Where She Went (ARC)

by Kelly Simmons

  Later the next day, she’d fished out that sweatshirt, holding her nose. She’d rinsed it in the sink, rubbed the stain with a bar of soap, then thrown it into a hot water wash cycle with another load of clothes. All the stains came out; all the school colors stayed true. She’d dried it, folded it, and put it in Taylor’s room before the other girls had even woken up. But Taylor hadn’t even noticed.

  The small ministrations that had made Emma beloved to Sarah Franco and other kids she knew in high school meant nothing to her college friends. It hadn’t taken too many instances before she got the message and vowed, No more. I’m done taking care of you assholes. The last time, when they’d been at a party and all had too much to drink except her (she’d wisely started throwing her last few shots of vodka into the soil of a fiddle fern), on the walk home, she’d dug into her small cross-body purse and doled out Advil to everyone.

  “Thanks, Mom,” Annie had said, and they’d all laughed except Emma. No one wants to be the mommy in college. They want to be a hot girl or a powerful woman. To hop from child to mother was the absolute worst, and Emma vowed to be more careful from then on. She would try to fit in without taking care of anyone. No, she would only take care of herself.

  She switched platforms, going down one escalator, across the main concourse, weaving through a thick throng of commuters. Coming to Thirtieth Street always meant a weird confluence of people—travelers from the airport switching trains, lost, clueless, not knowing where they were going; commuters, hurrying, working on laptops, reading materials for their meetings the next day; and students, since this was the stop for Drexel and Penn. Emma didn’t look out of place here, but then the mix of types, of locals and out-of-towners, meant no one did. And that was why, as she finally got to the up escalator, brushing elbows, avoiding luggage slung on people’s shoulders, that at first she didn’t think twice about the man in the beige windbreaker on the platform off to her left. She sensed him more than she saw him, smelled something familiar—cologne? the woody pulp of old books?—then turned abruptly, jostling a woman standing too close behind her, apologizing. Below her, the man darted away, behind a partition, then gone. Brown hair, beige jacket, and she wasn’t sure precisely what he looked like. But he was wearing exactly what Professor Grady had been wearing. Had he been watching her? And jumped off at Thirtieth Street, too, to follow her?

  There was no path to get up the escalator faster; no one was walking up the left or moving to the right. Too many people. When she finally got to the top, she ran back down the stairs, back to the concourse. She looked left, right, scanning, her mind chanting beige beige beige like a mantra. She’d never seen so much black, blue, and red in her life.

  She crossed, ran up the platform where she’d originally jumped off. If he’d been heading back to his home, that’s where he’d be. But she heard the train as the stairs rose, and running didn’t help. The faster she ran, the more the train seemed to accelerate, pulling out of the station. She stood, staring at the back end of it, half expecting his face to appear, half wishing she’d been wrong. She was just being jumpy, she thought. She was just a number in the lecture hall to him. She might be onto him, but he, she was certain, had no idea who she was.

  Her heart rate slowed finally, and she headed back to her platform to wait. She sat on the metal bench and waited for the next train. This platform was full of students, all going the same direction. She didn’t recognize anyone, and no one noticed her looking, glancing around. She sighed. Why couldn’t it be a male student she needed to follow instead of a grown man? That would be a piece of cake. She thought of the easy obliviousness that propelled her roommates through the world—leaving digital clues, inviting attention. Professor Grady sure as hell didn’t show up on any Snap Map, that was certain.

  She boarded the train and rode back. She was the only person in the car without earbuds in, and she found herself cocooned in the buzzy, tinny sounds of their leaking music. She wondered what they could and couldn’t hear with all that in their heads. Would they hear her scream or laugh or speak? She smiled at the thought of acting crazy and being ignored. Then she realized she was going a bit stir-crazy. She thought of her father saying once that police work was ninety percent waiting, ten percent listening. She felt that now and wondered how her father, with his constantly jiggling legs, itching to get up and go, handled it. He wasn’t built for it yet managed to do it; she, more motherly and patient, should be better at it. She just needed to cut herself a break and give it more time.

