Hard Landing (14 page)

Marblehead was different in daylight. Twenty miles north of Boston, it was one of those classic New England seaside communities. It had the dense, layered feel of a European village with narrow, winding streets nestled among the hills and tall trees. The houses were immaculate, three-hundred-year-old clapboard boxes painted the perfect shade of peach or gray or blue or yellow with shutters to match, wreaths on the doors, and brick driveways with flowerpots. All of them. They looked more like museums than houses, and I had the impression that the people who occupied them lived among us but not of us, which, come to think of it, was not inconsistent with how Ellen had lived.

A brunette, milky-skinned twenty-something named Heather was behind the counter at the Marblehead Athletic Club. When she saw me approaching, she laid two big, fluffy towels on the counter. This must be a good club. You could always tell by the quality of the towels. And since they had to be doled out by the staff and not left lying around for anyone to use, it must be a very good club.

"What locker can I get for you?"

"I'm here to see Tommy Kerwin. I have an appointment."

"Oh." She whipped those towels back and secured them in a safe place behind the counter. "I'll page him for you."

"Thank you."

Ellen's personal trainer was in his twenties, a solid block of muscle in a forest green Marblehead Athletic Club T-shirt and black shorts. His build reminded me of those Rock'em Sock'em Robots, the kind where the head pops up when you hit them just right.

"You have her same job," he said, studying my card.

"I have Ellen's job, yes."

"Do you know why she killed herself?" I was glad to see genuine interest in his eyes and not morbid curiosity.

"We're trying to figure out why. That's why I wanted to talk to you."

"Me?" His eyes widened as he handed the card back.

"I think you may have been one of the last people who saw her that last day."

He shook his head emphatically. "I didn't see her."

The invoice I'd found in Ellen's mail was in my organizer. I pulled it out and pointed to the PT entry. "Doesn't this mean she had a session with you that day? I took it to mean Personal Trainer."

He squinted as he studied the statement. "She was scheduled, but she canceled that afternoon. She just missed the cutoff by like a half hour and I had to charge her. It's club policy. She understood."

"When was her appointment?"

"Regular time, seven o'clock on Monday night."

"And what's the cutoff?"

"You have to cancel at least six hours in advance not to get charged."

Which meant she'd probably called from the airport sometime after one o'clock. "Did she say why she was canceling?"

"No. I asked her if anything was wrong, because she hardly ever missed, and if she did, she always gave me a reason. Not that I needed one. She was paying me. Anyway, she said something had come up and she didn't want to reschedule, but she'd call me later. That was it."

"How'd she sound?"

"What do you mean?"

"Well, she did what she did only a few hours after you spoke to her. I wondered if she might have sounded depressed or sad or, I don't know, anything out of the ordinary."

His face tightened as he seemed to consider for the first time his place in the sequence of events leading up to Ellen's death.

"She was maybe, I don't know, distracted. It was hard to tell."

A sharp outburst ricocheted out of the racquetball court and bounced around the small lobby where we were seated. Tommy, a man of few words, was staring at me waiting for the next question, and I wished I was better at this sleuthing stuff. I didn't know what to ask, or even what I was looking for. "What kind of a workout did she do?"

"It was a killer," he said, warming quickly to the new subject. "It would all be on her workout card in here."

I followed Tommy into the weight room, where two men and a woman were working through the Nautilus circuit and enduring the loud, pounding disco music that seems to be the required soundtrack at health clubs everywhere. While he searched a two-drawer file cabinet, I stood around feeling overdressed in jeans and a sweater.

"Here it is."

I looked down at the stiff pink card he'd handed me. Tommy was right. Ellen's workout had been a killer, with three reps of squats, leg presses, preacher curls, back extensions, lat raises, and lots more. She even did pull-ups. Twelve of them. On my best day I could maybe do three, and that was only with lots of grunting and cheating. "She worked hard," I said.

"No matter how hard I made it for her, she wanted more. And she did everything I gave her." He pushed the drawer closed and leaned against the cabinet with his arms crossed. "When I read about her in the paper, that's the part I couldn't believe. Why would she work so hard to stay in shape, to stay healthy, then… do that?"

