Murder Plays House

by Ayelet Waldman

I let the question hang in the air for a moment, and then I asked the others, “So what happened to Halley, do you know? How did she die?”

  Tawna shook her head, a queer glow lighting her luminous skin. “She was amazing,” she whispered.

  “What do you mean?”

  The other girls all leaned in to hear. I wasn’t sure if this story was being told for the first time, or if it was simply one so compelling that they were eager to hear it again and again.

  “Halley was regal. Like a queen. No, better than a queen. Like a goddess. The doctors would come with their weight charts, and she would stare them down. She’d sit at meals and not even touch her food. Not even move it around on her plate. She just sat there with her hands in her lap, staring at the nurses, daring them to try to force-feed her.”

  “Wow,” breathed the girl with the braces.

  “The night she died, it was like a presence went through the ward. I could feel her passing through us, saying goodbye. You know, giving us some of her power. I know it sounds crazy, but I think she just willed her own heart to stop, I really do.”

  “If anybody could do that, it was Halley,” the blond said.

  They all nodded, sighing in appreciation of their friend’s supreme control.

  “Halley always said that was how Dina died. That she killed herself without killing herself, you know? She just willed herself dead,” Tawna said.

  “Dina?” I asked.

  “Dina Kromm. She’s another girl from the website,” Tawna said. “She died a few months ago.”

  No wonder Susan Kromm had been so distraught. Halley’s funeral must have reminded her of her own daughter’s.

  “Dina was a Mia and an Ana, like me,” the girl in pink said, with pride.

  “Not really,” the girl with braces scowled. “She was a Mia like a hundred years ago. In junior high. By the time she died she was pure Ana.” She said this with pride.

  “Do you know lots of girls who end up killing themselves?” I asked.

  “Not really,” Tawna said. “I mean, you meet them in the hospital; it’s kind of unavoidable because that’s where they end up. And sometimes people from the websites just kind of disappear, and you aren’t sure why. But we knew Dina and Halley, because we’re all from LA.”

  “Do you get together often, in person?”

  “No, not really,” Tawna said. “We talk every day, but online. We instant message, or post to the boards. It’s too hard to get to each other’s houses. I mean, Rachel lives in the Valley, in like Calabasas, right?”

  The girl in pink, Rachel, nodded. “I think Dina and Halley used to see more of each other, because they were both from Brentwood. But they didn’t go to school together or anything. They met on the websites, just like we all did.”

  Our conversation was interrupted by the tinkling of a cell phone. “That’s my ring,” the girl with the braces said. She pulled out her phone and glanced at the caller ID screen. She answered the phone, saying, “What?” in a long-suffering tone. She looked at the blond girl. “It’s my mom. Twyla, you ready to go?”

  Twyla nodded. As if on cue, the other girls pulled out their phones and dialed their parents to come pick them up. I was dismissed. As I watched them drive away, I wondered if Alicia had introduced Halley to her Pro-Ana life. What had the supposedly recovered anorexic said to her boyfriend’s daughter about this terrifying cyber-world? Had Halley spoken to Dakota about it, perhaps? Their relationship had been terrible, by all accounts, but Dakota had admitted giving Halley diet pills. Maybe they had shared the online world, as well.

  Thirty

  “GODDAMN it, Ruby!” I shouted. “Finish your food!”

  She clamped her lips together and pushed the plate of noodles away.

  “Ruby!”

  “I hate it,” she said through gritted teeth. “I hate it.”

  “You do not! It’s beef and macaroni, just like Grandma Wyeth makes. Eat it!”

  “I hate it when the noodles and the meat are touching! It’s gross!”

  “They have to touch; that’s the whole point. It is not gross. You like this. You’re the reason Daddy made it, because you like it so much at Grandma’s house. Now eat it!”

  “No!” she bellowed, throwing herself to her feet.

  I grabbed her as she was running out the kitchen door and dragged her kicking and screaming back to the table.

  “Juliet!” Peter said loudly.

  I looked up at him.

  “Honey,” he said gently. “It’s okay. She doesn’t have to eat it. Leave her alone.”

