The Shining Girls A Novel

by Lauren Beukes

  The splayed open photo album is on the counter. Pictures have been removed, torn up and discarded on the tiles; so much confetti. A woman in a white bathing suit squinting into the sun, her face sheared through.

  In the living room, the sleek round ’70s table lies on its back with its legs in the air like an overturned turtle. The tchotchkes and art books and magazines that were on it are tumbled across the floor. A bronze lady with a bell hidden under her skirt lies on her side beside a china bird with its head snapped off, leaving a jagged wound of white ceramic. The bird’s head stares blankly at a fashion editorial of angular young women in ugly clothes.

  The couch has been cut up, long violent slashes that expose the soft synthetic innards and the bone of the frame.

  Upstairs, the door to the bedroom is ajar. On the drawing table, spilled black ink is soaking into the paper, obliterating the illustration of a grimly curious duckling interrogating the skeleton of a dead raccoon in a bear’s tummy. Some of the hand-lettered words are still visible.

  ‘It’s too bad. I’m so sad.

  But I’m glad for what I had.’

  A colored glass ornament sways slowly in the sun dappling through the window, casting crazy circles of light across the devastated room.

  The neighbors did not come to investigate the noise.

  Kirby

  13 JUNE 1993

  ‘Oh hey,’ Chet says, looking up from Black Orchid, which has a purple girl on the front cover. ‘I found something really, really cool in line with your mystery baseball card. Have a look.’ He puts aside the comic book and produces a printout from a microfiche dated 1951.

  ‘This caused quite the scandal. A transsexual jumped off the roof of the Congress Hotel and no one knew she was a he until the post-mortem. But the best bit is what she’s holding.’ He points at the photograph of a limp woman’s hand, extending out from under a coat someone has thrown over her. There is a blurry plastic dial lying nearby. ‘Doesn’t that look exactly like a contraceptive pill packet from today?’

  ‘Or maybe a cute compact mirror with a beaded pattern,’ Dan dismisses it. The last thing he needs is Anwar encouraging Kirby’s madness. ‘Now, do something useful and find me any information you can on Hasbro and when they introduced their pony range and toy patenting in general.’

  ‘Well, somebody woke up on the wrong side of the futon.’

  ‘Wrong side of the timezone,’ Dan grumbles.

  ‘Please, Chet,’ Kirby intervenes. ‘From 1974 onwards. It’s really important.’

  ‘All right, all right. I’ll start with their advertising and take it from there. And oh, by the way, Kirby, you just missed a Grade-A crank who was in here looking for you.’

  ‘For me?’

  ‘Real intense. Didn’t bring cookies, though. Next time, can you ask him to bring cookies? I don’t like to put up with that level of insane unless there’s some kind of high-calorie compensation.’

  ‘What did he look like?’ Dan’s head comes up.

  ‘I don’t know. Generic crazy man. Well-dressed enough. Dark sports coat. Jeans. On the skinny side of built. Intense blue eyes. He wanted to know about the high-school best athlete stuff. He had a limp.’

  ‘Shit,’ Dan says, even though he is still processing this. Kirby is faster on the draw. After all, she’s been expecting him for the last four years.

  ‘When did he leave?’ She’s gone pale, her freckles standing out in sharp relief.

  ‘What’s with you two?’

  ‘When did he fucking leave, Chet?’

  ‘Five minutes ago.’

  ‘Kirby, wait,’ Dan grabs for her arm and misses. She’s already out the door and running. ‘Fuck!’

  ‘Whoa. Drama city. What’s going on?’ Chet says.

  ‘Call the cops, Anwar. Ask for Andy Diggs or, shit, whatsisname, Amato. The guy covering the Korean murder.’

  ‘And tell them what?’

  ‘Anything that will get them here!’

  Kirby flies down the stairs and out the doors. She has to pick a direction, so she runs up North Wabash and stops in the middle of the bridge, scanning the crowds for him.

  The river is a Mediterranean teal today, the exact same color as the roof of the sharp-prowed tourist boat passing below. A tinny voice through a megaphone points out the twin corncobs of Marina City.

