Confessions on the 7:45(50)

“Think of your discarded selves as other people, distant family members. You know them; they’re part of your life. They’re characters, you can take pieces from them, use those pieces to flesh out your current self. But keep it simple. The more lies you tell, the more you have to remember.”

Pearl enrolled in an online high school. In the tiny isolated house, she got up and made breakfast for them. She took her online classes in the morning, while Pop went out to look for a “job.” When her schoolwork was done, she’d wander down the dirt road, finding the trailhead. And she’d walk and walk through the towering pinyon-juniper, aspen, spruce, cottonwood, her head filled with silence, her senses alive—the smell of sagebrush, the cerulean blue of the big sky, the whisper of wind. The sun hot and the air dry.

Everything inside her felt more alive as she became Anne, and left Pearl and Stella behind—distant figures in a life that seemed more like a dream. She rarely thought of Stella, which she knew was odd—but it was as if everything that came before had ceased to be real, even her mother. Who someone had murdered. Who? But even the urgency of that question had faded.

The case around Stella’s murder and Pearl’s disappearance quickly went cold. It fell out of the news within a matter of weeks. Charles Finch, Stella’s lover, the bookstore manager, also missing, was a person of interest in the murder and Pearl’s disappearance. The pictures that were circulating of her and Charlie—it didn’t even look like them anymore. She felt reborn.

About a month into their new life, Anne was online, searching for news stories, and she came across a feature article about their case. With no suspects, no sightings of the missing Pearl, local police were frustrated. A cold case investigator had been hired by the department, a man named Hunter Ross.

“We know that Stella Behr was murdered in cold blood, strangled in her own home. Her fifteen-year-old daughter Pearl is missing. Charles Finch, Ms. Behr’s lover and the manager of her failing book store, also disappeared that night,” he was quoted as saying.

“We have come to learn that the man known as Charles Finch was a fiction. None of the information on the job application we found is accurate. Name, address, Social Security number were all falsified.”

There were pictures, of Pearl, of Stella, of the storefront. They apparently only had one picture of Charlie. It must have been from Stella’s phone; he was smiling devilishly at the camera. There was a bit about Pearl—how she was a star student, but a loner with few friends. Teachers described her as polite, intelligent, always distant.

Her heart thumped as she scrolled through the article. The pictures there looked fake; the story sounded like a catalog of lies.

There was a timeline of the night of Stella’s murder, including a neighbor sighting of Pearl and Charlie leaving the house, bags packed, Pearl apparently acting of her own free will. Another man, not matching Charlie’s description—this one tall, muscular, with long blond hair and a full beard—had been seen arriving and leaving quickly a short time later earlier that day.

“A woman is dead. A young girl is missing. And the man at the center of this mystery is a ghost. My guess is that Charles Finch is a con, and that he’s moved on to his next mark. Maybe Pearl is with him—likely in the thrall of whatever con he might be running on her.”

She stared at the picture of Charlie. In the photo, he was in character, whatever character he was playing for Stella—the attentive lover. He played another character for Pearl, the caring friend. She looked deep into the eyes, and recognized something there, something from her own inner self—a vast emptiness, an icescape frozen and barren.

“We have a couple of leads that I’ll be following up,” said Ross. “Some of these are out of state, which means that the FBI could get involved. And there are some clues as to the true identity of Charlie Finch due to tips from the photos we ran nationally. He may be the wanted perpetrator of a number of high-level cons, rip-offs, and scams across the country. So this investigation is far from over. However long it takes, we’ll find answers. We won’t stop looking for Pearl Behr.”

The front door opened and closed with a bang, the sound moving through her like a gunshot. It hadn’t occurred to Pearl-now-Anne that Charlie-now-Pop might be running a con on her.

She walked out of her room to greet him. Pop was whistling in the kitchen, putting away groceries. A bouquet of fresh flowers lay on the counter.

“Hey,” he said. He stopped mid-action to give her a concerned smile. “What’s up? You look like you’ve seen a ghost.”

“They’re still looking for us,” she said. She was shaking and she didn’t even know why. “There’s a hired cold case detective. He said that there are leads.”

Pop nodded, went back to taking the milk from the reusable sack and putting it in the fridge. “I know.”

He was his constant, easy self. If what she said unsettled him, he didn’t show it.

“You said that they’d stop eventually.”

“They will.”

“The article said that there are leads, that the FBI is involved.”

“They always say that,” he answered, stopping to walk over to her. He put strong hands on her shoulders.

“In the article,” she pressed, “the detective said that they had leads on your identity, from other cons you’ve run, that they won’t stop looking.”