by Lisa Unger
“Lana,” she said. Her face was flushed with cold, and she looked pretty in her red wool hat. “I tried to call but got a strange busy signal. I closed up early because I was worried that you’d be on your bike. I wanted to drive you back to the dorm before the storm gets too bad.”
Luke wore an expression of unmasked annoyance. She’d broken the spell he was weaving and he was pissed about it.
“Oh,” I said. “Thanks.”
Luke helped me get my bike into their garage (Rachel had too much stuff in her trunk to fit it in the car), neither one of us looking at the other. Like a little man, he took the bike from me and rolled it down the path and up the driveway. As he leaned it against the wall, I noticed a kid’s dirt bike stood on a kickstand just over to the left. The wheels were caked with mud. I wondered when he had time to ride it. There wasn’t another adult bike in the garage, and I couldn’t see Rachel letting Luke ride around by himself.
“Do you still want to play the game?” he asked.
I was already puzzling over that odd poem, tumbling its words around in my brain. Of course I wanted to play, more than any adult reasonably should. In fact, thinking about the poem was the first moment that I wasn’t thinking about everything else. Here was a puzzle I could reasonably solve. Not like my life, which seemed like an endless series of questions with no answers. But I didn’t want him to see how creepy and bizarre I thought it was, how anxious I was to figure it out. Somehow I thought if I did, Luke would have the upper hand. And I couldn’t let him get that.
“Definitely,” I said. “Yeah, I’m looking forward to it. I mean, I’ve got some stuff going on. But I’ll think about it.”
I turned away from the dark look he gave me. He expected more from me. I had disappointed him. Inside I smiled.
We all hopped into the Range Rover, Luke in the backseat, me up front with Rachel. There was a very faint scent of cigarette smoke, covered by some kind of artificial cherry smell. I could see her as a secret smoker. It was something she tried to give up over and over, I guessed. But she just couldn’t kick it. She hid it from everyone, sneaking smokes on the deck after Luke was asleep, or as she drove home with all the windows open. Her breath always smelled like peppermint, candy she was probably sucking on to hide the smell. She didn’t smoke enough that it permeated the fabric of her clothes.
“You two are awfully quiet,” she said after a few minutes. Her tone was light and playful. The windshield wipers were scraping against the glass, the icy bits of snow crunching softly. “Are you up to something?”
“Lana’s upset,” Luke chimed from the backseat.
“Oh?” said Rachel.
“Her friend is missing.”
“Oh!” she said, giving me a sideways glance of concern. “Is that true?”
“Why do you always think I’m a fucking liar?” said Luke, his tone slicing and bitter.
“Watch your tongue,” she said, just as sharply.
“Watch your tongue,” he mimicked nastily. “A physical impossibility, by the way.”
He was mad that we’d been interrupted, that she’d come home early and ruined his game. I just knew it; I don’t even know how. An awkward silence swelled, and I could hear him tapping on something in the backseat.
“She didn’t come home from the library last night,” I said, addressing Rachel. I was eager to move on from the uncomfortable vibe in the car. I could see how things might quickly heat up between them and I didn’t need that. “But that’s happened before.”
“I hope she’s okay,” said Rachel. “Wasn’t there an incident a couple of years back?”
“Yes,” I said. “There was. Another friend of mine fell down some stairs and she was missing for a few days before—” Rachel glanced at me and I clamped my mouth shut. It wasn’t really appropriate to be talking about this in front of Luke. I certainly wouldn’t have brought it up if they hadn’t.
“Before what?” said Luke. He was straining forward in his seat.
“Before they found her.”
“She was dead, wasn’t she?” In the light of the passing streetlamps, he seemed like he was grinning. But when I turned to look at him, he was pale and grim-faced. I didn’t answer him.
“I’m sorry,” said Rachel. She shook her head sadly. “That’s awful.”
“It’s a statistical anomaly, isn’t it?” said Luke. “To have two friends go missing like that. Especially at your age?”
“Luke,” said Rachel. “What a thing to say.”
“I really don’t know,” I said stiffly.
He made some kind of noise in the backseat; it sounded like a derisive snort of laughter. But when I turned to look at him, he just stared ahead blankly. He was a super weird kid.
I was relieved to see the dorm ahead of us. But my relief only lasted for a minute. There were also two squad cars, and an SUV with Pennsylvania plates, which was where Beck was from.
“Oh, dear,” said Rachel.
“Thanks for the ride,” I said.
But I could barely hear over the sound of blood rushing in my ears, the pulse throbbing in my neck. I tried to remember what the doctor said, not to get catastrophic in my thinking. But I was water going down the drain, twirling, getting sucked into the void.
“See you tomorrow!” Luke was yelling from the rolled-down window of the backseat as they pulled away. “Don’t forget about our game!”
I turned to look at him, lifted my hand in an absentminded wave, and headed inside.
9
Detective Ferrigno and I were sitting at the bistro table in the tiny suite kitchen. Ainsley, and Beck’s parents, Lynne and Frank, were outside in the living room, each of them on a cell phone, calling literally everyone Beck knew.
