“So what do I tell my producer when she says the same thing?”
“Tell her that the evidence also fits his version of the story. He was there that afternoon. They had sex. She left to go meet her friends at the bar, and he slept for a while, took a shower, left, locked the door behind him. Met me and Ted at Au Cheval for our grandmother’s birthday dinner.”
Ava pulls a thin black vape pen out of the pocket of her dress and offers it to me. I decline. I feel like I should keep my head as straight as possible for this conversation. She takes a long pull, the end of the pen lighting up blue.
“Sleeping at her apartment doesn’t look like a great alibi.”
“It isn’t. Unfortunately, he wasn’t operating as if he’d need an alibi that night. He didn’t know she was gone until the next morning. Her friends just thought she flaked. They didn’t report her missing until she didn’t show up to work.”
“So tell me why I should believe he’s innocent,” I say, and Ava smiles. She seems to enjoy my incredulity, the skeptic in me.
“All the evidence they have against Colin is circumstantial. He was the boyfriend, he was the last one to see her, he was the last person she had sex with. He had a prior arrest.”
“Right,” I say, sipping my wine, which is diminishing quickly.
“Look at the things that don’t fit. She went missing from Rogers Park but was found in LaBagh Woods. Which means she was transported by car, and Colin didn’t have a car. He didn’t even have access to one,” she says. I get the feeling that this is not the first, or even the twentieth, time she’s made this particular case to a third party. “Add to that the timeline. We know she was taken between six and six forty-five in the evening, and Colin showed up for dinner in the West Loop for our seven thirty reservation. That doesn’t leave enough time to drive her to the woods, half-bury her body, and get to the West Loop in the dregs of rush-hour traffic, freshly showered. Even if he did have a car.”
“He could have killed her earlier in the evening. The timeline is based on when he claimed she left to meet her friends, right?” I ask. Because, in spite of myself, I’m hoping Ava has an answer. And she does.
“One of her friends called her at five fifty-three, asking Sarah to bring a necklace she wanted to borrow. She talked to her.”
“Did Sarah have the necklace on her when she was found?” I ask.
“In her back pocket.”
I hear someone climbing the stairs behind me, and we both turn to find Ted on the landing.
“Dinner’s ready,” he says, “whenever you two are.”
“Thanks, sweetie,” Ava says, though clearly we’re not finished yet, because Ted turns and heads back downstairs. I’m trying my best to think of ways in which Colin might be guilty. Working backward, away from the police’s line of reasoning, trying to find holes in her story.
“So he stashed her body somewhere,” I say, “went to dinner, and came back to dump her afterward.”
“Stashed her body where?” Ava asks. “Her roommate came home at eight. He says the apartment was empty.”
“Her roommate’s a guy?” I ask.
Ava nods. “Dylan. A friend of hers from art school. Not a fan of Colin, unfortunately.”
“And Dylan’s got an alibi?”
“Airtight,” Ava replies. “But he helps to establish the timeline that night. So the question becomes, how is Colin transporting Sarah’s body to wherever he stashed it, and then from there to LaBagh Woods? And why?” I can see a bright flicker in her eyes, flint sending off sparks. She knows she has me. “Why would he go to the trouble of dumping her in those woods when he has no easy means of moving her?”
“It was familiar,” I reply, remembering the accounts of the trial I read online. “That’s what the prosecution argued, right? It was close to where you two grew up, so he knew where to hide a body that wouldn’t be readily found.”
“Colin isn’t that stupid,” Ava replies. “To take that risk, of moving the body to a place that might link him to the murder. And still, that doesn’t answer the ‘how’ of it.”
“No,” I say. “It doesn’t.” I’m grasping now, trying to remember all the reasons I was initially against this. Trying to remember why everyone was so sure Colin was guilty.
