by Megan Goldin
Right on the hour, the auditorium door swings open with a thud and students stream out. Emily is at the rear, deep in conversation with two other girls.
I fall into place behind them as they leave the building. They cross the quadrangle to a campus cafe where she and her friends take an outdoor table. I sit at an adjacent table with my back to them. I open my laptop and pretend that I’m working while I listen to their every word.
One of them goes inside the cafe and returns carrying a cardboard carrier with three coffees. They talk mostly about a group assignment. Their discussion is tedious and useless for my purposes. I’m rewarded for my patience because, as they are wrapping up their little get-together, I get a scrap of information that makes it all worthwhile.
‘We’re going to need another meeting,’ sighs a girl with a Midwest twang. She pulls out her phone to check her calendar. ‘How about Thursday at six?’
‘I can’t,’ says Emily. ‘I’m teaching ballet.’
‘Damn, Em. I thought you only taught on Mondays and Saturdays?’
‘They asked me to fill in on Thursdays for the rest of the semester. One of the teachers tore a tendon and can’t teach for six weeks.’
I mentally file away that information as I follow Emily to her next class. I telephone every dance school in town while I wait outside the lecture hall.
‘Hello, can you tell me which ballet session Emily teaches?’ I ask repeatedly. On the fourth call, I hit the jackpot.
‘Emily,’ says the receptionist. ‘Emily teaches on Saturday mornings and Monday evenings. Actually, just a moment,’ the receptionist says, pausing while she checks on her computer. ‘Emily’s also doing Thursdays now, until 7.30 p.m.’
‘Emily Morrison?’ I ask, to make sure we’re talking about the same person.
‘Yes that’s right,’ the woman confirms. ‘Emily’s a wonderful teacher, especially with the younger kids.’
‘That’s what I’ve heard,’ I respond enthusiastically as I jot down the details.
When Emily emerges from her class, she goes straight to the cafeteria with another group of friends; two girls and a guy, all around her age. Emily shows no interest in the guy, who anyway is paying way too much attention to her petite blond friend. They sit at an empty corner table and take turns going to the self-service counter to collect their meals. I can’t get a seat at a table close enough to hear them talk so I am forced to watch from a distance.
After lunch, Emily goes straight to the fitness centre. I look at fitness class timetables pinned to the wall by the reception as she disappears into a change room at the end of the corridor. She emerges a few minutes later in pastel yoga gear and heads to a hot yoga class in the first studio. It’s an hour-long class. I am torn. I desperately want to stay but it’s getting close to school pick-up time.
Day two is not much different. Emily eats lunch at the campus cafeteria, a few tables away from where Matt sits with two colleagues; a psychology professor from his department, who I know from Christmas functions over the years, and Kate, the research assistant I met at his office. She’s wearing the same oversized glasses and her straw blond hair is knotted with a brown clip on top of her head.
Matt eats fried chicken and mash. That makes me mad. He had his cholesterol checked only last week and the doctor warned him that his triglyceride levels were too high. And now he’s eating the unhealthiest meal on the cafeteria menu. I am so furious that I have to restrain myself from going over there and snatching the plate away from him.
I get even more annoyed when Emily beams at Matt from her seat in the cafeteria. He ignores her as he bites into his chicken. I’m kind of relieved by his lack of interest. Then I remember that it’s just a facade. He could get fired if the university found out he was having an affair with a student.
I shadow Emily for the next few days, moving with her between classes and following her to the fitness centre, where she goes every day she has a break between lectures. Gradually, I piece together Emily’s life. At least during school hours. What happens after 2.30 p.m. is still a mystery to me because I have to leave to collect Alice from school.
I learn the names of Emily’s friends, and collect snippets of information about their lives. It’s remarkable what you can pick up from eavesdropping on other people’s conversations. I buy a second college sweatshirt in reverse colours so that I remain invisible as I burrow deep into Emily’s life. Sometimes I wear a baseball cap. Sometimes I take it off. I buy a pair of squarish glasses that make me look quite different from the other pair. I change my look while I wait for Emily’s lectures to end so that, when she comes out of the auditorium, I look completely different from the way I looked when she went in.
