Reconstructing Amelia

by Kimberly McCreight

  Amelia

  OCTOBER 18, 12:02 AM

  AMELIA

  hi! how r U?!

  BEN

  that’s how u r going 2 play it? . . .

  AMELIA

  u r mad. What did I do?

  BEN

  nothing

  AMELIA

  is this the silent tretmnt?

  BEN

  listen, you’re busy. I get that. You have a girlfriend now. But no one likes to be dumped by the side of the rd

  AMELIA

  u r right, sorry. I didn’t mean to hurt your feelings. Friends again?

  BEN

  okay. Friends always

  OCTOBER 18, 12:16 AM

  AMELIA

  forgot to ask. What about that kid on soccer team?

  BEN

  thx for asking. turns out he has a girlfriend at “boarding school.”

  AMELIA

  closet case?

  BEN

  definitely; you tell Sylvia yet?

  AMELIA

  told her I needed to talk, but then she ditched me 4 Ian.

  BEN

  you tell your mom?

  AMELIA

  not yet; she wasn’t home till late again

  BEN

  you’ve got 2 tell somebody; you’ll feel better if u do

  AMELIA

  when am I going to see u? I thought you were coming to NYC? I really really need to see you soon! we have to meet! if we don’t, I’m going to start to wonder if u r avoiding me on purpose ;(

  BEN

  still working on it; u’ll be 1st to know; xoxo

  AMELIA

  xoxoxo

  Kate

  JULY 19, 1997

  When I woke up this morning, I had myself convinced I’d dreamed the whole thing. That I’d made it up. Because there was no way I’d done a thing like that. Not me.

  But it was me. This me I hate. So I called in sick to the office and stayed in bed all day. I may never go back to work. They can give me a cold offer or no offer. I don’t even care anymore.

  I deserve to be unemployed for the rest of my life.

  JULY 22, 1997

  To: Kate Baron

  From: Daniel Moore

  Subject: ?

  Where are you? You missed an awesome summer associate event last night, and you know I think most of them are crap. It was an after-hours, private tour of the New York Stock Exchange. Seriously badass. Then dinner at Cipriani. I’m telling you, Kate, it was not the one to miss.

  Feel better,

  D

  Kate

  NOVEMBER 28

  Through her living room windows, Kate watched the sun rise, turning the world a dull gray, then a muted pink. She’d stayed up all night. For a long time after Seth left, she sat huddled on her couch staring at her phone, wedged into the cushion of the armchair where she’d thrown it after he’d read aloud that last awful text message to her.

  By dawn, Kate had finally made her way through almost all of the files that Duncan had sent her, except Amelia’s text messages, which she’d been putting off until the end. Kate had been planning to read the texts when she felt ready. Until finally, she realized, she never would be.

  Kate first wanted to see the texts Amelia had received about her dad. The fact that they were both getting anonymous texts about whom Kate had slept with didn’t seem like a coincidence. But finding those particular messages was easier said than done. The Unknown and Blocked Number sections of Amelia’s texts were huge. It took twenty minutes of paging through before Kate finally found what she was looking for.

  Your mommy was a home wrecker. And your daddy is a whore.

  My God. Sylvia hadn’t said anything that prepared her for something that awful. What Amelia must have felt when reading that Kate could only imagine. Shame, surely. Shame that wasn’t even rightfully hers.

  Kate paged through more of the Blocked Number and Unknown messages, trying to shake the awful empty burn in her stomach. They were a hodgepodge of junk texts, reminders from school, ordinary messages from friends who had blocked numbers. There were some weird references to Maggie, usually with a number, but there was no Maggie in Amelia’s contact list. Kate couldn’t remember Amelia ever mentioning one either. Eventually, reading so many meaningless messages, Kate’s eyes began to glaze over. She’d hardly made a dent in the Blocked Number messages, but she needed a break.

  Kate turned instead to the texts to and from Ben. There were a lot of those, too, and Kate soon found herself haphazardly picking her way through them—reading some, skimming others, skipping a handful altogether. This less-than-methodical way of reviewing Amelia’s texts was bound to leave things overlooked. Maybe a small part of Kate wanted it that way. She was still afraid to know everything, at least all at once. There were also so many texts it would have taken her days to read through each and every one; she had no choice but to pick and choose.

