Secret Girl

by Terri Elliot

  My thoughts are ineffectively drowned out by the open windows as I tear ass back to my home. I still catch whispers of anxiety, of fear. When I turn up the hill that winds around to meet my driveway, the car slows down. I ease my posture, though the muscles beneath my skin remain tight. The front of the car inches around the turn and I find his car resting before the front door. He’s home. I take a deep breath. It’s okay, Emily. You’ve been on a walk. You took your car. You drove to Runyon. In this outfit? You went out for coffee, ran into a friend, she was going for a hike, invited me along. Silly me, I was just so lonely, so stir crazy that I decided to tag along, clothes be damned.

  I push the engine off and stare towards the door. Henry’s lied. He’s lied to me, about his ex-girlfriend. Whether he’s a killer or not, that remains undeniable fact. He can lie, I can lie. I don a confident grin and approach the door, which opens before I take out my keys.

  “Hi, honey!” I say excitedly.

  “Welcome home,” he says, somewhat resentfully.

  I give a soft chuckle as I pass him into the house. “Sorry, I’d planned on being home when you arrived, but I--”

  “Where were you?” he asks pointedly.

  From the kitchen island’s corner, I turn around to face him. “Ran into a coffee.” I cringe. “Got coffee, ran into a friend--”

  “Who?” he interjects.

  I take a breath in through my flared nostrils. “Shar--”

  “Why are you sweaty?”

  I wipe my forehead off on the back of my hand. My eyes fall to the floor between the island and the kitchen countertop alongside the refrigerator. “She wanted to--”

  I feel his hands around my throat. I turn breathlessly back to him. His stare is upon me, his eyes practically pushed into mine. His hands don’t throttle, only lock in my neck with his overlapped thumbs. I think for a moment he’s going to k--

  His mouth wraps around mine, unprepared for a kiss. His tongue pushes past my lips and I taste cheap coffee and plane peanuts. He pushes his body into mine, against the island, and I feel it, stiff between us.

  “Henr--” He stops my speech with an onslaught of tongue and teeth and spit. I resist.

  Then I give in.

  I reciprocate. I reach for his buckle and begin undoing it, but first use it as a handle to turn and pivot, placing him against the island. I shimmy his pants down his legs, freeing himself to my touch. I grab hold and stroke with a violent gesture. He lets me. Until he pushes me back, lifts me up, and drops me onto the counter behind me. He tears down my pants, exposing my vagina. He spits into his hand and wets his penis then throws himself at me. We begin pumping at the edge of the counter, fresh sweat replacing the what’s dried from the previous night, some mine, much his. We fuck. It’s animalistic--

  No. Animals don’t fuck with this sort of violence.

  Henry slams into me with a power hiding ulterior motives.

  Animals are incapable of this lust. We are animals, but vicious ones. A different species. Murderers. I fuck him back until it hurts and we--

  He bursts, and his stroke slows to a quiver while I try latching onto him and pulling him deeper. But he loses his erection and stumbles back. I extend my neck for a kiss, but he bends to pull his pants back up to his waist. I watch while the cum leaks from me Henry’s back fading down the hallway towards the bedroom.

  What is this? What’s going on here? The drama unfolding in this house belongs on stage, I can’t fathom a reality that inhabits all the qualities of the preceding forty eight hours, a culmination of things dormant for years. I don’t live this life. This is television. This is surreal.

  My body becomes limp, the rush of the sex floods out of it. I feel completely lost in my own skin. This woman, this Emily, she isn’t me.

  I listen to the shower turn on in the bedroom bathroom. Henry cleans the moment from him while I stew in it.

  I have to escape her. The only way to manage that is to finish my investigation. The questions, the journal’s wandering narrative, needs an ending.

  Sarah Smith. I need to find this Sarah Smith, before the vines that ensnare us all begin to constrict.

  24.

  “I’m not sure she could have had a more generic name,” he says, leaning back in his office chair, tapping the end of his shoe as it dangles over his knee. “Sarah Smiths abound in the United States,” he tells me.

