The Guest Room(77)

She wished the girls were still in third grade. A year ago, she could have taken them to the American Girl store, and they would have been in heaven for hours. Now Melissa hardly ever played with her American Girl dolls. Kristin wasn’t sure she had picked up any of them since school had started in September. Soon they would be as much a memory as her plush pals from Sesame Street—Zoe and Abby and Elmo—or her Barbies.

She shuddered ever so slightly when her mind roamed to the Barbies, because that meant she saw once more the used condom on her daughter’s Tucker Tote. She wondered which of the two prostitutes had been in Melissa’s bedroom. Was it the one who later would bring her husband to the guest room? Or was it the one who would steal one of her kitchen knives and—according to the media, not her husband—nearly decapitate a Russian with a sequoia for a neck? (Richard had been more circumspect: he had said only that the girl had stabbed the fellow in the throat.) She had never liked emotional chaos, but she was feeling this morning that her composure—so frail since the bachelor party—was under siege. Hence the need for this Mountain Day. When she thought of the dead body in the morgue, she felt bad that she had any preference at all when she contemplated whether it was the one who had been with Richard or the one who had rained hellfire down on her bodyguard. Her captor. Whatever. But—and she could admit this only to herself—she did have a preference. Of course, she did. The truth was, she did not wish that either girl was dead. Had been murdered. But the inalterable (and unutterable) fact was this: Richard was now on his way to ID one of them, and somewhere deep inside her she hoped that the victim was the girl before whom her husband had stood naked. The girl who had led her husband upstairs, where the two of them…

Where the two of them either did nothing or something. Probably she’d never know for sure.

“Train’s coming,” Claudia was saying. “There’s a movie about a lady who throws herself under a train when it’s coming.”

“It was a book first,” Melissa corrected her.

“Doesn’t matter. Is that the worst way to kill yourself or what? What a total mess! You’re like…you’re like hamburger meat.”

“You should see our couch,” said Melissa, and she shook her head.

“Wait, what? Your couch?”

Wait, what. The train began to slow, and Kristin heard those two syllables echoing in her head. Melissa looked up at her, clearly wondering if it was okay to tell her friend about the couch. She shrugged. It was fine. The doors opened, and she herded the children into the car, the last of the commuters—the women as well as the men—making way for her and the two girls. She half listened as Melissa told her friend about the blood on the sofa, and then the blood on the walls and how there was a blank spot where once there had been a famous painting.

“It wasn’t that famous,” she corrected her daughter.

“No?”

“Nope.”

Wait, what? The words continued to reverberate inside her. A Ramones song? No. Something else. Someone else. It didn’t matter. This morning it simply felt like the story of her life—at least her recent history.

…

“Yes, that’s her,” Richard murmured, his voice wan. “She said her name was Sonja.” The pathologist was a muscular guy perhaps five or six years his junior, with hipster eyeglasses—thick black frames that made him look like he should be an Apollo 11 engineer—unruly black hair, and a nose that clearly had been broken at least once. Maybe twice. He had introduced himself as Harry Something. Richard had already lost the fellow’s last name, but he thought it might have been Greek. He’d pulled the sheet down only as far as the bottom of the girl’s chin.

Beside him was a New York detective, a fellow who reminded Richard a little bit of his father: they had the same dark bags under their eyes and the same ring of short white hair running along the back of their heads from ear to ear. Richard’s father had retired a couple of years ago; he guessed this detective would soon. He was wearing a tweed jacket and a white oxford shirt without a necktie. He looked more like an English professor than a cop.

“You’re absolutely sure?” the detective asked him.

“I am.”

“I mean, given the decomposition—”

“It’s her. I’m sure.” He was relieved it wasn’t Alexandra, and that made him feel both a little guilty and a little unclean. The sensations were related in a way he couldn’t quite parse here among the morgue’s cold lines and antiseptic counters. Its balneal tiles and polished chrome. Its Proustian-like aroma of biology lab. Harry, the pathologist, had warned him that the odor from the cadaver would dwarf that smell, but still the stench from the body had caught him off guard. He’d nearly gagged. The girl, now a mephitic shell, reeked of decay and dirty water, and he’d taken a step back—away—so the principal smell was the combination of disinfectant and bleach that had greeted him the moment he’d walked in the door. The stench of formaldehyde. But he had recovered. Breathing only through his mouth, he leaned in again. He had, to use an expression his brother sometimes used—and always in the context of endeavors that in point of fact demanded neither heroism nor spine, such as downing a shot of particularly wretched tequila or agreeing to bowl one more game at some trendy bowling alley in the small hours of the morning in Soho—manned up. The corpse had been found in the water beside an old dock in what had once been the Brooklyn Navy Yard. It was bobbing like a buoy against one of the pilings, trying to wend its way to the shore.