by Rae Meadows
She drinks well past her two-drink moratorium. She phones her mom but hangs up when her dad answers. She is restless, wound up.
Out on the curb, bags of garbage and recycling are piled in perilous saggy stacks. She fills a grocery bag with the empty bottles from the top of her refrigerator and carries the clanking bundle outside on her hip. The cement is deadening cold on her bare feet. She wobbles and narrowly misses stepping on a patch of scattered glass.
A group of boys walks by, two by two, razzing each other. They are tall but still adolescents, baseball hats under sweatshirt hoods.
“What’s up, Mami?” one says, walking backward to face her. “Where you been all my life?”
He has a sweet face, with burnished skin and wide brown eyes that reflect the streetlight overhead. His friend punches him and they laugh, continuing on their way.
She envies their easygoing confidence, their comfort with each other. She balances the bottles gingerly on the top of the heap and skitters back inside.
In her bedroom, the light from the sidewalk shines through the blinds in stripes across the duvet. Grace lies awake and absently traces them with her finger. She wrestles with the things she knows about Charles Raggatt and the case, but they don’t cohere. The story is only becoming murkier.
He has signed a confession and he is being held without bail. She wonders what it feels like to confess, if he wishes now that he could suck the words back in. She pictures his fleshy hands holding a blue ball-point pen, his signature precise, almost delicate. What if he wanted to give up his life? Perhaps now he can curl up in his cell and sleep.
Grace wishes she could do the same, but her brain ricochets despite the hour and the alcohol and the Tylenol PMs. Charles Raggatt. The telling thing is the silence. No friends rallying to his defense, no family offering its support. No one to contradict a profile that’s easy to despise.
She gets up and pulls on her coat over her pajamas. It’s warmer outside than it was earlier, a descended fog visible in the streetlights’ yellow pools. She walks up toward the park, past storefronts armored with metal grates. A car service Lincoln slows next to her but she waves it on. A late-night subway train rattles underneath the sidewalk. On the corner, the all-night Greek diner glows safe and welcoming—there are other people awake—despite the dinginess of its greasy windows.
Inside there is only one customer, a jittery woman in sunglasses, emaciated in a cavernous UCLA sweatshirt. Crystal meth or mental illness or despair. Grace takes a seat in the booth furthest from her and waits for the old man behind the counter to stop reading his paper.
“Yes? You know what you want?” he calls out to her. His accent is Greek. His eyebrows are bushy tentacles reaching out in every direction.
Grace orders a vanilla milkshake. He doesn’t smile.
When he turns the shake mixer on, the skinny woman jerks her head up, angry at the noise’s intrusion. Grace smiles in appeasement and the woman looks back down into her coffee.
Grace wonders what threads they have decided don’t support the neat story of the murder, what errant strands they have snipped away. Maybe, she thinks, I’m the only one who’s curious.
The old man brings her a frothing concoction overflowing its soda fountain glass. She sucks it in through the straw, her head gripped by the pain of too much cold. But she can’t stop. She drinks it down.
Maybe, she thinks, I can look a little closer.
She slurps out the last bit of the shake as the woman picks at a scab on her knuckle in the back booth. As she gets up to leave, Grace leaves five dollars on top of the check at the edge of her table, just in case the woman wants to take it.
Outside, the trees and grass emit breaths of green coolness. The sidewalk is empty, but somewhere nearby a can skids across the street and a car backfires. There is no moon for the fog. She finds a dented payphone at the end of the block. The phone is covered in graffiti but there’s a dial tone. She punches in Brian’s office phone number but freezes when she hears his recorded voice and hangs up.
A small man walking a miniature dog passes without looking at her. She waits until the jangle of the dog collar recedes before picking up the phone again. Grace calls Brian and leaves him a message that she won’t be in tomorrow.
CHAPTER 5
The campus of Emeryville College is tidy and traditional, the neoclassical buildings of the quad circling a wide lawn where groups of students sprawl in the spring sun. The Long Island school is small and private, with a quiet but decent reputation—a back-up school, drawing kids mainly from the northeast. Grace drives around and feels decidedly out of place. She stops to allow a group of girls with long hair and glossy lips to cross the street. They saunter in their slim jeans, unconcerned that she is waiting.
