Where She Went (ARC)

by Kelly Simmons

  In her small notebook, she wrote down the name of every freshman boy who had lived in their dorm that year. Page after page. Just in case. It was somewhere to start, and it seemed as logical a place as any.

  Walking back to her dorm, it was crystal clear to her: she’d been following the wrong people. The girls were a given. Whether it was one roommate or all—what did that matter? The part of her that cared about that was the girl in her, not the writer. She felt left out, excluded, jealous in a weird, twisted way. She had to laugh at the absurdity. Wasn’t I good enough to be a ho, too? What about me?

  But the writer in her needed to follow the men, the money, the mechanics of it. The girls could come later. All she needed was one, just one, to talk on the record. That, she thought, would be the easy part. And she decided that asking Fiona questions was wrong, too. Fiona didn’t want to talk. Fiona didn’t want to be pursued. When Fiona was home, she needed peace and quiet and space. So there was no reason to trip all over Fiona. No. There were other girls out there, had to be.

  She would have to let Fiona come to her, not the other way around. And Emma thought, in her youthful and naive way, that she knew how to do it.

  There was a reason Fiona had approached Taylor and not Emma. Taylor acted the part. Taylor looked the part. And that, Emma knew, was fixable. Learnable. Doable.

  First stop: CVS.

  Twenty-One

  Maggie

  Maggie believed a confrontation with her husband’s mistress would have happened at Frank’s funeral. She had steeled herself for it, convinced herself it was inevitable, that this woman, this Gina Colletti, a fellow cop who had become his partner, would not be able to stay away. When an officer dies in the line of fire, the whole city grieves. Not just the precinct. Not just the department. The mayor, the citizens, everyone. Gina had been there, after all, during what they officially called a stakeout gone wrong but what Maggie knew had been a stakeout turned into a tryst. When Captain Moriarty had told Maggie it happened outside the Warwick Hotel, she knew immediately. That was Frank’s favorite hotel. That was where he and Maggie used to go for a cocktail, back in the days when they did things like that at the end of an evening. That was not a stakeout.

  Still, regardless of the reason, it was a Tuesday, and they were newly paired as partners, and they were together and Gina could have been gunned down just as easily as Frank. And even though Maggie’s sister Kate believed a fellow Catholic wouldn’t dare show her face at a married man’s funeral—she’d be in a different church, her own church, praying for her soul, Kate had said—Maggie believed the cop code would take precedence over the God code. She pictured Gina slipping in, sitting in the back corner, dressed in dark tones, sunglasses on, hair tucked in a bun. Or in uniform, perhaps, blending in with the others, as if Maggie didn’t know exactly what she looked like.

  But it did not happen. And all Maggie’s careful preparations—a stylish black crepe dress she’d run out to Macy’s for at the last minute, hair blown out just so, a full face of waterproof makeup, and heels, high heels, which she never wore—were wasted. Or maybe they weren’t. She caught more than one appreciative glance from the men in attendance, and if even one of them had the thought that Frank was an idiot to give up Maggie for Gina, then it was worth all the money, time, and effort. But no, she had done it all for Gina, and the rest of it, the catering and the kind words and deference to Frank’s cousins and coworkers and city officials? That had been for Emma. So Emma would be proud. So Emma would have good memories. But the man she’d known? The man whose sideways smile and dark-blue eyes had turned her head at seventeen? That Frank, Maggie knew, had been gone for a while. She’d been mourning that loss for years, not days.

  Maggie stood, brushed off her clothes, and squinted at her. Gina was shorter than she’d pictured. A low ponytail, ragged at the ends. Skin color deepened from late-summer sun, like she went to the Jersey Shore on the weekends. Long eyelashes but dark circles under her eyes.

  “You’re not as pretty as I thought you would be,” Maggie said.

  Gina let out a small, tight laugh. “Well, it’s been a rough year. But I don’t need to tell you about rough years.”

  “No,” Maggie said. “No you don’t.”

  They stood for a few long moments in silence, catching their breath, taking stock of the situation. Maggie was, surprisingly, not angry. It was relief that washed over her, that it had finally happened and she didn’t need to worry about it happening, and what feeling was sweeter than relief? Nothing.

  “Look,” Gina said finally, “Kaplan’s an asshole, but he’s just following protocol and orders.”

  “Orders to not find a cop’s daughter? I find that fascinating.”

  “You’ve got a bunch of things going against you. One, college girls sleep over with boys and friends. Two, teenagers run away for all kinds of reasons. No one files a missing person report right away; they wait. They wait till the kid sleeps it off, till the hitchhiking adventure to see a band is over, till it resolves itself. Three, when shit goes down on a college campus, no one wants the cops involved. They want to handle it themselves.”

  “Well, they’ve already fucked it up.”

  “Nope. They informed you in person. That’s a lot more than most people get.”

  “If you’re here to defend the department and what is happening right now, you can just leave. I don’t need your public relations bullshit.”

  “I’m just telling you why, that’s all. I don’t agree with any of it. I’m just telling you.”