  There are more tourists wandering along the river walk, identifiable by their floppy sun hats and shorts as much by the cameras slung around their necks. An office worker with the sleeves of his suit pushed up is sitting on the red girder by the railing, eating a sandwich, waving his foot warningly at the scavenger seagull edging closer. People cross the street in tight-packed clusters to the tune of the pipping walk signal and lose cohesion as soon as they’re off the crosswalk. It makes it difficult to spot just one in the herd. She skips over them, micro-sorting by race and gender and build. Black guy. Woman. Woman. Fat guy. Man with headphones. Guy with long hair. Guy in suit. Guy in maroon T-shirt. Another suit. It must be getting to lunchtime. Brown leather jacket. Black button-up shirt. Blue jumpsuit. Green stripes. Black T-shirt. Black T-shirt. Wheelchair. Suit. None of them are him. He’s gone.

  ‘Fuuuuuuuck!’ she screams at the sky, startling the guy with the sandwich. The seagull lifts into the air, screeching admonishment.

  The 124 bus drives across in front of her, obscuring her view. It’s like a reset on her brain. A second later, she spots him. The uneven motion of a baseball cap bobbing slightly as if the man had a limp. She’s off running again. She doesn’t hear Dan calling.

  A tan-and-white taxi swerves to avoid her as she darts across Wacker without looking. The driver stops dead in the middle of the intersection, his hand still on the horn and rolls down his window to swear at her. Anxious hooting starts up on either side.

  ‘You crazy? You was nearly toast,’ a woman in shiny pants scolds her, grabbing her arm and pulling her out of the road.

  ‘Let go!’ Kirby shoves her away. She pushes through the lunchtime shopping crowd, trying to keep him in sight, breaking past a couple with a baby stoller into the shadow of the elevated tracks. The oppressive daytime darkness throws her. Her eyes don’t adjust immediately and in that split second, she loses him.

  She looks around, desperate, mentally cataloging and dismissing people as she glances over them. And then the boldness of the red McDonald’s sign catches her eye, dragging her attention upwards, to the suspended stairs leading to the El on the other side. She can only see his jeans disappearing from sight, but his limp is more pronounced on the stairs.

  ‘Hey!’ she shouts, but her voice is lost in the noise of the traffic. A train is coming in above her. She sprints across and up the stairs, digging in her pocket for tokens. In the end she jumps the turnstiles, hurtles up another set of stairs to the platform and shoves between the closing doors of the train without even seeing which line it is.

  She’s breathing hard. She stares at her boots, too scared to look up in case he’s right there. Come on, she thinks angrily to herself. Come fucking on. She raises her head defiantly and sweeps her gaze over the compartment. The other passengers are applying themselves to ignoring her, even the ones who were staring when she forced her way in through the doors. A little boy in a blue camouflage track top glares at her with a kid’s pure self-righteousness. GI Boy Blue, she thinks, nearly laughing in relief or shock.

  He’s not here. Maybe she was mistaken. Or he’s on the other train, heading in the other direction. Her heart free-falls away. She edges through the rattling car, making for the interconnecting doors, catching herself as the train swings hard through the corners. The perspex is scratched, not even graffiti, but hatchmarks scoured into the surface, accomplished over hundreds of rides by different people taking up the call with pen knives or X-Acto blades.

  She peeks cautiously through into the next car and immediately ducks back. He’s standing by the door, holding on to the handrail, his cap pulled down low. But she recognizes his build, the slope-sho
ulders, the angle of his jaw and his uneven profile, turned away from her, looking out over the rooftops swishing past.

  She ducks back, her mind rocketing. She digs in her bag and shrugs into Dan’s jacket to obscure her profile. She ties the scarf from her throat over her hair, babushka-style. Not much of a disguise, but it’s all she’s got. She keeps her head turned, enough to see him in her peripheral vision, to watch when he gets off.

  Dan

  13 JUNE 1993

  Dan loses sight of her somewhere on Randolph. His mind a knot of panic, he made it through the traffic, setting off another round of enraged hooting, but he just couldn’t keep up. He leans on one of the green trash cans, from the Chicago of yesteryear, like the streetlights with their gaslamp bulbs that look like inflated condoms. He’s panting. He has a stitch clawing into his ribs and it feels like Dolph fucking Lundgren has delivered a round-house kick to his chest. A train goes rattling overhead, the vibration practically shaking his fillings loose.

