I mentally flipped through the flash cards I’d been drilled on, pulling out names to match the faces. I put my finger on the first photo. “That’s Stuart Carlton, Bridgette’s boyfriend,” I said. I moved to the next, “And that’s Jordan North. I saw her this morning.”
The next photo showed a shaggy white guy with light brown hair I recognized as Grant Villa [20, friends with Bridgette, captain of the swim team, lifeguard at Country Club. Open secret that Aurora had had a crush on him since she was eleven. Net worth: none (attended school on scholarship). Now lived with his older brother in a trailer on the outskirts of Tucson]. After that was a dapper Asian guy, Roscoe Kim [20, two years ahead of Aurora in school, gay, $18,000,000 (or more)]. The only one I didn’t recognize was the statuesque white girl with the thick dark hair, which meant she had to be Xandra Michaels. I wondered why there hadn’t been a card for her. But that was secondary to the more major question of why Bain and Bridgette hadn’t mentioned that any of these people had been with Aurora the night she disappeared. Or that they themselves had been among the last people to see her alive.
For the second time, I got the queasy feeling that there was more to the story of Aurora’s disappearance—much more. And that Bain and Bridgette were hiding it.
I ran through all the names and photos, then pushed them away. I put on an apologetic expression. “I’m afraid I don’t remember seeing any of them the night I—that last night. And there wasn’t a party mentioned in any of the news stories I read. Are you sure?”
Detective Ainslie nodded. “That party is the last place you and Liza were seen. We kept that from the press as a courtesy to the Silverton family.” Her eyes went to Uncle Thom, and they were not friendly.
“And because Liza was found five miles away, she’d left hours before it was over, and there was no way to link what happened to her to the party,” Uncle Thom countered. “Everyone there cooperated fully.”
“Can you explain why you and Liza would have been at a party where everyone was at least a year or two older than you?” asked Detective Ainslie.
“As we discussed three years ago,” Uncle Thom jumped in before I could speak, “that was not unusual. Aurora often spent time with her cousins. The Family is close-knit that way.”
Detective Ainslie ignored him and kept her eyes instead on me. “Is that why you two were there? Because your cousins were throwing it?”
I shrugged. “I don’t know. What—what do the others say?”
“Grant Villa was the first to leave, at around nine thirty, and you two were still there. At about ten Liza approached you and Roscoe Kim and said she wanted to leave. Roscoe offered to drive you two, but by the time he returned from retrieving his coat, you’d disappeared. He figured you left with someone else, so he took off as well. An hour later, a little after eleven, Xandra Michaels, Bain’s girlfriend, went outside for a cigarette and saw you and Liza. She talked to you for a moment, but the two of you seemed to be in the middle of a heated discussion. So she wandered off in search of Bain.”
Uncle Thom cleared his throat genteelly. “I believe if you consult the transcript of her statement she just said ‘discussion.’ Not heated.”
Detective Ainslie gave him a tight smile. “Thank you. I’ll keep that in mind.”
I didn’t understand what was going on between the two of them, not then, or what the stakes were, but the sense of unease that had begun in my stomach was winding its way through my rib cage.
It didn’t diminish as Detective Ainslie’s keen eyes came back to me. “No one saw you after that,” she said. “The party ended less than an hour later when Bain and Bridgette had an argument about whether Bain should be driving. Bain got angry and stormed off, leaving Bridgette to ride with her boyfriend, Stuart, and Xandra to get a ride with Jordan North.”
I willed myself not to look away from her. “So none of them could have had anything to do with what happened to Liza and, er—me.”
“Unless they all did it together,” Detective Ainslie said in a mild voice.
“Oh, of course.” Uncle Thom’s tone was laced with sarcasm. “What would the motive have been? A thrill killing? Murder Orgy at Model House? I bet you’d like to make that stick to the Family.” He shook his head. “Do you have questions to ask my client or are you just going to tell stories?”
“I was hoping by recounting the timeline of the party that something might jog Aurora’s memory.”
I shrugged. “I’m afraid not. I don’t remember anything about the party. Is that—do you think that’s where we were—where whatever happened to us happened?”
“This is what happened,” Detective Ainslie said and held up a photo.
CHAPTER 19
A broken heap, a voice whispered in my mind as I looked at the photo, like the first line of a song, only not quite right.
It described the image though. In the photo it is a sunny day in early summer. It must not be too late because the first tiny shadows hang like dewdrops from the tips of rust-colored rock outcroppings. A bee alights from a white flower, captured midflight by the camera, suspended in time. A girl in a white dress lies next to it, head tilted, eyes closed, a slight smile on her lips like she’s in the middle of a pleasant dream. On her shoulder there is a ladybug. One hand lies next to her nose in the incandescent halo of her hair, and the other arm is extended behind her, hand open. Her legs, beneath the hem of her dress, make a number four.
When people talk about dying, they say, “She just drifted off,” or “She went quietly,” but it’s not like that. I know this from personal experience. No matter what, at the end there is a rattle, like wind making a door shutter against its hinges as someone tries desperately to hold it closed. There is no such thing as resting in peace.
