What's Become of Her

by Deb Caletti

  But, wait. Locked?

  Locked! She unfolds a paperclip, jabs it in the tiny hole until she hears a mouse-sized click. This may be all the evidence she needs that Henry is not a criminal. The drawer opens easily, and she suddenly realizes that the tiny key in his dresser drawer box would have been easier yet. No criminal would be this sloppy or exert so little effort to cover up his crimes.

  And there are no crimes here. Just poems, most of which she’d already seen that time on his desk, poems of ringing bells and windswept beaches and empty rooms with fluttering curtains, poems echoing the voice of his greatest, long-dead influence, Mr. Poe, with the same swirls and flourishes of language. Perhaps there’s some cryptic message of guilt in them, but Isabelle doesn’t think so. He is guilty of impersonating the voice of his favorite author, and he’s guilty of getting a whole lot less writing done than he’s implied, but the same things are true for most beginning writers.

  Open me, says his laptop.

  Or maybe that’s Maggie again. No, because here’s Maggie. Maggie is saying, Snooping on his computer? Wow, true love! Why are you with this guy, if you are pushing that power button right now?

  I just need…Isabelle tries to explain, but she has no idea how. What does she need? Love? Safety? Or does she just need to try and try to get love and safety from a place she’ll never, ever get love and safety?

  Reassurance, she says to the Maggie-ghost. I’m just looking for a little reassurance.

  Nice diamond, Maggie says.

  Isabelle takes off her ring, sets it on the notepad. Is it really snooping when he’s told her all his passwords? See how transparent he is? See how open? He didn’t even bring his laptop with him! It’s sitting right here! What is she expecting to find, anyway? A written confession?

  Nevermore, she types.

  If anything, his laptop is too clean. There are a bunch of photos, but only recent ones. There’s only a small amount of music. Desktop icons for his bank, his credit card, his investment company. There’s a bill-paying app. A document file labeled Poems. He bought this laptop after he arrived here, she thinks. It’s new. No wonder. She draws the line at his email. She won’t find anything there, anyway, she suspects. He barely communicates with anyone. She shuts the machine down.

  Half-assed detective work! What about search history? What about hidden files? Maggie says.

  Isabelle hates herself.

  When Henry calls later that night, she is sitting in the middle of a mess in their living room. He’d be shocked at what a disaster it is. There are old moving boxes, which she’s using to pack away the Christmas decorations, open and spilling their contents. The lights still hang halfway down from the window. The screen of her own laptop is frozen on a scene midway into a bad Christmas-wedding movie. An empty Marie Callender’s plastic tub, with smears of red spaghetti sauce, sits on the coffee table with a fork dropping from it. A half-empty bottle of wine is there, too, accompanied by a juice glass ringed in burgundy. The musician who used to live there would have been proud. It looks like the hotel room after the concert. She just needs to fling her panties and crash a lamp or two.

  “I am sleeping in a pink bed in a pink room with a faux zebra rug,” Henry says.

  “You’re a diva.”

  “Oh, and a stuffed panda where you should be.”

  “That sounds like good company.”

  “You’d be so much better. I was wrong not to insist you come. The girls want to meet their new aunt. I miss you.”

  “I miss you, too.”

  “We went for Mexican. What’d you have for dinner?”

  He’d be horrified. “I had Thai Ginger delivery.”

  “Nice.”

  “The Christmas decorations are almost down.”

  “You’re a saint.”

  Isabelle hears the shriek and stomping of little girls in the distance. The phone rustles and clunks. “Help, help,” she hears him call from far off. “It’s a princess attack!”

  He’s back. “Iz, they’re corralling me for another round of Candyland. Talk tomorrow? I love you and miss you.”

  “I love you and miss you, too.”

  “Keep my spot warm.”

  “Will do.”

  She eats some semi-defrosted Sara Lee cheesecake straight from the tinfoil pan. She is repulsive. Also drunk. It is possible that he’s too good for her. She doesn’t deserve him.

  She sleeps with his shirt. She wakes at 2:00 A.M. because the wind is howling and that house is too empty. All of that glass shakes in the storm. She is holding a fistful of cotton stripe, so no wonder she was having strange dreams about trying to catch a man, a delirious, unkempt man, who paced sepia-toned streets in rumpled clothing from another century.

