Limitless

I started shuffling through the papers around the upturned bureau and after a couple of minutes found what I was looking for, Vernon’s address book. I flicked it open to the M section. There was one number on this page, and it was Melissa’s. She was Vernon’s next of kin.

Who else was going to tell her?

I hadn’t spoken to Melissa in I couldn’t remember how long – nine, ten years – and here now in front of me was her telephone number. In nine or ten seconds I could be talking to her.

I dialled the number. It started ringing.

Shit.

This was all unfolding a bit too quickly.

Rinnnnnggg.

Click.

Hum.

Answering machine. Fuck, what did I do?

The next half minute of my life was as intense as anything I could remember in the previous thirty-six years. First, I had to listen to what was undeniably Melissa’s voice saying, I’m not here right now, please leave a message, though in a tone I found disconcertingly unfamiliar, and then I had to respond to her recorded voice by recording my own voice saying that her brother – who was here with me in the room – was dead. Once I’d opened my mouth and started speaking, it was too late, and I couldn’t stop. I won’t go into the details of what I said to her, mainly because I can’t remember what I said, not exactly anyhow – but whatever … the point is that when I’d finished and had put the phone down, the strangeness of it all hit me suddenly and I was overwhelmed for a few moments by an uneasy mix of emotions … shock, self-disgust, grief, heartache … and my eyes filled up with tears …

I took a few deep breaths in an effort to control myself, and as I stood at the window, looking out over the city’s blur of architectural styles, one thought kept running through my mind: at this time yesterday I hadn’t even bumped into Vernon yet. Until that very moment on Twelfth Street I hadn’t spoken to him in nearly ten years. Neither had I spoken to his sister, or really thought that much about her – but now here I was in the space of less than a day getting myself re-entangled in her life and in a period of my own life that I thought had gone for ever. It was one of those imponderables of existence that months, even years, can go by without anything significant happening, and then suddenly a cluster of hours comes along, or even of minutes, that can blow a hole in time a mile wide.

I turned away from the window – flinching at the sight of Vernon on the couch – and walked over towards the kitchen area. It had been ransacked as well. The cupboards had been opened and gone through, and there were broken plates and pieces of glass all over the floor. I looked back at the mess in the living-room, and my stomach sank yet again. Then I turned and went along the hallway to the door on the left, which led into the bedroom, and it was the same in there – drawers had been pulled out and emptied, the mattress had been upturned, there were clothes everywhere, and a large cracked mirror lay on the floor.

I wondered why it had been necessary to make such a mess, but in my confused state – and obvious as it was – it still took me a couple of minutes to get it … of course, the intruder had been looking for something. Vernon must have opened the door to him – which also meant he’d known him – and when I came back I must have interrupted him. But what had he been looking for? I felt a quickening of my pulse even as I formed the question.

I reached down and lifted up one of the emptied drawers. I stared into it and flipped it over. I did the same with the other drawers, and it wasn’t until I was going through some shoe-boxes on a high shelf in the closet a couple of minutes later that I realized two things. First, I was leaving my finger-prints all over the place, and second, I was actually searching Vernon’s bedroom. Neither of these things was a good idea, not by any stretch of the imagination – but the question of leaving finger-prints in the bedroom was especially worrisome in the short term. I had given the cops my name and when they arrived I fully intended telling them the truth – or at least most of the truth – but if they found out that I’d been poking around in here, my credibility would surely be undermined. I could be charged with disturbing a crime scene maybe, or with evidence-tampering, or I might even be implicated in the crime itself, so I immediately began retracing my steps, using the sleeve of my jacket to wipe over as many of the objects and surfaces I had touched as possible.

Standing in the doorway a few moments later, I looked back into the room to check that I hadn’t missed anywhere. For some reason which I can’t explain, I then looked up at the ceiling – and in doing this I noticed something quite odd. The ceiling was a grid of smallish square panels and one of them, directly above the bed, seemed to be slightly out of alignment. It looked as if it had recently been disturbed.