And Now She's Gone

by Rachel Howzell Hall

  Alabama Department of Public Health kept all vital records—birth, death, marriage—and that office was located more than 150 miles away, in Montgomery. Anyone could request a copy of a certificate, but to obtain a certified print, that person needed to have legal authority and be able to verify their identity. Isabel had known the answers to those questions.

  She texted Clarissa, hoping that the millennial had forgiven her. Hey! Do you know anyone in Social Security?

  The women wearing Mardi Gras colors had reached the Escalade and had joined hands. The one in gold turned her face toward heaven and prayed for peace, joy, and favor. Words poured from her lips and rode on the breeze sweeping through Gray’s car, and Gray hoped that she’d been infected by this prayer and that God would grant her peace, joy, and favor, too.

  Clarissa texted:

  Burt Polasek info attached. AND YES I’M STILL MAD.

  All Gray cared about was the time in which Elyse Miller had requested a replacement Social Security card. Gray read Burt Polasek the number from the picture she’d taken of the card found in the cabin up in Idyllwild.

  Burt tapped and pecked at a computer keyboard. “Looks like she requested a card a while ago, twenty-five years ago—Oh.”

  “What?”

  “We issued an entirely new number,” Burt said, “because Elyse Miller never had an old number. She didn’t have to replace anything.”

  “Right,” Gray said. “Because the real Elyse Lorraine Miller had been a two-year-old when she died in 1975, and her parents probably hadn’t thought that their toddler needed a number then.”

  “Uh-huh…”

  “How did she find that poor little girl’s identity in the first place?”

  “Scouring newspaper obituaries and Social Security death annexes,” Burt Polasek said. “It takes some skill, but it happens all the time. A dead baby is the perfect identity to steal.”

  “Did she have to explain her request for a Social Security card?” Gray asked.

  “It says here”—Burt Polasek tapped keys—“she never had a physical card and she needed one for college.”

  “And she did what to obtain a physical card?”

  “All she needed was a certified birth certificate and a form of identification, like a driver’s license.”

  “So she got a copy of the birth certificate for Elyse Miller, used it to get a driver’s license as Elyse Miller, and used all of that to get a Social Security card as Elyse Miller.”

  Burt said, “Probably.”

  “Has she paid into the system as Elyse Miller?” Gray asked.

  “Yes, she worked under that name, but then…”

  “She had her name legally changed. I know that she’s now Isabel Lincoln.”

  “Ah. Okay.”

  “Any background on this?” Gray read off Isabel’s Social Security number as one plump raindrop and then another struck the Chevrolet’s windshield.

  Burt tapped the keyboard again. “Isabel Lincoln started paying Social Security five years ago. And according to our system—Wait. What Social Security number do you have?”

  Gray repeated the number.

  He said, “Hmm.”

  “What?”

  “Her address?”

  “Forty-three forty-three Don Lorenzo Drive.”

  “I have an address on Seventy-Seventh Avenue in Inglewood. Her parents are…”

  “Christopher and Hope—”

  “Lincoln, yes. They’re dead. But, according to my records … so is Isabel.”

  54

  How was Isabel Lincoln dead?

  Ice filled Gray’s veins. “And how long ago did Isabel die? I don’t understand.”

  Burt Polasek said, “Well … technically she’s still alive, but she went missing in ‘ninety-five. She was fifteen. Since her body hasn’t been found, she was declared dead.”

  “Another child,” Gray said, shaking her head. “That address in Inglewood…” Bobby the Blood lived on Seventy-Seventh, in that red-roofed white house. “Can you check to see if there’s a Robert living there?”

  Burt Polasek tapped … and tapped … “Yep. There’s a Robert Engler at that address. The owner is Isabel’s aunt, Ruby Robertson. She’s receiving Social Security benefits and Engler is her caretaker. He’s receiving benefits as well.”

  “Caretaker?”

  “She’s blind.”

  “I know,” Gray said, “but I’m having a hard time believing that Engler is…” She sighed.

  Raindrops the size of melon balls now smacked the car. Thunder rumbled across the sky, but Gray didn’t startle. The rain was melting her anxiety, but it had done nothing for the burning tightrope snagged around her navel. She needed something stronger than ibuprofen, but all she had eaten was a bagel, and she was still working.

