Expose

by Danielle Girard

  Every conversation afterward had been strained, awkward. And Spencer often found his way into the conversation, her mother telling her that he might take her back if she’d stop being so stubborn. Even their phone calls over the past year had been laced with her mother’s hints that Schwartzman come home while she’d tried to convince her mother to visit her in California instead.

  Recently, her mother had brought that up less often. Not that her mother had mentioned coming to California. If her mother would listen to her—if her mother trusted her—then she would understand exactly why Schwartzman hadn’t come back to South Carolina.

  “I can’t believe next week is Thanksgiving,” her mother finally said, and Schwartzman stiffened in her chair. Again, they were going to argue about the holidays.

  “I’m afraid I’ll be working,” Schwartzman said without prompting. “Do you have plans, Mama?”

  “I’ll go to the club, I suppose. There’s usually a group of us who don’t have family plans.”

  Schwartzman’s father had loved Thanksgiving, his favorite holiday, one of the few times her father relished food. He had been a thin man, naturally lean like his daughter, and while he always complimented her mother on meals, he was rarely an enthusiastic eater.

  Except for Thanksgiving. When her mother made all of his favorites. All in one day, once a year.

  For breakfast, she served her rhubarb reduction with homemade biscuits. Lunch was shrimp cocktail with a spicy cocktail sauce before they moved right into dinner. After dressing the turkey, her mother coated its buttered skin with salt, and her father cooked it on the grill. Inside, her mother made all the sides—green beans with bacon and walnuts, fresh cranberry sauce with orange zest, and finally, her pecan–brown sugar pie.

  “Annabelle?”

  “Sorry,” she said. “I was imagining your pecan pie.”

  “I haven’t made that in forever,” Mama said, her voice breathless.

  Eight years since that last Thanksgiving with Spencer. Desperate to avoid a conversation about him, Schwartzman said, “I remember the year you made two pies and surprised Daddy with a second pie on Sunday morning. He was ecstatic. He’d carve a little slice of it every morning with his coffee. By the time it was gone, he made you promise never to do that again because he said you were making him fat.” She laughed lightly, imagining her father getting on a scale. Like he’d ever been anything other than slender.

  “Oh,” her mother said. As though surprised by something. Or troubled.

  “Mama?” Had Schwartzman upset her by mentioning her father? They so rarely talked about him. Of course, they so rarely talked about anything.

  “I’ve got to go, I’m afraid,” her mama said.

  “Is everything all right? Should I call you back?”

  “No need. I’m fine. Have a nice Thanksgiving, Annabelle.”

  Schwartzman had opened her mouth to apologize or explain, but the line was dead.

  Why had she brought up her father? They never talked about him, not even in the days following his death. An unwritten rule between them. It had taken Schwartzman a long time to understand that talking about him was too difficult for her mother. But she was desperate to talk about her father, to remember him by retelling his stories, hearing his voice in her head.

  For her mother, those same acts stirred up emotions that she’d battened down as though for a terrible storm. And she did not want to face them. Not ever again. On Schwartzman’s end, the terror came from the idea that her mother would bring up Spencer. And, in the end, what more did the mother and daughter have in common?

  Only those two men. One dead. One a killer.

  Schwartzman set her phone on the desk, screen up. The background image was a picture she’d taken on a particularly clear, warm day while hiking the Dipsea Trail in Marin. She exhaled, letting out the air she’d been holding. Guilt saturated her limbs with the next inhale.

  Her mother would be seventy in February. It wasn’t old, and she came from a long stock of women who’d lived into their eighties. By the statistics, Schwartzman wouldn’t lose her mother anytime soon.

  But she would not live forever.

  At some point, she would have to return to South Carolina. And she wanted to. She missed the smell of the air, ripe with the scents of the mimosa tree and the daphnes and gardenia in her mother’s garden, the heat that surrounded her like a heavy blanket. How could she go without those things for a decade, let alone for the rest of her life?

  How long before it would be safe to go? Before Spencer would relinquish his claim on her and simply let her be? A year had passed without a word from him. She wanted so badly to take it as a sign he was moving on.

  And yet, the core of her knew the silence was not a truce. He would be back.

  The phone rang, startling her. The lab number appeared across the screen.

  “Schwartzman,” she answered.

  “I’ve got something to show you if you’ve got a few minutes,” Roger said.

  “Yes,” she answered, perhaps a little too enthusiastically.

  “Good,” Roger said, seeming not to notice her tone. “Come on over.”

  Relieved for the distraction, Schwartzman locked up the morgue and walked toward the main building. As she went, she dictated a text to Hal about the Washington autopsy.

  The sky was cloudy, the ground wet, but the rain had left, and the relief felt like a gift. She remembered to be grateful. She was grateful.

  No matter that Spencer still loomed somewhere out there, he wasn’t here now.

  This was the safest she’d ever felt.

  That realization provided consolation.

  And it simultaneously filled her with terror.