  But how much time? Emma walked back to her dorm, trying not to think about her homework and her laundry and all the things she wasn’t doing while she was out chasing theories that weren’t playing out the way she wanted them to. She didn’t have months to let her theories play out. Her story had to come together, or she had to let it go, work on something else. She could almost hear Jason telling her that. And if following her professor wasn’t working, she needed to switch tactics. She could watch the club, not the professor. Who knows who else she’d see? All she needed was a car to wait and watch in. Or a job as a hostess, waiting for him to come in the door.

  She texted Michael and asked him if he could ever “borrow” a car for a night.

  She texted Sam Beck and offered to work a shift for free.

  Then a call came in, making her jump, and it wasn’t from either of them. It was Jason. She was so excited, she almost declined the call, fumbling while trying to answer. She finally picked up, and he asked her if she could update him on her progress. Asked if she was somewhere private, somewhere she could talk.

  “In a minute I will be,” she said. There were students all around her, and all she could think of was finding a door to lock. She ran into her dorm, up the stairs. No one was in the kitchen, Fiona wasn’t in her room, but she went into the bathroom anyway, locked the door, and, just for good measure, ran the water in the shower full force. She told Jason about Fiona and the account at the store. She told him about the valet trying to get her a good source. She told him about Sam Beck and trying to get a job as a hostess. She told him about Professor Grady being a former patron of the earlier club and the over-the-top renovations on his house. She said it all in a rush, and he didn’t say slow down, didn’t say wow, good work, didn’t say anything. For a second, she thought he’d hung up, that they’d lost their connection and she’d have to explain all over again. In those seconds, all her fears came forward. She realized she didn’t know him either, that he was a stranger, that phones have recording devices, that his father could be a patron of the university, for god’s sake, and she felt about as vulnerable as she had on the train platform. She wished she could see his face. Not just because it was a pleasant face, not just because she wanted to see him, but because, her father’s words about listening aside, that she realized she wasn’t good at it. She needed to watch, to see, to know if someone was lying or angry or interested or fascinated. For her, it was all about movement and body language.

  Finally, he spoke. “Are you…in a hot tub?”

  “No, I’m in the shower,” she replied quickly, then promptly wanted to curl up and die. Would he picture her naked now? Jesus! “I mean, I’m near the shower.” Then “Wait, is there a hot tub on campus?”

  “There’s a Jacuzzi in the gym.”

  Ah, the gym. Another place she wasn’t going while she was chasing the story.

  “Okay, so, Emma, you’re definitely onto something here. But unless you nail down a source and get more facts, figures, dates, you can’t write anything. You need to find more girls to talk or become one of the women yourself. I mean forget working as a hostess. You need to go on one of those dates and prove what actually happens.”

  She exhaled loudly. “I don’t think I can do that.”

  “I know it’s scary as fuck, but you either have to find a girl to talk or become a girl, or else the story isn’t about the girls, it’s about the men.”

  “No.�
�� She shook her head violently. “Jason, it’s not about the girls or the men, don’t you see? The story is about the school!”

  “I know that’s what you think it’s about, Emma, but—”

  “No, I know. I know it.”

  “Well, knowing it and proving it are two different things. And we can’t print it until you prove it.”

  The knock on the door was loud.

  “I gotta go.”

  “Okay, keep me in the loop.”

  “Are you almost through? I need the shower,” Annie called.

  Emma hung up the phone, turned off the water, and wrapped her head in a towel.

  “Going out tonight?” she asked Annie breezily as she passed by.

  “Possibly,” Annie replied. “You?”

  “I have homework due.”

  She laughed. The same laugh that had charmed Emma so on move-in day, a childlike laugh that rose and fell over something silly Morgan had said. She thought she could be friends with someone who laughed like that. But now it sounded hollow, forced.

