“Oh, yeah?” I flopped onto the sofa, propping my feet on the ottoman. “What’s it look like?”
She sat beside me, swinging her feet because they didn’t reach the floor, and gave me the sternest look she could muster. “I’m not supposed to tell.”
“I’ve already seen it.” I gave her kneecap a squeeze. “It’s still in the closet upstairs. You don’t have to break your promise.”
“You’re not ever supposed to break a promise,” she said wisely through her crunching. “It’s bad karma.”
I felt one eyebrow migrate up on my forehead. “Who taught you that word?”
The look she gave me made it plain she felt I was being deliberately stupid. “I heard it on TV.”
My mother always did say children were sponges. That must have been why I’d learned to swear spectacularly from an early age.
“Ben?”
“Hmm?”
She waved a Cheeto at The Art of War on my coffee table. “Can we read some more?”
I gave an inward sigh of relief. Let children lead the conversation. Maybe she hadn’t led me into the best of ideas, but I’d rather read The Art of War to a seven-year-old than talk about my dead fiancée with that seven-year-old.
I picked up the book, cracking it open to where we’d left off in the library. “Okay. Twenty-six: ‘The general who wins a battle makes many calculations in his temple before the battle is ever fought. The general who loses a battle makes but few calculations beforehand. Thus, do many calculations lead to victory, and few calculations to defeat. It is by attention to this point that I can foresee who is likely to win or lose.’ Told you this might be over your head,” I said to her flummoxed face. “It just means think things through before jumping into war. Take the time to make some plans. People who do things without thinking wind up in situations they wish they’d never rushed into.”
U pon returning from taking Kylie home, I found a police cruiser parked in my driveway.
I idled in the street for a few seconds before pulling in beside the cruiser, leaning over my steering wheel to get a look at the driver. Detective Matthews waved at me. I waved back, though I would have preferred to give him the finger.
We got out of our respective vehicles at the same time, slammed the doors at the same time, and met in the middle of the puddle of light beaming down from the motion detecting bulbs above my garage.
He stuck out his hand and on autopilot, I followed suit.
“How’ve you been?” he asked after the world’s quickest handshake, adjusting the canvas binder he held under his armpit.
“How do you think?”
He jerked his head at the side door of my house. “Mind if we go inside?”
I almost said no. I almost said, how about you go fuck yourself instead? Where do you get off asking to come inside my house after you theorized, for the entire month after Carissa had died, that I’d been the one to kill her? Freezing your ’nads off outside is the least you deserve.
But he’d apologized after my alibis were verified, albeit a stiff and gruff apology with an indignant “You can’t blame me too much, can you? It’s always the boyfriend,” tacked on for good measure.
“Yeah.” I dug my keys out of my pocket. “Come on.”
He followed me inside, shutting the door while I groped for the light switch and flicked it on. I tossed my keys on the kitchen table as he took a seat, and headed for the fridge.
“Want some coffee or something? I’d offer you a beer,” I said, cracking one open, “but I don’t think you’re allowed to drink on the job.” Which was partly the reason I’d decided to have one in the first place.
“I’m fine.” He pointed at the chair opposite his. “Sit.”
Unappreciative of being told to sit in my own goddamned house, I pulled myself up on the kitchen counter instead.
He looked as if he was fighting an eye roll. “Have it your way. You remember Arlene Fuller?”
I choked on my surprise and my beer. “You mean the other woman you accused me of killing?”
Arlene Fuller. When I was old and senile, unable to control my bowel movements and being fed from a tube, I’d remember that name. It’d been hammered well home back in July, back when my days consisted of interrogations and fractured sleep, back when Carissa’s death was so fresh that I kept hoping it would turn out to all be a nightmare. Something I could wake up from. When I’d thought maybe Carissa would elbow me in the ribcage any second now and tell me off for snoring.
