by Eva Robinson
Rowan’s eyes sparkled. “Oh, so you have free time? I could use your help with something.”
Hannah’s eyebrows crept up. “Oh?”
“You must understand educational inequality and things like that, right?”
“Well, sure. You mean like funding inequalities between districts?”
“Apple saaaah!” It was a frantic screech from Nora this time, less coherent. “Apple saaaah!” Hannah felt her body going into panic mode, heat pounding. Nora was hungry, and that was a crisis.
Rowan looked unbothered by the unfolding catastrophe, and she ran a hand through her dark curls. “I have some academic friends who are trying to raise money for a teen center in Cambridge. They’re applying for some grants, and I want to help raise money for the building too. But I need some help with the writing. I’m so bad at it, and people jump all over you if you say the wrong thing.”
After a gap year or two, Rowan had gone to Harvard. Why was she talking about herself like she was an idiot?
Hannah’s grip had tightened on the stroller, and she was fighting the impulse to rush Nora home to eat.
“There’s a teen center in Brookline,” Hannah said. “Depending on income levels, not all kids have access to afterschool learning, or things to keep them out of trouble. A teen center can help equalize education opportunities. And then there’s the school-to-prison pipeline—”
“Hungeeeeeeeeee!” shrieked Nora.
Hannah squeezed the stroller handles so tightly that she worried she might break them. “Anyway, it sounds like an interesting project.”
Rowan’s eyes lit up. “But this is amazing! This is like fate. I knew you’d understand it all. Can you help me with the writing? Every time I try to write something, I feel like I’m getting it wrong.”
Hannah’s pulse was now pounding out of control. She was losing the ability to think about how to phrase things tactfully when she had Nora’s hunger crisis to contend with.
She started rolling the stroller back and forth, as if that would somehow fix the starvation. “Right, sure I can help you. The thing is, Rowan, I just quit my job. And I need to find a new one somehow, so I might be busy. I need to find a way to earn money soon.”
“But you’re a psychologist,” said Rowan, as if that fact alone were the answer to all her problems.
“True, but I might have burned my bridges at work, so I don’t have any references for a new job.” Now was the time to ask, and yet after two days of planning, Hannah still didn’t know how to bring this up. Now or never. “Was it hard to… get into what you do?”
“Writing?”
“Well, yes, I want to write also. But I meant Instagram. Because that’s how you got the book deal, right?”
Rowan blinked. “Oh, are you thinking of doing sponsored content? What’s your handle?” Already she was scrolling on her phone.
Sponsored content. Hannah didn’t even know the right language. She was starting to deeply regret all this, and her cheeks started to burn. “Oh, I don’t have much of a following. HannahBookAddict. It’s just book reviews.”
“Nora hungeeeeeeeeeee! Nora eat dinner. Hot dog. Peanut-butter honey sandwich. French fries, Nora eating!”
Oh, great. A junk food litany.
Rowan didn’t seem to notice.
“I found you!” said Rowan. “You do have a good eye. I like the hot chocolate with the romance book. Some people earn money for book reviews. I could tag you in my stories, might get you some more follows. You know, when you help me with the writing.”
Now, Hannah’s mood was brightening. “Do you think?”
“But it would take a while to get it going. Psychologists do testing, though, right? People will pay a lot for the right test.”
About four thousand dollars. How did Rowan know that? “Yes, I do have a license for private testing,” said Hannah, “but I don’t have a client base. I’d need to make connections, maybe get a website—”
Rowan waved a hand. “Oh, don’t worry about clients. I can find them for you. My parents are looking for someone to test my sister, actually. You know, for the college boards. They had her tested by someone, but… she didn’t give the recommendations they wanted.”
“Are they looking for someone now?” Not the glamorous world of posing on French balconies, but it would pay Hannah’s rent.
“Yes, and they know tons of people who want testing also. You know, the public-school testing doesn’t recommend extra time for everyone.”
