Enjoy my eulogy? Truly, no one but you is qualified to deliver such an epic elegy, a timeless remembrance of my early exit, but I feared you wouldn’t get around to it in a timely manner. The fire department should be getting in touch with you very shortly (if they have not already done so) regarding my untimely departure, and you’ll be expected to go forward with my funeral very soon, but I thought I would cut to the chase, head things off at the pass, jump the gun. I expect Marlon wants to get back to the Sunshine State (wait, that’s Florida, the land of his birth. What is California? Google says: the Golden State. Our sun-kissed golden boy), so you’ll have to get cracking on the arrangements. Thankfully, we don’t have much family to notify. And the locals were already sharpening their pitchforks and marching on the vineyard; I’ve saved them the trouble of setting me on fire. They’ll be waiting at the top of the drive to say a very unfond farewell. If you please, I would like you to sing something really awful. Like “Danny Boy” or “Wind Beneath My Wings.” I’d like Mom to wear something black and matronly, please, and I’d like the whole thing to be as campy as possible. White lilies, somber faces, the works, Ava dear. I know your secretly ironic aesthetic is up to the task. If you need inspiration, just ask Wyatt. He’ll unwittingly provide you with all the material you need. In the meantime, enjoy this little audio clip.
Never forget,
Z is for Zelda
I play the file from Arcade Fire’s Funeral that she has sent along with her email as I head back down 414 to town. We listened to this song, “Crown of Love,” in high school, sharing one pair of earbuds branching from our black iPod. I park in the lot behind the station. I refuse to get another ticket; God only knows how many Zelda’s racked up. Before hopping out of the truck, I check Zelda’s phone again: nothing. I tuck the phone into the glove compartment of the truck. I don’t want it to ring while I’m talking to the police; that could make for an awkward explanation.
The same young cop greets me in the reception area and ushers me into a windowless room. He offers me a Coke, which I accept, and I twiddle my thumbs for a few minutes while I wait for the officer in charge of my sister’s case. I slurp the cool liquid, reflecting not for the first time that it is some sort of magical elixir that cures hangovers. When someone finally enters the room, I’m close to nodding off, but I snap to attention. I hate cops, but not as much as Zelda did. Does.
“Ava Antipova?” he asks me brusquely. He’s a squat, balding man with a substantial potbelly.
“One and the same. My father, Marlon, said you wanted to ask me a few questions? About Zelda.”
“That’s right. I’m Officer Healy, in charge of your sister’s case. We’re just trying to get a little information on where she was during her final days—”
“So you’re pretty sure she was the one in the barn?” I interrupt.
The officer clears his throat. “Well, yes, ma’am, at the moment that seems the most likely. We’ve spoken to some people who’ve established that Ms. Antipova—Zelda—slept in the barn regularly, and the text message she sent shortly before the fire began seems to confirm that she intended to sleep there that night—”
“—but the doors were locked, and the fire burned a touch too quickly to suit y’all,” I finish for him.
“Well, in a manner of speaking, yeah. I don’t want to leap to conclusions, or for anybody else to, for that matter, but we think we may be looking at a case of arson, and possibly homicide.”
“Lemme guess—your prime suspect is this Jason guy. The one she texted?” I can only imagine what the poor sucker did to Zelda to have her framing him for murder. Maybe he’d been giving her the silent treatment too.
The cop looks at me with a perceptible shred of dislike. I can see he doesn’t like me taking the wind out of his sails, deflating his brilliant deductions, but it’s hard for me to feel impressed by a guy who’s trotting around the dance floor exactly as my sister has choreographed. Then again, it’s probably not fair to blame him for that; he doesn’t have a lifetime of experience with Zelda’s games, and he has no reason to suspect that she’s playing him now.
“He is a candidate, yes. We’d like to find him, but we don’t have much information to work with. No last name, and the contact details your sister had in her phone were linked to a TracFone registered in your name.”
I sit up straight at this. “I’m listening,” I tell him.
“We understand that you’ve been living in France for the last twenty-one months? Paris?” He consults a sheet of paper in his file. I suspect this gesture comes from watching cop dramas, rather than from a genuine need to remind himself of one piece of information.