She finds North Moore, the dorm where Charles lived his first semester, and gathers her nerve to leave the car. In the entryway of the low brick building, in a glass case, is a map of the United States surrounded by photos of smiling faces. Pieces of string are pinned to connect the residents to their respective hometowns. Beneath the map in faded marker is written, “Welcome Frosh!” There is a blank square space where Charles’s photo must have been. Grace puts her finger to the glass and traces it back to Cleveland, leaving a smudge.
She walks to the lounge, where two girls and a football player watch The Price Is Right, their lunch trays balanced on their laps.
“I’m so fucking hungover,” one of the girls says, setting her tray on the floor.
She is blond but by her roots, a natural redhead, and she has attempted to hide her freckles with a coat of foundation and powder. There is something ill at ease in her forced languor. It appears she is, or is soon to be, the third wheel to these two.
“I have to go to section,” the other girl says as she gets up, her small butt packed snugly in pink sweatpants, her dark hair reaching mid-back.
The football player holds up his hand and she slaps it with nonchalant confidence as she walks out, calling, “Bye, chica,” over her shoulder. She is not worried about leaving the two of them together; she knows she has already won.
“Excuse me,” Grace says, making a hesitant approach.
The once-redhead snaps her eyes in Grace’s direction and the guy looks her over with mild disdain. His neck is the same width as his head. Grace clears her throat.
“Did either of you know Charles Raggatt?”
“Are you a reporter?” he asks.
“No,” Grace says.
“That guy was a freak,” the girl says. “I mean, like, clearly.” She talks with her face pointed down, as if she’s been told this is her most flattering angle.
“Did you know him?” Grace asks her.
She shrugs. “I saw him around when he lived here. But it’s not like we hung out or anything.”
“He gave a kick-ass party, though. Remember that first week?” the football player asks, nudging her knee. “He had a keg in his room. I was like, whoa, I am definitely not in high school any more.” He looks nostalgic when he says this, like he has, in this one year, lost all vestiges of youth.
The girl studies her nails and picks at a piece of skin on the side of her thumbnail. When she can’t get it off, she tries with her teeth.
“I’ve gotta motor,” he says, standing and stretching. He picks up the tray left by the dark-haired girl in one hand and holds his in the other. “You want to know my theory? He wanted to get with the chick, she was way out of his league, he made the moves, she rejected him, and he, like, wigged out. It’s not like they’ve been saying, you know, that he was some stud or whatever. The guy was a loser. Later, Amy.”
When he is gone, Amy bounces her foot and bites a new cuticle. Grace waits, unsure of what to do. She pretends to watch the TV. Amy picks up her tray from the floor to stand but then sets it back on her lap.
“So you knew him a little?” Grace asks.
Amy rolls her eyes to the ceiling, struggling. She looks around to makes sure no one’s in earshot.
“I haven’t told people this,” she says. “But…Charles gave me a ride last week to the train station. That was probably, like, after he killed Sarah, you know? It kind of creeps me out.”
“Yeah, I can imagine” Grace says. “Did he seem any different to you?”
“He was awkward but that was whatever. He said he was going in that direction anyway so it wasn’t a big deal.”
“So you two were kind of friends?” Grace asks, emboldened.
“No,” Amy says aghast, clicking off the TV.
“Do you know who his friends were?”
“No. I don’t know if he had any,” she says. “He had a roommate first semester. John Kim. But I never saw them together.”
“What about the fraternity?” Grace asks.
“Those guys just used him for his money and his car. He would, like, go and get all the beer or whatever else they wanted. He was their gofer. He even bought them a foosball table. Do you know he wasn’t even really in the frat? They never invited him to rush. They’re pretty much dicks.”
A fresh-scrubbed boy with a girl piggyback gallops through the lounge.