If there were, though, it would look like the girl in this picture. The way she was lying she could have just finished a picnic and snuggled back for a little nap except there was no picnic basket. And the bent part of the 4 was made by her leg being bent backward at an impossible angle, the knee shattered, so that the toe of her dusty white Keds lay along her calf, not the sole.
A heap of broken images, the voice whispered in my head, and I thought, Aha, yes, that’s it. But what? Words, phrases began to drift into my mind. Where the sun beats, and the dead tree gives no shelter. The words, though not completely unfamiliar, weren’t mine. They had to be from a song or a poem, long buried in my memory, but I had no idea what it was.
I couldn’t quite believe that the girl in the picture was dead. She looked as if she was just waiting for the kiss of the right prince or princess to wake her up, waiting to turn and smile and open her eyes—smile first, you could tell she was that kind of person. To blow the ladybug off her shoulder and say, “Make a wish.”
I shuddered. Detective Ainslie said, “Did you remember something?”
I shook my head. “It’s just… she looks so—not dead.”
Detective Ainslie gave a curt nod. She took another photo from the folder, this one showing more of the surrounding landscape, and went on. “Three Lovers Point is eight miles from the building site where the party was held. We think she jumped from here.” She pointed to a spot on the side of the cliff. “She seems to have hit the wall here”—her finger rested on a large boulder—“bounced off and rolled the rest of the way down.” She waited a beat, then said, “Does anything about this look familiar to you?”
There is a shadow under this red rock, my mind burbled, the stream of memory—it had to be memory, but memory of what?—rushing on. “No,” I said.
“What about this?” She pushed a piece of paper across the table toward me, and I saw it was a receipt from a department store. “Do you recognize it?”
At the bottom of the receipt, on the line marked, “I have read and understand the return policy,” Aurora Silverton was written in the overflowing, blowsy script I’d been practicing forging for weeks. I shook my head. “No. But unless someone faked my name it must be mine. Where is it from?”
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“It’s from your last Friday here, when you and Liza ditched summer school to go to the mall. And the cashier is certain it was you who signed it. Among the items on it are a pair of “Emma” three-inch high heels in green. What size shoes do you wear?”
“Eight,” I answered, remembering the closet full of shoes I tried on the night before.
Detective Ainslie made a note on a pad, then said, “The shoes you bought were a size 10. Liza’s size. Would you have bought her shoes?”
“I—I guess. Yes. Why?” I was finding myself increasingly distracted by the photo. It wasn’t just that the girl didn’t look dead, I realized. It was wrong somehow.
“Were you trying to cheer her up? Was she depressed?”
“I don’t remember.” I stared at the photo. Was it the dress? Was that what was jarring?
“You two had originally become friends on the tennis team right? And after that you were very close.”
Bridgette told me that Liza and Aurora had become friends during eighth grade on the tennis team. It had been a few months after Aurora’s mother had died, and maybe that was why they were so close, Bridgette had speculated. I thought about how Bain had said they were nearly inseparable. “I—I guess so,” I answered the detective.
It wasn’t the dress that was wrong, I decided. It looked new, but it wasn’t unheard of for people to wear new clothes when they committed suicide. But it was something related to the dress.
Detective Ainslie went on. “She left the team after Christmas. Do you know why?”
I shook my head slowly from side to side, increasingly aware of all the things Bain and Bridgette had failed to mention. “I suppose she just didn’t want to play tennis anymore.” I had the sensation that the room was growing close, as though something was crowding me.
“Wasn’t there an altercation with another girl on the team? Coralee Gold?”
“Maybe. I don’t remember.”
“Her mother had passed when she was in seventh grade. I believe your mother passed around the same time. Was that something you talked about?”
I shrugged. “Sometimes.”
Detective Ainslie leaned forward, as though she was getting impatient, but Dr. Jackson quelled her with a gesture.
“She had two sisters, I believe,” Dr. Jackson said, consulting her notepad. “Victoria, the eldest who attended boarding school out of state, and Eleanor, younger, who was living at home. All three of them were named after English queens. Her mother had been an English teacher. Your mother was a teacher too, wasn’t she?”
“Why do you keep asking about my mother?” I demanded. I was too sharp, too abrupt. “I mean, what does that have to do with this?”
I expected Dr. Jackson to give me a long look, maybe a smile, show me she’d won by shaking me, but she didn’t. She said, “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to upset you.” Not in a counselor way—in a way that made me think she meant it. “I was hoping that asking questions about your relationship, its foundations, might trigger your memory. It’s a common technique. It didn’t work. But would you mind answering a few more questions?”
“No.” I agreed. But somehow her admitting that, and treating me like I was human, was more disconcerting than if she’d just acted like a shrink. The air seemed to be growing denser, like it was surrounding me.
Stop, I told myself. That’s all in your head. You need to focus. None of this is your business, I reminded myself. The girl in the photo committed suicide, and that is too bad but has nothing to do with you. I took a deep breath and thought I smelled jasmine. The words Come in under the shadow of this red rock and I will show you something rushed into my mind like a river bursting through a dam.
“Are you okay?” Dr. Jackson asked, staring at the edge of the table in front of me.
