Body of a Girl

by Leah Stewart

  The building is quiet and my footsteps make no noise on the beige carpet in the hall. I rap briskly on the doors around Allison’s. Two apartments down, I hear someone coming to the door. It opens partway and a woman peers out at me. “Excuse me, ma’am,” I say. “I’m sorry to bother you. I’m from the newspaper, and I wondered if I might ask you a few questions.”

  The door opens all the way. A short woman with slack brown hair and glasses stands blinking at me. She is so skinny her skin stretches away from her mouth like fabric pulled tight on a frame. “Is this about the girl in thirteen?” she says.

  “Allison Avery?” I ask.

  She frowns. “I told the police everything I know.”

  I take a guess. “About the car?”

  With an aggrieved sigh, she says, “I saw it out front around ten. Next time I looked it was gone.”

  “Do you know what time that was, ma’am?”

  “Right after the news,” she says.

  I write that down. “Your window looks out on the front of the building?”

  “The bedroom window,” she says. “But you can’t come in.”

  “That’s fine, ma’am,” I say. “I just wondered if you might’ve noticed anyone you didn’t recognize out front last night.”

  “I already told the police I didn’t,” she says. “How many times do I have to go through this?” She peers at my notebook. “Is this going to go in the paper?”

  “Maybe,” I say. I get her name—Joan Bracken—and ask her how well she knows the dead girl.

  “I’ve had to go over and ask her to turn her music down.” She looks down the hall toward the apartment as though she expects the radio to come blasting on. “I’ve had to ask her more than once.”

  I make a sympathetic noise, and she goes on, “Once I asked her to water my plants while I was gone for the week. This was before I knew what she was like. She stole from me. She said she didn’t, but I know it was her. She had a key to my apartment!” She shakes her head. “She played innocent, but I’m not a fool.”

  “I’m sorry to hear about that, ma’am. Can you tell me what she took?”

  “A pink angora sweater,” she says. “And some shell earrings. They were from the Philippines. My brother sent them to me. He’s in the air force.”

  Looking at what she’s wearing now—a long denim skirt, a garish T-shirt with raised plastic letters spelling out the name of a country singer, and dangling silver earrings in the shape of a knife and fork—I’d have to guess those earrings were not something the girl would bother to steal. “I’m sure they were lovely,” I say. “Did you report this to the police?”

  She snorts. “Why would they believe me? That pretty girl would have made her big eyes at them and said she didn’t do it.” The way she says “pretty girl,” I can tell she means “slut.”

  “That’s a shame,” I say. “It’s terrible to be taken advantage of.” I give her a sympathetic smile.

  She crosses her arms across her chest and narrows her eyes.

  “Would you have recognized anyone Allison knew?” I ask. “A boyfriend?”

  “There’s always boys coming and going from her place,” she says. “I saw one of them a couple nights ago. Noticed him because I heard him yelling. I looked out in the hall and saw him kicking her door. Then he left.” She sniffs.

  I keep my voice even. “What did he look like?”

  “Just some boy,” she says. “How am I supposed to tell them all apart?”

  “Was he tall, short, dark-haired?”

  “I don’t know. I just looked out for a second. I didn’t want him coming after me.” She shakes her head while I list the things she might have noticed—clothing, glasses, facial hair. “Facial hair,” she repeats, letting her head come to a stop. “He had one of those . . .” She plucks at her chin. “One of those little beards.”

  “Goatee?”

  “Goatee.” She nods briskly and puts her hand on the doorknob. “Now, I’ve told you all I know.”

  “Thank you, ma’am,” I say. “One more thing, if you don’t mind. What kind of car did she drive?”

  “A blue 1993 Honda Civic.” She smiles for the first time. “I know cars,” she says, stepping back inside. I say, “Thank you,” to her closed door and listen to the deadbolt click into place.