“Right. Well, not everyone has a disability.”
Rowan cocked her head. “Of course. But the things is… when people are paying all that money for a report, they’re going to want the extra time. Otherwise there’s no point in paying for it.”
Hannah’s stomach fell. There was always a way to come up with a diagnosis. But it was such an unfair advantage for wealthy students.
“Are you interested?” asked Rowan.
Nora had now collapsed into full-blown screaming, and Hannah was all out of patience.
Thing was, she had a responsibility to take care of her daughter, didn’t she? She’d screwed it up yesterday when she’d quit her job. This was her chance to fix it. With this kind of money, she could give Nora the financial security she needed. And really, if anyone was to blame, it was the college boards for not giving kids enough time to demonstrate what they knew.
“Yes, I’m interested.”
Rowan grinned. “Perfect. I think we should get together soon, Hannah. I want to show you off to my friends. Send me your number through Instagram, and I’ll check my messages. My friends are throwing a party soon—you should come.”
Hannah grinned.
They said their goodbyes, and she hurried off into the breezy night, eager to get Nora home.
But as she rushed home to Somerville, goosebumps rose on her skin, and she cast a look behind her. For some reason, she had the eerie feeling that someone had been watching them.
Twelve
Ciara sat at her new desk, ignoring her rising hunger as she searched online for information about Arabella Green. She had her earbuds in and she was playing her favorite band, the one whose name she had tattooed on her wrist—Meute. A German marching band that played techno covers. Horns and a bass drum blared in her ears. Sublime.
Michael’s desk was next to hers, his space hung with a few colorful images—the London skyline at sunset, a train through the city. When he wasn’t there, Ciara occasionally peered over at his photos as she worked, imagining she was in another country.
She’d didn’t think she’d put up her own pictures. Besides music, her primary interest was in the grimmest aspects of history. If she were to decorate her space, it would likely be an unsettling combination of smiling marching bands and women in nooses.
Best to leave it blank, really.
She clicked on Arabella’s Instagram account. Her Facebook was locked down, but Instagram might give some idea of the woman’s mental state before she’d died. Ciara had read once that a machine learning tool could determine how depressed you were by the number of people who showed up in your social media pictures. When she opened the profile, she found six images—all showing flowers in Mount Auburn cemetery, all taken on the same day.
When Ciara clicked to see the photos Arabella was tagged in, she found something much more interesting: six photos, professional quality. Really, Arabella looked like she could have been a model in addition to a PhD candidate. Ciara clicked on a picture of two beautiful women—one with chin-length dark curls, her arm draped over the shoulders of a platinum blonde with bright red lipstick, their foreheads touching. The tag indicated the blonde was Arabella.
Their faces were so close that it almost looked like they were about to kiss. The sun lit them up from behind, streaking their hair. Rowan Harris was the name on the photographer’s account.
When Ciara clicked on Rowan’s photo grid, she saw that Arabella was one of the few guest stars in Rowan’s photos. The rest were just Rowan hers
elf. In one, they were taking a bath together, both wearing black dresses that clung to their bodies, covered in suds. There was something mesmerizing about these photos, a remoteness to their beauty that seemed otherworldly.
Ciara was snapped out of her trance by a white plastic bag dropping onto her desk, and she looked up to see Michael.
She pulled out her earbuds, and horns blared from them.
“Salt and pepper tofu, as requested,” said Michael.
“Ah, thank you.” Her stomach rumbled as the scent hit her nose, and she immediately started opening the container.
Michael dropped down at his desk next to her and opened a container of rice. “I spoke to Arabella’s husband. I’m going over to interview him in the morning. Do you want to come?”
“Yes, absolutely.” She was intensely curious about Arabella now. “I spoke to Arabella’s PhD advisor. He said she was brilliant, nearly done with her dissertation. He was shocked that I would even ask about mental illness. If she were suicidal and ingested a poison on purpose, you’d think a psychology professor, of all people, might notice the warning signs ahead of time.”
