Page 93 of Wrong Mail

He sniffs. "I'm not sure that's the answer you were looking for. But if you wanted to know whether David's back to his old games, I wouldn't put it past him. Now I'm afraid I have to go."

Then he's gone, back through the doors into the part of the building where they fix people. I remain on the bench with my phone in my hand.

I look down at the screen and type the name into a search bar.

Lena Holloway. Portland, Oregon.

It doesn't take long. It never does. That's the thing about looking for someone now. The wall between a name and an address is thinner than people want to believe.

An address appears beside her name. An east-side house. I search it next and find the old rental listing, a little single-story place with photos three years out of date.

I write the address under Richard Thomas's name on the same envelope, in the same unsteady hand. Then I sit very still on the ninth floor of a hospital in the city where my husband learned to bury things, and I understand that I'm not going home yet.

Chapter Thirty-Two

The house is smaller than the woman I've spent a week imagining.

That's the thought I have as I stand on the cracked front path in the last of the light. I've spent a week making Lena Holloway enormous, a threat the size of my whole marriage. And here she is, reduced to a single-story rental on a wet east-side street. The porch light glows against the dark, and a child's chalk drawing is smeared on the concrete under my feet.

I had the driver wait at the corner. I've rehearsed nothing, though the woman I was before would have. I only know I've come a long way to find the woman David hid and hear the truth from her.

I hesitate for a second then knock.

A man opens the door instead. He's in his late thirties, broad-shouldered, with a dish towel bunched in one hand. There's something raw in his face, something he hasn't had time to hide.

"Yeah?"

"Hi, I'm looking for Lena."

His hand goes still on the edge of the door.

"Who are you?"

"My name's Mallory. I think she knows my husband." I make myself say it. "David Grant."

The name lands somewhere behind his eyes and his knuckles whiten on the wood.

"Is this some sick joke?"

"What? No," I say. "I..."

"You've got a nerve." It comes out low, almost wondering. "Coming here. Today."

"I only wanted to talk to her."

"You can't talk to her."

I take a step back.

Then he gives it to me, because there's no soft way to hand a thing like this across a threshold. "She's dead. She was murdered. Two days ago they found her."

The porch light hums. Somewhere behind him, a television plays low and a kettle comes to the boil. All the ordinary sounds of a house that hasn't caught up to the hole in it.

A woman calls out to him from inside.

"Jacob? Who's at the door?"

"No one important, Mom."