by K. A. Tucker
I can only imagine. “Everyone says those things to get another prescription.”
“The coworker who called the police gave a statement that your friend had seemed very down lately. She had found her crying in the bathroom on several occasions.”
“Well . . . How recently? Because her mother was fighting cancer up until last January. I’d cry in the bathroom, too,” I say snippily. I did cry once. I bawled my eyes out for a good hour in my bedroom one night, after witnessing an especially bad day for Rosa, sick from the chemo.
“Recently,” Detective Childs confirms. “And we found a note with her body, in her handwriting, signed by her, saying that she was sorry.”
“Maybe she was sorry she missed a meeting. Maybe she was sorry that she was late. Who knows what she was sorry for! If someone was trying to stage her death, that’d be a handy note to use, wouldn’t it?”
“So that’s why you’re here.” He smiles sadly to himself, leaning back in his chair until it protests under his weight. “The ol’ murder theory.”
He doesn’t see what I’m getting at here. “I know Celine, Detective. She wouldn’t kill herself.”
“I’ve heard that a few times before. In my twenty-five years on the police force, I’ve never once seen it actually turn out to be the case.”
“That doesn’t mean it’s not possible. We still don’t even officially know what killed her, right? It’s just some medical examiner’s opinion.”
“And we won’t know for several more weeks.” Detective Childs begins rifling through a stack of envelopes and file folders. He holds up a sealed envelope. “But I had the lab run some tests on the glass found next to Celine’s body. Report came in this morning, while I was out.”
I watch him tear it open with leisurely fingers and scan through the page, humming to himself. I bite my lip until I can’t anymore. “Well? What does it say?”
“It says that the glass contained traces of Xanax, OxyContin, Ambien, and a wheat-based alcohol identical to the vodka found in her apartment. A bottle that she purchased early that day and drank half of, based on the receipt we also found. It’s a deadly combination, especially if the Oxy was ground up.”
“OxyContin? But that’s . . .” I frown. “She didn’t have a prescription for that, did she?”
“It’s not a hard drug to find on the street.”
I start to laugh at the absurdity of what he’s suggesting. “Celine didn’t do drugs.” She lost a high school friend to an overdose. The one time she visited me in college, she got mad at me for smoking a joint. “Someone must have forced it into her.”
“That’s a lot of pills for someone to force into her, Maggie. And no signs of a struggle. No furniture knocked over. No abrasions on her palms, no blood under her fingernails.” His tone tells me he’s already dismissed any further objections I may make.
He taps the picture. “And what is his name?”
“I don’t know. She never told me she was seeing anyone.”
“Hmmm . . .”
His hemming and hawing is beginning to irritate me. “Look, I’ve known Celine since she was four years old, and something doesn’t sit right with me. I just don’t think she was capable of suicide. She had too many plans, too many good things going for her.”
Detective Childs takes his time, folding his glasses and tucking them back in his shirt pocket. “Accepting that someone you love took their own life is very difficult. It’s easier for our minds to look for other answers. I see it all the time.”
He’s choosing his words carefully here. A very political answer that tells me this is pointless. “So, that’s it? You’re not going to do anything?”
“This city sees an average of four hundred and seventy-five suicides per year. I’m sorry, Maggie, but we can’t keep cases open unless there’s a good reason. My investigation concluded that there were absolutely no signs of foul play and there was sufficient evidence to suggest intent to cause self-harm. The investigation is over. Consider your friend’s case closed.”
I throw an angry hand toward the picture I just showed him. “And you don’t think this is a tad suspicious? You don’t think it warrants a closer look?”
“It certainly makes me curious, but suspicious . . .” He shakes his head. “I overheard my twenty-one-year-old daughter talking to her friends just the other day about some guy making her ovaries explode.” He chuckles. “My wife told me that means she finds him attractive. He’s not actually going to make anything explode. For all you know, Celine didn’t even know this guy. This could be some picture she found on the Internet and printed out.”
