by David Bell
“Sophia knew her. A little. They went to yoga at the same place and used to talk.” He shrugs, almost too casual. “I met Madeline once. Maybe twice. I’m not really sure. When she disappeared, the cops came and talked to me about that as well. I could tell they wanted to add her disappearance to my shopping list. Might as well, right?”
“Were she and Sophia friends?” I ask. “Good friends?”
Zachary’s demeanor cools. He no longer looks like he plans to charge through me like he’s the angry bull and I’m the red cloth. But something hums beneath the surface of the guy’s body, as if every one of his nerves and cells jangles with potential lethal energy. I threw Madeline’s name out, hoping to strike a nerve. It looks like I’ve hit more than one.
“Why should I tell you anything?” he asks. “Why shouldn’t I just call the police?”
“Maybe we can help each other. By sharing what we know.”
“I can’t trust anybody in this town.”
“You don’t have to trust me. Just . . . give me a few more minutes. Okay? How well did Madeline and Sophia know each other?”
He stares at me for a long time. And I think he’s going to go ahead and send me packing. Instead, he says, “Sophia knew a lot of people. Everywhere she went, she met somebody new. That’s why the cops had to cast such a wide net to figure out who killed her. She came in contact with so many people.” He pauses, lifting a hand to his forehead. He rubs the flesh there as if he’s easing a sharp pain. “I have to tell you, man, I don’t know how this became my life. Talking about my wife being murdered. Talking about suspects. Like I’m in the middle of a fucking TV show. I just want them to solve the crime so it all goes away. So I feel . . . peace.”
“Did Sophia talk about Madeline a lot?” I ask.
Zachary drops his hand from his forehead so it again hangs limply at his side. “You have to understand something. Sophia was a sucker for a hard-luck case. She was always befriending someone, always talking to someone about their troubles. She had this instinct . . . a vibe she gave off, and others just responded to it. Like a tuning fork. Or a divining rod. She’d go to the grocery store to buy milk or the post office for a stamp, and she’d be gone for an hour or more. When she’d come home, I’d ask what happened. ‘Oh, the woman in line behind me started talking about her daughter’s drug abuse, so we had coffee.’ That happened all the time. For all I know, that’s why she got killed. And I told the cops that. Somebody probably took advantage of her kindness.”
“Could it have been Madeline?”
“If Madeline had any problems, Sophia would have talked to her about them. I can guarantee you that.”
“Do you know what Madeline’s problems were?”
“I think they talked about Madeline’s classes. Life in general, I guess. You’ve really thrown me for a loop today. I’ve been trying to move on. To . . . get past all of this. And now . . .”
“I’m sorry,” I say. “I know how that is.”
“Sophia not only was on the lookout for hard-luck cases, but she really saw herself as a protector of younger women. She took women under her wing at work. The interns from the university, the kids who just graduated and were working their first jobs. That’s who they could afford to hire at a literacy nonprofit. She wanted to be the big sister to the whole world.”
“That’s not a bad quality.”
“No.” He purses his lips. “I was a philosophy minor in college. At Commonwealth. When Sophia was killed, I started looking at the books I’d kept. I’ve been reading Marcus Aurelius. You know, the Stoic?”
“Sure.”
“It’s helped me accept what happened to her. Or at least try to. It’s helped me stay calm. I struggle with that sometimes. I’m trying to deal with stuff from my childhood. I get . . . Well, every day is a battle to do that. To make sense of where my life is.”
“I understand.”
“You married?” he asks.
“Widowed.”
“Shit. Then you get it. You really do.”
“Can I ask you something else, Zach? And I’m sorry to be so pushy.”
“Go ahead. It’s good not to feel so alone all the time.”
“Okay,” I say. “So you know that night you and Sophia were arguing, and I came in here. It seemed like you were arguing over another woman.”
Zachary freezes in place. His body is still. “I don’t know what you’re getting at.”
I think of the book. Madeline’s book. The relationship between the two women—Sarah and Lilly. Things get difficult between them when Sarah’s husband starts to hit on Lilly. And when Lilly tells Sarah, Sarah ends up dead.
If so many of the details of the murder are true to life . . . then maybe the details of the relationships between the three characters are true to life too.
“You and Sophia and Madeline . . . you were all friends, right?”
“They were friends.”
“But you all knew one another. And you and Sophia had that fight. And I’m just wondering . . . I mean, maybe you and Madeline . . .”
Zach’s body stiffens. “Are you saying what I think you’re saying?”
“Look, relationships can get complicated. Especially when we’re young.”
Zach shakes his head again. And he looks at me with a combination of pity and disgust.
“I don’t think Marcus Aurelius has a chapter about this,” he says. He walks over to the door and pulls it open, letting in the cold air again. “You’d better go before my Stoicism wears off completely. And don’t ever come back, or I can’t be held responsible for how I’ll respond to you.”
I wish I’d kept my mouth shut. I wish I’d never come.
I do what Zach wants and walk out the door, which he forcefully slams behind me.
CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT
MADELINE
SUMMER, TWO AND A HALF YEARS AGO
She wanted to go out.
