Somebody I Used to Know

by David Bell

  “What caused the fire?” Laurel asked.

  “It was an accident,” I said. “Wasn’t it?”

  “It was,” Nate said. “It was right before Halloween.”

  “And someone left a candle burning,” I said. “Right? A candle or a pumpkin, something like that caught on fire while everyone slept. That’s what I remember hearing back then.”

  Nate still looked sympathetic. “You’re right. We knew Halloween was a big party time on campus, so it’s possible the residents of the house had been drinking. No way to really tell that either with the condition of the remains.”

  “Can you stop using that word, please?” I said without thinking. The words jumped out of my mouth, as though someone else controlled my vocal cords.

  Nate looked over at me. “What word?”

  “‘Remains,’” I said. “It’s so . . . clinical. So cold.”

  “It’s an old habit,” Nate said. He shrugged, as though trying to plead his own innocence. “We use certain terms on the police force.”

  “I think we’re done,” I said, looking at Nate. “I’m sorry we took up your time. I know you’re just doing what we asked, but I’ve heard enough.”

  I pushed back my chair, but didn’t stand. Something ticked on the other side of the room. Ticking and ticking. I recognized it as the sound of a kitchen timer, counting down the minutes until Nate’s cake was ready.

  I held out my hand to Nate. “Thank you,” I said. “I see the whole picture. I really do.”

  “Can I throw out one more question?” Laurel asked Nate.

  “Come on, Laurel,” I said, my voice low. She lifted an eyebrow, a modest admonishment, so I relented. She was there for me, trying to help. “Fine. Go ahead.”

  “Was there anything else unusual about the case?” she asked. “Anything that just jumped out at you? Unanswered questions? Any dangling threads?”

  Nate considered the question. He lifted his hand to his chin and gave it a thoughtful rub. Despite my anger at Laurel and my desire to get out of Nate’s house, I found myself anticipating his response.

  “I’ve been thinking about that question all morning, ever since you called,” he said. “To be honest, it was all pretty cut and dried. There were witnesses who saw these kids at the party. It was a huge one, hundreds of kids. It’s hard to say who was with who and who left with who. You’ve seen the streets on a weekend night. Flocks of kids going every which way. The cops just try to maintain some semblance of order.” He raised his index finger in the air. “One of these roommates got sick at the party. I can’t remember which one. Drank too much, a witness said, and the other roommates were taking her home early to put her to bed. No surprise, the way these kids drink sometimes.”

  “Thanks,” I said quickly, still wanting to get out of there.

  But then Nate went on. “And the only other thing that ever really stuck out to me was the nine-one-one call,” he said.

  “What about it?” Laurel asked.

  Nate looked at me, as if asking for my permission to continue. He didn’t need it. He was a free person, and so was Laurel. They could talk about it all they wanted. Clinically. Objectively. Like Marissa wasn’t a real person, a person I loved. They could talk about these events as though they had happened far away, to people we didn’t know, like a plane crash in Africa or a flood in Europe. So I nodded my head, encouraging him to speak. I did want to hear it. My curiosity—my painful curiosity—controlled me.

  “It was a young woman who placed the call. It came in around one thirty or so. She said she was just walking by the house on her way home when she saw the fire. No cell phones back then, of course. She had to get to a pay phone. That’s where the call was traced to. A pay phone half a block away. I’m sure it’s gone now. You can’t find those things anywhere. But this girl made the call, and she reported the fire to the dispatcher.”

  “And?” I said. “What was so unusual about that?”

  “It was a gut thing for me. Nothing I could point to.” Nate’s hand rested on his coffee mug, which was decorated with some seagulls and read, THE OUTER BANKS IS FOR LOVERS. He turned it one way and then the other. “But the way she phrased things in the call. She said, ‘They’re in there. Oh my God, they’re in there.’”

  There was a pause, and Laurel filled it by asking the question that had already crossed my mind. “Why was that strange?”

  “It sounded personal, as though she knew the people inside.”

  “Maybe she did,” I said.

  “We put a call out for the person to come forward.” He looked at me then. “Do you remember that?”

  “I don’t,” I said.

  “I do,” Laurel said. “I figured it was just standard practice.”

  “It is,” Nate said. “We like to learn as much as we can about the caller. We’re never sure if it’s going to shed light on an investigation to know who made the call, but we try. In the immediate aftermath of the fire, we didn’t know what we were dealing with exactly. Everything was on the table. Arson. Accident. But the person—the girl who made that call—never came forward. Maybe she thought she was in trouble. Maybe she wanted to stay out of it. Maybe it was a kid who never heard we were looking for her. Some people aren’t tuned in. Back then no Facebook. No e-mail. No Twitter.”

  “So maybe this person knew the people in the fire,” I said. “It’s a college town. Lots of people know other people. What does it matter if the person who made the call knew the kids in the house?”

  “It might not matter,” Nate said. “It just stuck with me. ‘They’re in there.’ Why not, ‘There are people in there’? Or ‘There’s someone in there’? ‘They’re in there.’ Like she knew them . . . in some way. And that witness said they left the party earlier than they might have otherwise. You know college kids . . . those parties go until three or four in the morning usually.”

