Reconstructing Amelia

by Kimberly McCreight

  The lines were well rehearsed, as though Adele had been waiting for Lew and Kate to come asking. She probably had been, from the very first night she’d shown up at Kate’s door. In fact, that could have been the real reason Adele had come by that first night.

  Kate turned to Zadie then, hoping she might be less prepared. “Was it because she was gay? Is that why you did it?”

  “Zadie, don’t answer that,” Adele snapped.

  “Why? I want to,” Zadie bit right back at her, then swiveled her head in Kate’s direction. “I wasn’t going to let Amelia turn Dylan into some dyke just because that’s what she wanted.” Zadie looked like she was trying to stay tough, but her cheeks were flushed and her voice was getting quaky. “Amelia thought that having sex with Dylan made her more important than me. But sex is easy. With Dylan, it’s practically nothing. Trust me, she’ll have sex with anyone not at this school. And I know all this because I’ve been fucking best friends with her for twelve years. That’s something that matters. Not this . . . whatever . . . she had with Amelia for, like, two weeks.”

  But the look in Zadie’s eyes said that it wasn’t that simple. She was trying to hide it—working her neck, the tough curl of her lip—but there was something desperate about it, like Dylan was all she’d ever had.

  “Zadie, we need to know what happened up on that roof,” Lew said calmly. “It’s time for the truth, all of it.”

  “I’m not going to let Zadie get into a discussion that could incriminate her,” Adele said, holding up a hand as she stepped between Lew and Zadie. “If you’d like to interview her further, it will be at the police station, with our attorney present. But I assure you, whatever happened on that roof was an accident.”

  “An accident?” Zadie glared at her mom. “You’re acting like I was there. Like I did something.”

  “We know for sure that someone in this house did something to Amelia.” Lew pulled from his pocket two printouts and tossed them onto the coffee table. “She got texts harassing her about her relationship with Dylan and about the identity of her father. They came from this house.”

  Zadie stepped forward and picked the pages up. “What the hell do I care about her dad?”

  If she was pretending not to have seen those messages before, she was doing a very good job.

  “We were hoping you’d tell us,” Lew said. “Because we know for sure that the messages came from here, from this house.”

  “I didn’t— Holy shit, Mom, what is your deal with this girl?” Zadie’s eyes were wide as she turned them on Adele. “You told me that you’d had some whole thing with her mom in college, that you wanted to make it up to her.” She hooked her thumb toward Kate. “That’s why you wanted me to tap Amelia. But you didn’t even go to college with her, Mom, did you?”

  “Zadie!” Adele snatched the pages out of her daughter’s hands. She folded them in half, then visibly tried to regain her composure. It wasn’t as successful this time. “Be quiet, honey, please.”

  Kate watched a tremor of hurt pass over Zadie’s face, then rage rise up in her eyes. Why in the world would Adele have asked Zadie to invite Amelia into the Maggies? Kate’s eyes moved from Zadie’s face to the white stripe in her hair, a stripe that could have been many things, including Waardenburg syndrome.

  The most exquisite, unusual eyes, too, Kate now remembered Adele saying when she’d been to the house. That’s a family trait? Two different colors like that? Why wouldn’t Adele have asked about Waardenburg syndrome? Why wouldn’t she have mentioned that her daughter had it, too? I knew people at Slone, Thayer. I still do. It was too much information for Kate to process all at once.

  “So what happened between you and Amelia on the roof was an accident, like your mom said, Zadie?” Lew seemed to be deliberately trying to fan the flames. “The two of you had an argument about Dylan, maybe. It got out of hand?”

  “Stop it! Stop talking to her!” Adele screamed at Lew. “I know you don’t have an arrest warrant. You would have shown it to us if you did.”

  “No, ma’am, we don’t,” Lew said. “We were just trying to get some questions answered. You’re within your rights not to cooperate. Of course, innocent people don’t usually need to hide behind an attorney.”

  “Innocent,” Adele snorted. “You and I both know that’s a relative concept, Lieutenant. I think my daughter would be better served by taking her chances and getting that lawyer.”

