Where She Went (ARC)

by Kelly Simmons

  He exhaled in disgust and headed for the back deck.

  Maggie sat back on the curb and waited, scrolling through Emma’s phone. One voicemail from an unrecognized contact, left over a year before? Could this be important? She pressed play. Hi, Em, it’s Dad…

  Tears sprang from her eyes. Of course. This was probably the reason Emma had kept this phone even if she had another, newer one. No nefarious reason. No undercover reason. Sentimental reasons. Fear that she might lose this voicemail in the changeover, in the updating, in the stupid volcanic mystery that was the cloud. Listen, before we meet you today, can you bring some napkins? That was so like Frank, so like a police officer, who didn’t want to run errands in his uniform. We have everything else. Thanks, sweetie. See you soon. His tone of voice, so different when he spoke to their daughter than when he spoke to her.

  If Maggie had saved her voicemails from Frank, they wouldn’t bring anyone solace. She imagined them all, end to end, a symphony of sharp and flat notes. An aural portrait of the man only Maggie knew. Not the calm tones of the public servant. Not the sweet harmonies of the Catholic choirboy. Not the soothing sound of a devoted dad. No. Her Frank would sound like an animal in a cage, nerves frayed, ready to jump. Maggie wondered, not for the first time, about his lover, the cop named Gina who she’d always simply referred to as Salt. Had she kept his voicemails, too? Did they have the same purring quality as Emma’s?

  The thought made the tears flow again. She wiped her eyes, shook her head. There was no time for this now. None. She’d gone through her husband’s things only a week after his death, thrown out his old socks, donated his shirts and sweaters, given the rest of him away, all the parts that Gina hadn’t taken. Emma had looked stunned by the speed and ferocity of her clean out, but Maggie was done. She’d mourned the person he used to be, but she would be goddamned if she was going to mourn the asshole he’d become. She was done feeling sad over Frank O’Farrell.

  Maggie started scrolling through Emma’s contacts. A–E, all first names. She steeled herself on D, thinking that Emma’s dad’s cell phone number would still be there. But it wasn’t. When she got to F, she was certain she’d find him. Father. Frank. Sentimental Emma would have kept that, too. But no. Hmm. Maybe P for Papa? What was there, in the Fs instead, was another Philadelphia number, with the rare 215 area code, the one no one had any more. The name? Future husband.

  Sixteen

  Emma

  Emma knew the biggest obstacle in trying to be a reporter wasn’t being afraid or being new to it or not being smart enough to make connections and figure things out. No. Her biggest obstacle was her tendency to blush. It would be one thing if it only happened when she was embarrassed or attracted to someone; that she could totally handle. But it also sometimes happened when she told a lie. Her mother had scoped this out early and used it against her. She supposed if she was ever in a long-term relationship and tried to cheat on her boyfriend, that he would be onto her, too. Sarah Franco was close enough that she might have noticed, but Sarah was a biology major, logical, left-brained, and tended not to see things other people did. Sarah was the friend who didn’t notice when you got your hair cut or had a new outfit on. Sarah had never teased Emma about her blushing. But Taylor? Taylor, addicted to acting and gestures and movements; Taylor, who memorized the walks of strangers on the street in case she’d need them someday in her work, had already teased her about blushing in front of the others, and for that reason, Emma had decided that she needed to talk to Fiona about her job in the dark. As in at night, when they were in bed, or when Emma used one of her mint-green facial masks. That would cover her blush, and that would cover her tracks.

  The problem was, Fiona wasn’t in a very chatty mood late at night. The first night, she’d answered Emma’s questions with single words, like a reticent adolescent: “Where were you tonight?” “Out.” “Did you have dinner?” “Yes.” “What did you have?” “Chicken.” And then, when Emma had asked her who she was with, Fiona had actually fallen asleep. That, or she’d pretended to. Emma knew her tactics had to be wrong. She’d seen Fiona in a group using actual phrases and sentences. She’d seen her drinking, laughing and loose. Maybe when she was tired and ready for bed was the wrong time. Maybe Emma interrogating her reminded her of her mother, her nagging sister, someone she hated. Making asking questions was the wrong thing to do. Maybe Emma should just talk? Or maybe, just maybe, it would be simpler and quicker to follow her. After all, she had to prove she was right first, didn’t she? Before she cozied up and got information, didn’t she have to prove her hypothesis and make sure Taylor and her love of drama and intrigue and character hadn’t just made the whole thing up to see if she could get a rise out of Emma?