“I have to go,” she says, glancing toward the door. “You’re not going to use my name or anything are you?”
Grace shakes her head. But when Amy leaves she takes another look at the map in the foyer. Amy Monroe, fair-skinned redhead, from Michigan. Grace writes the name in the notebook she’s begun about the case.
She finds Charles’s old roommate in his room with the door open, reading To the Lighthouse on his bed. He’s Asian American, with small round glasses and a wispy goatee. He doesn’t seem surprised by Grace’s appearance and agrees to talk to her with a casual flick of his hand. She leans against the inside of the doorframe.
“I didn’t spend much time with him?” he says with the upward inflection of not wanting to offend. “I was never here. My girlfriend lives in a suite in Franklin, where Sarah lived, so I was always over there. He had a lot of things. Material things. It looked like an electronics store in here. It wasn’t really my scene?”
He pushes his glasses up on his nose.
It strikes her that this is a boy whom college has made comfortable with himself. Charles, it seems, was not as fortunate.
“Did he want to be friends with you?” she asks.
“I don’t know. I guess? He wanted people to like him. He was nice enough but you could tell he was always trying too hard. He was always trying to impress people with crazy stories,” he says.
“Like what?” she asks.
“Okay, this is going to sound nuts, considering the circumstances? But one night when he was really drunk he said that he thought his mind was disintegrating.”
“He told you that?”
“Yeah, I know, but that was the thing about him, he didn’t have the same filters that everyone else has. So it’s not like anyone believed him. I don’t know.”
“Did he have any friends?”
He shrugs. “He must have some, right?” He runs his fingers over the edge of the pages of his book. “Sarah was cool,” he says. “Kind of a partier. She’s one of those girls that guys like and girls like? I just don’t get it, why she would ever have been alone with Charles.”
He points Grace in the direction of the dorm where Sarah lived, and on the way she passes a makeshift memorial at the base of a lamppost. Cellophane-wrapped flowers now mostly dead, votives, notes held down by rocks, a small, framed picture of Sarah dressed as Pippi Longstocking for Halloween, braids sticking straight out from her head.
Grace sits on a bench outside the building and watches the comings and goings of the dorm. Although the sun is out the breeze is quite sharp, the cold making the scar on the tip of her index finger itch. The whitish splotch takes the place of her fingerprint. She digs her thumbnail into the scar to replace the itch with pain.
When Grace was seven and her sister was five, Callie took their mother’s sewing scissors and went into Grace’s dresser, where she cut slices in her underwear and T-shirts, getting back at her for something Grace has long since forgotten. Callie, ever willful, her brown eyes shining with defiance, was going for the closet and Grace’s favorite long dress, smocked and frilly, that she was allowed to wear only on special occasions. Grace tried to grab the scissors from her but her sister brandished them, using both her hands to snap the blades. When Callie caught Grace’s fingertip in the scissors her eyes widened, but she slammed the handles together anyway, lopping off the pad, blood beading on the beige carpeting in small droplets. Grace stood there, stunned. Callie’s contrite howling alerted their mother, who wrapped Grace’s finger in the dress, the nearest thing she could find, to stop the bleeding. The separated part wasn’t enough to sew back on so the doctor stitched the sides together in a messy bunch. It was the first time Grace can remember the cracks being exposed in a childhood that had been relatively carefree, cracks where the future peeked in, where life as she knew it was over.
“Do you mind if I sit here?” a handsome long-haired boy in a tie-dye asks.
Grace shakes her head and scoots over on the bench. He sits Indian-style, a biology book spanning his knees.
“How’s it going?” he asks.
“Fine,” she says.
Shade has crept over the bench and she rubs her arms to warm them.
“Right on,” he says, turning back to his book.
“Did you know Charles Raggatt?” she finally asks the hippie kid.
“No, man. That’s some crazy shit though.”
“Yeah,” she says, giving him a halfhearted smile.
Grace tries to imagine Charles here, his money the only thing he thought he had going for him. A boy who wanted to fit in without any idea how to do it.
