LITMIR.BIZ

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she ain’t answering her cell phone.”

      What the hell was going on?

      “Do you have a key to the house, Libby?” I asked.

      “I ain’t got one, ma’am, but I know where she keeps it. I’m the only one that knows.”

      “Show me, please.”

      Libby led me across the lawn toward the little garden, our shadows stretching long and skinny in front of us. She walked straight to the birdbath and bent down to pick up a rock near the little bronze girl’s feet.

      “She keeps it under this rock,” Libby whispered, handing me the key.

      “Thanks,” I said, and we headed back to the door. At the steps, I stopped. Inside, I’d find a clue to where Noelle had gone. Something that would tell me why she hadn’t taken her giant bag with her. Or her car. That ominous feeling I’d had earlier was filling me up again and I turned to the girl. “You go home, honey,” I said. “Take Patches back to your house, please. I’ll try to figure out what’s going on and come tell you, all right?”

      “Okay.” She turned on her heel, slowly, as though she wasn’t sure she should trust me with the key. I watched her walk across the yard to her own house.

      The key was caked with dirt and I wiped it off on my T-shirt, a sure sign I didn’t care about a thing except finding out what was going on with Noelle. I unlocked the door and walked into the kitchen. “Noelle?” I shut the door behind me, turning the lock because I was starting to feel paranoid. Her purse lay like a floppy pile of leather on the table and her car keys were on the counter between the sink and the stove. Patches’ food and water bowls were upside down on the counter on top of a dish towel. The sink was clean and empty. The kitchen was way too neat. Noelle could mess up a room just by passing through it.

      I walked into the postage stamp of a living room, past the crammed bookshelves and the old TV Tara and Sam had given her a few years ago when they bought their big screen. Past the threadbare brown sofa. A couple of strollers sat on the floor in front of the TV and three car seats were piled on top of some cartons, which were most likely filled with baby things. More boxes teetered on top of an armchair. I was definitely in Noelle’s world. On the wall above the sofa were framed pictures of Jenny and Grace, along with an old black-and-white photo of Noelle’s mother standing in front of a garden gate. Seeing the photographs of the children next to the one of her mother always touched me, knowing that Noelle considered Tara’s and my girls her family.

      I walked past the first of the two bedrooms, the one she used as her office. Like the living room, it was bursting with boxes and bags and her desk was littered with papers and books … and a big salad bowl filled with lettuce and tomatoes.

      “Noelle?” The silence in the house was creeping me out. A slip in the shower? But why would she have told Libby to take care of Patches? I reached her bedroom and through the open door, I saw her. She lay on her back, her hands folded across her rib cage, still and quiet as though she were meditating, but her waxen face and the line of pill bottles on the night table told me something different. My breath caught somewhere behind my breastbone and I couldn’t move. I wasn’t getting it. I refused to get it. Impossible, I thought. This is impossible.

      “Noelle?” I took one tiny step into the room as if I were testing the temperature of water in a pool. Then reality hit me all at once and I rushed forward. I grabbed her shoulder and shook her hard. Her hair spilled over my hand like it was alive, but it was the only living thing about her. “No, no, no!” I shouted. “Noelle! No! Don’t do this! Please!”

      I grabbed one of the empty pill bottles but none of the words on the label registered in my mind. I wanted to kill that bottle. I threw it across the room, then dropped to my knees at the side of the bed. I pressed Noelle’s cold hand between mine.

      “Noelle,” I whispered. “Why?”

      It’s amazing what you can miss when you’re an emotional wreck. The note was right next to me on her night table. I’d had to reach past it to use her cell phone to call for help. The phone had been inches from her hands. She could have called me or Tara. Could have said, “I just did something stupid. Come and save me.” But she didn’t. She hadn’t wanted to be saved.

      The police and emergency team poured into the room, taking up all the air and space and blurring into a sea of blue and gray in front of me. I sat on the straight-backed chair someone had brought in from the kitchen, still holding Noelle’s hand as the EMTs pronounced her dead and we waited for the medical examiner to arrive. I answered the questions volleyed at me by the police. I knew Officer Whittaker personally. He came into Hot! early every morning. He was the raspberry-cream-cheese croissant and banana-walnut muffin, heated. I’d fill his mug with my strongest coffee, then watch him dump five packets of sugar into it.

      “Did you call your husband, ma’am?” he asked. He always called me ma’am, no matter how many times I asked him to call me Emerson. He moved around Noelle’s claustrophobic bedroom, gazing at another framed photograph of her mother on the wall, touching the spine of a book on the small bookcase beneath the window and studying the pincushion on her dresser as though it might give him an answer to what had happened here.

      “I did.” I’d called Ted before everyone had arrived. He was showing a property and I had to leave a message. He hadn’t received it yet. If he had, he would have called the second he heard me stumbling over my words as if I were having a stroke.

      “Who’s her next of kin?” Officer Whittaker asked. Oh, no. I thought of Noelle’s mother. Ted would have to call her for me. I couldn’t do it. I just couldn’t and neither could Tara. “Her mother,” I whispered. “She’s in her eighties and … frail. She lives in an assisted-living community in Charlotte.”

      “Did you see this?” Officer Whittaker picked up the small piece of paper from Noelle’s night table with gloved fingers. He held it out for me to read.

      Emerson and Tara, I’m sorry. Please look after my garden for me and make sure my mother is cared for. I love all of you.

      “Oh.” I squeezed my eyes shut. “Oh, no.” The note made it real. Until that second, I’d managed to avoid thinking the word suicide. Now there it was, the letters a mile high inside my head.

      “Is it her handwriting?” Officer Whittaker asked.

      I opened my eyes to slits as if I couldn’t stand to see the entire note again, all at once. The sloppy slope of the letters would be nearly illegible to someone else, but I knew it well. I nodded.

      “Was she depressed, ma’am? Did you have any idea?”

      I shook my head. “No. Not at all.” I looked up at him. “She loved her work. She would never have … Could she have been sick and not told us? Or could someone have killed her and made it look like suicide?” I looked at the note again. At all the pill bottles. I could see Noelle’s name on the labels. One of the EMTs noticed that some of the prescriptions had been filled the month before, but others dated back many years. Had she been stockpiling them?

      “Did she talk about her health lately?” Officer Whittaker asked. “Doctors’ appointments?”

      I rubbed my forehead, trying to wake up my memory. “She injured her back in a car accident a long time ago, but she hasn’t complained about pain from it in years,” I said. We’d worried about all the medication she was taking back then, but that had been so long ago. “She would have told us if something was wrong.” I sounded sure of myself, and Officer Whittaker rested a gentle hand on my shoulder.

      “Sometimes people keep things bottled inside them, ma’am,” he said. “Even the people we’re closest to. We can never really know them.”

      I looked at Noelle’s face. So beautiful, but an empty shell. Noelle was no longer there and I felt as though I’d already forgotten her smile. This makes no sense, I thought. She’d had so much she still wanted to do.

      I

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