Death Before Facebook

age.
    “It’s sweet that you and Geoff could confide in each other. I envy you that.”
    “You don’t… uh… have anybody…?”
    “Come on. Who’d want to tell me their secrets?”
    “Well, you’re a nice-looking man.”
    “But do I have an honest face?”
    “Sure.”
    “Well, tell me something. Did you and Geoff talk much about the flashbacks he was having?”
    “We talked about things a lot. Thoughts. Stuff on the TOWN.”
    “Did he ever say anything to you about a journal he was keeping?”
    Something clicked with Lenore; something Langdon had asked, about Geoff giving her something to keep. “He kept a journal? He never mentioned it, but… do
you
know something about it?”
    He shrugged. “Just a surmise.”
    What if he was lying? Lenore felt a tiny
frisson
about her burglary. Her burglary in which nothing was taken.
    “Let me rub your feet, shall I?”
    She gasped, thinking she needed to get him out of there…
now
! But then cooler heads prevailed. Pearce was the one person who couldn’t be the burglar. If he were the burglar, he’d know she didn’t have Geoff’s journal.
    And she could really use a little adult attention.
    * * *
     
    Neetsie had called shortly after lunch. “Dad, I need to talk. I just don’t… I can’t…”
    Cole sighed. “What is it, honey?”
    “I don’t know. I got through yesterday fine; I even went to dinner with friends and they talked about Geoff and I was absolutely okay. But today I woke up crying and I…”
    “It’s hard on all of us, sweetheart.”
    “But I couldn’t go to work. I mean, that isn’t even the point. It’s not just that I feel sad, it’s that I’m afraid.”
    “Afraid of what?”
    “I don’t know. I’m just…”
    “Well, look. I’ll come get you.”
    “No!”
    “What?’
    “I don’t want to see Mom.”
    So Cole had gone to Neetsie’s, to comfort a daughter coming face-to-face with her own mortality. She had always come to him when she was afraid, and it seemed to him that she was afraid a lot, of one thing and another.
    He didn’t know how to comfort her, how to tell her that the worst might be over, that if she had even the slightest success in the world, she’d never again have to live in the kind of poverty in which she’d been brought up.
    Not that her apartment was a step up—the opposite, in fact It was a roach-infested studio in the Faubourg—a big one, but in disrepair, although furnished cleverly. Neetsie was nothing if not clever. She could have been a designer. Instead, she had some piddling job at a computer store, and wouldn’t get another because she didn’t want anything that took too much of her energy; she needed to have an arid work life so that her real work, her acting, could blossom.
    This was her theory.
    His was that as long as she had to work all day, she might as well do something that paid well.
    He found her wearing jeans and a long black sweater, Kleenex in hand.
    “Oh, Dad!” She stared at him, a hard, beseeching, “give-my-brother-back” kind of stare, but she didn’t throw her arms around him. He sensed that she didn’t want to be held.
    “What is it, honey?”
    She flung herself on her duded-up bed; he sat in her one director’s chair.
    “Life is just so fragile.” She sobbed out the last couple of words, apparently in the grip of a depression she couldn’t shake.
    “Let’s go for a walk.”
    “Why?”
    “Because you’ll feel the wind in your face, and it’ll make you feel alive. And you’ll move your butt; endorphins will kick in.”
    She made a face. “That’s the last thing I want to do. I don’t feel like budging. I can barely get to the bathroom when I have to pee.”
    “You said you felt afraid.” How many conversations had he had with her that started like this? How many with Marguerite?
    “I don’t know. I might have a lump in my breast.”
    He might have panicked, but he had been here before. “You’re pretty young for that.”
    “Well, it might just be a rib. But I feel hot all over, and then cold, and it seems like my heart beats really fast. Do you know what palpitations are, Daddy?”
    “You get them when you fall in love.”
    “I’m not kidding, I think I’m sick.”
    “Two people in the same family can’t die within a week. What do you think the odds of that would be?”
    “It happens all the time. Somebody gets stressed out and drops dead at the funeral.”
    “The funeral’s over. Anyway, those people are a lot older than