Distemper

by Beth Saulnier

  “What do you think happened to it?”

  “Urn, I’m not sure. I guess it could just be lost in the shuffle.”

  “Or else…?”

  “The thing is, we’d had this sort of break-in a couple of months before. Nothing was missing though, so we figured it was just a prank or maybe a fraternity pledge. But I was thinking maybe somebody took some files without messing things up, so nobody noticed right away.”

  “Have you noticed any other applications missing?”

  “Just hers. And I wouldn’t have even thought too much about it if I hadn’t seen that drawing in the paper again this week. I thought, how much of a coincidence is that—that she wouldn’t answer her acceptance letter, and then her file would go missing, and then I’d see this drawing in the paper that looked so much like her…”

  “How come you haven’t gone to the police about this?”

  She hesitated again. “Well, that’s the thing. I… you see, I kind of did something stupid a while back—nothing much, really—just some bad checks I wrote out of state back when I was married. I mean, I use my maiden name now, but I was afraid if I talked to the cops, they’d find out. There’s sort of a warrant…”

  “And you want to keep a low profile.”

  “Urn, right.”

  “Why didn’t you just send them an anonymous letter?”

  “Oh. I guess I didn’t really think of that. I mean, couldn’t they trace it somehow? Like the DNA or something?”

  The woman obviously had an elevated opinion of the technical abilities of both Gabriel’s journalists and its cops. I was about to let her off the phone when I realized I’d forgotten to ask the single most important question. “Wait a second. What was the girl’s name?”

  “Oh, right. It was Amy Sue Gravink. The address we had for her was 3106 Brazos Street, Sugarland, Texas.”

  “If the file was gone, how do you know her address?”

  “It was on a separate list for the acceptance letters.”

  “Is there anything else you can remember about her, anything distinctive about the way she looked or talked?”

  “I don’t think so. I mean, she was sweet, but except for seeming kind of scared, she wasn’t all that different from anybody else.”

  “Well, do you happen to remember what she wanted to major in?”

  “No, I… Wait. I could be mixing her up with someone else, but come to think of it, I think maybe it was prevet.”

  I hung up the phone a minute later, after promising her five more times that I wouldn’t narc on her. Then I spilled it all to Mad.

  “Sugarland?” he read off my notes, which were smeared with chocolate frosting. “That’s got to be a joke.”

  “I checked, and it’s a real place. Looks like it’s part of the Houston suburban sprawl.”

  “So let me get this straight,” he said into his latest donut. “If your Deep Throat is right, then the first victim came from Texas.”

  “Yeah, but she was in town applying to transfer to Benson.”

  “So you think he snatched her up here?”

  “Sure, why not?”

  “If you follow the pattern, wouldn’t that mean that she had to have a dog with her? And that she took it to the Benson clinic?”

  “Well, what if she did? The lady who just called said she thought the girl wanted to be prevet, so she was obviously an animal person.”

  “Yeah, but would you bring your dog to your college interview? Oh, right, you’re crazy. Of course you would.”

  “Listen, the caller said this Gravink girl was scared about something. Maybe… I don’t know, maybe her dog got sick and she had to rush it to the hospital. Maybe she was scared about that.”

  “There’s one way to find out.” He picked up the phone, and a minute later was murmuring what I’d describe as dangerously close to sweet nothings into the receiver. Emma definitely had him whipped, and it was very entertaining to witness.

  “Ooh, my little table water biscuit,” I said when he hung up. “I want to lick up your crumbs too. Can’t I, please?”

  “You were eavesdropping.”

  “Of course. And I must say I’ve never considered that particular use for marmalade.”

  “Bernier, will you stifle yourself?”

  “After all the crap you’ve given me about”—we were in the newsroom, so I just wiggled my eyebrows where Brian Cody’s name was supposed to be—“you’re lucky I don’t take out an ad on the food page.”

  “Do you want to hear this or don’t you?”

  “Shoot.”

  “We’re no go. Emma says there’s nothing in the computer under the name Amy Sue Gravink, or any other Gravink either.”

  “Damn. Well, maybe the dog was treated under another name.”

  “Why?”

  “I have no idea. Maybe it belonged to a friend or something.”

  “And that shoots down your pattern again.”

  “I guess… No, wait. Not necessarily. Remember, we were talking about this a while before. Amy Sue Gravink—well, if the body really is her, but let’s call it that for the time being—Amy Sue Gravink was the first victim, right? And remember what we were thinking about the first victim?”

  “Do you know how many drinks I’ve had since then?”

  “Oh, Christ. We were thinking about how a perfectly respectable, middle-class girl could go missing and nobody would look for her. And we said maybe it was because the person who would have reported her missing in the first place was the one who offed her.”

  “Clever idea. Was it mine?”

  “No. So what if that’s exactly what happened to this girl?”

  “Well, like I said two seconds ago, there’s only one way to find out.”

  “Call down there. See if there really is an Amy Sue Gravink who lived in Sugarland.”

  “Close, but no cigar.” He grabbed me by the elbow and dragged me into Marilyn’s office. “We gotta go to Texas.”