“Grad school,” I answer with a nod.
“What do you study?”
“Comparative literature.”
“Oh? And what do you compare, exactly?” He grins, pleased with his joke. I don’t answer. “But you originally studied viniculture? Here at Cornell?” He consults his sheet again, then looks up at me with a quizzical expression, expecting an explanation.
“Viticulture. I had an identity crisis. Switched gears.”
“And they let you do that? Without any, well, background?”
“The school I go to in Paris isn’t especially particular about that sort of thing. A college degree and a check for tuition pretty much sealed the deal. One of the reasons I picked it. That, and it was an ocean away from my family. And the wine’s better.”
The cop smiles at me thinly and scribbles something in his notebook. “And you haven’t returned home at all during that time?”
“That’s right.”
“The TracFone was purchased three months ago, right after your sister came to visit you in Paris—”
“Wait, what?” I shake my head at him. “Zelda never came to Paris,” I say, my eyes wide.
Healy frowns at his file and pulls out a printout. “We have records showing that she purchased a plane ticket using your mother’s credit card, and that she used the same credit card to pay for a hotel in Paris, just three months ago. She was there for four days.” He looks at me suspiciously, and I can tell he suspects I’m lying.
“She didn’t tell me,” I say. “Seriously.” I read the address of the hotel: Hôtel Victoires Opéra, on rue Montorgueil, less than two minutes away from my apartment. Zelda, what were you doing there? Spying on me? “The hotel is near where I lived—live—but she never told me she was coming, and I didn’t meet her. I haven’t spoken to Zelda in twenty-six months. I don’t even know how she knew where to find me.” I’m rattled, but I don’t want Healy to know.
“Two years?” he asks.
“It was a boy thing. Just…a sibling rivalry that got out of hand.”
“How out of hand?”
Great, I think, I’ve just added myself to the suspect list. No doubt as Zelda wanted. “I just didn’t want to talk to her anymore. I needed space.”
Healy nods and makes a note, looking very serious. “Okay. Well. She bought two phones after she returned from France, one in your name and one in hers, and canceled her iPhone contract with Verizon. She had apparently been using the TracFone since then, and we suspect that she gave the one registered in your name to this Jason kid and instructed him to text her only from that phone. Any ideas why she would do that?”
“None at all, Officer. Zelda could be a little eccentric.”
“It makes it that much more difficult for us to find this Jason.”
“I imagine that has something to do with it,” I offer sweetly.
He stares at me down his swollen nose, dislike sneaking back into his expression. “Were you aware that there were some financial problems going on with your family’s vineyard?” he asks, his tone somewhat harsh.
“Like I said, I haven’t been home, and Zelda and I haven’t spoken. I just found out about the loans yesterday.”
“Apparently, Zelda Antipova made her first payment on a substantial loan just yesterday at the credit union here in Watkins Glen, which we thoug
ht was very strange,” he says.
I can’t help turning mildly pink. “That was me, obviously. I wanted to know how much she was in for, and I didn’t think the bank would be allowed to tell me. So I used Zelda’s ID. Evidently, she’s been having some money issues,” I say. “You know how to make a small fortune from a vineyard in upstate New York?”
“Start with a large one,” he answers, not looking up. There isn’t a person in this county who hasn’t heard or told that joke. “We think she may have gotten rid of the iPhone to cut costs, save some money. We also think she’s gotten into some other…side businesses.” I know this won’t be good. “She made several cash deposits in the months before she died, a couple hundred dollars each, and, with the exception of the trip to Paris, she hasn’t used a debit or credit card in six months. Any idea what she’s been living off?”
“I bet you want me to say ‘cash,’ ” I answer obediently. Increasingly, I feel like I’m here to be informed, rather than to offer up information.
“That is what we’re thinking. Does the name Holly Whitaker mean anything to you?” Healy asks suddenly.
I pause.
“Nope,” I say.
“Well, she just posted a photo on Facebook a little while ago, tagged your sister in it. In fact, she’s one of your sister’s most active Facebook friends.”