‘When’re we going to meet the new man in your life, Em?’ asks Charmaine, her study partner, as they sit in the campus cafeteria. Charmaine, I’ve learned, is a Californian who talks constantly about transferring to USC so she can be close to her boyfriend, Greg, who is in the first year of medical school.
‘Not sure. I’m still testing him out,’ Emily teases.
On the fourth day of tailing Emily, I’m in the change room when she comes out of her Pilates class. I go through the motions of buttoning up my shirt at the other side of the change room while Emily strips off her sweaty leotard and walks to the shower stalls with a towel wrapped around her. When she returns I’m standing by the basin fixing my hair. She drops her towel and, without any self-consciousness, stands naked in the middle of the change room to dress herself in white lace panties and a low-cut bra.
Emily has a particular aesthetic. She wears yoga pants with tight undershirts, cardigans and sometimes slip dresses. I’m yet to see her in a pair of jeans. Her preferred palette is frosty pastels. It makes her look feminine and super pretty with her dimples and fresh-faced complexion.
Her hair is always worn down except when she works out in the gym. I know this because, after a few days of watching her, I finally have the nerve to join her hot yoga class. This time I come in as myself with my hair scraped back and no makeup. I arrive late and leave before the class ends. I pick a spot behind Emily from where I watch her contort her body in a series of poses well beyond my abilities.
I’m sitting so close to Emily that I can see drops of sweat roll down her neck into the gap between her breasts. Her sweet, cloying scent is achingly familiar. Matt brings it home to our bed most nights.
Emily’s home address is still a mystery. One day I arrange for Alice to go home with a friend after school so I won’t have to rush to the school pick-up. I’m hoping that a few more hours of tailing Emily in the late afternoon might lead me to her apartment. Instead, she goes to the library for a marathon group study session.
In desperation, I access Matt’s computer again while he’s asleep. I find nothing on his hard drive. He has a link to a student database bookmarked in his browser but it’s password protected and none of my guesses work.
I decide to move to plan B. I pick up Alice from school and drive across town to the ballet studio. It’s in a yuppified warehouse district in the centre of town, surrounded by hipster cafes. In fact, it’s quite near the park where I sometimes take Alice to play on the weekends.
Alice looks pretty as a picture when she walks into the ballet studio in white tights and a pink leotard. Her hair is in plaits dressed in matching ribbons.
Emily arrives in her dance gear. Her hair is tied in a bun. Her deportment is perfect as the first notes of music signal the class has begun.
As the lesson goes on, I have to grudgingly admit that Emily is a good teacher. She patiently corrects each child’s foot position and gently moves their bodies into the right posture at the barre. She gives clear instructions and plenty of praise. ‘Good girl, Alice.’ Alice beams. ‘Lana,’ Emily says. ‘Your arms are wonderful. Pretend you’re a butterfly. That’s right, girls. Let’s try it again.’
‘Mommy, did you see how I danced?’ Alice shrieks as she runs to me at the end of the lesson. She stumbles ove
r the words in her excitement. ‘Emily says my toes were pointed perfectly.’
‘You were great, honey.’ I put her sweatshirt on her by the reception desk and zip it all the way up before we go out in the evening cold. I’ve timed our departure so that Emily is behind me.
‘Can I come again? Please, Mommy. Please.’
‘We’ll see,’ I tell her. Alice’s face suddenly lights up. I don’t need to turn my head to know that Emily is behind me. She wears a denim jacket over her ballet gear.
‘Alice really enjoyed the class. You’re a great teacher,’ I compliment her as we walk onto the street. It’s bustling with the evening cafe crowd. ‘This is a lovely neighbourhood. Do you live around here as well?’
‘I wish,’ she answers, with a dimpled smile so charming that it’s almost infectious. ‘I’m a grad student. I live in off-campus apartments up in the student district.’