  She looked up from her desk. “Okay, what’s the punch line?”

  “No joke,” he said. “We have to go to Texas. Today.”

  “Mad, I just spent the paper’s whole damn travel budget on your gas money to Syracuse and back.”

  “Send us to Texas, and we’ll bring you back the first victim.”

  “All right, I’m listening.”

  “We just got a tip. Said the first girl was named Amy Sue Gravink. She’s supposed to come from someplace outside Houston.”

  “You ever heard of the telephone?”

  “Come on, boss, you know how much they hate New Yorkers down there. You really think they’re going to go out of their way to talk about one of their own to a couple of Yankee reporters?”

  “Try.”

  “Yeah, and what if it just queers it all, so when we finally drag our asses down there, they’re all clammed up about her?”

  She turned to me. “When did he get this paranoid?”

  “Since Band scooped him on that Canine Killer story.”

  She grabbed her head as though I’d given her an instant migraine. “Do not mention that goddamn thing to me, or Gordon Band either. I swear I’d love to break every bone in his… Oh, fuck. What do you think, Alex? Is it worth the hassle I’m going to have trying to explain this to Chester?”

  “I’ll make you a deal,” Mad cut in. “If we don’t get squat, we’ll pay for the trip ourselves.”

  I punched him in the shoulder, and not gently. “We will not.”

  “I wasn’t talking to you,” Marilyn said to Mad. “How about it, Alex? It’s your call.”

  “Why is it my call?”

  “Because you’re the only person who knows this story inside-out and isn’t all cranked up on male hormones.”

  I considered it for a minute, standing there in Marilyn’s office with both of them staring at me. I thought about how the truly decent thing to do was probably to turn the information over to the cops, and how not doing it was essentially going against the deal we’d already
made. Then I thought about how I was turning into Brian Cody’s personal little news bureau and massage parlor, and the idea kind of nauseated me; I was blurring so many boundaries (personal, professional, and God only knows what else) I was starting to wonder who the hell I was.

  I pondered how I was going to explain it to him if I went running off to Texas, and exactly how furious he was going to be when he found out the truth. Then it occurred to me that the tipster had wanted to talk to a reporter, not to the cops, and that maybe I should just stop whining and do my fucking job for once.

  “Okay, let’s do it,” I said to Mad. “But if you buy one of those ten-gallon hats, I swear to God I’m leaving you at the airport.”

  26

  IT’S DAMN HOT IN TEXAS. I MENTION THIS BECAUSE IT’S just about the only cultural artifact I brought back from my seventy-two hours in the Lone Star State. That, and the fact that what we call Mexican food back home really sucks.

  But down there, even the lowliest fast-food places have kick-ass pico de gallo—and I probably would have enjoyed it more if I hadn’t been in constant danger of either fainting from the heat or catching pneumonia from the air-conditioning. I was raised in New England, where air-conditioning means opening a window. But in Texas, they take their climate control to such an extreme that I was only ever comfortable on my way into (or out of) a building. If I could have, I would’ve spent the entire trip in somebody’s vestibule.

  Luckily, the whole visit turned out to be shorter than a typical Jake Madison love affair. We spent exactly three nights in a Motel Six, which, like everything else in Houston, was located just off a highway. We shared a room, because there’s no such thing as propriety in the Gabriel Monitor travel budget (as you may have guessed, there’s usually no such thing as travel, either), and although Emma is sophisticated enough not to care, I had a feeling that if he ever found out, Brian Cody would object on several dozen different grounds.

  We got there late Wednesday night, and the next morning Mad dropped me off at Sugarland High and took off in the rental car to “follow his nose.” I feared that this might mean following it to the nearest bar to sample the tequila, but I thought it best not to mention it lest I give him ideas. I walked into the school office in my demure little sundress fully prepared to be bounced out on my Yankee butt, but the response I got was so astonishingly friendly and cooperative there was no way I could confuse these people with New Yorkers, upstate or otherwise.

  We’d been hoping like hell that Amy Sue Gravink had actually attended the local high school, since it would save us tracking down all the other options, like private or Catholic education. We knew she’d applied as a transfer student, which meant she would have graduated at least a year before—so we were also hoping there’d still be somebody around who might remember her. And to top it all off, we wanted this person to be around in the middle of the summer, and for the damn school to be open in the first place.

  We got the whole enchilada. I walked into the office armed with nothing but a name, an address, and a police sketch, and I’ll be damned if I didn’t walk out of there with Amy Sue Gravink’s life story.

  The source of this treasure trove of information was one Mimi Ochoa, a nice Mexican American lady who fed me iced tea and little cinnamon cookies while she answered my every prayer. She was the school secretary, and she had been for twenty years, and she was pleased as punch to tell me about the nice local girl who’d gotten her life together and made good, even though she was practically alone in the world.

  It wasn’t until the end of the conversation that it occurred to her to ask me who I was and why I wanted to know. I didn’t want to tell her by then, once I’d learned who Amy Sue Gravink was and all she’d gone through only to die in the freezing cold two thousand miles from home. But I hadn’t come this far not to be sure, so I put the drawing in Mrs. Ochoa’s hands, and sat there patting them while she cried like a little girl.