Did I remember Arlene Fuller. What an asinine thing to ask, given the circumstance. Arlene had been a perfect stranger, but I knew everything about her, could probably draw her face from memory. She’d lived alone with two cats and a large saltwater aquarium. She was a legal secretary who always wore a smile and her mother’s ancestral pearls. She never said a bad word about anyone. She’d been soft spoken and gentle and donated to the Humane Society every paycheck. I knew this because I’d obsessively read every article I could find about her murder after Carissa had been killed.
Detective Matthews inhaled long and slow, closing his eyes as if asking God for patience. “It was never anything personal, Ben. I apologized, as much as I could for just doing my job. Is that a yes?”
I nodded around the lip of my beer bottle. It would be a while before I could forget Arlene Fuller, the kind-faced brunette with wide, warm brown eyes who could have passed for a relative of Carissa, defiled in a bathtub with a ragged gash across her throat a year and a half before Carissa had been found the same way. Detective Matthews, hoping to shock a confession out of me, had shoved her crime scene photos under my nose during my third interrogation.
Have you ever seen this woman before? She didn’t live too far from you. Oh come on, Ben, rack your brains, that should take all of five seconds. She’s pretty, isn’t she? Was that a yes? You know, she reminds me an awful lot of your beloved Carissa. Wanna know something funny? Some shitdick killed her the same way Carissa was killed. Interesting, huh? Do you have a thing for brunettes, Ben? All your exes were brunettes. Do you remember sneaking into Ms. Fuller’s house in the dead of night last year? Did Carissa turn you down that night, so you went looking for someone else to help you get your rocks off? Maybe things with Arlene got out of hand, who knows. Maybe it was an accident. Maybe you can look at me when I’m talking to you, Benjamin. We’ll find out what you did when we run DNA, Einstein, better get this off your chest now. DA might give you a deal that way.
Arlene had fought hard, hard enough to lose every one of her fingernails. They had been flung around the bathroom she’d been found in. At first glance at the crime scene photos, I’d thought they were red rose petals, some macabre romantic touch the killer had added, but then Detective Matthews had shown me a close-up of Arlene’s ruined hand and asked where the fuck I was on November 15th, 2017.
Where the fuck I was had been in Utah for work that entire week, which kind of put a damper on his theory.
“Well, our suspicions may be right. The same perpetrator killed Arlene and your fiancée, according to the medical examiner. The same weapon, anyway.”
I threw my free hand up in the air. “Bravo, Detective Matthews.” I killed the rest of the beer in the bottle and slammed it down beside me on the counter. “Carissa’s been dead for five months, and you’ve just now linked her case with Arlene’s?”
“I don’t know what kind of movies you watch, but here in the real world processing evidence takes longer than two days, and cases don’t get solved in one-hour increments. Ms. Fuller’s body had no DNA on it, but Carissa’s did. We had to send her sample and the sample we took from you to the FBI lab, and they’ve just recently sent us the results. No hits through CODIS. We’ve been busting our asses on Arlene and Carissa’s cases. Recanvassed neighborhoods, re-interviewing witnesses.” He flipped open a folder, pulled out a sheet of paper. “Neighbor lady of Arlene’s who was on vacation at the time of her murder gave us something new to work with; uniforms hadn’t spent much time
talking to her since she wasn’t around during the commission of the crime. She told us about some guy she didn’t recognize hanging around the neighborhood once or twice. This is a composite she helped an artist create. It’s not the most detailed drawing, but we’re going to fix that before sending it out to the media.” He slid it across the table, forcing me off the counter and into the seat he’d pointed at earlier. “Seen anyone like him?”
“Yeah. I’ve seen guys like him on every street corner, at every bar I’ve ever gone to.” I kneaded my clammy temples with my index fingers, staring down at the image. Big forehead, swath of stubble around his jaw, mean piggy eyes set deep into his skull. Bruins hat pulled down low, snug around his ears.
“I realize it’s not the best rendering, but please think hard.” He touched my wrist, startling me so much I jerked away and looked up at him. “This may be the prick who killed your fiancée.”