‘That’s all the way across town. I suppose you have a car.’
‘I take the bus. Actually it’s two interconnecting buses. It takes about half an hour all up, which isn’t too bad.’
‘We live close to the campus. Would you like a ride? I can drop you home in under fifteen minutes.’
‘That would be great,’ she says after a brief hesitation. It’s worked out just as I’d hoped.
We walk to my car parked a block away. There are five minutes left on the parking meter. Emily unknots her hair and lets it fall to her shoulders. Whatever doubts I had about her relationship with Matt disappear as the smell of honeysuckle fills my car. It’s the scent of Matt’s betrayal.
We talk inanities during the drive. How long has she worked at the ballet school? Where does she come from originally? That sort of thing. She tries to ask me questions too, but I deflect.
‘It’s off Peterson Avenue,’ she says as we approach the university housing district.
‘This is me, here,’ she says, pointing to an apartment block on the corner. ‘Maybe I’ll see you next week.’ She thanks me and gives us a little wave as she gets out. Alice smiles and waves back.
I wait with the engine running as Emily disappears through the apartment building entrance. A moment later, light floods the windows of a ground floor apartment. The ballet class has served its purpose. I finally know where Emily lives.
Chapter Twenty
Mel
When the only lead you have involves a wild-goose chase, you go chasing geese. That’s what ran through my mind as I pulled into a parking lot at a horseback riding school about forty minutes’ drive out of town.
‘Stay here,’ I told Joe. He was slumped in the back of the car, overdoing the bored teenager act. My words were like a red rag to a bull. He climbed straight out of the car and followed behind me. It was the first time that day he actually did what I wanted. But hell, reverse psychology works a treat.
The reception area was in a cabin overlooking a white-fenced paddock where a rider was taking a horse through its paces.
‘Anyone here?’ I called out as we entered a wood-panelled office. A whiteboard above the counter listed prices for riding lessons and trail rides. On the walls were tattered posters of horses and a montage of faded photos with curled edges.
‘Come on, Mom, this is the fifth horseback riding place we’ve been to today,’ complained Joe. ‘Can’t we just go back home now?’
‘Sit down, Joe.’ I pointed to a threadbare couch. ‘Read a magazine or something.’
The owner came out, a short man in his sixties with ruddy cheeks and a clump of grey hair. He was wearing a plaid shirt, a brown leather vest, jeans and boots up to his knees. He smelled of horses and perspiration.
‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘I was cleaning out the stable. Didn’t hear you. Are you looking to ride? Charlie over there would be perfect for your boy.’ He pointed through the window to a chestnut lazily chewing hay in a pen next to the paddock.
‘Not today I’m afraid,’ I said, flashing my police badge. ‘I have a few questions for you.’ I showed him a photograph of Laura.
‘Can you recall this woman ever coming here to ride? It would have been around six years ago,’ I said.
He pulled out his reading glasses from his top right pocket.
‘Well, I can’t say that I recall this lady,’ he said, ‘but that would have been around the time I had my triple-bypass surgery. The person who’d know best is my daughter, Lacey. I’ll go find her for you.’
Joe sat on the reception room couch staring blankly at the wall. Last night, while I was at the station interviewing Matthew West, Joe and Sammy had an all-out fight. By the time they were done, the sofa cushions had been tossed all over the house, including in the kitchen where a cushion had knocked over the sugar bowl. They tried to clean it up so I wouldn’t notice, but they did it with water: I came home to find the floor covered with syrup. It took me two hours to scrub it clean. I told my kids it was a textbook case of the cover-up being worse than the crime.
The cherry on top was when Joe gave me his suspension note. It didn’t say why he was suspended, but it asked me to contact the school immediately. Joe’s monosyllabic response when I asked him what had happened didn’t exactly improve my mood. It was too late to call the school. I had an anxious night until the morning when I finally managed to get hold of the principal. He told me Joe had brawled with another boy and they’d both been suspended for a week.