  The wind and the waves roar, and rain splatters the windows. The house trembles. She knows who the man was, the one in her dream—tortured poet, creator of detective fiction, writer of horror stories. She’s hit with one of those sudden, middle-of-the-night truths, helped along by nightmares. Henry is likely more drawn to the man than to the melancholy waters and golden towers and valleys of unrest. Just the man, Poe, who longs for his mother and grieves for all the dead young women in his life. The man who was clever and brilliant and immature and a plagiarist. Isabelle remembers a professor of hers, arguing against the general theory of the lonely and misunderstood Poe, saying instead that he was small-minded and mean, with an ego so fragile that he couldn’t stand to be embarrassed or diminished. Poe was generous and stingy both, the professor had said. But he wanted to be admired. He demanded pity. And he got it, especially from women, because what a tortured soul he was, and how sad it would be to be that tortured, even if he was sometimes intolerable.

  Isabelle understands this, as the moon slowly slides into view in their window: the man recognizing the other man. The same personalities have existed over time, haven’t they? The same weaknesses, whether in a human being wearing a waistcoat or a down jacket from REI. The pit and the pendulum, the tell-tale heart, the maelstrom, they all happen inside of a person. What tumbles around a human mind is the truly terrifying and dangerous thing. And the scared, lost child in a human being could either stay a scared, lost child or become a reactive, threatening monster.

  Isabelle shoves the pillow over her head. The truth is too loud, and so is Maggie. When are you going to stop being a trembling little girl, Iz? Rise up, Muchacha. How about a little nevermore of your own?

  It will all feel overly dramatic in the morning.

  —

  She is in her robe and barely has the coffee made when the doorbell rings. Maybe it’s Remy, finally. Remy has been avoiding them, ever since Henry began nagging her about fixing the deck. Or maybe it’s Officer Ricky Beaker again (Please, God, no), ready to barge in and question her. Either way, it’s early, people. She hasn’t even brushed her teeth yet, so she’s still her disgusting single self, with old wine and now coffee breath. She notices her bare hands. She forgot to put her ring back on. It’s still sitting on that pad in Henry’s office.

  She peeks out the front window and sees the big, brown UPS truck rumbling off. She opens the door, and she’s hit with fresh, winter cold. That’s right—there’s life going on outside. You can forget that. She breathes in a nice, big lungful of morning. There’s a padded envelope on the front step.

  Curious.

  And, wait. What is this? It’s addressed to her. No one sends her anything, except Amazon and Nordstrom and DSW, when requested.

  From who? Okay, weird, there’s no return address. She’s momentarily unnerved. Actually, all alone out there, she feels uneasy. Maybe this is like that pair of handcuffs that was left on their porch a few weeks after they moved in. Henry said to ignore it, because shit like that happened to him sometimes. You had to grow a thick skin and forget it.

  But this has lovely, foreign stamps. The package has been sent from…She peers. Rochefort-en-Terre, Bretagne, France.

  She doesn’t know anyone from France, but her friend Anne tra
vels a lot. She hasn’t heard from her in months and months, but maybe this is why. Maybe she hasn’t just disappeared because Isabelle pushed her away, her last friend, because she can’t bear to be honest about her most recent romantic situation. Exotic world tour, it would be just like Anne. Isabelle feels a pang of longing for all the adventures she herself hasn’t yet had. And Rochefort-en-Terre sounds completely harmless. It sounds like a place where cows would wear little bells.

  She hopes Anne sent her a fun bracelet or something. She squishes the package, trying to guess. Maybe a bracelet. A small, long lump.

  She takes it into the kitchen, opens the top with a pair of scissors. She leans against the kitchen counter, reaches in. There is no card. Just something wrapped in tissue.

  She unrolls it.

  Her heart flips. She feels suddenly sick. It’s a watch. A woman’s watch—small, oval, old. It has a brown leather band, and the band is ripped. The last few holes are torn straight down, so that there are two, tiny strips of leather. The little prong of the buckle is bent sideways. It has stopped at ten seconds after 2:40.

  Isabelle shoves her hand in the envelope again, but there is nothing, no note of explanation, nothing but the watch.

