The Lost Girls

by Jessica Chiarella

  “Well, I’m not so sure,” I reply. He shakes his head, scratching out something onto a piece of notepaper and handing it to me. It’s a name and phone number, with a Chicago area code.

  “What’s this?” I ask.

  “It’s the name of a guy who works for the Sun-Times,” Olsen replies. “He covered the Ketchum case. He was a real thorn in the CPD’s side at the time, but he’ll have a copy of the case file.”

  “Why would you help me?” I ask, a little bewildered that it’s that simple. To actually walk away with what I came here for.

  “I think you need to see what’s in there,” he replies. “Because it’s not pretty.”

  * * *

  * * *

  IT TURNS OUT, Olsen is right. The Sun-Times reporter is more than happy to email me a copy of Sarah Ketchum’s case file when I call and tell him about the podcast.

  “They railroaded the kid,” he says, his voice a loud buzz of indignation over the phone. “I don’t think they even looked at anyone else at the time. Having someone else dig into the case is probably the best thing that could happen right now.”

  I print out the file at the FedEx on Clark Street, hovering over the printer as it churns out pages, for fear that someone else will pick the stack up by mistake and see the grisly typewritten descriptions of Sarah’s body. I can’t help but feel protective of her, this girl who looked like Maggie, who only made it a few years further in her life than Maggie did. I don’t want some stranger seeing the inventory of her clothing, the list of her injuries, the evidence that was collected from her. When I have the whole file, I stuff it into my backpack and bike home, already feeling a creeping sense of horror at what the pages may contain.

  When I open the door to my apartment, I kick a manila envelope that has been slipped beneath it. Acid wells in my throat when I pick it up and find Eric’s precise script on the note inside.

  Marti—my attorney sent these over. Just a draft. Have yours take a look. I was hoping to give them to you in person, but I guess this is the best I could do. Don’t hesitate to call if you have any questions. Be safe.

  Eric

  There is a little mark on the paper before his signature, where it looks like he began to write “Love” but then thought better of it. The envelope contains our divorce papers. This is not exactly a time for affection.

  It would be easy to be cut by the formality of his note, something that could have been a polite message to a colleague. But I know Eric well enough to know that he must have agonized over it, scribbling it in the hallway outside my door, with its burned-out fixtures and its moldering carpet. That’s the problem with having such a collegial divorce. There’s so much more pain in its niceties.

  I pull out my phone and track him, watch the blue dot that is his phone move southward on Milwaukee Avenue. I wonder what he’s doing. Try to imagine him, the angles of his face, whether he’s as lonely as I am. I’m waiting for the day he remembers that we can still track each other. Every time I open the app, I steel myself against the possibility that this will be the time when my access to his phone is denied. But each time, the blue dot is still there. And I wonder if he’s forgotten, or if he’s doing the same thing I am. Keeping tabs on me. Wondering what I’m thinking.

  All of this would be so much easier, in some ways, if Eric was angry with me. That’s the other problem with having a traumatic childhood. The people who love you always give you a pass on your bad behavior. If a body shows up in the morgue that could be your sister, and if you spend the next year coming undone in ways that make it impossible for your life not to crumble around you, the people who love you will still love you, even after all that’s left of your life is rubble. Even if they can’t stay married to you. Even if they were hurt, perhaps irreparably, when the walls came down. And their forgiveness just seems to make everything worse.

  Sometimes I wonder if our marriage might have been saved if Jane Doe had never arrived at the morgue. If I’d taken Eric’s advice and pursued a master’s in criminology, or volunteered for a women’s shelter, or gone back to therapy. Even in hindsight, it seems impossible. Because without Maggie, my life is like a chipped teacup, always an imitation of the perfect thing it once might have been, sharp along one edge, dangerous in a way it was not before. Useless and too full of memory to be discarded.

