Ghostheart (27 page)

If …

She decided to ask Sullivan to look into it. Perhaps there were people he could ask who would look up obituaries, personal records … perhaps he might even locate a photograph and she would find out how much like her father she looked …

The idea scared her, yet excited her. Like the high turn on the county fair rollercoaster, stomach all tightened up in a ball of frightened muscle, feeling like your breakfast was rushing ahead of you, eyes wide, teeth gritted, fists clenched …
Here I go Ma … top of the world!

Annie smiled to herself, switched off the kettle, and made some tea. She wanted David to come. Wanted him to read the next chapter. Wanted him to feel the way that she felt: that Johnnie Redbird was a real human being, that he was holed up in Rikers Island while Harry Rose lived the high life in Manhattan and pretended that he didn’t owe his life to someone who would never forget. These were dangerous people living dangerous lives. Murder, intrigue, passion, money, scandal: these were the elements of their everyday existences, and she felt certain these would be the things that found them in the end.

Leaving the kitchen she returned to the couch, and just as she sat she heard the street door open and slam shut. Footsteps on the stairwell. Not Sullivan’s. David’s, she felt sure, though she was not yet familiar with the sound of him arriving. His was a new sound, a different sound, and when those footsteps reached the third floor and she heard him knock she believed she’d never been so pleased to have anyone come to her home.

‘David?’ she called.

‘Bearing ribs and rice and things,’ he called back. She unlocked the door and let him in, barely allowing him to set his bags down before throwing her arms around his neck. He’d had a haircut, wore a clean pair of jeans, a white open-necked shirt and a tan-colored cotton jacket. He looked good, he smelled good, and when he returned her greeting with a
breath-squeezing hug she felt everything she ever could have hoped to feel about being close to someone.

‘Whoa,’ he said. ‘I only brought Chinese.’

Annie let him go. She stepped back and surveyed him. ‘You look good,’ she said. ‘Good haircut … it suits you.’ She reached up and touched the side of his face, pulled him towards her and kissed him. She felt his hands around her waist. Strong hands. Sensitive fingers. She felt like getting laid.

‘Eat first,’ he said.

‘First?’

He smiled. ‘Your face is a book, Annie O’Neill.’

She laughed, took the bags he’d brought and fetched plates.

They ate. They talked a little while. Annie made coffee and watched him smoke a cigarette.

When he was done she rose from her chair, pulled her tee-shirt up over her head and took off her bra.

She started towards the bedroom, tugging the button free on the waistband of her jeans. ‘Come get it,’ she said when she reached the doorway.

David was up out of his chair and had caught her by the time she reached the bed.

They made love. Furious almost. Hungry, as if they were out for revenge. And when it was over they lay naked and breathless, sweating on the bed beside one another, not touching, no contact, waiting for nothing but inner silence to return.

‘You see Forrester tonight?’ David eventually asked. He rolled over and leaned up, supported his head on his hand.

‘He couldn’t come … sent a courier over with the chapter.’

‘Can I read it?’

Annie rolled over to the edge of the bed. ‘Now?’ she asked.

‘Sure … if you don’t mind.’

She smiled. ‘I don’t mind. Why would I mind?’

David shrugged and shook his head.

Annie sat up and started towards the door. She glanced back, saw David watching her as she moved.

‘What?’ she asked.

‘Stunning,’ he said.

‘What is?’

‘You are.’

‘Stunning? That’s a little strong isn’t it?’

He smiled. ‘Not from where I’m looking it’s not.’

‘Tease,’ she said, and slipped out the door into the front room.

She brought his cigarettes back with her, sat on the edge of the bed and lit one for him. She took a mouthful of smoke and blew it out without inhaling.

‘You don’t want to start that,’ David said.

‘Practise what you preach,’ she replied, and handed him the cigarette.

David took the pages, sat upright, his back against the headboard, and for the time he took to read it Annie just sat and watched him.

