What Has Become of You

by Jan Elizabeth Watson

  Vera hadn’t known that Angela had been wrapped in a tarp. That detail had been omitted from the news reports. She thought of Sufia Ahmed, in her traditional dress, which she had first thought was a tarp when she’d seen her body under the tree in Dorset Park. She thought of the fiber evidence found on Angela Galvez—the fiber evidence that had come from Ritchie Ouelette’s car—and the DNA evidence in the front seat, which she now knew was the dead little girl’s urine. These concrete details felt more burdensome than illuminating. Now that answers were coming, she did not want them anymore. She wanted to turn her back on them, to run from them. But where was there to run?

  Vera wanted to ask: If this was so terrible, then why did you go on to kill Sufia? But she knew she was not supposed to ask questions. And she was not sure she wanted to hear this detailed response, anyway. She leaned toward Detective Ferreira, feeling self-conscious about the proximity of her mouth to his ear, and whispered, “Can you ask him what this has to do with me?” What she really meant was, Can we cut to the chase, please, because I really can’t take much more. So much for amateur detective skills, she thought; in the face of the truth, her heart and her stomach were deplorably weak.

  The detective voiced the question on her behalf, and Frank Ouelette, looking straight at Vera again, said, “Well, I’m up to the part where you come in, kind of.”

  He went on to tell her how Jensen had described her new English teacher as being, as he put it, “really into true crime and murder and stuff.” “Jensen had Googled you, and she found out that there’d been a murder in your hometown back when you were in high school. She also found out there were some people back then who’d thought, for a little while, that you’d done it. She was real excited about that. She had this, like, fascination with you or something. Not a crush or anything, but this interest because she felt like you and her had something in common. She told me you’d said in class that anyone could kill someone. It got her all worked up, knowing a teacher thought the same way she did.”

  “I didn’t say—” Vera began, but she stopped herself. Because she had. She had said it, but when she had said it, she hadn’t really meant anyone. She had only been referring to a certain type of anyone.

  “She saw you talking to Sufia Ahmed after class one time and said you seemed mad, that you guys were having some kind of a fight, so she got this idea that maybe we could get rid of Sufia and have everyone think you’d done it. That might give the police someone to look at other than Ritchie—someone who wasn’t me. I didn’t feel right about Ritchie taking the rap. So we thought . . . well, maybe point the finger somewhere else. It was like I’d become a robot. I could do anything anyone told me to at that point, and I wouldn’t feel a thing. Jensen said, ‘All you need to do is grab her by that thing she wears over her head and pull it really tightly around her neck. You can do it from behind, and you won’t even have to look at her.’ So that’s what I did. It was easy to get Sufia to come out with us because she wanted to learn how to skateboard. It was supposed to be me, Jensen, my friend Joey Fitts, and this other kid who goes to Bonny Eagle all teaching her some moves, but when we met up in the park, it was just me and Jensen. Jensen actually didn’t watch. She waited over by the little pond and told me to come get her when I was done. Once I was, we figured we’d leave Sufia in the park because we knew that was right across the street from where you lived.”

  Fitts, Vera thought. So that’s how I know the name. “I wasn’t mad at Sufia,” Vera said, starting to tear up.

  “Well, Jensen said you had a fight.”

  “It wasn’t a fight.”

  Ferreira shot Vera another warning look. “I’m sorry,” she whispered, looking down at her hands folded on top of the table.

  She could not drink her coffee anymore. She could not do anything but stare through brimming eyes at Frank Ouelette, who no longer seemed on the verge of tears himself but had become calm and conversational, the second death obviously bothering him less than the first.

  “Jensen had one last idea before we left town. She thought maybe we could get rid of you, too. Make it look like you killed yourself. Write a suicide note for you and everything. Maybe one with a confession in it. She was going to invite you to this hotel and do it there all by herself, but I think she chickened out, because nothing came of it.”

