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I won’t need to. The Hayeses have a traditional doorbell. There is no camera attached. It’s just the button. I relax.
I make my way back along the front walkway for the garage. I enter the pin number into the keypad. The garage door lifts open and, as soon as I can, I duck under the overhead door and watch it close behind me. When it reaches the ground, I turn the door handle and let myself into their home.
I find myself standing in a modern mudroom. I hold my breath, counting, waiting for an alarm to go off because maybe Lily was wrong. Maybe Jake and Nina got a home security system after last summer when Lily watched their cat, or maybe they had it all along, but didn’t ask Lily to set it. Lily and I have a home security system. I never felt we needed one. It was a luxury and just another bill to pay. We didn’t have one in our previous house. But this alarm came with our house and, until this week, we almost never used it. I set it off by accident once and the sound was enough to bring me to my knees. You don’t make that mistake twice. I practically had to offer up my firstborn child to make the security company believe that Lily and I were safe, that no one had broken in and was holding me at gunpoint.
Now, every night for the last five days, Lily has asked me to set the alarm.
Neither of us has put into words how, though we know Jake is dead, absent a body, there is nothing concrete to say that he’s dead.
I’m a numbers guy. As a market research analyst, my life’s work is all about qualitative and quantitative research. Data. I like proof. In the absence of proof, my imagination goes wild. Lily’s does too. She has fears that she hasn’t much articulated to me. But I know she feels them. Last night, as we made love, I caught a glimpse of her face in the moonlight. Lily was beneath me. She suddenly stilled and I looked to see if she was okay, if I had lost her. Lily’s eyes were open. She was staring somewhere over my shoulder. She wasn’t with me. She was somewhere else, her eyes on the open bedroom door and she was waiting, I think, for him, for Jake, to come in when our guards were down. Lily shows signs of PTSD. There are times she goes mentally back to that moment with Jake in the forest preserve. She thinks about it still. Sometimes, she’s said, when she closes her eyes, she can see his face, she can see the rage in his eyes. She hears him spitting his words at her. She feels the spit on her face. It terrifies and traumatizes her all over again.
In her head she knows that he’s dead. She just can’t make the rest of herself believe it.
Sometimes she wakes up crying from nightmares. In her dreams, she can’t run fast enough. He catches her this time, yanking her by the ankles, pulling her back, dragging her facedown across the hard earth. She feels it on her skin, on her face, as he hauls her over rocks and debris, further into the trees where it’s dark as night, the sun eclipsed by trees. He uses the palm of his hand to press her face into the earth. She inhales dirt as she tries to breathe. She’s always gasping for air when she comes to.
When I’m convinced there is no alarm in the Hayes’s house, I walk further inside, into a kitchen, which is overwhelmingly large and modern and white. I’ve been here before. I’ve stood in this very kitchen, around the island, talking to Lily, Nina and Jake, laughing and drinking to excess. I’m no stranger to their house, but still, it’s peculiar to be in someone else’s house when you haven’t been invited in. It feels as if the walls have eyes. I feel a phantom presence, like I’m not alone, though I am. I tell myself that no one else is here. It’s not possible. Nina is at breakfast with Lily and Jake is dead. Neither of their cars was in the garage or on the driveway. Iamalone. I just don’t know why it feels like I’m not. Maybe it’s my guilty conscience.
In the kitchen, a cat comes from out of nowhere, meowing at me. It curls itself around my ankles. I go to touch it and it hisses at me. I jerk back, my elbow knocking into a glass of water by mistake. The glass slips from the edge of the countertop and falls. I catch it on the way down. I don’t even know how. Quick reflexes. The glass doesn’t break, but the water spills, running down the face of the cabinet and pooling on the floor.
“Fuck,” I mutter. The cat runs away. I’ve never liked cats. They’re mercurial. One minute they’re your friend, the next they’re biting you.
I quickly unroll paper towels from a holder by the sink. I sop up the mess. I can’t throw the paper towels in the trash, because I have to leave no evidence that I’ve been here. I force the paper towels in my jacket pocket so I can take them with me when I go.
I look at my phone. Lily said she would text when they left the restaurant. They haven’t been gone long enough to be seated, much less have eaten. I have plenty of time. Still, I don’t want to be here. I want to find what I need and leave.
Lily and I made a plan before she left our house. We talked about it. I told her I didn’t want her texting things likeLeave noworNina is on the way, anything that would make us look guilty of wrongdoing or suggest that I was here, in case later someone, like the police, looked at our texts. I’m trying to be smart about this, to think five steps ahead. Lily and I have code words.Pizza tonight?means Nina is on her way home, but that I have a couple minutes to spare.Thai?is a code red. In other words, get out now.