“How did you guys get into her Facebook account? Isn’t that illegal?”
“Trent, the kid at the desk, he’s apparently Facebook friends with Zelda. He’s been looking at her page.”
I am actually impressed with this. I bet Zelda wasn’t counting on that. Then again, in this neck of the woods, you’d have to be an idiot to forget that everybody knows somebody who knows more about you than you thought. Healy seemed almost bashful as he told me this, though.
“Good sleuthing, Detective. But no, I don’t know Holly…Whitaker, did you say? We didn’t go to high school together, and I’m not friends with my sister on Facebook.”
“What did you say that ‘sibling rivalry’ was all about?”
“I didn’t.” We stare each other down. I win.
“And you’ve never heard of anyone named Jason? Anyone around town? From school?”
I’ve been trying to think of any Jasons living in Hector, but the only one I can think of is probably not going to be useful.
“There’s this guy Jason Street? Used to play football for the high school, but I think he’s in a wheelchair now,” I say innocently. Let the cops ask around town for him. Zelda would be tickled. Healy writes the name dutifully in his notebook, and I suppress a giggle.
“And there’s this other guy, I don’t know his last name. He’s always wearing this yellow fleece coat. He’s really into sailing.”
The cop squints at me—perhaps I’ve pushed it too far. “Okay, okay,” he says, nodding. “So you’d had no contact with your sister? You wouldn’t be able to tell us if she’d been behaving strangely in the last few weeks or months? Or if she’d had any disagreements with anyone?”
“Like I said, we hadn’t been speaking. She lived with our mother, who’s…not doing all that well. You’re welcome to come out to the house to question her, but I should warn you, she thinks I’m Zelda and has some difficulty keeping track of reality.” Healy looks at me in confusion. “She has dementia,” I explain. “You didn’t notice?”
“She was heavily sedated the night of the fire. We think she may even have been given extra sleeping aids that night, either accidentally or…” He obviously doesn’t want me contemplating the possibility that my sister was murdered, but it’s very clear that that’s exactly what he’s thinking. Zelda will have them all tied up in knots by the end of the day, no doubt. I wonder what other trails she’s left for them—us—to find.
“I see.” I wait silently for a few beats, expecting him to go on, but he just stares at me.
“You really look just like her,” he finally says.
“Funny thing about twins. Is there anything else I can do for you?” I ask.
“I think those are most of the questions we needed to clear up with you. Now we just need a DNA sample from you. We’re going to be testing the, er, human remains, to confirm that they’re Zelda’s….”
“Do you have any reason to believe that they’re not?” I try to sound hopeful. I know they’re not hers.
“At the moment, no, we don’t. I’m sorry, ma’am.” He pats my hand gently, and I tug my arm away before I can stop myself. He blushes, and I drop my eyes. “I’ll just, well, send our forensics guy in.” He scooches his chair back, his big belly wobbling, and lumbers to the door. “Thanks for your help. Oh, here’s my card,” he says, remembering, and hands one over. “Please call me if you think of anything.”
I nod, ashamed of my rudeness. I don’t quite feel like myself. That’s not how Ava behaves, I chide myself.
The forensic tech comes in a moment later and swabs my inner cheek wordlessly, not making eye contact. He wears gloves, and our interaction is almost robotic. I like that. I like not having to smile at him or let him touch me anywhere without latex between our two skins.
When I’m finished with the DNA swab, I make my way through the police station. The desk guy—Trent—is typing into the desktop computer, and he looks up as I leave. My hand is on the door when he calls out.
“Ms. Antipova? Ava?”
I pause. “What? Do you need me to answer more questions?”
“No, ma’am, it’s not that, it’s just…well, your sister was a really neat girl, and I just wanted to say, well, to say I’m real sorry for your loss.”
“You knew Zelda?” I ask with a smirk. This kid does not really seem like her type.
“We were, uh, friends,” he says, turning a violent shade of crimson, and I understand immediately that they were not just friends. Maybe she hadn’t fucked him, but he certainly thought she might.
“Oh. Well, thanks for your condolences,” I say with a polite nod, turning back to the glass door.