I tapped the card with my fingernail. "I don't know," I said. But what I thought was that it was the same compulsion that drove her to work like a dog, to organize and label everything in her life, to try to be perfect in all things. Working out was just another way to try to achieve perfection.

Tommy's name came over the loudspeaker for a call on line one. He looked relieved to have an excuse to end the conversation.

I held up the card. "Can I keep this?"

"I guess. I'd just throw it away."

I thanked him, and while he found a phone, I headed out through the lobby and toward my car.

"Excuse me, miss?" It was Heather calling from behind the front desk, catching me just as I hit the door. "Is someone going to clean out her locker?"

The trainer was trying without luck to remove Ellen's combination lock with a set of jumbo wire cutters. They'd sent a female trainer into the locker room with me, and she was not familiar with the tool. The longer she struggled, the more I wilted in the eucalyptus-scented humidity from the sauna. When the cutters slipped for the third time, I reached up and held the lock steady, albeit with the very tips of my fingers. Using both hands, she found the right leverage and, with a mighty squeeze, sliced through the thick metal hook. The lock fell away, I opened the door, and we both looked inside.

"I'll see if I can find you some sort of a bag," she said.

I started at the top and worked down. On the top shelf was a tray well stocked with tubes, squeeze bottles, Q-tips, cotton balls, combs. Her brush still had strands of her red hair. Hanging on hooks on the walls were sweat pants, T-shirts, and a couple of baseball caps. An old, faded sweatshirt turned out to be from Wharton, Ellen's business school alma mater. In a strange way, I liked that it felt stiff when I pulled it out, and it smelled of dried sweat. Almost every other aspect of Ellen's life for me was past tense, but the fragrance of running was so familiar that I could imagine the living Ellen in that sweatshirt, just in from a long, exhilarating run through a bright New England winter morning. Or an evening jog along the Esplanade.

At the bottom of the locker was a pile of clean socks, a few running bras, and two pairs of neatly folded tights. When I reached down to pull the clothes out, my fingers scraped something hard, something that was definitely not wearable. I pulled it out. It was a video. A
video?
In her gym locker? And not just any old video. If the cover was any indication, it was pornographic-really pornographic. What in the world was she doing with this? And where was the actual video? When I picked it up, all I had in my hand was an empty box. I hoped to hell we weren't going to find some dark and twisted corner of Ellen's soul because I didn't want to. I had started to like Ellen, at least the parts of her that I could see, and the parts that I could see were helping me understand the parts I couldn't.

Somewhere out of the steam I heard the voice of a woman, then the response of her little girl. I stuffed the box underneath the stiff sweatshirt and dropped the whole thing in the pile on the floor.

There was more in the bottom of the locker, and as I shoved aside the rest of the socks, I felt a tingle, an all-over buzz because right there in the locker was a binder with the Nor'easter logo. It was Dan's missing procedures manual, and when I saw what was underneath that, the tingle turned electric. Bulging, well used, and fuzzy at the corners, it was Ellen's Majestic/Nor'easter merger file, the one that had been missing from her desk. I trolled around in the gym clothes, thinking the answering machine tapes might be in there. I was looking inside the socks when the trainer returned.

"This is all I could find," she said, holding open one of two brown paper bags.

"That'll work." I quickly stuffed the clothes and toiletries into the first bag, the files, the video box, and the procedures manual into the second. "Thanks for your help."

A bag under each arm, I backed through the swinging locker room door, walked past Heather at the front desk, and out into the morning air, cool against the eucalyptus dampness on my skin and in my hair. The bag of clothes went into the trunk, the files up front with me.