###
College kids and old couples are scattered throughout the diner in town, its booths maroon plastic, its cake covers cloudy and cracked. The waitress, henna-haired and bulging out of her uniform, bustles about noiselessly in nude-colored nursing shoes. At the counter, Grace takes a place two down from a muscled guy reading the Post and tapping his foot. He has dark hair on the backs of his hands and he wears a gold insignia ring from some fraternal order. She looks away just as he checks her out. He stares. She orders coffee and glances over to dissuade his gaze, but he just smiles and lifts his cup in salute.
“How you doing?” he asks with a pronounced Long Island accent.
“Okay,” she says.
“What are you doing way out this way?”
“Excuse me?” she asks.
“You don’t look to be from around here. Manhattan, right?”
“Brooklyn,” she says.
“Ah, okay. Brooklyn in the house!” He laughs. “My grandmother lives in Sheepshead Bay.”
She smiles weakly and pours cream into her coffee.
“Tommy,” he says, extending his hand. “Tommy Toscano. Teamster.”
He keeps his meaty hand outstretched until she shakes it.
“Grace,” she says.
There is something surprisingly kind in his face, a softness in the mouth that she bets he doesn’t like.
“So Grace, what are you doing out here on a Thursday afternoon?”
It’s a good question, she thinks.
“The murder? At the college? I’m kind of interested in it.”
“I hope they nail the motherfucker’s ass to the wall. Excuse my language. Why do you care about that shit anyway?”
“I want to know the real story I guess.”
He snorts, amused. “What, you don’t believe what the grown-ups tell you?”
She starts to sweat under her coat.
“No, I guess not everything,” she says.
“You got a spark behind that cool façade, don’t you, Grace?” he asks, squinting his eyes. He slides over to the seat next to her and says softly, “The word is he couldn’t have her, so he took her. Simple as that.”
“That’s what they say.”
Tommy’s cologne is warm and
musky. His thick fingers look like they could crush the white coffee cup he holds around its waist. His masculinity is so exaggerated he is like a cartoon.
“You know the craziest part?”
“What’s that?” she asks.
“He drove around with her body in his car for like a week before he buried it.”
“I hadn’t heard that,” she says.
“My buddy’s on the force. Not working the case or nothing, but he’s got the inside dope.”
Grace nods and stirs her coffee. But then she doesn’t want to miss an opportunity so she leans toward his ear.
“What I want to know is, why was she at his apartment?” she asks.
“She wasn’t. Until she was dead, anyway. He killed her at the Econo Lodge out on Route 6. The same night she disappeared. They haven’t released that tidbit yet.”
This revelation plants a new stake, and the other elements must realign themselves behind it. Sarah went with Charles, or she met him at a motel, alone, late at night.
“They’ve probably made stranger discoveries in vacated rooms than a stain on the carpet. I think hotels do things to people. Allows them to do stuff they wouldn’t do on their own turf,” he says. A smile tugs at the corner of his mouth, like he has made her some kind of proposition. “I could drive you out there so you could take a look,” he says, finishing the last of his coffee like a shot of tequila. “Before you head back into Brooklyn.”
Her head swirls with the latest developments, which only seem to make the plot muddier. She wonders if Tommy knows more, but she also knows he’s been playing her, and most likely he’s used up all his lures.
“I don’t think so,” she says. “But thanks anyway.”
His plump lips pout a little but then he smiles.
“All right, then. Good luck there, Grace.”
###
It’s dusk by the time Grace finds a parking space on the edge of her neighborhood. The early spring sun is barely holding on. Ahead of her, as she turns onto her block, is a girl walking with her mother who spits clipped angry words into a cell phone. The girl walks a couple paces behind, her posture sullen; her feet, which she hasn’t yet grown into, drag. Grace reaches the stoop of her building but she doesn’t want to go in yet. She sits on the top step and watches the pair retreat. Despite the girl’s insolent walk, Grace thinks she sees something deliberate in her steps, and she strains against the darkness to confirm it. The girl avoids each crack, never catching even a toe on a line.
