Where She Went (ARC)

by Kelly Simmons

  “Emily,” he sighed.

  “It’s Emma,” she said quietly.

  “I’m sorry. There are so many Emilys and Emmas and Emmys on campus. Carolines and Carolyns. It’s impossible.”

  “Maybe you need a life proofreader.”

  He blinked, took a deep breath. “That’s funny.”

  “Yeah, well.”

  “Anyway, do you have anything yet? Because—”

  She interrupted him. She told him breathlessly about Sam Beck and the free shift she offered to work, that she was sure Fiona was recruiting girls, that there were free condoms in the bathroom at London, that they owned a store that gave free clothes to girls, that she was meeting with a former patron that very evening, and that she was certain she’d been followed when she—

  He held up a hand. A hand that reminded her of a professor, of a dad. Of every boy and every man who just didn’t want to hear it anymore.

  “So you have nothing more.”

  “No, I’m meeting the guy, I told you—”

  “Former patron? Not current. And you don’t have the hostess job, let alone posing as an escort yourself. And you don’t have a girl on record. You don’t have proof of recruitment. Did you even interview a psychologist? Did you talk to a gynecologist about STDs?”

  “Wait, what? No, those would be general, and you told me to be specific—”

  “Concrete. You need to be concrete. And you have nothing. So look for another story.”

  “No, I—”

  “Look for another story, Emma, or get your name off the list for the paper. There are plenty of other girls dying to write for me.”

  “Are you hungover?” she blurted out.

  “What?”

  “You look…like crap,” she said.

  “Not that it’s any of your business, but I’ve been working all night on another story. A story with documented, on-the-record sources and photographs that support it. A real story.”

  She blinked. She was trying to decide if she hated him. She was trying to decide if he was a true asshole or just someone who was under a lot of pressure who turned into an asshole when he was hungover and needed Advil and a cheesesteak, like a normal boy. Just go eat some meat, she thought. Call me after you’ve scarfed down a sausage pizza and a Coke.

  “You have three days to bring me something different, or you’re off the team.”

  “Fine,” she said, standing up and hoisting her backpack against one shoulder. Forget looking cute but serious. No more cute for him. “Maybe the person who’s following me will abduct me. That’ll make a great story. How about that?”

  “Emma,” he said, like he’d already known her name and had said it a million times this same way, the way everyone said it when they were disgusted with her, when they were tired of her shit, when they thought they were right and she was wrong, exhaled it with a long, drawn-out sigh—but she was gone by then. His sigh was just a bad, sour breeze, a whiff of beer breath that followed her out.

  She was almost at the library when the text came in from Fiona. She had to squint to believe what she was seeing. The photo, a bit blurry and dark but unmistakable. “Whose Future Husband?” it said beneath it.

  Well, she thought, look at this. Here’s a photo that supports a story, Jason. A real story, a dark story, if not exactly the one she thought she was chasing.

  She put her head in her hands and blinked back the tears. How stupid. How trite. Not that he would act this way. But that she had. Stupid, guileless Emma. What a freshman fucking move. How totally JV could she get, thinking he might actually like her.

  Thirty-Three

  Maggie

  Go home and sleep, they kept saying to her. As if that was possible. As if that was preferable. Maggie swore that every time she heard those words, this time at the precinct, her feet grew heavier, locked her into place, wouldn’t allow her to. Telling a worried mother to sleep as she stood in the sticky, damp hallway outside the detective’s waiting room was the stupidest thing a cop could do. There had been so much soda spilled on that floor, so much mud, so much blood, that the linoleum had turned into another surface altogether. It was hard for leather soles or sneakers or any kind of shoe to even slide on it. If you want people to leave, she wanted to scream, if you want people to go home and sleep, why do you make your floors like flypaper? You want to catch criminals but get rid of all the crying relatives?

