Body of a Girl

by Leah Stewart

  “Thanks,” he says when he comes to a stop in front of me. He exhales hard. I say nothing, waiting for him to speak. He extends his hand, and I take it. It’s warm and dry. “I’m Russell Freeland,” he says.

  “Olivia Dale,” I say automatically.

  The corners of his mouth lift a little. “I know,” he says. “I was inside.” He lets go of my damp hand and wipes his palm on his jeans. Then he sees me watching him and stops.

  “Are you related?” I say, nodding toward the church behind me.

  He turns to look back at the church. “Yeah,” he says. “He’s my dad.”

  I wait for a moment. He just stands, rubbing his fingers hard on the back of his neck. “Okay,” I say, the heat making me impatient, “nice to meet you.”

  “Wait, please,” he says. He shifts from foot to foot. “I need to talk to you.”

  Over his shoulder I see the church door start to open. A man’s voice calls, “Russell?”

  His body tenses, as though bracing for a punch to the gut. “It’s my dad,” he says. His voice goes low, urgent. “I’ve got to talk to you. Can we meet somewhere?”

  “What’s this about?”

  “Allison Avery,” he says, taking a step back.

  “Allison . . .,” I repeat. Without thinking, I put my hand in my bag, searching for my notebook. “What about her?”

  “I know her,” he says. He presses his lips together and blinks rapidly. He takes another step back.

  I put my hand on his forearm to stop him. “Do you have something to tell me?”

  “Russell?” his father calls again. “You out there?”

  “Coming,” he yells. Then to me he says, “I’ve got to go. Can I talk to you?”

  “Give me your number, tell me how to reach you.”

  “I’ll call you,” he says. He spins on one foot and starts jogging back toward the church.

  “When?” I call after him. He doesn’t answer. I stand and watch as he reaches his father, who puts his arm around his shoulders and leads him back inside the church. The heavy door eases shut behind them.

  I let myself into David’s house with the key he leaves inside the mailbox. Lou greets me at the door, woofing mightily and rearing up on his hind legs. I shout no at him until he drops to all fours, and then I pat him once or twice and he licks my hand. “Where’s your daddy?” I ask him, wiping my hand on my pants. He lets his tongue dangle out, looking up at me with his droopy eyes.

  I like being at David’s when he’s not home. Lou follows on my heels as I wander from room to room, looking in cabinets. Everything is in order. I open a drawer and run my hand over his neatly folded boxers. A white T-shirt lying on the bed has the scent of him still.

  On his desk is a shoe box labeled “Demo Tapes,” with two neat rows of cassettes in plastic cases. He’s even alphabetized them. I run my finger up to the As, and there it is. Allison Avery. He told me he’d never heard of her. I pull the tape out and stand for a moment with it in my hand.

  I put the tape in my pocket and start searching his desk, going through drawers, rifling through stacks of papers, looking for something else marked with her name. Lou paws at my leg. “What do you want?” I ask him. He cocks his head. Then I look at what I’ve done to the desk. The drawers are all open. The papers are splashed across the desktop. Some tapes have fallen to the floor.

  Hurrying now, because he might come home at any minute, I start cleaning up the mess I’ve made, shutting the drawers and stacking the papers. The phone rings, and I pick it up, thinking it might be David.

  “Hey,” Hannah says. “I thought you might be there.”

  “Didn’t I tell you I would be?”

  “What are you doing?”

  “Cleaning up some papers I knocked over,” I say. I step back and look at the desk. It looks neat and organized, and I don’t think he’ll notice I touched it. I take the tape with her name on it out of my pocket and look at it again. He gets a lot of these tapes. He probably just forgot her name.

  “Why so quiet?” Hannah says.

  “You know the dead girl?” I say. “I found one of her demo tapes on David’s desk.”

  “Creepy,” Hannah says. “Did you listen to it?”

  “Not yet. I wonder why he didn’t tell me he had it.”

  “Did you ask him?”

  “I asked him if he knew her. He said no.”