Alone.
She wanted to be alone. But not by herself.
She understood the difference.
Madeline worked her usual Friday night shift at the grocery store. She’d been working there the past two years, almost forty hours a week to try to pay for school. And even working that many hours couldn’t pay for it all, which meant she still had loans. Thousands and thousands of dollars of loans. She started out bagging groceries, and then the manager came along one day five months earlier and told her she was being transferred. To the deli. The manager needed someone over there, and she thought Madeline would be perfect for it.
“You’re fast and efficient,” the manager said. She was about fifty, with three kids and two grandchildren and a husband she helped support even though they were divorced. “And you have brains, unlike most people I’ve tried over there.”
Madeline went along with the change because it came with a fifteen-cent-an-hour raise. But she hated the work. Slicing meat, then weighing it. Trying to tell the difference between something called “pickle loaf” and something called “olive loaf.” Customers forgetting to take a number and then trying to cut the line. The perpetual fear of the meat slicer taking off the tips of her fingers, leaving her unable to write. Going home every night smelling like a butcher shop.
The hairnet.
But it was a job. And it was money. It really embarrassed her only when a professor came in. Like Dr. Nye, who showed up once and ordered a half pound of cheese and a pound of ham. He looked so sad, and she imagined him sitting alone in his house eating ham-and-cheese sandwiches and missing his family.
She wanted to go home with him and try to make him feel better. Talk to him. Or make him a real meal, even though Madeline didn’t cook and struggled to boil water for instant mac and cheese.
That Friday night in August, when the students were just starting to come back to town en masse, she showered and changed at home and then
headed to the Owl’s Nest, the concert venue downtown. Live music every night of the week. And dollar beers. PBR or something like it, but she didn’t care at all. A local band that had kind of made it, the Sharpshooters, was playing. They’d been on Jimmy Kimmel once, and that had been a big deal. Then the lead singer left and they never went on TV again, but they still played around Gatewood with a new singer, and everybody turned out like they were Vampire Weekend or Cage the Elephant. Madeline wondered what it was like to be so close to achieving a dream only to see it all fall apart. Was it better to have that little taste than nothing at all? She thought about these things when she wrote. And lately she’d been writing and writing, trying to get her thesis going and not having much luck.
At the Owl’s Nest, she danced in the middle of the crowd. Alone. The music pounded, and bodies pressed against her. She held her breath for a while, then let it go. No one groped her. No one spilled a drink on her shoes. She counted herself lucky. She usually ended up with both happening at the Owl’s Nest. A hand or two squeezing her ass. Cheap beer on her pants and shoes. At the end of the night, going home feeling and smelling like the floor.
Someone bumped against her. She ignored it. Kept dancing.
Go away, she thought. Just go away and leave me alone.
The heat made her hair stick to her neck. She peeled it away, kept dancing.
The person tapped her on the shoulder.
Shit.
She offered a glance, a sideways look she hoped conveyed no interest. Better yet, she hoped the glance conveyed contempt. Disdain. Disinterest.
When she saw who it was, she smiled.
“Oh, my God. Sophia.”
“Hey, girl.”
They hugged on the dance floor. Sophia’s blond hair hung loose, brushed across Madeline’s face. Even in the cramped space amid the sweaty bodies and spilled beer, Sophia’s hair smelled like a forest of lavender.
“Are you here with friends?” Sophia asked.
“Just me.”
“Cool. I was about to go outside. Do you want to come?” She leaned in. “I want to smoke. And I don’t want Zach to know.”
“Sure.”
Sophia took Madeline by the hand and started pressing through the crowd. It was always easier to get out than to come in. People moved out of the way when someone left, and then moved forward themselves, hoping to find that small pocket of space just vacated.
Sophia led them through the double glass doors and into the parking lot, the night air warm but better than the sauna inside the club. The sweat on Madeline’s body evaporated, the hairs on her arms standing up. They moved to the side of the building, to the parking lot, where a scattering of people stood around, smoking and drinking and talking. They weren’t supposed to bring beers outside, but everybody did. If a cop cruised by, everyone threw their beers into the bushes. At a dollar a pop, they were easy to replace.
Sophia dug in the pocket of her jeans and brought out a crumpled pack of Camel Lights. Madeline felt disappointed. When Sophia had said “smoke,” Madeline thought she’d meant weed, and her hopes rose. She couldn’t afford to buy it herself, but if someone offered . . .
Sophia struck a match and lit a cigarette behind her cupped hand. She blew out a plume of smoke.
“Can you believe I’m using matches? I’m like my papaw when he used to sit on the porch. Do you want one?”
“I’m cool.”
“You’re smart. This is a terrible habit. Imagine what the people at Yoga for Life! would think if they saw me smoking.”
“I won’t tell on you if you don’t tell on me for eating one of those chemical-filled frozen burritos at work tonight.”
“I love that kind of shit,” Sophia said. “I’d eat them every day if I could.”
Sophia held the cigarette between the first two fingers on her right hand. The wind blew a strand of hair across her face, and she shook it away, the gesture effortless. Like everything Sophia did.