  Suddenly, I saw myself through his eyes, my hair hanging in my eyes, my forehead sweaty, my face red with the effort of holding my squirming daughter.

  “Oh God,” I whispered, dropping Ruby. She collapsed into her chair, crying. “I’m sorry, Ruby,” I said, and then I burst into tears myself. I ran out of the room and threw myself onto my bed.

  I buried my face in my pillow and cradled my belly in my hands. Here was another girl, another chance for me to screw up, to create a person who so loathed herself and her body that she would rather die than look like a normal woman. Than look like me.

  The bed shifted and I felt a warm hand stroking my hair. I leaned into Peter’s leg, pressing my face against the slick softness of his ancient jeans. I squeezed my eyes shut. He kissed me on the back of the neck.

  “Shades of Margie Applebaum, huh?” he said.

  I opened my eyes. “My mother used to make me sit at the table all night until I cleaned my plate.”

  “Did that work?”

  I nodded. “Usually. By the time the TV went on I’d gag whatever it was down. I didn’t want to miss Three’s Company.”

  He laughed.

  I sat up and leaned against his chest. “Once, I remember she made this disgusting carrot thing. Like some kind of vegetable stew. Tsimmes, I guess. I must have sat in front of it for hours. I tried to eat it, I really did, but every time it got close to my lips, I would feel like I had to throw up. I couldn’t do it.”

  “So what happened?” He pulled me close to him and kissed my neck again.

  “My dad tiptoed into the kitchen and gobbled it up for me. He didn’t say anything; he just stood over my plate and ate it as fast as he could. I don’t think my mom ever knew what happened.”

  “Why didn’t he just throw it out?”

  “Because she would have found it in the trash and killed us both.”

  Peter laughed. I began to, as well, but then my eyes filled with tears.

  “It’s okay, sweetie. It really is. Ruby will get over it. And you apologized.”

  I nodded, wiping the tears from my eyes. I reached over him and, taking a tissue, blew my nose loudly. “What’s she doing?”

  “Eating a peanut butter sandwich in front of the TV.”

  “And Isaac?”

  “Him, too.”

  “But he doesn’t even like peanut butter!”

  Peter smiled. “You know how it is; if Ruby’s allowed to have a peanut butter sandwich in front of the television, then Isaac’s going to want one, too, even if he has to choke it down.”

  I sighed. “Food. I just can’t bear it. Why is it so fraught? Why don’t we just eat what we want, until we’re full, and that’s it? Why is it such a thing?”

  He squeezed me tighter. “I don’t know, baby. But it’s not as bad as you think it is. You’re just freaking out because you spent too much time talking to those crazy girls today. Most people aren’t like them. They’re not normal.”

  “I know,” I said.

  He gave me a last kiss on the cheek and said, “I’m going to go clean up the kitchen. Why don’t you relax. Read a book. Do your email. I’ll put the kids to bed tonight.”

  I nodded and rolled over on to my side. I was debating a hot bath when the phone rang. It was Al.

  “So, did you find out anything at the funeral?” he asked.

  I groaned. The last thing I felt like doing was describing my conversation with the skele
tal girls. “His ex-wife hated Alicia, that’s for sure. I mean, not just her, specifically. She blamed her daughter’s death on her husband’s obsession with skinny women.”

  “Hmm. She’s a pretty obvious suspect. I imagine Goodenough has questioned her already.”

  “I suppose so,” I said. I told him about Dakota. “Maybe Alicia found out about the pills, and Dakota killed her to keep her from talking about it.”

  “But don’t you think that would have been a pretty drastic reaction? I mean, maybe now it’s a motive for murder, what with Halley dead. But Halley was still alive when Alicia was killed.”

  “You’re right.” I sighed.

  “What’s wrong with you?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You sound strange. Is it the baby?”

  “No, no. I’m fine. Just tired.”

  “Tell you what,” he said. “I’ve got nothing going on tomorrow. You take the day off and relax, and I’ll spend the day checking on all the possibles. Not the grieving parents, but the others. That friend of Alicia’s. The waitress? Dakota the pill pusher. The Board of Realtors folks. I’ll feel around one last time, and if I don’t find anything, we’ll call it a day on this case, okay?”