Strange, she thought, how someone looks one way when you meet them, and as you get to know them they look different each time. Maybe as you get to know them what they’re really like comes through … you begin to see what’s under the skin, behind the face they wear for the world. Like the really attractive ones, at least attractive when you see them, and then when you get to know them you find out they’re complete assholes and they become uglier and uglier
.

She smiled at the thought, smiled and watched David, who could sometimes look a little like Kevin Costner, and yet again looked like no-one at all but himself. She wanted to reach out and touch him, perhaps lay her head on his stomach and feel the rising and falling of his chest as he breathed, but he was reading – his attention rapt – and there seemed to be something so important in sharing this thing with him that she didn’t want to disturb his concentration. They were sharing people’s lives, and it didn’t matter if they were real lives or not, didn’t matter if it was all a figment of someone’s imagination or The Gospel of Rose and Redbird. What she had read she could
feel
, and in feeling it she
wanted
to share it, and at this
moment it felt so much more important to share it with David Quinn than anyone else she could think of. Even Sullivan. Even Jack Sullivan – the man she’d once believed would be the closest she would ever get to a real honest-to-God friend. Annie felt she could spend the rest of her life with such a man as this and never want for anything else. For some reason – unknown, intangible, non-specific – it felt
that
right.

‘This is some story,’ David said as he turned the last page. ‘This is really something. This intrigues me, intrigues me greatly.’

Annie nodded. ‘Me too,’ she replied. ‘I am actually fascinated by the whole thing … who they were, how this all happened, what will happen to Redbird, if he’ll ever get out of Rikers Island.’

‘The suggestion is there that he will,’ David said. ‘This line: “That thought – and possibly that thought alone – kept me out of trouble on Rikers Island through the next seven years” – certainly gives me the idea that something happens to change things for him.’

‘Who knows?’ Annie said.

‘Forrester knows,’ David replied, and then setting the pages down on the bed he turned and looked directly at Annie. ‘Aren’t you interested to find out more about who he might be?’

‘Who, Forrester? Or the guy who wrote this?’

‘Forrester,’ David said.

‘I am,’ she said. ‘But there’s something else that seems more important to me now.’

‘And that is?’

‘My father … how this thing might connect to my father.’

‘Your father?’

‘Forrester has given me two letters … both of them written by my father to my mother. They’re addressed from somewhere called the Cicero Hotel … you ever heard of it?’

‘Can’t say that I have, but there’s gotta be hundreds of hotels in New York.’

‘If it was New York at all,’ Annie said.

‘Right, if it was New York at all.’

‘The whole thing has made me curious. The fact that I barely remember anything about him, that my mother never spoke of him, that I don’t really know what he did for a living. The letters have made me think about what he might have been like, and I was thinking of asking Sullivan to make some inquiries, try and find out how he died, stuff like that. And then there was the thing you said the other day, how Forrester had the letters amongst my dad’s things, and so the letters could never have reached my mother.’

‘It would be good to know,’ David said. He rolled over and pulled Annie close. His hands were warm, and he started to trace tiny circles across the top of her thigh.

Shivers ran through her leg, and pushing the pillows up behind her head she lay back and folded the length of her body against David’s.

‘How did you end up with the store?’ David asked.

‘How did I end up with it?’

‘Yes, how did you get to own a store like that?’

‘When my mom died I sold the house we lived in and bought the lease. Why d’you ask?’

David closed in tighter to her. ‘I just wondered.’

There was silence between them for a minute, perhaps two.

‘You okay?’ Annie asked.

‘Sure I am,’ David whispered. She could feel his breath on the back of her neck and it made her shiver pleasantly.

‘What’re you thinking?’

‘Closure,’ he said quietly.

‘Closure?’ she asked. ‘What d’you mean?’

‘Like when you don’t know something it seems to stick to you, and then when you find out the truth you can feel it let go … even if it’s the worst thing you could imagine, it still somehow manages to help you let go.’

She nodded without speaking.

She moved her left hand up close to her face, and there was
her father’s wristwatch again, its face no more than six inches from her own.

