Carter sent the e-mail, and looked at the dispatch confirmation on his screen for a long moment. He shook his head; he was reading too much into a short message. The tone was awkward simply because he was still all but a stranger to her, that was all.
He checked the address he’d seen Mr. Leverson leave against the list of suspected girlfriends Mrs. Leverson had given him. One of the addresses matched. He would check city records to confirm the name just for purposes of due diligence, but the case was all but closed. He brought his case notes up to date, and turned his attention to something more personal.
Henry Weston continued to bother him. He’d almost managed to put the man out of his mind when Emily Lovecraft told him that Weston was not the bookstore’s lawyer and was unlikely to be Alfred Hill’s, either. He had to agree with her. Why Hill would ask somebody like Weston to be his executor, and why somebody like Weston would agree, was an intractable mystery. All Carter could think was that maybe they had history, maybe old college buddies or something.
There was no return in any of this, Carter knew, and it was a waste of time and effort, but at least it might stop the question nagging at him. So he fired up the databases, and prepared to research Alfred Hill, and then Henry Weston.
At the end of three hours, he had everything he would usually expect when doing a background check of an upstanding citizen like Alfred Hill. School, college, some tax data, a few general Internet hits, and then the trail stopped abruptly seven years before, as he knew it would.
By his laptop, Carter had a scratch pad he used to list the kinds of searches he would make, and to tick off as he made them, storing the gathered information on the computer itself. The sheet for Alfred Hill was largely checked.
The sheet for Henry Weston was hardly touched. He found Weston on institutional sites, sure enough—here was his name at Cornell, here were his company papers for Weston Edmunds, here was his membership in the American Bar Association (a small surprise to Carter, the ABA being more a teaching and ethics organization than vocational)—but there was almost nothing else. No professional gatherings, no blue plate dinners, no functions at all. It was as if Henry Weston lived in his office and only rarely left it.
If Carter didn’t know it was impossible, he would have suspected “Henry Weston” to be a synthetic identity, put together for witness protection or something similar. It
was
impossible. Weston was a family member of a distinguished legal dynasty with a pedigree of ninety years. It was inconceivable that he could be anyone else but Henry Weston.
Maybe, Carter concluded, he just really liked his privacy.
It was a clear afternoon, and a clear walk across an uncrowded parking lot. There was nobody else within a hundred yards. Professor James Belasco had no reason to believe he was in the last minutes of his life. He was healthy and had, as far as he knew, no enemies who hated him enough to cause him harm.
In this latter point, he was incorrect. Soon he would die in unnecessary terror and confusion purely because he had an enemy who hated him greatly, yet had never shown him that hatred. Like Fortunato, he would die an ugly death because he did not realize there was a Montresor in his life.
All that was in his mind that afternoon was getting home, grading some papers, then carrying out a swift pass of the academic publications that had been stacking up in his e-mail. His personal interests in topology would garner most of his attention, but he would keep a pastoral eye out for anything that might impact the theses of his students.
He reached his five-year-old Ford Focus and unlocked the door. There was nothing, not a hackle rising or a sense of discomfort, to tell him he was being watched, nothing at all to tell him this was the last time he would unlock the door, climb in behind the wheel, and carelessly throw his briefcase onto the passenger seat.
Belasco leaned back in his seat, drew a deep breath, and sighed it out. He worked his head from one side to the other to relieve the tension he felt in his neck, tapped the steering wheel lightly with his fingertips. Finally, he drew on his seat belt, and reached for the key where it waited, unturned, in the ignition.
As he lifted his shoe from the rubber mat in the footwell, there was the distinct sound of water stirred by the movement. Belasco’s fingers hesitated on the key, and he looked down. The mat was dry, his feet were dry.
He frowned, put it from his mind, and went to turn the key again. As he did so, his foot shifted toward the gas pedal and, once again, there was the sound of water being disturbed.
