The Girl in the Water

by A J Grayson

  ‘No, to hell with you,’ she cuts me off. ‘I don’t want to hear about your long morning or your tired body or your worn-out temper, or your great throbbing bastard of a headache.’ Chloe is almost prescient in her huff. ‘You just sit there and tend to your pile of newspapers and dross, I’ll mind my till, and we’ll both pretend you’re not the pompous self-centred cow we both know you are.’

  She’s disappeared among the rows of shelves again. Despite the impressive array of insults having just been flung my way, I’m not willing to become too apocalyptic about the exchange. I re-open my computer. Chloe and I have tragic, earth-ending disintegrations of our friendship on more or less a weekly cycle, so I know this will pass.

  Though not, perhaps, quite as quickly as it actually does.

  ‘You’d think you’d be grateful for a little help with your snooping, since the art of the search clearly isn’t your forte.’ I hear her voice, soft and back-in-black, from somewhere behind a row of rarely visited classics. A strange comment. My ears are suddenly a degree more alert. My face comes up from my monitor and Sadie’s fuzzy underbelly is facing me from the photo on the wall.

  I’m entirely uncertain what sort of ‘help’ Chloe could be in a position to offer me – there’s a solid 50/50 shot it’s advice on hairstyles or improving my sex life, or just an all-out ploy to get me to do some menial activity she doesn’t want to do herself – but her reference to snooping jostles my attention. She hasn’t said it with the tones that normally go with jokes, and the word itself sounds foreign in my ears.

  ‘My snooping?’ I finally ask. I don’t get up.

  And I can’t explain it, but there’s that tingling in my spine again.

  ‘Yeah, help, woman,’ Chloe answers. Power is coming back into her voice, and after a strong intake of breath, she launches into a long collection of words she’s clearly been storing up since she first said hello.

  But I only hear the first three.

  ‘It’s about Emma.’

  And she keeps talking, but I suddenly can’t breathe.

  15

  Amber

  I am positively, spectacularly certain that I’ve never spoken with Chloe about my private, quiet little obsession with learning all I can about the murder of the woman in the river. It’s been entirely my own, tucked away in my corner and in the secret folds of my thoughts. Besides, a conversation like that would have been torturous, and while many of my emotions over the past twenty-four hours have been unusual, I’m not that out of it.

  But Chloe didn’t just mention the subject of my sudden interest. She mentioned a name. The name.

  ‘What do you mean, “It’s about Emma”?’

  I can barely form the last word. The name that came to me on the road, the one that stopped David mid-thrust and sent yesterday spiralling out of normalcy into disarray. The name I’m all but positive I didn’t even know before I left the shop yesterday.

  Yesterday. That word, again.

  ‘What do you mean, what do I mean?’ Chloe’s been talking non-stop for several seconds, her voice a background murmur behind my thoughts, but she halts at my interruption, genuinely puzzled. ‘Haven’t you been listening to I word I just said?’

  I shake my head, too anxious to be embarrassed. ‘Start again.’

  ‘I said,’ she draws out the word, emphasizing the condescension implied in her willingness to repeat herself, ‘that you being so interested in random bits of the week’s news seems to have paid off, in terms of curiosity value. The murder you’re so bent up on, up in the Russian River. Story’s got more involved overnight.’

  It’s solid now. She knows concrete details. Like she’s been in my head.

  ‘What the hell are you talking about?’ I demand, fire in my voice. I’m not normally this assertive, and the strength in my breath is doubly out of place in the quiet of the shop.

  Chloe’s left eyebrow rises so high it looks like it might go into orbit. ‘The hell am I? What … Calm down, girl. I’m trying to share the juicy details I dug up for you.’ She looks like she might spit at me if I don’t change my tone, but I can’t seem to stop myself.

  I didn’t ask Chloe to do anything for me, dig up anything. I’m mishearing. My palms are growing sweaty, sticking to the newsprint of the paper on which I’ve laid them.

  ‘That woman you’ve gone all Hercule Poirot over.’ Chloe’s voice stomps through my thoughts, instantly proving me wrong. ‘You’re not the only one who can play detective, you know. Come on, you’re talking to the queen. Try to name a detective novel published in the last five years that I haven’t read. Come on. I dare you.’

  I don’t. She rolls her eyes.

  ‘Anyway, I scoped out everything I could find on that woman last night,’ Chloe continues. ‘Web’s a fantastic place for the curious. Turns out she’s single, never married and no children. One site said she was gainfully employed, but didn’t say where. No ongoing relationships. No history of major drugs. No criminal background.’ Chloe lists off the facts in a way that stresses, again, that she’d just said this a moment ago, when my brain wouldn’t allow me to listen. ‘I did manage a little more this morning,’ she finally adds. ‘Since I knew you were interested. Looks like they’ve got a cause of death now, and some other stuff. Saved it on my phone. You want it as an email or a text?’

