Page 51 of Kiss Her Goodbye

Daryl and I exchange a look.We have a winner.Now what?

I’m contemplating throwing ourselves at Detective Marc’s feet, when Daryl pulls out his cell phone.He attaches some electronic gizmo to his mobile, then holds up the other end to the key reader.

Red blinking lights flash to green blinking lights.Faint click.

We’re in.

I stare at him.

“Bart’s also lived a life,” he states.Then he reaches out a hand, pushes open the door.

After that, I don’t need him to explain the rest.

THE TOWNHOUSE ISthree stories.Basic layout.Kitchen, living room, half bath on the lower level.Two bedrooms with private baths on the second floor.Crazy luxurious master suite top floor, complete with balcony and a view of the pink-washed canyon designed to make mere mortals weep.

There are closets and a pantry and a stacked washer and dryer.Nook to hide A.Cranny to disappear B.

We don’t need to search any of that to know Sabera isn’t currently present.The space is too gray, feels too empty.

Not to mention, we take our first step inside the shadowed unit and…

“Holy shit,” Daryl says.

“Holy shit,” I agree

And we know we’ve discovered Sabera’s hidey-hole, even if she is long gone.

IN SOME WAYS,nothing is disturbed.The beds are meticulously made, the bathrooms shipshape, the furniture precisely placed.

But the walls, leading from the foyer into the dining room, wrapping around the primary seating area into the kitchen…

Sabera has covered the walls in script.Starting from the doorjamb and continuing in a near vomit of communication.Numbers.Letters.Equations.Words.

I was never a math kid.I’d like to blame the booze as I spent most of my high school years in no condition to learn.But those two things went hand in hand.I didn’t just drink because I felt intimidated by general academics, my fellow peers, and high school culture.I genuinely struggled with general academics, my fellow peers, and high school culture, ergo it seemed a great idea to drink.

Now, confronted by this sheer mass of data, scrawled with a thick black Sharpie and covering nearly every visible vertical surface…

I have to suppress the urge to close my eyes and cover my head.It’s overwhelming, bordering on horrifying.

Daryl is already shrinking to the side, as if the madness might be contagious.He heads to the relative safety of the kitchen, which is encircled in cabinets and thus saved from the worst of the hysteria.

I take a deep breath, blink several times as if to clear my sight, then do my best to follow the notations.If it’s code, it’s a lot of it, and I suck at cracking that sort of stuff.What speaks to me, however, is the feel of it.The forward slant of the hastily scrawled figures.The relentless top-to-bottom coverage, filling every available inch of space and then continuing on and on, up, down, around, and now as I follow it, beginning to progress up the stairs…

There’s a feverishness to it all.

A desperation.

As if the person who did this was either manic or terrified.The question is, which?

The largest volume is in the dining room, where the expanse seems to be mostly filled with numbers, with random punctuations of symbols I don’t recognize but am guessing are mathematical.

Slowly but surely, I start to make out phrases:Two halves of one whole.A key that has no lock.

And repeated the most, almost obsessively:Chin up, chin up, chin up.

In the heaviest section, there are more numbers than letters.But the sheer infrequency of the characters helps them pop out.It comes to me slowly but surely, as I pick out each consonant and vowel, then string them together.

Tell Zahra I love her.