  “Was she going to use a gun?” Vera asked, remembering the service pistol Jensen had alluded to having with her. But that wouldn’t have worked, she thought. They would have traced it to Les Cudahy so easily. Or maybe, she thought . . . maybe a little poison slipped in some vodka and orange juice?

  “I don’t know what all she was thinking of doing. I just know we took off later that night—I was waiting for her behind her house, outside the dog fence, and my car was parked down the street. I’d gotten it back from the shop by then. We spent that night on a campground in New Hampshire, and from there we went to Vermont for a while, but that got boring pretty fast, so we ended up in New York City on the Lower East Side with this guy everyone calls Bob the Punk. He’s seriously old-school, like in his forties or something. He’s an all-right guy, though.

  “One morning I woke up and Jensen was just gone. She wasn’t in Bob’s squat anymore, and we spent two days looking around for her before we figured she didn’t want to be found.”

  Seeing that the monologue had moved away from details of the killings, Vera felt she could almost breathe again. She wanted to go backward, to ask him how he and Jensen had met, how he had come to know this girl—this terrible, monstrous, unfathomable girl whom Vera would never have associated with the Jensen Willard she knew and her journals.

  She leaned toward the detective again and murmured, “Can you ask him where he knows Jensen from?”

  Frank overheard her and, to her dismay, held her gaze again, his blue eyes guileless and confiding. “She was at my school, but I only talked to her a couple of times before I stopped going. After I dropped out, we still met up in the woods sometimes and kept talking about the same kind of stuff we’d started talking about in phys ed. Crazy stuff—setting fires, putting pipe bombs in the local schools, taking hostages. I never thought anything would come of it.”

  Vera thought for a while. Something had begun to occur to her. Forgetting once again that she had been coached not to ask questions to the young boy without a go-between, she found her voice, and clearly said, “You say you met her in phys ed. Was there any reason why she would have ever called you by the name Scotty?”

  “Yeah, once in a while. I thought it was dumb. It was after some author she liked—F. Scott Fitzpatrick. Because my real first name is Francis, just like that guy’s, I guess.”

  Fitzgerald, Vera almost said aloud. She thought of the Fitzgerald bookmark that she had used for her copy of The Catcher in the Rye and of how one of Jensen’s first-ever comments to her pertained to it—her approval of the ill-fated Scott and Zelda. Had Jensen already done some research on Vera at that point in time? Was it then, or sometime even earlier, that she had pinpointed Vera as someone to be taken advantage of? She remembered how Jensen had emailed her before they had ever even met: I look forward to meeting you, her first-ever message had read. Had she already done her research by then and put her in her sights?

  Vera could tell Ferreira was annoyed with her for speaking up, but at the same time she could also tell that this was his first time hearing that Scotty and Frank Ouelette Jr. were one and the same. He looked a little chagrined. Perhaps in an effort to take the bull by the horns again, reclaim his position as the one in charge, he turned toward Frank Ouelette’s attorney. “Miss Lundy found a note in New York City that she thinks Willard might have written,” he said. “This is all off the record for now, but I’m sure Miss Lundy would like to know why your client’s friend would have left her such a note, or written a note giving her the idea to come to New York City in the first place.”

  “I don’t know anything about tha
t,” Frank Ouelette spoke up, again directing his response at Vera. “That’s weird that she would write to you. She told me she didn’t want to hurt you because you didn’t seem so bad, after all, but she might have changed her mind.

  “Anyway, that’s kind of why I wanted to talk to you in person. To tell you that I didn’t kill Jensen, and that I wish I’d never laid a finger on those other two girls or even thought for a minute about putting you in a bad spot. We both got duped by the same girl, I guess. Funny, right? You seem like a nice-enough lady. I don’t think Jensen’s dead, and she thought of doing something to you once, so who knows? She might get that idea again. You’d better be careful.”

  “I think we’re done here,” Ferreira said. With a nod to the corrections officer, he said, “You can take him back now, Wade. Thanks, Frank, for being willing to talk again. We’ll talk again soon, I’m sure.”