  “Okay, Mommy,” Annie said, and as she turned away, Emma felt all the red in her skin, rising, burning.

  She went to her room, shut the door, and started going through Fiona’s things. Fuck them, she thought. I’m not doing this for them. I’m doing it for me.

  Twenty-Seven

  Maggie

  The summer before, when Emma was helping her at the salon with ads and social media, Maggie, Chloe, and Emma had gotten into a discussion about mean girls. Maggie had told them about Beth Flaherty’s slumber party in high school, when she’d been tricked into putting a yogurt and honey mask on her face and then they’d whistled for Beth’s two large dogs, who came bounding down the stairs, jumping on her, licking frantically. She was certain they were going to bite her face off, and the screams she emitted would have brought anyone else’s parents running, but Beth’s parents were drunk at a block party. Maggie had never recovered her social status with a few of those girls, who ate yogurt in front of her tauntingly at the cafeteria for years. Then Chloe had talked about being the last girl to get her period in high school and her friends coming in to class wearing tampons as earrings and necklaces. And Emma had not been surprised or even appalled. She had calmly told them how Sloane Adams had created a fake Instagram account and pretended to be a boy flirting with a girl in their class who had Down syndrome. Set up a date and everything, then broke the girl’s heart and recorded it all on video.

  “Okay, you win,” Chloe had said. “That’s some CIA-level shit right there.”

  “You never told me about that,” Maggie had said, frowning.

  “I’m telling you now,” Emma had replied.

  That interaction encapsulated their relationship. Emma would always answer a question; Emma would always come clean. But it would be on her terms. It was like living with someone on time delay; Maggie never knew when her daughter would hold on to something or how long she’d choose to cling to it, enjoying the secret or processing its meaning before she casually tossed it to her mother. Maggie thought of that now as she looked around the table at these girls who barely knew her daughter. What were their motives? What were they capable of?

  As the girls signed up and took stacks of posters and colorful thumbtacks, Maggie took a deep breath and approached Taylor.

  “How nice of you to come,” she said evenly.

  “Oh gosh, of course. Anything for Emma.”

  “I assume you’ve already spoken to the police?”

  “Well, I wasn’t much help. I haven’t seen her in days.”

  “So let me get this straight—now that you’re upright and sober—you’d do anything for her but not worry that you hadn’t seen her for days?”

  Taylor’s eyes narrowed so slightly that she probably thought Maggie wouldn’t notice. But Maggie was used to looking at women and girls, used to the micromovements they made in the mirror when they looked at their hair and tried to decide if they loved it or hated it or wanted to have Botox or liposuction. She was used to strangers not telling her the truth with anything but the tiny flickers of movement in their faces. Was that women’s intuition? Or just being a good hairdresser?

  “Oh, Emma was always in and out,” Taylor said. “So busy. We never knew where she was.”

  “Really?”

  “Really,” she said and smiled.

  Because that was the exact thing Emma had told Maggie about her roommates. That they were busy and didn’t spend much time in the dorm. But would saying that now, spitting it into Taylor’s face, betray her daughter? She thought so, so she said nothing. At the time, Emma’s comment had made Maggie happy. That her only child, used to quiet if not peace, had plenty of alone time to think and study. But now she wondered if she’d been foolish.

  “So when she moved all her stuff out of Fiona’s room, that didn’t faze you?”

  “Well, we figured she just needed her stuff. A girl needs her things, right?”

  Taylor cocked her head jauntily, and the move was so obvious, so calculated, it made Maggie sure of one thing. Taylor was a terrible actress. She would never work in this town or any town, let alone New York or LA.

  Maggie took the posters from Taylor’s hand. “We had plenty of volunteers show up before you,” she said. “But thank you anyway.” She didn’t want to waste the posters. She could practically picture Taylor walking around the corner and throwing them into recycling.

  “Wait, what? But I want to help.”

  “Oh, I think you’ve done enough already.”

