Page 57 of The Vacancy In Room 10

The sun threatens to rise when I find the edge of the wooden fence on a narrow two-lane road. But it’s still dark, and I know the trees are thick enough for me to be hidden in them as soon as I can pull the body from the back of the car and into the thicket. The fence and the well are not so far that I can’t do this, so I tug his backpack onto my back, knowing the best way in is to make small gains like I did before. Short bursts of energy...grip the tape at his ankles, pull as hard as I can and then stop and breathe, and do it again, inching along.

My back is throbbing, my eyes are blurred with tears, but I keep at it. It’s harder to do over uneven ground and roots winding and twigs snapping beneath the weight of him, but I pull and stop and pull and stop until I’m there.

It’s just like I last saw it. I look into its endless darkness and say hello, my words echoing back to me. Two hundred feet deep, bones cracking, child skeletons. My father’s face and laughter come back to me. I will not cry. I have to do what I came here for and get the hell out of here.

“I’m so sorry,” I whisper to Eddie. Because he’s a real person, and he has a wife and a mother somewhere, and I am so sorry. And when he falls, it’s just a quiet whoosh. It seems like he falls for a thousand miles until I hear a sound—the crash of a body hitting stone, and I try not to think about cracking bones and ripping flesh...and I know nobody will ever find him.

Then I decide to do something we promised not to do. Before I drop his backpack, I take out one of the saran-wrapped stacks of cash. Just one. I won’t use it now, but I might need it. Just one is enough. I have to. Then I drop the pack, and there’s a long pause until I hear a tap as it hits the bottom, and I marvel at how thousands of dollars and the IDs of seven men—what is left of the lives of five men—sound as small as my single penny falling.

And then I run as hard as I can through trees and vines, as fast as I can until my lungs burn and my ankles are scratched and scraped from twigs and vines, and my face is streaked with mud and tears. And then I reach my car and drive and drive until I can find a place to erase every trace of this dead man and all of my sins. I think again about just driving—just choosing a direction and taking this money and just never going back.

21

ANNA

The police called to ask me a few more questions again. It’s something about Henry’s laptop, and I wonder if they will be giving it back to me now—or if they found more secrets that I don’t know about.

I sit in my car in the parking lot outside the apartments, wondering if evidence of his affair was on his laptop and if they know, but also watching Cass pull in and park in front of the office.

It’s been a few weeks since she went to visit her father, from what I hear via the rumor mill at The Sycamores. She was gone one night and hasn’t been the same since she got back, if you listen to the talk. There’s lots of speculation on what could have happened, but none of it’s good because she’s acted like a zombie since that night, although she tries hard to cover it.

She usually parks in back but not anymore for whatever reason. She gets out of the car and just stands there, staring toward the building for a few moments. She looks like absolute garbage. Her face is ghostly, and her hair is limp and stringy. She walks slowly to her apartment door and disappears inside, and I know for certain something is up with her. She knows something. Is the guilt about what she knows getting to her, I wonder?

I think about Monica on my drive to the station, and how maybe I’ll find the answers I need on Henry’s laptop if they do give it back. At least it’s worth sifting through before I accuse my best friend of something I can’t take back. I haven’t talked to her much since I found the phone records. I know I should have confronted her right away, but something made me wait, so I’ve dodged invites and made excuses to get off the phone when she calls—just until I know more. She would lie, right? If there were something going on that she didn’t want me to know about, she would just lie, so tipping her off to the fact that I know they were in contact doesn’t help me. Patience is the only thing that’s going to help me.

I have barely talked to Callum in the days since that stupid night, either. We avoid each other and give an awkward nod when we pass one another on the pool deck. I just spend my time scouring every square inch of this apartment—every box, every sheet of paper, every photo—for anything that might put my life back together. So when I get a call that they have information, and it’s concerning Henry’s laptop, I’m anxious; but at least there’s something they found warranting my going back in.

He keeps a file on his desktop that’s labeled 2012 tax returns, but inside are all his passwords to social media, email, everything, so he has them all in one place when he inevitably forgets them. I have them in a similar file on my phone labeled passwords, but I guess his theory that nobody would ever care to look in his 2012 tax return file is smart. Of course, the police would, though.

The point is, I haven’t had access to any of this yet; not his desktop, his social media, email. They casually asked for the laptop so quickly after his death, it was all water through my hands before I could even think about how much I needed it for my own investigation. Not that saying no to them was an option. That list of passwords will open up an entire world to me about what he was really doing—things that the police don’t know to look for because they don’t know about the affair, so certain interactions may not mean anything to them. But I’ll know.

When I get there, I expect to wait for an eternity and then answer different versions of the same questions again from the same detective who thinks he’s good at making me feel like I’m an ally and not a suspect, but that’s not what happens. I’m ushered into a hallway right away. No waiting. Shit. This is probably bad then, it’s not like the other times.

“Ms. Hartley. Thanks for coming down.”

I turn to see Detective Harrison walking toward me with quick strides before opening a door and gesturing me in, and I follow him into a little depressing room the way I have done many times before. Four walls, one table, two bottles of water, and a soul-stealing feeling in the air.

“You found all you needed on the laptop?” I ask.

“Yes, and we will be giving it back to you sometime in the near future,” he says, and there is a shift in his tone from previous conversations—a lightness or warmth, almost. And I realize that I must not be a person of interest anymore because they wouldn’t release this back to me if I were, right? What must they have uncovered for this to happen? “I won’t keep you long, but I do just have one question.”

“Okay,” I say, hugging my purse to my chest, wishing I were somewhere else but knowing I need to suffer through more repetitive questions.

“There was a letter Henry wrote...intended for you,” he says.

“What? What do you mean?”

“It’s on the desktop of Henry’s laptop. So you haven’t seen it?” he asks, and I just stare at him, confused, still clutching my bag hard and mindlessly chewing the skin on my cuticle for comfort.

The detective clicks at the keyboard on his tablet and then turns it around for me to see.

It’s addressed to me. The thought that it’s the last letter I’ll ever receive from him doesn’t slip through unnoticed. I sit forward and hold my heart.

“We found the same text in an unsent email to you,” he says, and I read what’s on the screen. Henry’s precious words to me.

Anna, I love you. I’m so sorry for all the mistakes I’ve made. This is me coming clean. I’ve started writing this letter to you a dozen times. My shame and guilt is overwhelming, and you deserve to know how this all started to unravel.

I quietly pray he doesn’t say he killed someone the way he did to me over the phone that last day of his life, because I know he was manic, and it’s not true, and they can’t think that about him, or they’ll start going down some pointless path to find out who or what he’s talking about. But when I keep reading, he doesn’t say any more about that. It’s short. It’s cryptic.

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