The Lost Girls

by Jessica Chiarella

  * * *

  * * *

  IT’S LATE MORNING when we reach the prison. Ava has already taken me through what happens next, so I’m prepared for the metal detectors, the visitor release form, the pat-down by a bored-looking female guard wearing blue latex gloves. The guards seem particularly suspicious of Ava, in her suit dress and her stiletto heels, and of me by extension. Because we don’t seem to belong here, among the other visitors. She asks Ava twice if she’s counsel, and twice Ava shakes her head. They look even more wary when she produces a printout of the email from the prison’s warden, stating that we should be allowed to bring recording equipment with us into the visitation room. They make us wait twenty minutes while the guards get the warden on the phone so he can confirm his permission.

  It’s not like I expect, though. Not like you see in the movies, a line of chairs on either side of a counter, separated by a Plexiglas partition. No, we’re ushered into an open room with a scattering of green plastic tables, most already taken up with groups of people. Couples. Families. Some have little children with them. And the inmates are not wearing orange, like on TV. They’re dressed in gray.

  We take a seat at an empty table, and I pull the recorder out of my bag, plugging in an external mic and setting both out on the table between us.

  “Colin’s going to be okay with this?” I ask, motioning toward it.

  Ava nods. “It’s pretty much the point, isn’t it?”

  I don’t have a chance to respond, because there’s a flash of red hair in my peripheral vision, and I turn to watch Colin McCarty walk into the room. His skin is sallow, almost jaundiced, beneath the copper of his hair, and the patchy facial hair growing around his mouth reminds me of how young he is. Twenty-five years old. But his eyes are the same as Ava’s, large and blue, though his stand out beneath pale eyelashes like drops of cerulean paint. His mouth has an almost feline curl at its edges, and his arms are wiry and heavily veined. He moves like he’s imitating a boxer in his approach to the ring, all overblown swagger.

  “Sis,” he says when he reaches Ava, one arm looping around her shoulders in an embrace that seems false in its casualness. As if they’re meeting at a backyard barbecue, instead of in a prison visitors’ room.

  “This is Marti,” Ava says, turning to me. Colin looks me up and down in a way I don’t appreciate and then glances at the recorder on the table. He says something, his mouth full of small, square teeth that make him look younger still. I don’t catch the words, though it sounds a bit like Spanish. Portuguese, I remember, from my conversation with Ted.

  “What?” I ask.

  “Ignore him,” she says to me, before clapping him on the shoulder, the reprimand of a weary schoolteacher, looking him in the eyes. “She’s here to help you. How about you sit and answer some of her questions?”

  “Sure,” he says, giving me a Cheshire smile. His voice is higher pitched than I would have expected. “It’s nice to meet you.”

  “I wish it could be under better circumstances,” I say, though I’m only being polite. I seem to have already developed a healthy dislike of Colin. I know his type. His swagger, his brutishness—it’s a combination that makes me certain that he’s exactly the sort of guy who’d break a pool cue over another’s back for being called a gay slur. No wonder a jury didn’t believe his story.

  “What, no Ted this time?” Colin says, straddling one of the plastic benches as Ava and I sit across from him.

  “Not this weekend,” Ava replies, and Colin gives a little snicker.

  “Ted doesn’t like me,” Colin says to me, as if it’s a point of pride. He seems entirely pleased with himself, actually, which is a strange posture to take when you’re serving a life sentence. As if this is exactly where he wants to be.

  “That’s not true,” Ava says, but it’s a weak effort, we both can tell.

  “What happened to your hand?” I ask, motioning to his left. Three of his fingers are splinted, and the back of his hand shows dark bruises.

  “I got into a disagreement with one of the other residents here. Certainly not the first time,” he replies, pulling his hand quickly away from Ava as she reaches for his wrist.

  “Just let me take a look,” she says.

  “You know, they do employ actual doctors here,” he says. “They gave me an X-ray and everything. Real twentieth-century medicine.”