  She’d spent enough time around drama kids in high school to understand that some of them lived in a parallel universe. They were costumed, not clothed. They performed instead of talked. So it was entirely possible that Taylor viewed the world differently. But how differently? Could she have made this up? Was it part of some performance art for school? When Emma had asked Annie and Morgan if they knew where Fiona was, they both said they thought she had a job modeling clothes. And neither of them had blushed when they answered. They’d looked her straight in the eye, no hesitation.

  So first, Emma had to find out if Taylor was lying. That was her justification for tailing Fiona. It was as if she hadn’t believed herself, hadn’t believed the valet, the ownership and permits at London, hadn’t believed everything she’d laid out to Jason. It was as if she was finished before she’d even started, doubting herself completely, half believing that’s what it would turn out to be—a Taylor drama. Not a story. Not a story that would change her life.

  What had never occurred to her at the beginning, which didn’t hit her until later, was that Fiona might not just be exhausted but embarrassed, sad, something. That Fiona might feel old and used and ashamed and not rich and happy did not enter Emma’s brain for a while, and she felt badly the moment it did. Before then, she hadn’t felt anything but justified.

  Most of Fiona’s classes were in the afternoon, and when Emma left in the morning for hers, she’d assumed Fiona stayed in bed. Emma was at the Morning Grind picking up a coffee that first Monday when an email came through from Cara Stevens. A link to a book excerpt she might find helpful. A new memoir written by a thirty-year-old who dated an elderly man through one of the apps in New York. Emma had listened to a few podcasts with escorts and sugar babies and read articles written by prostitutes, but this was the first full-blown account she was aware of. The excerpt described how the woman’s first relationship had grown and expanded. Starting with drinks, dinner, and sex and then unspooling in the opposite direction. Brunch, shopping, movies. Just like with a girlfriend, there was as much daylight activity as anything else.

  This girl had had trouble adjusting to the man’s demands, the lack of privacy and space. They started out going to neighborhoods far away from hers; she lived in Queens and the man on the Upper East Side, so that was easily accomplished at first. But New York is a notoriously small place at times, and one day, when he had tickets for a Broadway matinee, their worlds collided. Her hand sliding from his arm the moment she saw her cousin on the sidewalk ahead. He’d patted his own arm, scrabbling, looking for her hand, as if he’d lost money or a piece of jewelry. But it was too late. Her cousin had seen them, and the awkward introductions had been embarrassing, and her cousin, young and sharp and outraged. “Oh, your friend Robert, huh? And where do you two know each other from, huh? You two kids in a book club together?”

  Reading this, Emma realized she could be missing out on a crucial part of Fiona’s situation by confining her investigation to the evening hours. She finished her coffee and vowed to check the Snap Map every hour, in case Fiona did more than sleep in and eat Starbucks sous vide eggs in the morning. After her Intro to Art History class, her instincts paid off. Fiona was not in her dorm and not in Starbucks or the gy
m. Fiona was down near city hall.

  The next day, Emma skipped class, donned a dark hoodie and a baseball cap, rented a blue bike from the campus station, and waited in Semper Circle, near the fountain at the south campus entrance. She figured the bike would give her flexibility in case Fiona took an Uber somewhere. If she took the subway, she was screwed, but somehow, she doubted Fiona was riding public transportation on the regular.

  An hour later, Fiona stepped outside Hoden House and walked down the street. Emma watched, not moving at first. She could be going over to Riordan or Digby, where she had friends. She could be going to get coffee. No. A black car idled nearby, and she walked to it, got into the back seat. An Uber? No. This was a Jaguar. Somebody’s driver was picking her up. Emma flipped up her kickstand, pulled her sunglasses down, and prayed that whoever was in the car drove slowly.