  I comb through Sarah Ketchum’s police file in the few hours I have before I have to get ready for work, eating frozen pizza and drinking vodka with olive juice, since I haven’t replenished my stock of vermouth since last week. The case file contains the incident report from the discovery of Sarah’s body and the medical examiner’s report. It contains a list of evidence collected from the woods where Sarah was found and from her apartment. In the crime scene photographs, her apartment appears both bare and cluttered, all its furniture of the threadbare and pressed-wood variety—a futon, a papasan chair, an IKEA coffee table—and its walls covered with music posters. Florence + the Machine. The Lumineers. Arcade Fire. The Black Keys. The once-ubiquitous poster of six naked backs painted like Pink Floyd album covers, thrown in for good measure. Stacks of DVDs in a wire rack against one wall of the living room, stacks of fashion magazines next to her bed. Audrey Hepburn smiling down from above the desk, diamonds at her throat, a long cigarette holder in her black-gloved hand.

  “You have to decide,” Maggie instructed me once, as she sketched my portrait on her bedroom floor, “whether you’re an Audrey or a Marilyn.” At seven years old, I had no idea who she was talking about. But, like always, I was an eager student, unwilling to show my ignorance for fear of losing her attention.

  “Which are you?” I asked, determined to be whomever she was.

  Maggie gave me that sly, amused smile of hers. “I’m an Edie Sedgwick,” she said, and I nodded. As if, yes, this was exactly right.

  I pull my hand through my own shorn blond hair as I page through the report. The records reference photographs of the body as well, which are mercifully not included. A lot of the personal information has also been redacted—sanitized for public consumption.

  Still, there are plenty of horrors here. Sarah was found facedown and partially buried in the underbrush of LaBagh Woods thirty-six hours after her roommate reported her missing. The report notes rain the previous night, and the only footprints found near her body belonged to the men who found her. She was wearing a T-shirt, jeans, and sandals. The cause of death is listed as strangulation. Her hyoid bone was broken, and there were petechiae in her eyes, both consistent with the finding. Skin was found under the ring fingernail of her right hand. Semen was found inside her.

  Reading the file makes my whole body ache, from the base of my skull to deep in my hipbones. I close the file, toss it into the cluttered mess that is my coffee table. Suddenly exhausted, and a little too drunk.

  I draw a bath in my dingy little bathroom. Hot enough that the window above the tub begins to cloud with steam. I look into the eyes of my reflection in the mirrored medicine cabinet; I look older than twenty-nine, my blond hair lank, my eyes deep-set with shadows. I feel about a hundred years old as I step into the filling tub, the water so hot I have to grit my teeth until I grow used to it, my skin flushing where it’s submerged.

  I cannot help but think of Maggie, as the water reaches my waist, my breasts, my shoulders, my throat. I think what a blessing it is, to never have seen a report like this on my sister, an inventory of her body and its injuries, an accounting of the manner of her death. There is never the knowledge of these things without the horror, and perhaps that horror is too great a price to pay, after all. I hold the thought, like a pearl between my teeth, as I sink below the surface of the water. Letting the heat burn every other thought away, my hair floating around me like a halo of golden, dead leaves.

  CHAPTER

  SEVEN

  Ava and I go to visit the prison the next morning. It’s a three-hour drive, made slightly longer by t
he fact that we stop for coffee before heading out of town, and then again at a rural McDonald’s to use the bathroom and buy some hash browns. Ava drives, because I haven’t driven a car in about twelve years. Plus her ancient-looking VW Cabrio has a manual transmission, and I never learned to drive stick. The late-nineties convertible gave me pause when she first pulled up to the curb. But Ava only shrugged at my surprise.

  “Ted thinks I’m crazy too. But they used ‘Pink Moon’ in the commercial for it,” she says. “And ever since then, it was the only car I’ve ever really wanted.”

