“I was dreaming about the lake,” he says, muffled by my hair.
“Was she there?” I ask.
“No,” he says. “It’s always the same. I’m alone in that cabin. Waiting for her, and she never shows up. It’s like a bad joke.”
My mind stalls as I search for something comforting to say.
“I was only there once,” he says, “but I remember that place better than I remember my childhood home. Where’s the fairness in that?”
“Have you ever considered going back?” I ask.
His grip around me tightens. “Going back,” he repeats.
“To the cabin,” I say. “Maybe it would help.” In the moonlight, the glass of water is silvery as a potion.
“I’m not sure it works that way.”
“You’ve never wanted to go back?”
“No,” he says. “I don’t see a point. It wouldn’t change anything. It wouldn’t . . .”
I wait to see if he’ll finish the sentence. When he doesn’t, I’m relieved, as if the edges of something huge have brushed against me and then retreated. “Looking at it again could take away some of its power,” I say.
Patrick doesn’t answer for a long time. “What would you know about it?” he asks at last.
My heart contracts. “Nothing,” I say. “You’re right.”
“Some things should stay in the past,” Patrick says.
The words fill the kitchen around us, all the implications. Outside the window, the sleeping neighborhood feels like a glimpse into an entirely different world.
“You don’t need to do that tonight if you don’t want to,” Patrick says, voice soft, and I look down at the lotus still clutched between my fingers.
“I know.” And I slide the lotus between my lips. I swallow. In the moment, it’s a relief to erase myself. Right now, I’m the discrepancy in this house, the dark thing disrupting the Braddocks’ life together.
TWENTY
Welcome to the Elysian Society, Mr. Rogalski,” I say to my newest client. “You’re hoping to reach your daughter, is that correct?”
My mouth is greasy and candy-scented with pink lip gloss. In the photo he provided, Mr. Rogalski’s arm is tucked self-consciously around a thin adolescent girl, her grin bristling with braces, dotted with gummy pink bands.
“As a matter of fact, I’m here to contact you.”
Mr. Rogalski fits the mold of the semi-anonymous bachelors that pepper my clientele. Late middle age, eyes drooping like a dog’s. I’d pegged him as divorced, latent problems with his wife triggered into action by their daughter’s death. But his voice, that knowingness pulled taut as a wire, makes me reconsider.
“I’m here to ask a few questions,” he says. “No need to take that.” He gestures toward the lotus. “I’d like you to be fully present. Think you can manage that?”
“I’m afraid you may have misunderstood the services we offer here,” I say.
Mr. Rogalski exhales, reaches inside the front of his jacket. He pulls out what looks like a slim back wallet, opening it and presenting it to me. I pretend to know which signs of legitimacy to look for, studying the somber police portrait against a pale blue background.
“I see.” I settle back in my chair. I’m fully awake now, caution buzzing through me. In spite of myself, I’m curious. “I’m not sure I can be much help, Detective.”
“Let me be the judge of that,” Rogalski says. “First off, what’s your name?”
“You can call me Eurydice.”
A lift of the eyebrows, a low whistle. “That’s from a myth, isn’t it?” He doesn’t wait for an answer. “Do you know the story behind it?”
“I’m familiar with it,” I say, though I’ve forgotten. I can’t remember if she’s the one who eloped with a swan or the one who ate fruit seeds in the afterlife, dooming herself to stay imprisoned.
He glances around the room with a considered weight, as if he’s just noticed where we are. “How long have you been working here?”
“Five years.”
“What drew you to this job, if you don’t mind me asking?”
“I needed work,” I say. “The Elysian Society was hiring.”
“Simple as that?”
“Simple as that.” The lie comes easily.
“And you enjoy it,” Rogalski says. “You’re treated pretty well by your boss, by, ah, Mrs. Renard.” He squints as if checking invisible cue cards.
“She’s a wonderful employer.”
“You’d really say so? Someone who asks you to do this?”
I’m silent.