Joe acted as if the suspension was some kind of badge of honour. He joked the principal was doing him a favour letting him off classes for a whole week. He teased Sammy he’d be sleeping until lunch and gaming all afternoon while Sammy was at school.
That was the final straw. Joe was coming with me to work. At the very least, I would keep an eye on him. Who knows, maybe he’d learn something.
That’s how Joe ended up being with me at the Sommerville Horse Ranch. It was southwest of town, about ten miles from where Laura’s car had been found, and well within the search area that I’d delineated on a map when I’d put together a list of horse ranches to investigate.
The older man with the ruddy face returned through the rear door. He was breathless and his face was even more flushed from his exertions. Behind him was a woman with a solid build and a plain face framed by black curls. She wore jeans and a denim shirt.
‘This is Lacey,’ he wheezed. ‘It took a while to find her. She was working in the top paddock.’
‘I understand you have a photograph to show me, detective?’ she asked as she shook my hand.
‘That’s right,’ I said. ‘Do you recall whether this woman might have come here about six years ago?’
She studied the photo of Laura under the overhead fluorescent light. ‘The face is vaguely familiar. But we get a lot of visitors here. It’s hard to remember them all,’ she said finally.
‘Is there someone else who might remember?’ I asked.
‘You could try Dylan, our riding instructor. He’s not here today, though. Dylan only works on weekends unless we have special bookings.’
‘Do all your riders fill out registration forms before they ride?’ I asked.
‘New riders register. Return riders sign a booking sheet before they’re allowed on a horse,’ she answered. ‘It’s for our insurance.’
‘How long do you keep your paperwork? I’m thinking credit card payments, booking forms, guest books, waivers. Business records. Whatever you have.’
‘Until we run out of room,’ she said. ‘If Dad had it his way then we’d keep every last scrap of paper. Just like his photo collection.’ She indicated the faded photo montage on the reception wall.
‘Do you think you still have the records from around this date?’ I asked, writing down the date Laura West went missing.
‘Maybe in the basement up at the house,’ she said. ‘There’s a stack of boxes in storage there. I can take a look, but I won’t have time today. I’ll have to get back to you.’
As we walked out, we passed another wall covered with photos of people riding horses. Most
were unframed and simply pinned to a giant cork board. Some of the photos looked as if they dated back years, with washed out colours and out-of-date clothing and hairstyles. I scanned them, looking for Laura.
‘She’s not there,’ said Joe.
I spun around. ‘Who’s not there?’
‘Your victim,’ Joe said. ‘I already looked. She’s not in any of the photos.’
Chapter Twenty-One
Julie
Dinner at Anne’s house is a once-a-month chore to be endured. Death by a thousand cuts. None physical. All emotional. That’s how Matt’s mother works. She chips away at me slowly; my self-confidence, my peace of mind, my happiness. She’s so delicate with her surgical strikes that her darling son, an eminent psychologist who prides himself on being perceptive, never notices. He actually thinks she likes me. He said that to me once. With a straight face.
Anne wears her hair short and dresses in neutrals. Colours are gauche; so middle-class. She wears whites and creams and taupes. Her jewellery is tasteful and plentiful. Always gold.
Anne’s from a family of politicians going back five generations. Her father was a state senator. She married Matt’s father at the age of twenty-one. He was years older than her, a childless widower who’d made a fortune buying up swampland in Boca Raton and Fort Lauderdale when they were scrappy beach towns where working-class Miami families took their vacations in the fifties. Ever since Matt’s dad passed away from a heart attack two decades ago, she holds the purse strings. Tightly, I might add.
Matt sees a sweet lady in her early seventies, filled with energy and generous to a fault with her money and time. She’s overdoing it, he tells me after each visit, shaking his head in admiration as we drive back from Greensboro after one of her excruciating dinners. He doesn’t realise that his mother is a prize bitch. What is it about mothers that blinds their sons to their faults?