  “I’m about to ask a crazy question,” Laurel said.

  Nate answered before she said anything else, reading her mind. “The nine-one-one tapes from back then have all been erased. They don’t keep those things forever, especially if the case is closed.”

  “Did anyone else share your opinion about the nine-one-one call?” Laurel asked.

  “No. I mentioned it to the fire investigator. He listened, but, in the end, what could anyone do about it? This was just a hunch that the person who made that call knew the kids in the house somehow. Even saying it to you now, it seems . . . kind of odd. It’s a college town, so maybe they did know them. But then why not stay at the scene and talk to us, right? I ran it by my boss, but he didn’t want a turf war. I was told to follow the fire investigator. He died about five years ago.” He played with the North Carolina mug some more. “The case is long closed. Life goes on.”

  “Right,” I said. “It does.”

  At the door, we all shook hands, Laurel and I thanking Nate for his time.

  “If you stayed longer, you could have some cake.”

  “That’s okay. Laurel’s buying me lunch,” I said, even though talk of the fire had dampened my appetite. We stepped onto the porch, but I turned back. “I’m curious about something. You said two of the . . . people were identified with the dental records. Do you happen to remember which two?”

  Nate’s forehead creased with concentration. “I figured you might ask me that. I tried to think back.”

  “It’s okay if you don’t remember,” I said.

  “What was your girlfriend’s name?” Nate asked.

  “Marissa Minor. She was from Hanfort.”

  Nate nodded. “I remember that name.” The creases deepened on his face while he thought. It was chilly outside, but he didn’t seem to notice the cold. “The two we could positively identify were . . . Sarah Locker and . . . the other girl’s last name was Shelly or something like that.”

  “Andrea Shelly,” I said
.

  “That’s it,” Nate said. “Those were the two. Not Marissa Minor.”

  I looked at Laurel. She seemed to know what I was thinking.

  Wasn’t the whole point of the visit to Nate to put the ghosts to rest?

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  We stopped for lunch at a diner in a strip mall not far from Nate’s house. Laurel ordered an egg-white omelette and wheat toast. I ordered a hamburger, but my appetite was slow to return after the thoughts of the fire, the burned and crushed bodies, the helpless 911 call. The “remains” of four people I knew. I picked at the meal, trying to ignore the odors of brewing coffee and fried food. Silverware clanged and scraped against plates, while cooks shouted in the kitchen and conversations murmured around us.

  Laurel put down her fork abruptly and said, “I just can’t stop wondering why that girl had your name and address in her fricking pocket.”

  “That dead girl,” I said.

  “She was alive when you saw her,” she said. “She was alive with your address in her pocket, but when she saw you, she ran.”

  “Maybe she didn’t have my address yet.”

  “Could be,” she said.

  “Maybe she had my address but didn’t know what I looked like,” I said.

  “Possible.”

  Laurel was distracted. She picked up her fork and continued to eat, but I could tell she was thinking about the conversation at Nate’s.

  “I thought you wanted me to let all of this go,” I said.

  “I just don’t know where to turn next,” she said. “The police are looking into this dead girl, this Emily.”

  “Please don’t call her a set of ‘remains.’”

  Laurel stopped chewing. She reached over and squeezed my hand. “I’m glad you said something about that. Nate didn’t mean any harm, but I know it seems cold. We’re talking about people. In Marissa’s case, someone you loved very much. We all need to remember that.”

  “I wasn’t a jerk to Nate, was I?” I asked.

  “He’s a cop,” she said. “Think of how many people have treated him worse.”

  “Thanks. I think.”

  “So if the police are looking into Emily, we need to look somewhere else,” Laurel said.

  “We do? We? Does this mean you’re helping me?”

  “Of course,” she said. “You told me Marissa said she was dropping out because of money trouble. I remember she told a few other people the same thing. But you never knew of her parents having that kind of trouble. Nobody did. Quite the opposite, right? They seemed well-off?”

  “They seemed pretty comfortable,” I said. “More comfortable than my parents, and we were middle class. I took out a student loan, but Marissa never worried about that. But people can hide financial troubles. Even Heather pointed that out to me. Just because people look like they have money doesn’t mean they really have it.”

  Laurel wasn’t saying anything. She held her fork in the air.

  “What is it?” I asked.

  “Nothing. It would never work.”

  “What?” I asked again, my voice more forceful.

  She set her fork aside again and folded her hands on the table. “I was just thinking that what would really help us would be getting access to Marissa’s records at Eastland. Who knows if they even exist anymore and who knows if they say anything. But they might be able to tell us if she really was having money trouble, or if there was some other reason she decided to withdraw. Maybe she was expelled for something embarrassing. Maybe she got in some kind of trouble she didn’t want to talk about.” Laurel continued to stare at me. “If only we knew someone who had access to the highest levels of power at Eastland.”

  Then I understood what she was asking. I started shaking my head.

  “No way,” I said. “Do you want me to get arrested? For real? I’m lucky she doesn’t have a restraining order against me.”

