Her Perfect Life

by Hank Phillippi Ryan

  “I’ve watched you on TV,” he said. “Everyone has. And I knew what you wanted—a perfect story. The spotlight. Success. So without you knowing who I was, I gave that to you. It’s easy. I’m a detective. No big deal.”

  “Why, though?”

  “Ma’am?”

  Lily flinched at the voice outside her window, the rap on the passenger-side door. Turned to see a twentysomething wearing a gray shirt with a crimson horse stenciled on the front, the name Erik embroidered across the top of the pocket, and a ball cap turned backward. A scruff of attempted beard. The fragrance of motor oil and marijuana wafted into the car.

  “Are you Lily Atwood?” he asked. He narrowed his eyes, looked at her. “You are, yeah, I see that now, too. Huh. Guy over there—” He pointed in the directon of the glass-fronted office.“Thought he recognized you. So what’s up? You doing a story about this gas station?”

  “Oh, thanks, Erik.” Lily gave her best smile. This guy. All she needed. “So lovely to meet you. No, we’re on the way to an appointment and my—”

  “Friend,” Banning broke in.

  “Needed air for his tires,” she finished.

  Erik shook his head, disdainfully world-weary. “Right. I know how you guys work. You TV people. You’re lying. You can’t be here without permission. Just because you’re TV, doesn’t mean you can just—hey. Wait.”

  Lily saw his expression change from cynical to accusatory.

  “Are you watching us or something?” He pointed a grimy forefinger at her. “Filming us? I have to call corporate, you can’t take pictures here. Is that your cameraman? You have to leave. I’m gonna get nailed to the wall if you’re taking pictures.”

  Lily tried the smile again. “No, truly, we’re just chatting while we wait for our—”

  A flash of light interrupted her explanation.

  Erik had taken a photo of them. And now brandished his black phone at her. “I got the goods here,” he said. “And I’m gonna send it to corporate if you try to pull anything. I have proof that I saw you, and told you to go away.”

  “It’s a public place, Erik.” Lily’d had it with this kid. This was insanity upon insanity, but no matter what, they had the right to be here. Plus Erik’s dismissive “you’re TV” annoyed her. “You can’t tell us—”

  Banning had shifted into drive. “Gotcha, buddy,” he said, leaning across the console and speaking out Lily’s window. “Don’t want to get you in trouble. We’re gone.”

  He inched the car forward, Lily barely managing to get her car door closed, then steered past the gas pumps and out toward the curb.

  Lily twisted around to look over her shoulder and out the back window at Erik, who was still standing at the air pump, intently tapping the screen of his cell phone. She yanked her seat belt back on. His snapshot of her was probably about to be tweeted out to his who knew how many followers, maybe with some slacker-triumphant #screwthemedia tag, and his perceived victory over the man.

  “Nice to be recognized,” Banning said, pulling back into traffic. “Although—guess your undercover days are over.”

  “Yours, too,” Lily said. “So. You’re Smith. And I’m grateful for the stories. Now where the hell is Greer? And what do you know about my sister?”

  BEFORE

  CHAPTER 35

  CASSIE

  Cassie was one step from the bathroom. If she’d been one second faster, one second more confident, one second more decisive, she’d have been able to hide in the steamy privacy of the shower while Marianne handled Rajit. The resident assistants, freshmen were told on day one, were the dorm’s absolute authority figures. And they could enforce the honor code rules, even to the point of recommending suspension, or worse. No men allowed except with permission and open doors, no alcohol, no loud music. Drugs of any kind meant instant expulsion, with no second chances. Rajit Rey, who might have been a supermodel in some other universe, now patrolled the hallways of Alcott Hall like she’d developed some personal radar that pinged on trouble. On hot plates. Cigarettes. Open booze.

  Marianne, still clutching her philosophy book, now approached the RA as Cassie stood still, trapped by the opened door and Rajit’s all-encompassing presence.

  “Hey, you two.” Rajit penned two firm check marks on her clipboard as if she’d accomplished some mission. “Meeting in the hallway. Like, now.”