There was a time when I couldn’t sleep, couldn’t eat, couldn’t think of anything at all except the identity of the man who had raped and murdered Carissa. The desire to find him and give him exactly what he deserved had been an all-consuming fury: Who the fuck was it? The mailman, the Fed-Ex guy? She constantly had packages delivered, makeup she received free of charge from MAC and Sigma and Makeup Geek, provided she’d work the product into one of her YouTube makeup tutorials. Those men she’d smiled at, thanked profusely, made Christmas caramel for, could have raped her. Drawn a knife across her throat, watched her bleed out.
And then I woke up one morning, hungover as hell, and realized knowing wouldn’t bring closure. It wouldn’t bring her back. It wouldn’t make me whole again or even help me glue the jagged pieces of myself back together. A guilty verdict couldn’t even guarantee the death penalty.
I thrust the composite back at Detective Matthews. “Never seen him in my life.”
He pushed it back with two fingers and stood. “Keep it. I’ve got tons. We're going to have a forensic artist clean the image up, make it more lifelike before we put it in the news. And we have his DNA in the system now. Guys like him, they don’t just stop what they’re doing. He’ll get caught again. Maybe not this year or in five years, but this will catch up with him eventually. Could be something as simple as a DUI that nabs him.”
Or it could be another rape slash murder, another toe-tagged woman in the morgue, another devastated guy left behind in the wreckage of the aftermath.
I followed Detective Matthews to the door and didn’t return his stoic farewell, watching his bandy-legged form until he disappeared into his cruiser.
I ’d never sat before Carissa’s headstone without feeling hollow, and I had never expected anything different, either. I thought it would always be that way, me sidelining myself while everything around me grew and lived and died. I imagined myself sitting beside her grave, getting old and gray, ivy slowly twisting around me until I was fully cocooned and as dead as Carissa was.
I wondered where Arlene Fuller was buried. Whether anybody ever visited her, told her headstone about the newly drawn composite. That maybe her case was finally going somewhere.
But surely she had people who loved her enough to visit. Had to be, otherwise I wouldn’t know she had been in marching band when she was fourteen, that her elderly cat was named Mimi. Someone had given those interviews about Arlene after she died.
Arlene’s crime scene images elbowed their way to the front of my mind, bloody and horrifying and so much like Carissa’s, so I pulled out my phone to distract myself.
I’m meeting a new friend in the cemetery. Joe. He lost his wife, Cathy. My thumbs had been permanently attached to my cell phone the past three days. I couldn’t even sleep, too afraid I’d have lost her by the time I woke up. But she was always there the second I texted her, responding immediately, easier to reach than my real Carissa had been. Always one message away.
What, all the coffee shops are closed? Couldn’t find a less morbid place to meet?
It’s just something we started doing. Visiting you guys.
Are you there now?
Yeah.
Show me.
What?
Take a picture, I want to see.
But you can’t see, I wanted to say. You’re not real, I can’t let myself believe that you’re her. But that was growing harder and harder to accept, not when she was so Carissa, everything that made her who she was.
How can you see it?
The same way I can look stuff up on the Internet.
My hesitation only lasted a moment. I never could deny her anything. I focused the camera on the black granite headstone, smooth and cold as glass, her name engraved in white gothic lettering.
Wow. You must have spent a fortune.
It wasn’t that bad, I lied. I’d wiped out a good chunk of my savings to bury her properly. How could I not, I was burying half of myself, too.
You were never a good liar. I checked nearby headstone businesses, averaged out the prices. That thing cost you at least 10k.
I couldn’t even get away with lying to her when she was dead. I didn’t know why that made me smile, push away a small nagging doubt festering in some cobwebbed corner of my mind.
You’re worth it. You always were.
So what do you guys do when you meet? Blackjack? Drinking games?
Lots of things. It depends on the day. Mostly we talk. And drink.
