What The Moon Owes Me

Chapter 3

CHAPTER 3: WRONG NOTES

Dana answered on the fifth ring, which meant she was either asleep or on a shift, and neither one would improve her mood.

"If this is a booty call, you have the wrong number," she said. "If it's a work crisis, I'm still hanging up."

"I cut my hand," I said. "On glass. Somebody broke into my apartment."

The silence lasted one second, maybe less. I heard a door close on her end, and a car engine turning over. "Are you bleeding on anything valuable?"

"The kitchen floor."

"Is anyone still in the apartment?"

"No." The place had the stillness of a room that has finished being used. "Dana, don't come here. I'll come to you. I'll just take the bus."

"Lyra." She breathed out through her nose, the way she does when a patient lies about how much they drink. "Wrap it in a clean towel, keep it above your heart, and get on the 4. I'll meet you at my door."

I wrapped it in the dish towel, the one folded wrong, and it was a small satisfaction to bleed all over it.

Dana lived in a second-floor walkup near the hospital, in a one-bedroom she'd painted the color of mustard because, she said, she spent twelve hours a day under white lights and deserved a little warmth. She was waiting in the doorway in scrub pants and a Vikings hoodie, her braids tied up in a scarf. She took one look at the towel and pulled me inside by my good wrist.

"Sit," she said. "Lamp on. Hand on the table. And I swear, if you say you're fine, I'll stitch your mouth shut next."

I sat. She unwrapped the towel with the brisk, impersonal gentleness she has for strangers, which I have always envied, and examined the cut under the lamp.

"Deep, but clean. No tendon, you can still make a fist. I could put four stitches in it, but I'd have to go back to the hospital for the kit, and I'd have to write your name on something." She glanced up at me. "I'm guessing you'd rather I didn't."

"Not tonight."

"Then it's glue and strips and you don't use that hand for a week." She pulled a first-aid tote from under the couch. "Okay. Talk."

So I talked. I told her about the signature and the shells and the forty-one transfers. I told her about Gerald, the coat, and the way he'd said Hale. I told her about the neat apartment. She didn't interrupt, only cleaned the wound, which stung like a slap, and pressed the edges together and laid strip after strip across them, and when I got to the shoebox she stopped, scissors in her hand.

"They took a birthday card."

"My father's handwriting was on it."

"Your father's dead."

"That's what the county says." I looked at the tape on my palm. "Dana, they didn't take my laptop. They didn't take my jewelry, which is, fine, mostly junk. They went through every book, and they put it all back. They knew what they were looking for."

"Okay, but how did they know?"

I'd been avoiding that sentence for two hours.

"There's something I never told you."

She raised an eyebrow and waited. She's been waiting on me for eight years, I realized, since the day we met in a laundromat and she told me my sweater was the saddest thing she'd ever seen and asked if I wanted a drink.

"I know when people are lying," I said. "Not always the reason, or what they're really thinking. But the lie itself. A sentence goes by and something in me goes flat, like a wrong note. It's been happening my whole life. Gerald lied to me tonight three times, and I knew each time, and the one time he told the truth was when he said Hale, and that's the only reason I'm sitting here."

Dana set down the scissors. "That's the thing you do at parties."

"You noticed?"

"I'm a nurse. I notice when a person watches everybody's mouth and not their eyes." She tilted her head. "Test it."

"Dana."

"I'm serious. I'm going to say three things. You tell me which ones are lies."

"That's not how it—"

"My name is Dana Anne." She waited. "I have a cat named Beyoncé. I did not eat the last of your leftover pad thai in October."

"The first one's true." I was already smiling, which I hadn't expected to do again that night. "No cat. And you ate the pad thai."

"It was four days old," Dana said. "That's practically compost."

"I was hungry, okay?" She started laughing, and then she wasn't, and she pressed the back of her wrist against her mouth and breathed. "Okay. Okay. It's real. You've been walking around with this for twenty-six years and you never told me."

"I didn't know how to say it without sounding strange."

"You sound strange all the time. I love it." She picked up the scissors again, but her hands weren't steady. "So this is what we do. You file a police report tonight. Tomorrow we find you a lawyer, an actual lawyer, and we put that flash drive somewhere in a vault."

"If I go to the police, Gerald's friends already know my name, and they know where I live."

"That is exactly why you go to the police."

"Dana." I turned my good hand over on the table and made myself say it plainly. "Someone has been waiting for me to find that signature for a long time. I don't think they're afraid of a police report."

She looked at me for a while. The lamp hummed.

"Where are you going to go?" she asked finally.

"Somewhere nobody knows the name Hale. Just for a few days. Until I understand what I'm holding."

"You don't even have a car."

"I have forty dollars and a laptop."

She stood, crossed to her kitchen, and came back with a coffee can. Inside was a thick fold of bills, and she pushed it across the table without a word.

"That's your rent," I said.

"It's my emergency fund. Consider this an emergency." Her voice caught on the last word. "You text me every day. If I don't hear from you for twenty-four hours, I'm calling every hospital between here and Fargo."

I was reaching for the can when my phone lit up on the table between us.

Gerald Whitcomb. One message, sent at 1:07 a.m.

Come to the office at seven. Bring the drive. This is the only warning you get.