  “What was the fight about this time?” Ava asks.

  “Nothing important,” Colin replies. “You know what happened here last weekend?” He motions around to the visitors’ room. “Guy’s brother got married in here. They did the whole ceremony right over there, vows and everything, so my buddy could be there for it. Let me tell you, there wasn’t a dry eye in the whole place.”

  “What’s your point, Colin?” Ava replies, her tone so flat the question seems hypothetical.

  “I’m just saying, it would have been nice to be invited to your wedding,” Colin says, turning again to me, his mouth seeming perpetually wet. “They got married at the Drake hotel instead. Would have cost less to do it here.”

  “Well, kid,” Ava replies, “you get convicted of murder, you’re going to miss a few family events.” She says this like a parent admonishing their child that there will be no dessert because his homework isn’t finished. Colin lets out a hearty laugh, and it’s the first glimpse of him that doesn’t feel like tough-guy posturing. The edge of a charm that probably once existed in him. Enough to draw a girl like Sarah Ketchum, once upon a time. A girl taught to look for something deeper, a bad boy with a secret vulnerability, waiting for excavation.

  “So what’s your story, Marti?” he asks.

  “I thought I was here to interview you,” I reply, a bit surprised that Ava hasn’t explained my story to him already.

  “Right to business,” he says. “I like it. Okay, well, what do you want to know?”

  “I guess,” I say, caught a bit off guard by the abruptness, “I guess, tell me your memories of the night Sarah went missing.”

  He inhales slowly at the question, through his nose. Then he shrugs.

  “It’s funny,” he says. “It’s to the point now where I’ve thought so much about that night that I can’t remember what are actual memories and what I’ve sort of cooked up myself since, you know?”

  “I’m not sure I do,” I reply.

  “Like, everything is hazy. We were high, and I wasn’t paying attention, you know? It’s not like I knew it would be the last time I saw her. When I try to remember, I get things wrong. Like, I could have sworn she was wearing this pink dress when she left,” Colin says. “She wore it all the time, because it was really short, and she had great legs. But then, it turns out, no. She was wearing jeans that night, and this white T-shirt, when she was found. So I must have been imagining a different night when she wore that dress.”

  “It’s called a false memory,” Ava interjects. “Our brains create memories that we never actually experienced sometimes, sort of filling in the blanks with inaccurate information. It’s one of the big problems with eyewitness testimony, actually. You see what you want to see, a lot of the time.”

  Like a car that shifts from blue to gray to silver in my memory, I think. Like a man’s face I’ve never been able to recognize. These ideas that haunt me, made of nothing. As insubstantial as vapor. I wonder if I’ve conjured them up all on my own, if the man and the car might dissolve with the lightest breath of air.

  “But I mean, it was a regular day,” Colin says. “I had class in the morning, and then I went over to her place after.”

  “Was she in school?” I ask.

  He shakes his head. “She’d gone to art school for a semester or two but then dropped out and moved in with a friend of hers. They were both working for the same temp agency.”

  “Dylan Jacobs, right?” I ask, trying to fill in the details. Dylan’s name came up a lot in
the police report, first as the person who reported Sarah’s disappearance, then as a possible suspect. Until the cops focused on Colin, that is. The other man in Sarah’s life.

  “Right. Dylan. He was a real . . .” Colin’s eyes alight on the digital face of the recorder. “Well, he was always giving Sarah his opinions on the people in her life.”

  “People like you?” I ask.

  “Dude seemed to think Sarah should be with someone more like him,” Colin said, sitting back and crossing his arms, a pose of calm assurance that strikes me as either completely fake or completely natural. “Turns out, she wasn’t into the sensitive types.”

  “He’s got an alibi, right?” I ask.

  “He was working at a call center that week.” It’s Ava who replies. “They record all of the calls their employees make. He’s on tape through the whole period of time when Sarah was likely taken.”

  “Plus, I mean, you should have seen the guy,” Colin replied. “I don’t think he saw the inside of a gym in his life. Sarah could have taken him, if it came down to it.”