  In apartment 17 I find a young blond woman with a Mississippi accent and two small children. Cartoons blare from the television in the living room as she stands at the door shifting the weight of her sleeping baby from hip to hip. Her white T-shirt is marked with green and orange stains, but she wears a perfect coat of pink lipstick. I tell her I’m from the paper, that I was wondering if she knew the woman in apartment 13. She says sure, she knows Allison. Allison baby-sits for her from time to time. She’s good with kids. A nice girl.

  “You’re friends?” I ask, and she nods.

  “It’s weird, though, you know,” she says with a laugh. “She’s older than I am, but the way she comes and goes, while I’m home with these two, it makes me feel about a million years old.”

  “How old are you?”

  “Twenty-two,” she says.

  “You are young,” I say, and then a crash sounds from inside the apartment and a loud wail starts up. She looks around as though searching for somewhere to set down the baby.

  “Can I hold him for you?” I ask.

  “Oh, thanks,” she says, thrusting him at me and turning to jog down the hall. He is heavy and hot and moist all over. I hold him up and press my cheek against his warm soft head. “Come on in,” the mother shouts from inside. The child’s howling goes on and on. The baby only opens and closes his eyes like a dreamer and snuggles into my chest. I pass through a gallery of family photographs into the living room, where the girl is bent over her wailing child, an overturned plant on the floor beside him. “You’re okay, you’re okay,” she is murmuring over and over, stroking his hair. The little boy’s cries trail off into sniffs and hiccups and his mother scoops him up and stands. We face each other, arms full of her children.

  “He was more scared than hurt,” she says. “Weren’t you, pumpkin?” The little boy stares at me. I cross my eyes at him and he smiles.

  “Two boys,” I remark.

  “Yes,” she says. “And less than a year apart, Lord help me.”

  I’m trying to imagine that this is my life, my face in a cloud of white tulle in the bridal picture on the wall, my eyes painted to look wide and hopeful, my pink mouth smiling that sweet and eager smile. My arms began to ache from the weight of the baby. I ask her the boys’ names—Nathan and Parker—and her own—Lisa—and what her husband does, where she’s from, what brought her to Memphis. By the time I bring up Allison again, we’re sitting in her living room with Nathan playing on the floor at her feet, two cups of coffee on the table and the baby still in my arms. Though Lisa offered to take him back, she seemed relieved when I said I liked holding him, and to my eyes her whole body looks lighter with no children hanging on. She hasn’t spoken to the police, and says she must have been napping when they came by, because, Lord knows, she’s always at home. I’ve told too many people already today that Allison is dead, so I’ve just said that she’s missing. She says again and again, “I do hope they find her. She’s a sweet girl.”

  I ask her if they ever go out together, if she knows any of Allison’s friends or boyfriends. She’s met Angela, but never any of the boyfriends, and she knows nothing about an angry man outside Allison’s door. Joan Bracken, she says, is an old busybody.

  “What do you and Allison usually talk about?” I ask.

  “Oh, you know, if she should call a boy she hadn’t heard from in a couple of days, if it sounded like he liked her. The usual sort of thing. Sex. Whether to, you know.” She looks at her children. “It’s hard to know what to say. You see where it got me.” She laughs.

  “You mean Allison is waiting for marriage?”

  “I don’t know for sure,” she says. “I know she goes to church regularl
y. She’s a good girl. I do hope they find her.”

  “Can you think of anything else that might be important?” I ask her. “Anything about an angry boyfriend?”

  She shakes her head. “I never saw anyone angry at her. All the boyfriends, it sounded like they really liked her.”

  “Do you know her family?”

  “I’ve never met them, no, but I know who her mother is.”

  I pause. I must have missed something. “Who is she?”

  “Oh, you don’t know? She runs the children’s hospital. Or maybe she doesn’t run it, but she’s some kind of bigwig there. She was in those ads they ran in the paper, remember?”

  “That’s right,” I say almost to myself. “I knew I recognized her.” I jiggle my knee, excited. This gives me a much better chance of making the front page. I make a note to check the paper’s library for clips on the mother.

  I ask Lisa to call me if she thinks of anything else, and when I leave she waves good-bye to me from the door, baby in her arms, like I’m an old friend who dropped by for a visit. “I hope to see you again,” she calls.

