The Elizas: A Novel(104)

I’d walked him into the Barn, which was what we patients called the main facility building where all of the therapies took place and the meals were served. I felt like I was slogging through mud. I’d been so ready to accept the blame. I had visions of being handcuffed and riding away in his car. I almost felt cheated of that moment.

I got the detective coffee. He stopped and spoke to one of the nurses, coincidentally an old neighbor from where he grew up. As he was about to leave, something struck me, and I ran after him. “Why weren’t you able to do a drug screen on Eleanor?”

He reached for the keys in his pocket and a silver gum wrapper fell out. As he stooped to pick up the litter, he said, “She had strict orders in her living will not to perform an autopsy, no matter her cause of death. We’re used to that around LA—a lot of celebrities have unusual death directives. But we couldn’t keep her body for very long, either—the living will also stated that we had to call a man immediately, and he would dispose of it as she wished. The report says her man showed up the next morning, and that was that.”

“Doctor Singh.”

He squinted at the report. “Yes. A Doctor Vishal Singh signed for her body. Pretty standard procedure. Like I said, we thought it was a suicide, anyway—and honestly, it was a suicide. She wanted to die. You have to believe that. She was on the run. She was going to be arrested. So we didn’t look into it. Doctor Singh showed up, took the body, and that was that.” He shrugged. “I appreciate your honesty and candidness, but really, this conversation doesn’t need to go any further. You can let it go.”

But I couldn’t let it go. I wanted the answer. I wanted to find Dr. Singh and figure out where he’d taken her body. I wanted to know why she hadn’t wanted an autopsy. What was she hiding?

The problem, however, was the Oaks had very limited Internet privileges, and they wouldn’t give me a special pass to do the research. So I asked my mother to look into it. She called every Dr. Vishal Singh in Los Angeles County. There were quite a few of them. None of them claimed to know a woman named Eleanor Reitman. None of them had claimed her body.

My mother also unearthed several boxes of things Eleanor had left behind from the Magnolia that she’d been keeping in an upstairs room, hidden from me. She brought the boxes to the hospital so I could look through them, too. Peeling off the tape, a sharp scent of bergamot oranges filled the room. I almost fainted. It was like letting a genie out of a bottle. I could see her before me, hale and hearty, wearing a fur, drinking a stinger. I could hear her croaky voice. I could feel her laugh.

We poked through the boxes. There were negligees, bathing suits, a lot of elaborate hats, a box of expensive perfume with a name I didn’t recognize. Several mystery paperbacks, a DVD of The Third Man. At the bottom, costume jewelry, a fringed flapper dress, a bunch of Vogue magazines, and a tiny knitted baby shoe. I held it up, my eyes wide. “Was this mine?”

My mother squinted. “Maybe?”

A card for the concierge at the Magnolia. A card for a literary agent in San Francisco. No writings, no paperwork, certainly no will. Not even a bill for her cell phone or her health insurance, if she even had health insurance. But no card for Dr. Vishal Singh. No indication they’d been friends. It was like he didn’t exist.

“Just let it go, Eliza,” my mother advised me. “What’s done is done.”

I tried to. It wasn’t worth looking into, I told myself. I’d done my part, too—I’d confessed, I’d gotten it off my chest, and now at least I could tell this story as part of my interviews, as I’d had to do a few after I was released from the Oaks. Yep, I might have pushed her, I said, but the cops know and they don’t think I’m guilty. It legitimized me, sort of. I still walked around worrying I’d done something horrible, but at least I wasn’t repressing it anymore. At least I remembered most of everything. And for those things I didn’t remember, those ephemeral, wobbly moments at the guardrail . . . well, maybe that was okay that I never got those gory details back. They wouldn’t do me any good.

Except I still felt unsettled from time to time. There were still a few loose ends, a few things I can’t make sense of. Who was it people kept seeing around town? Who filmed me in the hospital? Why, leading up to my psychotic break, did I feel followed? Maybe I was the one around town, after all—maybe my personality had split. And maybe my paranoia was because my guilt was poking through, beginning to show itself. These are the logical answers. And yet . . .

We work our way through the meal, though I’m too nervous to eat much. Posey steps to the podium and breathes a few times into the microphone, getting everyone’s attention. “Thank you all for coming,” she says. “It’s my great pleasure to be here at this launch party, celebrating a new novel by a young talent. As many of you know, Eliza Fontaine achieved notoriety with her last book, The Dots, and it has sold almost a million copies worldwide.”

Everyone applauds. I duck my head, still astonished at the number. I don’t look at Amazon ranks. I don’t read reviews. The only thing I read is mail fans send to me. Rarely are those letters critical. And usually, those people actually read my book, as opposed to the multitudes who bought it only because I’d made a name for myself for falling in the pool and acting like a maniac on Dr. Roxanne. I hate that that’s how I achieved the sales I did. I hate that people think I’d done those things on purpose because people need a gimmick, these days, to sell books. I hate that it’s kind of true that you need a gimmick to sell books.