  So she became part of a classic tableau, a nimbus of cliché surrounding her everywhere she went. The crying mother who didn’t want to sleep in case she missed something. The mother who didn’t want to go home, because she wanted to work the case herself.

  Finally, they’d said something foolish. What if your daughter comes home? Don’t you want to be there? And she’d wanted to scream and claw Salt’s eyes out. Because she knew Emma wasn’t going to come home, no matter how much sense it made. So as she lay awake on the sofa, trying to close her eyes and just rest—for that was all she hoped for, rest, not sleep—she kept asking herself why. Why, if Emma’s roommates were bothering her, why, if she was scared and had nowhere to go, why didn’t she just come back home to her mother? Salt had brought it up precisely because it made sense, made sense to anyone who thought about it for two seconds.

  Emma could write her story at home. She could commute to class, not easily, not quickly, but she could have. Maggie would have made her favorite dinners—chicken parmigiana, shrimp scampi—the things she asked for on her birthday. She would have proofread for her, rubbed her shoulders when she worked all night, racing against her deadline. All Emma had had to do was tell her what was happening, and Maggie would have supported her. But Emma was stubborn; yes, she could be as stubborn as Frank when she wanted to be. Teachers called it determination and perseverance, and while it helped her push through difficult subjects and long projects, Maggie knew that’s all it was—pure Irish stubbornness, as her mother would say. The world’s best and worst trait, depending on what you applied it to. But still, Emma was also practical, pragmatic. So all Maggie could come up with, the only thing that made sense as she stared at her own ceiling, as if the brushstrokes of paint and the shadows from the reading lamp would point the way, was that Emma was almost finished. That she could see the endgame and just needed a few more days. If she’d been an inch away from something, so close she could taste it, she would stick it out. But what was that final piece?

  Maggie replayed her conversation at the precinct again and again, projecting it across her eyelids as she lay down, rewinding it back and forth. What had she missed?

  Maggie had given the police Mr. Maserati’s phone number, but Kaplan said they’d already called him. They’d called everyone in Emma’s phone, every single contact, he’d claimed.

  “Everyone?” she’d said incredulously. That meant he was either lying to her or he had more manpower assigned; that other cops were canvassing, following up. But Michael hadn’t said a thing about being contacted by the police. Michael, the Valet to the Stars? Mr. Honest? Mr. From the Old Neighborhood? Wouldn’t he have told her if the cops had called him already? Or was he playing her, too?

  “Are you also going door to door in the dorm?”

  “Yes.”

  She’d sat there, not sure what to believe. Where was her surveillance footage? Where were the angles that showed the police doing exactly what Kaplan said they were doing, searching every darkened penumbra of this sprawling campus?

  “Have you spoken to her professors?”

  “There weren’t any professors in her phone,” Kaplan had said.

  “That’s not what I asked.”

  “We did an initial ask, yes.”

  “You have to realize,” Salt said softly, “the classes at a school this size number in the hundreds. It’s the first semester, and—”

  “Are you telling me she hadn’t been going to class at all?”

&n
bsp; “Perhaps. Or—”

  “Or what? You’re telling me her own professors didn’t recognize her picture?”

  “It’s early still. There are a lot of new faces.”

  “Is that what they said? Was that their excuse?”

  She thought of what Michael had told her, that Emma thought the school was in on it. The moment they’d shown her that awful photo of the Idiot Editor, the Future Philandering Husband, she’d assumed that was what Michael meant. But if the editor of the paper was someone involved with the scandal, wouldn’t there be a way to go over his head? There had to be a teacher advising them. Was that what Emma meant?

  Maggie picked her way back over their conversation and all the pieces of evidence. All the assumptions that Emma might be missing, kidnapped, killed, suicidal. The worst thoughts coming first. But what if it was simpler? Why would her daughter hide? What would she be close to proving? If she was close to finding a school official involved, she might not feel safe at the school. But who? A janitor, a security guard? A teacher? Maggie thought of the security guard and the RA she’d met the first night. The ones with keys. The thought took her breath away, and she sat up, convinced she had to go there immediately and hunt them down.