  It’s one of the things I’m beginning to realize about Ava. Beyond the designer clothes and the beautiful house and the Adonis husband, there’s a girl in there who might love something, even if it’s wrong in all the ways that matter. Even though Ava could likely afford a car that costs fifty times what the Cabrio is worth. Even though she’s the only woman in that McDonald’s wearing Louboutins. She still drives this boxy little car, because she doesn’t care how gauche it might be to love it because of a commercial. She still gets two orders of hash browns.

  “How did you get the warden to agree to this?” I ask, polishing off the last of my coffee, which tastes burnt and acrid in its Styrofoam cup. “My partner said it’s nearly impossible for podcasters to get approval to record interviews in prison.”

  “Ted called in a favor,” Ava replies. “He’s part of this big development deal on the North Side. Had an alderman reach out on our behalf.”

  “Lucky he has friends in high places.”

  “Lucky now,” Ava says, correcting me. “Seven years ago, when Colin was first convicted, the two of us had so little money we could barely get him a lawyer.”

  “Really?” I ask.

  “I was in med school, up to my eyeballs in debt,” Ava says. “He’d just gotten his license. And Ted’s parents weren’t about to foot the bill for his girlfriend’s brother’s murder trial.” The bitter note in her voice betrays the resentment that must exist between Ava and her in-laws. Perhaps between her and Ted, even. Another live wire, stripped bare between them.

  “Now I never know what I’m going to find on these visits,” she says, turning the radio down a bit. It’s summer hits of the nineties, more millennials-on-a-road-trip music than driving-to-prison music. Though perhaps the more times you’ve been down this particular road, the less it seems like a somber, momentous occasion and the more it seems like just another long drive.

  “I think in some ways, prison is having a deadening effect on him,” Ava says. “Like the more time he’s there, the less he can imagine getting out. When he was first convicted, I really thought I’d have him out in a year. I think I had him convinced too. So each year that goes by and he’s still there, he gets angrier. Gets into more fights, puts himself in danger. It’s like I’ve made it worse by keeping his hope alive.”

  “Hope is . . . ,” I say, trying to find the right way to describe the thing I handle like a shard of glass. Delicate, brilliant, likely to cut if held too tightly. “Tricky.”

  “You know better than most,” Ava replies. “It can turn against you quickly.” She knows it too, I think. It’s clear in the way she says it. She understands the thing that most people don’t realize about hope: that too much of it can ruin you.

  Outside the car window, buildings give way to soybean fields. The day is overcast. Cows dot the landscape. Raindrops occasionally fleck the windshield, chased away by the fast swings of the wipers. Everything is shades of gray and damp, loamy green. In the distance, the hidden sun curls threads of milky yellow through the clouds.

  “I spoke to one of the cops in Rogers Park,” I say. “He seemed pretty certain they have their man.”

  “Yeah, they’ve all been certain, since day one,” Ava replies. “No matter what we put in front of them, alternative theories or different evidence or issues with their case, they never wavered from Colin. They were never anything but completely sure.”

  “He helped me get a copy of the case file,” I say.

  “Did you bring it with you?” she asks. I nod. It’s in my bag, along with a mic and a handheld recorder Andrea bought for me.

  “The detective seemed to think it would be convincing.”

  “Was it?” she asks.

  “I don’t know,” I reply. “She’s got his DNA on her. Under her fingernail. And . . .” I hesitate at using the word “semen,” when it’s Ava’s brother we’re talking about.

  “He admits they had sex that afternoon,” Ava replies, seeming to understand the source of my hesitation. “It accounts for a lot of the evidence they used against him at trial.”

  “But we’re just supposed to take his word for it?” I ask, trying not to sound as incredulous as I feel. There’s something about reading the case file that centered my focus back to where it should be: on Sarah. My agenda is not freeing Colin. I’m here to find out what happened to her, the story that lives beyond the edges of what can and can’t be proven in a courtroom. It’s a good thing to be reminded of from time to time.

  “Go into my bag,” she says, motioning to the Burberry tote on the back seat. “There are some papers in there you should see.”

