The next speaker was different and seemed to break through the collective sense of paralysis. It was a female police detective—ruddy, rawboned, with a thinning shock of hair that was half gray, half carrot-colored—who introduced herself as Detective Helen Cutler. Chelsea’s aunt, Vera thought, leaning forward in her seat a little as the woman announced that she was there to discuss issues of personal safety and self-defense. She moved through a PowerPoint presentation, startling in its lack of emotion after all that had come before, showing slides with graphs about local crime statistics, lists on how to deter a would-be assailant and how to practice safe habits so that one didn’t end up a statistic like Sufia. Detective Cutler spoke with calm assurance, looking out into the darkened auditorium at the sea of blank, mostly white faces.
“This is not a time for terror,” she said, “but it is a time for caution. You can never be too cautious. And you can never have too much common sense. So use common sense, girls. And by that I mean, don’t go out after dark. Don’t tempt fate. Traveling in pairs is always best. But do call us if you see or hear anything that you think might be helpful to finding who did this to your classmate. Even if you’re not sure it’s suspicious, give us a call on the number you see up here on the screen. In fact, take a second to put this number in your phones right now. Every single one of you should have it.”
After Detective Cutler had finished her presentation, the school counselor, Lucy Grivois, got onstage to speak about grief counseling available to the students. Coming as she did after Cutler, her voice sounded thin and faded and uncertain. “Sometimes just indulging your grief is all you can do to move on to the next phase of healing,” she said, “and sometimes you just need someone to hold you. Sometimes you just need a shoulder to cry on. If anyone would like to come up on the stage, right now, we have hugs for you. We have hugs for all of you.” Two senior peer counselors flanked her, and upon mention of the “we,” the three of them moved away from the podium and waited at the side of the stage while the Madrigal Singers, their red robes flapping, reentered from the opposite side. This has got to be a joke, Vera thought. Hugs for everyone? There is no way any teenage girl in her right mind is going to go up onstage for a hug. Then the Madrigals began the first notes of a dreadful song—one that Vera recognized from a commercial about abused and neglected shelter animals—and as the song ramped up and the three counselors waited expectantly, the impossible happened. First, one girl—a red-faced girl sitting near the front, visibly crying—climbed up the stairs to the stage and stiffly placed herself in Lucy Grivois’s arms. Then another girl came up, and then another, until a few girls from every row had risen and formed a line at the foot of the stairs, waiting to hug out their grief.
It’s like watching the Jim Jones cult get up one by one to drink the Kool-Aid—no, the Flavor Aid, Vera thought. It was Flavor Aid that they actually drank.
Seeing so many of the girls seeming to relish their grief, waiting for their benediction, was too much to process. And for Vera, part of the problem was that it was all too familiar.
It brought her immediately back to the memorial service for Heidi Duplessis, which had been attended by hundreds of students from her high school. Attendance had, in fact, been mandatory for all the students at her school. Oh, the crying and the carrying-on there had been! The people embracing outside the church and sobbing outright! And worst of all, the people who laid a claim on Heidi, scrabbling to make any connection they could find with the dead girl.
She was my friend, everyone said. Even those whom Heidi had never spoken to.
She said she liked my bracelet once.
She beat me in the eighth-grade Spelling Bee. I came in second. She deserved to win, though—I’m glad she beat me.
My brother used to play softball with her brother Kyle.
Anything for a connection. The students had milled about the reporters, hoping to be quoted for the paper or the evening news, while fourteen-year-old Vera had stood outside the church by herself and had found a reporter’s microphone in her face. You look awfully sad, the reporter had said. Was Heidi a good personal friend of yours?
I didn’t know her, Vera had replied. And unlike everyone else, I’m not going to try to insert myself into the story and pretend that I did. People are acting like no one ever died before. But really, death is just a part of life.
That was the line that had gotten her in the most trouble when it appeared in the Bond Brook Gazette. It had never occurred to Vera that they would even consider printing it. It was not long after that the notebook in which she kept her private thoughts was stolen by Stephanie Lord, a popular girl from her homeroom, and the items she had written about Heidi became well known throughout the school. Once the notebook had been widely distributed, the phone calls came, and the threatening notes stuck in the vents of Vera’s locker. On one occasion she was even followed home in the dark. The resulting ambush, orchestrated by a particularly hard-bitten group of girls who had not been friends with Heidi but needed little encouragement to rough someone up, had been part of a night that Vera found hard to forget. Sometimes, when she was caught between a state of half sleeping and half waking, she could still hear their jeering, could still feel her face being pressed into the mud of her own front lawn, the sole of a sneaker braced against the back of her neck.
Did you kill Heidi? You wanted to, didn’t you, you crazy bitch?
And she could hear their fists pounding against the windows as they circled her house, still calling after Vera even after she’d broken free and locked herself inside.
Vera was shaky by the time the assembly was over. The students, faculty, and staff were shuffling their way out of the auditorium now, clogging the exits, and Vera saw Sue MacMasters and one of the junior English teachers coming toward her as she rose from her own seat.