  If Kirby was here, she isn’t now.

  He takes a wild guess and walks over to Michigan, holding his side, breathing between his teeth. Pathetic. He is sick with panic and rage. He thinks about her lying dead in an alleyway somewhere behind a pile of trash. Probably passed right by her. They’ll never catch the guy. What this city needs is cameras on every corner like a gas station.

  Please God, he’ll get in shape. He’ll eat vegetables. He’ll go to Mass and confession and visit his mother’s grave. No more cigarettes on the sly. Just let Kirby be okay. Is that so much to ask, really, in the scheme of things?

  Back at the Sun-Times, the cops have still not arrived. Chetty is in a fit of pique, trying to explain what’s going on to Harrison. Richie comes in, pale and freaked out, to tell them that a girl was murdered this morning. Stabbed in a pharmaceutical lab on the West Side. Looks like the same MO. Worse. The details are even more gruesome. And a woman from the dead junkie girl’s support meetings has come forward to identify a man with a limp who was asking about her.

  No one quite knows how to take it, Dan realizes. That maybe she was fucking right about the guy all along. He can’t believe that pendejo’s balls, walking in here and asking for her.

  He goes to the electronics shop down the road and buys a beeper pager. Pink, because it’s the window-display model and it’s ready to go. He heads back to Chet and gives him the number and strict instructions to page him on it if they hear anything. Particularly from Kirby. He clamps down on the worry. As long as he keeps doing things, he won’t feel it.

  He goes to fetch his car and get something from his house. Then he drives to Wicker Park and breaks into her flat.

  It’s even messier than it was before. Her entire wardrobe seems to have migrated into the living room, draped across the furniture. He averts his eyes from a pair of red briefs, inside out on the back of a chair.

  She’s been playing at being a proper detective, he sees. The contents of the evidence boxes are scattered all over the place. There’s a map of the city blu-tacked to the broom closet. Every stabbing femicide for the last twenty years is marked on it with a red dot.

  There are a lot of dots.

  He flips open the file on the jerry-rigged trestle table. It’s full of typed transcripts, neatly numbered and dated and clipped to the original news articles. Murder victims’ families, he realizes. Scores of people she’s tracked down and interviewed. I’ve been doing this all year, she’d said. No kidding.

  He sinks heavily onto the painted stool, flipping through the testimonies.

  I didn’t ‘lose’ her. I lose my housekeys. She was taken.

  I go through every day thinking about how I will react when he gets caught. It changes, you know? Sometimes I think I’d like to torture him to death. Other times I think I’d forgive him. Because that would be worse.

  They stole my investment in the future. Does that sound strange to you?

  They make it sexy in the movies.

  It’s the most terrible thing to hear, but in a way, it was also a relief. Because if you only have one child, you know you will never get that phone call again.

  Harper

  13 JUNE 1993

  A black rage swills through Harper’s head. He should have killed the brown boy at the newspaper. Dragged him to a window and hurled him down onto the street. He played coy with him. He humored him. As if he was some empty-eyed idiot from Manteno State Hospital with his chin covered in his own saliva and shit in his pants.

  It had taken every whit of his self-control to ask reasonable questions. Not how the fuck is she still alive and where is the cunt? But, is she in the office, he’d like to talk to her about the awards. He’s very interested in the awards. Could he talk to her, please? Is she here?

  He pushed it too far. He saw the boy switch from bored contempt to wary alertness. ‘I’ll just call security to fetch her for you,’ he’d said, which Harper understood perfectly.

  ‘No need. Tell her I was here for her, all right? I’ll come back.’ It’s immediately apparent how bad a mistake it was to say it. Enough that he buys a White Sox baseball cap on the street and pulls the brim down low over his face, because he half suspects the goddamn boy will call the police. He goes straight to the train. He needs to get back to the House to figure this out.

