by Nick Lake
I stood there for twenty minutes, hoping. The hipsters and the kids went in. A couple of old people I figured were just looking for an air-conditioned place to spend the hottest part of the day. The sun was high in the sky and sweat was trickling down the back of my neck, pooling in the small of my back.
I looked at my watch: 1:10.
No Paris.
In my mind’s eye, terrible scenarios played out. A john slitting her throat, letting her bleed out. Then dumping her body at sea. Someone cutting her up in a shed. Submerging her in an acid bath. I couldn’t see the man’s face in my imaginings. But it was always a man.
I felt like the sky was gone from above me. I felt like everything beautiful in the world had been stabbed to death and thrown in the ocean, weighed down with concrete blocks or whatever it might be.
At one thirty I left the theater and walked to Paris’s condo. It wasn’t that close; it took me a while. And the whole time I was seeing these awful images. Seeing her screaming for help as a knife entered her stomach. That kind of thing.
“Just what she deserves,” said the voice. “******* whore.”
“Oh shut up,” I said.
Amazingly, the voice did shut up.
I turned the corner onto Paris’s street and what I saw there made my heart clench like an oyster closing. A cop car, pulled up at an angle to the curb, like it had been parked quickly, carelessly. I started running, then. I entered the building and took the stairs, not wanting to wait for the elevator.
I got to the front door out of breath. Julie opened it before I even knocked; she must have heard my footsteps in the hall. She was wearing a pink sweater and a short skirt, polka-dotted, a headband in her hair—like she was going to a dance in 1959. But she had been crying; her eyes were red rimmed.
“Cass,” she said, and her voice was a hand desperately reaching for the side of a boat, to pull itself out of dark sucking water.
“Julie, what—”
But she launched herself forward and put her arms around me. I hugged her tight. “Julie, is she … is she …”
“We don’t know.”
She pulled back, straightened her hair. I looked past her and saw the young agent from after I found the foot.
“Horowitz,” I said.
“Cassandra. You knew Ms. French?”
My mind was blank for a second. “Oh. Paris. Yes. I knew her.”
Wait.
“You said knew.”
Horowitz looked down. “Slip of the tongue. Agent’s habit. At the moment she’s just missing.”
“What happened?” I asked.
It was Julie who answered. “She had a … a bachelor party last night. Or maybe it was a birthday party, I can’t remember. I drove her. I always drive her, if she goes out to an … engagement. For safety, you know?” She started crying; wiped her eyes brusquely with the sleeve of her sweater. “When she started … I didn’t want her to get into it. But she was Paris, you know? She always got her way. In the end, I said she could only do it if I drove her to every … appointment. I said it was the minimum safety requirement. But I … I …”
She broke down in tears.
“Go on,” said Agent Horowitz gently, after a pause. “You drove her?”
“Yeah. It was a house up by the shore. On the north side of town, in Bayview, before you get to the Cape—an okay area, not a great one. A row of clapboards. There’s an old rotten pier behind? Just a small one. I parked and she went in. Then … then I think I must have fallen asleep. But not for long. I woke up because I heard an engine—a car turned in front of me, onto the road, swept me with its headlights. Then a few minutes after that Paris called me. She was … she sounded …”
I took her hand and squeezed. “Go on.”
“She sounded terrified, Cass. Scared for her life, you know? But it was hard to hear what she was saying—the line was really bad. Like, a kind of shhhhhh sound like the ocean, you know? She screamed for help, told me to come quick. I said I was calling the police. And then that was the weird part.”
“Weird part?”
But Julie had her eyes closed and was choking up. She shook her head and walked quickly to the kitchen, to get some tissues, I guessed.
I looked over at Horowitz.
“Evidently Ms. French told her roommate not to call the police. Was very insistent about it. She—”
“She said it over and over,” said Julie, appearing at the kitchen door. “ ‘No, Julie! Not the cops! Don’t call them!’ And then the line suddenly went quiet. Then there was this heavy metal sound and then a thunk and then the line went dead.” Her impression of Paris was eerie; it was like Paris was in the room. But of course she wasn’t.