She could hear it ticking, and it seemed to follow the beating of David’s heart. She could feel the pressure of his chest against her back, the warmth of his skin, the sense of security and stability it gave her. Like an anchor. A safe port in a storm. She pushed herself closer against him, felt him respond and then, closing her eyes, she sighed so deeply she felt she would empty out and vanish.

‘You alright?’ he whispered.

‘Never better,’ she whispered in return.

She felt him kiss the back of her neck, her shoulder, the sound of his breathing mere inches from her ear, and within the depth of whatever it was she was feeling – an emotional freedom that was rare and heady and addictive beyond measure – she felt herself slip soundlessly into sleep.

David slept with her – front-to-back – their bodies pressed together as if one entity, and though the wind pushed against the windows of her third-floor apartment, there was nothing she could hear but silence.

The silence of loneliness tip-toeing its way out of her life for keeps.

The way the early morning light seeped through the window, the way it outlined David’s form as he slept on the bed, the warmth from the sunlight as it touched her skin – all seemed timeless, eternal, unforgettable.

Annie closed her eyes, opened them for a second, and then closed them again as if taking a photograph. Her mind was a camera. She would hold this image forever, and at any time she could replay it, see it there behind her eyelids and remember how she’d felt right at the second it was taken.

A Kodak moment for the heart.

She left him sleeping,
wanted
to leave him sleeping, because she could barely remember the last time she had done that: gone away and come back again to find someone in her bed. The feeling was one of completeness, coupled with anticipation for what this might bring and an urgent need to discover all that could be discovered in a relationship that worked. And beyond and beneath all that, she was aware that loneliness was already something she could barely remember as significant.

Annie put on a tee-shirt and jeans, slipped out of the apartment and crossed the landing to Sullivan’s. She tapped on the door, waited a handful of seconds, and stepped inside as the door opened.

‘Good to see you,’ she told Sullivan, and hugged him.

He was dressed, had more than likely been up since dawn. He did that sometimes, and then other times she couldn’t rouse him until after lunch. There was something around his eyes, not so much the shadows of insomnia, but more the mental and physical tension he must have been fighting. It was
not easy to stop drinking, she knew that much, and Sullivan had a battle on his hands.

‘How’re you doing?’ she asked.

‘With the drinking, I’m actually doing okay Annie. I figured it would be tougher, kinda cursed myself for making a promise, but I’m actually doing okay. And you?’

Annie smiled. She knew he was lying for her. She would have said something, but she didn’t know what to say, and in this moment she believed she could not have submerged her sense of well-being beneath anything.

‘I’m doing good enough,’ she said. ‘David’s still sleeping … I came over because I wanted to ask if you’d do something for me.’

Sullivan walked into his front room and sat on the couch. Annie took a seat at the table facing him.

‘My father,’ she stated matter-of-factly.

‘Your father?’

She nodded. ‘I wondered if you could do a little investigatory work, find out what you can about him … I figured you might have some contacts in the newspapers or something.’

‘And why would I be doing this?’ Sullivan asked. ‘First time in the five years we’ve known each other that you’ve asked me to do something like this.’

She shook her head. ‘Thought about it many times, but I think the letters from Forrester made me look at it more seriously. I could never get the nerve up, you know what I mean?’

Sullivan frowned. ‘Because there’s something you think you might not like?’

‘No, I don’t think so. More because I thought it might make me sad that I never got the chance to know him.’

‘I can check it out,’ Sullivan said. ‘Pass me a pen and paper from over there.’ He pointed to a chest of drawers against the wall. ‘Tell me his date of birth, where he lived, anything like that.’

‘I think he was born at the end of the ’30s, but I’m not sure.
Mainly lived here in New York as far as I know, and Forrester said he was some kind of engineer.’

‘Anything more specific than just a kind of engineer?’ Sullivan asked. He took the pen and paper and jotted down what Annie told him.

Annie shook her head. ‘That’s as good as I’ve got. I know it doesn’t help much but I thought you might be able to find out something.’

Sullivan shrugged his shoulders. ‘You never know,’ he said. ‘But for this kind of work it’s a hundred an hour plus expenses.’