Page 73 of Call Off the Dark

Some days, she opened Tyler’s phone and sent herself back a reply, imagining what he might say to her if he were still alive. Then she opened her phone and read the message, pretending it had really come from him:

I miss you too, Helen. So much. I’ll find a way back to you. You have nothing to be sorry for. I’ll be there soon.

Every now and then, she actually believed the replies were real.

Helen would roll the details over in her mind so many times. The worst of it would break her apart, but the strangest things would bother her too. The masked man was on the shorter side, barely taller than her. Someone who was physically smaller than Tyler had been able to kill him that easily, that quickly, all because he had a knife. These terrible realizations lodged in the space between her sticky mind and her spiraling heart.

All day, all night, she called out to him. Tyler, Tyler, Tyler.

At first, Helen stayed at her parents’ house in the suburbs outside Seattle, but she couldn’t sleep in her old bedroom. Her childhood had been a time before she knew Tyler. Sleeping in her old room would have amounted to an erasure of him. She couldn’t explain this to anyone; she just told her mother that she’d prefer the couch. Besides, she didn’t want to sleep in any bed, because she had reverted to her childhood fears. Beneath the bed is where the boogeyman hid, and the masked man was her boogeyman.

At night in the living room, she left a tableside lamp on. She rarely slept for more than an hour at a time, rarely more than three or four hours the entire night, and her dreams were nightmares.

The days were even worse than the nights. Her boss gave her a leave of absence from work for one month (as if one month could ever be enough!), and Helen dropped out of the history class she was taking on Thursday evenings. The idea of leaving marketing for some romanticized job working at a museum now seemed impossible. She stumbled through the days at her parents’ house, wondering how she’d ever managed to chop a head of broccoli or shape her eyebrows or type an email.

Simple tasks, now impossible.

One day, she saw her old bicycle in the garage, its flat tire and rusty gears staring back at her. She’d probably been seventeen the last time she’d ridden it. She pulled it out from behind a junk heap and rolled it onto the parking slab in front of the house. She swung a leg over it and climbed on. Her feet fumbled for the pedals and then she was coasting unsteadily down the slight incline toward the street. She felt the leg of her loose-fitting sweatpants rub against the gears. A sharp, unpleasant screeching sound came from somewhere on the bike. At the street, she stopped and contemplated which way to ride. It was gray and cloudy, the street damp from last night’s rain.

“I can get that fixed up for you,” her dad said, suddenly appearing beside her. Her parents were constantly on watch, it seemed. “You can’t really ride it like that.”

Helen looked down and realized the sound she’d been hearing was the bike rims scraping on the pavement.

She slid off the seat and let her dad take it back into the garage.

Only a few days later, the bike was ready. She had no idea what her dad had done to it and didn’t feel like asking. She just thanked him and climbed on.

“Oh!” her dad said. “I got you a helmet.” He opened the door to his SUV.

But Helen just shook her head and rode away. If she wrecked her bike, she wanted to crack her head open.

She rode south on Highway 99, pedaling on the sidewalk past taverns, greasy restaurants, and a strip mall with a faded sign. All the businesses had bars on their windows, but she knew now that protection was a falsehood.

Helen rolled her bicycle to a stop in front of a gun range.

A familiar feeling swept through her. After a moment, she recognized it as something she used to feel in her past life, the life when Tyler was still alive.

Motivation. An idea. A plan.

Yes, Helen was going to buy a handgun, and she was going to learn how to shoot it with perfect accuracy.

That way, when the police caught the murderer, she could kill him herself.

During initial police interviews, Helen was able to clearly recount details of the terrible night, and when they asked her questions that required her to imagine things or conjecture—Is there anyone that would want to hurt you or Tyler?—she was able to come to logical conclusions. The short answer was no.

She also had enough clarity to recognize at one point that the police were considering the possibility that she could have been the one who stabbed Tyler. She and Tyler had watched true crime shows on occasion, and she knew the spouse was always the first suspect. She briefly contemplated getting a lawyer. The detectives wanted to know if she and Tyler had been having marital problems or if either one of them had ever had an affair. No and no. Did they have money problems or debt? No and just a small amount of student loans. They wanted to know the size of the life insurance policy. Fifty thousand dollars.

The day after those questions, the head detective sat down with her. She was a tall woman named Calhoun, which sounded like a very detectivelike name to Helen. She wished she could tell Tyler that the detective handling his case had a movie-character name and drank coffee out of white Styrofoam cups. Helen wasn’t sure how she was going to go through the rest of her life observing details like this and being unable to tell Tyler.

Calhoun told Helen there was a witness who had seen the masked man at the apartment complex that night. The witness was a bartender returning home from his late shift. As the bartender was going up the stairs, a man in a ski mask with a bloody knife had come running down them. The bartender had immediately called 911 from his apartment.

“Do you have anything more?” Helen asked. “Did anyone see him on the street? Or any cameras? His car?”

“We’re working on different angles,” Calhoun said. “We also collected some DNA that didn’t match either you or Tyler. The knife may have nicked the intruder as he fled.”

“Blood?” Helen’s body went rigid. “His blood is in our apartment?”

“Just a tiny droplet, and we already collected it,” Calhoun said, measured and polite, but with an edge of scrutiny. “We’re running it through our database hoping to get a hit. That can take some time.”