Girls Like Us(42)

“You should take it easy tonight, okay? Get some rest. Have a drink. I need to be on hand for the interrogation. I’ll keep you posted.”

“Why did you get me involved in this case if you didn’t actually want my opinion?”

Lee pulls into my driveway and cuts the engine. He doesn’t answer my question. “You want me to walk you in?”

“It’s not the prom. Thanks for the ride.” I hop out into the rain, shutting the car door a little harder than I intended.





14.



Outside, the sky is dark. Salt rain pours in rivulets from the gutters. The temperature has dropped significantly since the morning. My hands tremble so hard I have trouble fitting the key into the lock. Lee waits, his engine idling, his headlights illuminating the front porch, until the door closes behind me. Then he pulls out of the driveway, so hard that his tires spin on the gravel. I watch his taillights disappear through the glass.

I flick the lights on. Nothing. The power is out.

“Fuck,” I say aloud, my voice echoing in the hallway. Power outages are not uncommon for Dune Road during a storm. Most of our neighbors have installed backup generators, but Dad was too cheap for that. Anyway, he was unfazed by darkness. There are flashlights stocked throughout the house. Canned food in the pantry. And enough wood to start a fire. I’m fine, I tell myself, though there’s a weight in my gut that insists otherwise.

I get to work on the fireplace, laying newspaper and kindling and logs. Soon, the living room fills with crackling heat and enough light to brighten the room. In the bathroom, I strip off my wet clothes. There’s no point in taking a shower; it won’t warm me up. I need to get into my father’s office. I’ve been thinking about it ever since Elena Marques mentioned his name. I dry myself with a towel. My clothes are filthy with mud; my hair is caked in it. Blood stains the stiff fabric. I pull the bandage off my shoulder, feeling the sting of cool air against the open wound.

Once I’ve changed, I find a large flashlight, a stepstool. My father kept the key to his office hidden in a coffee can in a cabinet. I know this because once, when I was a teenager, I spent two days systematically searching the house until I found it. I was always more resourceful than he gave me credit for; more keen-eyed and more stubborn. I learned, after all, from the best.

The key is unmarked, suspended on a rusted wire ring. I cross the living room and slip the key into the lock. I flinch when I push open the door. Even now, it feels wrong to go into Dad’s office. It was his private space, specifically off-limits to me. If he was inside and I so much as knocked on the door, I better have had a damn good reason.

I have a damn good reason now. I can’t shake the feeling that my father’s death is inextricably bound up in these murders. What if he killed those girls? The possibility eats at me. Maybe he killed them and then killed himself. Or maybe this is all more complicated than I could imagine, and I won’t understand it until I step back and start seeing a bigger picture.

The air in Dad’s office is stale. The sound of dripping emanates from the ceiling. I point the beam of my flashlight around the corners of the room but can’t isolate the source of the leak. The light falls to a framed photograph on my father’s desk. I walk over, pick it up, examine it closely. Dad and Glenn Dorsey. They stand side by side on Dorsey’s boat, the blue expanse of Long Island Sound glittering in the background. The sky is cloudless and serene. It is the end of summer. They are tan and grinning ear to ear. Dorsey is wearing Oakley sunglasses. An SCPD baseball cap casts a shadow across my father’s face.

Together, they hold up the body of a giant striped bass. I remember when they caught it: at seventy-eight pounds, it was one of the largest caught in this area. They made the local paper. This was a few years back, when Dad and I were in a relatively communicative period. He was proud of it, of them. He cut out the article and sent it to me in the mail.

A striped bass is a beautiful thing, and this one is particularly grand, both in scale and proportion. Its silver-scaled body gleams in the late afternoon sun. Its mouth gapes wide in protest; its eye is round and still. When I was young, I used to ask my father to throw back the fish we caught. I hated watching them squirm on the boat deck, gasping to be back in the water. Even more, I hated killing them.

Dad told me it was cruel to catch and release. The fish were injured, he told me. Damaged goods. They’d have trouble surviving in the wild. It was better to end it for them, he said, quickly and cleanly. The humane thing to do. Dad had a small club designed for the job, called a priest. He’d strike the fish hard on the skull, just behind the eyes, killing them instantly or at least rendering them unconscious.

My mother thought fishing and hunting were both barbaric. She wrinkled her nose in protest whenever my father took out the rods. I still remember the first time he taught me to shoot. They fought about it in the kitchen, the staccato sounds of my mother’s anger rising to the rafters. I still don’t know why she relented. Dad called up to me, told me to hurry up and get a move on. I scurried down the steps. When I passed her, she hugged me hard and then released me. “Go with your father,” she whispered, “have fun.” She patted me on the back, as if to tell me that it was okay. I turned around as Dad pulled the truck out of the drive, looking for her through the rear window. She was watching us from the kitchen window, her arms crossed against her chest, her mouth hardened into a straight line.