The Elizas

by Sara Shepard

  But she knew what telling might mean. She steeled herself for this decision, wondering if she could handle it. She’d already endured so much. And yet, just imagining getting the secret off her chest gave her a surprising sense of relief. People would know everything, bad and good, about Dorothy and about her. There would be no secrets anymore. No questions. If Dot had to suffer a little while—or maybe a long while—because of it, maybe that would be okay.

  She packed up her suitcase, leaving behind a few knickknacks she’d picked up during the trip. The bag bumped against her shin as she walked into the slick, wet night.

  Over a canal bridge, and then another. A late trolley wobbled down the tracks. Drunk kids hooted, coming home from a bar. The police officer on horseback was in the same spot Dot had left him. When she touched his calf, he flinched—he’d been looking the other way. He looked down, and his face blossomed with recognition when he saw her. “Benyeh oak?” he said in Dutch. At least that’s what it sounded like.

  “English?” Dot asked.

  “Yes, okay,” the cop said, and Dot felt relieved. “Is there a problem?”

  Dot breathed in. It was the last breath she would take, she realized, as a free person, as a person with secrets. But maybe that was okay. Maybe this was growth. “There is a problem,” she said. “I hope you can help.”

  EPILOGUE

  Three Years Later

  I’VE NEVER BEEN to the Hotel Vetiver before now, and for that I am grateful. When I came here a few months ago to scout a location for this party, I’d walked through the dining rooms and ballrooms as a stranger—there were no associations, no tickles of memories. The hotel is so brand-new it still smells like Home Depot. All the staff is so young they were probably still in high school three years ago when I was cycling through my troubles, and all of the guests are so old and moneyed that they probably have no time or interest in the Dr. Roxanne show or contemporary fiction. I hate that three years have passed and I’m still on the lookout for people I might know or who knew me—past ghosts, past oglers. I’ve run into a few women who’d been at that Dr. Roxanne taping; a couple of them came up to me right away, recognizing me, gushing about how good I look, how healthy, and that they loved the book. Others back away quickly, their mouths puckered in a half laugh. I only know they were in the audience because I hear the whispers. If you were at that show, you won’t forget it anytime soon. Probably the only person who doesn’t have a crystal-clear memory of that day is me.

  Desmond and I walk into the ballroom together hand in hand. Posey, rail-thin, her three babies long since evicted, greets us as promised in the lobby.

  “There are a lot of people here already. We’ll do dinner first, and then the silent auction, and then you’ll say a few words. Read from your new novel if you like. Everyone is dying to hear what it’s about.”

  I feel that same jump of nerves I always get before getting up in front of a crowd. It hasn’t gotten much easier for me, but at least now I can actually do it.

  Posey’s neck turns sharply toward her phone, which is ringing. “Gotta take this.” She scampers away.

  Desmond touches my arm. “You’ll be fine,” he says into my ear. He smells like sandalwood; his hair has been cut to show off his angular face and his blazing blue eyes. I’ve only seen him in a suit a few times, but he looks deliciously handsome. When he came out of the bathroom with it on, I’d jumped on him and tore it off again, so beguiled by his tall, thin body in all that black wool.

  “And if you’re not fine, if you need to get the hell out of here, I scoped out all the exits,” Desmond continues. “There’s one only about fifteen steps away to your left. And there’s another to your back that will lead you through a really long hallway and out into this Dumpster area—that one might be best. No one will be gawking at you out by the trash cans.”

  I grin at him, then kiss his cheek. “Thank you.”

  There are about twenty round tables that seat ten people each. Desmond seems to know the way, guiding me to a front table marked with the number 1. My mother and Bill are already sitting. Gabby’s with Dave, her old boss and now fiancé. His son, Linus, a boy as pale and fragile as I had been at his age, sits next to them. Kiki has brought the new occupant of my bedroom in Burbank, someone named Theo I’m not sure if I like yet. Even my old friend from high school, Matilda, has come out, dressed in the same black spidery gown I used to borrow from her. I don’t dress in so much black anymore, though. My hair has a few highlights in it, even. It’s just something I’m trying. A new version of myself.