  At least the messages between Amelia and Ben were sweet and warm and supportive. Reading them, Kate couldn’t help but fall a little bit in love with this boy named Ben, whoever he was. The strangeness in how Amelia had met him soon seemed to matter much less than the fact that he had been such a genuinely good friend to her. Even compared to Sylvia. Because while it was obvious that the girls had loved each other, their relationship had tilted hard in favor of Sylvia. With Ben, it seemed that Amelia had shared more secrets, especially about the boy named Dylan whom Amelia liked or might like. It was a relief, too, the way Amelia talked about Dylan—nervous and a little embarrassed, giddy. Young. Not at all like some hardened girl who was hawking her wares on the Internet.

  Kate moved on from Ben’s texts to read some of those between Amelia and the boy named Dylan, trying to follow the crooked trail of her daughter’s life. Of course, none of it was as clearly spelled out as Kate had hoped. Actually, it wasn’t spelled out at all. Including the many references in Dylan’s texts to Maggie #1, Maggie #2, and so on. They were code names, Kate had figured out, though she didn’t know to whom they were referring or why they were being used. What Kate was sure of was that there had been something romantic between Dylan and Amelia, how serious it was wasn’t clear. The two of them did make plans to meet at least once in the middle of a school day, which meant he could have been the boy who Kelsey had seen. It was possible: that was all Kate could say for sure. Of course, the more she looked into Amelia’s life, the more she was beginning to feel like anything was possible.

  “I don’t want this to become the focus here,” Kate said, handing Lew her cell phone when he finally got to her house a couple of hours later. “But could you add this text to the others that your people are trying to trace? The messages seem to be getting more hostile. Also, I found one of the ones that Amelia got about her dad. It would be good to know who sent that one, too.”

  Lew stared down at Kate’s phone, nodding slowly. Standing there in the living room, with a freshly showered Lew, Kate suddenly realized how strung out she must look: exhausted and unwashed and in the same clothes. She hadn’t even brushed her teeth yet.

  “I’ll have the IT guys take a look,” Lew said. “I’ll also check in about their progress on the earlier texts. They’ve been moving a hell of a lot slower than I would like. But then our IT Department is pretty much a single guy with an old PC who works this stuff out for all the Brooklyn precincts. I’ll try to expedite the subpoena on the phone company, too.” He took a deep breath. “Now, given this new message, I think it’s time you tell me about Amelia’s dad.”

  Lew—with his six grandkids, and the ailing wife he cared for so attentively—was such an upstanding person. He’d probably never slept with the wrong person. He certainly would have never lied to his own children. Kate stared at him for a moment, wondering whether she could wriggle away from her dirty little secret any longer. But she already knew that the answer was no. That it should have been no a long time ago.

  “Okay,” Kate said finally, dropping down onto the couch and staring at her hand
s. Seth was the only other person who knew. Kate had known that she’d probably have to tell Lew eventually, but that wasn’t making it any easier. “His name is Daniel Moore,” she finally managed to say. “We went to law school together, and he works—or worked—at my firm. He’s not a very nice person.”

  “Does he know about Amelia?”

  “No,” Kate said. Her voice was high and tight. It was a liar’s voice. “I mean, yes. He knows about Amelia, but he doesn’t know that she was his.”

  “He never suspected?”

  “He must have, I guess. But he didn’t ask. To be honest, I would have lied if he had.” Kate couldn’t even bring herself to look at Lew. “We’d broken off whatever it was between us before I ever found out I was pregnant. Daniel kept his distance for a long time after Amelia was born. Maybe he was afraid I’d change my mind and come asking for something.”

  “And you never told Amelia about him?” Lew asked.

  Kate shook her head. “I know how it must seem. But Daniel’s not a good— We weren’t— He’s not the kind of man I wanted for Amelia’s father. So I guess I just made it so he wasn’t. I’m not proud of what I did, but we were never in a relationship. It was sex between two people who didn’t even really like each other. We couldn’t have a baby together. But I wanted her. And I didn’t want Daniel trying to convince me not to have her, which, knowing him, he definitely would have done. Then he got married a couple of years after Amelia was born, and it wouldn’t have been fair to tell him then. He’s divorced now, but it’s not like I can tell him about Amelia when she’s already dead.”

