My cell phone was in my hand without me being exactly aware of how it got there. I punched in Dave Tanner’s number. He picked up on the third ring.

"Hello?"

"Mr. Tanner? Matt Salewski."

"Oh, hey," he said. "You got the pictures? Are they clear enough?"

"Yeah, they’re good," I said. "I need some background before I get started here. Can you talk?"

"Sure. Teresa’s not here right now."

"How long have you been married?" I asked.

"About four, four-and-a-half years."

"So before you sold your website for a bazillion clams," I said.

"Yeah," Tanner said. "She didn’t marry me for my money. At least there’s that."

"How long you think she’s been stepping out?" I asked.

"She’s been a bit distant for about a year and a half. She’s been doing her nighttime vanishing act for about seven, eight months," he said.

Before I’d met her. "Okay," I said. "Where would she be right now?"

"In Jacksonville, shopping," he said. "Really shopping. Her friend Rosa picked her up about twenty minutes ago to go to St. John’s Towne Centre. They’ll probably be gone most of the day."

"Fine," I said. "I’ll keep you posted."

I killed the call and went to my closet to put on some new jeans, leaving the coffee-stained pair where it fell. I went into the kitchen and looked at the coffee pot and then decided I deserved something stronger and poured myself a scotch and added a mixer of more scotch. I sipped at it until I felt calm enough to make another phone call.

I scrolled through my phone book until I found the entry for Sheri. It occurred to me then that we’d never actually talked on the phone; we’d always sent text messages back and forth. "I hate the phone," she’d said, and I’d put it down as the typical 21st-Century love of texting and nothing more. Stupid, stupid, stupid.

I highlighted Sheri’s number and hit send. It rang four times and voicemail picked up.

"This is Sheri, leave a message." Beep. Not This is Teresa. Interesting. It looked like someone was maintaining two mobile accounts. I hit send again and called her back. The voicemail picked up again. I hung up and hit send again. This time she picked up after the third ring.

"Jesus Christ, Matt, where’s the fire?" she said.

"Just thought you might like to get together tonight," I said.

"You just saw me last night."

"Every little absence is an age," I said.

"Very sweet, but I’m busy tonight."

"I was thinking maybe you could carve out some time, Teresa," I said.

She was quiet for a long time. "What?"

"You heard me."

More silence. "You know about Dave," she said at last.

"I know about Dave," I said. "I also know that you’re going to talk to me. Tonight. I don’t care what excuse you have to make or what you have to reschedule. I don’t care if you were planning to donate bone marrow to a doe-eyed orphan. You’re going to talk to me tonight. In person."

Another silence. Then she said, "Fine. But not at your place. I want neutral ground."

"You never have to worry about setting foot in my place again," I said.

"You don’t even want to hear my explanation?"

"I’m aflame to hear your explanation. That’s why you’re going to talk to me tonight. It won’t change the situation, though."

"No, I suppose it won’t," she said. "You know the motel on 17?"

"Yes," I said. I knew it well. A lot of my business involved discreetly observing couples going in and out of the place.

"Ten p.m.," she said. "I’ll let you know the room when I get it."

"Fine," I said.

"You’re being an asshole."

"I wonder why?"

"Christ, Matt, would it really have mattered that first night if you’d known I was married?"

"Probably not," I admitted. "But I’d like to have been given the option to make that decision. And maybe your real name would have been nice, too."

She sighed. She sounded more exasperated than contrite, and if she’d been in front of me I’d probably have throttled her.

"I don’t suppose it would help if I told you I was sorry," she said.

"Not a whole hell of a lot," I said. "I’ll see you at ten." I killed the call and walked over to the kitchen table and sat down and stared at the tabletop. I stared at it for a long time before I could force myself to do anything else.

###

She called me at seven and told me she’d meet me in room 115. "I won’t be there before ten," she said. "I just checked in on my way somewhere else."

"Maybe you should turn your ass around and go back now," I said.

"No, Matt. You’ll get your fucking talk, but I’m not upending my whole life over this."

"Perish the thought."

"Go to hell, Matt," she said, and hung up. I put the phone in my pocket and left the house and walked down to Centre Street to eat an overpriced dinner at O’Kane’s and nurse a beer for a couple of hours. A light rain started around eight and just kept falling. Around 9:30 I left the bar and took a cab back to my place to pick up my car and drove off-island.

There are other small towns in the area, but to islanders there are really only two locations between Georgia and Jacksonville: "On the island" and "Out in the county." The Bryceton Vacation Motel was out in the county, off U.S. 17 in an unincorporated area called, coincidentally enough, Bryceton. The motel was a fleatrap remnant from the pre-interstate days when staying anywhere in Florida was a novelty to tourists and even tiny motor lodges 15 miles away from the nearest beach could do land-office business. It survived now as a convenient meeting place for trysting lovers and the home address for semi-transient meth-heads who paid by the week when they were working and slept rough in the woods behind the motel when they weren’t.

I pulled into the motel parking lot at 9:50, and Sheri’s little blue Honda was already there. There were only four or five other cars in the lot; the meth-heads mostly rode bicycles or hoofed it. What cars there were all had Florida plates and probably belonged to drivers who’d told their spouses they’d be working late tonight. I got out of my heap and dashed through the drizzle to the motel’s covered sidewalk.

The lights were on inside 115 and the blinds were shut. I didn’t hear a TV or radio. I knocked and got no answer. Waited through a quick cigarette in case she was in the bathroom and knocked again. No answer. I tried the door, found it open, and let myself in.

