“You’re right,” he said quietly. “It isn’t.”
Robin and her father said their good-byes, the sky darkening outside her window and the voice of Michael Kay in the background, groaning over a pathetic, botched play.
AFTER SHE HUNGup, Robin pulled a slip of paper out of her wallet—Quentin Garrison’s number, copied off her caller ID at work. Shetyped it into her phone and called him, but it went straight to his voice mail. She hung up without leaving a message.
She opened up her laptop, went onto Google Images, and looked up Inland Empire Killers. Far as she could find, there was only one photo of April Cooper and Gabriel LeRoy, and it had been taken at his school dance. He wore a brown tuxedo. She wore a high-collared prairie dress with ruffles at the chin. He stood behind her and gripped her shoulders tightly, as though he were afraid she might float away. It was an old, faded picture, the blues gone grayish, the reds rust brown. Robin could barely make out the faces, but they both looked pale for Californians. He had a kind of creepy, closed-mouth smile. She just looked sad.
The girl had blond hair and a prim, rosebud mouth.Like Mom’s, Robin thought. Robin’s mind, playing tricks on her. April Cooper was three years younger than Mom. April Cooper had died in a fire. But why had she never seen a picture of Mom as a child, as a young girl? Why were there no photographs of her taken before her wedding day?
I’ll ask her about that, when she calls.Robin took both the cordless and her cell into the den and watched the rest of the Yankees game, both phones on the coffee table. The cell vibrated frequently, but only because of her column. Hate tweets. She read a few, then ignored the rest and continued to wait.
She waited until the game was over and it was pitch-black outside and headed upstairs, into her bedroom, slipped under the covers of her empty bed, and set both phones on the night table, yawning. “Long meeting with your important source, Eric,” she said.
Something about the sound of one’s own voice, late at night, all alone in a room...
Robin drifted off to sleep, still waiting for her mother’s call.
AT 11:45 P.M.,Robin’s phone vibrated sharply on the bedstand, waking her from a light, fitful sleep. She blinked at it. She’d uninstalled Twitter about an hour earlier. So many notifications, and they’d all turned out to be hate tweets—hundreds of them. People she’d never met before with flags and frogs and porn models as avatars, calling her a bitch, a dumb skank, feminazi, childless slut. The red-pill crowd telling her to get a boob job, get a facelift, to get laid, to eat poison and die... Normally, she wouldn’t have cared all that much. Insults and threats meant her column was getting clicks, which would ultimately up ad revenues before all the trolls moved on to another target. You just breathe deep and ignore it. She’d been through this before, more than once.
But tonight, the ugly words made her feel vulnerable, even scared. She’d locked all the doors in her house, turned on the alarm, yet still, she felt watched. Hunted. How had he found her anyway, this Quentin Garrison?
Robin lifted her phone, remembering her dream—flames enveloping her home, everything burning to the ground.
The text was from Eric:
On my way. Meeting went late. Sorry!
Outside, Robin heard sirens—someone else besides her in this quiet suburban neighborhood, awake and having a crappy night. She stared at Eric’s text. “Fuck you,” she whispered. She thought of Ginny in her patriotic bikini top and typed: Trouble in Paradise. Sent it without hesitation, without thought.
Eric replied: ???
Robin saw it through a blur of tears. I’m not an idiot, she typed.
How had the two of them gotten to this bad place in such a shorttime? A few years ago, they would have been up and awake together right now, researching the Cooper/LeRoy murders and Quentin Garrison over a bottle of wine—figuring it all out, gazes locked, phones in a drawer. They’d reported stories together in J-school. Sat together at the back of city council meetings, nudging each other in the ribs to stay awake. “We’re a team, you and I,” Eric used to say. “Like Woodward and Bernstein, but with sex.” But now, their texts weren’t even on the same wavelength.
Is there anything worse than being alone in one’s confusion?
It was nearly midnight. Robin’s parents were undoubtedly asleep. She didn’t want to wake them or worry them, but it was a tug-of-war, their feelings versus hers. And the state she was in right now. The ugly questions running through her brain, and she was alone with them. All alone.
She tapped in her parents’ phone number. No answer. They had an old-fashioned answering machine rather than voice mail, so when it picked up, Robin started talking into it, loud enough to wake them but calm, so they wouldn’t panic. “Hi, Mom and Dad. I know it’s late, but can you please pick up? Mom? I really need to talk to you. Please?”
No answer.
“Hello?”
Still nothing. “Mom?”
Robin thought about calling her mother’s cell phone, but Mom hardly ever had it with her during the night. “I like to give my full attention to Dad, not Candy Crush,” she would explain.
Robin was starting to get worried. She tried again, louder. “Mom, please! It’s Robin! Pick up the phone!”
At last, someone picked up. “Are you within driving distance, ma’am?” A woman’s voice. Young. Clinical.
Robin’s heartbeat sped up. “I’m a few blocks away,” she said.
“Would you mind coming by their house?”
“Who is this? Where are my parents?”