“When you see clients, it’s only talking, right?” he asks. “No physical contact.”
“Correct,” I say.
“Forgive me for being blunt, Miss Eurydice, but this job, it’s not sexual?”
“Of course not,” I say, heat rising through my veins.
“I’ve heard this place is supposed to be classy or something. All on the up-and-up. But to be frank, there’s a potential for something a little—” He searches for a word. “Untoward. It never bothers you, having men use your body for their girlfriends and wives?”
“No,” I say. “It’s not like that at all.”
“So what are your clients like, the men? Do you ever notice violent tendencies? Possessive, obsessed, yeah, I know all that.”
“Our clients are not possessive,” I say. “They’re not obsessed. They’re here to reconnect with their loved ones.”
“Your wife dies and you don’t move on? You keep on dragging her back, sitting in a room with a pretty girl in a dress that barely covers her, pretending you’re getting closure?” His eyes move pointedly to my breasts.
I resist the urge to tug at my neckline.
He smiles as if my mere silence has settled something. “When you’re sitting here, in this room, you must overhear lots of private information. Strangers spill their guts to you.”
“The information our clients share in these rooms is confidential. I don’t hear any of it.”
He tilts his head down, looks at me from beneath his eyebrows. “But aren’t you sitting right there?”
I’m an endless expanse of ice. “Can I ask why you’re here?”
“I’m here about Laura Holmes,” he says. “You’ve heard of her?”
“In that case, Detective, I think I can clear up some confusion,” I say. “Whoever worked with Mrs. Fowler was doing so unauthorized, without our knowledge. That case doesn’t have anything to do with the Elysian Society.”
“Well, look at it from my angle,” he says. “What we have is a lead that sounded like the work of your typical nut job. Half the time, when someone comes in with a tip like this, it’s useless. This time, though, the joke’s on us, because it turns out to contain some valid information. But it doesn’t mean that everything is aboveboard.”
I clasp my hands so tightly that I feel the interlocking bones.
“There’s nothing conclusive yet, but Fowler’s given us enough information to push the investigation ahead. Better than what we were working with before. So the question is: Does somebody inside these walls know more about that girl’s death than they want to let on?”
Curling my fingers inward, I press my fingernails into each opposite hand until my flesh burns.
“The workers here could be sitting on some big secrets,” he continues. “You squat here all day, hearing people’s private thoughts. Deep dark confessions.”
“As I’ve explained,” I say, words brittle under the weight of my impatience, “the conversations they have with their loved ones stay between the two of them. Nobody else.”
“Maybe,” Rogalski says. “Or maybe somebody here overheard a juicy secret, a nice piece of information, and then fed it to Fowler.”
“If you don’t believe that what we do here is real, there’s not much I can say.” My heartbeat is shuddery and too quick. “We’ve never wasted time pandering to the skeptics.”
“That’s real noble of you.” Rogalski laug
hs once. “People get all scrambled up by grief, they want to throw their money at whatever will make it all better, and you’re here waiting in your little tight dress. Taking advantage of the grief-stricken, that’s—” He turns his hand into a gun, thumb erect, pointer out, and jerks his hand once. “That’s shooting fish in a barrel.”
Impulsively, I reach up and wipe away the lip gloss. “May I speak plainly?”
“Please. That’s what I expect.”
“If I were you, I wouldn’t judge what happens between these walls when you’ve lived a life so untouched by death.” My anger is unwieldy, forcing the words out.
“And what makes you think my life has been so untouched, Miss Eurydice?”
“If you’d experienced loss on the same level as our clients, I don’t see how you could come here and try to twist what we do into something”—I reach for the right word—“predatory.”
Rogalski folds his arms over his chest.
“The girl in the photograph you gave me,” I say. “Is she a friend’s daughter? A niece?” I glance down at the lurid streak on my hand. “I assume you bought the lip gloss yourself.”
“I bought it on my way here. It’s called, ah, Sugarplum Fantasy. Nothing I’d ever let my daughter wear, personally.”
