The Wreckage: A Thriller
Looking in the mirror, he blinks through bloodshot eyes. The foul taste is in his mouth, the toxins in his system. The smel of urine in his hair, on his clothes… Someone pissed on him. The boyfriend wanted some payback.
    He walks up the stairs. Drawers have been pul ed out, up-ended, searched. The contents lie on the floor.
    What’s missing? His camera, a police medal, an iPod Claire gave him (stil in its box), some euros, his passport… He flicks through his checkbook. Two blank checks are torn from the middle. They were clever. Practiced.
    He should make a list. Not touch anything. Cal the police. Then what? They’l send a car out sometime in the next two days. He’l have to make a statement. He can hear them laughing already. The jokes. The ribbing. Detective Inspector Vincent Ruiz, taken in by a girl he invited home. They’l suspect she was a hooker or a cal girl. Ruiz is paying for sex now, they’l say, like some sad old pervert.
    Another thought occurs to him. He climbs the stairs to the study. The desk has been swept clean. The pages of the manuscript are scattered on the floor. He didn’t number them.
    The drawers have been forced open. One of them had been swol en shut for twenty years. Ruiz remembers what it contained—Laura’s jewelry, her engagement ring and an antique hair-comb that had been passed down through her family. When Laura knew she was dying, when disease swam in her veins and grew in her chest, she wrote a series of letters to the twins—to be opened when they turned eighteen, or when they married, or when they had children of their own…
    One of the letters was for Claire on her wedding day. It contained the rings and the hair-comb. Now the torn envelope lies discarded on the floor. The letter screwed into a bal . The smal drawstring bag with the jewelry has gone.
    Ruiz picks up the crumpled letter and tries to smooth out the creases. Laura’s handwriting had grown spidery as the chemo robbed her of energy, but none of her sentences are crossed out or corrected. Perhaps a person knows exactly what to write when the sand is trickling away.
    Ruiz stops himself reading. The letter is meant for Claire. His eyes drift to the bottom of the page where Laura finished with hugs and kisses. A smal circular stain has marked the porous paper—a fal en tear as a punctuation mark.
    Anger rises. Burns. Most of the missing items can be replaced—the camera, the iPod and the money—but not the jewelry. He wanted Claire to wear the hair-comb on her wedding day. It was the “something old” to go with something new and borrowed and blue—just like the rhyme says. But it’s more than that. The hair-comb is something that Ruiz has cherished.
    Laura was wearing it when they first met at a twilight bal in Hertfordshire in 1968. She looked like a proverbial sixties flower child with her hair braided and pinned high on her head.
    Early in the evening she danced with him but then Ruiz lost her in the crowd and spent four hours trying to find her. It was after midnight. People were starting to leave. Buses were waiting to ferry them back to London. Ruiz saw Laura standing near the entrance. She pointed to him and summoned him with her finger. Ruiz looked over his shoulder to make sure she wanted him.
    “What’s your name?” she asked.
    “Vincent.”
    “I’m Laura. This is my phone number. If you don’t cal me within two days, Vincent, you lose your chance. I’m a good girl. I don’t sleep with men on the first date or the second or the third. You have to woo me, but I’m worth the effort.”
    Then she kissed him on the cheek and was gone. He cal ed her within two hours. The rest is, as they say…
    Picking up a notebook, Ruiz makes a list. First he contacts his bank and reports his cards stolen. The recorded messages give him six options and then another six. Eventual y, a girl with an Indian accent takes the details. Checks his account. There was a cash withdrawal just before midnight and another
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