  “He probably forgot,” Hannah says. She pauses. “Unless of course, he’s the murderer.”

  “That’s not funny, Hannah.”

  “Oh come on,” she says. “It is, too. Jesus, you’re paranoid.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “How many years have you been with this boy?” Hannah says. “Don’t you think he would have told you if he remembered the girl’s name?”

  “She was very pretty. Maybe he had an affair with her and he doesn’t want to tell me,” I say, only half joking. I turn the tape over in my hand. “Maybe I don’t know him as well as I think.”

  “He tells you he loves you, right?” she says. “What else do you want?” She laughs. She thinks that’s funny.

  “I want everything,” I say.

  “I don’t think you do,” she says.

  For a moment I say nothing. I listen to her breathing. “What are you doing now?” I ask.

  “Listening to Denise have sex. It’s so loud today.”

  Denise lives in the other half of our duplex, which does not have thick walls. We know a lot about her life considering how rarely we actually talk to her, because she lives it at a very high volume. She has a crazy boyfriend, who, she screams, does not treat her right. From time to time, judging from the sounds she makes, he treats her very right.

  Hannah wants to know if I’m spending the night here, and I tell her yes, that I’ll see her after work tomorrow. We hang up the phone. I turn on a TV movie, and Lou flops down at my feet. He keeps his eyes trained on my face, his anxious eyebrows dancing. On the television, a man searches frantically for the woman he loves. She’s been in an accident. She lies in her hospital bed, doing nothing but breathing, and he waits all night for her eyes to open. In the morning they tell him to go home and get some sleep, and when he gets home he can’t be strong anymore and he just sinks to the floor and cries.

  So what I want to know is, if David came home and I wasn’t there, if I were dead, missing, lying in the hospital, unconscious, beyond the reach of anything he could do, what would he do? Would he sink to the floor, slide down the wall to his knees, would his breathing turn jagged, gasping, would he make any sound, would he sob, cry out, would he hold his hands out in front of him like this man, down on his knees, his hands spread, impotent, powerless, in love? Or would he hang up his jacket and go to bed, and come visit me in the hospital early in the morning, bringing flowers? Would it be tulips, because they’re my favorite, or roses, because they’re his?

  A hand brushes against my thigh. I sit bolt upright in the armchair, blinking. It’s dark. “Allison,” I say. My outstretched fingers touch skin.

  “Who?” David says. He is leaning over me, smiling with gentle amusement.

  “Oh.” I sink back into the chair. “What’s going on?”

  David settles on the arm and strokes my hair back from my face. “You were sleeping.” He holds something up. “What’s this?”

  It takes me a moment to understand, as though I’m translating from a dimly understood language into my own. I want to ask David, “Who are you?”

  “It’s a tape,” I say.

  He laughs softly, his fingers still in my hair. “I know. Why were you sleeping with it? You had it clutched in your hand.”

  “I was looking at your demo tapes. This tape, it’s Allison Avery.”

  “So? Who’s that?”

  “Jesus, David, don’t you listen to me? Don’t you read my stories? It’s the dead girl. The one I asked you about.”

  “Don’t shout, Olivia,” he says evenly. “I haven’t had time to read the paper lately.
I didn’t remember her name.”

  “Did you listen to it?”

  He shakes his head. “I just brought that box home from work yesterday. She must have sent it to me right before she died.”

  He pushes up off the chair and goes in the direction of the stereo. I close my eyes. In a moment Allison Avery’s voice fills the room.

  “How old was this girl?” David asks, whispering so his own voice won’t drown out the sound of hers.

  I tell him she was twenty-four. I know why he asked. It’s not the voice of a girl. If I didn’t know better I’d imagine a much older woman, someone who’s known twenty years of loss and heartbreak.

  “Gorgeous voice,” David says in the space before the next song begins. “What a waste.”

  “Would you have called her?” I ask.

  “Definitely.”

  We listen in silence, her voice with us like a ghost in the room.