“It was a beautiful tribute, wasn’t it, Vera? Oh, I can’t get over how sad it all is. But I think this was a really great idea for the girls, don’t you think? I hope it gave them some closure and some peace of mind.”
“I think it did, Sue,” Vera said. She wanted to be kind. Sue looked so beside herself, her eyes widened in what looked like genuine shock.
Vera had almost gotten out the side door when she felt a hand on her own shoulder, and she looked into the face of Detective Helen Cutler.
“How are you doing, Vera?”
“Doing?”
“You don’t remember.” The detective actually looked amused—an expression so out of place in this context that Vera felt the first pricklings of alarm.
“I was on the scene last Saturday morning. In the park. We talked for a while.”
Vera drew a quick intake of breath. “Oh. I remember you now.”
“I doubt that. You were pretty intoxicated.”
“No, I do remember.” Vera rooted around in her memory for something to substantiate this lie. “It was you and—Officer Babineau.”
“Gerry Babineau was one of the other ones who were there,” Cutler acknowledged, still looking bemused. Vera tried to tell herself that maybe this was just the permanent set of the woman’s lips. “You’re looking better now than you did then, I’ll say that much. Do you have some time to talk?”
“Right now?”
“Why not? Someplace quiet would be good.”
“The classroom I normally teach in at this time would be empty.” Vera looked around her to see if anyone was noticing the detective talking to her. Then she reprimanded herself for being so twitchy. “I can . . . I can show you the way.”
As they walked down the hall, Detective Cutler a little too close at her side, she said, “This is really just a follow-up.”
“Follow-up?
“Sure. It’s been a little over twenty-four hours since we talked to you in the park. Who knows—maybe you remember more now than you did then. Something you saw. Something you observed.”
“Oh,”
Vera said, entering her classroom and limply settling into the nearest chair. Detective Cutler shut the classroom door behind her and grabbed a chair for herself from one of the tables, scraping it across the floor and positioning it opposite Vera. “I wish I could tell you more,” Vera said, “but honestly, I don’t have much to tell. Are you going to tape-record this?”
Cutler, eyebrow raised, took a notepad out of her pocket and tapped it with her pen. “This’ll do.”
Vera, holding her hands in her lap so the detective could not see them trembling, went over what little she remembered of the evening. She was embarrassed to tell her about the married man she had met in the bar—she could not even remember if she had shared this information previously—but she felt she should impart what few facts she could. “I was in the park, but I don’t know exactly why I was there,” she finished. “In fact, I don’t have any consciousness of being there until the moment I saw Sufia and realized who she was. Then I took out my phone and called you.”
“How many drinks did you have that night, Vera?”
“How many drinks? I don’t know. I don’t think it was all that many. Five? Maybe five mixed drinks?”
“Well, that’s progress,” the detective said, scribbling in her pad. “On Saturday morning you told us two. Do you get blackouts often when you drink five drinks?”
“Sometimes.”
“Take any medication? Prescription or otherwise?”
“I take a very low dose of an antidepressant. Fluoxetine—that’s generic Prozac.”
“A recent prescription?”
“Oh, no. I’ve been on it for years.”
“Probably shouldn’t be drinking at all then.”
“No,” Vera admitted miserably. “I probably shouldn’t.”
“Do you have any sense, looking back, on how much time passed between the moment you found Sufia under the tree and the time you called us?”
“Just seconds,” Vera said. “It was almost instantaneous. And then . . . well, they got there—you got there—very quickly.”
“Do you remember anything else you saw in the park, besides Sufia and the tree? Anything that looked out of place? Any sign that someone else was around?”
“No, nothing like that.”
“What about touching anything at the scene? Touching Sufia or any part of her clothing?”
“I’m positive I didn’t,” Vera said. “I was afraid. I kept some distance once I knew what I was looking at.”
“Do you know anyone who disliked Sufia Ahmed? Took some issue with her or her family?”
Vera shook her head.
“We’re asking that question of everyone. You don’t need to look so petrified.”
“Sorry.”
The detective stood up, brushing her red hair back with a large hand. She could probably palm a basketball with one of those hands, Vera thought. “I think that’ll be all for now, then,” she said.
“Detective Cutler? May I ask one thing?”
“Ask away.”
“I haven’t mentioned to other staff or faculty that I was the one who found Sufia.”
“And why is that?”
“I don’t know. I guess I don’t want people asking me about it. It isn’t a nice thing to have to talk about over and over.”
“Talking about it with people might make it easier to process. Might even be good for you.”
“I’d prefer they not know,” Vera said, “so if there is any way you can keep them from knowing when you speak to them, that would mean a lot to me personally.”
“I’ll do what I can, Vera. That’s the best I can promise. Just so you know, we’ll probably be checking in with you again. Maybe just a phone call next time. Memory’s a funny thing. A couple more days, and maybe there’ll be something different you remember.”
After the detective had left, Vera could not shed her sense of unease. She did not think she wanted the burden of remembering any more than she knew now, much less being prodded to remember.
