Could anyone else see it? Probably not. Not without the Parabon report. Wendy certainly didn't see it. She saw her nephew. Rebecca's boy. Tom's son.
Noah wanted to push the questioning further. The words were right there. Did Rebecca ever mention a relationship with anyone in law enforcement? Did she ever mention the name Sutherland?
He held them back — not because of caution, but because of Wendy. She was sitting across from him in a house that was slowly emptying, her husband disappearing into a fog she couldn't stop, her nephew struggling in a bookstore she had given him, and her sister dead. She had offered him coffee and opened her door and answered his questions because she was the kind of person who did that.
He wasn't going to make it worse.
"Well, thank you for the coffee, Wendy." Noah stood. "I'll see myself out. You've been very helpful."
She stood with him. "Is Liam in some kind of trouble?"
The question was quiet. Careful. The question of a woman who had spent years watching her nephew struggle and had learned to listen for the sound of things getting worse.
"No," Noah said. "Just following up."
She nodded. She didn't believe him. But she let him go the way people let things go when they're too tired to hold on.
Noah walked to the front door. He paused with his hand on the knob and looked back at the living room. Wendy was already clearing the mugs. Her husband sat in the recliner, unchanged, looking at the same spot he had been looking at since Noah arrived.
The photo of Liam in his dress uniform sat where he had left it.
Noah stepped outside and closed the door behind him.
Birchwood Books.
That was where Liam had gone. Where he had stayed. Where he was now.
29
The bookstore was closed.
Noah stood on the sidewalk and looked at it. The green awning. The hand-painted sign in white letters on dark wood. The display window filled with books arranged in neat rows, spines facing out, the kind of careful presentation that suggested someone who cared about what they were selling.
The lights inside were off. A small handwritten sign in the window read CLOSED until further notice. The ink looked fresh.
It was just after noon. Elizabethtown's Main Street was quiet. A few cars lined the road. A woman walked a dog past the courthouse. The brick facades and old maples and the mountains beyond the rooftops — all of it looked the way it had the day he stood here after visiting Kline and felt something pull at him through the glass.
Now he knew what it was.
The side door was to the right of the storefront. A narrow entrance with two buzzers mounted on the frame. The top one had a faded label that read APT 2 with no name. The bottom one read APT 1 - MGMT. Noah pressed the top buzzer and waited.
Nothing.
He pressed it again. Held it for three seconds. The sound was faint through the door, a distant electronic whine somewhere above.
Nothing.
He was about to step back when the door opened from inside. A man in his sixties came out carrying a bag of recycling, keys in his other hand. He glanced at Noah without interest and held the door with his foot while he shifted the bag.
Noah caught the door before it closed and stepped inside.
The stairwell was narrow and dim. The carpet was worn on the steps. It stank of old wood and dust and something else, coffee maybe, hours old. He climbed to the second floor. Two doors. Apartment 2 on the left, closed, a television murmuring behind it. Apartment 1 on the right.
Noah knocked.
The sound was flat against the wood. There was no movement inside. No footsteps. No chair scraping. He knocked again, harder.
Nothing.