“And her phone that mysteriously vanished?”
“Yes, I noticed that. Most people your age can’t live without their phones. We questioned the neighbor and her coworker about it, and they both confirmed that Celine had a bad habit of misplacing her phone. Leaving it in coffee shops, at work. On the subway once.”
I can’t argue with him because I know that to be true. I think she lost a phone every year since college.
“She could easily have misplaced her phone earlier in the day and not bothered to do anything about it. All the other evidence was compelling enough to point to suicide that we chose not to pursue the question of the phone.”
I fall back against the uncomfortable chair, equal parts angry and deflated. On the cab ride over, I had these visions of sirens going off and a flock of detectives jumping out of their chairs to go arrest someone once I handed them this smoking gun.
Now I realize how ridiculous that was.
And I’m smart enough to accept that Detective Childs could be right. The neighbor doesn’t know about any boyfriend. Hans, her gay best friend, doesn’t know about any boyfriend. I sure as hell don’t know about any boyfriend. “What am I supposed to do?”
Detective Childs clicks a button that clears Celine’s file from his monitor.
Case closed.
CHAPTER 5
Maggie
I’ve always preferred the real jungle to the urban jungles of New York and Chicago, where my mother still lives and I visit when obligation arises. But Celine . . . she was completely enamored with New York before she ever stepped foot in the city. I can’t say I know another person who would gladly trade the beach and the laid-back West Coast lifestyle for a concrete horizon and cold climate.
Instead of staying in California, where I was enrolled in an Environmental Engineering program at Berkeley, Celine had her sights set on hopping on a plane for the Northeast and this mecca for museums and art. I think that had been her goal for years, probably since the day a seven-year-old Celine discovered my father’s Gustav Klimt in the study, an original landscape portrait that had been passed down through generations. We weren’t allowed to play in the study, and so I quickly chased her out before someone caught us.
But she kept venturing in, until one day my father came home to find her sitting cross-legged on the floor and staring up at it. My father has never been a cruel man, but he has always been abrupt and lacking patience. I expected him to discipline her but instead, he eased himself down on the floor and asked her what she liked about the painting.
I watched from the shadows of a corner, unseen, as the seven-year-old girl talked about the mix of bright colors and the flecks of gold. He, in turn, told her all about the painting, and about Klimt himself. He spent the next two hours telling her the stories behind all the sculptures and oil paintings and other pieces of art in his study.
An art history lover was born. Celine walked out of there that day and began making up elaborate stories for random objects she might find, until her voracious reading allowed her to refine her knowledge. I think that’s around the time she realized that having a collection like my father’s required a lot of money. She didn’t let that dissuade her. At age eleven and with twenty dollars of allowance money in her pocket, Celine bought a silver tea set from a local garage sale that my dad believed was worth upwards of a thousand dollars.
That
tea set currently sits on one of Celine’s shelves.
Though Rosa would never guilt Celine into coming home, I think she secretly hoped that her daughter would move back after racking up four years of college debt, only slightly softened by Rosa’s savings and a few small scholarships. But Celine had other plans.
She got a job.
I enter the same solid glass doors that she walked through every day for the last five years, wondering if Celine ever considered swallowing her pride and taking me up on my offer to pay for her graduate school tuition. She could have had her master’s and been doing what she loved long ago, instead of filing papers and answering phones at an insurance brokerage firm.
It’s a prestigious firm, fine, but still . . .
“Vanderpoel, please,” I ask the security guard, my cold, stiff fingers self-consciously smoothing my ponytail as my eyes wander to the people speeding in and out of the lobby, cell phones ringing, heels clicking. Everyone’s put together so well. I can now see why Celine had a closet full of dresses. Thankfully the chilly temperature outside has forced me into one of her winter coats and scarves, hiding my sweatshirt beneath. It’s been so long since I’ve made a conscious effort with my appearance. Over in South Africa and Ethiopia or any of the countries I’ve spent the last six years living in, Gucci doesn’t matter. Blush and mascara don’t matter.