  I sit across from him, seated where I’d met him. It feels like ages now, yet the intervening weeks are an afterthought to the nature of our present business. The encampment, the murder, the coverup, the sex. It’s all like it didn’t happen, like it’s hiding in the corners of the room, afraid to entangle itself with the current objective. For the better, it would only complicate the search. I can’t afford to address my emotions, wrecked, mangled, probably rotting at the core of me. It doesn’t matter. We need to finish this. “So, nothing?” I ask.

  “Not exactly,” he says, tilting his head foreward. “Casey provided enough clues in her most recent diary entry to narrow the field.”

  I lean forward. Please tell me you’ve found her. “Where did you look?” I ask hurriedly, disregarding the appearance of my own desperation. I don’t hide anything from Geoffrey now, there’s no point. The barriers that would ordinarily separate us into private investigator and client have been eroded, we saw to that.

  He pulls his chair forward and folds his hands atop the table with a look of discomfort. I can tell he doesn’t want to reveal this to me. His eyes fall into the crevices between fingers, squeezing against one another. “The entry you provided made mention of her child.”

  “Lilly,” I blurt.

  His eyes lift to match mine. He can see the eagerness in my expression, my posture. For a calculating man, it’s unnerving, Geoffrey is a man at odds with himself right now. “She talks of her child being taken. Now, when you strip away the melodrama in her words, you get to the salient point. What people entrust children from one person to another?”

  I shake my head. “Orphanages?”

  He clicks his tongue. “There’s an organization, located here in Los Angeles, California Children’s Future Society. It’s a massive non-profit charged with undertaking a broad mission. Find a home for every child without one. They have a lot of heavy hitters that fund them, some anonymous. They’ve been operating for about twenty years. Anyway, point being, the person that heads up the organization is a one Sarah Smith.”

  I lean back in my chair. In my periphery, I view the skin of my arms retract, gooseflesh forming all the way up to my shoulders, exposed in my tanktop. I feel it in my jeans, the tiniest hairs on end along my thighs, my whole body in a state of gasp. This must be her. California Children’s Future Society. Saving a child born to a drug addict, a criminal, finding a more hospitable family. Stealing her child, offering it to a rich family. Could it be that conspiratorial? The connections are shooting rapid fire between the dots in my mind, I have to take a breath and pinch my temples to keep from getting dizzy. I peer down at the floor, the stained carpet, my flats. They fall out of focus. “Where is it?” I ask, somewhat breathless.

  “Their office is located in Beverly Hills.”

  Beverly Hills. I lean back and retrieve my phone from my purse and immediately open a browser window to search. I type in California Children’s Future Society and see what it delivers.

  “Emily, I don’t know if this is the right Sarah Smith--”

  “Of course it is,” I tell him, opening their website, an innocent looking page, happy children’s faces. I feel sick.

  “What are you doing?”

  I navigate to their contact page. There it is. My eyes pass over the digits to find the city, cross checking with Geoffrey’s information. Beverly Hills. I click it and open a map navigation. Twenty three minutes. Twenty three minutes separate me from the woman around which the chaos of my life appears to revolve. It’s not Casey, but it’s who she’s after. Sarah Smith has my answers now.

  I rise from the chair a
nd turn to exit, stray brown hairs catching in my eyes while I storm towards the door. He calls after me, but I can’t wait any longer. This mystery haunting me will be laid to rest. The door swings open to Mrs. Gonzalez on the other side, glaring up at me. I pass with her permission, though she turns to block the Geoffrey’s way as he gives chase, a stubborn older woman disinterested in the personal drama of the man she’s paid to do a job. I thank her in my mind as I descend the stairs, knowing that if I let Geoffrey put his hands on me, I might lose my resolve, melt to his reason, which I find myself now susceptible to. I can’t let that happen. The world is spinning around us all, and in order to stop it, I must follow the breadcrumbs to the final conclusion.

  I’m going to sit down with Sarah Smith in twenty three minutes.

  25.

