Hope to Die Read Free Page B

beyond the outstretched fingers of my memory. But the sensation of having her there with me ebbed away all too fast, and the smells in her closet changed, some threatening to go stale and others sour.
    That petrified me.
    Was it the same in the other bedrooms? Were their smells fading too?
    Sickened and fearful at what I might find, I had to force myself to open Ali’s door. Holding my breath, I went quickly inside and shut the door behind me. I didn’t turn on the light, wanting to deaden one sense to heighten another.
    When at last I inhaled, Alex Jr.’s little-boy smell was everywhere, and I could suddenly hear his voice and feel how good it was to hold my son, remember how he loved to nestle in my arms when he was tired.
    I went to Jannie’s room next. The air there left me puzzled and then upset. I guess I had gone in longing for the smells of years gone past. But Jannie was finishing up her freshman year in high school and was already a track star. For a long while I stood there in her pitch-dark bedroom, overwhelmed by the understanding that my little girl had become a woman and then vanished along with everyone else in my family.
    I stood outside Nana Mama’s room, and my hands shook when I reached for the doorknob and twisted it. Stepping in, closing the door behind me, I breathed in her lilac air. Surrounded by dozens of vivid memories, I felt claustrophobic and had to get out of there fast.
    I went out and shut her door behind me, sure that I’d find better air up in my attic office, where I could think more clearly. But as I started to climb the stairs, it dawned on me that one devastating odor was already gone.
    Damon, my seventeen-year-old, my firstborn, had been away at prep school in Massachusetts the past two months. The idea that I might never smell Damon again shattered whatever resolve I still possessed.
    As I flashed on those photographs that haunted my dreams, wondering if they were enactments of things to come, my headache turned excruciating. Maddened, I charged up the stairs into my office and stuck my face right in front of a camera hidden between two books on homicide investigations.
    “Why, Mulch?” I yelled. “What did I ever do to deserve this? What the hell do you want from me? Tell me! What the hell do you want from me?”
    But there was no response, just that little lens staring back at me. I grabbed the lens, tore it free of the transmitter, and crushed it under my heel.
    Fuck Mulch, or Elliot, or whatever he called himself. I didn’t care that I’d just showed him we knew about the bugs. Fuck him.
    Panting, wiping the sweat off my forehead, I decided to destroy all the bugs in the house before their presence destroyed me.
    Then a dog started barking across the street, and someone began to pound on my front door.

CHAPTER
5
     
    I OPENED MY DOOR to find a short, fit, and attractive brunette in her midthirties looking like she wanted to be anywhere but on my front porch as she held out her detective’s badge.
    “Dr. Cross,” she said. “I’m Tess Aaliyah. I’m with Metro Homicide.”
    “You are?” I asked, because I’d never met her before.
    “Came on board last week from Baltimore PD Homicide, sir,” Detective Aaliyah replied. “While you were solving the massage-parlor murders and the baby kidnappings.”
    For a moment I was puzzled, didn’t know what she was referring to, but then, like a window opening a crack, it came back to me. Even though those cases felt like they’d enveloped me a lifetime ago, not a week, I nodded, said, “No partner, Detective … uh …”
    “Aaliyah,” she said, cocking her head to study me. “Chris Daniels is my partner, but he evidently shattered his ankle this morning lifting weights.”
    I winced, nodded, said, “Daniels is a good guy.”
    “Seems that way so far,” she agreed. She swallowed and looked at the porch boards.
    “How can I help you, Detective?”
    Aaliyah let out a short, sharp breath before looking me in the eye.