Carefully, carefully, I lift out a perfect half of a fist-size gray stone, left here by Dad in the night. It must have been; it was here when I got up this morning, no note or anything, just the stone heart I’ve never been allowed to hold and haven’t seen in five or six years—not since Dad met Lindy, at least. I cup the rock close to my nose in the blue-black dark. Even now, the crystals glitter faintly in the starlight through my curtains.
Down the hall Lindy stirs loudly in the big bedroom—banging around in her closet, maybe, or searching my dad’s for clues. While I wait for her to go to sleep I clutch the stone to my chest, curled up around my secret like an oyster around a pearl.
THREE
On the bookshelf in Dad’s home office, set apart from worn-out paperbacks by Graham Greene and Raymond Chandler and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, there’s a row of his own novels in hardcover. The shiny dust jackets on the older books are greased with little fingerprints from me sneaking them off into the night when I knew I wasn’t supposed to. I’d slip out the books and leave the jackets behind, propped up. They only just fit into the squat shelves, so unless Dad picked them up he’d be none the wiser. And he never picks up his own stuff, never reads it again once it’s been published, and never wanted me to read it either. Said it’d give me nightmares, all those crime scenes and rib spreaders. He joked it’d make me creepy, besides; a pale little kid who reads books about a morgue could turn into a pale teenager who sets death traps for squirrels and weaves their delicate matchstick bones into friendship bracelets. Which, all right, maybe I’m not a homecoming queen, but I’ve never once set a death trap for anything.
None of his protests worked. I was nine when I read his very first novel, A Time to Chill. I didn’t understand every four-syllable word or the science of cadavers, and did my best to skip over the naked parts (dead-naked, not sex-naked), but I was hooked. Captivated. When at last he wised up, he brought me kid books by the paper-bagful. Parentally acceptable stuff like From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler. Everything by Caroline B. Cooney. The stiff, yellow-spined Nancy Drews. I didn’t enjoy the trashy teenage-thriller stuff so much. Girls my age now (who seemed so old then) hiding in dark corners in skimpy summer dresses. Or running down an alley with their blond hair streaming. Or caught in a pair of headlights on a dark road by some unseen vehicle. They were always scared shitless, those girls on the covers. And they hardly ever solved their own mysteries. What happened was the big bad guy would find the girl before the girl found him, then chase her around a Florida swamp for a while until an alligator ate him from behind at the last possible second. But I read those books anyway, and picked up the next before the “Oh, come on” had rolled off my tongue. Soon enough I went back to the adult stuff, the classics I like best with brooding detectives and grisly murders and grown women, but sometimes I still read the old books, visit those silly girls on dark roads.
There’s just something about a mystery. You’ve got this question rattling around your head, so all-consuming that there’s hardly room for anything else. What’s Moriarty up to now? Who’s the devil in a blue dress? What is the secret of the old clock? But the whole time, you have faith you’ll have your answer by the last page.
No, more than faith. Before she was my stepmother, Lindy said in one of our few sessions together that faith is a special thing that only exists where there isn’t any proof. Faith was how thirteen-year-old me had dealt with my dad flopping through life like a fish onshore for the few months prior, one of the roughest bad times he’d been through.
Faith has never been my forte. Even Miles Faye, the star of Dad’s books, doesn’t operate on it; throughout the novels, the handsome forensic pathologist is all about the facts, always muttering to himself, “What do you know, Miles?” Right now, I could fill my own book with what I don’t know about Dad. I have the stone heart, and a theory that even I’ll admit sounds crazy, but few hard facts.
But that’s okay. Because in mysteries, if nothing else you know that no matter how weird or dark or hopeless things get, one way or another it’ll all be right by the end.
After a long and silent hour, by which time I’m sure Lindy’s in bed for good, I leave my room and pad barefoot down to Dad’s office. He and I made a deal that he’d never rifle through my bedroom looking for weed or notes from boys or squirrel bones, and I’d never snoop in his office, where he keeps his scribbled notes and half-birthed books and who knows what else. I doubt he’d care if I snuck around in his bedroom (Lindy absolutely would care) but his office is his private space.
Still, didn’t he invite me in by leaving our stone for me to find?
The summer before I started high school, Dad took me out for pizza to let me know he was dating our brand-new family therapist. He’d never brought a woman home before because he loved me and he loved us, and I was all he needed. But now that I was old enough, maybe I could understand that he sometimes felt . . . “isolated,” he had said. He never said lonely, was always really careful with the L-word.