Afterward, she was asked to wait inside the garage for a car to return her home. She was standing alone, waiting, when her phone rang. MOM, read the screen.
Oh no. An electric shiver ran through her. If her mother had heard something—a call from the press, perhaps—Odessa didn’t want to talk about it. And if she hadn’t heard something—if this was just a coincidental catch-up call, their first in more than a week—then not talking about it would become a huge issue the next time they spoke. Why didn’t you tell me? The recriminations, on and on. The guilt. Yes, the guilt. Odessa’s world was gone and yet, her mother would make it all about herself. You should’ve told me sooner.
Odessa silenced her phone. She couldn’t talk to her now. Not now. But ignoring the call and letting it go to voicemail was not enough.
Never enough.
Odessa walked away. She couldn’t get in the car right now. As she neared the door to the street, she lengthened her stride, afraid of being seen and called back before she could escape.
She made it onto the sidewalk, moving two blocks north before she felt free again. She texted Linus—she had insisted he go in to work, and wanted him to know she was done with her interview and basically okay—and kept walking. The clouds above were a thick, sweatery gray, threatening hard rain, but only a few needle-sharp drops fell.
She walked due north, staying away from the sketchiest areas near the river, passing car washes and phone stores and bodegas and graffiti-covered vacant storefronts. Just as she began to grow tired of the crumbling sidewalks and faceless streets, she found herself at the entrance to the Mount Pleasant Cemetery, an oasis in a perpetually troubled city. A stone marker near the Victorian Gothic gate said 1844. She walked along the winding roads and rolling lanes, passing funereal sculptures, Romanesque crypts, and elaborate mausoleums. It was a mood.
She thought on a lot of things, but it was all scattered, impossible to dwell upon. Maybe that was a good thing. One image she kept coming back to was Linus’s vexed reaction to her confiding in him about the essence…the presence…the whatever she saw emanating from Walt Leppo’s body after he passed. She wished she had the luxury of doubting herself, of discounting what she saw. She wished she could dismiss it.
The hunger pangs came upon her suddenly. She found a Dominican restaurant nearby and sat alone eating roasted chicken and seasoned rice. What she liked best about the place was that it looked nothing like the Soup Spoon Café, where she had spent her last hour with Leppo.
Walt, what happened?
It was still light as she crossed the river back into Harrison. Her legs and feet were tired, and she thought she was thoroughly exhausted—until she saw the gathering outside her building from a block away. It didn’t register at first, and then the realization washed over her all at once, with a sickening surge of fight-or-flight adrenaline.
They were reporters. The vans were TV camera trucks, and they were waiting outside her residence on a stakeout. Now Odessa was receiving the same treatment Peters had after his scandal came to light. Now she was the pursued.
Like a bank robber with a trunk full of loot approaching a police checkpoint, she turned on her heel and walked the other way—fearing, with every step, that she would hear her name shouted and be chased. It was out there now: news of the bad shoot, identifying her. Her silenced phone remained in her purse, probably burning up with voicemails and news alerts. She felt hunted. She wiped away tears.
Her world, as she once knew it, was gone. Seeing those lights, the throngs of people outside—waiting—she knew nothing would ever be the same again.
In a bit of grace, she soon found herself walking past the Harrison Public Library. Inside its cool, quiet rooms, between the stacks, she remembered how libraries in the towns she grew up in outside Milwaukee, Wisconsin, were sanctuaries in her youth. The smell of old paper, the coolness of the metal shelves, the smoothness of the tile floors. Libraries were a place for hiding as well as exploring, same as the books they freely offered. She found a chair in a corner and sat awhile. Her phone remained inside her purse like a radioactive stone encased in lead; breaking the seal would expose her to its harmful rays, poisoning her. Numb, she ruminated on her damaged career, on her disrupted life, on Leppo’s death. Children walked past her and she had to close her eyes, so shaken was she by the images of the slain Peters children.
The closing in fifteen minutes announcement came, and Odessa felt sick. She found a clock and wondered if any of the reporters—at least the television reporters—had given up on featuring her in their newscast. It was dark outside and she walked directly to her apartment building, key in hand. Thankfully, there were no TV trucks and no reporters in sight. She made it inside her lobby without incident, and upstairs into her apartment.
The next morning, she was unable to deal with 90 percent of what was on her phone, but one message got through. Her boss told her not to come in to Claremont for work, but to report to the New York City Field Office instead. Odessa took the subway in to Tribeca, and for the first two days of her temporary reassignment the brass on the twenty-third floor tried to find something for her to do. She expended a lot of energy trying to look busy, but by the end of the second day she was fine just looking out the window. Nobody talked to her.
On the third day, the office emptied for Walt Leppo’s funeral. Odessa could not bring herself to attend it. She was certain no one wanted her to go. Sitting at an empty desk knowing her friend and mentor was being eulogized and buried across the river: That was her lowest point.
Her mother kept calling. Odessa communicated with her siblings—there were five, the closest one to her geographically living outside Cincinnati, Ohio—by text, telling them she was okay and promising to call on the weekend. Her siblings were well intentioned, but the mere thought of actually talking to them about what had happened was draining. With her mother, she caught a break. In a rare moment of mercy, Odessa’s call went to voicemail.
Mom, it’s me. Sorry, things have been just hectic, as you can imagine. It’s been a terrible week and I don’t know what’s going to happen. I’m okay, though. I’m as well as can be expected. I’ll try you again later but there’s so much to do on my end, I don’t know when that will be. Okay. It’s Odessa. Okay. Bye.
And then she sat at her empty desk with nothing to do until it was time to leave.
The next day, they found something for her to do. She was dispatched to the Brooklyn-Queens FBI Resident Agency across the East River, in Kew Gardens. A retired agent had recently suffered a stroke, and her task was to clear out his office. Why a retired agent still had an office, she did not know, but she was certain that, as a rookie agent on desk duty currently under a cloud of investigation, questioning the assignment would not be a good look.
True to form, the office manager at Kew Gardens had no idea Odessa was coming, nor did she know anything about the office in question. She fished out a tray of thirty or so odd keys from a cabinet in the copying room and presented it to Odessa, pointing her to the hallway.
Odessa found the office at the end of a back corridor, kitty-cornered with an emergency exit to the stairs. The door was unmarked and indeed locked. Odessa shook the tray of keys and considered the time it would take to try each one—knowing that, by the Odessa Law of Averages, the correct key would be among the last ones selected. The office door was sufficiently hidden from view of the rest of the office wing, so instead she appropriated a paper clip from a vacant desk, removed a pizza delivery joint’s business-card-size magnet from the break room refrigerator, and used both to pick the simple lock.