Page 5 of Nine Lives

Her office hours over, she crossed the campus to where her Prius was parked, then drove to her two-bedroom cottage in the Water Hill section of Ann Arbor. She’d left Fable, her adventurous cat, out all day, and was relieved to see him waiting on the front porch for her, relieved also that he hadn’t caught and killed a bird and left it on her doormat. He followed her in, pinned his gray ears back, and bolted toward the food bowl in the kitchen. Estrella, her shy orange tabby, leaped up onto the dining room table to greet her. Caroline flipped through the mail she’d received, pulling out a white envelope, her address printed out on a mailing label in Courier font. A single Forever stamp with the American flag was in the right-hand corner. There was no return address.

Something about it seemed personal somehow, even though there wasn’t anything remotely personal about it. She set aside the excise tax bill, the solicitation letters from any one of the animal welfare nonprofits she got—Pet Smart had clearly sold her address to some sort of mailing list—and slit open the envelope with an unvarnished thumbnail.

Inside was a single piece of paper, computer printed, the font Courier, like the mailing label.

Matthew Beaumont

Jay Coates

Ethan Dart

Caroline Geddes

Frank Hopkins

Alison Horne

Arthur Kruse

Jack Radebaugh

Jessica Winslow

Caroline looked into the envelope to see if there was anything else, but there wasn’t. Just the single sheet of paper with the list of names, none of which was familiar to her, except for her own, of course.

Estrella tried to rub her cheek against the edge of the paper, and Fable loudly mewled from the kitchen, waiting for food. A horrible thought went through Caroline’s mind: It is a list of death. Someone has marked us for death. She thought this automatically, in the same way that she automatically thought that every time her phone rang it was news of some unspeakable tragedy. She read the list again, then laughed internally at how morbid she’d been. Of course, if it was a list of living people, they were all marked for death, sooner or later. It was eerie, no matter what, and reminded her of that Muriel Spark book, Memento Mori. Of course, she was reading too much into what was probably a list of no consequence. But that was what she did with her life, that was her profession—she read into things.

“‘I do not want to be reflective anymore,’” she recited to herself, “‘envying and despising unreflective things.’” MacNeice was onto something there, even though he’d probably been talking about the political situation in Germany right before World War II and not about a tendency to overanalyze. But in her own life, though not necessarily in her class, she allowed for personal interpretations of literary works. What was the next line in the poem? Was it “I do not want to be a tragic or a philosophic chorus,” then something, something, then “And after that let the sea flow over us”? Maybe tonight she’d memorize the whole poem. It was the one good thing that her mother had taught her to do. Memorize and recite poetry.

Caroline rubbed Estrella beneath the chin, feeling the vibrations of her purr against her fingers. Then she went into the kitchen to feed Fable.

6

Thursday, September 15, 12:33 p.m.

He glanced through the list, didn’t think much of it, and threw it into the kitchen wastebasket. Jay Coates had a callback for a commercial that day and was feeling halfway bullish about his prospects. It was an ad for instant rice, and he would be playing the elitist chef won over by the crappy processed rice in a box. His meeting was at three that afternoon in Burbank, so that gave him two hours before he’d need to be in the Beemer and on his way.

Even though he’d gone for a short run right after he’d gotten up, he pulled out the rowing machine and did a solid hour on it, finally watching the NCIS episode that his friend Madison was in. It had been on his DVR for weeks, and she’d been asking if he’d watched it yet, hoping for notes. Notes. Jesus. It was NCIS. She had two scenes, and a total of three lines of dialogue. She played a personal trainer at a gym, and the director made sure her tits—he probably thought they were real—were prominently framed in both of her scenes. After watching the whole episode, Jay was relieved that a) it was a crappy role, and b) Madison was crappy in it. The real reason he’d delayed watching her big break was the fear she might have nailed it, and that it might lead to more work for her, and that was something he couldn’t handle right now.

After parking in one of the guest spots outside of the single-story office park where Buchman Creative was housed, Jay did two quick lines of the coke he’d been saving up for just this occasion, then walked across the gluey asphalt in the near ninety-degree heat, hoping he wouldn’t start sweating before the meeting. He was ushered straight in by the doughy receptionist, who had some sort of Midwestern accent, turned down the offer of a bottled water, and asked for tap. Madison had suggested the tap-water move—made you seem down to earth, she’d said. He ran his lines again in front of the two ad writers, creeps who might be younger than he was, although he was not a hundred percent sure, plus Amy Buchman, head of the agency, who swung by because she’d just found five free minutes in the day. When he left, Jay spotted Dan Sweden in the waiting room. They both pretended not to see each other.

His manager called an hour later to tell him that they’d passed, but that Amy was impressed, and if anything else came up, etcetera. The call came while he’d been walking through the Brentwood Country Mart, considering buying some new sneakers at James Perse. Instead, he went and got onion rings at Barney’s Burgers, sat at a table, and, seething, began to look for a good prospect. It took twenty-five minutes but just as he was finishing his rings, he saw her. She was perfect: late twenties, yoga pants, not quite as pretty as she’d been told she was, and all alone. He followed her, knowing exactly how to blend in, not be noticed, but always keeping her in his peripheral vision. He followed her into Christian Louboutin, where she was pretending she could afford a pair of shoes, and asked the woman behind the desk if Tracy still worked there. She looked confused, then finally asked, “Do you mean Theresa?”

“Right,” Jay said.

“She works on the weekends.”

“Thanks,” Jay said and left the store just as the blonde did.

He trailed her to the parking lot, where she got into a silvery blue Honda Civic, probably purchased by her father when she turned twenty-five. “It’s a very reliable car, sweetie,” he’d undoubtedly said, then she’d kissed him on the cheek and told him in her little girl’s voice how much she loved her daddy.

After she got into her car and pulled straight out of her parking spot, Jay trotted to his Beemer, managing to find her again on San Vicente heading east. He followed her all the way to Koreatown, memorizing her license plate number. She parked in front of a two-story stucco apartment building and entered through the plate-glass doors using a key on the same chain as her car key. This was where she lived. Jay pulled into the strip mall across the street, parked so that he could keep an eye on the building, and lit one of the two Parliament cigarettes he allowed himself per day. He got on his phone, and went to Instagram, punching in #brentwoodcountrymart, not really expecting to get a hit, but not entirely surprised when the most recent image, a close-up of some latte foam swirled into a heart, was posted by an abbybritell. Her pictures, mostly selfies, confirmed it was the blonde he’d been following. She called herself an actress, writer, and tai chi instructor.

And like that, he owned her. Her name. Her personal photos. He knew where she lived, what she drove. And Jay knew, without a doubt, that he could murder her in the next twenty-four hours. And no one would ever catch him. There was zero connection between Jay Coates from West Hollywood and Abby Britell from Koreatown. He could imagine the headlines already. A pretty white girl murdered in Hollywood. It would be everywhere. He started to fantasize about how it would play out but stopped himself. There’d be time for that later, and, right now, just the fact that he’d learned her name and where she lived was giving him a hot buzz of adrenaline. He felt better as he pulled the car out of the lot and drove toward home. He thought he’d feel good the entire drive, but he didn’t, not really. It had been way too easy tracking that woman, and maybe what he really needed to do was to up the game, actually hurt one of those smug bitches, and then see how he felt.

That night, after doing a hundred push-ups, then his facial routine, he called Madison to let her know he’d watched her NCIS.

“Oh, finally. So?”

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