It’s like we have our own secret language.
I think about where, if Lily didn’t carry my spare key, we would keep it.
A junk drawer comes to mind. I search the kitchen drawers for a junk drawer, finding one, but without a key fob in it. Instead batteries, an eyeglass tool kit, birthday candles and matches. The dining room or living room don’t make sense. I step back into the mudroom and sink my hands into the pockets of a jacket on a coatrack, coming up with only gloves. A bag also hangs from the rack. I unzip the pockets of the bag one by one but they’re mostly empty inside, with things like tissues and coins.
The master bedroom, maybe. My dad used to keep his wallet and keys on his dresser at night. Jake could too. I start to head for the stairs when I remember that Jake has an office. It’s toward the front of the house. It’s one of the rooms you see when you first come in through the front door. The first time we had dinner here, he showed me his office. He and Nina had just moved in and we were getting the grand tour of the house, the massive master bedroom, the finished basement with wet bar, the workout room. Jake was most proud of his office. It was masculine and luxurious and more importantly, all his, like a man cave but with prestigious diplomas and a bar cart full of top-shelf liquor.
I remember that Nina and Lily skipped the office part of the tour. They went back to the kitchen for more wine and appetizers, which they took out onto the patio that overlooks a golf course. Jake and I stayed for a while in his office, him sitting at the incredibly large executive desk and me on the small leather chair opposite it, feeling just as small as the chair. We sat there, sipping some kind of gin that he told me sold for almost three hundred dollars a bottle. “Good, isn’t it?” he’d asked, gloating from behind his lowball glass. I wasn’t impressed. I didn’t tell him, because that’s not me. Instead I said it was good, the best gin I’d ever had.
I leave the kitchen for the office now, cutting through the foyer. I let myself in through the frosted glass door, which is closed but not locked. I leave the door open behind me.
At first I carefully float around the room. I run my fingers over things. I want to know Jake Hayes. Not the Jake Hayes who was arrogant but funny and fun to be around, like a rich frat boy, but the one Lily bumped into this week. That’s a man neither of us knew.
Jake was a man who was hard to get a read on. Lily and I talked about that and agreed. For a doctor, he wasn’t compassionate or empathetic. After a few drinks, he had a tendency to make light of things that happened on the operating table. Maybe it was his way to cope with the stress of it all or maybe he was just cold. I’ve read his reviews online, mostly because I was curious and they were there, public and easily accessible. Patients complained about things like appointments being rushed or feeling not listened to, but they said that he was highly competent, that they trusted his decisions. I’ve also read that people with a higher IQ have a lower emotional intelligence than people with a lower IQ. Jake is the classic example of this. Smart but emotionless. The red flags are more obvious now, in light of what’s happened. They’re less easy to dismiss. From the things Nina has told Lily, smart but emotionless is not an unfair assessment of him. It’s practically spot-on. Even in their marriage, he could be cold.
But now, moving around his office, I want to know the side of him I never knew, this other side of him that thought it might be okay to try and come on to my wife, to exploit her trusting nature, to force her to her knees on the dirt and attempt to do things to her that I can’t stand to imagine. Jake isn’t just arrogant and cold. Now I know that there’s this violent, brute side of him that keeps me up at night, wishing I had been the one to bash his head in with a rock, although maybe it’s better that it was Lily because sweet, little, one-hundred-and-ten-pound Lily would have been less forceful about it than me, dragging it out, killing him slowly. I like to think he died slowly. That it was painful. That he suffered.
I don’t try to be particularly quiet as I riff through the desk drawers, sliding my hand along the inside of them and beneath piles of notebooks and paper, feeling for the key. I take things out, looking under and behind them. I keep thinking I might find something damning among Jake’s things, but it’s all harmless, files and such. I sit in his executive chair for a second, swiveling around, letting my eyes wander around the room, considering the file cabinet or a safe. Is a key fob the kind of thing you keep in a safe? If you don’t want to lose it, maybe.
I rise up from the desk to go to the file cabinet.
It happens at the same time. The phone, in my pocket, vibrates against my thigh. I take it out to look. It’s Lily.Thai tonight?
From upstairs, above my head, comes a noise like footsteps. It crosses above me, and then stops. I hold my breath. Not ten seconds later I hear the rush of water like through pipes. My eyes follow the movement of water as it snakes across the office ceiling and then descends behind the wall, down to the basement.
Someone, upstairs, has flushed a toilet.
My instincts were right.
I’m not alone in the house.
