The Lost Night (Page 27)

My insides lurched. She knew—of course she knew about the baby, of course the autopsy report hit her eyeballs first—but it jarred me, how she tossed these things off like a grocery list.

So Mrs. Iredale had been in Calhoun the very night of Edie’s death. Now busily trying to convince me it was nothing but a suicide.

Something clicked. “Wait, other conspiracy theorists?”

She sighed and the same eye flicked again. “It’s been ten years, Lindsay. I think you should go.” There was a calm confidence in her syntax, as if it made perfect sense. As if I’d spent a decade on the armchair in Edie’s mother’s living room.

Sarah, right? She had to mean Sarah. I should talk to Sarah.

“I’m sorry, Ms. Iredale. To have taken up your time. I know there’s nothing I can say to make you believe me, but for what it’s worth, I didn’t come with a…conspiracy theory.” I wiped the drip on the side of the mug. “Guess I just miss her.”

She shook her head. “You can’t know,” she said. “You don’t know what it’s like. I think about her every single day. And how I should’ve tried harder to persuade her to come back home with me, to talk some more.” She sighed and rubbed her temple. “I’ll never forgive that kid for convincing her to go back inside.”

My stomach did something gymnastic. This was too much all at once. The rain throbbed against the window and she glanced at it; when it rains, it pours, my neurons spit out.

“Who convinced her to go back into Calhoun?”

“Some boy she was seeing. He was texting her the whole time we were talking, and she must have told him where we were because eventually he showed up to escort her back inside.” She looked out the window again. “He introduced himself, seemed pretty polite. But maybe if we’d had more time to talk…”

Not Alex, whom she’d met before. “Do you remember his name?”

“Oh, what was it…Roy, I think. He told the cops the same thing as me—that she seemed really upset and shaken by our conversation.” She whipped her head over to look at me. “And no, he’s not a suspect. He was photographing a concert that night, and he headed straight into Manhattan for it. There were witnesses.”

Who the fuck was Roy?

“Wait, not Roy,” she announced suddenly, almost proudly. “His name was Lloyd.”

Chapter 8

For a moment my mouth gaped open like a fish’s. Edie was seeing Lloyd? My Lloyd, the object of my obsession? Did people know?

“Are you sure they were dating?” This was just a month or two after Edie and Alex had split. The next revelation blared: Maybe Edie had been cheating on Alex with Lloyd earlier that year, too. Perhaps he was the other man Alex wouldn’t name.

She narrowed her eyes at me. “Well, it sure seemed like it.”

And then the question boomeranged back into me. Did I know? Had I seen something that summer? Had my intuition finished a puzzle and sat proudly back until I was drunk and uninhibited and suddenly able to catch up? Was there a split, forgotten second when I knew on the night of August 21?

“She was sick,” Mrs. Iredale announced, “and she was upset. Edie was someone who turned to relationships for—for comfort, so it doesn’t surprise me she was seeing someone new. He said it was casual. Afterward, I mean.”

Alex told me Edie had ended the affair “after a few times”; if my hunch was correct, she’d picked it up again after they’d broken up. Or maybe she’d never quit.

“Of course. I’m sorry.”

Mrs. Iredale stood, crossed as far as the fireplace, and stopped. “Lindsay, there aren’t…things don’t always fit together the way you want them to.” I thought of her late husband, of the moment she learned her daughter was dead; I stared at the dark circle of coffee in the bottom of my cup and nodded. “Whatever you’re trying to go back over and see how it looks if you piece it together a different way—it won’t change anything. It just is what it is.” She turned and walked into the kitchen.

I stood to follow her and noticed a few framed pictures propped up on the mantel—one of Mrs. Iredale and a nerdy older guy, presumably her second husband, on vacation somewhere warm. Another of Mrs. Iredale and her late husband—god, he looked just like Edie, gangly and good-looking—waving under bright layers on a ski vacation. And one of Edie, teenage and lovely, sitting under a tree and reading obliviously while the wind tangled her halo of hair. I gazed at it, half expecting her to look up at me and wave. Edie, I whispered silently. Did you know you’d grow up to be kind of a bitch?