  The glass and metal of the watch face is cold. Isabelle turns it over.

  Oh, dear God. Oh please, no. It’s engraved.

  Virginia Arsenault. ARHS.

  She flings it in horror. It lands with a clunk under the counter, where there are cereal crumbs and spilled bits of sugar. She eyes it like it’s a coiled snake, or a deadly insect.

  Who sent this? What’s it supposed to mean? Is it some message from Virginia’s family? One of those friends in the articles, who pleaded for justice for her death? But what message is there in an old watch?

  She should call the police. Then she remembers—the police won’t exactly be jumping to protect her or Henry from senders of broken watches.

  The house is still a wreck. She does something that underscores the general downward direction of things—takes a swig of what’s left in the wine bottle along with her coffee.

  She paces around. Back in the kitchen, she picks up the watch again. She sets it beside her on the couch, sits with crossed legs with her laptop. She clicks off the frozen holiday wedding movie. Virginia Arsenault, ARHS, she types.

  Algonquin Regional High School. Virginia graduated twenty-six years ago, eight years before Isabelle herself. There’s a photo of Virginia, in a small group of teenagers wearing tracksuits. She’s the smallest of them, standing in the center of the front row. She’s beautiful and young, with dark hair and those elfin features Isabelle recalls from the other photograph she saw. Virginia is a tiny doll.

  The watch must have come from one of Virginia’s sisters or her friends. Isabelle remembers their anger in those interviews after Sarah’s disappearance. She looks up their names again. Mary Youngers. Florence Watanabe. Shelby Frey. With addresses in Boston, Lexington, Chelsea. Shelby’s Facebook page has a profile picture of a cat, wall posts from a vacation in Hawaii. None of them has any obvious connection to Rochefort-en-Terre in Brittany, France. Maybe one of them went on a trip. Maybe they used the opportunity to hide their mailing address and their identity. Maybe they want to remind her that Virginia was a real person. Her watch is a real object, which belonged to a real human being whom they loved.

  This must be it. It feels like the most logical explanation. But something is off about it, too. The watch is intimate—too treasured, one would think, to stick in the mail and send to a stranger. It has import. An eerie, distressing import. She feels shaken and disturbed. She takes the watch and shoves it deep down into one of her boots in her closet.

  She can’t do anything the rest of the day. She’s frozen; she sits in a chair and stares out the window, thinking. The surf breaks against the rocks again and again. She checks the locks and the windows. She feels watched.

  She tells herself that she’s acting crazy. She is still in her robe, the one from her mother with the crane on the back. She forces herself to put on some clothes, brush her teeth. Staying around the house in this state is not good for anyone; just ask Clyde Belle or Henry himself.

  She goes out, buys some groceries. She will cook something, just to prove she can be on her own without falling to pieces. She sticks stuff in her cart and then puts it all back. She checks out the alluring array of green Marie Callender’s boxes, chooses the family-size macaroni and cheese.

  When she comes out of the store, she sees Kale Kramer, resident thug, smoking a cigarette over by Randall and Stein Booksellers. Who knew people even smoked anymore. But Kale Kramer is only a harmless visual distraction compared to what’s disturbingly right in front of her. Officer Ricky Beaker is parked at the curb. He just sits there in his cruiser, his eyes on her. Maybe she is feeling watched because she is being watched. He follows her when she pulls out. She takes the curves of Deception Loop fast and hard to lose him, until her mind supplies images of princesses and movie stars plunging to their death from speeding cars on high cliffs. She ducks into Point Perpetua Park. It looks like Ricky Beaker has given up on her. She gets out, glances over her shoulder, but she’s alone. She walks the stormy beach with her hands shoved in her pockets.

  An awful thought occurs to her. What if Ricky Beaker is not hunting her, but protecting her? Somehow, this feels more terrifying. She files through her memory. Has she seen him more than usual? Driving just behind her, or parked outside of wherever she is? She doesn’t know! Damn it! She’s got to stop this. She tries to concentrate on her feet on that hard sand, the surf rolling in and the surf rolling out. Walking against the strong wind feels good. If she looks up, she can see both her mother’s old house and the house she lives in now. She picks up some beautiful, smooth rocks from that perfect spot where water meets shore, where all the stuff both good and bad collects, and she puts them in her pocket and brings them home.