I touch my lips. “I’m going to need you to leave.”
Rogalski studies me for a second longer before he rises to his feet. His unhurried, shuffling movements are out of place in this room. I’m suffocated by his presence: the lunch on his breath, his uneven fingernails, the missing button on his jacket pocket.
He pauses, extends his hand toward me, something white jutting from between his fingers. I accept automatically. A business card. “If you’re ever feeling in an honest mood, don’t hesitate to be in touch. I’d like to hear your side of things.”
I place the card on the end table.
At the door, he hesitates and then turns. “You should know that you’re wrong about one thing,” Rogalski says. “That really was Madison, in the photo. Her eleventh birthday party. She would be twenty-one this year. She’d be grown up, a real adult. Madison was crazy to grow up. Always in a big rush for it.”
I sit very still. “What happened?”
“What happened doesn’t matter,” Rogalski says. “Folks pretend to be sympathetic, when they ask, but there’s an ugly part of their brains that just wants the story. We all have it.”
I’m a still ocean. A starless night.
“I got to apologize for my role in what happened, and I’m grateful for that. I’m not grateful for much in my life, but that,” he says, “I’m grateful for.” He opens the door. The corridor beyond is muted as the backs of my eyelids.
“Detective, I’d be willing to help you contact your daughter,” I say. Sitting in Room 12 in my white dress, I suddenly and desperately want him to try. I want the predictability of swallowing the pill and waking to that brief moment of a stranger looking at me as if he loves me. “Maybe then you’d understand what we do here. Then you’d believe.”
But Rogalski smiles patiently. “I’d rather not, Miss Eurydice,” he says. “Thanks for the offer and all, but saying good-bye once was more than enough for me.”
I wait for Jane. When she walks in, I have to make myself speak before I lose my nerve. “Jane,” I say, “you should know that the client who was just here, Arnold Rogalski, was here under false pretenses. He’s with the authorities.”
Jane sucks her breath in through her teeth, a sharp hiss.
“I suppose we should have been guarding against something like this.” She sits down heavily in the client chair. “We’ll have to be more careful,” she says, as if to herself. “Stop taking on new clients, at least for a while.” She looks at me. “What kinds of questions?”
“He was looking for problems between the bodies and clients,” I say. “He seemed concerned that we might be preying on clients. Taking advantage of their private information.”
Jane smiles with one side of her mouth. “A skeptic,” she says. “That’s a relief. At least he’s focused on protecting his own ego. He won’t poke around too deeply.” She sighs. “I hate this, Eurydice. I can’t tell you how much. All this negative attention.”
Something about her weary, confiding tone makes me trust her. Or maybe it’s the fact that she’s sitting across from me, dressed in a short-sleeved blouse that shows off her sunburned shoulders, looking exactly like one of my clients.
“Have you told Mrs. Renard that I bought lotuses?” I ask.
She glances up at me, gaze whetted into a point. Her harmlessness falls away. I regret saying anything. “No,” she says.
“Thank you,” I say.
“Don’t get all comfy,” she says. “It’s for my own sake that I’ve kept quiet. But Renard’s not a patient woman. We’re running out of options. When it comes right down to it, I might have no choice.”
“I’m afraid it would look bad,” I say. “If she knew I’d bought lotuses right before the story broke.”
“It would look bad,” Jane agrees. “Especially considering that Fowler came to you first.”
I lick my lips.
“If you want to prove your innocence, you need to figure out who worked with Fowler,” Jane says. “There’s no two ways about it. You’re hardly a social butterfly, but it shouldn’t be that hard. Did you tell anybody else when she first came to you?”
The day unspools in my memory. Mrs. Fowler’s derisive smile over the heart-shaped zipper pull; her sickly sweetness as she tried to bribe me into channeling Hopeful Doe; and afterward. I remember a tendril of cigarette smoke, a laugh. My mind clicks and clicks again. The obviousness of it is clean and swift, so pure that it feels like a solution. It’s only after a second that I begin to see its true shape as a complication.