In the kitchen, I handed my mug to Mrs. Iredale and watched her load it into the dishwasher. “I get the feeling you didn’t know about Lloyd, so I’m sorry if that was…by design on Edie’s part or something,” she said. An observant woman, like Edie. She closed the dishwasher and looked out the window, toward a bird feeder. “No sign of the sun coming out. I’ll get your umbrella.”

* * *

The umbrella promptly snapped inside out, and I arrived at the bus stop soaked and bedraggled, damp hair spooling across my forehead and neck. I climbed into the bus’s brightness and caught my reflection in the window. The bags under my eyes had ballooned, the lines from my nose to my mouth deeply etched. Had that been a help or a disaster? I felt the questions growing and multiplying, two for every one answered, spreading like cancer cells.

On the one hand, Mrs. Iredale had a point, one mark in the suicide column: The stew of mental illness, drugs, and a pounding stream of bad news did point to the conclusion that she and the cops had come to. On the other hand, why the fuck had Edie been seeing Lloyd? If he came out and collected her, and he didn’t live in Calhoun, then certainly they must’ve clambered up to her room together…

We wheezed to a stop at a red light, and I turned over another odd detail: What had Mrs. Iredale been doing there just hours before the potential crime? “You can’t know,” she’d said. A slip, a tell that she was holding something back?

Her reason for rushing to Calhoun felt flimsy, too. Late on a Friday night, why bolt all the way to Bushwick to tell Edie something that could wait until morning? The condo would be foreclosed; they’d no longer be covering her grad-school tuition. Upsetting, but not earth-shaking—more Edie’s parents’ problems than her own.

I played it out, the outlandish scenario: Could Mrs. Iredale have waited in SAKE with a gun, a fake suicide note already typed out on Edie’s computer? I couldn’t picture the woman getting into the building without anyone noticing, although she did know the way; she’d slipped inside to knock on SAKE’s door a few times before. I pictured her biding her time in the dirty hallway. Parties blaring in from every side, the boozy flotsam and jetsam of our hard-partying lifestyle littering the floor. Ridiculous.

It certainly didn’t sound like Mrs. Iredale thought I had anything to do with it. Edie liked you. Well, she liked everything I wanted, too. And unlike me, she got it.

My phone buzzed against my hip, and it was Alex fucking Kotsonis, well of course. I made up my mind to let it go to voice mail and then answered it at the very last second.

“Hey, Alex!”

“Hi! It’s…I was gonna say ‘It’s Alex.’ ”

“Yeah, your name came up.” I glanced outside again: lightning julienning the western sky.

“Old habit, I guess.” He laughed. “So look, I was thinking more about what you said the other night about Edie having drugs in her system, and I realized I kinda hung up before I even asked anything about that. Because that’s super weird. We both know she didn’t use anything. Right?”

“That’s what I thought. But it’s in the autopsy report. Hang on, let me look at it.” I put him on speaker and pulled it up. “ ‘There was a high level of,’ here goes, ‘methylenedioxymethamphetamine in the blood.’ That’s Molly.”

“Huh. I mean, everyone in the building was kinda into it, so it wouldn’t have been hard to get. I just don’t know where or when she would’ve taken it.”

“Yeah, it’s strange, right?” I said. “And that drug makes you happy. You don’t kill yourself on it.”

“If anything, people die because they jump off balconies and stuff. Makes you feel like Superman. Invincible.”

Maybe it’d turned Edie into even more of a braggart, a mean girl. Perhaps it made her say just the wrong thing to the exact wrong person who happened to be with her at that moment. Take me, for example: a little sniping on Edie’s part, maybe a snotty proclamation about Lloyd or about our clique’s true allegiance or about any one of my three thousand weak spots, could’ve set me off. Every clue, it seemed, offered dozens of possible interpretations.

“What are you doing tonight?” I blurted out. “Let’s get dinner,” I went on, when he didn’t say anything, “or just, like, grab a drink after work. It’ll be fun! We’re not too old to be spontaneous, right?”

He half laughed. “Maybe—I had a project I was going to finish up.” I knew this was my shot, the universe plopping Alex in front of me like a cat dropping a very dazed mouse.