  We worked on a draft of the story on the plane, one of the only times I’ve written something in longhand since junior high. God only knows what our fellow passengers thought as we filled the miles from Houston to Pittsburgh with murder and suicide and pedophelia, but at least it kept them from trying to make small talk with us.

  We’d already gone over the facts during dinner the night before. We went to a restaurant called Chuy’s, whose festive atmosphere clashed with our morbid conversation so violently it prompted us to drink even more than usual. The meal therefore involved eight margaritas (five for Mad, three for me), plus great quantities of guacamole, sour cream, and tomatillo salsa. And by the time we got to hashing out the story on the plane, we’d gone through the gory details so much they didn’t even bother us—which probably made our seatmates think we were not only crazy but callous to boot.

  The gist of it went like this: Amy Sue Gravink came from a middle-class family, with a mother who was a secretary for a petrochemical company and a father who worked for the Houston building department. They’d seemed like decent people who did the usual suburban crap—church, PTA meetings, ski vacations, trips to the beach. They’d even gone to high school football games every Friday night to watch their son play second-string halfback while their daughter waved pom-poms and yelled rah-rah-rah.

  So when it happened, it came as a complete surprise. No one could have predicted that good-natured Bob Gravink—a guy who couldn’t pass a stranded driver without stopping to change the tire—would rip his wife in half with a shotgun before blowing his brains out. They would certainly never have suspected that when the local cops went to the house they’d find stacks upon stacks of sadomasochistic pornography. And even when it came out a few weeks later that the feds had been investigating Gravink for buying kiddie porn over the Internet, people still didn’t believe it—until they heard just what had been found on the family computer.

  Amy Sue Gravink was seventeen when her parents died; her brother Bobby was twenty. The murder-suicide had left them with no other close relatives and very little money. Their mother hadn’t had a life insurance policy, and their father had voided his by blowing his own head off. All they had was the house, which would have been hard enough to sell even if Dad hadn’t set a fire in a halfhearted attempt to erase the evidence.

  So they moved back into it. The whole school pitched in to redecorate (presumably, this included cleaning up several gallons of blood) and help raise money for them to live on. Since Amy was nearly a legal adult, the court declared her an emancipated minor, and they both finished high school. Her brother was never much of a student—he’d been held back twice in elementary school—but Amy Sue graduated near the top of her class. She probably could have gotten into any college she wanted to (just imagine the admissions essay she could have cranked out) but she decided to save money by living at home, working full-time, and taking two years of community college night school. Then she applied as a transfer student at several universities, all of which had big-name vet schools.

  Then she disappeared.

  People thought it was strange that she’d leave like that, so suddenly and without saying good-bye. It smacked of rudeness—and in Texas, Mrs. Ochoa explained to me patiently, people still care about manners.

  They might even have worried about her, if her brother hadn’t explained to everyone that she’d decided to take a little vacation before starting school. Then she was going to go straight to campus, he said, to try to find a cheap apartment and a good work-study job. And everybody nodded their heads at that, and said it was just like her to be so responsible.

  Then Bobby left too. He said that without his sister around, the house was too big and empty. And since he’d just lost his job, the best thing for him was to start over somewhere else. He’d closed up the house, paid courtesy calls on the neighbors, and driven away in his Chevy pickup with the promise that he and his sister would try to visit at Christmas. That was the last anyone in Sugar-land had seen of them. And other than a few letters and postcards, it was the last anyone had hear
d from them, either.

  “That’s it?” Bill was saying. “We sent you two down to Texas for a sob story about some Goody Two-shoes and her big lug of a brother?”

  The four of us were sequestered in Marilyn’s office. The door was closed, which only happens when someone has died, been fired, or announced they’re leaving to work for television. Through the narrow window I could see the rest of the newsroom gaping as they walked up the stairs, wondering which of the three applied to us.

  “Don’t sweat it,” Marilyn said with a nasty smile. “Madison here promised if they didn’t find anything useful they’d pay us back for the tickets. So how do you want to do it? A lump sum, or ten bucks out of your paycheck for the next couple years?”

  Mad returned the smile in kind. “Actually, I think the paper’s gonna end up footing the bill.”

  Marilyn put down the numchucks she’d been fingering for the past half hour. “Okay, let’s hear it.”

  “Well, if you’d rather,” Mad said, “I guess we can eat the plane tickets and see if Band can get us in down at the Times.”

  She picked up the numchucks again, this time in not such a playful way. The look on her face said don’t make me use these.

  “Here’s the thing,” I said. “We still think Amy Sue Gravink’s our victim.” Bill and Marilyn opened their mouths, but I waved them off. “I know, I know—what about the letters they sent back to Sugarland? The short answer is we think it was a dodge. All the stuff we just told you was what we got from this Ochoa lady. Well, we did a bunch of other interviews, made the rounds of all the neighbors and coworkers and friends we could dig up. We also made a trip to the morgue down at the Chronicle. The big picture turned out to be a whole lot less wholesome.”

  “Less wholesome,” Marilyn said, “than a kiddie porn collector who kills his wife and blows his own head off?”