  “Chances?” Zadie snapped. “What the fuck, Mom? Why are you talking about me like I’m a criminal? I didn’t do—”

  “Zadie,” Adele hissed. She looked as if she was coming unglued. A piece of her carefully swept-back hair had fallen loose, and with it the rest of her seemed to be unraveling, too. She waved a finger in her daughter’s face. “I mean it. For once in your life, could you not make absolutely everything worse!”

  Zadie recoiled, blinking. Her mouth pulled in once, then again, like she was about to cry, but her face quickly set back into stone.

  “Come on, Adele, take it easy,” Frank Carmon said, finally pushing himself out of his chair and reluctantly into the fray. “There’s no need to get crazy.”

  “Crazy!” Adele screamed, waving her finger in front of Frank now. “It’s crazy for a mother to want to protect her child from herself?”

  “Right, because you’re trying to save me,” Zadie laughed, but tears had smeared her black eye makeup. “You don’t care about me. All you care about is yourself.”

  “Zadie, this isn’t a game,” Adele said, more quietly now. “You say the wrong thing, and you could go to jail for the rest of your life. ”

  “Um, unless, of course, I didn’t fucking do anything!” Zadie stared at her mother for a second, then there was a sudden flash of recognition. She laughed in a crazy, manic way. “Oh my God, Mom. You actually think I pushed her?”

  “No,” Adele said, though it was clear she did. “That’s not what I—”

  “Holy shit, you do. You seriously think I killed Amelia. That I murdered somebody.” Zadie turned to Kate. “She’s the one who wouldn’t shut up about her. She was obsessed. ‘She’s the daughter of my long-lost friend, blah, blah, fucking, blah.’ She even made me find out where you worked so she could get back in touch with you. All of that was bullshit, obviously. She doesn’t even know you. You are such a fucking liar, Mom. Who knows, maybe you pushed Amelia.”

  “Okay,” Frank said again as he walked over and rested his glass on the counter. “I think all the ladies here need to take a deep breath.”

  “I wouldn’t take her side if I were you, Frank,” Zadie said. “You know the only person she has ever really cared about is him.” She pointed toward the framed photographs on the bookshelf. “When she gets into her third glass of Merlot and you’re not here, she says she doesn’t belong stuck with some wannabe mafioso from Bay Ridge. She loves your money. But you, Frank? I’m not so sure. Isn’t that right, Mommy?”

  Kate stared at the framed pictures on the bookcase where Zadie had pointed, slowly moving across the room toward them.

  Adele had turned to Frank, who was taking another long swallow of his drink. “Frank,” she pleaded, “you know that’s not true.”

  Frank’s mouth pulled in as he nodded. “Sure thing, Adele.” He reached for the bottle of whiskey and refilled his glass. “Whatever you say.”

  As Kate drifted closer to the photographs, she saw a familiar banner at the back of one, and she recognized the school photo arrangement of the two dozen adults pictured, too. Even from a distance, she knew she’d seen the photograph somewhere before.

  “Frank, I’m serious.” Adele sounded frantic. “You can’t listen to Zadie. She lies all the time. You know that.”

  Kate was at the bookshelf now, bracing for someone to stop her before she laid hands on the photo. No one did. They were all too focused on one another.

  “I don’t know what happened to Amelia on that roof,” Zadie said to Lew. Her voice was low and quiet now, almost unrecognizable. “
But I can prove I wasn’t up there.”

  Kate lifted the photograph from the shelf, running her hand across the glass, then tracing her finger down the sides of the heavy silver frame. It was a photo from a Bar Association Public Service Award ceremony from seventeen years earlier. And there was Jeremy in the center of the photo, shaking Adele’s hand as he accepted a plaque.

  Kate had seen the photo so many times before, sitting on a shelf behind Jeremy’s head whenever they were meeting in his office. She’d never even noticed the woman handing him the award, until now.

  “I was here when Amelia died,” Zadie said finally.

  “In the middle of a school day?” Lew asked.

  Kate turned around, the photo still in her hands. She looked at Adele, who was still staring at Zadie. Adele had one hand over her mouth, for the first time looking upset instead of enraged.

  “And I wasn’t alone.” Zadie shrugged. “You can ask him, if you want. I guess he might lie. He’s kind of a prick that way.”