  Neither of us moves to pop the tape out when it’s over, listening without speaking to the whirring of empty ribbon through the speakers. David turns off the stereo and finally it’s quiet. Then he comes back to me, and I’m surprised to see that his eyes are filled with tears. “It’s terrible,” he says.

  I don’t say anything. “What happened to her?” he says.

  “I told you. Somebody grabbed her outside her apartment. They beat her, raped her, killed her.”

  David shakes his head like he can’t believe it.

  “I told you this before,” I say.

  He reaches for me and pulls me into a hug. “Now it seems real,” he says, his breath warm against my ear. He tightens his arms around me.

  I close my eyes. I stood over her body in the dirt. It always seemed real to me.

  “I love you,” he whispers.

  I want to say it back but I don’t. How can I, when I know he’s only saying it because he’s imagining me dead?

  David is beside me when I wake up in the morning before the alarm goes off. I put a hand on his cheek, soft from sleeping. He sighs when I kiss him and then opens his eyes and smiles. “Good morning,” he says.

  “We’ll see,” I say.

  We make love without kissing. No matter how long or tightly I hold him, he is never close enough. He gets out of bed and goes to shower. I lie there, sweating, stupid with desire.

  8

  At my desk, I read my story about the funeral over a cup of coffee. From the story, someone who wasn’t there could learn what the minister said about faith and comfort, what expressions the family members wore, what flower—a lily—the mother carried. My lead begins, “Like the lily her mother laid on her coffin, Allison Avery was . . .” I skip ahead, already embarrassed by something I wrote only yesterday, its slick sentimentality. I quoted Allison’s employer saying how much she will be missed, Angela saying what a wonderful friend she was, and some Avery cousin saying the family has faith in the police to bring about a swift resolution to the case. Someone who wasn’t there wouldn’t know how hot it was in the sun-baked black clothes we wore, how quiet it was in the moments after the minister stopped speaking, how that boy’s hand felt inside my own. Next to the copy is a photo of Allison’s mother, leaning forward with the flower in her hand. Her husband stands behind her, his head bowed. Half of Peter’s body appears at one edge. Some careless person cropped out the rest.

  I put down the paper and check the phone book for James Freeland. There are two J. Freelands. I call the first number and a querulous old woman complains that she’s never heard of Russell Freeland. When I call the second, I get a machine. A girl’s voice recites the phone number but no names. I hang up before the beep. If you leave a message, you can’t call back.

  I check my E-mail. One from Bishop. “I’m bored already,” it says. “Any news on your dead girl?” I write back, tell him I’m shit out of luck with the cops and not sure what to do next. A few minutes later he appears at my desk. “Let’s take a ride to the station,” he says. “I’ll try one of my guys for you.”

  As we pass a cheap motel on the way, Bishop says, “Guy killed his wife there.”

  “Oh yeah?” I turn to watch it go past. “How?”

  “Strangled her.”

  “See that corner?” I say, pointing. “That’s where that professor got busted picking up a twelve-year-old prostitute.”

  Bishop says, “What happened to him?”

  “Still teaching literature to freshmen,” I say, and laugh.

  At the police station I sit on a bench and wait while Bishop goes into homicide. After a few minutes Sergeant Morris comes out. I stand up.

  “Got nothing to tell you,” Morris says as soon as he sees me. He walks toward the water fountain, and I trail after.

  “Does that mean there’s nothing going on, or there’s nothing you can tell me?”

  “Can’t really answer that, can I?” he says. “Just write the same thing: police still following up leads.” He bends over the water fountain. I can’t tell how old he is. He looks as old as sixty to me, but police work seems like the type of thing that could age you early.

  “Come on,” I say. “How many times can I write that story?”

  “I read your piece on the funeral,” he says, wiping water from his mouth. “You’re holding off on this one, aren’t you. No quotes from the immediate family.”

  “Give me something,” I say. “Anything.”

  He holds his hands out toward me. “I got nothing, Olivia. Nothing. Now I’m going in the bathroom, so quit following me, okay, sweetie?”

