Page 66 of Wrong Mail

Then I stand and walk out of the room before I can change my mind.

Outside, the daylight hits me hard.

I make it three streets before I have to stop. I lean against the side of a building, one hand on the brick, the other in my pocket.

The smell of the apartment is still in my nose. Garbage. Piss. Something sour I can't name. I gag hard enough to double over, but nothing comes up.

For a minute I only breathe.

Then I think about the phone in my pocket. His phone is dead. Mine will lead straight back to me.

I press on. I pass one convenience store with a camera over the door and keep walking. The next is smaller, older, with no camera that I can see.

I go in.

“Can I use your phone?” I ask the man behind the counter. “It’s an emergency.”

He studies me for a second, then slides it across.

I move toward the rear of the store, out of earshot, and call 911.

When someone answers, I give the cross streets as clearly as I can, then the building and apartment number. “Third floor. Three-oh-seven. There’s a man in a bad way at the back,” I say. “I think he’s overdosing. He needs help now.”

They ask for my name.

I hang up.

I tell myself I did the useful thing. I called. I sent help. But the shame comes anyway, because I know why I called from three streets away and gave no name.

By the time I make myself move again, the words he gave me have started to change in my head. A middleman. Scare her. Never met him. They aren't proof, and I know it.

But I can't stop setting his words beside the things I already know. Someone sent two men to my house knowing exactly when David would be gone and I would be there alone. Then this morning Henry came through a gate I know I locked, along the side of the house, beneath a camera he installed himself, and my phone never made a sound.

I don't want to put his name to it. Certainty has started to feel dangerous, and I have been wrong before. But the thought is there now, and I can't get rid of it.

Henry knew the house.

By the time a car takes me back across the lake, the dead phone is heavy in my pocket and Julia's warning won't leave me alone.

I call her before I can talk myself out of it. She answers on the first ring.

“Hey, that thing you said," I say. "About Henry."

"Which thing?"

"The stupid thing." I make myself finish it. "You might be right. Not about all of it. I don't know. But something about him isn't adding up."

Julia goes quiet.

"What happened?"

"First tell me something. You haven't gone into his house, have you?"

The silence on the other end is just long enough.

"Julia."

"No."