  “He’s a sweet guy,” Ava replies, a corrective. Probably for my benefit. “He threw her a surprise party for her birthday, invited all of us, stuff like that. He called me a couple times after Sarah disappeared. I got the sense that he didn’t have anyone else to talk to about her.”

  “He threw that party to make me look bad,” Colin replies. “To make it look like he’d had the idea and planned the whole thing. Like I wouldn’t have thrown her a surprise party on my own.”

  “Honey, come on, you wouldn’t have. You have a lot of exceptional qualities, but planning really isn’t one of them.” She says it with just enough sarcasm that it’s clear she doesn’t think many of Colin’s qualities could be considered exceptional.

  “Whatever, can I tell her the story now?” Colin says, as if this little detour has been entirely Ava’s fault. She waves her hand, offering him the floor. “So,” Colin says. “Dickhead had a job that week, but Sarah had the day off in between gigs. So I meet her at her place after class, and we just kind of hang out. We smoke a little, we hook up, we make some chicken salad and watch a movie. Then she’s gotta go meet her friends, so I crash in her room while she gets ready.”

  “Why didn’t you go with her?” I ask. “To meet her friends?”

  “I was not their favorite person,” Colin replies, his smile all mischief, like when he mentioned Ted. “It’s tough to imagine, I know. But she still ran with her art school pals, and I think they all assumed that I was the reason she dropped out.”

  “Were you?” I ask, and Colin levels me with a dead-eyed stare.

  “No.” The simple word unsettles me, though I can’t quite pinpoint why.

  “Did she say goodbye before she left?” I ask, trying to smooth over what was clearly a question too far. Trying to get him back to talking.

  “Yeah. She wakes me up, tells me to lock up when I head out.”

  “Did you have a key to her place?”

  “No,” he replies. “There was a lock in the door handle, you know? So you can just turn it and pull it closed.” He’s quiet for a moment, chewing absentmindedly on his lower lip. “Sometimes I think I dreamed that part. Her waking me up, giving me a kiss. Because I could have sworn she was wearing that dress when she left.”

  He looks almost wistful then. And suddenly there’s a gentleness to him, an unexpected flash of nakedness beneath his haughty, rough veneer. Still so much a boy, beneath it all.

  “What happened then?” I ask, if only because I want to pry at this glimpse of him, wedge something into the space he created between who he is and who he might have been. I want to keep him talking.

  “I sleep for a little longer,” he says. “Get up, shower, head to my grandma’s birthday.”

  “How did you get there?” I ask.

  “Cab,” he replies.

  “That was verified by the police,” Ava interjects. “They found the driver, he’s part of the established timeline. He remembers Colin being quiet, and his hair being wet. Nothing incriminating.”

  “Grandma’s dead now,” Colin says, and sniffs. “Passed right after the trial. That was the last time I ever got to celebrate her birthday.”

  This is a familiar lament, this idea of time lost behind bars. Of years being stolen and people slipping away. But part of me is still Maggie Reese’s sister, and that part pulls against any burgeoning pity for Colin. After all, he is still here. So is his sister. They can still make each other laugh. His loss doesn’t compare to the loss the Ketchum family has suffered. Time is nothing. I have had a lifetime of this already.

  “So tell me about Sarah.” Sarah, the reason I’m here. Not for Colin. Not even for Ava. I want to understand who Sarah Ketchum was, so her story will not be diminished to the reverberations of her murder. So she will not be just a dead girl.

  And I want to see Colin’s face as he describes her to me. Because deep down, I really do think I’ll be able to see it, if he killed her.

  “Well,” he says, turning his hands palms-up on the table, like he’s praying. “She was smart.” He enunciates the word to give it emphasis, as if saying all of its consonants will demonstrate the scope of Sarah’s intelligence. “She should never have been working at a fucking temp agency, that’s for sure.”

  “So why was she?” I ask.

