Dead Letters(91)

“Can I see it?”

I’m already heading to Zelda’s room, and I make my way through her clutter, finding her passport after a quick paw through her top drawer. Wyatt has followed me, and he peers over my shoulder as we look at it. He takes it from my hands and flips through it. “You said she went to France. Why?”

“I have no idea,” I say with a shake of my head. “I’ve tried to puzzle that out. It would have been after she went to the doctor. Maybe she was freaked out about her health and wanted to make up with me? Do it in person?”

“Could be,” Wyatt says, sounding unconvinced. I don’t blame him. I’m not convinced either. We start to paw through Zelda’s papers, deciphering the palimpsest of all the physical documentation she considered important. We become historians of her life, analyzing receipts for dinner and excavating random business cards that have sieved down through to the contact paper that lines the bottom of the drawer. Anything could be important, which renders the stacks illegible, opaque. There are too many letters, too many clues. Too much text. Wyatt picks up the receipt for the hotel she stayed in in Paris, analyzing it.

“Where is this?” he asks.

“Around the corner from my house.”

“Is there anything else there? Something she would have to go to Paris for, specifically?”

I think hard. “Other than decent wine and healthcare…no, nothing I can think of.” I shrug.

“Can you think of something you can do only in France?”

Half a dozen silly quips rise to mind, covering the gamut from the raunchy to the political, but I bite my lip. “I’m sure there must have been something, but…” I lift up a stack of papers and fan through what seems to be a pile of bills. The heading on one makes me pause. “Wy? You said she’d been using a burner phone for the last few months?” I ask.

He nods. “Yeah. But she had her iPhone the whole time too. She only used the burner sometimes. I figured it had to do with the drugs or something. Like, she only called her dealer from the TracFone.”

“But then why do the cops know about the TracFone and not that she still had her iPhone? Surely it should be the other way around,” I muse aloud. “Look at this.” I hand him the bill I just found.

“Verizon?”

“Like Healy told me, she canceled her iPhone contract. Here’s the thing, though: Ending the service cost a fair bit, and it wasn’t due to expire for a few more months. But she canceled it three months ago. When she bought the TracFone.”

“And went to Paris,” Wyatt adds, looking at the dates on the hotel bill.

“Oh,” I say slowly. “Oh.”

“What is it?” Wyatt’s head jerks up.

“She cancels her iPhone contract, goes to France, and buys a TracFone when she comes home. But we know she keeps using her iPhone.” I waggle Zelda’s phone in illustration.

“How do you do that, without service?”

“Indeed.” Agitatedly, I graze through the papers in the drawer, looking for the receipts that will confirm what I’ve just suspected. They wouldn’t really count as official or important documents in her mind; Zelda kept business cards that she found attractive, postcards she pocketed from interesting places, scraps of napkins and beer coasters, trouvailles from her adventures. But I’m pretty sure she will have left these papers for me somewhere in this drawer. I find what I’m looking for on the right-hand side, two pieces of paper stapled together. I skim them and hand them to Wyatt.

“Verizon pay-as-you-go card?” he says, puzzled, waiting for the epiphany to strike. “Is this V? Did we skip U?”

“It might be V. But it’s definitely U. Read the next page.”

“It’s in French. De-ruh-voo…” He looks at me for help.

“Déverrouiller votre portable,” I say, enjoying the French words in my mouth. “They passed a law a few years ago in France. You can use any service provider you want, even without a contract, with any phone. It’s called ‘unlocking.’ It’s not like here in the States, where Apple ensures that you’re stuck with whatever multinational you sell your soul to when you buy your damn phone. I think maybe you can swap out the SIM card with the new iPhones, but Zelda has an ancient 4S.”

“So Zelda went to France to get her phone…unlocked?”

“Well, partly. I’m sure she had other reasons. But she wanted to use this phone to send me these emails. The cops can subpoena her carrier for access to her messages and conversations, but she hasn’t had a contract with them for three months. Verizon will come back and say that as far as they know, she turned that phone off three months ago. She’s been using different pay-as-you-go plans for data and cell service for the past few months.”

“Don’t you have to have an account to do that? Registered, I mean? With your name?”

“Yeah, but it’s easy to fake. It’s not like signing a contract, where you have to do credit checks and deposits. You just need a name and some ID, and then they give you a phone number. She could have gotten a friend to do it. Lemme guess: Zelda’s number changed three months ago?”

“Shit. Yeah. She said some telemarketer was harassing her, so she changed the number. I figured it had something to do with a guy, so I didn’t press her too hard on it.” Wyatt looks unhappy. I know that he thought he had a piece of Zelda, that she’d opened up to him on some fundamental level while they were together. I’ve seen other people absolutely convinced that for all Zelda’s secrecy and crazy behavior, they were the only ones who truly got her, were the only ones Zelda revealed herself to. It’s always heartbreaking to watch Zelda’s friends and lovers realize for the first time that not only did they never have access to her secret heart but she was actively concealing herself all along. I’m reaching out a hand toward Wyatt in pity when I realize that I’m exactly the same as all of them. I always thought that I was privileged, different, that only I really knew Zelda. Part of me still revolts against the idea that this is not true.