  Everyone smiles when they see me, each of them expressing varying levels of enthusiasm—Bill braying and opening his arms for a hug, Gabby clutching Desmond’s and my hands, my mother coolly nodding though at least looking half-decent in makeup and a dress, Kiki cheering and sharing news of Steadman, whose store burned down last year in a blaze of animal hair and bone and who moved to Tunisia. It was my mother’s idea to have the release party for my new book, Pawns. Personally, I would have preferred something a little less stuffy—this has the feel of a fund-raiser or a reception for a wedding where the bride and groom aren’t 100 percent sure about getting hitched—but as my mother was the one who planned it all, I can’t help but feel flattered.

  Waiters deliver endive salads and bottles of wine. In the center of the table is the cover of Pawns: stark white, with two black chess pieces side by side, a pen-and-ink of an institutional building in the background. I started work on the book about a year after The Dots came out. Not because it took me that long to come up with the idea—the idea came, actually, at the Oaks, as the story is about two men in a mental hospital who bond over their love of chess and their messed-up heads and lives. Jim and Pablo, the original chess players, were invited to this, too, invitations sent to the Oaks, where they’re both still living, but they declined to come. I don’t think they ever leave that place. It took me so long to start the new novel because I had to completely recover, and once I did, I had other things to do first. I ended up doing exactly what Dot did in the novel—exactly what Albert suggested. I turned myself in.

  The Dots ends before we find out what happens to Dot—is she extradited to the States? Does she go to a Dutch prison? I wish I’d written a scene—at least it would have given me a template for what I was about to do. As it happened, I had to go in blind.

  I was still a patient at the Oaks when I spoke to a detective at the station. They had to scramble around to find someone to take my call—Eleanor Reitman’s death didn’t have a file, as it was considered a suicide. Finally, when Detective Carson answered, he sounded dubious, and when I told him he had to visit me at the Oaks all the way in Palm Springs, he almost hung up on me.

  But he came anyway. Detective Carson met me outside, on a bench. He had graying hair and a jowly but friendly face. His bright eyes were so light blue they were almost translucent. He was the kind of man I could see roughhousing with grandchildren; he probably had a trampoline in his backyard. We sat on the lawn; he took out a pad and pencil and asked me to explain my story. I was soothed by the old-school way of documentation, his scratchy pencil marking up the page. And so I told him. I told him what Eleanor had done to me when I was a child in the hospital, how she’d been banned from the nurses, how none of it had been communicated with me, how she’d returned and started drugging me in other ways. I explained our last dinner, how I’d switched the drinks—I didn’t realize what she’d put in my cocktail would be so dangerous. I just wanted to see if she’d planned to do it to me. I told him the story exactly as I’d written it in the book. I’d decided to buy into that version of the truth, mostly because I didn’t have a clear sense the truth could be anything else.

  Detective Carson was not familiar with The Dots. He had to read passages from my book as a form of evidence; I waited for him to finish the passage where Dorothy catapults into traffic. “So she charged for you?” he asked, then slapped the book shut. “At that guardrail? And you pushed her over?”

/>   I shrugged. “I guess so. I mean, I don’t remember any of this very clearly, though my therapist says that I’m choosing not to remember it. I remember wanting to push her, that’s for sure.”

  “So you’re admitting to her murder, then?”

  I took a deep breath. “I’m admitting to . . . something.”

  “But you don’t remember.”

  “No, but I don’t see how it couldn’t have happened.”

  The detective pulled his bottom lip into his mouth. “I just don’t understand why someone would write a confession in a novel. Even someone who was mentally compromised, as you were. It seems to go against every instinct we have as humans.”

  “I confessed because I thought it was fiction. I went through treatment, and the memories were taken out of me.”

  “Yes.” He frowned. “Your family was in charge of that, right?”

  “They were, but . . .” I stared at my trembling fingers. Maybe I hadn’t thought all this through. I didn’t want my family getting in trouble. “They were worried about me. They’ve been worried for a long time. But it’s not their fault. It’s mine.”