  The lobby is an open format first floor with a visitor’s check-in situated before a series of elevators. I find the display labeling each floor by their occupant, but conspicuously missing is any mention of California Children’s Future Society. A brief moment of suspicion creeps into my thoughts and suggests conspiracy, but at this point, I don’t entrust my perspective on the truth to the words of a rambling junkie. For all I know, Sarah Smith’s operation may have its detractors, but on the face of it, a baby placed in better hands sounds like good work. But the impetus to choosing Casey’s baby, Lilly, suggests they know details about the mother, things that informed their decision. Things about her actions, about a criminality that may or may not have existed and may or may not have involved my husband. Things I must know before I can make a decision about the rest of my life.

  I catch sight of myself in the reflective surface of the marble walls surrounding the elevator doors. I’m slim. Perhaps slimmer than my last observance, a trace of gauntness to my features. My hair is a tangled mess resting atop my head, and frizzing out around my shoulders. My breasts sag beneath the fabric of my black tank top, only slightly, without a bra. My face. My face is still pretty. That’s vain to say, but it’s reassuring against the striking image of a thinner body and untamed hair. Though the expression is strange, unrecognizable in this moment. I haven’t seen myself look that way before. I feel lucid, directed. But I look panicked, distracted. The nausea at bay threatens in my belly when a stray thought hints at an unfavorable comparison to the homeless.

  “Ma’am?” I hear a woman’s voice directed at me.

  I pivot away from the elevators towards the visitor check-in and correct my hair. I brush it down with my fingertips and don a smile, something slight, but welcoming. She still observes me with an air of annoyance. I approach her. “Yes, hello, perhaps you could help me--”

  “Those elevators won’t open without me requesting from the board here,” she says while I round her desk to lay my forearms over it.

  “I’m trying to visit someone that has an office in this building,” I explain with composure. “Her name is Sarah Smith and she works for California Children’s Future Society.”

  I watch her eyelids pull down slightly over her eyes, her lips tighten. Her head turns, though her focus remains on me, with a new judgment I can’t ascertain. “One moment,” she tells me, lifting the phone to her ear and dialing. She pivots away and speaks in hushed tones that I can’t make out. I await patiently, letting my vision wander about the room for a moment. Fake trees in the corners, plaques on the the wall--

  I see a photo enshrined on the wall behind the check-in, a golden plaque beneath it with the name Sarah Smith etched in. She’s older, probably sixties, though she could be in her early seventies. Her grey hair forms a halo around her head, treated to hold that position with a great deal of effort. Its thinning. Nestled into it are her ears, with round, emerald opals that cover their lobes. Her face is aged, but puffy, made rosy with blush that accentuates the balls of her cheeks. Cheery. She looks cheery, and kind, though her eyes are beady and nearly hidden in her face. I can’t tell what color they are, but perhaps that’s the room’s lighting. It’s only her shoulders up, but I get the sense she’s a short woman. Overweight, but not fat. Too bright red lipstick, a poor choice some older women make. Harmless. In appearance.

  “Someone will be down shortly,” the woman behind the desk announces, pulling my attention away from Sarah’s photo. I look back once more and notice the plaque labels her as donor. She paid for the building. An office in Beverly Hills, bankrolled by a nonprofit’s president.

  Before I have time to mull over my curiosity, the ding of the elevator echoes through the room and a younger woman in a business suit approaches the desk. She stands behind the seated woman and lifts her chin to nonverbally address me. Her face is angular, exceptionally pale. Her black hair is pulled back in a tight pony, and her suit rests on her narrow body loosely. I think for a moment, at least I’ve kept enough weight to retain my curves.

  She lifts her eyebrows in an attempt to address me again. I wait for her to speak, I won’t be condescended to. “Can I help you?” she finally says impatiently.

  “What’s your name?” I ask.

  “Carol Bragin and yours?” she replies curtly.

  “Emily Garner-Broadhurst. I’m here to see Sarah Smith,” I tell her.