  “Well, we can leave it alone for now, I suppose. But if it starts looking like Amelia had contact with him, we’re going to have to talk to him.”

  “Oh my God, you don’t think . . .”

  Lew shook his head. “I think it’s a lot more likely that Amelia’s death had something to do with this.” He held up his red folder. “I matched up the girls in the Birds of a Feather group with the school meet book.” Lew opened his folder and pulled out a single page. On it was a pristine chart—girls’ names, addresses, and parents’ names. “They’re all students at Grace Hall, mostly upperclassman. There are twenty-two of them.”

  “Same number as the notes,” Kate said. “I think maybe Amelia refers to all these girls as Maggie in her texts. The name, with a bunch of different numbers, comes up again and again.”

  “Could be,” Lew said. “Either way, I think it’s time we ask the school.”

  Inside Grace Hall’s cool stone vestibule, there was a guard seated behind a computer at a big wooden desk. He was older and droopy-eyed. His loose, fleshy face had a bluish cast from the computer screen. His name tag read WILL FINKLE.

  “Can I help you?” he asked lazily, keeping his eyes on the computer.

  “We’d like to see the headmaster.” Lew flashed his badge, making him seem more like an actual police officer than he had since Kate first met him. “It’s about the girl who died here a few weeks ago.”

  “You don’t say,” the guard said drily, like he’d gotten bored waiting for someone to show up asking questions about her. He met eyes with Kate. He recognized her, she was sure of it. But he was having no problem pretending that he didn’t. “Gonna need some ID first.” Kate dug out her driver’s license as Lew handed over his badge. The guard eyed them, hunting and pecking his way through recording their information in his computer. “Sign here,” he said when he was finally done, pointing to a small, electronic signature box. Seconds later, two visitor passes were spit out of a small printer.

  “A lot of high-tech security for a school,” Lew said, nodding in the direction of the computer.

  “When you’ve got more money than you know what to do with,” the guard said, “you find something to do with it.”

  “Is it new?”

  “Maybe three weeks ago for the computer . . . last week they added this.” The guard hooked his finger back toward a box to swipe key cards. “You know how many kids forget those damn cards? I must be up and out of this chair fifty, sixty times every morning unlocking the damn door.”

  “What inspired it?”

  “You tell me,” the guard said. “You’re the ones here about a dead girl.”

  The heavily floral air of the main lobby brought on Kate’s nausea as they headed toward the main office. Two grand wood staircases curved up in front of a pretty, antique chest of drawers—old-looking, without been precious—with an enormous flower arrangement on top of it. Above was a painting that could have been an actual Picasso. On the opposite wall was a huge black-and-white photograph of a scantily clad, voluptuous dancer sitting in a filthy dressing room.

  Lew and Kate stood shoulder to shoulder in front of the photograph, staring at it and the little plaque beneath that read DIANE ARBUS, BURLESQUE COMEDIENNE IN HER DRESSING ROOM, ATLANTIC CITY, NJ, 1963. A GIFT OF THE GREENE FAMILY. It was new. Kate may not have been at the school often, but a picture like that was the kind of thing she would have remembered. On the one hand, the edgy photograph’s bold placement dovetailed nicely with Grace Hall’s progressive streak; on the other, it seemed totally inappropriate. Especially now.

  “Do you think the new security means something?” Kate asked.

  Lew frowned. “Hard to say.” He was still staring at the picture. It wasn’t sitting well with him either. “Seems like they’re hiding something. Could just be a guilty conscience.”

  “Ms. Baron!” someone called from down the hall then. The voice was high, shrill.

  When Kate and Lew turned, there was an older woman marching quickly down the hall; her graying hair was pinned up, and she was wearing a tailored tweed suit. Mrs. Pearl. Kate might not have been able to picture Woodhouse very clearly, but Mrs. Pearl had left an indelible impression. And not a particularly good one.