Belasco looked down. There was no water in the footwell, although …
His frown became curious. There
was
something down there after all. In the air, he caught a glimpse of a fine white wisp that vanished as soon as he saw it. Then more appeared. It took him a moment to understand what he was seeing. It was like looking at light reflected from the surface of a lake, the crests of the waves and ripples showing more strongly than the troughs. He watched the layer of waterless ripples, visible only by the light coming through the car windows.
He was having some sort of perceptual event, he knew. Perhaps some sort of stroke. There was no water there, yet there was water there. Experimentally, he lowered his hand into the surface of the rippling plain and wafted it back and forth. The ripples broke against his hand, and he could distinctly hear the sound of water being splashed. He could even feel a sense of resistance to his fingers, and perhaps coolness. Yet when he lifted his fingers clear, the sensation immediately vanished. His fingers were not wet. There was no water.
With a shock, he realized that the water was rising. It was already at his knees and the ripple layer was appearing across the top of the front passenger seat. He watched as a loose paper lying there gently rose from the bone-dry seat cover, floating on phantom waters.
Belasco looked out the side window, fully expecting the glittering layer to be covering the whole parking lot. After all, such an effect could hardly be localized, whether or not it existed only in his own mind. He was surprised and alarmed to see it was not. Outside looked perfectly normal; the water that was not water was confined to his car, and it was still rising. When it reached his waist, he decided it was past time to put scientific observation aside and vacate himself from the experiment in progress.
The door wouldn’t open. It didn’t feel locked; there was no give in the handle at all. It might as well have been cast directly as part of the door. He undid his seat belt easily enough, the non-water splashing with his movements, and he tried the handle again. It refused to move even slightly. He turned the key to switch on the electrical systems, and the dashboard illuminated as normal. He’d feared they might short, but apparently the non-water was non-conductive.
Belasco pushed the toggle to lower his window. Nothing happened. He could hear the motor laboring, but the window wouldn’t move at all.
The water was up to his chest.
He was still not panicking, but worry was becoming fear. He tried the door handle again, but it still resisted even when he put his weight behind it, moving not a millimeter. He reached across to the passenger door and, as he did so, his face dipped beneath the surface of the glittering nothing.
He couldn’t breathe. Nothing filled his mouth, nothing at all. Certainly not air.
He sat up, eyes wide, gasping. It was as if the car was filling with a heavy, unbreathable gas. He found himself thinking in those terms because it was easier to rationalize than the concept of ghost water. He ignored how the light glittered across a liquid that was itself invisible and almost intangible. He ignored how it splashed and how he felt drops of nothing strike his skin, to leave it dry but for his sweat.
Keeping his head above the layer, he tried the passenger door, but it would not open, as intractably sealed as the other.
Finally, fear blossomed into panic. Belasco lay across the seat and kicked at the passenger window. He felt the water resist his movements, saw the surface surge in reaction to his movements, held his breath as his mouth dipped below the glittering reflections. The window might as well have been made of steel. His kicks did not even make the glass vibrate under the blows. He turned and braced himself with his back against the seat and his feet against the windshield, then tried to force it out. The glass did not bow even the tiniest fraction to all his frantic strength.
James Belasco was observed as he died. The increasingly desperate responses to his deteriorating situation were mentally noted as the experiment approached its conclusion. How the car slowly lowered on its suspension as it filled with water that wasn’t there. How the shell of the car, its body, doors, and glass, all behaved anomalously. How Belasco clung on to the very end, pushing his face into the diminishing layer of breathable air in the compartment.
When even that layer had gone, Belasco writhed and convulsed, drowning on dry land. It lasted almost a minute. Then he hung there in the roof space, floating facedown.
The body slowly sank to lie sprawled across both front seats as the car simultaneously rose on its suspension. Less than two minutes later, all was normal once more, but for the small detail of the corpse of a man who had died as no man had ever died before.
* * *
Carter’s cell phone rang. He checked the display before accepting the call. The number wasn’t withheld, but neither he nor his phone’s directory recognized it.