  “What’s his name?” Lew asked.

  “Ian Greene,” Zadie said.

  “You can check the house security tapes for confirmation. They’re all dated and time-stamped,” Carmon said to Lew. But Zadie was telling the truth. Kate already felt sure of it. “As for Molina, you should ask her about him.” He nodded his head in the direction of Adele. “Last time I checked our phone records, she was still finding a reason to talk to him every day.”

  “Her hair,” Kate finally managed to say. She pointed to Zadie’s streak. “It’s Waardenburg syndrome, isn’t it?”

  Adele turned around slowly. She looked first at the picture in Kate’s hands, then up at Kate. When she did, there were tears in Adele’s eyes.

  “I have to give you credit, you’re a good liar,” Adele said, her voice wavering. “I went to your house because Molina told me about the text you’d gotten about Amelia. I wanted to see for myself what you planned to do about it. I almost believed you when you said there was no family history of Waardenburg even though you and I both know that’s impossible. Jeremy must love the way you protect him. It’s very convincing.”

  “I said that because it was the truth,” Kate said. “I’m Amelia’s family and I don’t have Waardenburg.”

  Adele shook her head like she was sure Kate was still covering for Jeremy.

  “I guess that’s why he’s kept you around all these years. Me, he wanted nothing to do with. He was worried I was going to make him accountable. The funny part is that I would have kept his secret, too, if he’d done something to keep his other illegitimate child away from my daughter.” Adele shook her head, then wiped at her eyes. “He was talking about leaving Vera for me, you know. He would have, too, if you hadn’t come along. I realize that now. At the time, he told me he’d decided he had to stop cheating on Vera. But it was actually about you. I had no idea there was another child until I saw Amelia at Grace Hall this fall, when she volunteered for the Harvest Festival. I noticed her eyes, but I never would have made the connection to Jeremy if Julia Golde hadn’t mentioned how it was so amazing that Amelia was so great, given that she was being raised by a single mother—a lawyer—with a crazy schedule.” Adele was staring at her clenched hands now, looking closer to the edge of tears. “It took only one call to find out about you and Jeremy. It’s not the best-kept secret. I wasn’t just going to let Jeremy get away with lying to me for all these years. He made me think I was the only one. That what we’d had actually meant something. He should have at least had the decency to keep Amelia out of Grace Hall, and away from me.”

  Kate tried to breathe, but she felt like someone was sitting on her chest. She’d been even more responsible for everything that had happened to Amelia than she ever could have imagined.

  “It was you who e-mailed Daniel Moore?”

  “We’re on the Bar Ethics Committee together. Daniel has been complaining about Jeremy to me for years,” she said. “He was looking for a way to get back at him. Of course, he waited months before finally doing something about it. I didn’t think he was ever going to.”

  “So you dragged Amelia into it?”

  “It was time that someone held Jeremy accountable,” Adele said. “And Jeremy made clear a long time ago that he’d make me pay if I ever opened my mouth. He plays golf with my general counsel. He could have destroyed my career before the first tee.” She shrugged. “He’d never have done anything to Amelia. I obviously had no way of knowing”—she motioned toward Zadie, who glared again at her mother—“that things with Amelia and the club, with Dylan, would get so out of hand. How could I possibly have predicted any of that?”

  They sat in Lew’s car in silence. Kate had walked out of the Carmon house still holding the photograph. She sat in the passenger seat, staring down at it.

  “Are you going to be okay?” Lew asked, after they’d sat there like that for at least five minutes.

  “I keep thinking things can’t get worse, but then they do.” Kate shook her head. “If I’d been honest with Amelia about who her father was, or at least who I thought he was, maybe none of this would have happened. She might still be alive.”

  Lew shook his head. “Wouldn’t have made a difference.”

  “You don’t know that.”

  “Maybe not,” he said quietly, then looked Kate hard in the eye. “But you need to.”

  Lew’s phone rang then. He answered it and, after a few curt yeses, hung up. He stared at the steering wheel for a minute, his finger tracing the outside of the circle.

  “Who was that?” Kate asked.

  “We got an address on those first texts sent to you about Amelia,” he said as he started the car.