  “If we’d known you were coming, we’d have had someone come out to meet you,” Mrs. Pearl said, staring pointedly at Kate before reaching out a crinkled hand to Lew. “I’m Mrs. Pearl, the dean of students at Grace Hall.”

  “Lieutenant Lew Thompson,” he said, shaking her hand firmly.

  Mrs. Pearl stared at them for a moment longer, as if she was expecting an explanation for their surprise visit. When none was offered, she smiled, but not very pleasantly. “I’m afraid Mr. Woodhouse isn’t even here. He’s at an independent schools conference in Boston. He’ll be back tomorrow. If you’d like, I can schedule an appointment for you to come back—”

  “It can’t wait,” Kate said, reaching out for the folder Lew was holding.

  He relinquished it, reluctantly. He had made it clear that he was supposed to do the talking. But seeing Mrs. Pearl again, Kate was suddenly too angry to stay quiet. She held the folder out toward Mrs. Pearl.

  “I’m sorry, what is that?” Mrs. Pearl asked, blinking down at the folder but not moving to take it.

  “It’s a list of girls who were in some kind of club with Amelia,” Kate said, pressing the folder closer to Mrs. Pearl so that the corner was almost sticking into her breastbone. She sounded angry, too. In fact, she was much angrier at the school administration than she’d even realized. What had they been doing to stop kids from banding together into some kind of porn ring? It wasn’t as if they were short on resources. “They posted half-naked pictures of themselves on a blog.”

  Mrs. Pearl took a step back, raising her hands in front of her chest, which Kate had apparently begun poking the folder into.

  “That certainly sounds like upsetting information to have come across,” Mrs. Pearl said smoothly. “But as you can imagine, Grace Hall can’t control—practically or legally—what the children do off of school grounds.”

  “Off of school grounds? This is something they’re doing online,” Kate snapped. “It’s not happening anywhere. And I think the girls were bullying Amelia, too. I found hate notes in her room, and I’ve only started sorting through her texts. God knows what else I’m going to find. Bullying has to be against the rules, no matter w
here it happens.”

  Kate was aware that using the term bullying instantly transformed the conversation into a hot-button one. But she was glad. She wanted them to listen up. She was going to make it impossible for them not to listen this time.

  “Bullied?” Mrs. Pearl asked, looking a little surprised and a lot skeptical. “That is an extremely serious allegation, Ms. Baron. I assume you have proof?”

  “Amelia’s dead,” Kate said. “That seems like pretty good proof to me.”

  “Lieutenant.” Mrs. Pearl’s eyelashes fluttered as she turned her attention from Kate to Lew, as though she were in search of a voice of reason. “I thought the police had ruled Amelia’s death a suicide. In fact, we’re planning to have a huge suicide awareness benefit a week from now in Amelia’s honor. It’s to raise money for a national hotline. Are you telling me now that she didn’t kill herself?”

  “There are questions,” Lew said. “Substantial ones.”

  “Suicide awareness benefit?” Kate asked. “I asked someone with the PTA to wait before doing that.”

  Mrs. Pearl frowned. “Well, I can’t speak to that, but the benefit is scheduled for next Friday. If you have further questions, I suggest you talk to the PTA. In terms of discussing this supposed harassment, I’m afraid you’ll have to wait for Mr. Woodhouse.”

  Kate was about to snap at her when Lew’s hand came down hard on her arm, cutting her off before she even got started.

  “That’s fine,” he said to Mrs. Pearl. “We can wait. In the meantime, we’d also like to speak with Amelia’s English teacher.”

  Mrs. Pearl crossed her arms and narrowed her eyes as if she was calculating how much it would cost her to refuse this request, too.

  “I suppose that’s fine,” she said finally. “If she’s available.”

  Ten minutes later, their three sets of feet were echoing loudly down the stone hallway as Mrs. Pearl led them toward a waiting area near Liv’s office.

  “Wait here,” she said, pointing to the small cluster of furniture, which included two wing-back armchairs and a couple of small tables. “Liv should be out shortly. Now, if there’s nothing else, I really do need to be getting back to work.”