  They were low level; they wouldn’t add much to the scandal of Emma’s story. College boys and college minimum wage workers having sex with girls in dorms? The thought made her sick, but it was hardly novel. It had to have happened a million times before. And even if there was payment involved—again, this did not surprise Maggie or shock her. There were rumors of boys paying girls for sex at high schools, for god’s sake. But still, those guys had keys. They could get to Emma or any of the girls, the same way her roommates could get to her. Had Salt or Kaplan thought of that?

  Maggie took a quick shower, dressed in clean jeans and a sweater, went downstairs. A couple hours’ rest would have to be enough. The thought of having a direction, a purpose, refreshed her more than sleep.

  The drive was brief in the middle of the day; traffic was light, and even the trucks, which often drove too quickly for the narrow Schuylkill Expressway, seemed to be going slower, allowing her quick passage.

  She parked on the edge of campus in a two-hour spot. She did intend to leave, she thought as she closed the door. As she put quarters in the meter, she thought of her fingerprints lingering there, the timer telling a story, the meter reader surveying her car’s color. She thought of everything she did now, everything that happened, as evidence, a clue, motivation. There was a kind of buzzing low voice, a running monologue inside her, an awareness that there wasn’t before—it told her she was leaving DNA. It reminded her that she had a license plate, that she drove the same route, that she had a distinctive, long-legged gait with a size 8 footprint. Her tics, her traits, her peccadilloes, left their mark as much as anyone’s. And she realized suddenly that this was cop awareness. Vigilance. Knowledge. Something inside them, like a heart murmur or tinnitus, they couldn’t shake.

  Was that why so many of them drank, did drugs, caroused? To make this horrible stain of an underlay recede? She walked fast, passing students, heading for Emma’s dorm. She’d start there. She’d find the RA, the janitor; even if they wouldn’t talk to her, she’d look them in the eye. Sometimes that told you more than words, especially when they were kids. Maggie had always been good at knowing when children were lying, if not necessarily husbands. Oh, the clues were there with Frank, too, she had to admit, but she had ignored them. Ignored them because they were too much for her to deal with.

  As she approached the dorm, a small group of students gathered by one of the buildings north of it, standing on the steps, blocking the entrance. A class outside? She didn’t see a teacher. A college tour? She didn’t see any parents. As she walked closer, more students approached that building, and the buzz of their conversation grew louder. She detoured, curious. As she approached the bottom of the stairs and peered through the bodies, a blue uniform stood sentry, a cop, hand on holster. She forced her way up, elbowing students, shouting for them to let her through. The group jostled, shook, as she went to him.

  “What’s going on?”

  “Police investigation,” he answered. Was the rulebook, all the procedures, imprinted on his tongue? Crime tape wove through the door handles, crisscrossing back and forth. One of the windows was cracked, and that was the only thing that calmed her. A break-in? A rock thrown? Would that prevent them from letting students in? Would they call a rock a police investigation?

  The drone of an ambulance behind her, the shadow of flashing lights casting red and blue tints across the pale faces of the crowd.

  “Did you find a body?” she asked the cop, and he ignored her. As if she was a reporter, a pest. The kids behind her, milling about, looking not for gossip or scandal but something to take a photo of. Something for their Instagram story that showed they had witnessed something in their boring crush of a day. She thought of these kids, these babies, finding her daughter’s body. A stream of them walking past, thinking it was someone sleeping off the night before, until a biology major finally bent down and looked at it more closely, poked at it like a lab specimen, like something they would put under a microscope later.

  She asked again, louder. Nothing. She wanted to reach for the cop’s arm, shake him. But she knew better than to touch or grab any part of a cop. That was how things went wrong, always. A touch, a look, a sudden move. When a person was on edge, those small things flashed larger, cut deeper, than they did to civilians. Everything little meant something big to a cop.