Following her eyes, I saw I was gripping the table with my good hand, hard. I pulled it away. “Yes. Fine. I’m sorry, I—it’s just a lot to take in. What were you saying?”
She hesitated, but went on. “Behavioral changes like resigning from the team could be signs of trouble at home. Did she ever mention anything like that to you? Did she fight with her father or her sisters?”
“No,” I answered. “Not that I know about.”
“You left your phone at the party, and when it was found, all the messages had been erased. Did you often do that?”
“Maybe.” I thought about how sterile Aurora’s room was—and the photo strip hidden in her drawer—and I suddenly realized why. I said, “I didn’t want my grandmother to read them.”
“Was that the kind of thing she did?”
“I guess I thought it was.”
“During your day at the mall you spent more than”—Detective Ainslie consulted a piece of paper in her file—“seven hundred fifty dollars total. You’d withdrawn it over the course of the previous week, leaving only twenty-three dollars in your bank account. Was that a normal thing for you to do?”
“I don’t remember.” I took a deep breath and thought I smelled jasmine again, and I began to tense up until I realized it was probably Uncle Thom’s aftershave.
“Where did you and Liza go after you left the party?”
“I don’t remember.”
“Was it your idea or her idea to go to Three Lovers Point?”
Uncle Thom cleared his throat. “Excuse me. You have a witness who saw a girl—one girl—getting into a white car heading in that direction. Which means—”
Detective Ainslie interjected, “He saw a girl. He wasn’t sure whether there was more than one.”
“—Which means,” Uncle Thom resumed with what I’m sure he thought of as a glower, “there is nothing to suggest my niece was there.”
“Actually,” Detective Ainslie said, reaching into a box next to her on the floor and bringing up an object in her hand, “there is. This button was found in the place where Liza jumped.” She slid a small plastic evidence bag toward me. “It comes from your niece’s trench coat. But as you can see from the crime scene photos, there was no trench coat there.”
I looked at her, not the button. “How do you know it was my trench coat?”
The detective pointed to the receipt she’d shown me before, the one with my signature on the “no returns” line. “You bought it at the mall that day.”
Uncle Thom threw up his hands. “Two years ago it was a watch. Now it’s a button. Really, this is absurd. There must be dozens of identical trench coats like that out there.”
A watch? I wanted to ask what that meant, but a confusing jumble of words seeped into my mind, distracting me. Something different… striding behind. It was like a bad phone connection, a radio station only half-tuned in. Like someone was speaking in my mind.
“They’d just gotten them in that day,” Detective Ainslie said. “And your niece is the only person who bought one. They hadn’t even been put on the floor yet.”
“There are other stores, in other states. That isn’t conclusive. Besides the body wasn’t found until the next day. That button could have belonged to someone else who went to the Point. Or someone could have put it there to implicate the Family.”
I noticed he said “the Family” the same way Bain and Bridgette did, and wondered how long the indoctrination took. Would I be saying it soon too?
“Are you sure you weren’t there?” Detective Ainslie asked me.
I fingered the button in its plastic bag. It was antique gold and faceted to look like the setting for a gem. In the center was a crystal heart. It was ugly, but it was also distinctive. “No. I’m not sure about anything.”
I realized that Detective Ainslie and Dr. Jackson were watching me, not like they were curious about what I remembered, but like they thought I was guilty and lying to them. “I don’t understand. She committed suicide. Why are you asking me about this?”
Detective Ainslie flipped her hand over, showing the palm. “Leaving your phone behind. Erasing all the messages. Emptying out your bank account. We have to wonder: Was it some kind of
suicide pact? She went through with it and you didn’t?”
“Oh my God,” I said, jerking my hand back from the button. “I—no, it couldn’t have been.”
“You’re sure? That is more positive than not remembering.”
I wasn’t sure. How could I say I was sure? But I wanted to. The idea of it froze me from the inside. I felt like the walls were closing in around me. “I’m—that just doesn’t feel right.”
“I don’t like this,” Uncle Thom said.
Detective Ainslie ignored him and kept her eyes on me. “Were you aware of the legal battle between your family and Liza Lawson’s father?”
“What?” The chill intensified, and with it the idea that whatever Bain and Bridgette had been planning was not what they’d told me. I was starting to feel like an animal who has walked into a cunning hunter’s trap and stands there dociley as it tightens around her.
Next to me, Uncle Thom was flapping his arms. “Okay, enough. We sat through the rest, but that is outside the scope of this meeting. We discussed this last night.”
Detective Ainslie said, “Look, Thom. There are people who think it is quite a coincidence that Liza Lawson would kill herself in the very valley her father was currently suing the Silverton family to protect. It would be remiss of me and bad for you if I did not at least ask these questions.”
“Is that true?” I looked at Uncle Thom. “That Liza’s father was suing”—I paused, then made myself do it—“the Family.”
Uncle Thom’s lips were set in a thin line. “Not exactly.”
“Which parts of it are true?” I demanded, half dreading the answer.
“The Family is just one party to that lawsuit, and her father represented a bunch of environmental groups. It is needlessly reductive to pretend it was some kind of battle between two families. This wasn’t Romeo and Juliet.”