drink, and you’re there, too, and maybe it’s even your birthday: does that mean it’s actually about you? No. It could have happened by coincidence, or to watch a ball game. You could slip away midevening, and after five minutes of bemusement they’d buy another beer, close the circle, and it would be as if you’d never been there. You could die. Within weeks the same thing would happen.
You’re not the cause, the be-all and end-all, of anything. There’s no house. There’s no life. There’s just you. A point in space and time.
I shook my head violently,