“You’re here with Zach?”
“And some friends. He ran into some guys he knows. He didn’t want to come. He’s kind of a homebody. And there’s a baseball game on or something. But I wanted to go out. A long week of work. Who wants to sit home?”
“Right. I agree. That’s why I’m here. I just wanted to get out and be around other people and listen to good music.”
“I hear you. Are things better with your mom?”
Madeline looked at the ground, kicked a shard of glass from a broken beer bottle away with the toe of her boot. Her hand went up for her eyebrow, got all the way there before she stopped it. “I haven’t heard much this week. When she has a new boyfriend—and she always has a new boyfriend—I don’t get as many calls. She reaches out only after the boyfriend is gone, and she’s alone. I’m her therapist.”
“Kind of like I am for you, right?”
The remark stung a little. Madeline felt her face flush.
“Hey, I’m just fucking around,” Sophia said. “I like talking to you. I’m living vicariously through you. It makes me feel like I’m a college kid again and not an old lady.”
“An old lady of twenty-seven?”
“That sounds old.”
“Well, my mom must be fine because I’m not hearing from her,” Madeline said. “I always swore I’d never be like her, never depend so much on a man to make me feel good. I want to stay focused on me. On school and writing.”
“That’s the spirit.” Sophia dropped the cigarette on the ground and crushed it beneath her sneaker. “It sounds like you’re doing well in school. And writing a thesis.”
“Can I tell you something strange?” Madeline asked. “I hope you don’t think I’m a freak.”
Madeline rarely cared what others thought of her. She tried her best to stay out of the kind of drama her fellow students seemed to be absorbed in. She hated the way her mother judged her own worth based on how a man felt about her. And yet . . . Sophia brought out something different in Madeline. When Madeline talked to her, she wanted to believe Sophia thought the best of her, that she looked at Madeline as more than a dumb kid or a hanger-on. She wanted to do and say things that impressed Sophia. Madeline wondered if that’s what it was like to have a big sister, someone you emulated and tried to impress. Someone who laid down tracks you could put your own feet in.
“I would never think that,” Sophia said. “But I will light another while we’re out here. You sure you don’t want one?”
“I’m good.”
“See. You’re smarter than me.” She shook another cigarette out of the crumpled pack and struck a match. “Go on. Tell me your freakiest shit.”
Madeline crossed her arms in front of her chest. Her face flushed again. “You know how I’m writing my thesis?”
“Yeah.”
Madeline shivered as the wind blew. “I’m kind of basing the main character on you.”
“You are?” Sophia’s eyebrows went up, and her big green eyes opened wide, catching the floodlights on the side of the club.
“Is that too weird?” Madeline asked.
“Really? Why me?”
“Writers sometimes draw on something true from their own lives. That’s the way I understand it. There’s a character based on me too. It’s about the friendship between the two women. Honestly, I’m having trouble getting the story going. There’s not much happening yet.”
“They could rob a bank. Go on a crime spree. Or maybe they become spies.”
Madeline laughed. “I need some ideas like that. Something dramatic. Are you sure it isn’t weird?”
“No,” Sophia said. “I’m flattered. Seriously. I dated this guy my freshman year who wanted to photograph me. At first I thought it was cool. Then I found out he was photographing a lot of girls. It was a way to get us to take our tops off.” She stuck out her tongue. “No, I’m flattered. Seriously. What�
��s this woman like? Is she smart? And pretty? And sensitive?”
“All of the above.”
“Then all I care about is getting to read it when you’re done.”
“Okay. I don’t know if I’ll ever finish it. It’s just kind of me writing and writing without getting anywhere. A lot of character stuff.”
“You’re warming up,” Sophia said.
“And you have to be honest when you do read it. If you don’t like it . . .”
“I’ll like it.”
“I’ll be finished at the end of the year. My favorite professor is my thesis adviser, and you know, I really want him to like it too. He’s been such a huge influence and a mentor.”
“That’s the dude you mentioned once after yoga?”
“Maybe I did. He’s a real writer. He published a book.”
“That’s cool. It matters that people believe in your talent that way. We all need that.”
A guy popped his head around the corner of the building. Brown hair, neatly trimmed beard. His eyes were dark brown, like small stones embedded in his face.
“Sophia?” he said.
He didn’t wait for an answer but walked right up to them.
Sophia’s mouth formed a small O, and she opened her fingers, letting the cigarette drop to the ground, where it sparked. She turned and said, “Hey, babe. Ready to dance?”
The guy came and stood with his hands on his hips. He looked at the ground, looked at Madeline, back to the ground.
“Really? I thought you quit.”
“It’s just one.”
“Look, I’m ready to go home,” he said. He studied the smoking cigarette and shook his head. “It looks like you are too. It’s getting late.”
“This is my friend Madeline. The one I told you about. The one from yoga.”
“Are you ready?” he asked. He ignored Madeline.
“I wanted to go back in,” Sophia said. “Do you want to go home without me? I can Uber.”
He took a step closer. He glanced once at Madeline and then back to Sophia. “Don’t you think we should go together?”