Keep Her Safe

by Sophie Hannah

  With this news, the media erupted all over again. If Kristie was so desperate for a child, said some, then surely this gave her a powerful motive for murdering Melody, who could never be her own. Others argued the opposite: Melody was the closest thing Kristie Reville had to a child of her own; it would therefore make no sense for Kristie to murder her. Either way, Kristie Reville suddenly had an alibi for March 2, 2010. No one could think of any reason for Victor Soutar to lie, especially since his exposure as a charlatan who faked success stories and references from women who didn’t exist put an end to his lucrative business. Kristie Reville confirmed his account of her day and admitted she’d lied because she was afraid of her husband finding out. She was not sure, she said, that Jeff wouldn’t regard her “treatment” from Soutar as a form of sexual infidelity as well as a betrayal on account of the secrecy involved.

  Soutar confirmed that Kristie Reville had left his apartment in tears on March 2, 2010, after a long heart-to-heart. “Two weeks before I saw her that day, she’d turned forty. I think she saw it as a milestone. If she wasn’t pregnant by the age of forty, maybe she never would be. Women’s fertility declines fast after forty, they say. Kristie asked me if there was anything I could do beyond what I was already doing for her, and she said if there wasn’t then maybe she’d stop coming to me.”

  Soutar persuaded her to agree to at least one more session, but he was unable to lift her spirits. This perhaps explained why Jeff Reville’s colleague, Nate Appleyard, saw her with red, puffy eyes that day.

  Asked about any blood on Kristie’s arm and hand, Soutar said he was certain there had been no blood on Kristie’s arm when she left his apartment.

  Asked if she had confided in anybody at all about her fertility massage treatments from Victor Soutar, Kristie Reville at first said no, but Larry Beadman did not believe her. He pressed her on this point, but she maintained her silence. The answer, surprisingly, came from Soutar. When the police asked him the same question, he told them Kristie had mentioned to him that she’d confided in one close friend: Annette Chapa. Annette confirmed this, and finally Kristie admitted that she had told Annette but no one else. To explain her lies, she later said in an interview with Bonnie Juno, “It sounds crazy, but I just felt it was bad enough me not telling Jeff. If I admitted to telling anyone else, it’d make me keeping it from Jeff sound so much worse. I had no job of my own—not a real job. Most of what I paid Vic was money Jeff had earned.”

  Shortly after the story of Kristie’s alibi from Victor Soutar broke, a school parent, Shannon Pidd, came forward. She remembered seeing Kristie Reville’s Toyota Camry in the school parking lot, with Kristie and Melody inside it. Interviewed later by Bonnie Juno, Pidd broke down in tears and admitted she had not “suddenly remembered” this—she had remembered from the start, but been reluctant to contradict the general view that Kristie and Melody had not been there that day.

  When Juno yelled at her, “What were you thinking? How could you withhold such important evidence?” Pidd agreed her behavior was reprehensible but said, “I guess I just assumed I’d remembered wrong. If everyone else was sure they weren’t there, I figured I might have had the days mixed up.”

  Crucially, Pidd did not see Kristie or Melody get out of the car that morning. Both were still in it when Pidd and her son left the parking lot and headed toward the school building. Asked by detectives if she’d been able to gauge the mood of either Kristie or Melody, Pidd said, “Kristie was on her phone, and Melody looked as if she was just sitting there waiting—pretty bored, really.”

  Bonnie Juno, when she returned to the air after two months away, was eager to talk about the bloodstained white sock seen by Nate Appleyard in Kristie Reville’s car and later found in Melody’s schoolbag in the grass behind the gas station. Juno had a question and she wanted an answer: if Kristie hadn’t abducted and killed Melody (and Juno believed she hadn’t), how did that bloodstained sock end up in Kristie’s car?

  On Justice with Bonnie on August 24, 2010, Juno said, “There’s only one way it could have gotten into that car: if Annette Chapa put it there in a deliberate attempt to frame Kristie Reville for Melody’s murder. Think about it: Kristie had confided in nobody but Annette Chapa about her sessions with Victor Soutar. No one in the whole world knew Kristie’s car would be parked outside his apartment that day—apart from Annette Chapa.” Juno and Lexi Waldman, the Chapas’ lawyer, had a heated argument on Juno’s show in which Waldman accused Juno of being “the only one desperate to frame innocent people in this case.”