“It’s a circumstantial case,” Ava says, something like victory in her expression. “It shouldn’t have been enough to convict him. But you know this city. You know that nothing ever works out the way it’s supposed to here.” She knows she’s winning me over, except she isn’t smug about it. She’s not battle-weary in the way I would expect for someone who has spent the past seven years fighting in Chicago’s court system. Instead, she’s alight with something, the promise of victory, even a small one. The prospect of convincing me of her brother’s innocence.
And that’s when I realize it. She needs me. This whole evening is designed to impress me, because I have somehow become the person who can help these people most. Rich and sophisticated and influential as they are, they need me.
Ava stands, offering a hand to pull me up.
“Let’s go get some dinner,” she says. And as I take her hand, I know what I’m doing. I’m agreeing to it, to take the case, to help Colin. And I can’t stop myself from being a little thrilled at the prospect.
* * *
* * *
DINNER TURNS OUT to be pasta with garlic and fried hazelnuts, a roasted cauliflower side with capers and dill tahini, and brown bread with a marmalade that tastes of both oranges and mustard seeds. In short, it’s the best meal I’ve had in recent memory. We wash it down first with my Beaujolais—which is rich and smells a bit of decaying violets—and then with some sort of fizzy gin cocktail that Ava expertly mixes at the bar cart by their fireplace.
The music has changed to chill and chic, a mix of Billie Holiday and Ani DiFranco and David Bowie and the Volcano Choir. Ted talks for a long while about his plan for growing tomatoes this summer, the varieties and growth medium and potential uses he’s considering. Salsa and canning and methods for sun-drying. It’s all extremely civilized, the sort of hobby a man adopts when he realizes it’s easier to buy beer than to brew his own. And then he makes a detour into the kitchen and pulls something out of the freezer, setting it on the counter.
“Dessert,” he says when he sees me watching.
“Oh lord, I don’t think I could possibly eat any more,” Ava says, padding over to examine the pint of ice cream he’s pulled out. “Except for Jeni’s, of course,” she quickly adds when she sees the label. “I’ll always have room for that.”
There’s a moment, when the two of them look at each other, and there is such fondness in their eyes that I find it almost poignant. It seems fragile, for two people to love each other so genuinely, as if the world is simply waiting to do something to ruin them. It’s the way my parents looked at each other, once upon a time.
I think of Eric, of course. Of the way we were in college, in the first years of our marriage. How we were still each other’s greatest source of solace, greatest source of joy, back then. Eric, the youngest of four boys from a Kenilworth family even wealthier than mine, though not without its own tragedy. He’d lost a childhood friend in a skiing accident when he was in high school and described her much in the way that I described Maggie to him: As young and fierce and beautiful. Full of promise. The way everyone talks of girls who are disappeared from the world at that age, as if sixteen is the mighty pinnacle of a girl’s worldly luck and potential. No matter how they go.
The way he talked about her, I think Eric might have been in love with her. It was the classic story—a house full of boys, the girl next door. The tagalong, tomboyish and bratty and beloved by all of them, though none more than Eric. The sort of childhood friendship that begins with a shared disgust for all the adult amusement at your pairing and then shifts the moment that puberty sends your body haywire. She had be
en his first, he told me one night, early on in our relationship. The first everything, he said. And all I could think was, Christ, how could I possibly compare?
But there was a strange symmetry to it, Eric’s history and mine—when we met. I knew that if his friend had still been alive, that bright girl, bright in all the ways that mattered, he would not have been with me. And I think he suspected that if Maggie was not gone, I would have lived an entirely different life, one that would not have brought me to him. He once described me as being the sort more likely to eschew college altogether, to travel through Europe and Southeast Asia and Central America, uncaring of my parents’ disapproval. Learning how to sketch and to surf, reading all the local poets. Living the sort of young adulthood only ever afforded to women of means with an undaunted certainty of their own freedom. I don’t know if he’s right, if I would have gone off into the world fearlessly had Maggie not gone missing.