“Did he know of anyone who might have been competitive with her? Or angry?”
She shrugged. “There was another PhD candidate she’d gotten into an argument with about counseling methods or something, and they both accused each other of being incompetent in a public argument. But that woman has been in San Francisco for weeks.”
Gripped by hunger, Ciara dipped her scallion pancake in the soy sauce. It was just the right mixture of salty and crispy, with the faintest hint of sweetness. Harvard Square’s China Express deserved a Nobel Prize for this. “I just found these photos of her with this Instagram chick. Maybe they were romantically involved? They’re in a bath together.”
Michael leaned over the divider and shrugged. “The popular Instagram models often have vaguely sexual poses like that with other women—hanging out on beds together, covered in soap, straddling each other, that kind of thing.” He cleared his throat. “Not that I’m an expert in that area.”
She quirked a smile. “Right. What did the coroner say?”
“Inconclusive. Irritated stomach lining, which can suggest poison, but not a particular type. We still won’t know anything definite until we get the toxicology report.”
As she ate, she clicked Rowan’s Instagram profile again, which featured a tasteful nude photo on a bed, Rowan’s nipples just barely concealed by her fingers. The image had garnered over a hundred thousand likes. It was immediately apparent to Ciara why she had so many followers. The woman knew how to take a selfie.
It took her a moment to realize that Michael was staring over the divider, chewing as he stared transfixed at the picture.
“This was Arabella’s friend,” Ciara explained. “Arabella hardly had any photos of herself online, but Rowan has six of them.”
As Ciara scrolled down the page, she glimpsed images of the Harvard campus and luxurious hotel rooms. Several pictures featured the Eiffel Tower. The photos were a combination of sex appeal and privilege. Arabella, as a gorgeous elite student, was the perfect prop.
Ciara scrolled down to a photo of Rowan sitting on Arabella’s lap on an upholstered antique sofa, flanked on either side by rows of bookshelves. White ceilings arched above them, chandeliers hanging from the ceiling. Creamy white light streamed over them from the right of the photo.
The photo had been taken at the Boston Athenæum, a private library nearly as old as the country itself.
Ciara could not tear her gaze away from that picture, and she felt a strange tug, a yearning to part of that world. “I know this place. My twin sister Jess loved it. We went on a tour ages ago. It was the place where Hawthorne and John Quincy Adams read their morning newspapers. It was so old that they used an ‘æ’ in the name, and a half-number in its address, like some kind of Harry Potter portal.” She cocked her head. “It looks like Arabella was a prop for this other girl’s whole elitism vibe. Arabella was English, a Harvard student… It’s all very old-money Boston. Like sexy twenty-something Brahmins. It’s actually really compelling.”
“Charles!” A wiry man with pale skin poked his head in the door from across the room. “You didn’t get me any lunch? I’m hurt.” He grinned, then closed the door.
Michael let out an audible sigh.
“Charles?” asked Ciara.
Michael shrugged. “Everyone calls me Charles.”
“Why?”
Michael scratched his forehead. “They think it sounds particularly English, I think. Like Prince Charles.”
She swallowed a mouthful of spicy tofu. “That’s stupid as f—” She stopped herself. Be lovelier. “That’s stupid.”
“You and I are the only ones who think that.”
“If we’re going to give you a patronizing English nickname, how about Cromwell? Did you know he took all the Maypoles down in London? Killed the theaters too. Burned a bunch of Catholics in a church. He was terrible.”
“You know, I don’t really like that any better, funnily enough.”
“Well, you don’t get to choose your own nickname.” Lovelier, Ciara. “You know what, forget that. We were talking about Arabella. What did her husband say when you spoke to him on the phone?”
“He mentioned the laptop theft. He called her paranoid, hysterical about it. Maybe psychotic. She thought people were after her. Paranoia lined up a little with my impressions of her, but she didn’t seem mentally ill. Her language was focused and logical. She seemed distraught to me, but not mentally disorganized.”