  The car headed south down Broad Street, predictably enough. She stuck to the wide sidewalk, where she had less chance of being seen. She knew it was illegal to ride a bike anywhere but the street, but the cops in North Philly had bigger concerns. This close to campus, the concrete was pocked with broken brown and green glass, crushed cans, and discarded Juul pods. Emma tried to swerve around them, worried about the tires on her rented bike. She drove past the Top Hat, the dive bar kids went to for its cheap Natty Light and soft pretzel nuggets with cheese dip. Emma considered it, just a block and a half off campus, as far south as she would ever walk off campus alone, even during the day. She felt slightly safer on a bike but not much. This was not a place anyone wanted to be stranded, in this stretch between campus and city hall. But this time of the morning, it was quiet. Ugly and littered but not loud, not jangling with music and shit talk from groups of people gathered on the stoops and the street, drug dealers, gangs, or just bored neighbors who didn’t quite fit either description. It was impossible at night to tell who was who. Unless you were a student, foolish enough, broke enough, or drunk enough to be walking back to campus. People were regularly robbed after dark, and everyone knew it. Even the materials on Semper’s website acknowledged the need for caution.

  Emma kept well behind the car to make up for the occasional stop at a red light. She kept pace pretty well, and the timing was mostly fine. Occasionally, she had to pedal faster, on the off chance the car would turn before it hit city hall, but Emma didn’t think it would. Broad Street wasn’t pretty up here, but the surrounding streets tended to be far, far worse.

  Then, a turn signal. Left.

  Shit, Emma thought. Be a mistake. Be an accident. Please don’t turn. Please don’t turn. She was on the far right, on the sidewalk; turning left was not going to be easy for her, and it would be conspicuous to panic or veer. That, and she really didn’t know what it was like over on those side streets; they could be drug houses or urban pioneers for all she knew, but she did know they would be narrower, smaller, and closer than the width and boulevard sweep of Broad Street. It would be harder for her to hide.

  The car was well ahead of her when she finally made her way across. She slowed at the corner, watchful. The block wasn’t too bad. A few renovated houses mixed among ones that were falling down. An empty lot on one corner, a community garden on another.

  The car was going slower now, so Emma got off and walked her bike. If Fiona looked in the rearview mirror or turned around, would she recognize her? Emma doubted it. She sometimes had the feeling that she was invisible to her roommates. The car stopped next to the garden. Buying vegetables? she wondered. Did Fiona have to cook for this guy, too, pick up salad fixings, what?

  But no. Another young woman appeared, walking from the opposite direction, in booties and a floral dress, her long, dark hair glinting in the sun. The car idled, and she heard the slide of the window going down. The girl stopped. A brief conversation. Then she opened the back door and joined Fiona inside.

  What the fuck had just happened here? Was this a three-way? Or some kind of transport? Emma would never know, would never be certain. As she followed them all the way to Center City, the car pulled up in front of a fancy woman’s store, one where you had to be buzzed in, and waited as the girls went inside.

  Emma wasn’t dressed well enough to follow them. She huddled in a coffee shop across the street and watched from the window as the girl she didn’t recognize came out an hour later. Fiona did not reappear.

  She got up, stretched. Ordered another coffee, a decaf, and waited another hour. The seats were small and made of concrete, to discourage loitering or to appeal to only skinny people who could balance on them. She watched a stream of people only a few years older than she was walk to work, headphones in, ignoring each other. This was life, she thought. Walking around, knowing no one. No one going to the same building you were, no one with the same professor. People on a sidewalk who only had the sidewalk in common. She drank the last gritty sip of her coffee and realized the futility of what she was doing. Fiona either worked there or was spending a lot of money, and at this point, even if she walked out with shopping bags, Emma might never know which it was. She could feel her GPA plummeting to the ground as she watched and waited and waited.

