The Duration Read Free Page B

skeptically.

I took the envelope, held it up to the blinking hospital fluorescents, but the manila was thick and opaque. I considered not opening it. Sure, maybe there’d be something great inside, something that would make me feel less annoyed about having taken a vacation day to drive two and a half hours out of Boston just to be stood up in the entrance hall of KMC. But what were the odds? You gonna come through like that, envelope? Probably not. Once, looking to furnish our apartment via Craigslist in a style I liked to call “Victorian Indochine,” I bought an old wooden cabinet for $20 from a guy who cleaned postmortem estate basements. It was a radio cabinet with a bad paint job, but the top lifted straight up like a treasure chest and I had visions of turning it into a bar. When I was putting it into the apartment, Kelly noticed that one side of it was hollow, and after a little inspection it became clear that there was a hidden panel on that side, a space beneath the main panel that wasn’t there on the other side. I knocked on it. I could see, under the paint, the places where small stays had been hammered in to hold the wood in place. I got excited. Who knows what might be in there? A map? Of course it was a map. Or a will. Or a gun, the gun used to shoot a good man in a cold cone of streetlight. I got a lot of mileage out of that panel during the cocktail parties we threw in those early days. Sometimes I’d come at the thing with a screwdriver and the guests would almost shriek. But I left it sealed up each time. Kelly said maybe I should just keep it that way since, odds were, the fantasy was sure to trump the reality. Sort of a bedrock principle of our relationship, come to think of it. But then football season came, and one weekend I got a little drunk watching the Patriots short-yardage themselves into another loss and decided that the time had come, and the screwdriver was at hand, and the paint chipped all over the floor, and when I finally pried the board back, the space behind it was empty. Kelly got the little vacuum and shook her head.
    I ripped the envelope open, sighed like I wasn’t interested, and felt around inside. I came out with a glossy brochure for a local health spa called Head-Connect at Fleur-de-Lys, the kind of brochure that’s folded into thirds and available at the front desk. That was it.
    I looked at Lemon.
    “Head-Connect at Fleur-de-Lys,” I said.
    Lemon just looked at me.
    “You ever been there?”
    She raised her eyebrows like I’d asked her to try a weird food or whether she’d ever been to Japan. A sort of protective revulsion, a do-not-want-what-I-haven’t-got kind of thing.
    “No, I have not,” she said.
    Head-Connect was a four-figure-a-night place down in Gable, a mystery spa whose guests roamed vast lawns and were chauffeured through the county in white vans. I’d never been inside. Well, that wasn’t totally true.
    I turned the brochure over. Looked into the envelope again. It was empty.
    “Is this where he’s staying?” I asked, more to myself than Lemon.
    “Mr. Johansson, I can’t give you any information about a patient,” she said. “But the way he looked I doubt it.”

I walked back to the Escalade, head on a swivel but no sign of Chick. I sat in the front seat and sipped the dregs of my rest-stop coffee. I had to take a piss, but couldn’t bring myself to go back in and ask Lemon for the restroom. Our relationship, I felt, had run its course. Once, during a particularly rough period in college, I tried to hit on a young nursing student at the school infirmary after a panicked screening for syphilis. I was clean—jeez!—but the nursing student still wasn’t interested, and I’d learned not to press my luck with nurses. Plus, I didn’t trust hospital restrooms. The number of hand-washing posters, the industrial disinfectants, they all hinted at some bad shit lurking in the grout.
    I tossed the envelope in the passenger seat and headed down