  She’ll be harder to find if she’s spooked, but he can’t keep the bile back. He wants her to know. Let her run. Let her hide. He’ll dig her out like he used to do with rabbits, dragging her out of her hole by the scruff of her neck while she flails and screams, before he cuts her throat.

  Watching the city slide past the windows of the train, he touches himself with the back of his hand through his pants. But his consternation is too overwhelming. It defeats him. Everything is slipping. It’s her. He should have taken her when she didn’t have the dog. There were other opportunities.

  He feels terribly alone. He feels like plunging his knife into someone’s face to relieve the pressure building up behind his eyes. He has to get back to the House. He has to fix this. He will go back to find her to try and unravel where he has gone wrong. The stars must realign.

  He doesn’t see Kirby. Not even when he gets off the train.

  Kirby

  13 JUNE 1993

  She should walk away and call the police. She knows this deep in the base of her skull. She’s found him. She knows where he is. But what if, the thought nags at her. What if it’s a ruse? The house, by all appearances, is an abandoned wreck. One of several on this block. He could have gone into it because he was aware of her following him. She’s not exactly subtle in this neighborhood. Which means that he might be lying in wait.

  Her hands are numb. Just call the cops, you idiot. Make it their problem. You passed two payphones on the way here. Sure, she thinks. And both of them were trashed. The glass smashed and the receivers pulled off. She tucks her hands into her armpits, miserable and shaky. Standing under a tree, which Englewood, unlike the West Side, still has plenty of. She’s pretty sure he can’t see her, because she can’t see the broken windows on the second floor. But she can’t tell if he is peering through a crack in the plywood boarding up the windows downstairs, or hell, if he is sitting on the front steps waiting for her.

  The plain, terrible truth is that, if she leaves, she will lose him.

  Shit-shit-shit-shit.

  ‘You going in?’ says someone at her shoulder.

  ‘Jesus!’ she jumps. The homeless guy’s eyes bulge slightly, making him look innocent or intensely interested. Half the teeth in his smile are gone and he’s wearing a faded Kris Kross T-shirt and a red beanie despite the heat.

  ‘I wouldn’t go in, I was you. I wasn’t even sure which one it was. But I kept watchin’ him. He comes out at strange times, dressed funny. I been in. You wouldn’t be able to tell from outside, but it’s done up all nice. You want to go in? You need a ticket to get in.’ He holds up a crumpled piece of paper. It takes her long seconds to recognize it as money. ‘I’ll sell you one for a h
undred bucks. Otherwise it won’t work. You won’t see it.’

  She feels a jab of relief that he’s clearly crazy. ‘I’ll give you twenty if you show me where to go.’

  He changes his mind. ‘Nah. Nah, wait. I been in. It wasn’t good. Place is cursed. Haunted. Devil’s own. You don’t want to go in. You give me twenty for the good advice and you don’t go in, you hear?’

  ‘I have to.’ God help her.

  Everything she has in her wallet amounts to seventeen dollars and change. The homeless guy is not very impressed, but he takes her round and helps boost her onto the wooden staircase zig-zagging up the back of the house, regardless.

  ‘You won’t see shit, anyway. Not without a ticket. Guess that means you safe. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.’

  ‘Please be quiet.’

  She uses Dan’s jacket to climb over the barbed wire that has been looped round the base of the outside stairs precisely to stop people getting in. Sorry, Dan, she thinks as the wire rips into the sleeve. You need new clothes anyway.

  The paint is flaking on the boards. The stairs are rotten. They complain under her every step as she gingerly picks her way to the ground-floor window that gapes open like a hole in a head. There is broken glass all over the ledge. The shards are dirty and rain-spattered.

  ‘Did you break the window?’ she whispers down to the crazy man.

  ‘You shouldn’t ask me nothing,’ he sulks. ‘Your business, you want to go in.’

  Shit. The house is dark inside, but she can see through the open window that it’s trashed. Junkies went to town in there. The floorboards have been ripped up, along with the piping, walls busted up and stripped to the bone. Through a door on the other side, she can make out the naked porcelain of a broken toilet. The seat has been wrenched off, the sink kicked to the ground and cracked open. It’s absurd that he would be hiding in there. Waiting for her. She falters on the edge. ‘Can you call the police?’ she whispers.