I shivered.
“Why do you think she said not to call the police?” said Agent Horowitz.
“I don’t know! Because … because of what she was doing?”
Agent Horowitz spread his hands. “Possible,” he said. “But stripping? I mean, it’s not exactly illegal.” His face looked like it had acquired a couple of new lines since I’d first met him. Around his eyes, his mouth. Stress?
“No, but she didn’t want her dad to find out,” said Julie.
I wondered if that was true. Her Instagram was pretty public. But anyway it didn’t seem logical to me.
“What,” I said, “she’s afraid for her life and at the same time she’s worried her dad’s going to find out she’s stripping?” I said. “Really?”
“I admit it seems implausible,” said Horowitz.
“So then why would she say not to call the cops?”
“I have no idea. That is what we are going to have to try to establish.”
“But you think she’s gone,” I said. “You think it’s the Houdini Killer. Of course you do—you’re FBI or whatever you are.”
Julie was looking from me to him, from him to me, like a metronome. “You’re not police?”
“Not precisely,” said Horowitz.
“Oh Jesus,” said Julie. “She’s dead, isn’t she? She’s dead, and I didn’t do anything to stop it.”
A weird echo in my mind. The voice: I’m dead, and you didn’t do anything to stop it. I put a hand out to steady myself, caught hold of the sideboard in the hall.
“Cassandra?” said Horowitz. “You okay?”
“No one is okay!” said Julie. “I went into the house,” she continued; a total non sequitur, her mind jumping all over the place, to stop landing on the image of a dead Paris, I guessed. “The door was open. I ran in. The place was empty. Repossessed or something, you know? Bare walls. People had written things on the surfaces. ‘**** the bankers.’ ‘Foreclose my ass.’ Stuff like that. It stank of piss and there were empty bottles everywhere, condom wrappers. But no Paris. No Paris! And I watched her go in there, like half an hour before.”
Horowitz had taken out a notebook from his pocket. “Did you hear anything? Car engines, anything like that?”
“I don’t know!”
“Did the place have a garage? A lot of those properties, they have a garage that can be accessed from the kitchen. At the side of the house.”
Julie thought for a moment. “Yeah. Yeah, I think so.”
“Is it possible someone had a car in there? That they left when you came in the door?”
Silence.
Then:
“Yeah. Yeah, it’s possible. I mean, I was shouting. Calling for Paris, you know? I wasn’t really listening. I was looking. For her. Oh *****. Oh Jesus. You think I missed something because of that? You think I—”
“I think you were looking for your friend, to try to help her,” said Horowitz softly.
Julie sat down abruptly on one of the living room chairs. Her movements, her speech, were abrupt—like someone had cut up footage of her, taken out the slow transitions, so that she jumped around the room.
“So after that, that was when you called the police?” said Horowitz.
Julie sighed. “Yeah. I mean, Paris had said not to. But I was
freaked. The house being empty, you know? It was like a horror movie. So I dialed 911, and this cop car turned up like one minute later. It must have been close by, I guess.”
“This was …” He consulted his notebook. “Officer O’Grady.”
A shrug. “Maybe. He said his name was Brian. He came with his lights flashing, the siren, everything, you know? He was going fast and he braked hard; the tires squealed. It was ****** up. It was like a movie, and I couldn’t turn it off. And you know the stupidest thing? You know how much of an ******* I am?”
“What?” said Horowitz. His tone pretty gentle.
“I had this song going around and around in my head! You know, the old hip-hop song? “Woop, woop, it’s the sound of da police … woop, woop, it’s the sound of da police.” Someone was probably slitting my friend’s throat at that very moment, and I was sitting in my car like a moron, watching this cop turn up and with a random ******* hip-hop song stuck on repeat in my head.” She hung her head and sobbed.