  Taylor took a deep breath, offered another fake smile, and left.

  As Maggie worked her way around the room, handing out posters, thanking the girls, one of the girls asked her if she’d checked with health services.

  “No, I don’t think so. Why?”

  “Sometimes girls leave school abruptly because they’re having a health crisis.”

  “A health crisis?”

  “Yes. You know, a complicated problem or an embarrassing problem? Something they’re ashamed of, maybe? Related to health?”

  Maggie offered her a tight smile. How many ways could this poor girl try to say something awful without saying it?

  “I think she’d come to me with that,” Maggie replied.

  “Maybe,” the girl shrugged. “But it’s worth asking. And she was—is—Catholic, right?”

  “Yes,” Maggie said. “Yes, she is. And I’ll check, thank you.”

  When they were finished, she called Kaplan and was surprised when he picked up the phone.

  “I was just about to call you,” he said.

  “Really? Why?”

  “Well, you called me, so you go first.”

  “I was wondering if you’d contacted the health center on campus.”

  “I have,” he said.

  “Oh,” she said.

  “Sorry to take away the pleasure of you yelling at me.”

  “Well, what did you find out?”

  “Emma made an appointment last week but didn’t show up.”

  “An appointment for what?”

  “She didn’t say.”

  “She didn’t say, or they wouldn’t tell you?”

  “Judging from the intelligence of the person I spoke to, it’s hard to answer. But there are HIPAA laws protecting patients. So we don’t know if she needed a flu shot or a shrink.”

  “She had a flu shot.”

  “Okay.”

  “So…why were you calling me?”

  “We got partial handprints in Emma’s room that didn’t belong to one of the girls.”

  “But that could mean anything, right? It could mean a party.”

  “If there had been a party, there would have been multiple handprints and fingerprints. And the, uh, position of these prints would indicate an intimacy.”

/>   “You’re talking in code,” Maggie said with a sigh.

  “Above the bed,” he said simply.

  “Oh.”

  “They’re not in the database, though. And there was no DNA on any of the sheets.”

  “So you have nothing,” she said simply.

  “Spoken like a cop’s wife.”

  “Widow.”

  “Well, there is one thing,” he said.

  “Which is?”

  “The reason I called it a partial and not a full was that one of the fingerprints was missing.”

  “And the other ones were there?”

  “Yes. So we might be looking for someone with an amputated finger or a finger in a splint.”

  Maggie’s breath caught in her throat. “What about a Band-Aid?” she asked.

  Twenty-Eight

  Emma

  Like lots of only children, Emma had gone through a phase of wanting a sibling. Specifically a sister. And impossibly, she kept asking for an older sister. Maggie had carefully explained, without going into too much detail, that that wasn’t the way things worked. Emma hadn’t been happy about that. She’d seen the difference in her friends’ homes: the babies crying, the toddlers grabbing at necklaces, biting fingers. But the older kids were useful. They doubled the toys, doubled the clothes, halved the blame. So a few years later, when Emma finally understood the biology of what her mother had been trying to tell her, she started a small campaign for them to adopt, or at least borrow, an older girl. She tried to be subtle yet forceful. She left Big Brothers Big Sisters literature around the house. Emma casually mentioned famous actors and singers who had been adopted. Her parents tolerated the behavior but didn’t overreact. It’s possible they laughed at her alone at night in the privacy of the kitchen, when they sometimes shared a snack when Frank came home from his shift. But it wasn’t until high school that Emma overheard the truth from Maggie’s sister, Aunt Kate. They were at a confirmation for one of Kate’s children, and in the kitchen, Kate had told another woman how hard these celebrations were for her sister. There had been miscarriages, half a dozen, maybe more, before they’d simply given up on the idea. Maggie’s body and mind couldn’t take any more, and she took birth control pills, church be damned. The friend had nodded and said she didn’t blame her. “I’d like to see how the pope holds up after six miscarriages,” she’d said.