  I abruptly stand up. The newspaper clings to my wet palms and I frustratedly shake it free.

  ‘What’s going on, Chloe? Why are you nosing around into these things?’ I’m affronted by what feels like her invasion into my inner world. Has she been watching me? How could anyone know I was so taken by this? How could she?

  ‘Who asked for your help?’ I blurt out.

  Chloe’s face drops out of banter mode. It’s not a facade she often abandons.

  ‘You sure you’re feeling okay, Amber?’ Her voice is once again more Oakland than fake Floridian, and she looks genuinely confused. When I nod my head but say nothing, her eyes go a little wider. ‘Because, I mean, what kind of question is that? You asked me, obviously. Who else would have?’

  I suddenly feel dizzy on my feet. I want to snap back at her, but I can’t find any words.

  Liar. Cow. I haven’t talked to you about this. I haven’t talked to … But the reactions stay firmly in my head. If I could see my face, I’m certain I would see it going white.

  ‘We, we talked about this? You and me?’ I try to make the question sound calm, rational, but inwardly I’m imploring her to say no, to announce some joking Chloe-esque detail that puts an end to this spontaneous charade. Maybe she caught a glance at my computer screen yesterday, or my notepad. Damn that oddly enticing Hello Kitty logo. She’s just goofing around, playing the clairvoyant.

  ‘I wouldn’t say so much that we talked,’ she answers. I knew it! Cow! But Chloe doesn’t stop there. ‘It was a weird conversation. A few scattered words. But I caught your drift in the end, hon.’

  My eyes are back into hers. They must ask the question for themselves.

  ‘You were just sitting there at the periodicals service desk, muttering,’ she continues, nodding at my cluttered workspace. ‘About three o’clock. Shop was in the afternoon lull, and you’d been lost in your little world a while. Come on, you’re honestly saying you don’t remember?’

  I don’t want to admit that, even to myself. ‘Remind me,’ I say instead.

  ‘Your eyes were glued on your laptop, Amber. Your whole body was rigid, like you’d really been captivated by something. Weren’t saying much, but you were obviously enrapt.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘And, well, it isn’t every day you start out a conversation asking for help. So I paid attention.’ She pauses – long, expectant – but I don’t have anything to say.

  Asking for help? This makes no sense.

  ‘After that,’ she continues, ‘you just said a few words, pointing at the screen.’ She indicates my laptop. ‘“My story. The dead woman in the river, her name is Emma. Help me.” You obviously wa
nted to explore the story, and heck, I’m always up for diving into a bit of snooping around.’

  It’s suddenly gone very cold in my corner of the shop. Chloe’s words are not nearly as disturbing as the fact that I have absolutely no memory of saying them.

  I finally peer back at her. She’s eyeing me with what feels like too much curiosity. Then, joltingly, the intensity breaks and a devious wink flickers across her eyes.

  ‘You want my opinion, hon?’ she asks, her voice toying.

  ‘No.’ But that answer’s never worked with Chloe before, and it doesn’t now.

  ‘I think you need to get yourself laid.’ She leans forward, her small chest heaving as rapaciously as she can manage. ‘Nothing better for clearing a foggy mind and that pasty looks like a good—’

  ‘Was I right?’ I suddenly find myself asking, eager in equal measure for an answer and to keep Chloe from finishing that particular sentence. Her face is instantly a question.

  ‘Right?’

  ‘When I said … you said I said the girl was called Emma … All those other details, but you haven’t said whether what I said was …’ The sentence is convoluted. I’m not sure how to frame my question in any other way. ‘Was I right?’

  Chloe’s eyes are now as wide as I’ve ever seen them. She doesn’t answer immediately, and her silence feels foreign and uncomfortable. Finally she replies, with a tone bridging tenderness and concern, ‘Yeah, hon, you were right. Course you were. Doesn’t take a mystery fan to figure that out. Name’s public record.’

  ‘She really is called Emma?’

  ‘Emma Fairfax.’ I can see Chloe trying to normalize her expression, hoping to re-rail a conversation that hadn’t gone at all the way she’d anticipated. But when I keep silent, it becomes clear that Chloe doesn’t know how to continue. She begins the slow departure back towards the front of the shop.

  ‘Whatever, girl. I’ll shoot you off an email with a few more notes later, see if I can help you make all the nice plot points fit together.’ Her voice retreats to a whisper before it fades away all together. ‘Not like I don’t have my own things to be doin’.’

