What Has Become of You

by Jan Elizabeth Watson

  Vera hung up the phone, trying to process the significance of this call. The possibility of being of assistance to the police was an effective bait, too good to refuse. She checked the bus schedule on the Internet and found that a late-night bus would make its slow passage back to Maine.

  Back to ME, she thought.

  She did not have a lot of time to waste. She put on her coat and shoes and began to pack what few things she had—her pajamas, her toothbrush, The Comprehensive Book of True Crime—into her tote bag. She wondered whether to interrupt Elliott’s evening with a phone call to inform him of her sudden departure or to leave a note, if that wouldn’t be too gauche; she decided on the note and scrawled it quickly, taping it to the bathroom mirror, where he would be sure to see it when he got home.

  Elliott, you old dog,

  Heading back to Maine on a late bus tonight. Sorry for the lack of forewarning, but I’ve been ordered by higher-ups to get back there. This may or may not have to do with recent developments in Dorset, so details will follow. Thank you for the use of the couch, and for all the food and hospitality and insults. I promise it won’t be too long before I come back to see you again and repay my debts.

  Love,

  V.

  Vera placed Elliott’s extra keys on the sink below the mirror and took one last look around the apartment before she left. Unlike the last time she had departed from New York City, she did not feel as though this had to be good-bye. The city would always be there for her if she wanted it. There were no rules dictating how many times a life could be revisited or even started anew. After all, it seemed that things in Maine were taking on a new life, a new beginning that she could never have prepared for—and she was eager, if a little uneasy, to see what it entailed.

  Chapter Thirteen

  The Dorset-bound bus pulled into the station just after 7:00 A.M., but Vera did not call Detective Ferreira first thing upon arrival. The long ride had given her plenty of time to reflect, and she had come to the solid conclusion that there was one thing left that remained undone. She called the cab company and asked for a driver to take her to a remote spot on Bleachery Road.

  She had not slept during the bus ride back to Maine and was beginning to feel the scrambled, disordered thinking and the near-tearfulness that always hit her when she was sleep-deprived. When she’d had fits of moodiness or sadness in her childhood, her mother had always clucked, Somebody’s tired!, and this reductive assessment had always made her fighting mad; there is a big difference between tiredness and sadness, as any child knows. But Vera, in her current state, had to admit that there had been a germ of truth in her mother’s words. She was tired. Though she could sense the fine line between her exhaustion and her sadness and even her burgeoning hysteria, she could not afford to nurse any of these just now. She sat at the edge of her seat in the back of the cab, ready to spring out at a moment’s notice.

  Deposited at the mouth of the long dirt road, Vera began to make her way toward her destination. She was glad that the dark was lifting. The darkness of quiet, isolated areas was always more terrifying to her than city darkness, and Miriam Folger’s cottage at the end of the road was the most isolated house of all.

  Aunt Miriam’s cottage sat at the top of a small hill. Instead of grass, the hill was blanketed with pebbles, so Vera walked up this path feeling glad for her sensible shoes. The cottage was a compact ranch house, the sort of space that probably offered very few hiding spots within; she pictured Jensen Willard inside it with Bret—their heads bowed together, speaking of concepts too big for them—and tried to visualize Jensen inside it now: asleep, alone, clutching her coat close to her body to keep warm. She could already see that the blinds in the windows were closed and that no lights were on, but that didn’t mean there wasn’t an occupant in there somewhere. As she approached the front door, she played out the scenario in her head, a scenario that, to her thinking, unfolded most naturally:

  The door opens to my knock, and Jensen Willard stands there in the exact outfit she’d worn at point last seen: the dark-gray T-shirt, the oversized pants—both of which look as though they’ve been slept in for consecutive nights. Her hair covers most of her face, but her eyes light up with curiosity, seeing who her visitor is; she tucks a hank of hair behind one ear, and then her expression resumes its flat neutrality.