  And Sean Dixon was still out there somewhere, eyes on her.

  Blame Isabel Lincoln—or whoever the hell she was.

  “Isabel’s real,” Gray said, nodding. “And not real.”

  She was as real as Gray and as not-real as Gray. But then, was Gray “more” real being Natalie Grayson or Natalie Dixon? Was she more “real” being Natalie Kittridge, the girl who’d dissociate and go to that place in her head every time a foster brother or play uncle touched her? Every time Mom Twyla poured just a little vodka into her Kool-Aid? Was she more “real” every time Child Protective Services pried her hands from the leg of a kitchen table in a hovel somewhere in Northern California? Was she more “real” as the married woman with blood pooling in her cupped hand or her blood splattered on chrome or mirrors or car seats or cabinets or staircase bannisters?

  Natalie Dixon hadn’t been hit since she’d become Grayson Sykes.

  Natalie Kittridge hadn’t suffered from ringworm or yeast infections or an empty belly since becoming Natalie Grayson.

  During those few moments in her life—being a member of the Grayson family—she’d laughed and ached, fucked and prayed.

  So. Which version of her was more real?

  Gray sat in her car at Walnut Hill Cemetery for over an hour, and she still needed to find a flight back to California. The inside of the rental car had cooled from the sudden storm, and as the weather system moved north, dragonflies and butterflies danced over the graves of babies, brave men, and beautiful women. New families dressed in whites, blues, and blacks had come to watch a thousand-plus dollars disappear six feet beneath the earth.

  Isabel Lincoln was real. As real as the blue butterfly flitting near Gray’s open window.

  And Gray would find her, and make her pay—for stealing money, for stealing the innocence of a little girl named Elyse, for probably killing Tommy Hampton, for possibly murdering Omar Neville, for—

  Gray’s phone buzzed. A new email.

  Your ALL OF ME results are back!

  Gray’s clammy hands itched. She’d forgotten that she’d left the purple toothbrush, as well as hair and nail samples, with the DNA diagnostics lab almost two weeks ago.

  Person one’s ancestry compilation was 89.7 percent sub-Saharan African, 7.5 percent European, 2.3 percent East Asian. A variant had been detected for macular degeneration, but no variants detected for Alzheimer’s or celiac disease. Person one had 1,102 DNA relatives on All of Me.

  She tapped the link to the second report.

  Person two was 64.3 percent sub-Saharan African, 31 percent European, and 4.7 percent East Asian. Person two had 766 DNA relatives on All of Me.

  This second report must have been Isabel’s; Ian had not thought of his girlfriend as “black” because of that 31 percent European.

  Person two had a second cousin, Danielle Sledge, in Raleigh-Durham, North Carolina, and Alicia Kelly, a first cousin in Oakland, California. There were other DNA relatives, but Alicia Kelly was the only first cousin listed.

  Gray called Jennifer.

  “Hello, stranger. Clarissa’s still pissed at you.”

  “And I’m still So what. Listen.” Gray told her about Isabel Lincoln’s DNA result
s and the emergence of a first cousin. “So I need an address and phone number for this Alicia chick.”

  “Got it.” Jennifer’s fingers clicked the keyboard. “That Dylan guy I met at the club? I ran background on him and guess what? He sells knives. Here you go.” Then she rattled off an address on Seventy-Second Street in Oakland. “And here’s a phone number.” She rattled that off, too.

  “Can you look at something else?” Gray asked. “Can you find out if she traveled to Belize as Elyse Miller? Clarissa did a search already on the Isabel Lincoln name.”

  “Lemme check and I’ll get back to you.”

  “Thanks, Jen.”

  “You coming home anytime soon?”

  “Home is where the heart is.”

  “I don’t think Nick will like hearing how much you’re spending.”

  “He authorized all of this,” Gray said.

  Jennifer snorted. “That’s a lie. I know Nick better than you do, don’t forget that. And I know he’s a tight-ass when it comes to the company Amex, especially after Saturday night’s dinner.”

  Gray said, “Hunh.”

