Page 116 of Skeletons in the Closet

The bed beside me was empty and cold. The drone of the TV played on from the other room.

Diem had turned off the lights in the apartment, a courtesy, I was sure. A gentle yellow glow from his snake enclosure danced across the ceiling and helped to highlight the furniture.

“Oh god,” I mumbled into a pillow. “I’m sleeping in the same room as a killer snake.” But I was too tired to truly panic and lay still instead, listening for Diem, wondering if he was sitting out there alone or if he’d fallen asleep.

Ten or fifteen minutes passed. I was nearly back to sleep when the same clicking noise that had woken me sounded from the other room. It hadn’t been a dream. It was the office door. That time, the noise was followed by the quiet tread of someone walking toward the couch. I listened as Diem settled, and then there was no sound but the TV.

I waited, taxing my ears. I’d set my phone beside the bed earlier. Reaching for it, I checked the time. It was three thirty in the morning.

Sitting up, I lowered my bare feet to the cold floor and fumbled for my broken glasses. Diem’s T-shirt hung to midthigh as I wandered around the partition, foggy from sleep.

He was on the couch, elbows planted on his knees, fingers tightly clasped behind his head, which hung limply between his shoulders. He wasn’t watching TV. He looked like he was suffering from whatever was going on inside his head.

I approached, shuffling my feet so I wouldn’t startle him. He didn’t look up, but I sensed he knew I was there. A faint waft of cigarette smoke billowed off his clothes and hung in the air. I didn’t know if it was the cheating husband case, what happened at the university, my exposure to poisonous gas, or the fact I was sleeping in his bed and he didn’t know how to bring himself to join me that had set him off, but he was clearly troubled. Suffering.

The rubber ball I’d given him sat a few feet away on the coffee table. Three empty bottles of water occupied the space beside it. No beer. No empty tumbler. A stress ball and water.

He’d tried.

I sat beside him, close enough to lean my head on the broad side of his shoulder. “Hey, Guns.” My voice croaked with sleep. “Should have let me go home, huh?”

No response.

“Do you want your bed back? I can sleep on the couch.”

“No.”

“Do you want to join me?”

No response.

“It’s okay if you do. I’d like that. I won’t push myself on you. I promise.”

Nothing.

“Are you protecting me against the killer snake in the corner? If so, I appreciate it.”

The noise I’d come to associate with an almost laugh left Diem’s throat, and I chuckled.

I didn’t ask any more questions but leaned against him for another twenty minutes until my eyelids grew heavy before softly kissing his shoulder blade and heading back to bed.

He didn’t join me, and in the morning, I found him passed out on the love seat in a sitting position with his neck craned to the side. I dressed, collected my things, and donned my brokenglasses. I couldn’t see properly to drive, which was why I hadn’t taken myself home the previous night, so I arranged an Uber, cringing at the expense.

Even though it was Saturday, I needed to go to work. I’d missed three days that week and feared my attendance might be frowned upon. The records department was closed on the weekends, but it didn’t mean I couldn’t catch up on work. Hopefully, showing initiative would help me look more favorable in my boss’s eyes. I couldn’t afford to be out of a job.

I’d get my car later.

On my way out, I left Diem a note, telling him to call me when he woke up, knowing he probably wouldn’t.

***

I arrived at the headquarters building by nine. Thankfully, it was a quiet morning. Most employees had weekends off, so only a core group of detectives, those working on important cases, graced the premises on Saturdays or Sundays.

It gave me time to think. I hadn’t been in any state of mind the previous day to contemplate what had happened in Natalia’s office. The sheer risk to my life and how I might have died had I not managed to connect a call to Diem was mind-boggling. He could easily have sat in the parking lot for another hour before realizing something was wrong. I’d have been dead by then.

Spending the night in his bed—without him—was a whole other can of worms to process.

I continued the monotonous task of inputting data into the computer system for the first few hours, then I grew bored and read the digital version of theToronto Starnewspaper—I’d paid for a stupid subscription after all—seeking information about the incident at the university. I found a tiny write-up on the third page that indicated the police had a potential suspect in custody.No name was provided, but I knew from Doyle it was Roan Guterson’s father.

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