  —Hi, she says, opening the door a little wider to let me in. I’m glad it’s just you.

  —Just me indeed.

  —This place belongs to Bret’s aunt. I guess you found it because I mentioned it in one of my journal entries?

  —Not exactly.

  —Well, Bret and I used to come here all the time. I thought it would be a good place to stay when I just feel like being by myself. Do you remember what I wrote to you, about how I wanted an adventure or a retreat? This is it.

  —You’ve worried a lot of people, Jensen.

  —Really? People are talking about me?

  —To say the least.

  —I don’t mean to worry people, but I’ve figured some things out. That last Friday, after I got back from the hotel, I didn’t go in the house right away. Instead I lay in the grass in the backyard and looked up at the stars for a long time. I hadn’t done that since I was a kid—not since I’d done it with Annabel. Annabel is real, didn’t you know? Just like Scotty is real. Just like everything is real, in its own way.

  After I’d been lying there for a while, it became clear to me that I didn’t have to die. Not yet. But I also knew I couldn’t go on living the way I was living. I couldn’t do anything until I felt like doing it. So what I decided to do was nothing. Nothing except disappear . . .

  Vera interrupted her internal script to knock on the front door. There was no answer, no pale face appearing behind the glass window. She knocked again, bowing her head, as though someone were more likely to appear if she averted her eyes. Still no response. She moved away from the doorway and pressed her face to the nearest window, hoping to see something through the blinds, but saw only a muddied hint of yellow that seemed to bathe the entire room. Yellow curtains, Vera thought. She pounded on one of the windows, then tried to open it, but as she had expected, it was locked up tight.

  She went around to the other side of the house. The hill sloped downward on this side of the hill, making the windows seem higher—just an inch or two out of her reach—and she noticed right away that something else was different here. One of these windows was open a crack. She felt victorious. Not many people would leave a window open overnight in April, in a currently vacant property—unless, that is, someone was inside.

  She wished there were something for her to stand on, to give herself some added height and leverage. A ladder was too much to hope for, but an upturned trash can, a stray bucket, a sturdy plant pot all might make enough of a difference in helping her reach the screen. Lacking any of these, she could only stand on her toes and pound on the window some more, feeling her fatigue give way to mounting hysteria as she did so. I need to stop this, she thought; I need to stop carrying on like this—but that voice in her head seemed faint and far away.

  Behind the window, something shifted—an advancing shape that was clearly human. But the shape was wrong, the silhouette too big.

  The shades jerked up, and Vera found herself eye to eye with a startled-looking man, his face pockmarked and haggard.

  She screamed—a muffled scream, but one that frightened her almost as much as it frightened the man on the other side of the glass. “Jesus, lady!” she heard him say, and as he fumbled for the window, she pivoted on her heels and broke into a run.

  She was still running down the hill when she heard the window wrench the rest of the way open and the man weakly yelling after her, “Christ, lady, I just needed a warm place to sleep. Hey, you calling the cops? Don’t do that, okay? I wasn’t bothering nobody!”

  Vera wasn’t sure how long she ran for—five minutes, maybe
as many as ten—but she had never had a runner’s strength and stamina. She dropped down on the ground on the outskirts of some woods, clutching her tote bag to her and gasping for air. She put her head between her knees and tried to slow her breathing, tried to recollect herself. A homeless man, she thought, that’s all. She should have known. She remembered overhearing a story from one of her former Dorset Community College colleagues about being shown an empty apartment and having a terrified homeless man spring out of the walk-in closet when the landlord opened it.

  She got up in search of a road sign to determine her whereabouts. She was on the Old Roland Road, a good forty-minute walk back to her apartment. Best to head back in that direction, she knew, but she was not ready to concede defeat just yet.

  She walked about twenty minutes before stopping for a rest in downtown Dorset near the small waterfront parking lot where skateboarders often practiced their flips, grinds, and jumps. But it was too early for skateboarders. She looked out over the river, spotting the distant heads of ducks gliding along the water’s surface; they were her only company.