  “Will you let me know . . .”

  He cuts me off. “You just keep asking,” he says. “Sooner or later I’ll have something to tell.”

  I go back down the hall and take my place on the bench again. A woman sits next to me, hitting the bench hard. She’s about fifty, white, with gray-blond hair to her shoulders and a face creased as crumpled paper. She’s wearing green polyester pants, a yellow shirt tucked into them. A worn and enormous purse balances on her lap. She clutches white-knuckled at the handles.

  I ask her how she is, and when she says not too good I tell her I’m sorry and ask her what’s wrong. To her it seems like I’m just being polite.

  “It’s my brother,” she says. “The cops called him in for an interview.”

  I tell her I know how that is and watch her twist her wedding band round and round her finger.

  “He’s not even a suspect,” she sighs. “I hope not, anyway. He’s got a history.”

  “He’s got a record?”

  She pops open her purse, searching through it for something. Bottles of medication rattle. She pulls one out, empties a pink pill into her hand and swallows it without water, tossing her head back. Then she says, “He’s a sexual predator. They’re talking to him about that girl.”

  “What girl?”

  “That one got raped and killed at the park,” she says. “Don’t you read the papers?”

  “Do you think your brother’s involved?”

  “He’s no killer,” she says.

  “But he’s a rapist?” I look hard at her. Her face is set, nothing in it to show what her brother is to her, except maybe those deep lines in her skin.

  She starts rummaging through her purse again. “He is what he is. Nothing you can do.”

  I watch her going through her purse, looking for something in it to tell me how it is to live this woman’s life. I see crumpled tissue, lipstick, a wallet bulging with change, a comb full of gray-blond hairs. She pulls out a roll of mints and offers me one. I take it. My mouth is dry. I get up and go to the bathroom, where I stand inside a stall and write down everything the woman said. When I get back to the bench, she’s gone.

  After a while Bishop comes back out, shaking his head, and says, “Let’s go home,” and by the head shake he means he got nothing from his source, and by home he means back to the paper. When we get in the car he throws his notebook in my lap and I see that he’s written “Nada” across the page and circled it. It’s funny how you get in t
he habit of writing down everything, even when it’s nothing. In the car I tell him what I wrote down: that the police are interviewing blind, groping in the dark, that that woman’s brother, he is what he is.

  “That’s more than I got,” he says. “At least we know something.”

  I know something. I know what it says in my notebook: nothing you can do.

  On the drive back I write the word “nada” over and over down the side of the page. “How can I get something in the paper on this?” I ask Bishop.

  Bishop shrugs. “Not much to say, is there,” he says.

  “I want to keep it out there. What do you think it would take to sell Peggy on it?”

  “Get confirmation they’ve got no leads, that they’re interviewing,” he says. “Maybe call the family. Get some quotes from them.”

  “They’ve been uncooperative,” I say.

  “Get them to cooperate.” He glances at me. “That’s your job.”

  Back at the newsroom, I call the Averys’ house. The machine picks up. “This is Olivia Dale from the newspaper,” I say. “I know you don’t want to talk to me, but I want to write a story about Allison, what she was like. I need to keep this in the news. You don’t want people to forget about it. The police . . .”

  “Hello,” a woman’s voice says. Then a squeal of feedback comes through the phone. “Hold on,” she says, and then she goes to turn off the machine.

  “Okay,” she says when she picks it back up. “I’ll talk to you.”

  “Now?” I can’t believe my luck. I wasn’t even expecting her to answer the phone.

  “You can come to my house at three,” she says. Then she hangs up.

  Evan is watching me. “She said yes?”

  I nod.

  “That’s great.”

  “It’s incredible,” I say. “A few days ago this woman thought I was the devil incarnate.”

  “People change their minds,” Evan says.

  “Or maybe now there’s something she wants printed.”

  “Jesus, Olivia.” Evan shakes his head, grinning. “You have such a suspicious nature. She’s probably just ready to talk about the girl.”