  The moment she stood up to leave, two other people dove for her table. Good luck, she thought. You’d be more comfortable sitting on the curb. She walked outside, annoyed with herself, with the situation. She thought, as she often did when she was in the city, of her father. How did her father have patience for stakeouts? The thought of her dad, always in motion, his foot tapping as he sat, fingers drumming on the steering wheel. How could he have sat still to observe or to wait? And paperwork? It was easy to imagine him running after a perpetrator, interrogating a witness—that she could see in sharp, realistic relief. The rest of it? No freaking way.

  She stood on the corner, trying to decide if she should get another bike from the docking station or just walk to Broad Street and grab the subway, when she heard a familiar peal of laughter.

  Across the street, Taylor, Morgan, Annie, and Fiona, coming out of the store, shopping bags swinging on their arms. Taylor’s familiar laugh, the others subtler, smaller. A cluster of dark denimed legs and high boots and long sweaters, better dressed for this morning jaunt than they ever were on campus. They headed toward Rittenhouse Square, sliding in and out of the molten autumn light, passing through the shadows of buildings high and low, bits of gold sparkling at their ears and wrists, the buckle of a bag, the hardware of a boot. Not toward the subway. Not toward school. Toward the world, another world.

  Shit. How had she missed the rest of them entering the store? When she’d glanced at the menu? When she’d bent down to take a sip of coffee? Had she slurped on that foam too long? She watched them walk up to the next corner, linger at the stoplight. Suddenly, she cared less about where than why.

  She ran across the street against the light, hitting the store’s buzzer urgently with the flat of her hand. A man in a suit arched one brow at her behind the glass, and she pulled down her hood. Her hair tumbled down around her shoulders, and she saw him soften, open the door.

  “Thanks,” she said. “I just need a word with the cashier.”

  The store was landscaped in white wood with very little merchandise in it. The clothes hung a few items to a rack, as if someone didn’t want the hangers to touch, clank, mingle.

  “Excuse me,” she said. “I was supposed to meet friends here after I went to the gym. I think maybe I missed them?”

  “Fiona’s friends?”

  “Yes,” she said brightly. On a first name basis?

  “They just left,” the salesperson said with a tight smile. “Perhaps you can catch them.”

  “Damn,” she said. “Did they all buy new outfits?” She fingered the sleeve of a blue dress hanging nearby. “Because we have this thing tonight, and I was just gonna wear a black dress, but now maybe I have to step it up, y’know?”

  “No, Fiona got them matching sweaters. So cute.”

 
“Matching sweaters,” she repeated dumbly. This was not what she expected to hear. They were eighteen, not eight.

  “For their birthdays?” the clerk continued.

  “Ahhhh,” she said. “Right, because—”

  “All their birthdays. So close together in the fall.” The girl sighed. “Libra. It’s one of the most generous signs.”

  “Clearly,” Emma said, then thanked her and left. It could have been a half-truth, or it could have been a complete lie. Emma didn’t know when all of her roommates’ birthdays were; it hadn’t come up. But she knew Taylor’s was in September. Maybe the girls’ birthdays were in the same quarter, and that was close enough.

  She put up her hood and continued walking toward the square, just in case they were all still nearby. But it didn’t matter. Where they were going instead of going to school, who cared? Girls skipped school all the time. She was pretty sure she knew what she needed to know: that Fiona—or maybe even her sugar daddy; who knew who got her that credit card?—was trying to woo them. Or bribe them. That was the conclusion she held on to tightly. Because the other explanation was too painful—that they were all best friends and she wasn’t. That Emma simply wasn’t invited, even though her birthday was in September, too, and no one had so much as bought her a cupcake.

  Seventeen

  Maggie

  Maggie’s eyes closed as she waited at the curb. Elbows on knees, head in hands. She didn’t know how long she’d been asleep or how long Kaplan had been inside the house when he jostled her shoulder and told her that Taylor was no longer there.

  “How is that possible?” she said.

  “Well, there’s more than one door, a lot of windows, and I’m only one person.”

  They headed back to the dorm together. Later now, quieter. Inside the hallways, the common rooms, just an occasional girl in flannel pants and a T-shirt, shuffling in Ugg slippers or worn moccasins.