Her Perfect Life

by Hank Phillippi Ryan

  Police, I typed after Pennsylvania. Then investigation. If something were wrong, some kind of a mystery or a situation, that would pull up the news coverage. I was looking for a good story, I knew. Cassie Atwood, person with normal happy life wouldn’t be that interesting.

  Cassie Atwood Pennsylvania police investigation. Five words.

  Nothing is ever what we predict; the universe can come up with complexities the human brain is incapable of inventing. Soon, I’d know.

  It gave me a chill. In ninety minutes, if all went as planned, I’d finally meet Smith. Mystery solved. And I’d find out why he’d asked me about Lily’s sister. I’d wait for him to bring that part up, of course.

  Out my window, Boston was edging into dusk, the streetlights lining the sidewalks with the glow of powerful blue-white halogens. There was even an ice cream truck on the street, a harbinger of the coming summer. Maybe I’d walk to Lido, in fact, take in the spring evening, see if I could hear the tinkling of the truck’s ragtime jingle. I remembered Mom buying one orange Popsicle that she’d split in half, and we’d share it, down to the sticks, as our mouths deepened to bright orange. I can’t hear ragtime like that without thinking of it, and of her. Lily and Rowen must be home now, making their own memories.

  When I go home, there’s no one. Relationships, that’s for later. Family, all gone. It’s not fair to a pet that I work this much, so I haven’t even a solitary goldfish. Or maybe I’m the solitary goldfish, swimming and swimming and getting nowhere. But I have time.

  Thirty-eight isn’t old, it is just what I am. Thirty-eight is the new thirty. Thirty-eight is old enough to have experience, some control, to be in charge. It also means I have time, plenty of time, to do whatever I want to do and be whatever I decide to be. Blah-dee-blah. I didn’t even know what that is. My life is far from storybook perfect. But for now, it’s fine. At least my life—my work—is real. My life is my work. Perfect enough for me.

  Back to my search. I hit Enter.

  I stared at my computer screen, at her name in indigo-purple on the main search page. Cassandra Blair (Cassie) Atwood, B. 1981. No date of death. An “Images” sidebar box, with two tiny photos, showed a classic ’90s college student, flannel shirt over a crop top, hair in a scrunchy, brown lipstick. She looked happy, but that’s how people looked in posed photos, the ones where you knew you were supposed to plaster a happy expression on your face. No matter what the fashion or circumstance, though, Cassie was an attractive eighteen-year-old.

  But she’d never gotten any older. Not that anyone knew of, at least.

  Links to several TV news stories from back then popped up, the headlines recording the increasing—and then lessening—emphasis on the story.

  Hamilton girl reported missing, said an early one. Family asks for help. When I clicked on that story, a quick thirty-second voice-over showed what looked like a high school graduation photo. The sound on the next story, a longer one, was full of annoying glitches and audio dropouts, but it was clear from watching the video that Cassie graduated from Hamilton High, and had lived in a modestly landscaped two-story home. Was it the one in the sepia photo? She’d attended the private and pricey Berwick University—must have been a smart girl—and that was the last anyone had seen her. I wrote Berwick on my scratch pad. There seemed to be no father, I’d noticed as I watched the stories. Police officers, very Midwest, with mustaches and broad shoulders, said she’d likely come back on her own.

  “College students,” said a local police lieutenant chyroned Walter B. Kirkhalter, Berwick Police Department, “tend to be immature and unreliable. Away from home for the first time, on their own.” He stood behind a too-short bouquet of microphones duct-taped to a metal stand. Seemed to be tiptoeing for a way to blame the missing girl for her own absence and not blame her at the same time. He leaned down into the mics again. “We are looking for her with all our assets and asking everyone to help us find her. But we are hoping she’ll appear on her own.”

  Nice, I thought. I wrote Kirkhalter on my scratch pad. The headlines grew pessimistically darker as the coverage continued. A roommate with red-rimmed eyes, Marianne was all they called her, showed Cassie’s perfectly made bed, and a row of flannel shirts hanging in “her half” of the closet.