  “You think we should give up?”

  His voice softened. “I think this is one of those crimes better left to the professionals, kiddo. It was probably a B&E gone wrong. We’re not going to find anything out, and I’m betting Detective Goodenough won’t, either. Someday the creep will do it again, and maybe he’ll get cocky and leave more of a trail.”

  I knew he was right. I had allowed myself to get distracted with the Hollywood types, the anorexic girls. But I knew as well as he did that this was just one of those random, horrible crimes that never get solved. Didn’t I? Then I remembered Brodsky.

  “But if we don’t solve this crime, we’re not going to get hired by Brodsky, and our entire business is going to go under!” I groaned.

  “There’s nothing we can do about that.”

  I felt the prick of tears in my eyes, and swallowed, hard. Damn those pregnancy hormones. “I won’t get my house, either. No house, and no business. Great.”

  “Look, Juliet. That’s what this business is like. Sometimes we catch the guy, sometimes we don’t.”

  I sighed. “I know.”

  “There’s just nothing we can do about it.”

  “I know that, too.”

  “Get some rest,” he said, and then he hung up.

  I lay in bed for a while, listening to Peter do the dishes, and then the sounds of the children splashing in the bathtub. Ruby was instructing Isaac on what his role would be in the mermaid game they were about to play. That’s always the way it is with them. They spend hours planning their games, deciding who will do what, who will say what, but they rarely get around to the actual game. It’s the setup, the preparation, that’s the fun, apparently.

  After a little while, Peter called to me.

  “Marcel wants his mother!” he said.

  Like a modern-day, Batman-loving version of Proust, Isaac couldn’t go to sleep without a kiss and what he called a “lie with me.” As I lay cuddling my boy, who never seemed as small and baby-like as when dressed in his footypajamas, lying in his too-large expanse of bed, his face flushed from the bath and his fine hair still wet, I wondered what adult experience would trigger memories of these times with me. What would be his madeleine? The scent of Mr. Bubble? The taste of chocolate chip Teddy Bear grahams? The sensation of nestling his face against a woman’s breast?

  Lying next to Isaac made me feel infinitely calmer and less hopeless. When his breathing had grown deep and soft, I carefully heaved myself out of his bed and wandered down the hall to kiss his sister good night. She was in her own bed, surrounded by stuffed animals. I kissed her lightly on the forehead, turned off her light, and went to find her father.

  Peter was stretched out on the sofa, a comic book catalogue in his hand.

  “Feeling better?” he asked.

  I nodded and sat down next to him. “Nothing like a few Isaac and Ruby hugs to improve my mood. Especially when someone else has gotten them cleaned up and into bed.” I took his laptop off the coffee table. “Mind if I use this?”

  I hadn’t really meant to do it. Truthfully, I was feeling done with the case, sick of Alicia, sick of her problems, sick of the skinny girls. Yet, for some reason I found myself launching a search engine and inputting the words “Pro-Ana.” The sites were every bit as horrifying as I had imagined they would be. They were all maintained by the girls themselves. Some were pretty basic, weblogs with a diary entries about progress losing weight, poems about their alienation from the world, complaints about their parents. Others were remarkably sophisticated. These often had entire archives of “trigger” photographs—pictures of particularly skinny Hollywood actresses and models, and occasionally pictures of the girls themselves.

  At one point Peter looked over my shoulder. “Oh, gross,” he groaned. Peter, a man whose imagination includes cannibals with strips of flesh hanging from their teeth, couldn’t bear to look at the photographs.

  I followed a link to a message board. In page after page, girls wrote each other begging for advice on how to lose weight, asking for support in dealing with their parents, complaining about how awful they looked and felt—not because they were so thin, but because at eighty or ninety pounds, they were ‘pigs.’ I found a series of postings of girls joining forces to support each other through fasts. Every once in a while there would be a desperate message from a girl who felt herself succumbing to the urge to break the fast. The others would email frantically, encouraging her to be strong, sending her trigger photographs, sometimes even giving her their home phone numbers to call for more immediate support. These group fasts lasted a week, or ten days.