  It was difficult to say all that. It wasn’t like I wanted to go to prison, but I’d resigned myself to it. I couldn’t walk around with a murder on my conscience. I couldn’t have people thinking I’d killed and gotten away with it. Like Dot, I needed to own up to it. It probably sounded naïve—prison was going to be awful, I knew—but I really felt like that was how the story should end.

  Detective Carson stood and brushed a few pods that had fallen from the trees off his pants. “The thing is, Miss Fontaine, the way you describe the incident in your novel doesn’t sound like murder. It sounds like self-defense. If I were your lawyer, that’s how I’d frame it.”

  “Huh?” I snatched my book and leafed through the pages to the end.

  “Eleanor came at you first. She poisoned you. There might not be empirical proof that she was the one who did it, but when she left, you got better. She’s the one who should have been in jail—for child abuse. And even that night—all you did was switch the drinks. You didn’t know for sure that she’d put anything in yours. And at the guardrail, you wrote that she charged at you and tried to push you over. There’s no picture showing otherwise. I have a report of the accident here, which describes that we identified Ms. Reitman’s body by her driver’s license. It details the state of her body while the department still had access to it in the morgue. There are no signs she was choked or hit or bludgeoned or struck in any sort of way by you. We don’t even know if she was poisoned by that drink you gave her—we weren’t able to do a drug screen on her. It could have all been an act.

  “It doesn’t add up to much,” he said. “I mean, sure, you can claim you did it, I can send you to prison, but do you really want that?” He touched my shoulder gently. “You seem like a nice girl who just had some shitty luck. I’d go live your life. Stop feeling guilty. It’s not your fault. None of it is.”

  “But—but—” I stammered nonsensical vowels and consonants. “My therapist told me to confess to you. He said this was the right thing to do.”

  The detective had a hint of a smile. “Maybe he told you to do that because he knew I’d say what I’m saying. Maybe he hoped you’d listen to me. It’s not your fault, Eliza. None of this is. You’re the victim, okay? And that’s hard, too. Because now you have to heal.”

  He extended his hand, and I realized after a moment he wanted me to take it. Once I did, he squeezed hard. I felt like he was my grandfather, comforting me after a bad dream. “Now, I read that this place serves really decent coffee,” he said. “Mind if I stop in and get a cup?”

  I’d walked him into the Barn, which was what we patients called the main facility building where all of the therapies took place and the meals were served. I felt like I was slogging through mud. I’d been so ready to accept the blame. I had visions of being handcuffed and riding away in his car. I almost felt cheated of that moment.

  I got the detective coffee. He stopped and spoke to one of the nurses, coincidentally an old neighbor from where he grew up. As he was about to leave, something struck me, and I ran after him. “Why weren’t you able to do a drug screen on Eleanor?”

  He reached for the keys in his pocket and a silver gum wrapper fell out. As he stooped to pick up the litter, he said, “She had strict orders in her living will not to perform an autopsy, no matter her cause of death. We’re used to that around LA—a lot of celebrities have unusual death directives. But we couldn’t keep her body for very long, either—the living will also stated that we had to call a man immediately, and he would dispose of it as she wished. The report says her man showed up the next morning, and that was that.”

  “Doctor Singh.”

  He squinted at the report. “Yes. A Doctor Vishal Singh signed for her body. Pretty standard procedure. Like I said, we thought it was a suicide, anyway—and honestly, it was a suicide. She wanted to die. You have to believe that. She was on the run. She was going to be arrested. So we didn’t look into it. Doctor Singh showed up, took the body, and that was that.” He shrugged. “I appreciate your honesty and candidness, but really, this conversation doesn’t need to go any further. You can let it go.”

  But I couldn’t let it go. I wanted the answer. I wanted to find Dr. Singh and figure out where he’d taken her body. I wanted to know why she hadn’t wanted an autopsy. What was she hiding?

  The problem, however, was the Oaks had very limited Internet privileges, and they wouldn’t give me a special pass to do the research. So I asked my mother to look into it. She called every Dr. Vishal Singh in Los Angeles County. There were quite a few of them. None of them claimed to know a woman named Eleanor Reitman. None of them had claimed her body.

