Don't You Cry(70)

I hear the sound of paper on the other end of the line, and imagine this man, this Detective Robert Davies, thumbing through the report, staring at the image of Esther and me I imparted to the Chicago PD: she and I at Midsommarfest, feasting on greasy ears of corn. I uproot memories of the setting sun, the sound of some ABBA tribute band onstage, Esther laughing as she smiled for the camera with a piece of hairy husk strewn between her teeth.

Where are you, Esther? I silently plead.

“You’re the roommate of Esther Vaughan?” he asks, and when I say that I am, he says he has some questions for me, questions he’d like to discuss in person. At this my stomach drops. Why? Why does he want to talk to me? In person, no less. Can’t he ask his questions over the phone?

“Am I in trouble?” I ask spinelessly, and he lets loose a railroading laugh, the kind that isn’t meant to express humor but rather be intimidating. And it works; I’m intimidated.

I glance at the clock. I now have about fourteen minutes until I need to leave for work. I don’t have time to stop by the police station on the way to work, and I’m not even sure I want to speak to this detective all on my own. I need Ben.

“I can stop by the station this afternoon,” I say, though of course that’s the last thing in the world I want to do. “After work.”

But the detective says to me, “No, Ms. Collins, it can’t wait until the afternoon. I’ll come to you,” he decides, and already he’s asking where I work—though I’m banking on the fact this is something he knows—but one thing I refuse is to let a detective show up at the office, asking questions, in a place where gossip and hearsay spread like wildfire. Police were here, people will say, asking questions. Details will be invented: handcuffs, Miranda rights, a million-dollar bail. Before the end of the day, the rumor mill will have decided that I killed my roommate and Kelsey Bellamy, too.

I shake my head. I tell him no. “I can meet you in an hour,” I say to him instead, and we make arrangements to meet at Millennium Park.

“Make it two,” he says then, seemingly the kind of man who always needs to get in the last word. We’ll meet at Millennium Park in two hours. Detective Davies and me. Sounds quite quaint, and also a little painful and terrifying, like dental work. I sigh, pressing the end button on the phone and then I make two subsequent calls: one to work, calling in sick—a second bout of the stomach bug, I tell my boss, Anita, who is clearly not pleased—and a second call to Ben, which goes unanswered to my chagrin.

But here’s the really weird thing, though of course everything about this day, this week, is weird. When I talk to Detective Robert Davies, I’m absolutely certain we’ve spoken before. His voice is as familiar to me as some decades-old song whose lyrics you never forget.

I’m not in a rush anymore. Now I have time to kill, two hours until I meet the detective. I drift into Esther’s room and drop to the floor, assessing the photograph I’m creating, all those minced-up bits of photo paper coming together one by one: the sleeve of a plum sweater, the black of a shoe. Threads of blond hair that look uncannily like mine, the blond blown-out look bobbing on the surface of that chunky sweater with its bateau neckline. My fingers start to shake as I grab for more shreds and lay them in place, the task becoming quicker now that it’s nearly through. There aren’t so many pieces remaining anymore in my pile on the floor, and I’ve become quite the maven, knowing innately the blue of the sky versus the blue of a short-sleeve shirt of a man hovering in the background beneath a store awning, which is, of course, also blue. I gather the bits one by one and pop them into place, watching the image take shape: a city street scene. I’m not one for wearing purple, but the sweater is a favorite of mine, the boatneck that slips from the shoulder exposing the flesh of a collarbone: the closest to sexy I ever get. It’s a dark purple, nothing too feminine or dainty like lavender or violent, but rather plum. A robust plum. I’m standing midstride in the image, walking down the urban street. I’m not smiling; I’m not even staring at the camera. In fact, I don’t even know that the camera is there, and—as I’m flanked by dozens of other pedestrians also as incognizant of the camera as I—I imagine Esther hidden on the other side of the busy city street, snapping the photo with a long lens.

But why?

It’s as I lay the last few shreds with shaking hands that the answer comes to me. As I piece together the last ribbons of skin I begin to understand, the skin no longer a summer tan but losing color quickly and drifting to a winter white as it does now. My face takes shape: the flat forehead, the thin eyebrows, the big eyes. I piece together the nose, the lips, moving downward, and as I reach the exposed neck above the collar of that plum sweater I see that someone’s taken a red roller ball pen to the flesh and slashed clear through the neckline.





Alex

I run silently from the house but I don’t go home. Instead, I hide in the overgrown bushes outside. I haven’t quite figured out what to do and so I loiter and think, think and loiter. But I don’t have to do either too long. Before I know it, there’s a noise from the window of the old home. The sound of footsteps in the lawn. The crunch of brittle, autumn leaves beneath her feet. And then Pearl appears and makes the decision for me.

She is wrapped up in her coat and hat and in her hands is a shovel. A shovel? I think, taking a second look at the item in her hands. Yes, a shovel.