  “Great. Fine. Thank you. The grieving police widow has been informed of the police handbook. You’re off the hook.”

  Gina took a deep breath, let it out. “I’m sorry,” she said, “but the deck is stacked against you here. I heard Kaplan down at the precinct bitching about you getting in the way, messing everything up.”

  “What did he say?”

  “Something about interfering with evidence and you going to a frat party to confront a witness. Is that true?”

  She shrugged. “Technically. Sort of.”

  “You need some help, and if you keep your mouth shut about it, I’ll give it to you.”

  Maggie wanted to ask her why, why she’d do such a thing, but she knew the answer, and she didn’t want to hear it. The idea of Gina Colletti saying her husband’s name out loud was suddenly too much. Just way, way too much. But motives aside, she’d be a fool to pass up the offer.

  “All right,” she said. “Are you going to help me search or with the posters or—”

  Gina karate-chopped her hand through the air. “Nah, you can get kids to do that. There’s an organization called Take Back the Night that will distribute them for you all over the city, not just the campus. Just get one of your daughter’s friends to take them there. Done.” Gina picked up one of them and nodded, told her she did a nice job, that the photo was the right size, the phone number, too. “You’d be surprised how many people do a bad job on these, make them almost illegible, make the kid look terrible, at a bad angle.”

  Maggie imagined creating them all alone, after being up all night, eyes blurry with tears. Of course they did a bad job.

  Gina took another breath. “Now, here’s what I’m going to try to do. I can get surveillance footage from the camera outside her dorm, the library, the popular entrances, and any of her favorite off-campus restaurants that she frequents. So you find out what those places are. Also, I’ll look for cameras outside any recent frat parties or anyplace you think she’s been in the past few days. And I can get lists of everyone who is in each of her classes. We can interview them, try to piece this thing together.”

  “Emma was…is…a little introverted. I don’t think she’s made a ton of friends in the first couple months of school.”

  “They don’t need to be friends to know something. Sometimes it’s better. It’s easier to complain or gossip or whatever ab
out people who are strangers.”

  “What about enemies?”

  “That makes it easiest of all, doesn’t it? And then I’ll get her phone records and check the cell towers—”

  “I have her phone.”

  “She left her phone behind?”

  “Yes.”

  Gina raised her eyebrows, and Maggie knew what that meant. It was bad, always, for someone that age to go anywhere without their phone. It simply did not happen.

  “And Kaplan let you take it?” She screwed up her face.

  “Not exactly.”

  “Okay, well, I’ll try to get it unlocked.”

  “I unlocked it.”

  “You had her password?”

  “She’s my kid. I know my kid.”

  “Okay, well, what was on it? Anything interesting, concerning? Any texts the night she went missing?”

  “We don’t know when she went missing.”

  “What?”

  “Not sure of the day.”

  “Okay. Well, still, anything that looked suspicious?”

  “Hardly anything. She deleted most of it. Even most of her contacts.”

  “Then you’ll definitely need her records, transcripts, and I can get that. Give me the phone number and the name of your carrier. We can also see where else she’d been before you got the phone.”

  “So the fact that I have it, that’s not gonna be a problem.”

  “On the plus side, I’m guessing you own the phone, your name is on the bill. On the minus side, you obstructed an investigation and fucked with a crime scene. Hard to say, but whatever, no one needs to know that right now.”

  “Do you have kids?” Maggie blurted out.

  “What?”

  “You heard me.”

  “No,” Gina said quietly, almost apologetically. “Divorced, no kids.”

  “So you don’t know.”

  “Know what?”

  Maggie took a deep breath. How many times could you tell someone who didn’t have kids that having kids changed you as immediately as a landslide, a tsunami?

  “Know that obstructing an investigation doesn’t matter to me. That my husband being a cop and knowing the rules and how things go? None of that matters. Not when it’s my kid.”

  “I’m not judging you. As I said, I’m here to help.”

  “You don’t like Kaplan.”

  “I don’t like a lot of people,” Gina said.

  Maggie believed her. There was an edge to her, she saw now, the kind of edge you needed to be a cop or a nurse or anyone who had to deal with a lot of people a lot of the time. Maggie had always thought she had that edge, too, from having too many heads in too many bowls of warm water. Sometimes all she wanted, at the end of the day, was to drown them, to take advantage of their trust and erase all those people’s heads, faces, beings.

  They exchanged phone numbers and information. Gina said she’d be back in touch as soon as she could pull some favors, get what she needed. She warned Maggie that it might take more time than going through traditional channels, but she would do her best.

  Maggie listened to her, watched her, couldn’t help inventorying her. Her hair needed to be cut, conditioned. Her scalp had spent too many days under a hat, sweaty, unwashed. Her eyes didn’t really need makeup; she didn’t have a great body; she wasn’t tall like Maggie. She looked like she’d wolfed down her share of egg sandwiches and bagels in a hurry. But her skin. Her skin had the warm, buttery quality that you only see in Mediterranean people. Her skin looked like cookie dough, Maggie thought, and it made her sad, suddenly, to think of how her husband might have admired it, touched it. So different from Maggie’s thin, pale Irish skin, that always looked stretched to the breaking point. She thought of her father and the bruised translucency of his hands and arms before he died. She bet Gina’s father looked like George Clooney.