Jane watches me, her eyes keen behind the lenses of her glasses. “Anything?” she asks.
I shrug, give a rueful smile. “Nothing,” I say. “That day’s a blank.”
“Well, too bad,” Jane says. “I thought we were on to something.”
In the waiting room the next day, I wait for Ana. Before she has a chance to sit down, I stop her in the doorway. Her eyes are still blurry from the lotus, her skin cool against my fingertips when I touch her shoulder. “I need to see you alone,” I say, low.
“God, Edie,” she says. “I always knew you had a thing for me, but this is pretty forward.” Her teasing isn’t quite right; it has a tinny flatness that makes me embarrassed for her. When I don’t respond, her voice becomes more subdued. “All right,” she says. “Follow me.”
I think she’ll guide me to the restroom, but I trail her down the corridors, past Jane’s office, past the block of encounter suites, until we reach an unmarked door that’s tucked off to one side. Ana makes a show of looking around, mouth drawn into an O and eyes too wide, before she opens the door and slips inside. I hesitate, seeing only a shadowy gap beyond the door frame, and then I follow her.
Darkness. The air against my legs is prickling cold; a musty odor presses against my nose and eyes, thick as a wet cloth. The combination sends panic rippling across my skin. I’m drowning, not able to draw a full breath. A name streaks across my brain like a primal scream. A soft click ahead of me. A watery light spills out. We’re standing on concrete steps, the edges clotted with cobwebs. Ana smiles up at me from two steps below. “You didn’t know this was here?”
I make myself breathe normally, though the air is clammy and earthy, too heavy.
“I don’t come here often.” Ana sits down on the step, bringing her knees to her chest. “But it’s the best way to get privacy around here. Used sparingly.” She lifts a lacy strip of cobweb between her thumb and forefinger, examines it, then flicks it into the darkness at the bottom of the stairs. “You said you wanted to see me alone. So here we are. Alone.”
I sit. The cement is so cold against my exposed skin that it burns. “Did you work with Fowler for the money?”
Ana stares. Before she
can pull her usual armor back into place, I see raw emotion on her face: a blend of relief and surprise, as if she’s finally been unburdened of an immense heaviness.
“I told you about Fowler right after I turned her away,” I continue. “She mentioned to me that money was no object. She must be paying you well. And I know you need the cash.”
There’s a deep silence as we study each other.
“Well, look who finally woke up,” Ana says. She gives a rough scrape of a laugh. “What brought about this miracle, Edie? Did you get laid?”
“I know you’ve broken other rules, Ana. I just want to hear it for myself.”
“God, you’re seriously falling for this bullshit?” Ana asks. “I know you’re a sycophant, but I thought you were at least smarter than this.”
“Don’t distract from the real issue,” I say.
“This is all an act, Edie,” Ana says, jagged with impatience. “Renard calling us into her office, the big sad eyes, boo-hoo: it’s a smokescreen. She wants us to be distracted, a bunch of tattling kids, so we won’t notice what’s happening.”
“And that is?” I ask.
“There’s more to this story than she’s been telling us,” Ana says. “Think about what Laura Holmes was wearing when they found her. A sundress. A single diamond earring.”
A brief, ominous note rings at the back of my skull. “That doesn’t mean anything,” I say. “A dress and jewelry? That could describe nearly any woman in this city.”
“Well, it could describe you,” Ana says. “It could describe me. A shitty dress and then one nice thing, something we could never afford ourselves.”
I imagine Laura in a gauzy dress, bare-shouldered, her eyes snapped shut. “You worked with Fowler and now it’s out of your control,” I say. “This is how you’re justifying it? Making up your own theories so you don’t have to be held accountable?”
Ana’s expression stays chilly as stone.
“Our clients have been hurt by what Fowler’s doing,” I say. “It makes us look irresponsible. It makes us look sloppy.”
The Possessions Page 15
