Watch You Die (27 page)

Jess overturned the frame on the coffee table, pinched back the clips and lifted off the back. Nat’s school picture was still there, behind Joe’s new print. Jess picked up Nat’s photo and turned it over.

It had been slashed, sliced and punctured. What did it mean that Joe had savaged my son’s picture? Look what he had done to our cats. Did it mean that he could …?
Don’t even think it
. I could shake the thought but not the chill because I
felt
it. This image of Nat, defaced, buckled me over and I wept into my hands.

“I bet he used a key,” I heard Jess say to Rich. “See how thick and jagged some of the cuts are? Probably got a copy of Darcy’s house key somewhere, used it to get in, slashed the picture with it,
covered
it with his own picture. Psychos like this, they’re into metaphor, believe it or not.”

“That’s one heavy-handed metaphor,” Rich said.

“Yeah, well, he’s no poet.”

“How would he have gotten Darcy’s key?”

“He got the laptop. Maybe she left her purse unattended at work sometimes.”

I sat up, wiping tears off my face with the palms of my hands. “Of course I left it unattended. I didn’t carry it around the office with me. I left it in one of my desk drawers.”

“Locked?”

I shook my head no.

Jess helped me fill out the paperwork while the locksmith changed all the locks on my front and back doors. He waited while Sharon tagged and bagged Mitzi’s and Ahab’s bodies to be autopsied at Forensics; they had to verify the cause of death, obvious assumptions not being enough in the hyper-rational world where creeps who killed pets in a fit of terror-love might be thrown in prison – or not. Then he gave us a ride over to Rich’s house, where I would spend the night. I called Karen and Bill to let them know that I was staying with a friend in the neighborhood and asked them not to tell Nat that I wasn’t home. He knew my new cell number by heart and my phone was charged; he could reach me anytime. Before saying goodnight, I gently asked
them
to be careful answering their door, should someone ring the bell.

“Don’t worry,” Bill said. “We’ve got that figured out.”

Nat called me at seven in the morning after a night of restless sleep in Rich’s bed. Green sheets, very soft. We had not made love because the mood was so wrong, but he had comforted me and I him. While I talked with Nat, Rich hurried into the shower to get ready so he wouldn’t be late for school.

“How was the movie?”

“Great.”

“What did you have for dinner?”

“Spaghetti and meatballs. Why did you want me to stay over? You never let me have sleepovers on school nights.”

“Long story. I’ll tell you later.”

“Are you OK, Mom?” The warble of worry in his voice: I hated it.

“
Yes
, absolutely fine. I’ll be home when you get there after school.”

“Speaking of school, Mom – I need my bookbag.”

Of course he did; I hadn’t thought of that. “I’ll ask Mr Stuart if he can swing by and pick it up.”

Nat went to school with Henry, so Rich didn’t need to drive him. Instead, he took the time to chaperone me back to the house of doom and gloom where I now dreaded spending the day watching
handymen
install things I didn’t want to need as badly as I did. But I
did
need them – all of them. After locking the doors and double-checking all the windows, I sat at the kitchen table and started to call Courtney again; this time I would try her at work.

Out of habit I reached for the landline phone before remembering that this line was now reserved to receive Joe’s calls and record his messages.
His messages
. How many more times had he called after Friday night, when Nat had figured out how to silence the phones? How many times had he called since yesterday afternoon when this new machine had been installed?

Thirty
. That was the magic number after which my new answering machine was too full to hold any more messages. Plus
twenty-one
, the number of messages picked up by voicemail before the machine was installed. I listened to them all, listened to the steady escalation in Joe’s desperation as his messages went from quasi-casual pretend-friend missives, small hellos, to reminders, to enticements, to pleas. He had left me his address and directions to his building in four separate messages over the course of Saturday night. He had waited for us, for Nat and me, to grace his table. One message described candlelight. Another, betrayal. By Sunday the messages had degraded to raw shame; and then by afternoon he had regained some of his chirpy tone
as
if he was ready to reconcile after a lover’s quarrel. He was ready to “give you another chance” he said in a syrupy voice that made my skin crawl. But not once did he say he was coming over. Not once did he say he had my key, or that he was bringing me a specially toxified leftover of the meal I had so heartlessly missed. The messages offered heaps of lunacy but no actual evidence that he had been the one to come in here last night and crazy up my life and home some more.