  “You’re right, Elliott,” she said out loud. Now that she thought of it, she couldn’t remember ever not seeing ducks year-round. She remembered something else—sitting in the Roundview Hotel room across from Jensen as she mentioned the line about Holden at the lake in Central Park.

  Do you know what I think is beautiful? That part where Holden says he feels like he’s disappearing every time he crosses the street. And then there’s the ducks in Central Park. How he wants to know where they go in the winter.

  She could still visualize how Jensen had looked as she’d said these words, one leg crossed over the other as she perched on the edge of the hotel bed, her face contemplative and a little childlike.

  Elliott’s voice in her head again: The ducks never go anywhere, have you noticed?

  She thought of Jensen’s parents. She thought of Les Cudahy saying, She’s a good girl, mostly. A good girl. And of Jensen saying her parents would do anything for her.

  Where had Jensen redirected herself, if she had left New York City?

  Back to ME.

  Back to ME I suppose.

  What if Jensen had gone back to Maine and had sought refuge in her own parents’ house? What if they were hiding her? She pictured herself in the Cudahys’ driveway, seeing the light from the TV reflected in one of the windows; she imagined knocking on the back door, which would be closest to the light, and hearing the basset hound bark lustily in response. She imagined a long wait before she heard an inner door open and saw Mrs. Cudahy standing behind the screen door dressed in a nightgown, her gray hair in pink foam curlers. She even pictured herself from Mrs. Cudahy’s perspective: worn and disheveled from traveling, her overstuffed bag in one hand.

  But then what? If Vera were to ask if Jensen was hidden somewhere in her home, she could not imagine that this inquiry would be well received. I can’t believe you, of all people, would come here and suggest a thing like that to me, Mrs. Cudahy might say. Don’t you think the house has already been searched? That was the first thing those cops did. Parents are always the suspects first, even when there isn’t a crime.

  And what would Vera say in response? Look, Mrs. Cudahy, I know you’ve lost two children already. And I know Jensen wanted to disappear. Perhaps she’s returned but has asked you to pretend she’s still lost out there somewhere so that she wouldn’t have to go to school, wouldn’t have to go out among people. Maybe there’s another reason, too—a bigger reason that she’d want to stay hidden. These things aren’t unheard of. These things happen. And I imagine that someone who’s lost her first two children would do just about anything for her daughter, if she asked.

  No. She couldn’t say any of that. It was something only a madwoman could cook up, and the only net result would be Mrs. Cudahy calling the cops on Vera and having them remove her from their home. If anyone’s going to call the police on me, Vera thought, it’s going to be myself. They’re expecting my call, anyway.

  She realized that she was too tired to walk back to the Greyhound depot and pretend she had called Detective Ferreira as soon as the bus came in, as she had promised she would. Like a sheepish teenager asking to be picked up at a party that had gotten out of hand, she called the detective’s number and told him where he could find her. She remained seated on the low brick wall that formed a border on one end of the parking lot, dully half watching a flock of crows’ raucous fight over a bag of fast-food leftovers that they’d found in a nearby trash can.

  The detective’s sedan pulled up in less than ten minutes. Vera lowered herself off the wall and walked toward the vehicle as the detective rolled down his window. “Whatever happened to calling when you got to the bus station?” Ferreira asked.

  The detective looked almost as fatigued as Vera felt. The furrows between his eyebrows ran deep, and his thick, gently graying hair was ruffled up like rooster feathers at the back of his head.

  “Sorry, Detective. I had a little nervous energy I needed to blow off first.”

  “Seems a little early for nervous energy. Hop in the back, why don’t you.”

  Vera did so. “I was in New York checking in on a few things,” she said candidly as she fussed with her seat belt, sensing that Ferreira was planning to ask her about the reason for her out-of-state trip. “I don’t know that I accomplished anything, really.”