  “Let me know if you need me to run interference. I have a special touch with him.”

  Gray rolled her eyes. “I’ll let you know.”

  Her stomach growled—she still hadn’t eaten a decent meal today. Breakfast had been a bagel from the hotel’s tiny kitchen. It was raining hard and nonstop by the time she found a small, sketchy diner off Wolf Ridge Road. It was the kind of greasy spoon with greasy windows, old framed photographs, whirling ceiling fans, and “World Famous Fried Chicken.” The waitress, a short, thick black woman wearing squeaky shoes and a name tag that said “Lottie,” led Gray to a booth near the back and handed her a sticky menu.

  There was just one other customer. On the other side of the diner, an old black man sat in a booth near the jukebox, which was now playing “The Great Pretender” by the Platters. His hands cupped a mug of coffee.

  Gray ordered chicken-fried steak and grits—she didn’t make either dish at home. She found the Percocet vial in her bag and shook one out. This was the best kind of food to take with pills. As she waited for her meal, she flipped through her phone and found the notebook pages she’d photographed at Mail Boxes Etc.

  Belize … Belize City … apartment in Ladyville $650!! 2bd 1 bath but too close to police station … Buttonwood bay? $750 … Unclaimed b … 5k Ermond 501-223-0010

  “Right,” she whispered. “Who is Ermond?” She dialed the number. How far ahead or behind Alabama was Belize time?

  The line rang … rang … “Yeah.” The man sounded as though he’d run to the phone. “Ermond Funeral Home,” he said. “Weh di go ann?”

  Kriol. Crap. Gray said, “I’m sorry?”

  “Da how yudi du?” the man asked, slower.

  Gray said, “English?”

  “Yes, how may I help you?”

  “May I speak to Ermond, please?”

  “I am Ermond.”

  Gray cleared her throat. “You and I talked maybe a few days ago?” She glanced down at her notes. “About unclaimed … five thousand?”

  “Yes. You get the hair? You get the nail? I take ’em and you get the body nobody want. You get the det’ certificate, too. People come, cry and sing, that’s extra. Cash only. I can do cremation—very nice service. Very nice. When you come down?”

  Her hands were shaking. “Next week?”

  “Good. Got a good one for you. Car accident. Nobody can tell what’s what. A shame.”

  “Sounds…” Gray swallowed. “Sounds good. Your address?”

  “Off Western Highway. Belize City. You can’t miss it.”

  Was Isabel Lincoln buying an unclaimed body from a funeral home in Belize?

  If so, who was she planning to pass off as dead?

  “The hair and nails,” Gray said. “Proof for the death certificate and insurance company.”

  She was planning to pass herself off as dead. The woman with the official name change from Elyse Miller would be “dead.”

  But what was her endgame?

  “Insurance,” Gray whispered. “Half a million dollars. That’s the endgame.”

  Lottie returned with food as well as a thick steak knife and extra napkins. “Enjoy, baby.”

  Gray loaded her bowl with sugar and butter, just like Mom Twyla had eaten her grits. Better than the salt, pepper, and cheese grits that Mom Naomi liked.

  When she was bites in, a man slipped into her booth and sat across from her. He grinned at her, and his whiskey-brown eyes glinted like stars. “Since when did you start eating grits?”

  Gray’s belly dropped, and her bottom half warmed.

  Otis Redding sang about trying a little tenderness …

  “You’re crap at looking over your shoulder.” Sean Dixon plucked the saltshaker from the holder. “I’ve had someone tailing you for a week now. He was standing in line behind you in Vegas when you bought your ticket to fly down here.”

  “Squeeze her, don’t tease her…”

  Sean smiled. “You should already know this, Mrs. Natalie Dixon: I will never go away. And you can call yourself by some other name, but you will always be my wife. ’Til death do us part, baby. ’Til death do us part.”

  55

  Panic burst around Gray’s body, but she couldn’t move, couldn’t speak.

  Sean Dixon was now shaking salt into Gray’s bowl of sweet grits. “I watched you waddle”—he moved the shaker from her grits to her cup of coffee—“around a cemetery today. What was that about?”