  By now Bonnie Juno was more unpopular than ever, but it was clear she had no intention of backing down from her stated position. The interviewee she had promised, whose testimony would convince the world of Annette and Naldo Chapa’s guilt, did not materialize as quickly as Juno had implied, and several people—including guests on her own show—accused her of being a fraud and a liar. Meanwhile, Juno berated Detective Larry Beadman for the failure of the police to do a thorough search of Annette and Naldo Chapa’s property and their two cars. Beadman told her, live on Justice with Bonnie, that she didn’t know what she was talking about, and provided the two dates on which the Chapa home had been searched.

  Juno argued that these searches did not count, for a different reason in each case. The first search of the family property took place the day after Melody disappeared, when detectives had hopes of finding her safe and sound, so it was as much a search for a child who was still alive as for evidence of a murder. The second search was carried out once Kristie Reville was already under heavy suspicion, therefore the detectives searching the Chapa home were unlikely to have been particularly thorough, given that their suspicions at that stage were focused elsewhere.

  Detective Beadman called Juno’s theories “laughably weak” and accused her of inventing a story that suited her need to persecute and vilify others, and trying to force it to fit the facts. He made it clear that there were no plans to search the Chapa home a third time. By this point he and his team were treating the case as a suspected murder. He said, “Even if Annette and Naldo Chapa are guilty of murdering their daughter—and I personally believe it’s a monstrous insult to innocent, twice-bereaved parents to suggest they are—anyone with a functioning brain who’d killed a child in March would have used the five months since then to remove any incriminating evidence. I don’t believe Naldo and Annette Chapa are stupid any more than I believe they’re killers. If Kristie and Jeff Reville are innocent, that does not mean the Chapas are guilty.”

  Ingrid Allwood put forward an interesting theory at around this time. Interviewed by Mark Johnston on CNN, Allwood said, “Whatever he claims, I believe Detective Beadman and his colleagues would by now have searched the Chapa home again if it weren’t for the aggressive approach adopted by Bonnie Juno. For a smart woman, she’s acting real dumb, if you want my true opinion. By upbraiding the cops for what they aren’t doing, when for all she knows they might have been just about to do it, she’s antagonizing them quite needlessly. Last time Larry Beadman went on her show, there was utter loathing in his eyes. I think there’s a real danger that his determination to reject anything that comes from Juno could lead to vital aspects of this case being overlooked.” When asked what these vital elements might be, Allwood replied that it was not her place to speculate. Asked if she, like Bonnie Juno, suspected the Chapas of murdering their daughter, she said, “I’m happier keeping my suspicions to myself when I can’t prove anything either way. I’d also like to remind people that Melody Chapa’s body has not been found. We still don’t know for certain that this poor little missing girl is dead.”

  The police were slow to drop the charges against Kristie and Jeff Reville—something Bonnie Juno took them to task for on numerous occasions. And then an episode of Justice with Bonnie changed everything.

  5

  October 10, 2017

  I can feel Tarin’s impatience as Riyonna stares at the computer screen in front of her, shaking her head every few seco
nds. Zellie, by Tarin’s side, is listless. She doesn’t want to be here with her mother and me, pursuing this stupid Melody business. There’s no doubt in her mind that the whole thing’s a giant waste of time.

  Tarin’s frustration is more purposeful. She taps the little bronze Buddha statue on the top of its head, like a drumbeat, as if that might make something happen quickly. It’s killing her that all she can see is the back of the monitor. What’s Riyonna looking at that’s making her eyes widen like that? I want to know, too, but apparently not as much as Tarin does. She’ll march around to the staff side of the desk if Riyonna doesn’t tell us something soon.

  I don’t like the way she’s made herself the driving force in all of this. She was the one who told Riyonna the full story, more succinctly than I could have. I feel as if she’s intruded on something that’s mine, which makes no sense given that I’d never heard of Melody Chapa until today.