  “What’s wrong?” Marianne, sounding concerned, set her book on the bed and took a few steps closer to the opened door.

  “I’m doing this one floor at a time,” Rajit said. “By the elevators. Now.”

  They’d had a few of these meetings since school started two months ago. Someone’s backpack had gone missing, and then forty-two dollars in cash from a desk drawer. Drugs had been confiscated, and everyone said it was roofies. A girl from someplace like Boston, who was even in Zachary Shaw’s biology class, had “decided to go home” soon after. Had she known Jem, too? Cassie almost fainted now with that possibility.

  Rajit pivoted on one black leather trainer and turned her back to them. “Put on shoes, Cass,” she called over her shoulder.

  Cassie wasn’t the only one in a bathrobe as she and Marianne joined the murmuring huddle in the rectangle beside the three silver elevators. Friday night at Berwick, you could pretty much tell who was who at a moment like this, Cassie thought. The flannels and flip-flops and oversize pajama shirts of the stay-in studiers, the careful eyeliner and cleavage of the ones who planned a night prowling the bars of Mountville Street.

  Not one of them, Cassie thought, carried the baggage she did. Of conscience, and a haunting decision. Mom always said if you told the truth and were sincerely sorry, then everything would be forgiven. Wrong.

  She tied her robe belt tighter around her waist and tucked the lapels up under her neck, high as she could. Seventeen girls lived on Alcott Three now, since that Boston girl had bolted. They’d made a two-ringed semicircle around Rajit, who, clipboard in hand, stood in front of the shiny closed doors of the middle elevator.

  “Ladies?” Rajit surveyed her charges, pointing her black pen at each of them, counting. “Good, seventeen. I need your full attention. In the back? Karen? Hannah? You two want to hold your private conversation for later, please?”

  With a murmur of sheepish assent, the students shifted positions in the too-small area, some with arms crossed, others with fingers absently twisting strands of hair. Third-floor Alcott was all freshmen, away from home for barely two months.

  Cassie had chosen a spot farthest on the end, positioned herself behind Marianne. Cassie needed a barrier. Needed to hide her expression, if she had to. This meeting was probably about some new transgression, or new rule, or even about what happened at Wharton Hall, though the campus paper was reporting the police and the gas company had decided the explosion was an accident. Cassie yearned to be alone. To think about what—if anything—to do about Jem.

  “So, ladies.” Rajit tapped the edge of the clipboard against her chin. “Let me assure you, first, there’s nothing to be afraid of.”

  “Afraid of?” a voice near the window almost yelped.

  “Shh,” someone else whispered. “Let her talk.”

  “Yikes.” Marianne took a step back as if fear had pushed her into Cassie, who stumbled backward, off balance. “Oh, sorry, Cass,” she said.

  Cassie made herself even smaller.

  “Berwick officials have asked me to inform you that—” Rajit consulted her clipboard, took a deep breath, then continued. “One of our community has been found unresponsive in their off-campus apartment. Law enforcement officials and campus authorities are now investigating the circumstances under which—”

  “Raj? Was it drugs? Bad drugs?” The voice came from down the line, Cassie couldn’t see who.

  “Like an overdose?” someone added.

  “If you’ll let me finish, please.” Rajit glared them into silence. Checked her clipboard again. “Circumstances under which this student was found.”

 
“Are they dead?”

  “Dead?”

  “Someone’s dead? Who’s dead?”

  Their muddle of voices blossomed into a cloud of curiosity and concern. Cassie could almost feel the loops of fear tightening around her. Dead?

  Rajit went on as if no one had interrupted. “Officials assure you that you are not in danger. You have no reason to be afraid. Elizabeth, you inquired, rather quickly, about bad drugs.” The RA eyed the student who’d spoken up. “If you have any information about such things, I’d ask you to come to my office immediately after this session. You’ve signed an honor code, as you know, Elizabeth, and I find your question disturbing. If there’s something you’d like to report—”

  “No, no.” Elizabeth waved both palms in front of her as if wiping away the subject. “I only wondered.”

  Rajit clicked her ballpoint, wrote something on the clipboard.