  As Gina walked away and promised to call her as soon as she had more information, she, too, told her to get some sleep. Told her to go home. Maggie supposed she was right. She’d been up for nearly two days now, and her eyelids had that heavy feeling she used to get when Emma was a baby. Plus, she was getting weepy over moisturized skin and how strangers’ fathers aged better than her own. A sure sign that she needed to rest, to calm that mind of hers down.

  “Maggie.” Gina stopped, called over her shoulder. “You know the reason they didn’t find Frank’s killer right away? The reason they interrogated you, asking you those stupid questions? That was my fault.”

  Maggie sighed. “I have always believed it was all your fault. Every piece of it.”

  “I deserve that, I know, but specifically, I didn’t do the right thing. I didn’t grab my weapon and run after the perp. I should have, and I didn’t.”

  “I’m sure you told Moriarty that. I’m sure he’s forgiven you for screwing up.”

  “I did. He did. But I did it for a good reason.”

  Maggie blinked. “To stay with Frank.”

  “Yes.”

  “So he wouldn’t die alone.”

  “Yes.”

  Maggie couldn’t believe they were both standing here, on a college campus, twenty feet away from each other, discussing Frank’s last moments, and both of them appeared to be dry-eyed. She understood her own lack of tears but not Salt’s.

  “If you expect me to thank you for that, I’m not sure I can.”

  “I’m not asking you to. I’m apologizing for the unnecessary interrogation.”

  Maggie knew this technique—gain their trust with a confession, then wait for a confession in return. But she wasn’t falling for it. They had a job to do.

  “Okay then,” Maggie said and continued to walk. “Wait,” she said suddenly. “I did find one weird thing on the phone.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Well, someone told Kaplan Emma had a boyfriend, but when he interviewed the guy, he said they worked together on the paper, but that’s all.”

  “Okay. And?”

  “And she never mentioned a boyfriend to me. But there was a contact on her phone that said ‘Future Husband.’”

  “Future husband? When you called the number, who did you get?”

  “I haven’t called it.”

  “Well,” Salt said, walking back toward her. “What are we waiting for?”

  Twenty-Two

  Emma

  Emma didn’t know if it was growing up with a mother who was a hairdresser or her own worldview, but she’d always believed that if her hair was clean, trimmed and styled, that was all she needed to look good. Hair was more than half the battle, and if her hair worked, the clothes and makeup didn’t matter so much. As a result, she’d never really paid much attention to the rest. Her mom cut her hair in angled layers like the photos she showed her on Instagram and taught her how to blow-dry it and style it in beachy waves and put it into a bun in the cutest, fastest way imaginable. So her hair was always on point.

  At her high school, almost everyone played sports and didn’t wear much makeup to school. Their selfies and videos were more playful, fun, not posed. But suddenly, at college, everyone cared about everything; the world revolved around going out and looking good. Even girls who ran track and wore sweats to class could turn it up a notch at night. Emma hadn’t caught up. And maybe, just maybe, if she looked a little bit more like Fiona, Fiona would talk to her more. So she went to CVS and bought mascara, eye shadow, lip gloss, and blush. She had to guess at the colors but thought she’d come close. Even if it didn’t work with Fiona, she needed to look more worldly if she had any hope of getting inside that club. She went home and watched YouTube videos about cat eyes and contouring and decided that the people who did this for a living were insane, even though they were probably rich. Emma didn’t know anyone who made videos in their rooms on any topic, or at least no one who confessed to doing so.


  When she was done, she looked in the mirror and decided she looked pretty good. Not better, just older. She was going to pay a visit to her valet friend and see if the club was open. See if they might be taking job applications. She could be a hostess. She could help them with their social media. She could bus tables. She could wash dishes. She didn’t have to become a sugar baby to learn what was happening. She just needed to get in the door. She couldn’t count on Fiona making an overture to her like she had to Taylor. Couldn’t count on her confiding in her or even, if she was brave enough, taking her there or introducing her to one of her “daddy dates.” She’d have to pursue all angles until one of them opened up.

  And later, when she got back, she was going to follow Professor Grady. She was already pretty certain he took the train to work, didn’t drive—she’d seen the SEPTA pass hanging around his neck with his school ID. Two lanyards, which clicked together as he walked around the room, handing back tests. She could almost imagine following him by that sound, like the tags and collar on a dog, like the halyards of boats, a kind of elocution. Did he even know this happened? Did it not bother him, listening to himself walk, like squeaky shoes or creaky knees? Oh well, she thought; if she wrote the story, this would be an interesting detail. That he wasn’t as quiet, as under the radar as he thought. He had a tell, just like everyone else.

  She skipped her late morning class, figuring she’d just do the reading again and catch up later. Maybe she could borrow someone’s notes, maybe not. As long as she kept up on the reading and turned in her papers, she’d be fine.