Page 123 of Wrong Mail

"Here. Let me."

I take his arm and get him back into the chair, then take the towel out of his hand.

I wipe up the coffee myself.

He watches the spill without seeming to see it. Then he looks at me, and he tries to smile, but his face won't hold it.

"What is happening," he says. It isn't quite a question. "I don't feel well."

"I don't imagine you do." I fold the towel over. "I expect it's how the others felt. The ones in Oregon who were drugged."

He stares at me, his eyes barely holding focus.

"But you'd know all about that."

I take a plastic bag from my pocket. I put the cup in it, then the wet towel, and seal it.

"For a while I thought you might have drowned," I say. "I even hoped you had. But that’s the thing about men like you. You can't stop. You can bury the old name. You can pick a quiet street at the end of nowhere. You can sit in a little house with a dish towel over your shoulder and pretend you're someone else. But sooner or later, the urge is too much.”

He gets a hand on the table and tries to push himself up. The room goes sideways on him, and he comes down into the chair harder than he means to.

I don't hurry. I keep the table between us.

At the clinic, they teach you to keep something solid between yourself and an animal that is frightened and cornered, in case it has one bad lunge left in it.

"You know it took hours," I say. “Weeks of searching. I checked property records and listings after unsolved deaths. You'd be surprised how many there are." I let that sit. "Then a couple turned up dead across town last month, and their house went on the market before they were in the ground. Same pattern as Oregon. Port Angeles lit up like a flare in the dark."

He stares at me.

"In Oregon, you were patient," I say. "Lately, you've gotten sloppy. Rushing things."

His eyes move over my face, slow and unfocused.

"It was in the coffee," I say. My voice stays level. I am surprised, from somewhere far off, at how level. "A sedative. The kind I use on animals a good deal smaller than you. Of course, I gave you more than I would ever give one of them."

"Who are you?" he says. It comes out slurred.

"Nobody you'd remember." I keep the table between us. "That was the whole point of me showing up."

His mouth moves.

"But I imagine you remember my father."

He watches me.

"David Grant,” I say.

He knows the name. I watch him place it, then place me, the daughter he never once knew to look for.

"But how?" he says. "How did you find me?"

"That's right," I say. "Nobody in law enforcement put it together. Nobody could." I let the quiet stretch. "But somebody did."

His eyes move past me, toward the doorway.

"It helps," I say, "to have someone who knows how they found you the first time."

The boards in the hall creak once.