  Julia did not look happy to see them. She opened the door and forced something that didn’t even approximate a smile.

  “Sylvia isn’t feeling well,” she said. “I’m not sure she’ll be up for visitors.”

  “I’m afraid, ma’am, this isn’t an optional discussion,” Lew said. “I wish that it were.”

  Julia stared hard at Lew, then, for even longer, at Kate.

  “In that case, come in, I guess.” Julia looked away from Kate and moved begrudgingly to the side. “I’ll need to make sure that she’s awake.”

  But as soon as they stepped inside, there was Sylvia, standing like a gray specter in the doorway to the kitchen.

  “Oh, there you are,” Julia said nervously. She went over and wrapped an arm around Sylvia’s shoulders, then closed her eyes as she kissed the top of Sylvia’s head. “Kate and the detective have a few more questions they want to ask you. If you’re not up to it, honey, that’s okay.” Then she turned to Lew, apparently suddenly realizing something. “Speaking of which, what exactly did you mean when you said this wasn’t an optional discussion?”

  “You’re daughter left out some facts surrounding Amelia’s death,” Lew said matter-of-factly. “We need for her to supply them now. Kate’s waited a long time to know what happened to her daughter. It’s time now, Sylvia, that she knows.”

  Julia looked from Lew to Kate, then down to Sylvia, considering. Finally, she nodded.

  “Sylvia doesn’t have anything to hide. We loved Amelia like she was family. We want to know what happened to her, too.”

  “You knew Amelia was a Magpie, isn’t that right, Sylvia?” Lew asked. His tone wasn’t exactly aggressive, but it was as forceful as Kate had seen him be.

  Sylvia stared down at her hands for a minute. When she looked up, there were tears in her eyes.

  “Do you know the stuff they did to her?” her voice squeaked out. “I was afraid— I thought they would do the same thing to me if I told you about them. That stuff . . . it doesn’t even matter if it’s true, people don’t forget.”

  “Do you think it was one of the Magpies who pushed her off the roof?” Kate asked.

  Her heart was pounding. Yes, say yes. Say you saw it happen.

  Sylvia shook her head. “Like I told you before, I think that Ben kid did it. Have you even fo
und him? He was supposed to be visiting Amelia that day.”

  “We found Ben,” Lew said quietly. “It wasn’t him.”

  “Oh.” Sylvia wrapped her thin arms around herself. “Never mind then.”

  “These clubs,” Julia said, crossing her arms and shaking her head, “I’m getting on the phone today about this. We pay tens of thousands of dollars to send our children to Grace Hall, and this is what we get: Lord of the Flies?”

  “I agree, ma’am, you should contact the school. All the parents should.” Lew took a deep breath, as if he were relieved the hard part was over. Kate wondered if it was genuine, or if he was just trying to get Sylvia to relax. “Now what about Dylan? Is there a reason you didn’t mention her to us before?”

  Kate stared at Sylvia, waiting for her to look confused, worried, something. But she just looked worn-out.

  “She didn’t even tell me about Dylan until after it was over,” Sylvia said finally. “I told her that girl wasn’t worth it. But Amelia was crazy upset about it and totally obsessed with getting Dylan back. She wouldn’t listen to me.”

  “She was ‘crazy upset’?” Kate asked.

  “Like nutso.” Sylvia shook her head

  “And you didn’t think maybe you should tell somebody? Like an adult?” Kate snapped. It sounded like an accusation. She couldn’t help it. What if Amelia really had killed herself? Because for the first time, it suddenly seemed possible. “Maybe she needed help.”

  “Kate, that is not fair,” Julia shot back. “I’m not going to let you blame my child for your oversights. It wasn’t her job to be Amelia’s mother. It was yours.”

  Kate closed her eyes and tried not to cry. Because Julia was right, of course. Kate was the one who’d really failed Amelia.

  “I think Amelia was in that club because she was lonely.” Sylvia’s voice cracked, and there were tears in her eyes. Julia put her hands on Sylvia’s shoulders, trying to calm her down, but she shrugged her mother off. “She needed a family. Maybe if you’d been around more, instead of spending all your time at your stupid job, she’d still be alive.”