  I lean back and grab the bag, its velvety leather heavier than I expected. I pull a packet of papers from it and look them over. It’s an unredacted version of the case file. I compare it to my copy, where the personal information has been blacked out.

  “So?” I say. “They’re basically the same.”

  “But not exactly the same,” she says. “Look at the evidence page.”

  I compare the two. The one in Ava’s is a photocopy, complete with shadowy edges and flecks of dust. Mine looks like a scan, all black and white, a PDF with all the gray noise removed. But the information is the same.

  That is, until I look closer. Nearly lost in the photocopy is a faint notation under “Evidence collected from victim’s apartment,” a marking that looks like it’s been eclipsed with Wite-Out.

  “What does that say?” I ask, squinting at the muddy reproduction.

  “That’s a third hair sample,” Ava replies. “It was taken off the initial evidence list before it was released in discovery.”

  “Seriously?”

  “They were afraid it might put someone else in Sarah’s apartment around the time of the murder,” Ava says. “Dylan’s bathroom was off the living room. But Sarah had the master. You had to go through her bedroom to get to hers. So the police thought it would create reasonable doubt in the trial.”

  “But couldn’t it have been from a houseguest, or from someone who lived there before?”

  Ava shakes her head. “She had one of those mesh drain covers. The hair was caught in it. So it had to have been recent. And her roommate said that nobody but Colin had visited the apartment in the past few weeks.”

  “So someone was in her apartment, and she was hiding him from her roommate.”

  “Showering in her apartment,” Ava says.

  “You think Sarah was seeing someone else? Cheating on Colin?” I ask, and Ava lets the question hang.

  “Do you have any doubt as to why the police are so convinced they’ve got their guy?” Ava asks. “It’s because they ignored the possibility it was someone else. It’s called pitting evidence. They remove anything that might threaten their case. We only found out about it after his conviction. Someone in the SA’s office leaked it to our defense team. We still don’t know who.”

  She’s speaking in the plural, when she talks about the police. But of course, it wasn’t the Chicago Police Department, writ large, who would have decided to hide the evidence in Colin’s case. It would have been Detective Richards. The man who sat next to me for hours the night Maggie went missing, watching as I thumbed my way through the heavy books of mug shots stacked before me. Who told me that I’d been very helpful, even when I couldn’t recognize a single one. One of the good ones
, I always thought when faced with reports of CPD misconduct. Its racism and brutality. News stories of unlawful detainment and CIA-style black sites. At least one of the good ones was assigned to my sister’s case. Now, however, I’m not so sure.

  “But isn’t this already enough to get him a new trial?” I ask.

  “Not according to the appellate court of Illinois,” Ava replies. “They said that simply the presence of another hair in the shower drain wouldn’t have been enough to establish reasonable doubt for the defense.”

  “Did they ever test the DNA?”

  “During the appeal,” Ava replies. “But it didn’t match anyone involved with the case, and it didn’t match with anyone in the criminal database. So it’s a dead end.”

  “Jesus,” I reply, thinking again of Detective Olsen. How willing he was to help me get the redacted case file, the one that didn’t contain the hair sample from Sarah’s shower. His certainty that Colin killed Sarah Ketchum. An idea based on nothing, slipping away as easily as water cupped between hands. “What about the second appeal?”

  “Ineffective assistance of counsel,” Ava replies. “Three years after the conviction, Colin’s attorney died of a Vicodin overdose. It turned out he’d been addicted for years, and there was evidence that he was high for most of Colin’s trial.”

  “And that wasn’t enough, either?” I ask.

  “Marti, a few years ago the court denied the appeal of a man whose defense attorney literally fell asleep during his cross-examination of a witness,” Ava replies. “My advice? Don’t get convicted of murder in the first place.”

  “Not bad advice,” I reply, beginning to understand Colin’s anger. I think of all the years that have passed since Maggie disappeared. Maybe losing hope is simply the pragmatic choice, at some point.