  When Frank Ouelette and the entourage were gone, Vera looked up at Ferreira helplessly. “I don’t think he killed Jensen Willard,” she said to him. “Let me be the first to admit that I’m a much worse judge of character than I ever thought. But when he says she’s still out there, I believe him. I could be wrong. She could be in the river, like you think, and he could be lying through his teeth.”

  “That’s what we’re trying to sort out.”

  “Are you planning to try him as an adult?”

  “Not for me to decide. Do I look like the courts to you? Nice work with the Scotty connection, by the way. We hadn’t gotten him to pin down exactly where he met Willard. Can’t use this as evidence, of course, but it’s a useful thing for us to know.”

  Vera suddenly felt her entire body sag. She put her head between her knees and moaned softly.

  “You going to be okay?” Ferreira said.

  “I think I’m going to be sick.”

  The detective pulled the garbage can from the corner and planted it in front of her just as she leaned forward and retched. Coffee-colored saliva and bile hit the edge of the trash can liner, and Vera wiped her chin with the back of her hand, embarrassed. “My God,” she said.

  “You’ve been through a lot,” Ferreira said. “You’re looking a little worse for the wear. I wonder if there might be a close friend or relative you might stay with for the day.”

  Vera tried to heave again, this time bringing up a pasty gruel that she took for the package of crackers she had eaten shortly before Ferreira picked her up.

  “I’ll be all right by myself,” she said, but she was not sure that she would be. She realized she was too spooked to go home alone. She thought of Frank Ouelette—Scotty—telling her to be careful, and of Bret Folger nearly saying the same thing before that. She wanted to be careful.

  “I’d feel better if I knew you had someone to keep an eye on you,” Ferreira insisted.

  It was nice to know someone cared. And the more she thought about it, the more she decided what she wanted to do and whom she wanted to call. She found herself pumping quarters into the pay phone at headquarters and dialing her mother’s number while Ferreira looked on. She barely got out a hello before her mother let out a relieved squawk and launched into a series of recriminations for not having answered her voicemails, for not having called her much sooner.

  “Mom,” she said, “Mom. I can’t really talk right now. But I need a favor. Things have gotten bad. I need to come home, Mom.”

  No place was home, Vera thought, but sometimes a substitute had to do. She wondered if Jensen Willard’s substitute home was now the river—if she was cradled on the riverbed, the water lapping gently over her, the bottom-feeding sea creatures feasting on what remained. She doubted it. She replaced the receiver in its cradle and then closed her eyes because it hurt to keep them open, and the more she looked at the empty chair where Scotty had just been sitting, the more she felt the urge to throw up again.

  It was an hour’s wait before her mother could reach Dorset. She wondered if she could nap there in the police waiting area. She thought once again about the young girl who might or might not be in the river, and for the first time she felt a great divide between herself and this girl—a divide of decades and experience and maturity and mortality and even conscience. She remembered what she had said to Jensen in the hotel room: I’m still that fifteen-year-old girl in a lot of ways. In some ways, perhaps that still held true. She might always be the awkward, self-doubting girl she once was. But in other, more significant ways, a door had closed on that fifteen-year-old girl forever.

  And isn’t it better this way? she asked herself. Isn’t it better to finally leave her behind? Vera thought the answer was yes. Still, as she felt herself nodding off in her chair, she felt the inner dissonance of one who has lost and gained in equal measure.

  Chapter Fourteen

  The next two weeks were the lost days, spent in a state of half waking.

  This was a time when one day bled into another, a time when sleeping until two or three in the afternoon was commonplace for Vera. A time when little was required of her other than keeping her mother company. She ate her mother’s plain New England cooking—everything baked and boiled within an inch of its life—and listened to her complain about the neighbors, who, her mother was sure, were running a brothel out of their house. She picked up smoking cigarettes again—her former habit, and her mother’s lifelong one—and she and her mother often sat out on her patio, inhaling tobacco and stubbing their butt ends into a shared ashtray with particular emphasis, as though the extermination of a cigarette were the period at the end of an unspoken sentence.