  “There’s nothing missing.” Marianne seemed as if she could barely get the words out. Her blond hair was supposed to pouf in a Princess Di look, but one side was flat. Her eyeliner had melted into fear lines on her cheekbones. Princess Di was already dead, I calculated. But everyone knew what had happened to her. Killed by fame and celebrity.

  “Did she have a boyfriend?” a reporter in a red tie and navy suit jacket asked as he flipped a network-logoed mic toward her. “Did she seem upset about anything?”

  Typical, I thought. Upset. Boyfriend. Years pass, reporter’s questions never change. Watching old TV stories like this was like reading a book where you knew the ending. Knowing the end, it’s easier to decide what’s prescient and what’s peripheral. What’s relevant and what isn’t.

  The headlines devolved into WHERE’S CASSIE? as if, like Cher, it took only her first name for everyone to understand who she was. One story was titled “Up and Disappeared,” a reference, as it turned out, to what Cassie’s maternal grandmother, tight white curls and ice-blue eyes, had told one reporter. I’d gasped when I saw her grandmother’s name. It made me realize what I’d forgotten.

  “That girl always did what she wanted,” Lily Horgan had told the reporter with a twinge of a Southern accent. “From day one, moment one, I swear she was in charge. If she up and disappeared, I do believe she did it of her own choice. And if she doesn’t want us to find her, well, we won’t.”

  Lily. That’s who I’d forgotten in all this. My Lily must have been named for her grandmother. I did a calculation in pencil on a yellow stickie. Lily would have been seven back then, maybe. Old enough to know her sister was missing and definitely old enough to be terrified and sad. But where was she in all this coverage? We’d seen Cassie’s mother—Lily’s mother—whose obituary was later included in an anniversary story about the still-missing Cassie. We’d even had a quick glimpse of the flop-eared pet I knew to be Pooch. But they’d kept Lily off the screen. I wondered if that was on purpose, to keep her from the spotlight. To keep the little girl private. Or safe.

  The grandmother, Lily Horgan, must be dead.

  Marianne, roommate with no last name. Could be anywhere. She could have been helping Cassie, maybe, covering for her.

  Which gave me another idea. I looked at the clock. I could do this search really fast. I hovered my fingers over the keyboard, considering. Missing … I shrugged, giving myself permission to type. Missing persons who walked away on their own.

  The results popped up as varied and diverse as a Law & Order show, lists of them, terrifyingly long lists, from a two-year-old who’d been in the back seat of a van in a dry cleaners parking lot to a nineteen-year-old college student who was last seen on her way to class, to a forty-six-year-old who apparently dumped all her belongings, from jewelry to stuffed animals to a blender and a wedding dress, into a trash bin before she vanished. Or maybe someone else dumped them, I frowned as I read the story, second-guessing the investigation.

  My mind cataloged and sorted the individual stories as I viewed them, searching for similarities and differences. So many situations, but all the descriptions ended with some version of “They were never seen or heard from again,” like the refrain of some disturbing tale told around the campfire, designed to frighten teenagers into being careful and staying aware.

  Lots of white vans in these stories, I noticed. I felt like a human database, organizing and shuffling and looking for patterns. Women and girls. Mostly women and girls. Men were rarely kidnapped. Men did not “disappear.” Women did.

  Many of them were later found, of course, dead. But. I felt my eyes narrow as I looked at the screen, scanning only for the ones who were still unaccounted for. There was a pattern there, too.
>
  Many of them seemed to have set up their impending absence. Prepared for it. They gave away possessions. Made nonchalant-sounding phone calls to relatives about how they had exams or were taking a week off to take a break. Told professors they’d been called home for an emergency. They’d plotted to delay the moment someone would miss them, or wonder about them, or start worrying. They’d strategized to give themselves a head start.

  Cassie hadn’t left any notes, or warnings, or plans. Unless, of course, she had sworn people to secrecy. That would be a difficult secret to keep, knowing the heartbreak it would cause.

  It must be a terrible juggle, I thought as I stared at my screen, to decide to leave your family and friends, knowing they’d be in anguish forever. What would make a person do that? Love, money, fear, anger, temptation? Again and again, by far, most of the never-seen-agains were women.

  It was either breathtakingly self-centered or a method of self-preservation.