  Most girls had a signature line that it took me a few minutes to figure out. Finally, I got it. They would sign their names, or their online nicknames, and then the initials “CW,” “HWE,” “LWE,” “GW,” followed by numbers. Each girl was letting the others know the most salient facts about her—her current weight, her highest weight ever, her lowest weight ever, and her goal weight. It was the last number that I found most disturbing. Not a single girl quoted a number over 100, and many listed seventy or eighty pounds as their goal. Some even hoped one day to break sixty-five. A few of the girls had the most chilling notation of all. At the end of their lists of weights they wrote the initials “UG,” ultimate goal. And then the single word ‘death.’

  Finally, sickened and ultimately bored with the sameness of the pathology on exhibit, I clicked back over to the search engine and input Halley Hoynes’s name. She didn’t have a site of her own, but she had been a very active poster on a number of the bigger Pro-Ana sites. The last message I found from her was a desperate rant about how she was being forced to go into the hospital. She begged the girls to think of her and send her strength. There was a flurry of supportive postings, including a promise to pray for God to help her “keep the sick fat away.”

  I clicked to a page maintained by a girl who called herself Thin-Lizzie. On her links page, I scrolled through page after page of weblogs and chatroom sites. More of the same. At the bottom of the last page was a link marked “pics.” I clicked on it and found the image that would lead me, finally, to Alicia Felix’s murderer.

  In the middle of the page of photographs was one of a woman with long blond hair, facing away from the camera. Her emaciated torso glowed white against the black background. I had seen that photograph before, in the album Dr. Calma’s nurse had shown me. It was Alicia.

  I clicked on the photograph and was led to Alicia Felix’s Pro-Ana website. Her name was not, of course, anywhere on the site. Her photographs, however, were everywhere. In addition to the one from Dr. Calma’s album, there were dozens of others, each showing off her gaunt body from a different perspective, and carefully hiding her face. The website was not merely a photo essay, however. Alicia prov
ided more of the same kind of information and sick support that the other girls did on their pages, but there was something special about hers. The banner across the top of the page read “Successfully and Beautifully Ana for Twenty Years!” Her message was quite simple. She had done it, and they could, too.

  Alicia called herself Ana-Belle, and described herself as a television and film actress “whom you all would recognize immediately.” One long essay called “The Perils of Plump,” detailed her difficulties finding roles when her body size exceeded her goal weight. She did not list her credits, but she did make repeated references to actors, directors, and producers who had cast her because of her “perfect Ana body.” One of the names she mentioned was Charlie Hoynes.

  Alicia’s, like the other sites, had links pages, inspirational photographs, diet tips, and 100-calorie-a-day food-plans. She also provided information for Mias, whom she described as “our bingeing sisters.” She encouraged them to end a binge with milk or ice cream, because those dairy products came up easily. She cautioned them to brush their teeth frequently, lest they lose the enamel on their teeth and their teeth themselves begin to loosen in the bone. She also warned against “busy-body dentists” who might recognize the warning signs of bulimia. She suggested that Mias try to find older dentists because they wouldn’t be as clued into the contemporary issues like eating disorders.

  The most chilling section was a stark white page with a quotation at the top—“Scorn the Flesh and Love the Bone.” It was a step-by-step instruction manual for surviving a hospital stay without gaining weight. Alicia told the girls what to say to make the physicians believe they were making progress in therapy. She told them to resist at first, but slowly to pretend to be coming around. Alicia told the girls to thank the therapists and nurses, to cry frequently in group therapy sessions, to warn other girls against the dangers of starvation. “The idea,” Alicia wrote, “is to snow them with your words and your tears, so they don’t even notice that you haven’t eaten anything.”

  Alicia also gave specific information on how to plump up for weigh-ins. She suggested the girls drink large amounts of water, not so much as to make the nurses suspect they were bingeing on water, but enough to add pounds for the scale. She told the girls that in some cases their water consumption would be strictly monitored, and that some hospitals even turned off the sinks in bathrooms to prevent the girls from drinking to hide their weight loss. She suggested the toilet tanks. “That water is clean—it’s not from the toilet itself—and there’s enough water in your average tank to get you up to weight. Remember, even a few ounces will put the doctors on your side.”