  “She was also kinda fucked up,” he says. “Not in like a bipolar way, but more in like an ‘I’m not taking any of Daddy’s fucking money’ way. I guess her dad up and left her mom when Sarah was still in diapers. He had all this family money, and he still fought her mom for every cent of support. She said one winter they were living in a rental where the hot water kept going out, and her dad wouldn’t give them an advance on the next support payment so they could move.” His face twitches, like a wince of anger. “He was the one paying for her college, but he hated the fact that she was studying fashion design. Kept threatening to cut her off if she didn’t change majors. So she took his fucking power away from him and dropped out. Just like Sarah; she’d rather quit school than let someone else make her choices for her.”

  “Was her dad pissed?” I ask.

  “Oh my god, you should have heard him screaming at her over the phone,” he said. “I was across the room and I could hear it. You know, she’s stupid and impulsive, just like her mother, or no daughter of his was going to be a fucking dropout. Really cruel stuff, actually.”

  I glance at Ava, but she’s already shaking her head. As if she can read my mind. As if this affinity between the two of us already lends itself to telepathy.

  “Dad’s got an alibi too,” she says. “On a golf trip with some guys from his office.”

  “Plus, no one gets that angry at his kid if he doesn’t love her, you know?” Colin says. The sentiment of a kid whose father used to beat the hell out of him, I think. But then there’s my family, their indifference a different brand of that same kind of cruelty. How nothing I did could ever draw their focus from my sister’s disappearing act.

  I begin to notice a shifting at the tables around us, a sort of simultaneous gathering of belongings. I glance again at Ava.

  “Time’s almost up,” she says. It feels impossible, even though I check my watch and realize she’s right. We’ve been here for almost an hour.

  “Will you come back?” Colin asks, and I can’t tell if he’s directing the question toward me or Ava, though she’s the one who answers.

  “Of course,” she replies, while I remain quiet.

  * * *

  * * *

  WE HEAD BACK to Ava’s car in silence, the feeling of walking to the parking lot from the prison something like an escape. I only realize now how claustrophobic it was, inside those walls. The constant surveillance of the cameras, the constant presence of the guards. I imagine living my life like that, never being able to walk more than a hundred yar
ds in any direction, and can’t stop the rush of pity I feel for Colin then, no matter how misguided.

  “So,” Ava says when she unlocks the car. “What do you think?”

  I get in, sitting heavily in the passenger seat. I play it all back in my head, trying to parse the conversation, trying to remember every word.

  “What did he say to you when he came in?” I ask.

  “Oh,” she says, rolling her eyes a little. “It was Portuguese. It’s sort of a family thing, we drop into it sometimes.”

  “I know, Ted told me,” I reply, noting her attempt at deflection. “So what did he say?”

  “He made a joke that if I was going to start bringing him women, he’d prefer ones with bigger breasts,” she replies, wincing a little. But it makes me trust her, somehow, the fact that she tells me what he said. She’s being honest, despite her own embarrassment. Despite the fact that it might offend me. It’s as if Colin is just another one of those things she loves despite knowing better. And that devotion is enough to make up my mind.

  “Look,” she says. “He’s a pig. Admittedly. But I swear to you, he’s not a killer.”

  “Yeah,” I reply as she starts the car and throws it into reverse. “I know.”

  CHAPTER

  EIGHT

  Two days later, Andrea and I sit at opposite mics in her little bedroom studio, the conflicting case files open between us. It’s just like Andrea to want to record this conversation. Just like she did when Jane Doe was found, turning the recorder on before I’d even gotten back to our table in the little bistro in Lakeview. Already recording, even though she didn’t know what had happened yet.

  “So,” she says now. “From the beginning. Convince me.”

  Convince her, I think. But of what? Should I try to outline the ways in which Sarah’s murder might be linked to Maggie’s disappearance? Make the case that Colin McCarty may be innocent? Or simply pitch the whole story as interesting enough to carry our second season, even without any certainty of either the former or the latter?