  Grandmother Lily Horgan had said, “If she doesn’t want us to find her…”

  Grandmother. I wrote that on my scratch pad. I couldn’t believe the reporter hadn’t pushed her. “Would Cassie have left you all?” That’s what I would have asked. “Her loved ones? Was there something she was running away from? Or running to?”

  Grandmother Lily might have had a clue. Even roommate Marianne. Marianne. I added her name under Grandmother.

  But the reporters hadn’t pursued it, not what was used on camera at least, and now it was too late.

  “Late!” I yelped the word as I stood, pushing back my desk chair. No time for makeup or hair or preparations. Outside, dusk had fallen in earnest, that May color of the sky that’s pink and purple and unphotographable—seemingly new colors of nature in wild, reckless abandon, taking the atmospheric stage for the last moments of their life, until the darkness again falls. Smith, here I come.

  I’d get there just in time.

  CHAPTER 17

  LILY

  If she hurried, she could make it. Lily followed Petra and Rowen into the kitchen, each carrying their dinner plate to the sink, and tried to come up with a reasonable excuse. Thank goodness for Mother’s Day, the second Sunday in May. That meant that today, the second Tuesday, florists were probably going nuts with orders. And open late. Willaby’s, according to her quick internet search, was open until nine. She could get there just in time.

  “So, guys?” Lily said over the sound of the water running in the kitchen sink. Rowen had put on the yellow dishwashing gloves, a million times too big for her, but she loved them. Loved squirting the dish soap into a pan of water and watching the bubbles. She’d outgrow that, Lily knew, but it was sweet while it lasted.

  “Watch out, Mumma!” Rowen had turned, and in one motion puffed a billow of soap bubbles in Lily’s direction. They floated over the pale wood floor, then plopped to the ground, popping in defeat. “I’m bubble girl!”

  “Right. Bubble girl. And now you’re clean-up-the-floor girl.” Lily smiled, though, reassured that Rowen could enjoy anything. That was the Sam Prescott gene, Lily had to admit. He could be the most—anyway. “While you’re cleaning up, you two, I’ll pick up ice cream.” She’d finally come up with an unrefusable offer. Then remembered how late it was in Rowen world. Recalculated. “For tomorrow.”

  “Jamaica Jamoca!” Rowen scooped up another handful of bubbles. At Lily’s expression, she blew them into the sink. “And I can stay up ’til you get home!”

  “Any flavor is fine.” Petra eyed Lily as if questioning the sudden shift in agenda. “About how long…?”

  “Forty-five, tops,” Lily said. “You two maybe … have a story? And no staying up, kiddo. I’ll come in for penguins.”

  She was trying not to bolt, but it was all she could do to measure her steps until she got to the front door, opened it, and stepped outside. A waft of lilacs from the garden next door floated across a soft puff of breeze, and the new leaves on her white birch rustled, whispering in their own soft voices.

  She had to stop for a moment, taking it in. She was always so crazed, moving so fast, not noticing her surroundings. Here, on her very own porch, and her dear daughter inside playing with bubbles, she tried to remember to—

  The box. The box still on the porch bench. The one Rowen had rattled. The one that held the thing she didn’t remember ordering. She stared at it, the seconds ticking by. In the time she’d waited, she could have opened it.

  She scooped it up to take it with her in the car. Or—why would she take it in the car?

  “Lily!” she admonished herself out loud. “You have to go!”

  Leaving the box, she raced to her car. The florist had to tell her, had to, where those flowers came from. They could dodge her on a phone call. But not in person. She was Lily Atwood.

  As she opened the door of Willaby’s, a tinkling from bells announced her arrival. Two women, identical in tight black tees, black jeans, and cropped curls, looked up, then smiled at her.

  Felicia and Arnelle Hunneman owned Willaby’s, named for their activist great-aunt who’d started the first minority-owned florist in this neighborhood so many years ago. Each wore canvas garden gloves and flower snips on orange lanyards around their necks. Long-stemmed roses and lilies and peonies and greens piled precariously on the counter in front of them, black plastic containers of baby’s breath holding them in place, and a lazy Susan of enclosure cards sat in front of a cash register. The bells tinkled again as the door clicked itself closed. The fragrance of rose and spicy eucalyptus surrounded her, intense as if she’d entered a secret garden.