I called the alarm company with renewed conviction that Wednesday was too long to wait for their best alarm system, all the bells and whistles, whatever technology had to offer. When begging didn’t work, I flat-out told the customer service agent that I had a stalker who had infiltrated my home last night and killed my cats. That got her attention; she set me up with an appointment for an installation that afternoon.

Then I called Jess; and now the bad news: just as he’d predicted, Joe had been released for lack of evidence.

“If I’d had a restraining order—” My old saw.

“Right, we’d be able to hold him. But maybe it wouldn’t be for killing your
pets
. Do you hear me?”

“Loud and clear.”

“I’ve asked for a warrant to get into his apartment and search for traces of the poison that killed your
cats
. It’ll take a day, maybe two. Meantime, we wait and watch.”

And what then? What to do with yourself when you’re watching your hole grow deeper and deeper, darker and darker, when you’re burrowing with all your might, trying to hide from an enemy who manages to keep invisible most of the time? Lethal gas, that was Joe, following you, weakening you, poisoning your life by degrees. What do you do when nothing you do seems to stop him?

You reconsider leaving.

And in the meantime, you decide to buy a gun.

I left a voicemail for Courtney on her work line, then spoke with Stan, who told me she hadn’t come in to the newsroom yet. It was ten o’clock and she was always there by seven so that worried me.

“I asked around and she hasn’t called,” Stan said. “I gotta admit it’s not like her.”

“I think I know who she was with on Friday night. I’ll give him a buzz and see how long they hung out.”

Stan snickered at that:
hung out
. He had known her longer than I had. Courtney didn’t hang out; she came, she saw, she conquered.

Jed Stevens seemed embarrassed by my questions about his social itinerary Friday night, until I told him that I was starting to worry about Courtney since it wasn’t like her to hold a silence this steadily, over
days
, nor was it like her to not show up for work without a call. Finally, he told me, “Yes, she was with me Friday night. My place. Left about eight in the morning. Said she had to get home.” He sounded like he hadn’t known what to make of her early-morning disappearing act.

I pretty much knew what
she
would have said: “How many men would even spend the night? It’s not like I owed him anything.” The more I heard her voice in my mind, the more her silence worried me. Courtney was brave and bold. In some ways, she acted like a man, using every tool in her arsenal to get what she wanted. But when it came to staying in touch with her friends she was all woman, a master communicator. I knew she would not have dropped my cause without an explanation. Plus, she owed me information that I now badly wanted: she had promised to find me a firearms training class and a gun, something pretty. But more than anything I wanted what she most had to offer: herself. I wanted my new and currently best friend. Courtney’s silence was like throwing stones into the echoey well that was missing Hugo, missing Sara, missing my mother, the distant echo of missing my father. Missing everyone I had loved and lost.

I went outside into the back yard to see how far the electrician had come in wiring the outside for floodlights, telling myself to snap out of it and stop
casting
Courtney in reflected dread. So she’d gone AWOL all weekend. So she was late for work. It didn’t have to mean anything more than that.

But ten minutes later I couldn’t help myself: I called Jess. He asked for some information about her but our friendship had only just started to blossom outside work so I didn’t know much. I knew where she lived – in a doorman building on the Upper West Side of Manhattan – and gave him her address. I also told him about Jed Stevens.

While my home was wired – an apt word for what was happening here as I was now bound ever closer to my home, picturing myself literally wired to it, a female Gulliver hog-tied to the beams of her house, actually
homebound
, not unwilling but unable to go out – as my home and I were wired, I traveled the Internet. Weapons; I wanted
weapons
. Going against the grain of everything I had ever believed, I wanted a gun.