But there was a balance in our relationship, at first. He knew what it was to mourn someone lost too soon. So he gave me as much latitude with my own grief as I needed. When we were in college, Eric seemed to want nothing more than to hold me in his dorm’s twin bed, an arm locked around my chest, and listen as my secrets came pouring out of me. I told him all of it, about Maggie and my family and the reckless things I’d done as a teenager to try to fix it all, and the more reckless things I’d done when it would not be fixed. The drugs. The boys. The places I went, because I heard that they were places where lost girls might turn up. Flophouses. Strip clubs. Bus stations. I turned over my secrets before him like tarot cards, from a deck stacked with Death, its specter appearing again and again. That I was damaged made me fascinating to boys, I knew that much. And I loved fascinating Eric. He became the golden center of our life, and I was a tiny planet that circled him in an unsteady orbit. Always half swallowed by the absence of his light. Always half in love with the dark.
Now, as I watch Ava and Ted, I wonder if Ted ever hates Ava, secretly. If there is a part of him that cannot stand her devotion to her brother, a frailty in him waiting to be pressed. I wonder if Ava realizes that she’ll have to change, eventually, to keep him. I learned that the hard way with Eric, that in marrying me he’d cordoned off his grief for the girl he once loved. Eventually, Eric lost patience for comforting me, because I was incapable of shutting out Maggie. Because the truth was, no matter how I tried to forget her, she lived in my life as an active presence; she would not allow herself to be ignored.
“Marti,” Ted calls. “Ice cream?”
I give him an exuberant nod. And maybe it’s the wine or the gin or the music, but I suddenly remember that I have not yet met everyone I will love in my life. That I may still find more people to love. It seems eminently possible, tonight.
* * *
* * *
WE’RE HALFWAY THROUGH our ice cream when the topic shifts back to Colin. To the night Sarah Ketchum was murdered.
“I like to think I’m good at reading people,” Ted says, eating out of the pint, while Ava and I use bowls. Like civilized people, Ava said when she spooned out our portions. “I make these deals all the time with people, and I can always see it, you know? If they’re holding something back, or if they have more room to move with the financials than they’re claiming. And I’ll tell you, Colin showed up to the restaurant that night, and not a blip on my radar. Nothing out of the ordinary with him.”
Ava nods. “One of the things I kept coming back to at first was that I knew I would have been able to tell that night, if he’d just done something so horrific.”
“Tell me about the assault charge,” I say, because I’m drunk enough now that I have no hesitation with demanding information.
Ava lets out a long breath.
“Well, it’s not good,” she says, already regretful. “He was in college. His first year at UIC. And you have to understand, our old neighborhood? He ran with a pretty unrelenting crowd. So he was out at this bar with a couple of his friends, and there’s some sort of disagreement with this other group of guys about who had the next game on the pool table.”
Ted makes a show of sucking his front teeth, his lip curling.
“I know,” Ava says. “I know. But you have to think about it in context, you know. He was a stupid kid, he was drunk, one of the other men called him a”—she stumbles a bit over the word, wincing as she finally says it—“a faggot, and Colin broke a pool cue across his back.”
She shakes her head, and I notice how her hair is escaping its clip, floating down around her face in dark curls.
“It would have been one stupid arrest in college, if he’d never met Sarah. Something to report on his bar application one day, if he made it through law school.”
“Was that where he was headed?” I ask. “Law school?”
“We were encouraging it,” Ted replies, exchanging a look with Ava. I see the instinct of a big brother in Ted. Trying to be upstanding, a good example for his brother-in-law. Maybe a streak of hard-ass in him as well. “He’s such a smart kid. He just couldn’t ever get out of his own way.”
“It’s not like he could have prevented what happened,” Ava says.
“I know,” Ted replies. “I just mean, it was always something. If it wasn’t this . . .”
“What, a murder charge?” There’s a current of tension in Ava’s voice now. One that I knew had to be there, somewhere under the surface. Because no couple is this happy. The light trill of Ava’s phone ringing cuts through the moment of unease.