  Gray wanted to throw that coffee in his face. She wanted to scream, Get away from me!, but she couldn’t move.

  He sat the saltshaker down, reached across the table, and laid his hand atop hers.

  She whispered, “What do you want?”

  “I wanna make it right between you and me. How can I do that?” The veins in his eyes were red and wild, crisscrossing each other like highways on a map. “Don’t you want it to be the way it was? Friends again? Lovers again? I mean … looking at you now, it’s obvious that no one wants you. I loved you when you were a buck five. I’ll love you now, fat ass and all.”

  Lottie’s squeaky shoes announced her arrival. She set a menu and glass of ice water in front of Sean. “You want something, sugar?”

  Sean said, “Nothing for me, thanks.”

  Gray tried to pull back her hand.

  Together, they watched the waitress shuffle back into the kitchen.

  The old man nursing the coffee shuffled out into the rain.

  The jukebox clicked, and Stevie Wonder sang, “I never dreamed you’d leave in summer…”

  Sean held their clenched hands against Gray’s cheek. So cold, his hand. So familiar against her face, that hand. A sob was growing in her chest, and for a moment she didn’t know where she was.

  A diner off a small highway in Mobile, Alabama?

  Or the breakfast nook on Trail Spring Court?

  His hand drifted from her cheek to the base of her throat.

  She stopped breathing, as though he was already crushing her neck. The last time he’d touched her there … A sickening crunch of teeth against teeth. Warm blood filling her mouth.

  “You didn’t ruin me, Nat,” he said. “You tried. You poured out all of my beer and left the empties on the counter, but you didn’t ruin me.”

  Her phone rang from the table. The ringing startled her and loosened her tongue. “Go. Please. If you want to live, you should go.”

  “Or?”

  Her phone kept ringing.

  He spun the device around and frowned, seeing a man’s face there. “Who’s that?”

  “A man who wants to kill you almost as much as I do.”

  His hard eyes searched hers and he grinned. “You better answer it, then.”

  With her free hand, she picked up the phone. Eyes still on Sean, she said, “Hey.… Yes.… Yes.… He’s sitting across the table from me. He has his hand on my—” She paused, then offered Sean
the phone.

  He snatched it from her and snarled, “Who the fuck—” Sean smirked as he listened, then said, “Fuck you, bitch.” He dropped the phone back on the table.

  “You shouldn’t have done that.”

  “I gave you everything. You lived like a queen. We could’ve ruled the world.” He released her hand. Sean Dixon was still six three and still weighed more than two hundred pounds. He wasn’t scared of her; he wasn’t scared of Nick; he wasn’t even scared of God.

  Gray was still five four, heavier but nowhere near his punching class. A halibut fighting a nurse shark was not a fight.

  Sean leaned over her plate, parted his lips, and sent a globule of spit from his mouth into her grits. He slid out of the booth and stood over Gray, bending until they were face-to-face. “You better hope your boy kills me.”

  Gray could smell his breath—the funk of ego and evil. She wrapped her hand around that mug of salted coffee … and swung the cup.

  Coffee splashed across his face.

  Sean grabbed her neck.

  Gray wiggled, loosening his grip. She scrambled out of the booth.

  He grabbed her shirt collar and yanked her back.

  Her head hit the edge of the table and she saw stars. Her hands fluttered around her, and her fingers found tines—fork! She grabbed it and jabbed it into his wrist.

  Sean loosened his grip.

  She grabbed the steak knife.

  The waitress shouted, “Whoa whoa whoa!”

  The cook, a man bigger than a bear, pulled Sean off of Gray.

  Gray grabbed her purse and ran out of the diner and into the rain. It was coming down hard now, but it was still hot. Head throbbing, she stumbled through the weed-choked parking lot to her rental. She looked over her shoulder.

  Sean grabbed her arm.

  Gray reeled, struck him with a weak blow with her left hand, and then, with her right, jammed the knife into Sean’s thigh.

  He gaped at her.

  She gaped at him. Her breath was hot and rushed, and her hand was slick with rainwater and from the blood now seeping through Sean’s track pants.

  He leaned into her, and his weight made them sink to the asphalt.

  Lower … lower …