  18

  Bitty woke with a raging headache, the sensation of blood thumping like a hammer at her temples. The clock beside the bed said 9:27. A glance at the window showed daylight between the closed shades. She held her head and pressed herself upright, reached for her phone. The screen showed six missed calls from home. She unlocked the screen and read the date. Thursday.

  She had slept through the rest of Wednesday. How was that possible?

  After leaving the conference, she had walked the streets in the rain, letting herself be soaked. All she could think was that she had failed. Aleena was gone and she hadn’t found Bengal. All this effort for nothing.

  It had been sometime after four when she returned to her hotel room, the hours lost. She’d eaten a bagel, she remembered, but couldn’t recall where she’d bought it. Back in the room, she had peeled off her wet clothes and stood under the hot water before taking two of her sleeping pills and climbing into bed.

  Now it was Thursday.

  Her phone rang on the nightstand. Tucker, of course, but the call surprised her. He rarely called twice, let alone seven times. When the text messages started to come in, she knew he was worried. And Tucker never worried.

  Instead of feeling guilty, she was frustrated.

  Didn’t he understand that she was busy?

  How many times had he ignored her calls at the office? Even when she requested he call her back as soon as possible, it sometimes took hours.

  And when she’d ask, he’d say, “I’m sorry, Bitty, I was working.”

  The way he said it, the confused expression on his face—like he’d never considered that she’d been literal when she’d asked that he call as soon as possible—eliminated the possibility of frustration. And if she were honest with herself, it was never an emergency.

  But what if it had been?

  She never asked that question. She knew the answer. Tucker would say that if it had been a genuine—a word he pronounced in a way that she hated, the -ine rhyming with wine—emergency, she would have said that in the phone message.

  That was how his logic worked. And it was true. If the house were on fire or one of the boys hurt, she’d have said that when she called. “The fire department is at the house. They’re saying it’s a total loss.” Or, “Have him mee
t me at the hospital. Dirk fell out of the big oak.”

  The phone buzzed in her pocket. Call home?

  Question mark. No exclamation mark. No emergency there.

  She thought about her boys. Would Tucker take the time to write emergency in his text? This situation had no precedent. She had always been there to parent.

  But she couldn’t respond now. She had to focus. The conference was still happening. Maybe Bengal wasn’t yesterday’s speaker, but it didn’t mean he wasn’t there.

  She shut off the phone and tucked it in the bottom of her purse, then got up and dressed herself in the same blouse, the same slacks. She hadn’t brought anything else to wear. She wet her hair in an effort to reduce the frizz and applied a little makeup, though it did little to erase the exhaustion on her face. That despite eighteen hours of sleep.

  She stopped for coffee and a sweet apple pastry, eating as she made her way back to the hotel. In the lobby, she steeled herself with a breath and turned to the conference hallway. Before she even had a chance to look for him, she spotted the imposter, talking to a group of men. He wore dark gray slacks again today with a black blazer and shirt, every bit as put together as he had been yesterday.

  She took a seat on a nearby sofa and pretended to read her phone, though it was shut off. From the corner of her eye, she watched him. Those big gestures, the small hands. How had she mistaken him for Bengal? Even for a second.

  Where was Bengal?

  He was supposed to be the conference’s keynote speaker. The website had said so. Something must have changed. Something had kept him away.

  She had the fleeting thought that he might be dead, but that was impossible. If he were dead, she would know. She would sense it.

  But this man—she’d never caught his name—was her link to Bengal.

  She needed the opportunity to speak to him in private. She would make him talk. She would find Bengal, one way or another.

  And she could wait. She’d come this far.

  It took three hours before her chance came. Three hours, wishing she’d kept the sword. She’d balled up the burqa and stuffed it in the bottom of her purse, but for what reason? She could hardly wear the bloodied thing around. Bulky and awkward in her bag, it took up space that should have been occupied by a weapon.

  Instead, she’d had to scan the surroundings for things she might use. Each time he ducked into a meeting, she had gone hunting, never leaving for more than eight or ten minutes. There was so little of use in the small gift shop. And her fellow attendees yielded next to nothing. She slipped a woman’s scarf into her bag and stole a pair of sunglasses left momentarily on a table. Borrowed a pen from the woman at the registration desk. “I can’t believe I’ve already lost two of them,” she said when the woman hesitated to give up one of hers.

  On a visit to the hotel’s little shop, she bought dental floss and breath spray. Holding the two items in her hand, she tried to decide if they were worth the eight dollars they would cost her. She imagined distracting him by spraying peppermint in his face, then using the floss to strangle him or tie him up. She’d be like some farm-girl MacGyver.

  But the real luck had come when Bengal’s imposter sat down with two other men for lunch. By then she was starving. She followed the hostess through the restaurant and stopped at a table right past theirs, waiting until the hostess noticed Bitty had stopped walking. After an awkward silence, the hostess sat her there.

  Only when she was seated, when she was holding the glass of ice water between two sweaty palms, did she realize that she was no longer herself.

  You killed a man you’d never met.

  An innocent man.

  Was he, though? Innocent?