Immediately, I discovered that Courtney had been wrong about something: the pretty guns might not be what you needed to protect yourself. Most were dark, ugly mechanisms made by and for men to extend the hand of violence and
I hated them
and it irked me to be doing this and I thought of Hugo standing behind me, peering over my shoulder, his face twisted in disgust. The more I looked the closer I came to knowing what I wanted. Not wanted:
needed
. Though it was a skewed need. According to statistics, for every hundred women who bought a gun, only one successfully used it for self-protection; the rest were killed with it by someone else.

A compact gun seemed to be the ticket, and soon I found the one: a three-inch-barreled micro-compact .45 caliber pistol that had been voted the
perfect carry gun for women
. Not a pretty gun but a good gun. I so wanted to share my discovery with Courtney.

Courtney, who, had she been around and done what she’d promised, would have already known what I learned next: that to have a handgun in New York City you needed a permit to purchase the gun and a permit to carry it. The permit applications could take months, yet, strangely, no gun training was required. Other than the permits, all you needed was a background check and fingerprinting. All well and good for the so-called hobbyist, but for me? I didn’t have a month or a week or possibly a day. For all I knew, I didn’t have an hour. I didn’t know how much time I had.

So I called Jesus, the man with the answers, to see if he could expedite things, given my situation.

“You don’t want a gun,” he told me.

“Actually, I think I do.”

“No, you don’t. Trust me.” And he spewed off the same statistics I had already found on the Internet.

“I know, but Jess, the threat assessment firm recommends it. You know as well as I do – no, you know
better
than I do – that this situation is out of my control. I’m a sitting duck.”

“The alarm system installed?”

“He just finished.”

“Lights in the back, camera on the front?”

“Yes, but—”

“I’m thinking you might also consider calling an ironwork outfit, get bars on the windows.”

“Then I’ll be the one in prison. Why should I be locked up when
he’s
the criminal?”

That silenced him. I knew what he would have said, had he spoken, which he didn’t dare:
He needs to commit a crime before he’s a criminal
. A verifiable crime.

“Listen,” he said, “as soon as he violates the order, he’s locked up.”

“For how long?”

“A day or two.”

“Much good that’ll do me.”

“It’s better than nothing.”

“No, Jess, it
is
nothing, for all practical purposes.”

“You’re in a shitty situation, Darcy, I know that. I am here to help you. I just want you—”

“I’m thinking Nat and I might leave. I’m going to talk to him about it this afternoon. The problem is Joe will follow us. I know that. So I want a gun.
Please
, Jess, can’t you help me expedite the permits?”

In the brief pause that followed I felt a trickle of hope he would agree. But instead he gave me the professional, disciplined answer: “Can’t do it, Darcy. And I strongly suggest you don’t do it on your own, either.” But I heard the hesitation in his voice, that fissure of doubt, because he knew
all
the statistics, especially the ones about how impossible it can be to get free of your stalker once he sets his sights on you.

I would have to go through the regular channels, then, which meant appearing in person at the NYPD’s License Division at One Police Plaza in downtown Manhattan. I would go tomorrow, plead my case, beg if necessary for an emergency permit. To hell with it: Joe could follow me there if he wanted to, in fact I hoped he would. I’d like to see what would happen if he attacked me at Police Headquarters.

Before hanging up I asked Jess if he’d found out where Courtney was.

“Since she lives in Manhattan,” he said, “she’s out of my jurisdiction. I passed it on to her local precinct – they’ll look into it.”

The first thing Nat did when he got home from school was wave hello to our new electronic eye, the camera that now hovered conspicuously above our
front
door. I watched him through the monitor on the kitchen counter. He entered with his own key, then I heard Nat and Rich talking in the front hall.

“Whoa, what’s this?”

“A keypad for an alarm system.”

“Mr Stuart, maybe
you’ll
tell me what’s going on because my mom’s not talking.”

“I think you should ask her.”

“What’s the point? She treats me like a kid. She won’t tell me anything.”