  “Uh huh,” she says, placing her hands behind her back and holding them there. She keeps her chin raised and I think how easy it would be to uppercut her. “Well, I’m sorry, Mrs. Smith is not available to take any visitors today.”

  Carol turns back to the elevators, but I call after her. “I really need to see her.”

  Carol pauses, twists her body emphatically on her toes, and smiles with a clenched jaw back towards me. She walks her way back and stops beside the desk. She places a hand against it and leans forward, speaking at a more discreet volume, “Your business with Mrs. Smith will have to come through the right channels--”

  “It’s about a child,” I tell her. I suppose my logic is that this organization cares about kids, so invoking one will help my cause. It seems desperate. I don’t know what else to do.

  Carol’s face changes, the smile disappears. She pulls a cell phone from a pocket in her blazer. “Garner, was it?”

  “Garner-Broadhurst,” I tell her as she walks half the length of the hallway to stand perfectly centered between the elevators for a private phone call. I look down at the security girl who has already turned her attention back to her computer screen and a television show on it.

  Carol returns with fury, her steps clapping against the walls in a grating high pitch. She steps up to me in a threatening manner and I feel my neck angle backwards to bring my head away from her.

  “Mrs. Garner, I’ve been instructed to inform you that the nature of your business is of no interest to the California Children’s Future Society.”

  “What do you m--”

  Through gritted teeth, she interrupts with a slithering whisper, “The deal arrived at between the Society and your husband is a protected arrangement and any attempt to retrieve your child with be met with severe pushback , is that understood?”

  My mouth opens, but she’s already entering the elevator to leave. Pushback? My child? Arrangement? I feel a buzz at my hip, a phone call I see is from Geoffrey. I push the phone deeper into my pocket and walk out of the building, on a new mission. To unearth the connection between my husband and this mysterious organization. Henry, what did you do?

  26.

  I pull up to the house and feel the blood drain out of my head. Henry’s car is in the driveway and I’m not prepared to confront him. My resolve spills out of me. I don’t know what I had planned on doing. Search through his email? As though a man with an illicit connection to a criminal front would retain communication in the form of emails. What then? Ask him? I suppose with my new information I could mount a sneak attack, catch him off-guard with a barrage of facts he’d never assume I’d learn. Then what? He comes clean? Tells me what an egregious sin he’s committed, fall to his knees and beg forgiveness from the woman foolish enough to stay? I kept secrets. From the moment I returned t
he book to its darkened corner of the attic, I kept my pursuit of the truth hidden. Is that the behavior of a loyal spouse? A good wife? I’m complicit in all of this, too. By virtue of like transgression. We both lied, we’ve both killed. I can’t do this. My breath is shallow. I’m going to feign illness. I’ll tell him I’ve been out with a girlfriend, for matcha tea, something was wrong about the mix, I need to lie down. Kill time.

  My legs feel weak as I approach the front door, a lack of energy that extends to my arms when I strain to twist the knob. It opens and swings inward by its own weight. I step in, close the door behind me, and the world mutes to a solemn buzz of noise a great distance away from me. Inside, I’m trapped.

  “Emily.” His voice nearly echoes out from the dining room. I take a breath and hold it as I approach him, rounding the kitchen to arrive at the island. He sits before me, slouched into one of our three hundred dollar chairs. He looks strange in it, like a shadow. “Emily,” he repeats, this time it’s with a tone, a parental tone, a scolding tone. The room dims around him, the air rushes out from it. Or so it feels. I feel at odds with my own reality. “What have you been doing?”

  He lifts himself out of the chair, unspooling into the air, a towering figure, not my husband. I feel my feet retreat, return my body behind the island, putting it between us. He’s standing there, looking down at me. How does he know? The nonprofit. The deal. After I came, they called him. Shit, I’m in this moment now. Sweat beads across my forehead. Henry sighs. “Why were you snooping around, Emily?”

  I fight against my own throat to counter with a question of my own, “What have you done, Henry?”

  His eyes narrow to slits. “What I’ve done lies in the past, Emily. My past.”

  My mouth is dry. Still, I engage. “They called you.”