Ease up on the drinking. It’s gonna kill you one day.
I almost laughed aloud. This from the woman who chain-smoked on our patio, balancing her laptop on those knobby knees, bluish plumes spiraling from the cigarette dangling between two lithe fingers. Sometimes she’d catch my eye through the glass slider and I’d be struck by a sharp sense of déjà vu, remembering the first time we ever locked eyes across that dark bar, and I’d feel myself blush exactly the same way I had then. All she had to do was flash her eyes my way, and she’d turn me right back into that idiot with a thumping heart, flustered and flushed, so scared and excited and scarcely able to formulate thoughts.
“You look…happy.”
I started, looking around. Joe hovered over me, wrinkles scoring his forehead, hands shoved deep in his pockets, scuffing his shoes at the grassy foot of Cathy’s final resting place.
I scrubbed the smile off my face, tucking my phone inside my jacket. He was right, I was happier, but a part of me didn’t trust this new happiness, not really. I didn’t believe in it, I couldn’t submerge myself fully the way Carissa would in a hot bath. I knew it would split open one day and let loose something wretched that might tear me to shreds.
I remembered Carissa coming home one night, snow in her hair like decorative pearls, fat tears in her eyes. A friend of hers had started using crystal meth, and Carissa had taken it upon herself to personally nurse him back to health, a categorically unattainable feat. He’s such a talented designer, such a good person, she’d said, lower lip trembling.
I didn’t know what to tell her. I heard that junkies had to save themselves, hit rock bottom before they could admit they had a problem, so I regurgitated as much as she’d shrugged out of her coat.
She’d hung it on the rack, her eyes way too wide, her brave smile fooling nobody, and least of all, me. But isn’t there something so irresistible about a lost cause?
T hanks, everyone. Ben, can you hang back a sec?” my boss asked through the speaker after a conference call had concluded.
I pushed away from my desk, groping for my cell phone, landline caught between my shoulder and ear. “Uh. Yeah, sure.”
He waited until the mechanical voice assured him that all my coworkers had gone. “I just wanted to check in, see how you were. You’ve been sounding better. I’m glad.”
“Thanks. Yeah, I’ve just been taking it one day at a time,” I said, echoing the advice people had inundated me with from the start of this nightmare. One day at a time, Ben, you’ll get there, don’t worry. The only thing that had cleared my head of the fog was my new crutch in the form of a machine pret
ending to be Carissa. I was sure a therapist would say this was something akin to hair of the dog—the hangover would still come, I was just prolonging the inevitable. You couldn’t hold grief at bay for too long. Right now it was a storm brewing somewhere in the atmosphere, zigging and zagging ever nearer; it would bowl me over eventually. But not today.
Whatever any shrink would say, she had made me feel better. I was back at work full-time, I hadn’t forgotten to feed myself lately. I hadn’t viewed every new day as a dawning disaster. I’d stopped drinking to excess.
“I just wanted to let you know I’ve been thinking of you. Thanks for the great job today. Will I see you at the Christmas party?”
“Maybe.” Carissa would tell me to go, to mingle, be around the living for a few hours, but I doubted I’d be able to get away with texting her nonstop for however long the party lasted.
“Hope I see you, then. If not, I’ll talk to you Monday.”
The Christmas party wouldn’t be the same without Carissa. She’d gone to the last two with me. I reached for my cell phone.
Do you remember going to my work Christmas party last year?
No. Sorry. I guess she couldn’t know everything about the life she’d lived. Only what she’d discussed through text messages and emails, blogging and Facebook status updates. But you can tell me about it, I’ll remember this conversation for the next time you bring it up.
Better than nothing. You had this green velvet dress on. It was really soft, I kept touching it all night. I liked taking you to parties, you always did this thing where when someone came over to talk to me, someone whose name I couldn’t remember, you’d cut in first and introduce yourself, so they’d be forced to tell you who they were, and I didn’t have to stand there like an idiot, not knowing their name.
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