“You really look a lot like her,” he calls after me as I step back outside into the sun. I wave goodbye without turning around. I know.
It’s already getting warm out here. I shut my eyes briefly, to think. Oh, Zelda. Fucking a cop. Is that how you were getting away with the drugs? Were you selling or just using? And if you weren’t selling, where the hell were you getting enough cash to live on? And Paris? Was it me you came looking for, or was it for some other, darker motive? I sigh, unable to ponder any of this in the heat.
Back in the truck, my head is pounding, my hangover catching up with me at last. I want to look at Zelda’s phone, but I’m afraid to, here in the parking lot. Still, I’m too curious to see if what the cop said is true, and I open the Facebook app on Zelda’s phone. The red blip on the world icon indicates that Zelda has indeed been tagged in a new post. An hour ago, someone named Holly Whitaker tagged a photo of Zelda sitting on the deck of Silenus, big sunglasses covering much of her face. My mother is next to her, looking distant and confused, wrapped in her bathrobe and staring out at the lake. The photo is captioned “Fucked-up Family Fun with the Antipovas.” I scour the picture for any clues to when it was taken, but it’s just a summery photo of my mother and sister sitting on the deck. I look at Holly’s page and see a series of photos, all featuring her wearing skimpy get-ups, looking high as a kite. I don’t recognize her from high school. I wonder if she doesn’t know that Zelda’s supposed to be dead or if she’s too stoned to realize how weird the post seems if she does.
I want to take a nap, but I desperately don’t want to go back to the house with Marlon and Opal and Nadine, all waiting for me there, each of them wanting to devour me with their special brand of neediness. I want my goddamn sister to be there, so we can roll our eyes and laugh at them and snort when they don’t understand our mockery. I need to sleep, so I drive to Zelda’s trailer. It looks lonely and cozy, perched on the hill amid the rows of grapevines.
I open the door and breathe in Zelda smel
ls. I tug the mismatched curtains over the living-area windows to block out any light. It’s hot and stuffy in the trailer, but I don’t care. I start poking around, knowing it has to be here somewhere. Checking her usual hidey-holes reveals nothing, so I search the fridge and freezer, the top drawer, the frame of the ugly Pomeranian painting. I turn circles in Zelda’s hotbox of a home, annoyed with her and with myself for not being able to figure her out.
But then I see the dolls, Addy and Josefina, tucked away on a bookshelf, staring at me with their blank, baleful eyes. Let’s see, would Zelda pin it on the black girl or the Mexican? That, of course, is the wrong question. She would pin it on me. I reach for Josefina, and when I take her from the shelf, a familiar small box falls to the floor. I pick it up, the edges smooth and worn. Zelda has had this box since we were thirteen, one of the last gifts our father gave her before his flight to California. In high school, Zelda called it her “box of false promises.”
I open it up and am only mildly surprised to see a needle, spoon, and stretch of elastic nestled in with a slender bag of snowy powder. Zelda was always going to try heroin eventually. This part of the world is having a minor opiate renaissance: Rich white kids get hooked on Oxy, and heroin is a cheaper fix. I wonder if Zelda waited until I was gone or if she was using before. I’d like to write off her whole dalliance with Wyatt by that simple explanation: She was high. But that wouldn’t be the whole story. I’m unwilling to think about the whole story. In fact, I never want to think about it again.
Heroin isn’t what I’m after, though. Zelda always said that deep down I was conservative, timid, that I would never live wildly, even though I fancied myself a bohemian. I resented it then, but she was right. I’m surprised that my search for Xanax comes up empty. That used to be one of Zaza’s favorite come-down drugs. Instead, I settle for a Valium, which is almost as good. She has lots, probably lifted from my mother’s supply. There is a zip-lock bag filled with them, clearly labeled with a Sharpie. I swallow two, take off my clothes, and crawl into her bed, waiting to fall asleep. The exquisite prandial sun is beating violently down on the white tin roof of the trailer, and just as I’m drifting off, I imagine I can hear it sizzling, crackling, scorching.
Dead Letters Page 11
