CHAPTER 5
Evie tried to make her question sound more casual than it was. Chloé was bent over her phone, and impatience crept into her mother’s voice. “Can you stop for a minute and answer me? What did Scout say exactly?”
“How am I supposed to remember?” The text was from the boy on the debating team. Everybody at school knew she had leukemia by then.
“You talked to him. . . . Think.” Evie saw Chloé wince as she put in her earbuds. The doctor had warned the bone ache would get worse.
“I wasn’t paying attention.” As Chloé texted back heart emojis, she thought about how urgent and slightly scary the boy’s nakedness had felt in the dark.
Evie unbudded her daughter’s right ear. “Try to remember.” Evie’s voice had an edge to it. Chloé heard it.
“Why is it suddenly so important?”
“It’s not important. I was just wondering what Scout had to say for himself. We haven’t seen each other in a long time. Does he still need a cane to get around?”
“Didn’t notice.”
“How did he seem?”
Chloé sensed her mother was hiding something. “Were you and Scout lovers?”
“Christ no!” Evie felt like she’d been kicked in the stomach. “Why the hell would you think that?”
“Because your face is turning red, and the way he said it.”
“Said what?”
Chloé was a good mimic. Her voice captured just the right note of ersatz sincerity. “ ‘Tell your mother I miss her in ways she can’t imagine.’ Trust me, he definitely has a thing for you.”
Evie felt her throat closing. “Did he say anything else?”
“Something like . . .” Chloé sounded just like him when she mimicked, “ ‘Let your mother know I’ll be checking in.’ Don’t worry, you’ll hear from him.”
Having to hide both terror and rage left Evie feeling scorched and blistered; the kind of raw there is no salve for. As she started dinner, Evie turned Scout’s words to Chloé over and over, hoping to shake loose some clue to his intent. In truth, she had no evidence that would indicate anything more than casual sadism on Scout’s part. But having grown up in the forest, she knew a predator roamed far afield when its needs weren’t met in the usual hunting ground.
She prepared Chloé’s favorite meal that night, poulet à la fermière. Jacques had taught her how to braise the chicken in shallots and white wine and then add a splash of cream. Usually while she cooked, Evie could hear her husband whispering in her ear in French. “More butter . . . don’t forget the tarragon.” But tonight, it was Scout inside her head: I’ll be checking in.
At dinner, Chloé took two bites of the poulet and pushed her plate away. “I’m sorry, Mom, it’s really delicious, but I feel like I might vomit.”
After the meds knocked Chloé out for the night, Evie stood alone in the living room staring down at the darkness of the empty street below. Her daughter’s cancer wasn’t her fault, but Scout was.
Part of Evie wished her monster would step out of the shadows, come to the door, and tell her what the fuck he wanted. Another part of her longed for him to ring the bell simply so she could put the muzzle of the shotgun she kept in the bedroom to his head and pull the trigger. It was no idle fantasy. She had told Chloé there was a 12-gauge on top of her clothes closet in case art thieves tried to steal the antiquities entrusted to her care. But the truth was that Evie had been waiting seventeen years for Scout to show up.
Knowing that killing the monster wasn’t going to keep her daughter alive, Evie splashed cold water on her face and went down to the studio to rummage for the pack of cigarettes she had hidden when she gave up smoking a year ago. She had promised Chloé she’d quit for good, but she needed something to keep her hands from shaking.
Lighting up and feeling guilty, she opened her laptop and consulted her bank account. She was trying to calculate how much money she could borrow on her credit cards in case the lost relative she was in search of wanted cash in return for their marrow, when an incoming Skype chimed.
Evie accepted it and the lower half of a man’s face appeared onscreen—a Dr. Radetzky. Chloé’s oncologist had said he’d put them in touch with a doctor in America who could harvest the marrow if they found a relation who was a viable donor, but she thought the timing was strange—11:30 in Paris was 5:30 in the morning in New York. Had he been up all night or started work early? The doctor was rumpled, about forty, and wore a white hospital lab coat. Tired eyes, graying beard, sitting in a cluttered office. His hand reached out to adjust the angle of the camera as if he were trying to touch her.
“I’m Nick Radetzky . . . I was hoping to speak to Evie Quimby.” None of Chloé’s doctors called her by her maiden name.
“I’m her.”
His image flickered, his voice a half-beat behind the movement of his lips. It was as if he were speaking from another galaxy. “I’m sorry, I didn’t recognize you . . . you’ve changed.”
“You know me?”
“We spoke briefly once, a long time ago.”
“Who are you?” The cigarettes were making her dizzy.
“I’m a psychiatrist. I’ve been in contact with your mother and she suggested we speak. I’m sorry to ring so late, but when I called you earlier your voicemail was full.”
Evie’s face brightened. She was thinking one of the emails she fired off must have touched somebody’s heart at the Adoption Registry, and their luck had finally turned.
“You know where my mother is?”
The doctor looked puzzled. “She’s in Rangeley. At least she was a few days ago. She mentioned that she hadn’t spoken to you in a long time.” But Flo wasn’t the mother Evie needed to find. Radetzky continued, “I was hoping you might be able to answer some questions I had about my brother. We weren’t close but I’ve recently discovered some things that—”
Evie cut him off. “I don’t know what my mother told you, but I never met you or your brother and don’t have time to—”
It was the doctor’s turn to interrupt. “You and your father found my brother’s body.”
Evie recognized him now. He didn’t have a beard seventeen years ago. She remembered he was wearing sneakers and a rumpled black suit. Evie’s brain coughed up a memory of a corpse submerged in a swirl of white.
The psychiatrist leaned into the screen. “I know it’s been a long time, but I was wondering if over the years you might have remembered something, heard something that could help me understand exactly what happened that night. How he fell? How he drowned? I’ve spoken to everyone else who was mentioned in the sheriff’s report. Except for you and your father.”
Evie pulled back from the screen as if she’d been slapped. She felt small hairs on her arms and the back of her neck stiffen and rise. It was as if Scout were in the room breathing on her. The only thing she was certain of was that Scout had surfaced at the foot of her daughter’s bed two days ago because he knew she would be getting this call.
Onscreen the pixelated psychiatrist held up a piece of paper close enough for her to make out the letterhead: it was from a bank in Cyprus. He was saying something about his brother getting an interest-free, unsecured loan for $250,000 when he was still a college student. The doctor said, “Who gives a kid who can’t qualify for a credit card that kind of money? Any idea?”