What does matter?
Clean water.
Malaria vaccinations.
HIV education.
And it’s not that I suddenly care what others think here. I’d just rather not stick out; I’ve never been one for overt attention.
“Forty-second floor,” the guy instructs with barely a glance before moving on, grinning broadly, to help an attractive woman with badge issues.
“Great,” I mutter, shifting my focus past the giant silver-and-blue decorated Christmas tree to the long corridor where doors open and close in rapid succession and people pour out. At forty-two floors up, the stairs are out.
Thankfully the elevator I step into is nearly empty and it moves smooth and fast. Still, I bolt out of it the second the doors open, earning a high-browed stare from the receptionist who sits at a long marble desk. A wall of glass and security doors stretch behind her and VANDERPOEL is engraved on a sprawling metal plaque above. “Can I help you?”
I tuck the stray hairs from around my face behind my ear. “Yeah, I’m here to see Daniela Gallo.” Human Resources told Rosa they could either courier Celine’s personal belongings to San Diego or hold them for me. I opted to pick them up in person. It gives me an excuse to see more of Celine’s recent life, plus it saves Rosa from the hard task of deciding what to do with her daughter’s things.
The receptionist adjusts her headset. “Do you have an appointment?”
“Tell her it’s Maggie Sparkes.” I hesitate. “For Celine Gonzalez.”
The layer of frost on the receptionist’s face melts with a small, sympathetic smile. She must have known Celine. I’m sure she liked her. Everyone liked her. “Please, have a seat.”
I’m not sitting for more than a minute before a striking woman around my age pushes through the door, her arms laden with a box, her three-inch heels echoing through the narrow corridor. She’s dressed for the outside, her royal blue coat complementing her eyes.
I stand to meet her. “Daniela?”
“It’s Dani.” She drops the box down on the table and then envelops me in slender arms, like we’ve known each other for years, her soft, ebony-colored corkscrew curls brushing against my cheek. Even though I grew up with Rosa, a very affectionate woman, I find hugs from strangers awkward. But this is for Celine, so I grit my teeth and try not to stiffen when she touches me.
“How are you doing?” Bright, almond-shaped eyes, with flawless strokes of smokey shadow and smooth eyeliner, peer at me.
“Still in shock.” I don’t know how else to answer that.
She nods sympathetically. “So are we.”
There’s a moment of awkward silence as I trace Celine’s writing on a piece of paper in the box and then Dani says, “I was just heading downstairs to grab a late lunch. I’ll walk you down?”
Given it’s nearly four p.m., it’s a very late lunch. That could be my dismissal. I’ll take it, wanting to get this elevator ride over with as soon as possible. I hold my breath as the doors close. If Dani notices my discomfort, she doesn’t say anything. I normally hide my issue well.
“So, I packed up everything from her desk drawers that wasn’t company-specific, and the few pictures on her desk. There wasn’t much there, though, even after five years. She kept her space tidy.”
I manage a tight “Thank you.”
She nods. “How long will you be staying in New York?”
The doors open and I rush out, releasing a lung’s worth of air and plenty of tension. “A couple of weeks, probably. It’ll take me that long to sort out all of her things.”
“Right. I remember her apartment being . . . full.”
I follow her out the front doors and into the brisk December air. She leads me to a hot dog stand. “I wish he’d move his cart somewhere else, far away from my building. This is my second one this week. It’s a sickness,” she explains as she pays the vendor for a foot-long and dumps hot peppers and mayo over it. I don’t know where she puts it. From what I saw beneath her previously open coat, she has the skinniest waist I’ve ever seen, accentuated by a fitted black dress. “Are you going to eat?”
The smell of it is actually tempting. I haven’t had a solid meal in two weeks. But I shake my head and take a seat on a nearby bench in the courtyard, huddling against the chill. I’ll never get used to this kind of cold.