  Vera seldom went outside during these days for fear of running into Peter and his new wife or—worse, in its own way—former high school classmates who might wonder what she was doing back in town. She slept in the same bed she’d had as a child, under the slanted roof with its window that looked out at the barren crab apple trees, until she realized her Dorset apartment wasn’t paying for itself and that she would either have to relinquish her rental or go back to it.

  She was afraid to go back, she had to admit. She felt safer under her mother’s roof. Then again, if Jensen could find her at the volunteer headquarters, she could surely find her at her mother’s address. She could find her anywhere.

  There was also the question of how Vera would continue to support herself. She had appealed to her former boss at Dorset Community College, asking if there might be some adjunct work she could pick up there, but she’d been told all the sections of English composition were full—and she’d received this message not from the boss himself but from his secretary, which made her think she was unwelcome on campus, just as she was at every other academic institution in Dorset. Only to be expected, she thought with a sort of fatalism.

  During the fourth week of her unemployment, after she’d returned to her studio, Vera went to the shopping mall in South Portland and walked out with a low-paying job as a sales associate in the junior formals department; she had no retail experience, and she saw this as a dismal step down from teaching. Still, she felt lucky to get this job over the other options—fast-food worker, grocery store carryout girl—that were available to her; at least at the department store she could wear pretty clothes and lipstick and handle garments intended for events Vera herself had never attended: prom, homecoming, spring formal. She spent a great deal of time herding giddy teenagers and their tired mothers into fitting rooms and shooing boyfriends out of them; she zipped zippers and tied sashes and straightened petticoats of dresses.

  Tending to these exuberant younger girls, she tried not think of Jensen Willard. Sometimes she was successful. Sometimes not. There were times when she would see a dark-clad girl sulking in the waiting area outside the fitting rooms—usually a younger sister who had been dragged along while the older girl tried on gown after gown—and Vera would stop dead in her tracks, her arms often laden with heavy garments that needed to go back on the sales floor, her mouth a small O of consternat
ion until she realized, as she always did, that the girl she was looking at was not Jensen Willard. Not even close. No matter how many times this happened, she never failed to be surprised by the commingling feelings of relief and disappointment she felt all at once.

  One day an older customer came into the department store with a younger one; as the girl browsed the racks, the older woman proudly told Vera that this girl was her granddaughter, looking for a formal dress to wear to “nice events” at Princeton.

  “Oh, I went to Princeton,” Vera said without even thinking.

  “You did?” The older woman looked horrified. “And this was the best job you could get?”

  “Well,” Vera said, hiding the sense of affront she felt, “I do other things, too.”

  But this was a lie. She didn’t do anything else. She didn’t even pretend to work on the Ivan Schlosser book anymore. She hadn’t read a real book in months. She hadn’t talked to anyone but her mother and her customers—and the customers barely counted, as most of them looked at her as an impersonal “it,” a means of getting something they wanted. As for Elliott, even his chiding emails had softened, taking on the pitying tone of one who has assessed his friend as being beyond hope. She couldn’t even summon her bright wit in her own email responses, but one day, after crawling out of bed in the late afternoon, she logged on to her email and wrote, Elliott, you old cabbage. Do you know of any jobs available in New York City right now? Maybe a desk job. A cubicle job. Entry level is okay. I don’t really care what it is.

  But Elliott, in his reply, knew of no available work: Vee, you old Nutter Butter. If I knew of a job in NYC, do you really think I’d continue to write about Crunch ’n Munch vs. Cracker Jack? The pickings are slim. Do what you did before and apply to a college program around here—something practical this time, like auto repair. Oh, wait—you don’t drive! Maybe library science, then. You’d like that. But don’t do it unless you can get a tuition reimbursement and a little stipend on the side. With your credentials, you could probably teach remedial English to the incoming frosh. It’s just an idea.