There was an aura of urgency, certainly. But it hadn’t yet descended into the terror of a missing girl, mainly because Beck had run away three times before.
As a teenager, she’d left home at sixteen because she wanted to go to Cuba to experience the burgeoning art scene. With the help of her ex-stepfather, she’d purchased a ticket to Toronto, then took a flight from there to Havana, where she was apprehended in the airport and returned to her parents. (Her ex-stepfather realized he’d screwed up and came clean pretty quickly.)
I am the product of my parents’ misery, she claimed often. Her parents had divorced when she was eleven, each married other people and then got divorced from those people to marry each other again when Beck was fifteen. Now her parents were about to divorce for the second time. They were the kind of people who thought that they could call their toxic, shitty relationship “tempestuous” and make it cool. They often framed their vicious, violent fights and passionate makeups as “romantic.” I don’t even know what a real marriage looks like, Beck said to me once. Do you know how much pain they’ve caused each other, and every other person unlucky enough to get involved with them? They make me sick. I could relate. She knew I could, because I’d told her some about my parents, even though she didn’t know everything. Our shared horror of our parents’ terrible marriages was what initially bonded us.
She’d disappeared briefly during the summer between freshman and sophomore year because she didn’t want to live with her parents again. She hitchhiked across the country, dropping e-mails along the way—just to let everyone know she wasn’t dead. She ran out of money in Albuquerque, and asked me to wire her seven hundred dollars for a ticket back home, which I did. She paid me back (even though I told her she didn’t have to) in increments of twenty and fifty dollars whenever she had extra cash. I loved her for that, that she was crazy and irresponsible, but totally ethical. It was a rare quality in a person.
“So the librarian said you two were arguing,” said Detective Ferrigno.
“I guess,” I said. “Nothing serious.”
“Serious enough for you to storm out.”
“I didn’t storm out,” I said. “I wasn’t feeling well, so I was impatient with her. I didn’t want to talk about what she wanted to talk about.�
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“Which was?” He didn’t have his notebook. He was doing the we’re-cool-just-hanging-out thing. But he’d obviously been walking around campus asking a bunch of questions.
“First, she was giving me a hard time about my new job,” I said. “I’m babysitting for a difficult kid. She thought it was a stupid thing to do.”
If you want to babysit for the bad seed, go for it. I wondered what she would say about Luke’s poem. She would probably be really fascinated, would really dig the whole scavenger hunt thing. I couldn’t wait to tell her about it. Then I remembered and my heart sank. We wouldn’t be sharing things like that anymore. I was on my own.
“And what else?”
“I’m sorry?” I said.
“You said ‘first,’ as though there was more than one topic you hadn’t wanted to discuss.”
“Oh,” I said. I picked at a string on my sleeve to communicate my nonchalance on the topic. “She thinks I have a crush on my student adviser, and she likes to give me shit about it. I just wasn’t in the mood.”
I heard Lynne’s voice in the other room, an easy conversational pitch that ebbed and flowed. Who was she talking to? I wondered. What would she learn about Beck from the cast of characters in her phone book? Some of it might not be pretty.
“Do you have a crush on him?” the detective asked. There was a smile in his voice, a friendly tease.
I realized I’d hiked my shoulders up high, and I consciously pushed them down. “No,” I said. “I don’t. He’s a lot older than me. He’s also my professor.”
He shifted in his seat and it groaned under his weight. It was cheap furniture from IKEA, the kind that you put together with one of those torturous little metal L-shaped tools. Did those things have a name?
“It’s not like it doesn’t happen,” he said. He gave me an understanding smile. “You’re both consenting adults.”
“It’s inappropriate and unethical.” Was I really such a prude? Beck was always accusing me of being too stiff, too uptight. Loosen up, my friend. Let go.
“Who is it?”
“Professor Langdon Hewes,” I said. He nodded as though the name meant something to him. He got internal for a second, maybe searching his memory for a connection. Of course, he’d be looking for connections now that two girls had gone missing in two years. Elizabeth’s death was ruled an accident, but no one had ever felt good about it. There were too many unanswered questions. Her parents had been back to town twice, trying to get the case reopened. So far, that hadn’t happened.
“Why didn’t you tell me before that you two had argued?” he asked.
“I don’t know,” I said. I blew out a breath, brought a hand to my forehead. There were a couple of ways I could play it. Finally, I said: “It didn’t seem important.”
He cracked some tension out of his neck and leaned toward me.
“But being mad at you would be a decent reason for her not to come back to the room.” He sounded cool and reasonable, like he was looking for a reason that Beck would be fucking with us.
“I guess,” I said. “Honestly, it just wasn’t that heated, you know.” It hadn’t been, really. Not for us.
The third time she disappeared was after our encounter at the frat party, our kiss. She didn’t come back to the room for three days after we slept off our hangovers. She’d met a guy in town a few days before the party, and she’d been yammering on about him in that kind of goading way she had—as though she was trying to elicit some response from me. He was a construction worker or something, but he was into raves. He’s as dumb as a thumbtack, she said. But even thumbtacks have their application.