The room was standard hot-sheets hideaway. Ragged carpet that had once been brown, worn thin in front of the double bed and accessorized here and there with food, coffee, and semen stains. TV vintage 1989, bolted to the top of the dresser. All illumination provided by lamps bolted to walls which had originally been off-white but were now yellowed with the tar of untold thousands of cigarettes. I didn’t pay much attention to any of that, though. I was too busy concentrating on the flat, coppery smell that hung in the stale air. I walked across the room on numb legs, looking for what I already knew had to be there.

She was on the floor between the bed and the wall. She didn’t look peaceful and even the part of her face that was still there was no longer pretty. Dead isn’t peaceful and dead isn’t pretty. It doesn’t matter if dead punches a hole in you with a bullet or gnaws away at your insides with tumor teeth or smothers you quietly in your sleep when you’re a hundred and seven, dead is never peaceful and it’s never pretty and it’s never profound. Dead is the ultimate banality. Dead is just dead.

With all the blood it was hard to tell how many times she’d been shot, but it had been several. One bullet had caught her high on the right side of her forehead and had excavated a gaping trench in her skull. Her half-open eyes glittered. Her mouth was slack. She didn’t look afraid, but that didn’t mean anything. Facial muscles relax after death, no matter what the cheap detective novels say. Her right arm was thrown above her head, the hand half-curled around nothing. Her left hand rested demurely on her stomach. Blood had welled up between the fingers and ran in congealing trickles over her knuckles and down toward her wrist. It stained a small diamond on her third finger, a diamond I’d never seen her wearing before.

I looked at her for a long time. Looking at her wasn’t telling me anything. I turned away from her and surveyed the room. There were two cigarettes stubs, her brand, in the ashtray on the bedside table. Nothing in the drawer but the inevitable Gideon Bible and a phone book two years out of date. I held both of these by their spines and gave them a shake. No scraps of paper bearing cryptic clues fluttered from between the leaves of either. The bedframe was one of those solid-block hotel jobs that leave no space for you to slide anything under the bed. I stripped the bed and flipped the mattress anyway and found nothing. I tried the drawers in the bureau. For some reason I couldn’t begin to fathom, motel management had seen fit to glue them shut.

I went over to the microscopic closet and looked inside. There was nothing on the shelf above the coat rod, but a small overnight bag sat on the floor. I retrieved it from the closet and took it over to the bed and opened it up.

There was a change of clothes and a box of condoms inside, which made me wonder. Sheri, or Teresa, or whoever, had surely known she and I wouldn’t be spending the night together. Under the clothes I found two cell phones, an expensive 4G smartphone and the cheap little Virgin Mobile prepaid I’d always seen her use. I flipped through the contact list on each. There wasn’t a single duplicated name. My name and number were on the Virgin phone. Dave Tanner was in the smartphone. I dropped the prepaid phone in my pocket and put the 4G job back in the overnight bag and unzipped the bag’s side pocket. I reached in and withdrew a ziplock bag filled with white powder.

I pondered that for awhile. I’d never seen Sheri use anything stronger than tobacco and alcohol, and this amount of coke would go for about a grand in this county -- far too much product for personal use. I was still pondering when I heard the sniff.

An icicle formed high in my throat and reached down to spread freezing tendrils through my chest. The sniff, like someone snuffling mucous back into his throat, had come from behind the closed bathroom door. There was no other sound. Just that one sharp intake of breath. I’d spent twenty minutes tossing the bedroom and hadn’t even considered the john. I wondered which coatcheck room I’d left my brain in before coming here.

I stood absolutely still. I glanced around the room for a weapon. The most lethal-looking item in view was the television remote. I had a miniature Swiss Army penknife in my pocket, but its tiny blade was barely adequate for slicing an apple, let alone slicing whoever was cooped in the bathroom. Perhaps I could slide the little plastic toothpick out and poke him in the eye.

I kept on standing absolutely still for awhile. I made no sound. The guy camped out in the john made no sound. While we were each busy not making sounds I tried to formulate a plan of attack. Two ideas occurred to me. Number One: Turn around and walk as quietly as possible out of the room and call the cops. Number Two: Walk as quietly as possible over to the bathroom door, then throw it open and leap into the bathroom flapping my arms and yelling "Booga booga booga" and hope it shocked the guy long enough for me to think of a Number Three.

Number Two was perhaps the single stupidest thought that had ever occurred to me, and probably anyone else, so that’s the one I went with. I walked over to the bathroom door as slowly and quietly as I could. I didn’t breathe the whole way there. I wrapped my hand around the knob and then it occurred to me that I was going to feel pretty stupid if the door was locked. Oh, well. Too late now. I clamped my teeth together and coiled my legs to spring and jerked my wrist to the right.

The knob turned easily. I threw the door open and leapt in. I was yelling, yelling something, I don’t know what. Whatever it was, it died in my throat. Didn’t matter, really, because the guy sitting on the bathroom floor didn’t seem shocked by my sudden entrance. He barely seemed to notice me at all. I stood gawping at him. He became aware of me by stages. After spending some time contemplating my shoes and my jeans and my shirt, he finally glanced up at my face with too-big eyes that looked vaguely wounded. They would always look vaguely wounded.

"My wife’s in the other room," Dave Tanner said in a dazed voice. "I think she might be hurt."

Next Chapter: THREE