  Cassie almost felt the weight of Rajit’s gaze as it landed on her, for half a beat too long? This was Jem, it had to be about Jem, there was no way it wasn’t. But she couldn’t ask, couldn’t even let it be known that she knew him. A flicker of hope tried to struggle to the surface. Maybe this was about someone else?

  “So,” Rajit went on. “I am asked by campus and law enforcement officials to let you know that if you have any information about a person named Jeremy Duggan—”

  And there it was, there was no papering it over, no hiding from it, no hoping, no more bargaining with the universe. When Marianne turned to look at her, eyes wide, Cassie tried to return her surprised look in kind, as if this were just as baffling or coincidental as Marianne thought it was.

  The murmurs again, the whispers.

  “Wasn’t he the one who—?”

  “The guy in the explosion, right?”

  “He’s in the hospital, though, isn’t he?”

  Cassie’s mind felt flat, like someone had erased the whiteboard of her lies. What had she told Marianne about Jem? Marianne, ditz though she appeared, had a ridiculously good memory, even remembered Jem’s name from the newspaper, must have, because Cassie was pretty sure she herself had never mentioned it. It had been more than two hours since she’d left his apartment. Whoever he’d asked to come help him—that’s who’d found him.

  As Rajit hushed the students again, Cassie had taken herself back to that apartment, tweed and leather, to the darkening forest out the window, to the sound of the tap water flowing into the nubby blue glass, to the cool feel of the glass full of pink wine. To the baggies in the cabinet. To Jem, talking on the phone to someone.

  She’d worried that Jem had specifically told his friend her name. That possibility, the frustratingly unknowable possibility, was the one thing that linked her to him.

  “Information about a person named Jeremy Duggan,” Rajit repeated, her voice pitched over the murmuring whispers, “or what he might have been involved with in his apartment, or elsewhere, or if you know anyone who might know something relevant—” Rajit’s eyes swept across the women who were listening, rapt, focused.

  Cassie could almost hear her dorm-mates’ thinking. Did they know him? Did they know anyone who knew him? She could totally hear Marianne’s brain at work.

  “You are asked to contact campus officials. Or come to me. All discussions will stay confidential.”

  The elevator light pinged over Rajit’s head again, and the familiar sound seemed to punctuate the realization that had just connected in Cassie’s mind.

  If Jem’s friend, whoever that was, the one who’d come to take care of him and found him dead—he was dead, and no way to talk herself out of that—if Jem’s friend knew she had been in that apartment, there would have been no “informational” meeting in this elevator hallway.

  If Jem’s friend knew her whole name, that she was Cassie Atwood, then the police would have come to find her.

  But they hadn’t.

  Maybe she was free.

  NOW

  CHAPTER 36

  LILY

  Banning did not look at her. Keeping his eyes on the road ahead, he plucked his phone from the car’s center console and handed it to her.

  Lily accepted it, curious. “The screen is black,” she said.

  “Tap it,” Banning instructed.

  Lily touched the dark screen with one finger, and a photo appeared. Black and white, a screenshot from a newspaper. She used her thumb and forefinger to expand it, focusing on the block-lettered headline, though it was now so close up it only allowed her to read a few words at a time.

  Local, she read. Detective. Fatal crash. She looked at Banning, who seemed to be hyper-focused on driving. She returned to the screen, scrolling down, skimming. Scrolled up again. “Local detective succumbs after fatal crash,” she said out loud. “This is in the Berwick paper. About that detective, Kirkhalter.” She stared at the screen, reading as she did. “Crash still under investigation, lead detective in the Cassie Atwood—‘disappearance,’ it calls it.”

  “Keep reading,” Banning instructed.

  “But I know this,” she said. “I’ve read every article and every—”

  “Humor me.” Banning clicked on his turn signal and steered toward a stone-sided bridge over what Lily knew was a narrow estuary of the Charles River, today lined with redwood picnic tables, benches now empty, and with a lone figure holding a fishing pole, rubber boots ankle-deep in the water, poised at the bank’s edge. The tips of slender marsh grass barely touched the surface, bobbing away as the breeze ruffled them, and a single green-headed mallard glided away, keeping his distance from the fisherman. A shield-shaped metal sign on a bright blue pole welcomed them to Watertown.