“Excuse me,” she says, getting up and moving to the opposite end of the kitchen to take the call.
“She knows what I mean,” Ted says as soon as she’s preoccupied with her call. Perhaps more to himself than to me. He pauses, his eyes meeting mine in a way that feels weighty, in a way that makes me almost uncomfortable, with Ava out of the room. “Ava told me about your sister,” he says. “I’m sorry.”
“Thanks,” I say, flatly, because this is not my usual script, alone with a man, talking about my sister. This is usually the point in the conversation when someone makes a move, after I describe my childhood trauma, and the man who’s listening decides that he knows exactly the method with which to fix me. And it’s generally an enjoyable enough game, letting them try. Ted seems like he’d be up for the challenge, at least for a little while. But it’s a thought I don’t allow to linger.
“It’s Colin,” he says, motioning toward Ava, who is speaking so quickly into the phone that it’s difficult to even catch a word of the conversation floating across the large kitchen.
“How do you know?” I ask.
“She’s speaking Portuguese,” he replies. “They both speak it, so they could talk to their maternal grandmother as kids. She was fresh off the boat, and married into a family of micks.” He shows me the claddagh ring on his left hand, as evidence. I’ve seen a matching one on Ava’s as well. “Now they use it to avoid eavesdropping while he’s in prison. If that’s not the American dream, I don’t know what is.”
“It looks like she did all right, at least,” I say, motioning to the expensive trappings around us.
“She’s like her mother. Too smart to keep her IQ a secret, not smart enough to jettison the men in that family before they drag her down.” He smiles bitterly, and it’s still a charmed expression on that face of his. “Do you think there’s a connection between your sister’s kidnapping and Sarah Ketchum’s murder?” he asks.
“I don’t know yet,” I reply. “There are certainly similarities. The geography is compelling. But that’s a lot of time to lapse in between the two.”
“Yeah, Ava told me about that too,” Ted replies. “I gotta say, I’m not sold on it. At least, not in the way she is.” I’m about to ask him why, but then Ava is strolling back from the kitchen, plopping down on the couch next to Ted, and pulling his arm around her shoulders.
“So,” she says, with a look between the two
of us that’s almost wary, “what have you two been talking about?”
CHAPTER
SIX
I haven’t been to the Twenty-Fourth District police station in Rogers Park in over a year, since the morning I gave the DNA sample that proved Jane Doe was not my sister. It looks the same as it always has. The same as it did the first time I came here, on the night of Maggie’s disappearance. After a report came in of a blond teenager seen getting out of a silver sedan near the Rogers Park Red Line station. That tip was why her case was active both in the Sutcliffe Heights Police Department and in Rogers Park, why I spent four hours that night sitting in that station looking through thick, greasy books of mug shots, trying to recognize the man in the car. But today is different—I’m not coming here to inquire about Maggie. After my dinner with Ava and Ted last night, I’ve decided it’s best to get some information from a third-party source. So as Ava suggested, I’m on the hunt for Sarah Ketchum’s case file.
I also haven’t been back to this—or any—police station since the podcast became a minor sensation, both in Chicago and across the country. And I’m not sure its content will particularly endear me to Chicago’s finest. Partially because they’re not huge fans of citizen crime-solvers trying to step all over their territory, but also because I wasn’t entirely complimentary of their handling of Maggie’s case. I’m not sure I won many friends in the CPD with the podcast’s release, but now I just hope I haven’t lost any.
Silvia sits at the front desk now, because it’s Saturday, and she works the weekend shift when her ex has her daughter. She lights up when she sees me walk in, though I know deep down that it has more to do with the caramel Frappuccino I’m carrying than with me. I’ve brought one for myself too. Another trick. So it doesn’t feel so much like a bribe as an excuse to do something bad with someone else. A shared guilty pleasure.
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