Chapter 5: Eleven Calls
Calhoun looked at his mother.
Hester looked at the table.
That was all I needed.
"How long?" I said.
She didn't answer.
"Hester.
How long have you been in contact with him?"
"It isn't what you think."
"I don't know what I think yet.
I'm asking you to tell me what it is."
She pulled out the chair across from me and sat down with the careful deliberateness of someone buying time.
"Daniel called me eight months ago.
Out of nowhere.
I hadn't heard from him in years.
He said he needed help.
He sounded—" she paused, "—he sounded like he used to, before everything got bad.
Lucid.
Calm.
He said he was in treatment and he wanted to make things right."
"So you talked to him."
"I talked to him.
Yes.
He's my sister's child.
Whatever he's done, he's still—"
"He had photographs of my son on a wall."
"I didn't know that then."
"When did you know?"
Her hands moved in her lap.
"Three months ago."
The number landed in the room like something dropped from a height.
Calhoun pushed back from the table.
"Three months.
Mother."
"I was handling it."
"You were handling a man who had a wall of photographs of Baxter." His voice cracked on his son's name.
"You were handling it by taking his phone calls."
"I was trying to find out how much he knew.
How close he was.
Whether he was actually dangerous or whether it was still just—" She stopped.
"Just what?" I said.
"Just obsession without action." She met my eyes for the first time.
"There is a difference.
I was trying to determine which one we were dealing with."
"We," I said.
"There is no we in this.
You made yourself part of something that directly endangered my child and you kept it from me.
Both of you." I looked between them.
"You sat across from me at dinner.
You watched me take Baxter to school.
You watched me live in this house for over a year while a man had his photographs on a wall and you said nothing."
"Nora—"
"Do not say my name right now."
Calhoun stood up.
He walked to the window and stood there with his back to us.
"Marcus." I picked up the phone from the table.
He was still on the line.
"Are you there?"
"Yes."
"The number Daniel called.
The one registered to this address.
Is it a landline or a cell?"
A pause.
"Cell.
Ending in 4471."
I looked at Hester.
"What's your number?"
She didn't answer.
"What is your cell number, Hester."
She recited it.
Quietly.
The last four digits were 4471.
Calhoun turned from the window.
He looked at his mother the way you look at something you recognize but can no longer name.
"He called you eleven times in three days," I said.
"The unit was cleared out.
He knew someone had been inside it." I set the phone down.
"Did you warn him?"
"No."
"Did you tell him that Marcus had been to the unit?"
"No."
"Then how did he know to clear it out?"
She said nothing.
"Hester."
"I may have mentioned," she said very carefully, "that Calhoun had hired someone to look into certain things."
The sound Calhoun made was not a word.
I stood up from the table.
My legs felt distant, like they belonged to someone else, but they held.
"I'm going upstairs to check on my son," I said.
"When I come back down, I want every phone in this house unlocked and on the table.
Every message thread with Daniel Fosse.
Every call.
Everything." I looked at Hester.
"And then I'm calling the police."
"Nora, if you call the police it becomes public and Daniel's mother—"
"I don't care about Daniel's mother."
"She's dying.
She has six weeks, maybe—"
"I don't care." My voice didn't shake.
I was surprised to find that it didn't.
"A man emptied a storage unit full of photographs of my six-year-old son three days ago and nobody knows where he is.
That is the only fact that matters to me right now."
I walked to the doorway.
Behind me, Hester said, very quietly: "He left something.
When he cleared the unit.
Marcus didn't find it because he didn't know to look.
Daniel called me this morning and told me where it was."
I stopped.
May you like
"He left a letter," she said.
"Addressed to Baxter."
