Two people. A brief argument — I couldn’t hear it, only read the geometry of it, the way one figure leaned forward and the other stepped back. Then the first figure walked away and the second one stood very still for a moment before following.
I had thought nothing of it. A couple’s argument. An ordinary Tuesday night.
I lay in the dark and understood that I had witnessed something after all.
I called Marsh first thing in the morning. This time he answered, and I told him everything. He listened without interrupting.
“Can you describe the figures?” he asked.
I told him what I could. One taller, wearing something dark and long — a coat, maybe. The other shorter, in lighter clothing.
“Which one walked away first?”
“The taller one,” I said. “In the dark coat.”
There was a pause. Brief, but I caught it.
“Mr. Pace, I’d like you to come in and make a formal statement. Today if possible.”
I said yes. I put the phone down and went to shower and dress, and while I was standing at the bathroom mirror something occurred to me that stopped my hand halfway to my face.
Marsh had come to my door because a neighbour reported my light on. He said sometime between eleven and midnight.
But I had been reading in the chair before ten. The light would have been off by the time I went to bed.
If my light was on between eleven and midnight, someone else had been in my apartment.
I went through every room. Slowly. The windows were all locked. The back door deadbolted. Nothing was missing, nothing moved. But in the bedroom, on the windowsill, I found something I hadn’t put there.
A small key, the kind that opens a luggage lock or a cash box. No tag. No markings.
I stood holding it and thought about the note. You saw more than you think. I thought about the car idling across the street. I thought about Marsh’s pause on the phone.
I put the key in my pocket and I did not go to the police station.
Instead, I went to the library and spent two hours on the public computers reading everything I could find about Elise Farmer. She was a paralegal. Her firm represented three clients currently under fraud investigation by the city. One of those investigations, a short paragraph buried in a business journal from eight months ago, had stalled due to — the article’s phrasing was careful — the unexpected withdrawal of a key internal witness.
The paralegal who had managed that witness’s documentation was listed by initial only.
E. Farmer.
I walked home slowly. The key sat heavy in my pocket. Someone had been in my apartment and left it there, which meant someone wanted me to find it, which meant whatever it opened was meant for me.
But Marsh had paused when I described the taller figure. The dark coat. And Marsh owned a dark coat — I had seen it hanging in my hallway when he’d taken it off and asked if he could come inside.
I didn’t know if Marsh was protecting the investigation or threatening it. I didn’t know if the person who left the note was warning me or setting me up. I didn’t know whose side the key was on.
What I knew was this: I had seen something in an alley on a Tuesday night, and a woman was dead, and two separate people had found ways into my home to remind me of both those facts.
I sat down at my front window and looked at the street below.
Across the road, in the shadow of a doorway, someone was standing very still, looking up.
When my eyes found them, they didn’t move.
They had been waiting for me to look.
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