“It’s not your fault,” I said. I knew all about unwanted sounds in the head.
“The mind responds to stress in unusual ways,” said Horowitz. “I’ve seen people laughing uncontrollably when they find out their kid is dead.”
“Mm,” said Julie, noncommittal.
“And what happened after the cop, I mean Officer O’Grady, turned up?”
“He spoke to me for a while and then ran into the house. He didn’t come out again, and after I’d sat there for like half an hour I figured he wasn’t coming out, so I drove home. Which is why you came here, right?”
“Right,” said Horowitz. “Like you, Officer O’Grady—Brian—found no one in the house and nothing suspicious. But we have a tech team over there now. If there are traces … if there’s anything there, they’ll find it.”
“Oh God,” said Julie.
I went and put my arm around her shoulder. She shook under my touch. “She didn’t even get to finish her cranes,” Julie said.
“What?” said Horowitz.
Julie was crying too much to explain; I filled him in about the thousand cranes.
“Oh, right,” he said, like it didn’t matter, when of course it did. I mean, it may not have been important for finding Paris. But it mattered to Paris.
She never got her wish.
“I think we need to take you in,” said Horowitz to Julie. “Get a proper witness statement. Cassandra, I can give you a lift home if you like.”
“Am I a suspect?” said Julie.
“No,” said Horowitz. “And a suspect in what? At the moment we have a girl who has gone missing. Admittedly a sex worker in a town where sex workers have been disappearing, which fits a pattern. But for all we know she’s run off to her parents in New York.”
“She hates her parents,” I said. I was thinking: sex worker. Hearing it like that, flat, neutral, was like a hammer blow.
“People have been known to go back to parents they hate. But for now I need to do this by the book, and that means bringing you in for a formal witness statement, Julie.”
Julie closed her eyes. “Fine.”
But it wasn’t fine. Nothing was fine; not anymore.
Horowitz dropped me outside the house, but I didn’t go in. I couldn’t go in. Dad was at work anyway, so what was I going to do? Who was I going to talk to?
I waved to Julie as the car pulled away. She didn’t wave back.
I took out my cell, went to call you, but then I remembered that I didn’t have your number; I’d never asked for it.
Right then I wished I had.
“It’s your fault,” said the voice. I was standing on the sidewalk. Heat was rising from the ground in shimmers, in waves. I was blinking sweat and tears. A gull wheeled above me, crying its ugly cry, accusing me.
Cass, Cass, Cass. “You killed her,” said the voice. “You were listening to your white noise and she called. She needed you. But you didn’t answer.”
“She called Julie,” I said. “She called Julie too, and Julie was closer. But Paris told her not to call the cops. She couldn’t do anything.”
“She did more than you did. She went into the house.”
“What could I have done?”
“You could have answered your cell. Instead of being so selfish. Instead of fighting with me.”
“You said you were going to kill my dad! You told me to cut off my toe or you would murder him.”
Silence.
“It’s not my fault!” I shouted. “It’s you! With your threats, with your cursing, with your making me block you out, with your endless—”
“You could have just cut off your toe,” said the voice, sullenly.
“No, I couldn’t.”
Silence.
“If we had not been fighting, we would have heard the phone,” said the voice.
I stood there very still for a moment. I had never heard the voice sound sad before. I had never heard it use the word “we.”
“Excuse me?”
“It’s us,” said the voice. “It’s our fault. Both of us. But …” And now the voice’s tone went sly again. “But we’re the same person, aren’t we? I am you. That’s what Dr. Lewis says, isn’t it? I’m just the angry part of you. So it comes down to the same thing.”
I felt sick. It was my fault. It was all my fault.
Like an automaton, I walked down the sidewalk, not watching where I was going. It was only when the hardness under my feet was replaced by soft sand that I realized I was at the beach.
