by David Bell
But Madeline is here. On my stoop.
I pull back, wondering if she saw me.
Everything I learned at the police station about Sophia Greenfield’s death comes back to me. And I knew her. At least in some way, I knew her. In my mind, I knew her much, much better. In my imagination, she’d grown to be larger than life.
And the only person who knows the details of Sophia’s death, besides the cops, is Madeline.
She knocks again, her palm pounding against the door, rattling the glass.
“Come on, Connor. I’m freezing my ass off.”
Of course she knows I’m here. She saw the lights, likely saw me through the window.
My phone is in my pocket. I can call Bowman, let her know what’s going on. She could be here in minutes and haul Madeline away. I’d lose everything.
But I’d be done with Madeline. And Madeline seems more and more like a killer.
Who might be here, at my door, to do something to me. I stole from her. I took money that belonged to her.
“Connor?” she says. “Please? We need to talk.”
Did she not do me in the night before only because Preston and Lance showed up and interrupted? Did they save my ass with their bottle of champagne and stupid jokes?
Has Madeline only spared me long enough to get the money she wants . . . and then . . . ?
I go across the room and take a steak knife out of a block on the counter. It’s one of a set Emily and I received when we got married. I doubt the knife will do me any good. It’s probably so dull it can only slice butter.
But it’s something.
My mouth is dry as I walk over to the door. I slip the knife into my pants pocket, within easy reach. The only question—would I actually have the guts to use it even if I needed to?
I’m about to find out.
I yank the door open. Madeline looks up, blinking in the light that spills from the kitchen.
“It took you long enough,” she says. “Do you know how cold it is?”
“Come on in, and yes, I do.”
She blows past me, and when she gets inside, she stomps her feet and runs her hands up and down her arms. Grendel stops barking and goes over to her, but she’s too busy trying to work warmth back into her body and she ignores him.
“I came by earlier and you weren’t here. Were you out at Dubliners with the new crop of students?”
“I wish. I was with the police, learning all about Sophia Greenfield.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
MADELINE
FALL, TWO AND A HALF YEARS AGO
Madeline walked two blocks from campus to the attic apartment she reached by climbing a rickety staircase in back. The metal contraption looked more like scaffolding than an actual conveyance for human beings, and footsteps shook it like it was about to decouple from the building and tip over into the yard.
She was taking a full load of classes, including a nearly impossible science requirement—Introduction to Biology—with a professor who wore an oversized beard sprinkled with crumbs and talked in a whisper. Madeline preferred to sit in the back of the room, but the guy spoke in such a low voice she moved to the front, squeezing in next to two basketball players who sprawled out in their desks like they were in their own living rooms.
Madeline should have skipped that day. She’d been sick to her stomach ever since hearing the news about Sophia two days earlier. Little eating, no sleeping. A friend from the studio Yoga for Life! had shared the news on Facebook, and when Madeline saw it, she literally sank to the floor, crumpling onto the shitty tiles in her kitchen like discarded clothes. She wanted to sleep somewhere else that night. Wanted to feel safe. She resorted to wedging a kitchen chair under the knob of the door to her apartment and kept a large cast-iron skillet next to her bed. Weaponized kitchenware. The best she could do.
She felt marginally safer in the early-fall daylight. She had gone to Biology only because there was a test, and Madeline never skipped tests or quizzes. She walked faster than normal, operating under the assumption that moving quickly would keep her from harm. Walk with a purpose. Act confident. When she made it inside, she planned to collapse into bed, pull the covers over her face, and maybe never come out. And keep the skillet nearby.
Or maybe it was time to move on. Try a new place. Avoid the trouble that seemed to be swirling around her.
As she approached her building, she saw someone standing at the bottom of the fire escape. A woman, middle-aged or older, in a white shirt and tan pants, her bobbed hair mostly gray. She smiled when she saw Madeline, like she recognized her. And Madeline froze about twenty feet away, uncertain if she should proceed.
The woman lifted something that glinted in the midday sun. Something gold.
“Madeline, I’m Detective Wallace with the Gatewood Police. I was hoping I could ask you a few questions.”
Madeline stayed rooted in place. She felt like one of those stupid animals, a deer or an opossum, that thought if it stayed still long enough and didn’t move, a predator would attack something else. Even though this woman bore no resemblance to a predator, Madeline hoped she didn’t have to talk to her. Cops had put her on edge ever since her childhood. A cop showing up unannounced never led to anything good. They’d shown up once when she was four and taken her mom away for leaving the scene of an accident. Later, much later, she learned her mom had been drunk and had hit a parked car. Madeline went to live with her grandparents for a time after that. Her mom was in jail—she had to go somewhere.
And more than once the cops came because of one of her mom’s boyfriends. Madeline called them herself once when one of the guys shoved her mom against the dishwasher. But the guy told the cops it was an accident, and her mom refused to press charges, and Madeline never looked at the police the same way again since they didn’t seem to care.