  “Lily!” Felicia greeted her, saluting with a graceful pink rose. “Welcome to our annual Mother’s Day chaos. It you want to place an order, do it now, sister. We’re stripping the last of the roses here. After this, it’s carnation city.”

  “We don’t do carnations.” Arnelle shook her head. She picked up another rose, snipped off the lower stems. “But we may be down to daisies. Anyway—hey. You got here just in time. What can we do for you?”

  “The lilies you sent?” Lily began.

  “They’re okay, right?” Felicia peeled off her gloves, stuffed them in a back jeans pocket, came out from behind the counter.

  Lily nodded. “Yes, perfect. As always. But did you … deliver two? Two bouquets?”

  “Ah, yeah.” She tilted her head. “And?”

  Arnelle had joined her twin in front of the counter. “Is there a problem?”

  Was there a problem. Exactly the question Lily knew she’d be asked and still hadn’t decided how to answer.

  “Oh, no, of course not.” She waved off their concerns, trying to look like she was telling the truth. “But so silly—two bouquets. Same lilies, exactly. That’s what I get for being named Lily, I suppose, right?” She tried to keep it light, and talked faster to cover her unease. “The first bouquet—there was no card. But the one that came today, with your store’s card—the vases were the same.” She made the globe shape with her hands. “So—”

  Felicia stepped back behind the counter, leaned down, and came up with an empty fishbowl vase. “Like this?”

  “Yeah.” Lily recognized it, nodded. “Exactly.”

  “We have those made special,” Arnelle said. “So it must have come from here.”

  “Hey. That means those were the other lilies.” Felicia pointed at her sister.

  “Must be,” Arnelle answered, nodding.

  “We named that particular bouquet after you, actually,” Felicia interrupted. “The Perfect Lily. Because you helped us get the loan that time and—”

  “And we’re grateful.” Arnelle finished the sentence. “So—”

  “Felicia? Arnelle? Thanks.” Their ping-pong conversation was making her headache return. “Can you look up the transactions?”

  She stopped, mid-sentence, seeing the same perplexed expression pass over each woman’s face.

  “I’m just trying to find out—” she went on.

  Arnelle had taken a step forwa
rd. “Lily? Sure. We can look it up for you.”

  “Arn, those were Venmos, right?” Felicia tapped on the computer. “Huh. It’s just a weird—it’s just ‘at flowers.’ No name.”

  The bells tinkled again, and Lily moved aside as a young man in a white button-down shirt and jeans entered. “’Scuse me,” he said. He looked at his watch, then at each of them in turn. “Ah, it’s kind of an emergency.” He shrugged, sheepish. “A sorry-for-being-late emergency, if you know what I mean.”

  “It’s fine, I’ll wait,” Lily said.

  Felicia laughed. “A red-rose-level emergency?” she asked. “Or daisy level?”

  Lily tried to stay patient, though she could almost hear the time ticking away. But this poor guy, fighting on some emotional battlefield, his emergencies so ephemeral they could be solved by flowers. She thought of the lilies on her coffee table, flowers someone—someone—had sent to her, actively turning beauty into a sinister message, a false intimacy, an intrusion into her home. And into Rowen’s. And that name on the card. Cassie. How many people even knew that name?

  Cassie knew about Cassie, though. But if Cassie were still alive, and had found her, why didn’t she come out and say so?

  The bells tinkled again. The young man left carrying a sheaf of long-stemmed red roses in pale green tissue paper and walking with a newfound confidence. The cash register drawer clicked closed.

  “Lily?” Arnelle came out from behind the counter. “Poor guy. Totally in red-rose territory. Flowers will do the trick, though. Flowers always work.”

  Lily tried to retrieve her last thought—a wisp of an idea that now eluded her. But she was here to find out about those flowers. Flowers that were not flowers, but a message. Or a threat.

  “Here’s the problem,” Lily said. “I don’t know who to thank for the flowers.”

  “But the second bouquet was signed,” Felicia said. “Maybe that’s why they sent two. Because they forgot to put a card in the first one?”