  When Henry calls that night, she does not tell him about the watch. She listens to his stories about the nieces and Jerry and how Mark has a lot of patience, putting up with that bitch. The family all went out to lunch and to a movie. He bought the girls baseball caps with the restaurant’s rooster on it. Tomorrow, his other brother, Jack, is expected to fly in.

  She listens to his voice on the phone, and notices how those beach rocks look entirely different now that they’re out of water. They’ve lost their magic. They’re plain and dull since they’re no longer where they belong. It always goes like this. Still, people just can’t seem to let things be. She can’t. She can’t resist picking them up, even though this happens every time.

  That night, it’s impossible to sleep. Isabelle swears she can hear that dead watch ticking from inside her boot. She is sure that if she looks out her window, she’ll see Officer Ricky Beaker’s squad car parked under the streetlight in front of her house. She wills herself not to look.

  Willing herself not to look is something she’s good at.

  Chapter 22

  The New Caledonia Corvus Research Facility and Sanctuary has visitors from the Auckland Zoo. Two women and two men are there to catch the Coconut Lorikeet (Trichoglossus haematodus massena), so that they can study the prevalence, origin, and locations of Parrot Beak and Feather Disease in the New Caledonian parrots. Weary is with them out in the jungle now, helping with the mist net. Lotto is there, too, as is Hector, the new assistant. Yann is gone, fired. Good riddance, loser!

  Maybe Weary was too hard on him. After all, even Corvus will tease another creature just because it’s funny to do so. The thing about being Weary’s age, though, and living through what Weary has lived through—you don’t put up with shit. People will treat you the way you allow them to treat you. This can be a hard-earned lesson, one that takes years and years to get through one’s slow, stupid head, but once it’s in, it’s in.

  Yann begged for his job. Heh. Too little, too late, buddy. On top of making fun of Weary within earshot, Yann had made comments about the female students, thei
r fuckability, their weight, their general worthiness. Weary hates a misogynist.

  See you later, asshole.

  So Hector is here as of today, tromping around the jungle with the Australians, climbing trees with Lotto to place the rope lines. God forbid the visiting researchers would have to climb a tree. Two long lines now fall from a pair of widely separated Niaoulis, dropping from the branches like the ropes from an old swing. Hector and Lotto are getting along fine, and Hector is hard working and amiable, even with all of the teasing he’s gotten this morning. Teasing, because Hector is also the name of the notorious saltwater crocodile who turned up on the beach at Mu in 1993 and has never left, the island’s only croc, a famous creature who still gets the occasional media attention of an aging star athlete. Poor Hector the human—he’s been putting up with the fallout. He must get it everywhere he goes, the giggles and jaw-snapping gestures.

  “Croco!” Lotto calls. “Pull it up! Is it twisted? Hook it to that side rigging there.”

  “Green side up. It’ll go up half-cocked like that,” Weary calls. Honestly, visitors make Weary a little unhinged, with their demands on his time and their prying eyes.

  The net scritch-scratches up. In the often-dull work of researching birds in the field, this is a big event. “Brilliant. Just brilliant,” Callum says. He’s the alpha of the Aussie group. Now they all crane their necks and gaze at a sky full of black mesh. They admire their trap. It’s funny, the bounty of choices a person can make with a life. You can work at a tire store or become a banker or a deep-sea diver. You can live in a city, or way out here in the jungle with the birds. You can live with a creep or a sweetheart or all alone. Choices are beautiful, when you think about it.

  Not one hour later, a Lorikeet flies right in. Right in! There is much excitement over one little Lorikeet. The researchers are thumping one another on the back. “Look! Look at the tiny thing!” one of the women says.

  The bird twitches and flaps in shock and Callum trots over with his cage to retrieve it. As he watches, Weary can’t help but think of Isabelle and his own beloved Corvus. Corvus would never be so easily and quickly captured, and neither will Isabelle. You have small-brained birds and then you have the willful, determined, incredibly intelligent crows. Creatures like that, like Isabelle—they’ll remain cautious even if those nets are set up to save their life.