  “I sincerely apologize,” says Riyonna, blinking furiously, bereft once again, thanks to me. “I’m so dreadfully sorry, really I am. This whole mess is my fault. I sent Mrs. Burrows to the wrong room, and now I can’t remember the number, and I can’t find the information you need on our system. Maybe someone else could, someone who knew how to look for data that’s been deleted, but from what I can see, it’s just . . . not here.” She shakes her head again, as if she can’t understand it. “It should be . . .” Her voice tails off.

  “Wait, what do you mean?” asks Tarin. “Are you saying the system ought to have a record of the mistake you made, but someone’s erased it?”

  Riyonna looks stricken.

  “She can’t tell you that without being unprofessional,” Zellie says.

  “Oh, screw unprofessional,” says Tarin. Now she’s playing with the green-bean plant in the yellow pot. Any second now she’s going to rip off an entire bean with her sharp nails. “No, I mean screw professional. I want to know what’s going on here. What kind of freaky resort is this? Murdered girls apparently wandering around, people with cancer who’d be better off in the hospital, crazy octogenarians staggering around like zombies . . .”

  “So sensitive, Mother.” Zellie turns away in disgust. “So you’re a doctor now, who knows what medical treatment people need? If you say one more thing about Hayley, I swear . . . Can’t sick people go on vacation? And old people, for that matter?”

  “Why, yes, they can—at the Five-Star Resort of the Zombies, where the brain-dead play Marco Polo in the pool until you want to kill yourself, and where an automatic side dish of guacamole comes with every freakin’ meal, unsolicited. Even steak. Even pancakes and maple syrup.” Tarin leans in and puts her face right in front of Riyonna’s. “Are you going to tell us what’s going on, or what?”

  Riyonna has started to cry. I’m fairly sure that wouldn’t have happened if I’d been able to deal with this on my own, without Tarin in tow.

  “What?” Tarin asks Zellie. “I didn’t swear. I said ‘freakin’.’”

  “I’m going to be real honest with you, Mrs. Fry,” Riyonna says shakily. “I don’t know what’s going on any more than you do, and it’s scaring me a little.” She wipes her eyes. “The system wouldn’t record anything as a mistake—it wouldn’t flag up any sort of error—but it does keep a record of all the check-ins and checkouts dating back several months. What ought to be here is the information that Mrs. Burrows was checked into that room and then, very soon after, checked out of it. If that were here, I could find the room number—but it’s not here, and I can’t think why not.”

  “Could be the system’s not working properly,” I say. “That might also explain why the room appeared as available when it wasn’t.”

  “Maybe I should say . . .” Riyonna begins hesitantly. “I couldn’t tell you the room number even if I found it. That kind of information’s confidential.”

  “Even though I went to the room? I could easily have remembered the number.”

  “But you didn’t, and . . . well, as you unfortunately discovered, it’s another guest’s room.” She shrugs apologetically.

  “Typical bullshit,” says Tarin briskly. “Why bother looking for the number if you had no intention of telling us what it was? Are you sure you didn’t delete whatever record ought to be on the system to make like your screwup never happened?”

  “Yes, ma’am,” says Riyonna tearfully.

  “If she’d deleted it, why would she tell you it ought to be here and isn’t?” says Zellie.

  “This is getting us nowhere.” Tarin slaps the palms of her hands on the countertop. She turns to me. “You said it was on the third floor. How sure are you?”

  “Completely.”

  “Let’s go, then. Once you get up there, you might remember. Something might jog your memory.”

  I open my mouth, then close it again.

  “What?” Tarin leans in to peer at me. “What is it?”

  Of course. I can find the room easily, even without knowing the number. I feel stupid for taking so long to think of it—at risk of being added to Tarin’s list of brain-dead and otherwise flawed specimens littering the resort with their presence.

  “I know what I did when I got out of the lift—how I walked. I was in the lift on the left, not the right—there are two side by side. I came out and turned immediately left. Not just left as in I veered left, but left and back, to kind of behind where the lift was. And it was a dead end, I remember that. The end of the corridor. I couldn’t have walked past the room to other rooms.”