The woman came closer, still holding her badge up. Maybe she thought she could hypnotize Madeline with it. “You do know why I’m here, right?”
Madeline decided to move. Otherwise the woman might think she was an idiot. So Madeline nodded. Her hand started up, reaching for her eyebrow.
No, she thought. No.
She scratched her nose instead.
“It’s about Sophia Greenfield,” Wallace said. “We’re trying to talk to everyone who knew her in any way. And I understand the two of you attended the same yoga studio. Do you think I could just ask you a few questions?”
The cop looked friendly, more like a grandma than a detective. Madeline knew cops liked to pretend to be one thing when they were really something else.
Madeline ran through excuses in her mind, reasons to get away from the cop, but nothing plausible popped into her head.
She tried her best.
“Well,” she said, “it’s a lot of steps up to my apartment.”
Wallace turned her head, took in the three-story climb on the ancient stairs. “I’m deceptively fit. I do yoga too. I think I can handle it. Unless you want to talk somewhere else. We could go down to the station in my car. But that’s a lot less friendly.” The woman smiled again, took a step toward Madeline. “I’m not here to get you in any trouble, Madeline. I’m just here to find out what happened to Sophia. It’s possible you don’t know anything useful. And if you don’t, then I’ll just leave. But the sun is hot, and you have those books you probably want to put down.”
Wallace nodded toward the metal stairs, raising her eyebrows. She looked like she was suggesting something fun. An adventure. A day at the park. Not questions about a woman who’d been murdered.
But Madeline hadn’t talked about Sophia with anyone. Maybe she needed to. At least some parts of it.
“Okay,” Madeline said. “Let’s go.”
CHAPTER THIRTY
Wallace complimented the skylight but nothing else. Madeline trusted her more because she didn’t try to co
me up with some bullshit about what a homey apartment it was. Madeline knew it was a dump, crappy even by student standards. But it was all she could afford without mortgaging her entire future. As things stood, she’d be paying off loans until the end of time.
And she’d be paying off those loans while trying to make it as a writer.
Poverty much?
Wallace settled on a chair Madeline had rescued from the Salvation Army store. A five-dollar special. She’d asked the guy downstairs—the one who frequently played music so loud her own windows shook—to help her pick it up, and together they’d wedged it into the trunk of his car. He’d carried it up by himself, and clearly thought he was going to get something more in return than the cup of tea Madeline gave him. She knew she’d disappointed him, but Madeline had enough trouble in her life without getting entangled with a neighbor. Her mom, who wasn’t good for much, taught her that: Maddy girl, don’t shit where you eat.
Thanks, Mom.
Madeline sat in the other chair, which had remained in the apartment after the previous tenant moved out. Madeline had thrown a sheet over it before she sat in it the first time, hoping to cover it up and eventually forget about the multiple unidentified stains on the upholstery.
Wallace smiled. “I know this is hard. It’s always difficult when a young person dies senselessly.”
It wasn’t a question. Madeline knew she was supposed to look sad, to nod her head and bite her lip. So she did.
“You knew Sophia from Yoga for Life! How long had you been seeing her there?”
“I guess a few months. I started going at the beginning of the summer. I only go once a week. On Tuesday evening they have a pay-what-you-want class, so I go then. I usually put in a dollar. I feel cheap, but it’s all I can afford.”
“Sure. That’s student life. Did you ever socialize with Sophia? Outside of the yoga studio?”
Without meaning to, Madeline looked at the door and then back at Wallace. If asked why her eyes made that dart across the room, Madeline would refer back to her childhood, to the times the police came and asked her questions about her mother or, perhaps, one of her mother’s boyfriends. Madeline felt certain one of those boyfriends—and she couldn’t name the guy or even picture him in her head anymore—gave her the advice never to enter a room without knowing how to get out. The cops, he said, liked to cover all the exits, but if you tried hard enough, you could always find a window, a trash chute, an exhaust vent. . . .
So much worthwhile wisdom from her childhood. She felt certain most of her classmates at Commonwealth had grown up in very different worlds from the one she had grown up in. She tried to embrace the difference, tried to see herself as unique. She knew she’d absorbed it all, knew it was part of who she was. A college education didn’t bleach it all out of her.
“You’re not in any trouble, Madeline,” Wallace said. “This is fairly routine. And I’m not even the lead investigator on the case. I’m just helping out.”
Madeline knew there was only one door. And if she went out a window, it was a three-story drop to the yard below. She took her life in her hands enough just by going up and down the rickety stairs every day.
“We went to get coffee sometimes,” Madeline said. “Just to talk after yoga. And I saw her out at a concert once. And we talked there.”
Madeline had noticed Sophia a month before they ever spoke. Sophia looked older than Madeline by a few years and wore a wedding ring on her left hand. Sophia’s body looked like it was chiseled out of rock, like it would take several good-sized men to be able to push her over. And maybe not even then. Madeline had once stood behind her at yoga and marveled at how gracefully she did every move, her blond hair in a long braid down her back. More than once, Madeline had opted to do child’s pose instead of something particularly difficult the instructor presented. But not Sophia. She had done everything, never missing a beat. Strength, beauty, and poise had radiated from her as if they came from a glowing core.