  “I know. And I don’t want you to get arrested. For anything. Speaking of which, I bet those DNA results come back soon.”

  “I’m not worried about it,” I said.

  “Anyway, Gina’s dad is a trustee,” Laurel said. “She’s done all that fund-raising crap for Eastland, even though she didn’t go to school there. She must know some people. And her dad certainly would. Can’t you ask her? Politely?”

  “Wouldn’t that be illegal?” I asked. “To look at someone’s private records like that?”

  “Well, yes.”

  “That’s not like you, Laurel. I’ve never seen this side of you.”

  “It’s not like me, and I’m a little ashamed. But I can’t stop thinking about this. All of this. There must be something there, something we haven’t seen yet.”

  “Do you really think there is?” I asked. “You don’t think I’m crazy?”

  Laurel picked up her fork and started eating again, not answering my question. “Let’s just try to get our hands on those records.”

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  Gina agreed to meet me in a public place. Very public. She said she absolutely didn’t want me coming by her house. And she wasn’t willing to come to mine. I didn’t tell her what I wanted to talk to her about, and she didn’t ask. But she told me she had things to say to me as well, which I was both grateful for and afraid of.

  I arrived at the Irish Lion, a bar that sat between campus and downtown and attracted both students and professionals. They served Guinness on tap and fish and chips or shepherd’s pie for dinner. Gina sat at the end of the bar, sending a text, while the happy-hour crowd swelled around her. Irish music—authentic or not, I couldn’t say—played through the sound system, and the waitresses—college girls in white shirts and short black skirts—hustled through the masses, repeating the same words over and over: “Excuse me, excuse me.”

  Gina put her phone away when she saw me. “There you are.”

  She sounded like she’d just discovered a tick in her bed.

  “Here I am.”

  “Do you want to get a table?” she asked. “It’s more private. There’s one over there.” She nodded toward the back.

  “It’s up to you,” I said. “You’re the one drinking with a madman.”

  She ignored my comment and went to the table, where I ordered a pint of Guinness and Gina ordered wine. We’d originally met at an Eastland fund-raiser almost ten years earlier. I was there as an alum, and she was there because her dad, a local contractor, was a bigwig donor. I think she liked me because I wasn’t rich like all the guys she’d known growing up and because my work with the housing authority told her I liked to fight on behalf of the underdog. Gina liked a good fight. She worked as a college counselor at a private high school, and her eyes lit up when a scholarship kid from an underprivileged background was admitted to a great university. She saw each of those small victories as a chink in the armor of the Man, whoever the Man was.

  The time waiting for the drinks to arrive could only have been more awkward if we’d been naked. We both looked around the bar, letting our eyes wander to anything but the other person’s face. I wished I’d had a drink before I arrived, but I’d come straight from work.

  “Andrew’s okay?” I asked, needing something to say.

  “He’s good.”

  “Good,” I said.

  “How’s work?” she asked.

  “It’s fine. Busy. The usual. How about you?”

  “It’s going pretty well,” she said. “We’ve been hearing about a lot of acceptances, which is excellent. And some really painful rejections. I hate those.”

  “I know. You live and die with some of those kids.”

  The drinks arrived. Mercifully. I took a long sip off the top.

  “So what did you want to talk about?” Gina asked.

  “Okay,” I said. “I need your help with something, and it doesn’t have anything to do with Andrew.
It doesn’t have anything to do with us at all. So there’s that.”

  “I’m listening.”

  The music seemed to grow louder, and across the bar, a guy in a maroon turtleneck won a game of darts and started high-fiving everyone he saw. A bell rang somewhere, perhaps in honor of his great athletic feat.

  “Well, I was wondering if your dad, or maybe even you, knew anyone who worked in the registrar’s office at Eastland.”

  “Probably. Why?” she asked, a sliver of caution slipping into her voice.

  “Right. You’ll want to know why.” I took another drink of my beer. And then I told her I wanted to get a look at Marissa’s records, specifically to see if they might show a different reason why she dropped out of school right before she died. While I explained, Gina’s face closed off. A curtain of anger I recognized all too well dropped across it, and she picked up her wineglass but didn’t drink. She held it, swirling the liquid.

  “You asked me here to use my father’s influence to look at someone’s personal records. Is that it?” Gina asked.

  “Yes, that’s it. You can say no if you want. I understand I’m not your favorite person right now.”

  “You know,” she said, “my dad never liked you. He didn’t like your job, and he told me not to marry you. I always came to your defense with him. I defended your work. I said it was important, and it is. I believe that. Do you know what he’d say if I brought this to him? It’s a huge ethical violation.”

  “She’s dead, Gina.”

  “Is she?” she asked.

  I sat back. “What are you talking about?”

  “We were never really married, were we?”

  “What do you mean?” I asked.

  “I mean we went through with everything,” she said, waving her hand in the air to show the fruitlessness of our time together. “We got the license, and we said the vows, and we got the gifts. But you were never really married to me. I think it’s funny that everybody looks at us and thinks I was the one who didn’t want to be married to you.”