A Flicker in the Dark(83)

“A reporter for what?” the woman asks, her eyes darting from Aaron to myself. She stares at me for a second, her forehead crumpled, a dark blue shadow to the right of her nose. Her eyes are gelatinous and yellow, the consistency of Goo Gone, like even her tear ducts can’t be saved from the nicotine in the air. “You said you work for a newspaper?”

For a moment, I’m terrified that she recognizes me. That she knows who I am. But almost as quickly as her eyes settle on mine, they dart back over to Aaron, squinting at the ID on his shirt.

“Yes, ma’am,” he says. “I’m writing a story about the deaths of Aubrey Gravino and Lacey Deckler, and it came to my attention that you also lost a daughter, twenty years ago. A daughter who went missing and was never found.”

My eyes scan the woman, the weariness in her features, like she doesn’t trust a person in the world. I look her up and down, take in the ratty, oversized clothes she’s wearing, the sleeves covered in microscopic moth holes. Her arthritic thumbs thick and crooked like baby carrots, the red and purple shiners marbling her arms. I can almost make out little finger marks, and in this moment, I realize that the shadow beneath her eye isn’t a shadow at all. It’s a bruise. I clear my throat, deflecting the attention from Aaron to myself.

“We would love to ask you a few questions,” I say. “About your daughter. Finding out what happened to her is just as important as finding out what happened to Aubrey and Lacey, even after all these years. And we were hoping—I was hoping—that you might be able to help us.”

The woman looks at me again before glancing behind her shoulder, sighing in what seems like defeat.

“Okay,” she says, pushing the screen door open and motioning for us to come inside. “But you’ll need to make it fast. I need you gone by the time my husband gets home.”

We walk inside, and the dirtiness of the place overpowers all my senses; there’s trash everywhere, heaped in the corners of every room. Paper plates with caked-on food forming leaning towers on the floor, flies buzzing around fast-food bags stained with ketchup smears and grease. There’s a mangy cat resting on the edge of the sofa, its fur patchy and wet, and she swats at it, sending it scampering across the floor with a squawk.

“Sit,” she says, motioning to the couch. Aaron and I look at each other briefly, then back down at the sofa, trying to find enough fabric peeking out from behind the magazines and dirty clothes. I decide to just sit on top of it, the crunch of paper beneath my weight unnaturally loud. She sits in the seat opposite the coffee table and grabs a carton of cigarettes from the surface—there seem to be cartons everywhere, littered across the room like reading glasses—peeling one from the pack with her thin, wet lips. She grabs a lighter and raises the cigarette to the flame, inhaling deeply before blowing smoke in our direction. “So, what do you want to know?”

Aaron grabs a notebook from his briefcase and flips it to a clean page, clicking his pen repeatedly against his leg.

“Well, Dianne, if you could just start by telling me your full name, for the record,” he says. “Then we can get into the disappearance of your daughter.”

“Okay.” She sighs, sucking in another cloud of smoke. When she exhales, I watch her eyes grow distant as she stares out the window. “My name is Dianne Briggs. And my daughter, Sophie, went missing twenty years ago.”





CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN




“What can you tell us about Sophie?”

Dianne glances in my direction, as if she had forgotten about my existence entirely. It feels wrong that this is the way I’m meeting my would-be future mother-in-law. She clearly has no idea who I am, and as long as I can avoid giving her my name, it should stay that way. I no longer have Facebook, so I never post pictures of myself online—and even if I did, Daniel doesn’t speak to his parents anymore. They aren’t invited to the wedding. I wonder if she even knows he’s engaged.

She seems to consider the question for a second, as if she’s forgotten, lifting her hand to scratch at the leathery skin on her arm.

“What can I tell you about Sophie,” she echoes, sucking down the last of her cigarette before putting it out on the wooden table. “She was a wonderful girl. Smart, beautiful. Just beautiful. That’s her, just there.”

Dianne points to a single, framed picture on the wall, a school portrait that features a smiling girl with pale skin and frizzy blonde hair, a turquoise backdrop that looks like pool water. It strikes me as odd to see her class picture displayed—that, and nothing else. It seems staged and unnatural, like a sad sort of shrine. I wonder if the Briggs family wasn’t big on cameras, or if there just weren’t any moments worth remembering. I look around for pictures of Daniel, but I don’t see any.

“I had big dreams for her,” she continues. “Before she went missing.”

“What kind of dreams?”

“Oh, you know, just getting out of here,” she says, gesturing to the room around us. “She was better than this. Better than us.”

“Who is us?” Aaron asks, resting the tip of his pen against his cheek. “You and your husband?”

“Me, my husband, my son. I just always thought she would be the one to get out of here, you know. To make something of herself.”

My chest lurches at the mention of Daniel; I try to imagine him growing up here, getting buried alive in the clouds of cigarette smoke and mountains of trash. I’ve been wrong about him, I realize. His perfect teeth, his smooth skin, his expensive education and high-paying job. I had always assumed those things were a product of his upbringing, of his privilege. That he is inherently better than me, than damaged Chloe. But it isn’t; he isn’t. He’s damaged, too.