“Celine told me about what you do. You know, your charity organization. It’s pretty impressive. I don’t know if I’d be brave enough to do it.”
I smile. My first genuine smile today. “You’d be surprised how good it feels at the end of a long day.” That’s my party line. That’s how I recruit most of my volunteers.
We kill the next fifteen minutes talking about life in Africa, about the kinds of initiatives I’ve funded—giving one village of children iPads to learn how to read, outfitting another with solar panels to generate electricity for every home, training locals to teach in the one-room schools that I built. The answers roll off my tongue as if I’m being questioned by the media. It’s relaxing. It certainly helps distract me from other, darker thoughts.
“You sound like you miss it.”
I pause to take in my surroundings. The horns blasting, the looming buildings casting shadows even when the sky is blue, the hordes of people rushing past like ants running for their hills, many weighed down by multiple shopping bags. Now that Thanksgiving has come and gone, people’s thoughts are on Christmas. ’Tis the season to build credit card debt on material things. It’s not me. “I can’t wait to get back.”
Dani purses her lips together, deep dimples forming in her cheeks. “I still can’t believe she did it. I just talked to her earlier in the day that Sunday, too. She sounded down, but you know Celine, always putting up a brave front.”
“On her phone? You called her on her cell phone that day?”
She frowns. “Yeah. Why?”
“No reason. I just haven’t been able to find it. What time was that at?”
“I don’t know . . . around noon, I think?”
So Celine had her phone up until noon that day, at least. While the delay in finding her body made it hard for the medical examiner to pinpoint time of death, he estimated that she died between eleven p.m. Sunday night and six a.m. Monday morning.
What happened to her phone between noon on Sunday and her death?
“Did she mention not feeling well? Or maybe that she had plans later?” I ask.
Dani’s curls sway with her head shake. “She just didn’t show up to work the next day, or the next, and I started to worry.”
“Are you the one who called the police?”
Dani nods. “I know
she was desperate to get to California, but she still had another week at work. We were even planning a farewell party for her that Friday.”
I frown. “Farewell party? What are you talking about?”
She pauses, giving me a funny look. “She was leaving Vanderpoel and going back to San Diego.”
Going back to San Diego? I don’t know what to say. Finally, I mutter, “HR never said anything about that.” Did Rosa know?
“She didn’t want to lose any more time with her mom. Such a sad story. But Celine was still hopeful,” Dani rushes to say, dabbing a napkin at a smear of mayo on her lip. “Not . . . suicidal.”
Such a sad story?
“Vanderpoel was only willing to give her a three-month leave of absence, and she didn’t know how long it would be before . . . you know. So she quit.”
Blood rushes to my ears, blurring her words. Lose any more time with her mom? You know? No, I don’t know! What the hell is she talking about? Rosa is in remission!
Isn’t she?
“Are you feeling okay?” Dani leans in, scowling. “You’re a little pale.”
“Yeah.” I clear my throat and stand, shifting the box in my arms. “I’m still fighting this jet lag. I should probably get going.” So I can call Rosa and find out why this complete stranger knows things that I don’t.
“And look, I don’t know if Celine had mentioned me subletting her apartment from her, but I don’t think I can do that now.”
Now that Celine died in there.
She shrugs. “But I guess it doesn’t really matter anymore. She’s not coming back to New York.”
Or San Diego. Or anywhere ever again. I swallow the lump in my throat. “It was nice to meet you, Dani.”
“You too. And be careful. That’s a heavy box.”
“I’ll grab a taxi. I’m fine,” I mutter, rushing backward through the courtyard, toward the street, Dani on my heels. I make myself stop. “Thank you for caring enough about Celine to call the police when you did.”
“Of course. If there’s anything you need, anything at all, please call me.” She pauses to blink away a sudden tear. “Celine and I started at Vanderpoel at the same time. She was a really good friend to me. A nice person.”