She made a point of saying she was meeting him for coffee the day after, then spent the next three days at his place—blowing off classes, not returning calls. Her parents had come down that time, too. When she wasn’t getting enough attention, she still regaled me with tales of her sexual exploits that week; he was the best she’d ever had, she claimed. Which—coming from a nineteen-year-old—sounded pretty silly.
I suppose she was trying to make me jealous, imagining her with someone else. She was a child, always looking for attention and drama to keep herself entertained. And she never heard from that guy again.
“Someone said you were in tears.” The detective held me in his gaze; I could tell he wasn’t sure whether I was being honest or not.
“I wasn’t,” I said with a little laugh. “Really.”
“So after the library, where did you go?”
“I came back here,” I said.
“You left the library at around eight, according to witnesses,” said the detective. “And you came here around nine-thirty? But the library is only a ten-minute walk at most.”
I didn’t say anything right away. I remember this from my father: Don’t say too much. Talk as little as possible.
Finally, “I just walked around a bit.”
“But you weren’t feeling well.”
“I thought some air might do me good.”
“Witnesses say that she left a few minutes after you did.”
Witnesses say, witnesses say, witnesses say. If I had a dime for every time I’d heard that phrase. People, it seemed, were always watching, taking measure, issuing judgments. They couldn’t wait to start running their mouths off. But did you know that eyewitness testimony is often totally unreliable? The human memory only records events through the filter of its own frame of reference. We try to fit the information we receive into schemas, units of knowledge that we possess about the world that correspond with frequently encountered situations, individuals, ideas, and situations. In other words, we often see things as we expect to see them, or want to see them, and not always as they are.
When I didn’t say anything: “So you didn’t see Rebecca again that night?”
“No,” I said. “I didn’t. I walked around, maybe longer than I thought. And then I came back to my room.”
“It seems like she might have caught up with you on the path.”
“But she didn’t,” I said. Don’t get defensive. Don’t let them rattle you.
“Okay,” he said. He gave a quick nod, as though everything had been settled. He made to stand up, then seemed to change his mind.
“If you don’t mind my asking,” he said. “What is your relationship to Rebecca? Or—you call her Beck, right?”
“We’re friends, roommates. Good friends,” I said.
“More than that?” He’d lowered his voice to a whisper.
I started to quiver inside, a kind of shocked and angry shaking that started in my core and radiated out. It took my voice away. I looked toward the other room. Had anyone heard him?
“No,” I breathed. I wanted to scream at him. Who said that? Who would say something like that? Ainsley?
He could see that he’d upset me, held up both his palms in a gesture of surrender. “Okay,” he said. “I’m sorry. I have to ask all of these questions, Miss Granger. It’s my job to look at all the angles.”
I didn’t say anything else, just looked down at the table between us. He slid his card under my gaze. “Call if you think of anything you want to discuss, no matter how small.”
“Okay,” I managed. When I looked up at him, I wore a polite smile. “I will.”
He stood, and I felt a wave of relief that the conversation was over.
Then he stopped. “I was going through the files of the case a couple of years back—Elizabeth Barnett?”
“She fell down the stairs,” I said. “It was an accident.”
“Right,” he said. “It was ruled an accident. There was no evidence of foul play and she had been drinking heavily.”
I nodded, felt myself choke up a little at the memory of those horrible days, the searching, the waiting. Why did this keep happening?
“You were with Elizabeth the night she disappeared, weren’t you? You and Rebecca?”
“We were at a party together,” I said. What was he implying? “There were lots of people the
re. Half the school.”
“But the three of you went to the party together, isn’t that right?”
“Yes,” I said. “We did.”
We’d all gone together, but Elizabeth had been meeting her boyfriend there. It had taken us a long time to get ready. We’d been drinking before we left, trying on different outfits. They’d been giving me a hard time because I went into the bathroom to change, didn’t want to parade around in my underwear like they did. But it was good-natured enough. We were mainly focused on Elizabeth, how she thought it was going to be her first time with Gregg. She’d shopped for the occasion, and showed us her black-and-pink lace panties and matching bra. Her body was perfect; it looked like molded plastic. I found myself staring at the swell of her hips, her lush and pretty breasts, the lovely hollow of her belly button.
“God, who looks like that?” said Beck. “You’re perfect.”
Elizabeth just giggled and pulled on her clothes. “Yeah, right.”
She wasn’t a girl who knew her own beauty. And she was more beautiful for it. The three of us left together, giddy and happy, and ready for a good time. But when we walked through the door together, Gregg was waiting, looking smitten. I still remember how he enfolded her, and how she looked at him with a wide smile and glistening eyes. Love, a promise delivered already broken. Who said that?
But the rest of the night is a bit of a haze. We drank too much, all of us. But maybe especially me. When I drank, I found such a delightful state of blissful numbness, something about the way it mingled with the meds I was on. Naturally, I wasn’t supposed to drink. But I did anyway. When I wake up after those nights, all I can remember usually is some blend of music, voices, light, a weird collage of my encounters. The same is true of that night. I sometimes dream of Elizabeth crying, but I don’t know if that happened or not. I dream of being angry with her, but I don’t know why.