  “Yes,” I say, and for a moment I do feel that we’re friends, that I might call her to ask what she thinks of my boyfriend, David, whether he’s the one. The feeling is gone by the time I get to the end of the hall.

  We’re not friends. This is just my usual rhythm, slipping in and out of all these strangers’ lives.

  The newsroom is like an outsized classroom, long and rectangular, with row upon row of tan metal desks and, at the front of the room, the glass-walled offices of editors. The outside wall is top to bottom windows. I almost never look out. All that’s there is the street, and my desk is on the opposite side of the room. In the far corner a cluster of desks forms the features department, a part of the room I rarely enter. I walk to my desk past people leaning into computer screens, vertical lines appearing between their eyes, people murmuring into telephone headsets, fingers flying over keyboards, people spreading today’s papers out on their desks, looking for their names. Some people wear suits, some wear short-sleeved shirts and casual pants, depending on what they cover and whether they need to impress anyone. Me, I wear suits to look older. I say hi to one of the metro editors, and he nods, dreadlocks bouncing against the back of his neck. I pass a reporter who sits constantly chewing sunflower seeds, whistling under his breath. I exchange a sympathetic glance with the reporter whose desk is next to his, a chain-smoking nervous woman who covers education and goes everywhere with a fanny pack around her waist. She rolls her eyes and sighs. All of the women in news are either borderline anorexic or plumping up from too much late-night pizza and after-deadline beer. I’m still hovering somewhere in the middle.

  At my desk I run a search on Cynthia Avery, the dead girl’s mother. I skim a few articles that quote her, many about fund-raising, one a feature piece about her, the joys and trials of caring for terribly sick children. I write down one of her quotes. “We do our best to be of comfort to the families. There’s nothing harder than losing a child.”

  I pick up the phone. I don’t usually call the family first, because it’s easier to hang up than to avoid someone who’s at your door. But since the direct approach didn’t work at the police station, I dial the number and get the girl’s mother on the phone. I never gave her my name, so she doesn’t have to know it’s me again.

  “I’m terribly sorry to bother you, Dr. Avery,” I say. “I’m calling because I want to tell the city about your daughter. I understand from talking to her co-workers that she was a very gifted singer.”

  She makes a choking sound and hangs up.

  I count to ten and call back. Often someone much calmer answers the phone the second time. The phone just rings and rings. From his desk next to mine, Evan Fitzpatrick is pretending not to watch me. I’ve known Evan since we were both summer interns here in college. He is always here when I get here in the morning; he is always here when I leave at night. Once a week or so he brings in clippings from The New York Times or The Boston Globe that he wants me to read. “This guy really knows his stuff,” he’ll say. “Look how he works the background information into the lead.” I can’t call him on Sundays, because he is making his way through three or four Sunday newspapers and will speak sharply to me on the phone. He is the only reporter I’ve ever known who writes other reporters fan letters. Evan believes in The Truth; he takes on a story like a mission from God. He never has to stop and wonder what he’s doing on someone’s doorstep, because he carries the answer around like a cross on a chain—the public’s right to know. Evan makes me feel ashamed any time I have doubts, the way my Southern Baptist high school boyfriend made me feel ashamed for not wanting to go to church.

  “I hear you’re working on the girl’s murder,” he says when I put the phone down. I pick it up again and dial the weather report. “Phone call,” I mouth at him. I don’t want to talk about this yet.

  “I’ll wait.” He crosses his arms and stares at me.

  I pretend to take notes, then I realize how ridiculous that is, since I haven’t said a word into the phone, so I hang up. “What?” I say.

  “What’s the scoop?”

  “Nothing,” I say. “They know nothing.” Evan loves words like “scoop.” When he gets depressed he goes home and watches All the President’s Men, and it restores his faith. I watched it once with him, and when it was over I said, “But then what happened?”

  “What do you mean?” Evan said. “You saw what happened. They got the story.”