“Hello?”
“Mr. Carter?” said a voice. He didn’t know it. The ambience on the line sounded as if the caller was outdoors. “The private investigator?”
“Speaking.”
“Mr. Carter, my name is James Belasco. I’m a professor of mathematics at Clave College. I…”
There was a pause of several seconds. Carter was about to speak when Belasco continued, “I believe I’m in danger. Would it be possible for you to come to the math department as soon as possible?”
Carter wasn’t even sure where Clave College was. It only rang a few distant bells. Before he could ask for directions, Belasco said, “No, that might not be safe. Meet me in the east parking lot. I drive a silver Ford Focus.”
“If you’re in danger, Professor, you should call the—”
Belasco hung up.
Carter looked at the phone, nonplussed. He called the number back, but after ringing for thirty seconds, it was put through to voice mail.
Carter was in his office, so he did a fast search. Clave College, it transpired, was in Providence.
Carter pushed his chair back, a chair still blissfully on casters, and rubbed his mouth as he thought. He’d been intending to go back to Providence for the weekend anyway, and the Leverson case, such as it was, had tied itself up in a gift bow; he’d already had his last meeting with Mrs. Leverson. She’d nodded a few times, said very little as he laid out what he had learned, paid him in cash, and left very quickly. He got the feeling she’d somehow been hoping to be proved wrong, despite everything.
His schedule was clear. Fine, he would head up to Rhode Island a couple of days earlier than planned.
* * *
There were police vehicles in the parking lot, and an ambulance pulling away as Carter approached. The lot was taped off and so Carter had to go around the block to find a parking place. He walked back and joined the crowd of students and gawkers who were just starting to dissipate.
“Hey,” said Carter to a group of three who were talking about getting a drink, “what happened here?”
“They found a dead guy in that car,” said one, and pointed to the silver Ford Focus that was the center of CSU attention.
“Suicide,” said another.
“Dude, you don’t know that,” said the first.
Carter thanked them, and they headed off to find a bar. The CSUs were taking away a cell phone in an evidence bag. Carter guessed that meant they’d found it in the car rather than on the body. On impulse, he took out his own cell, selected the call he’d had from Belasco, and returned it.
The crime scene tech carrying the bag stopped as the phone in it illuminated and vibrated.
Carter stepped over the line and approached the nearest cop, holding up his wallet to show the PI license in the window. He nodded at the tech who was passing the ringing phone to a colleague, and held up his own phone.
“That’s me,” said Carter. “I need to speak to the detective in charge.”
* * *
The senior detective’s name was Harrelson. Carter had never heard of him, but Harrelson knew Carter.
“I know that name,” he said when he examined Carter’s license.
“It’s not an uncommon one,” said Carter, knowing what was coming.
“You used to be a cop?”
Carter nodded.
“The Child-Catcher? That was your pinch?”
Carter nodded again. He knew there was more to come.
Harrelson, a raw, broad man with razor rash on the folds in his neck, handed Carter’s license back to him. “That was rough about your partner, man. I’m sorry.”
Carter smiled the tight little smile he kept for these times. He said the words automatically, a reflex he had conditioned so his mind could be elsewhere as the words rolled out. “Thanks. It just happened. There was no warning, no hint. Never really know why he did it.”
The syllables slid out of Carter’s mouth, less an explanation than a catechism. As always, they worked, because the listener never really wanted to hear them anyway.
“So,” said Harrelson, the “brotherhood of cops” business out of the way to his satisfaction, “you knew the deceased?”
“No. Not at all. I just got a call from him at”—he checked the call log of his phone—“13:06. I’d never heard of him before. Said his name was James Belasco, he was a math professor here, and he thought he was in danger. Asked me to meet him at the college, then changed his mind and said the lot. Told me he was in a silver Ford Focus.”
Harrelson looked across the asphalt at the car. “You get many calls like that in your work?”