I didn't even wait to get back to Boston. I pulled into the first coffee shop I could find-they're called crumpet shops in Marblehead-ordered my morning tea, and started with the procedures manual. It was thick and dense and filled with pretty basic stuff, like how to load airplanes. I learned a lot about Nor'easter's ramp procedures, which hadn't been much different from everyone else's, and nothing about why Ellen had found the manual so interesting that she'd taken it with her to the gym. It wasn't exactly a book you'd prop up in front of you on the stair climber. Occasionally, I'd come across notes in the margins, but not in Ellen's handwriting. They always pertained to information on that page, and I assumed they were Dan's. But the first page of the Beechcraft section was marked with a paper clip. So was a diagram of the aircraft, which showed top and side elevations, positions of seats and the cargo compartments, forward and aft. But that was it. There was no indication of why it would be of interest to her.

Almost an hour later, I was drowning in Irish breakfast tea. I'd finally broken down and bought a scone. I don't like scones-to me they taste like warm rocks, sometimes not even warm-but it was all they had. What would have been wrong with serving a bagel or a piece of wheat toast? I was turning pages in the merger file, reading tedious notes, memos, legal documents, and remembering exactly what I had so disliked about my assignment in headquarters. Then I found it. Nestled in among the other papers was a check stub. It was dated April 1995. There was no name, but it was in the nice round amount of ten thousand dollars, and it had been issued by none other than Crescent Security, same as the name on the invoice I'd re-suspended twice. Molly had described Crescent Security as a nickel-and-dime firm that did background checks, which couldn't have been more than a couple of hundred bucks apiece. I tried to remember the amount on the invoice. I didn't think it was more than a few hundred dollars. I knew it wasn't anywhere near ten thousand.

The shop had filled up since I'd been there, and several heads turned my way when my beeper went off. They looked at me as if my cell phone had gone off in church. I checked the display and was surprised not to see the number from Operations. It was a number that was vaguely familiar, but I couldn't place it, so I ignored it. With only a few pages left in the file, I wanted to get to the back. When I got there, I was glad I did.

Stuck in the back of the file as if it didn't belong there was a single sheet of paper folded in half. Handwritten in black ink on the white page was one paragraph.

I think of how my life would be without him, and the thought of letting go scares me to death. I can't think about it directly, so I creep up close to the thought, walk around the feeling, touch it, pull back. When I get too close, I have trouble breathing. My lungs fill up with something cold and heavy, and I feel myself going under. And then I think about my life before him, about the work that filled my days and the ghosts that walked the nights with me, and I feel myself going under again and the only thing that keeps my head above water is the motion of reaching up for him. And I can't let go. Because when I'm with him, I exist. Without him, I'm afraid I'll disappear, disappear to a place where God can't save me and I can't save myself.

The air suddenly felt thicker, harder to breathe. Even if it hadn't been in her handwriting, I would have known that Ellen had written those words. I recognized her voice-the
longing
in her voice. I read it again. Who was she writing about? Had he left her? Is that why she'd 'disappeared'? Because she hadn't known how to save herself? I put the page down, pushed back from the table, and leaned over. I took a few deep breaths, releasing each one in a long exhale. In my mind I saw Ellen writing those words. I saw her reaching out, reaching up for him and trying not to drown. What I couldn't see was his face, the face of the man she was reaching for. And I couldn't see him reaching back for her. She was reaching into emptiness, and I knew what that felt like.

A large woman pushed behind my chair, trying to get by. She brushed against my shoulder, and her touch made me shrink away, pull into myself. It was time to go.

Out in the car, I sat with the door open and the note in my hand, feeling the fresh ocean air on my face and listening to the calls of the seagulls. Up until then Ellen had been elusive to me, hiding amidst the color-coded labels and the calligraphic handwriting and the bare walls of her office. But on this page, in these words, she didn't hide, and it was almost painful to see her so clearly, like looking into the sun after a long walk in the dark. I flipped the page over hoping for a signature or a date, some clue as to who inspired it. Nothing. It could have been written a month ago. It could have been written five years ago. I had a strong feeling based on nothing more than instinct that it was more like last month.

I read it again, this time more slowly. There were no cross-outs, no corrections. The thoughts and words seemed to have flowed out onto the page fully formed, as if she couldn't hold them back. Toward the end the handwriting loosened, almost a tangible representation of the author coming unraveled.