  As they crossed the bridge, Lily focused back on the little screen, which had darkened again as she got her bearings. Watertown, she thought. Why are we here? Greer had been “gone” for three hours now. And Lily still didn’t understand what “gone” meant. Plus, no officials had contacted her in search of her “missing” producer—no station management, no colleagues, no real Boston police detectives. But not Greer herself, either. Still, Banning hadn’t answered any of her other questions, so she figured he wouldn’t start now. She tapped the screen again.

  “Retired from the force,” she said, skimming as she read it out loud. “One sensational story in his thirty-some years on the job, the still-unsolved Cassie Atwood case. No apparent cause of the—listen. I know this, Banning.”

  He drifted through an octagonal stop sign and turned left onto an even narrower street. “Keep reading.”

  “Services, donations. Detective Kirkhalter leaves a wife, the former Sandra Wyzeck, and a son—”

  “There you go,” Banning interrupted.

  Lily stopped. Stared at the screen. “Walter Banning Kirkhalter Jr.” She read the name, then looked at Banning. Then back at the screen. “You’re kidding me.”

  “Nope. Yup.” Banning looked almost sheepish. “You can still call me Banning. My mother did, though it’s really my middle name. To her, the only Walt was my dad. I was still a part-time student at the time he was a Berwick town cop.”

  Lily pursed her lips, trying to calculate.

  “Are you saying—you were at Berwick College?” Lily waved his statement out the car window. “Come on.”

  “Not with your sister, if that’s what you’re thinking.” Banning shook his head. “I always wanted to be a detective, too, but Dad told me…” He shrugged, seemed to be remembering. “Over his dead body. His words. We say things like that, you know, offhand. It’s only an expression. Until it’s reality.”

  Lily, eyes on Banning and watching his expression change, remembered what Cassie had said to her. Cassie had told her she loved her. That was reality. And it wasn’t a dream.

  When Cassie vanished, Lily had been about Rowen’s age. Those sweet and formative years when every experience may be the one that changes you forever. Cassie had changed her, that was certain.

  And Rowen. Her trusting and sensitive little girl, who at seven hadn’t grown out
of stuffed penguins and hair ribbons, and who still willingly snuggled with her under Gramma Lily’s pastel crocheted afghan, and slept with Cassie’s Penny. Rowen would become a teenager, in the blink of an eye, with intent, and passions, and what might happen to her? She’d be seventeen, eighteen, someday, and go off to college. And then what? Lily had not explained Cassie’s story to Rowen—how could she, when she didn’t understand it herself?

  So Detective Kirkhalter was Banning’s father. Lily’s mind raced ahead. That’s why he was here. He knew something about Cassie.

  He seemed to be heading into the residential part of Watertown, a warren of twisty streets and well-kept houses. Many, she saw, with manicured forsythia bushes, the last of their yellow holding on in a losing battle against summer, and some with scatters of crocuses lining paved driveways.

  Detective succumbs, Lily silently read the headline again. “I’m so sorry. I’d somehow gotten the impression that he’d died instantly,” Lily said.

  “No,” Banning said. “Might as well have, though.”

  “I’m sorry,” Lily had to say again.

  “Yeah. Before he died, though, before the crash? He told me about your visit.”

  “He did?” Lily wondered what he might have said, whether he’d regretted how unpleasant he’d had been to her, how cynical and dismissive. Banning, Smith, she remembered, or whatever his name was, was lurching toward a point. And she did not want to derail his intentions. He knew about Greer. And Cassie.

  “He felt bad about it,” Banning went on. “He knew you were upset. It was hard for him to talk about that case. He’d initially been gung ho, he’d find the bad guy, get justice for Cassie, all the things cops say, and then at some point…” His voice trailed off. “My dad had his secrets, police business, he’d say, and we were taught to respect that, not ask questions. But I knew he looked—changed.”