I walked toward the ocean, drawn to it, an iron filing toward a magnet. It was high tide; the water was almost up to the piers. You wouldn’t have been able to drive your truck around them. I could smell that indescribable smell of seaweed and salt and the deep.
I thought of Venus, stepping out of the sea. My feet were in the foam now, the wet sand sucking at my Converses. I took another step forward. Cold water pulled at my calves, made my jeans heavy; icy fingers. No matter how hot it gets in New Jersey the ocean always feels freezing to me. The Atlantic. It’s too vast, too empty, to ever warm up.
I knew how it felt.
My feet moved forward of their own accord until I was waist deep. There were other people on the beach—I mean, it was daytime—but they were a long way away, closer to the piers.
Then, suddenly, I felt hands on my shoulders. I gasped and turned around, and there you were.
“What are you doing, Cass?” you asked.
“I don’t know.”
“Come in. Come in and talk to me.”
You took my hand and pretty much dragged me back up onto the sand. You sat me down, then went to your truck and got a towel, put it over my legs.
“How can you drive around the piers?” I said.
“Huh?”
“High tide.” I indicated the water.
“Oh. I don’t need to. Just delivering to Pier One.” You pointed to the truck. I couldn’t see any bags of toys in it. “Dippin’ Dots. I do plush and Dippin’ Dots ice cream. I have no idea why. The hot dogs and stuff, they come from somewhere else. My warehouse is just stuffed animals and Dippin’ Dots.”
“Weird,” I said.
“Yeah. So what were you doing walking into the ocean with all your clothes on?”
I looked at you. You were so there, so present. I can’t describe it. You were just with me, looking at me, looking at me like I was real, and mattered. Interested in me. You and Paris, you were the first people ever to be interested in me. Even my dad wasn’t, not really.
Especially since I killed his wife.
You were looking at me curiously, like you really genuinely wanted to know what was going on with me, like you cared. Did you care? Do you remember? I think you did. I think you care about everything. I think that’s what makes you be you. If you came across a sea anemone that was out of the water and unable to breathe, you would throw it back in; you would save it. I don’t know why I’m talking about sea anemones. It’s stupid.
“You know my fr
iend Paris?” I said.
“The weird one?”
“Yeah. She …”
“Cass, you’re crying. What’s wrong?”
So I told you. I told you everything.
“She was a prostitute, then?” you said, when I had finished.
“No. She was a stripper. And, what did she call it? A cam girl.”
“Huh,” you said. “I wouldn’t have guessed. She seemed so …”
“Smart? Cool? Smart girls can be sexual, you know. It’s her body, she can do what she wants with it.” I sounded defensive; shrill. I didn’t know what I was saying or why.
“I know that,” you said. “I didn’t mean to … Oh, I don’t know. I’m just surprised, that’s all. I’m sorry.”
I looked at you for a moment, then sighed. “Julie told her it was dangerous. I should have too. But I guess I was, I don’t know, I guess I thought it was glamorous, you know? I got why it was a thrill for her.”
You nodded. “I see that. But, look, you are not to blame for this.”
“No,” I said, unconvinced.
“So I guess there’s one big question,” you said.
“Which is?”
“Which is what are we going to do about it?”
“What are we …”
“Yeah. What are we going to do? To find her?”
“I don’t …”
“We have to try, right? We have to try to find her.”
I thought back to all my research in the library. My theory that my voice was one of the dead women. And now it was like the circle had turned all the way around again, and again the Houdini Killer was in the middle of it.
“You hardly know her,” I said.
“So?” you said. “She’s in trouble. We have to help her.”
“Why, because you like her?”
You stared at me. “What?”
“I saw you, the way you boosted her over the fence. I … it’s fine. I don’t know why I’m even mentioning it. Sorry … I’m … I’m not used to speaking to people, I’m not …”
“Cassie,” you said gently.
I looked up.
“Yes?”
“Is this why you were weird in the pickup?”