  My mother also unearthed several boxes of things Eleanor had left behind from the Magnolia that she’d been keeping in an upstairs room, hidden from me. She brought the boxes to the hospital so I could look through them, too. Peeling off the tape, a sharp scent of bergamot oranges filled the room. I almost fainted. It was like letting a genie out of a bottle. I could see her before me, hale and hearty, wearing a fur, drinking a stinger. I could hear her croaky voice. I could feel her laugh.

  We poked through the boxes. There were negligees, bathing suits, a lot of elaborate hats, a box of expensive perfume with a name I didn’t recognize. Several mystery paperbacks, a DVD of The Third Man. At the bottom, costume jewelry, a fringed flapper dress, a bunch of Vogue magazines, and a tiny knitted baby shoe. I held it up, my eyes wide. “Was this mine?”

  My mother squinted. “Maybe?”

  A card for the concierge at the Magnolia. A card for a literary agent in San Francisco. No writings, no paperwork, certainly no will. Not even a bill for her cell phone or her health insurance, if she even had health insurance. But no card for Dr. Vishal Singh. No indication they’d been friends. It was like he didn’t exist.

  “Just let it go, Eliza,” my mother advised me. “What’s done is done.”

  I tried to. It wasn’t worth looking into, I told myself. I’d done my part, too—I’d confessed, I’d gotten it off my chest, and now at least I could tell this story as part of my interviews, as I’d had to do a few after I was released from the Oaks. Yep, I might have pushed her, I said, but the cops know and they don’t think I’m guilty. It legitimized me, sort of. I still walked around worrying I’d done something horrible, but at least I wasn’t repressing it anymore. At least I remembered most of everything. And for those things I didn’t remember, those ephemeral, wobbly moments at the guardrail . . . well, maybe that was okay that I never got those gory details back. They wouldn’t do me any good.

  Except I still felt unsettled from time to time. There were still a few loose ends, a few things I can’t make sense of. Who was it people kept seeing around town? Who filmed me in the hospital? Why, leading up to my psychotic break, did I feel followed? Maybe I was the one around town, after all—maybe my personality had split. And maybe
my paranoia was because my guilt was poking through, beginning to show itself. These are the logical answers. And yet . . .

  We work our way through the meal, though I’m too nervous to eat much. Posey steps to the podium and breathes a few times into the microphone, getting everyone’s attention. “Thank you all for coming,” she says. “It’s my great pleasure to be here at this launch party, celebrating a new novel by a young talent. As many of you know, Eliza Fontaine achieved notoriety with her last book, The Dots, and it has sold almost a million copies worldwide.”

  Everyone applauds. I duck my head, still astonished at the number. I don’t look at Amazon ranks. I don’t read reviews. The only thing I read is mail fans send to me. Rarely are those letters critical. And usually, those people actually read my book, as opposed to the multitudes who bought it only because I’d made a name for myself for falling in the pool and acting like a maniac on Dr. Roxanne. I hate that that’s how I achieved the sales I did. I hate that people think I’d done those things on purpose because people need a gimmick, these days, to sell books. I hate that it’s kind of true that you need a gimmick to sell books.

  “Now, Eliza is here to read from her new book, Pawns, which comes out next week. Once dessert is served, we’ll have her up here for an excerpt and for signing. So until then, enjoy, drink, be merry, and please buy a copy of Eliza’s book in advance if you want it signed. Thank you.”

  There’s a smattering of applause, and the music comes back on. My mother smiles at me from across the table, but I’m too jittery to smile back. Downing the rest of my water, I drop my napkin on my chair and head to the bathroom. I need cold water on my face and pulse points. The last thing I want is to faint up there on the stage. I pass a table covered with copies of Pawns and about twenty Sharpies in varying colors and styles. My stomach tumbles. This time, I have to actually promote a book, go on tour, give interviews. But I can do it, I think. I can tell the truth. Mostly because I know what the truth is.