• • •
Wednesday was the day of Sufia’s funeral. Vera had been surprised to see that it would be held at St. Sebastian’s Church; she had assumed that the Ahmeds were Muslim, not Catholic, and she wondered if they had converted somewhere along the line. Had they been Muslim, perhaps they would have preferred a quieter service and burial. But Vera knew from the scuttlebutt around the school that the funeral would be spectacular, that half the town was planning to attend and pay their respects to the promising young immigrant as she was laid to rest.
Vera decided not to go. Part of her wanted to, but she had only ever been to two funerals in her life—Heidi’s and her father’s—and felt that that had been enough.
She stayed home, thinking she might do some writing, perhaps catch up on some old emails, but instead she slept most of the day and then found herself riveted by the six o’clock news, with its coverage of Sufia Ahmed’s funeral.
The scene was very much as she had expected it to be. Media from all three local TV stations were there, positioned outside the cemetery gates and collecting sound bites from teenagers who were all too eager to appear on TV for an instant. She recognized a girl from her afternoon class as one of those who spoke to the reporter from WCTL. “Sufia was really popular,” she said. “She is going to be missed.” People streamed past her as she leaned into the microphone, and Vera thought she caught Jensen Willard in the background, walking by quickly, her hair almost obscuring her face. But it can’t be her, Vera thought; since when did Jensen ever walk with any spring in her step? The news story also showed the outside of Sufia’s parents’ house, whose crooked front gates were now festooned with flowers, balloons, and stuffed toys left by well-meaning kids who had wanted to leave a tribute of some kind. Seeing this, Vera had an almost visceral reaction, and she thought: I should have left something, too. I should have at least sent some flowers for Sufia. Violets, perhaps, for such a quiet and unassuming girl. Sometimes she wore a violet-covered hijab, which framed her face so beautifully . . .
For the first time, Vera wondered if the Ahmeds even knew who she was. Had the police revealed her identity to them—told them about the drunk woman, Sufia’s own teacher, who had surprisingly had the wherewithal to call for help but had been of so little use to the authorities after that? Would they see a gift from her as unwelcome, as taboo—see Vera herself as a bringer of bad luck? She hoped not.
Thinking about this, Vera looked up the Ahmeds in the phone directory and found that their house was located on Preble Lane, in a working-class neighborhood not far from where Vera lived. She could walk there. It was still not quite dark, and the town had not rolled up its sidewalks yet; she would have time to pick up a modest floral arrangement at a store along the way. She could leave that for Sufia. This small gesture was the least she could do to pay tribute to the dead girl toward whom she felt a deeper, more personal connection than she had ever felt in life.
• • •
Vera had no trouble finding the Ahmeds’ house. It was a small, old duplex with a sagging porch, a home badly in need of a paint job, but its front gates suggested an eerily party-like atmosphere, bedecked as they were with heaps of flowers, hand-lettered notes, and lumpy, dull-eyed teddy bears. Vera stood outside these gates with the small potted violet she had bought and bent down to place it in an unobtrusive spot. Straightening up, she read one of the signs that had been taped to the Ahmeds’ wooden fence:
REST IN PEACE SOPHIA, YOUR ONE OF GODS ANGELS NOW.
Vera stood there a while; she wasn’t sure exactly how long. She knew she was beginning to feel cold, even in her winter coat and hat, and she was just about to turn away and head back home when she saw the wooden gate open up and a familiar face peering through it with a high-beamed flashlight. Squinting against the light, Vera stepped back and shielded her eyes.
“Hello, Vera. Looking for something?”
It was Officer Gerard Babineau. The officer who had taken her report at the crime scene. The one whose card she still carried in her wallet.
“No,” Vera said. “I was just . . . I was just leaving some flowers. A plant, really.”
“I heard Helen Cutler talked to you at the school the other day. We didn’t see you at the service, though.”
Were the police keeping tabs on such things? Keeping tabs on her? “No, I . . . I didn’t go. I thought about it, but it didn’t feel right to me.”
The officer nodded. “Understandable. But what brings you here now? The Ahmeds don’t wish to be disturbed this evening. I’m sure you can see why they’d like to have a little privacy and quiet after such a difficult day.”
“Oh, of course. I wasn’t planning to disturb them, Officer.”
“If you’d like me to get those flowers to them, I can take them inside.”
“That isn’t necessary,” Vera said. “But thank you.”
Babineau just kept looking at her with those sorrowful eyes that made her feel as though she needed to apologize for something. Vera mumbled something else, something that was half apologetic, and made haste on her way back to her apartment. She felt as though Officer Babineau were watching her all the way down Preble Street, and she didn’t care for that feeling at all. What had he been doing at the house? Had the Ahmeds requested a constant police presence there, in the wake of their daughter’s murder?
It’s because the perpetrator often likes to go to the victim’s grave or to where the victim lived or to the scene of the crime, Vera thought, turning blindly around the corner. Their ego prevents them from staying away. I should have known that. I should have known that someone would be there, monitoring the entrance of the house, waiting for someone who doesn’t belong to show up. Someone just like me.
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