“Maybe her paranoia was justified.” Ciara leaned back in her chair. “Don’t you think it’s a bit strange that the guy calls his recently deceased wife psychotic?”
“I’m trying to keep an open mind until I meet him.”
“Of course. But it seems…” Ciara’s taste buds were exploding with garlic and chili peppers, and sweat beaded on her forehead. She tended to order the hottest dish possible—the ones with the five chili peppers symbol. And China Express had succeeded in bringing her a dish that gave her a true endorphin rush, burning the inside of her mouth with a euphoric surge. “It seems insensitive to point it out that way. And let’s not forget he works in a chemistry lab, where they’re experts in toxic substances.”
“Of course he’s a suspect. Statistically, as her husband, he’s the person most likely to hurt her. We know that. No known history of domestic violence in his case, but he’s still the most likely. And psychosis would be immediately obvious to everyone around her. Her advisor would have seen signs of it. It would show up in her writing. Delusions, grandiosity, schizophasia—”
Ciara’s eyebrows rose. “I don’t even know what that is. Why do you sound like you could be teaching a class in this topic?”
“Schizophasia is word salad. Using words because they rhyme or have some other tangential associations rather than conveying something meaningful.”
“Okay. How do you know that?”
“Med school dropout. I wanted to be a psychiatrist at one point.”
She had a million more questions now. Why leave medical school? Why come to the U.S. in the first place? But if he’d wanted her to know, he probably would have volunteered the information.
She turned back to the laptop. Forcing herself to focus, she narrowed her eyes at the photo of Rowan and Arabella in the library. It was hard to reconcile the image of Arabella in the photo—wispy-haired and ethereal, angelic—with someone dying alone in a hospital room, vomiting herself to death.
If she’d been poisoned, one of two things had led her there: the mental anguish that would lead a person to take her own life, or a complete and utter betrayal, probably by someone she knew. That level of human suffering—whether it was evil or despair—had to leave behind a presence.
Michael sighed. “I should have waited until I was done eating before going through the autopsy report again.”
Ciara slid her container of tofu onto his desk. “
Try this, then. It’s one hundred percent corpse-free.”
“You make it sound so delightful the way you describe it. You should be in food marketing.” Despite his sarcasm, he speared a square of tofu. After one bite, his eyes started watering, and he clamped his hand over his mouth. He snatched his glass of water off the table.
“I forgot to mention the chili peppers,” said Ciara. “I forgot English people only like bland food.”
And there it was, Ciara thought. Her unfailing ability to make people dislike her by revealing her distinctly unlovely personality.
Well, it didn’t matter. She was good at her job, and that was why they’d hired her. Not to make friends. Even if she couldn’t always explain her reasoning, her instincts were on point.
While Michael coughed and chugged down a pint of water, she turned back to Rowan’s Instagram. As Ciara browsed through the photos, a pattern started to emerge in her mind. One person had liked every single one of Rowan’s photos: Adam Green, Arabella’s husband.
And even more interesting, he’d left a heart emoji on her nude—after his wife had died.
“Michael. I don’t think Adam is particularly upset about his wife’s death. In fact, I think he has something of a crush.”
Thirteen
Well into her second bottle of wine, Rowan stared at Arabella’s Facebook wall, at the stream of tributes that flooded her page.
Arabella—miss you forever xoxo
Gone too soon, Bella.
Even in the middle of the night, photos were popping up every few moments—Arabella at her graduation from Oxford, hugging a friend on a city street, standing on a hill overlooking a city, wearing a long floral dress. Rowan supposed it was morning already in the U.K.
Rowan found herself shaking, but the tears weren’t streaming down her cheeks like they should be. It wasn’t grief she felt—something more like fear. When she closed her eyes, her mind flooded with images of death—grey skin, blue lips, veins vivid beneath pale skin. Arabella’s face, the color of ashes. The people she admired would wither and die around her…