  “Too bad you don’t get stories like that all the time,” I said. “That story was really important.”

  “Every story is important to somebody,” Evan said.

  Now he rummages under his desk, to reappear after a moment with a torn and dirty magazine, cheaply printed on white paper. “Look at this,” he says.

  I reach for it, but he pulls it back. “Look with your eyes, not with your hands,” he says in a schoolboy’s taunting voice. “It’s a Satanist magazine.”

  “So?”

  “Don’t you get it?” he says, paging slowly through the magazine. “I found it in that kid’s trash.”

  “What kid?”

  “The one they suspect of killing that ten-year-old in Arkansas. You know about it?”

  “Of course I know about it. I wrote the first story, remember?” I glare at him. “So you dug through his trash?”

  “It paid off,” he says. “This is front page.”

  “You’re frightening me,” I say, only half joking.

  “Hey,” he says. “I have to write something.” He seems hurt, and he puts the magazine away and doesn’t talk to me anymore.

  That’s one reason why we’re so eager for news, because when it’s not there we have to manufacture it, and that’s no easy task. When I was still a general assignment reporter, I spent one Sunday afternoon at the Mississippi River Museum asking people why they were there. “We wanted to do something touristy and tacky,” one girl said. “It was this or Graceland, and I’ve been to Graceland before.”

  “I haven’t,” her boyfriend said.

  “He hasn’t,” she said. “But I have.”

  Then I went back to the office and made a story out of this. When I wrote it, it said, essentially, that a few people were at the museum. The headline in the paper said MISSISSIPPI RIVER MUSEUM COULD BE IN TROUBLE; LACKS VISITORS.

  Peggy, one of the metro editors, leans over me, both palms flat on my desk. “How’s that story coming, kid?” she asks. Peggy is black, with close-cropped hair and a few dark freckles on her cheeks. She is my favorite editor, because she never changes a lead without showing it to me first. She is also the smartest, and so the hardest to fool. I’m leaning toward leaving the girl’s parents alone now. I know she won’t go for that, and I need her behind this story. For this, I want better than the front of Metro, where local crime goes unless it’s particularly sensational.

  “Peggy,” I begin, leaning forward and lowering my voice, �
�I think this could go front page.”

  “Do you now?” She laughs, rocking back a little. “Why’s that?”

  “Young girl, brutal killing, probably sexual, and she’s got prominent parents.”

  “I don’t know, kid,” Peggy says, pulling a list from her pocket. “We’ve got competition today. See what else you can come up with.”

  After she goes I sit, drumming my fingers on the desk. Evan hits me in the back of the head with a balled-up piece of paper.

  “What’s that for?” I say.

  “Front page,” he says. “You brazen hussy. What else can you come up with?”

  I pick up the phone to dial Sergeant Morris. “Listen and learn,” I say to Evan as the phone rings. A couple of weeks ago Morris mentioned that the city was approaching the one-hundredth-murder mark earlier than ever this year. I’m wondering if Allison Avery might have hit it.

  “I don’t know,” Morris says when I ask him. “We did brisk business over the weekend. Don’t know times of death yet.”

  “But she could be, right?” I say. “She’s close.”

  “She could be,” he says. “We’re over one hundred now. For all I know, she’s the one.”

  I hang up the phone, writing down: Allison Avery equals 100. It may not be the truth, but it’s close enough to count.

  At Peggy’s desk, I say, “She’s the hundredth murder victim in the city this year. Earliest we’ve hit the mark since cops can remember.”

  “All right,” she says, glancing up from her computer screen. “I’ll push for it.”

  “Thanks,” I say, turning to go.

  “Get the family,” she calls after me. “We have to have the family now.”

  The Averys live in a quiet, middle-class neighborhood of elegant two-story brick houses and two-car garages, each a slight variation on the last. Their lawn is neatly mowed. There’s a basketball hoop in the driveway. I stand on the porch and look at the landscaping, low clipped bushes and daffodils. Off to one side, three tall orange lilies sway a little in the breeze.