Don't You Cry(79)

“You know that song?” Ingrid asks of me with a pleased smile, and when I nod my head in a nebbish, submissive sort of way—exhausted, scared and confused all at the same time—she confesses, “I used to sing that to my girls when they were young,” and without missing a beat, she trills aloud, “Go to sleep, my little baby,” and all I can see is Pearl clutching that old cloth doll to her chest, the gentle hip sway as she oscillated back and forth on the dilapidated floorboards of the old home. Ingrid’s old home.

Before her eyes can reveal too much, Ingrid turns her back to me and continues the low drone of a somber little lullaby she used to sing while she rocked her baby girls to sleep in her arms. At the kitchen sink she goes through the motions of washing dishes as I stand slackly by, fighting still to catch my breath, completely unsure what to say or do. Do I say anything? Do I do anything? Do I tell Ingrid about the young woman squatting in her old, dilapidated home, the one who dug an empty casket out of Genevieve’s grave and sings the same lullaby that Ingrid now sings?

Or do I turn and slip away, pretending not to see what’s there before my eyes, the way the dots connect, the way the pieces correlate?

My folks gave me up, Pearl had said as we walked lazily around the street, but now I’m not so sure.

It’s midday now, the sun at its highest point in the sky, the time of day it lets itself in uninvited through windows. A cold flurry of air sweeps around the side of Ingrid’s house as Ingrid and I stand in the kitchen. Over the stream of water running from the kitchen sink I hear the front door squeak open against the weight of the wind, causing the walls of the home to whine.

“The door, Alex,” says Ingrid with a jolt. The terror takes over her eyes. “You closed the front door. You locked it.” But whether I did or didn’t, I don’t know.

As a scalloped dinner plate slips from Ingrid’s wet hands and shatters into a million pieces on the kitchen floor, she screams. “Esther,” she says, staring over my shoulder as a low moan escapes from her throat and she beats a hasty retreat from the room, across the shards of glass. The water continues to pour from the faucet, rallying together a thousand polished bubbles in the sink, which threaten to overflow. Bubbles like a bubble bath. “Oh, no,” Ingrid moans, a hand groping for her throat. “No, no, no.”

I turn and there behind me stands Pearl.

“Alex. It’s so nice of you to come,” she says, but never once does she look at me, for her eyes are lost on Ingrid.

“You look just like her,” bleats Ingrid, her voice far away as if she’s underwater, as if she’s drowning in the kitchen sink. “You look just like her. I almost thought you were...” As she steps forward and past me, she reaches out a gutless hand to stroke the rippled locks of ombré hair.

Pearl smiles the most pleased smile, like a child who’s just made a brand-new friend. She runs a hand along the length of the bleached-out hair and offers an ostentatious curtsy so that the hemline of her checkered coat falls down to her knees. “I thought you’d like it,” she says, beaming. “She always was your favorite, after all. I thought you might like me more if I reminded you of her.”

And then she reaches for a knife.





Quinn

When I get to the end of the note, I let out an unsuppressed cry. I can’t help it. It just comes. A hand goes to my mouth with instinct.

In my hands, the note shakes like a leaf in the wind. I can’t stop my hand from shaking. I try to process what I’ve just read, to reread the note, but the words blur before me until I can no longer tell my a’s from my o’s or pronounce the words. The letters and words meld together before my eyes, becoming one. They flit and dart on the typed page, sneering at me: You can’t catch me.

But there are two takeaways that I do gather from the letter: whoever this EV is, she killed Kelsey Bellamy, and quite possibly she’s done something to hurt Esther. She’s pretending to be Esther, running around town, looking and acting like Esther. Who is she? The letter makes mention of family: You took my family away from me, it says, and yet it doesn’t seem like something Esther would do. Esther never talked about her family to me; if it weren’t logistically impossible, I’d say she didn’t have one, that she was raised by dwarves in a woodsy cottage with a thatched roof. Esther shied away when I asked questions; she snapped the lid back on the box of photographs I’d stumbled upon at the storage facility, family photographs, and when I asked who those people were in the pictures, she said to me, No one.

But it was clear that they were not no one. And now I feel desperate for another look at those images, longing to see a visual of Esther’s family, wondering whether or not the person who penned this note is in those photographs. I need to see. I run through the memories I’ve stored away in my mind, but they’re nowhere. I can’t dredge up the pictures, not that Esther gave me much of a chance to see, anyway, that winter day we stood in the storage unit, looking for the Christmas tree. It was cold that day and outside the snow came down in gobs. We stood in the cold storage facility and, though heated, the concrete walls and floors didn’t do a thing to keep us warm. I think it’s over here, said Esther, meaning the Christmas tree, but instead I lifted the lid off a shoebox of photographs. I was snooping, yes, and yet it didn’t feel like snooping with Esther in the very same room. I didn’t think she’d mind.