  She didn’t feel the phone vibrating in her purse; the leather satchel, the small packet of Kleenex, the wallet, the fingerless gloves, all absorbed its message. Before she saw that summons, she felt a hand on her own shoulder and turned. Salt and Kaplan. Where had they come from? Were they going inside?

  “Did someone find a body?”

  “No.”

  “What’s in the building? What’s going on?”

  “You didn’t get our message?”

  She looked between their faces. So they were a they now? Salt was his partner, finally aligned with someone else, now that Frank was gone and her medical leave was up? Was this official? She set the small shock of that thought aside; it didn’t matter much at this very moment. After all, Frank was dead. His partner having another partner didn’t make him more dead, did it?

  “I didn’t hear my phone. I—”

  “It’s okay,” Salt said. “Let’s go somewhere quieter to talk.”

  Blue gloves hung out of Kaplan’s pocket, a sure sign that he’d been inside, looking at something.

  “What did you find? What did they find?”

  “Let’s go ins—”

  “No!” she cried. “Stop moving me around, trying to get the conditions right. The conditions are never gonna be right again, okay? I won’t be sitting down, I won’t be well rested, I will not ever be calm! So just tell me. Tell me now. Tell me right now.”

  “We found something unusual in the first-floor bathroom.”

  “What do you mean unusual?”

  “It appears to be hair,” Kaplan said.

  “In the sink, you mean? Strands? Are they Emma’s color? Are they—”

  “Not exactly.”

  “Not exactly what?”

  “Not exactly strands, not exactly in the sink,” Salt said.

  Maggie’s mouth dropped open. Were these two kidding her right now? Was this how they communicated with the whole world, hiding half the information, not telling people what they needed to know, when they needed to know it?

  “Well, what exactly and where exactly were they then, for Christ’s sake!”

  Salt took a deep breath and looked at Kaplan. He closed his mouth. They didn’t know what to say, how to tell her? What the hell had they found that they had no words for it? A life-size voodoo doll with her daughter’s scalp on top?
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  Maggie broke away, ran. Her purse flapped against her hip, weighing her down, but she was still fast, still track-team wiry enough to beat them back to the steps. She heard them behind her, the slap of Kaplan’s shoes, the rustle of rayon fabric between Salt’s thighs. She took that as a sign, as a victory. She may have been older, but Maggie ran quietly, as fast people often do. She was a breeze, and they were thunder behind her, trying to catch up but too heavy and earthbound.

  Finally, she felt Kaplan’s arm on hers, touching her in a way she wasn’t allowed to touch him.

  “Let me go,” she cried. “I need to see!”

  “Maggie,” he said. “We can’t just let you roam the campus.”

  “I won’t touch anything. You know I won’t.”

  “I don’t think you understand.”

  “You’re damned right I don’t!” Her face contorted, twisted in a way she knew was ugly, pinched, and she did not care. Mock a grieving mother, take a photo of her at her worst, and she will say nothing. Nothing at all. It was like giving birth; who cared what you looked like when you had a job to do?

  “Maggie, we have some camera footage of someone following you,” he whispered.

  “What? Who?”

  “We don’t know. A man or boy. Can’t tell. A hoodie, a hat. Dark clothes.”

  She sighed and shrugged. “Oh well.”

  Their faces, so blank.

  “You don’t really think I care, do you? Let him grab me. Let him try. Maybe then he’ll take me to Emma! At least someone will!”

  “Maggie—”

  “Maggie what? ‘Maggie, calm down?’ ‘Maggie, pull yourself together?’ ‘Maggie, let us do our jobs?’ ‘Maggie, shut the fuck up and go home?’ What? My daughter is out there somewhere, and you two fuckers are talking in code and in circles! Be concrete for God’s sake!”

  “Okay, okay,” he said. “We’ll take you inside. Come on.”

  He spoke to the cop guarding the door, then handed her a pair of gloves, and the three of them walked in together.