  “Checking in on a few things, eh? Sounds like trouble to me.”

  “I talked to Bret Folger. Jensen Willard’s boyfriend.”

  “No wonder you didn’t accomplish anything. Kid’s got nothing to contribute.” Detective Ferreira turned around in the front seat, slowly and deliberately, and glared at Vera as he put the car in drive. “These little exploits have got to stop. I’m telling you, if you were anyone else, I’d have charged you with obstructing justice by now.”

  “But you haven’t,” Vera said.

  “Want to press your luck?”

  “Oh, no, I don’t want to press my luck,” Vera said, sitting up straighter like a child who is being upbraided. “But you did say I might be of assistance to you here.”

  In the rearview mirror she could see the detective purse his lips as though weighing this comment in the balance. “You know,” he said, still staring ahead at the road, “when someone puts themselves into an investigation as much as you do, usually I assume one of two things. One, that the person is involved in the crime somehow. Or two, that the person is simply a megalomaniac who gets a charge out of being overinvolved.”

  “Megalomaniac. That’s a good word.”

  “Some bored little schoolteacher trying to scare up some excitement for herself,” Ferreira went on, ignoring her interruption. “And that doesn’t usually get rewarded, believe me. Don’t think you’re special just because we’d like your input on something.”

  “I don’t think I’m special, Detective. I promise you I don’t. I’ll behave.”

  Vera caught the detective’s face in the rearview mirror. He was trying not to smile.

  “Music?” he asked, reaching for the radio dial.

  “I don’t mind it.”

  The detective settled on a station playing classic rock—a song that had been popular among the big-haired metalhead girls when Vera had been in high school. For some reason—perhaps because she was so tired and dreams seemed so close—she felt as though she’d been transported back to a high school dance in her old gymnasium, and as she closed her eyes and reclined against the back seat, she thought she could almost see, toward the very back of the crowd, the swaying, bouncing, undulating form of her onetime classmate Heidi Duplessis.

  • • •

  Back at the police station once again, Vera was led into the same claustrophobic interrogation room she’d been in previously. In true Ferreira style, he cut to the heart of the issue and broke through the glaze of her dissociation—that tire
d, disembodied, almost drunken feeling that had begun to overtake her again. “What have you heard about Ritchie Ouelette and the Angela Galvez murder?” he fired at her as soon as she’d sat down.

  “Only what little they printed in the newspaper,” Vera said, and she recapitulated what she remembered from the brief article.

  “So you know we have a different suspect in custody now. A minor.”

  Vera nodded.

  “I’ve brought you here this morning because there’s something I’d like you to hear. This is not something we’ve shared with anyone else outside the department except for Jensen’s parents hearing a little. I want you to listen, and there’s no need to comment until you’re spoken to, got it?”

  “Got it.”

  “Here’s the context so far as we know it. Short and sweet. This seventeen-year-old punk kid shows up at the station the other day, copping to all kinds of stuff, including the murder of Angela Galvez. After we cracked down on him for a day and a half, we got him to confess to the Ahmed killing, too. What you’re about to hear is only a small part of that confession.”

  Him, Vera thought, exhaling with a sense of relief. So the voice on the tape, the underage confessor, was not Jensen Willard. Why, then, would the police want to share it with her? She leaned toward the tape player, which the detective had placed between them, resting the weight of her upper body on her elbows and propping her fists under her chin, her eyes shut tight so as to listen without distraction.

  The detective hit the PLAY button, and the room welled up with the husky voice of a very young boy. His words sounded a little muffled, and Vera could not tell if this was due to the poor quality of the recording or if the speaker was in the throes of a head cold.

  “When Angela Galvez died, it was just something that happened. I was kind of made to do it on the spot. I didn’t have anything against that kid personally. For months before that I’d been getting pressured to see what I was made of. To see if I could take a life, just to prove that I could, and to prove that something like life and death really doesn’t matter.”