“What did you talk about?” Wallace asked.
Madeline knew she couldn’t tell Wallace everything they’d talked about. She couldn’t say any names, not in a town as small as Gatewood, a place where everyone seemed to know everybody else three times over. And Wallace was here to talk about Sophia’s life. Not Madeline’s.
“I guess I just told her some of my problems,” she said. “Mostly we talked about school. My future plans. My writing. I’m working on a thesis, and it’s kind of . . . Well, one of the characters is based on Sophia.”
“Is it finished? Can I see it?”
“Oh, no. Not even close. In fact, I might . . . I might trash it and start over. It isn’t very good.”
“How did Sophia feel about you writing about her?”
“When I first told her, I guess she thought it was a little weird. But once I explained it, she didn’t seem to mind. She was really supportive. And Sophia gave me good advice. She listened, and, you know, she was a little older, so she saw things the way my friends couldn’t.”
Friends. Madeline didn’t have a lot of friends. She had talked to Sophia in a more real way than to any of them. Sophia just seemed to invite that kind of openness.
“Did she ever talk about her own life?” Wallace asked.
Madeline didn’t know if the relief showed on her face or not, but she felt it. A wave passed through her, and despite the awful circumstances of Sophia’s death and the nausea she still felt over it, she didn’t want to talk about her own life, which was nowhere near as orderly and straightforward as the animal taxonomy she was learning about that semester.
Madeline thought about her answer. She wanted to be clear and, since she could, honest with the cops. “She talked about her job more than anything else. The one at the nonprofit. How they helped kids with literacy, which I thought was awesome since I’m an English major. And she talked about her house. I guess she’d just bought one and was fixing it up. It sounded like it needed a lot of work.”
“Did she talk about her husband?”
Madeline scanned through her memories of her conversations with Sophia and decided she didn’t have anything to lie about. “She didn’t.”
“Never?”
“Never.”
Wallace remained quiet and still. If the conversation between them came down to a waiting game, it was obvious to Madeline that Wallace would win. She looked like a guru, a Zen master, someone content to sit on that crappy-ass chair for hours at a time until Madeline said something, anything she could use. She looked perfectly at ease in the cramped attic apartment, not bothered by the stuffy air, the scattered books, the dirty laundry spilling out of the lone closet.
But Madeline held the line. If Wallace wanted to know what had happened at the party, she could ask. And if she wasn’t going to ask, Madeline wasn’t going to offer. And nothing really happened anyway. And how on earth could any of it be related to Sophia being murdered?
Could it?
Wallace broke the spell by asking, “Did Sophia ever say anything was wrong in her life?”
“To be perfectly honest, Detective, we mostly talked about me. Maybe I went on too much about my own issues.”
“She was a good friend, then.”
Madeline didn’t use the word “friend” lightly. Did it apply to Sophia? Was Madeline nauseated by her death and sleeping with the skillet next to her bed just because a woman had been murdered in Gatewood? Or was she feeling so distraught because she had known the person and cared about her?
She decided there was something real there. A real sense of loss. A real pain that stabbed her in the side and wouldn’t stop.
Like when her dad died when she was three. Aortic aneurysm when he was only twenty-nine. Twenty-nine. Who did that fucking happen to? It was like winning the world’s worst lottery. And Madeline reminded herself at least once a week not to dwell on her dad’s death, not to think about
the alternate timeline that could have been her life. A life where she grew up with him, in a normal house, and her mom was happy.
Was all of that too much to ask?
Don’t think about it.
“Yes, she was a good friend.” Madeline looked down at her stained threadbare carpet. “Is it true what they said online? That someone strangled her in her car?”
“It’s true,” Wallace said.
Something rose in Madeline’s throat, the feeling that came right before she threw up. She lifted her hand to her mouth and was about to run for the bathroom when the feeling started to pass.
“Are you okay?” Wallace asked.
“I think so.”
“Do you want me to get you some water?”
“I’m okay,” Madeline said. “It’s just . . . How could someone get so close to another human being and kill them? It seems so—”
“Personal?”
“Yes. I was going to say ‘intimate.’ ”
“Strangulation is a very personal, intimate way to kill someone. But it doesn’t mean the killer knew Sophia. Some killers just like doing their business a certain way. It gives them a sense of control to put their hands on their victims. Especially if the victim’s a woman.”
“That’s so sick.”
“Or a killer may use another item to strangle a victim. Sometimes that gives them the thrill they’re after.”
“Is that what happened?”
Wallace shrugged and stayed quiet.
Madeline felt tears rising inside of her, stinging her eyes. She pressed her lips tight, tried to hold it together.
But Wallace was no dummy. She saw it. She saw how upset Madeline was.
“I’m sorry to bring all this up,” Wallace said. “Do you have someone you can talk to about this? Another friend? Or your parents?”