  “Let’s go,” says Tarin. To Riyonna she says, “Once we have the room number, we’ll be back to find out who’s in there.”

  “Mrs. Fry, I’m afraid there’s no way I can share confidential information about—”

  “Just make sure no more information gets wiped before then. And get those detectives back here.”

  “Many people have access to the hotel’s network.” Riyonna sounds panicked. “I’m not the only one. But . . . I can’t understand what’s going on, I really can’t!”

  This is awful. I should be thinking about my own children, not Melody Chapa. My own new baby—not a dead American girl.

  I don’t belong here. All of this . . . it’s someone else’s nightmare, not mine.

  “Mrs. Burrows, are you okay?” Riyonna’s kind voice breaks into my silent panic.

  “I . . . yes, I’m fine.” Or rather, I’m English, so that’s how I’m always going to answer that question.

  Tarin jabs me with her elbow. “Come on,” she says. “Third floor.”

  Zellie sighs as she trails after us toward the lifts. As we step inside the first one that comes, Tarin sighs and says, “This is going to be disappointing.”

  “Why?” I ask. Doesn’t she trust my memory? I can hardly blame her, if so. I’m terrified that we’ll get up there and I won’t have a clue. The blue light moves from the 1 to the 2 above the lift doors.

  “You didn’t notice anything, down there in the lobby, before we got on the elevator?” Tarin asks me.

  “Like what?”

  “Yeah, like what, Mother? Let’s hear more of your genius observations, please.”

  Tarin smirks. “You’ll see,” she says. “Both of you.”

  Automatically, without thinking—that’s the best way to do it. The doors open and I step out, pretending to myself that I’m alone, praying Tarin will keep quiet while I get my bearings.

  It’s late, you’re exhausted, you’ve just driven from the airport . . .

  This is easy. I remember. I stood here, looked at the numbers and arrows painted on the walls, realized I had to turn left, around the corner, behind . . .

  Shit. Not so easy after all.

  “What is it?” Tarin pounces.

  Out of the lift, turn left around the corner—that part is right. Definitely right. And the dead end: also correct. There’s a problem, though. There are two doors in front of me, not one. Rooms 324 and 325.

  “Aren’t you going to—”

  “Hush, Zellie. I�
��m not saying a word. Not yet. Cara? Which room was it? Which of the two?”

  “I don’t know. I . . . I don’t remember there being two doors. I only remember one.”

  “Maybe some ghostly guests have been adding on new rooms as well as erasing information from the computers,” says Zellie.

  “Obviously not,” I say. It comes out flatter and harder than I intended. “Obviously both these rooms were here last night, but I didn’t notice the second. I saw only what I needed to see: the door I needed to open to find the bed I was going to sleep in—or so I hoped. And I can’t remember which door that was. I’m sorry.”

  “You’ll be even sorrier in a second,” says Tarin. “Come here.” She beckons me back toward the lifts. When I get to where she’s standing, she says, “Okay. What do you see?”

  Tell her you’re not prepared to play games.

  “The lifts. A corridor. A gray carpet. A framed picture of the Grand Canyon on the wall.”

  “Okay, stop. How many elevators do you see? Or ‘lifts,’ as you Brits call them?”

  What’s wrong with her? Isn’t it obvious how many? “Two.”

  “Two?” Tarin squeals. “Seriously?”

  “I’m looking at two. You asked me what I could see. I know there are others behind me.”

  “Winner, winner, chicken dinner!” Tarin claps her hands together. She grabs hold of me and whirls me around. “And what do you see now? How many elevators?”

  Oh, God. I can’t believe I’ve been so stupid.

  “Two elevators this side, two that side,” says Tarin. “You remember getting out of the elevator and turning immediately sharp left into a corridor with a dead end—but look, there’s a dead end over there, too. Rooms 322 and 323—exactly the same, a mirror image. You remember you were in the elevator on the left, not the right, but there’s a left and a right on both sides. You could have come out of the one on the left on either side, turned left around the corner and found yourself in a dead end looking at two doors. I’m guessing from the look on your face that you don’t remember which side you got in on the ground floor?”