I’m walking back to the flat with Pandora’s hand in mine when I notice something off about John Mercer’s car. It’s parked outside our place where I’ve seen it a hundred times before, except today something about it catches my attention. The wheels look more scuffed than they did last week, and there’s a small dent in the passenger-side door that I’m almost certain wasn’t there before. Now, this could mean absolutely nothing. John has never struck me as a man who considers painted lines in a parking lot to be legally binding, so a few scratches and a dent aren’t exactly shocking developments. Still, I slow down, and Pandora keeps walking for another half step before realizing I’ve stopped. When she looks back at me, I’m staring at John’s car like it has just failed a background check. “What?” she asks. “Nothing,” I say, which is what people say when something is definitely becoming something. Pandora gives my hand a little squeeze and starts toward the building again, but now I’m looking at the car more carefully. There’s dirt along the lower panels, a scrape near one wheel, and that dent. John has apparently been putting some miles on this thing. Of course, cars are specifically designed for putting miles on them, so this observation should not be particularly alarming. Unfortunately, my brain has already convened a committee.
I glance toward our window and spot Mr Whiskers sitting on the sill, staring down at us with his tail flicking behind him. Even from here, he looks judgmental, which I choose to interpret as support for my investigation. I’ve been trying to shake this feeling about John for a while now, but little things keep sticking with me. His early Tuesday mornings, for example. Maybe he goes to the gym. Maybe he gets breakfast. Maybe he has an appointment. There are hundreds of perfectly reasonable explanations for a grown man leaving home early on a Tuesday, and somehow my brain has rejected all of them in favor of clandestine activity. The dent isn’t helping. Was it a parking accident? Did somebody hit him? Did he hit somebody else? Has John been driving around late at night? Why do I even care? Pandora squeezes my hand again, which makes me care more. I look at her, she looks at me, and when she asks, “What?” for the second time, I tell her she keeps squeezing my hand. “I’m holding your hand, Hal,” she says. Fair point.
We start walking again, but I glance over my shoulder at John’s car and remember what Karen mentioned recently about seeing somebody she didn’t recognize walking around the neighborhood late at night. When I asked what the person looked like, she shrugged and admitted she hadn’t gotten a good look. At the time, I dismissed it because people walk around neighborhoods and that is generally how neighborhoods work, but now there’s John’s car, the dent, and those Tuesday mornings. I immediately recognize that I am constructing a criminal conspiracy out of automotive wear and a weekday, which should probably be enough to stop me. It isn’t. Mrs Jenkins’ voice floats through my memory instead: “You can’t be too careful these days.” That woman could say the same thing about expired yogurt and somehow make it sound like a warning from the intelligence services. Maybe Karen really did see somebody suspicious. Maybe John really has been driving somewhere unusually early. Maybe the dent really is new. Those three things could theoretically be connected, although they could just as easily have absolutely nothing to do with one another.
Pandora pulls me gently toward the entrance and asks if we’re going inside. “In a minute,” I tell her, still looking at the car. She follows my gaze and immediately says, “Oh no.” I ask what she means, and she tells me I’m doing the thing again. I insist that I don’t have a thing, which earns me the sort of look that confirms I absolutely have a thing. “Have you noticed that dent before?” I ask. Pandora studies it for approximately two seconds before saying no, and my eyebrows go up before she can add, “That doesn’t mean it wasn’t there.” Interesting. Very interesting. Not actually interesting, obviously, but my brain has already written it down. I crouch slightly to get a better look at the passenger side while Pandora stands behind me with the patient expression of a woman who has apparently accepted that this is how her evening is going now. Maybe John clipped a shopping cart. Maybe somebody opened a door into him. Maybe he backed into something. Those are the reasonable explanations, which means my brain immediately offers another possibility: maybe somebody was trying to get into the car.
I stand up quickly enough that Pandora notices. She asks what I’m thinking now, and I tell her it’s nothing. “Hal,” she says, in that particular tone that means she knows perfectly well it isn’t nothing. “Karen saw somebody.” Pandora reminds me that Karen saw somebody walking. I point out that it was at night. She reminds me that people also walk at night. I point out that it was near here. “We live near here,” she says, which is another annoyingly strong argument. I look toward our window again, hoping for some moral support from Mr Whiskers, but he’s washing one paw now and appears to have lost confidence in the investigation. The trouble is, the harder I try to convince myself that there’s nothing strange about John’s car, the more details I begin noticing. There’s something on the back seat that I can’t quite identify through the glass, maybe a jacket or a bag, and there’s a receipt or piece of paper wedged near the center console. They are completely ordinary things and evidence of absolutely nothing, so naturally I lean closer to the window.
Pandora catches the back of my shirt before I can get any closer and tells me not to press my face against John’s car. I tell her I wasn’t going to, and she tells me I absolutely was. I straighten up with what dignity remains and let her pull me toward the building, but another thought occurs to me before we reach the door. John has always been spontaneous. He’s the king of last-minute plans, sudden errands, and random suggestions to go somewhere. I used to think that was simply John being John, and it probably is simply John being John, but what if it isn’t? What if those spontaneous trips aren’t actually spontaneous? I stop walking again, and Pandora groans before I’ve even said anything. “What if John plans his spontaneity?” I ask. She stares at me long enough for me to realize how ridiculous that sounded. “That sentence made more sense before I said it,” I admit. “No,” Pandora says, opening the building door. “I don’t think it did.”
Before following her inside, I take one final look at John Mercer’s car. The scratched wheels, the dent, the dirt along the bottom of the doors—none of it is remarkable, and none of it is sinister. It’s just an ordinary car belonging to an ordinary man who probably bumped into something in a parking lot. That’s the sensible explanation, and I am perfectly willing to accept it. Mostly. The problem is that I can’t quite forget Karen’s stranger or John’s Tuesday mornings, and somewhere in the back of my mind those unrelated details have begun arranging themselves into a pattern. I know how this works. First there’s one thing that seems strange, then another thing that might be strange, and eventually I’m standing outside someone’s car examining a dent while my girlfriend physically prevents me from putting my face against the window. There is probably an important lesson in there somewhere, although at the moment I’m more interested in the dent.
Mr Whiskers is waiting for us when we reach the flat, sitting near the door as though he’s been expecting a full report. I bend down and scratch behind his ears while Pandora heads farther inside. “You saw it too, didn’t you?” I whisper. Mr Whiskers blinks slowly at me. “Do not involve the cat,” Pandora calls from the other room. I look at Mr Whiskers, and Mr Whiskers looks back at me. Neither of us says anything, which is hardly surprising in his case, but there’s something about the expression on his little face that makes me glance toward the window one more time. From here I can just make out the top of John Mercer’s car below. It’s probably nothing. The dent is probably nothing, the scuffed wheels are probably nothing, the Tuesday mornings are probably nothing, and Karen’s mysterious nighttime pedestrian is almost certainly nothing. I scratch Mr Whiskers under the chin and tell myself that I’m done thinking about it. Then his ears suddenly perk toward the window, and I narrow my eyes. “Exactly,” I whisper. From the other room, Pandora sighs.