  Did it matter? If he’d committed some crime—something that had nothing to do with her—did that make her own crime less wrong? That she’d done society some good?

  And why would she think that? Because he was black?

  Black and young, the demographic always on the news. The boys who always got shot by white police officers.

  Of course not, she told herself.

  She was not racist. There were black folks in Perry.

  Not many, of course. But that wasn’t her doing. She knew only a few. But that wasn’t her doing either. They went to a different church, lived in a different part of town.

  It was the way things were.

  Would knowing black people have changed the outcome of that night in the theater? She’d been so frantic, so shaky. If she’d been black, would he have let her in? Would she have hesitated to use the blade to wedge open the door?

  It was an accident.

  The blade had been so sharp. He’d been standing on the other side. She couldn’t see him. She didn’t know.

  She’d just needed a place to hide, somewhere to rest. And he wouldn’t let her in.

  But that wasn’t her. She didn’t recognize herself in that woman who had struggled to get the door open, who’d fought against him. A drug had been in the air or . . .

  Something.

  Some foreign power had hold of her.

  She would never have been so bold. She would never have even insisted on a table in a restaurant. Never shut off her phone so Tucker couldn’t reach her.

  She was not Bitty. That’s all it was. For these few days, she was not herself.

  She had to find him. Confront him. Hurt him.

  Then it would be done.

  She would go home.

  And everything would be fine.

  When the waiter returned, she was calmer. She ordered a cheeseburger and french fries, a soda. She had missed Wednesday night at home. Burgers. They always had burgers. And she usually made home fries, too. The boys loved her home fries.

  The burger came out, and she dug in almost before the waiter had taken his hand off the plate. But the best gift came a few minutes later, when the waiter circled back and placed a steak knife on the table.

  She had everything she needed, a weapon that wouldn’t alarm anyone.

  She slid the knife into her purse, and the knowledge that she had all the pieces—that she could prevail—made her ravenous.

  She ate hungrily, quickly, the way she always complained the boys and Tucker did.

  Like animals.

  But that’s what she was.

  For herself, for her roommate, today she was an animal.

  And her prey wasn’t food. He was territory. She would level the field.

  She was still eating when she overheard the imposter at the next table. “I’m going to head up to my room and work for a couple of hours, then get a sweat in.”

  She looked at the food that remained on her plate. Half a burger, a third of the fries, food she would have gladly finished. She couldn’t remember being so hungry.

  “What time should we meet?” he asked.

  She listened intently for the answer and checked her watch.

  He would be in his room for two hours. She had time to finish eating and then go. No. She had to go. He would lead her to Bengal.

  What if he couldn’t? What if it was a dead end?

  No. He had to know something.

  Laying her napkin over the rest of her food, Bitty pulled a crumpled twenty-dollar bill from her wallet before realizing that it probably wasn’t enough. She didn’t have any smaller bills.

  The imposter rose.

  Panicked, she left another twenty as he walked out of the restaurant.

  “How is everything?” the waiter asked. “Can I get you anything else?”

  “I’m afraid I have to go,” she said, the last bits of chewed meat tucked in the pocket of her cheeks.

  He held up the twenties. “Do you need some change?”

  How she wanted the change. Was the bill more than twenty? But she’d read the menu. The burger was at least nineteen dollars. And there would be tax and gratuity, although he’d done nothing more than set down a plate.

  She stole a glance at the imposter, walking across the lobby in those long stride
s, his phone pressed to his ear. He would reach the elevators in seconds.

  There wasn’t time.

  “No. Thank you.” She rose quickly, catching the table linen in her hand and pulling it as she got to her feet. The plate slid toward her and her water glass tipped over, pouring the contents down the side of the table.

  “Oh my,” the waiter said.

  Bitty’s heart rose into her throat and pummeled the back of her mouth. She didn’t try to talk. She couldn’t make words. It was time. This was happening.

  Head down, she tucked her purse under her arm gently, feeling the knife through the thin, cheap fabric. Scurrying out of the restaurant, she felt eyes on her. She hunched her shoulders and tried to make herself small, invisible.

  And she was. Even if they saw her, they couldn’t imagine who she really was.

  A tremor rose in her fingers as she gripped the purse straps and ran. The imposter had rounded the corner, and she no longer had a view of him. Her shoes slapped the fancy tile floor, the backs biting into her heels.

  She ran faster.

  Louder.

  As she came around the corner, the elevator doors were open. A hand held the door.

  She halted on the threshold. The imposter’s head poked out of the elevator. “You coming?”

  “Yes.” The word came out cracked and broken.

  He barely saw her.

  She stepped inside. “Thank you.”

  The inside panel displayed dozens of numbers. Only one—twelve—was lit.

  “Which floor?”

  “Twelve,” she said, pretending to peer into her purse.

  The wooden knife handle was the first thing she saw.

  She leaned into the elevator wall, trying to catch her breath. She would follow him out of the elevator, down the hall. And then what?

  But before she had thought it through, the elevator stopped with a little bounce. She caught her breath as the cheeseburger shifted in her gut.