  I wish I could say that I’m able to move on and accept Chloe’s strange words as just her being her. I wish I could just get about my day, but I can’t. I only manage to get myself back into a seated posture by the most extraordinary exertion of will.

  Chloe’s words mingle with those already in my head.

  Single, never married, no children.

  Emma.

  Gainfully employed.

  Emma.

  No relationships. No domestic problems.

  Emma.

  Foul play. Murdered.

  Emma.

  Emma.

  Emma.

  As I whisper the name now, I remember whispering it yesterday. Uncomprehendingly. Innocently.

  And again I remember David’s body, rigid beneath my own.

  16

  David

  ‘Not … by … choice.’

  When those words emerged from Emma Fairfax’s lips, as I first met her two and a half years ago, a little more, they opened a door. A door I’d been waiting for my whole life, without even knowing it. She became a revelation, and a revelation only for me.

  She’d been admitted to the ward nine days before her first interview with Dr Marcello, and she’d already gone through the usual battery of psych evaluations that accompany every arrival. Even when one is committed by law, rather than choice – when there’s at least the legal assertion that the individual has substantial psychological problems – there’s a routine that has to be gone through in order to arrive at a formal diagnosis. Intake interviews, broad-level diagnostics, then assignment to an appropriate ward for specialist interviews prior to the prescription of treatment. She’d come to Dr Marcello only after the first few rounds of those had already been accomplished, ready for the diagnostic comb to be finer and the focus of treatment more precise. And I sat at his side, as I always did in those days, watching, learning, taking notes, offering thoughts. The pharmacy wing always had a representative at consults like this, to counsel the doctor on options to form part of any treatment, and to receive instructions in turn on the precise drugs a patient’s regime would require.

  So there we were. The system, in its glory.

  All this had fallen upon Emma Fairfax because of the day she got into a car. A blue Chevy Malibu with a custom JBL ten-speaker sound system, still blaring Coldplay, of all things, at full volume when the emergency services unwrapped its wrinkled metal frame from a tree trunk in Santa Cruz. There would probably have been an arrest following her hospitalization in any case, given the nature of the crash, but a stomach filled with a nearly lethal combination of Valium and Xanax, stirred together with most of a bottle of cheap tequila, changed things. Attempted suicide always gets a psych eval.

  Attempted suicide. With pills. At first, an innocuous case. Later, that feeble attempt at taking her own life would make so much more sense.

  The tree Emma had hit stood in a front yard in a residential neighbourhood inhabited by twelve children under the age of fifteen (the prosecutor had been insistent to identify the exact number and ages, even though none had been injured in the crash), and that meant Emma had been labelled ‘psychologically disturbed with criminal liability’, which in turn meant she’d ended up in DHS-Metropolitan, the Department of State Hospitals facility in LA County, rather than in a cell in the women’s prison in Chowchilla or Valley State.

  Which meant she came within the scope of my vision.

  It took days for her conversations with Dr Marcello to open up beyond the blank stares and occasional mutterings that had characterized the first encounter. Part of that was due to the sedatives forcibly delivered to her in a little paper cup each morning, but part went beyond the medications. Something was haunting this young woman. I could see it, even from the side of the room. And my interest grew, because there was something there that was familiar. Something that stirred at memories. Something that made me want to … help her.

  ‘You know, you can talk to me.’ Dr Marcello said this almost every morning, usually towards the beginning of the prescribed thirty-minute sessions. It was a truth that needed to be gradually absorbed by the patient, softening up the clay that had hardened into her rock-solid defences. She’d eyed him each time he said it, sometimes glancing over in my direction as well, but usually little more than that. Only in the fifth session did she finally begin to open up.

  ‘It’ll help if you talk, eventually,’ he added that day. ‘You’ve been here two weeks now, a little more. Time’s got to come to speak, Miss Fairfax.’

  She grunted. We weren’t to be believed. Her look was momentarily all revulsion, peering up and down at Marcello, then at me. Then the emotion evaporated. The doctor jotted a note down on his pad, just visible to me on his knee. Resistant to authority. Maybe to men.

  ‘Though I suppose, from another perspective,’ Dr Marcello added, ‘we could say you don’t have to speak at all.’ He laid down his pen over his notes. ‘You can stay silent, if that’s what you want, and we can just sit like this. You’re going to be in here for a while, in any case. You know that.’

  ‘Not long enough.’

  I barely caught the words. She barely said them. But the whisper made it to my ears, and my shoulders rose, encouraged by the first sign of a real communication.

  ‘What does that mean, Emma?’ Dr Marcello asked. ‘Is it okay if I call you Emma?’

  She shrugged, dismissive and annoyed. It was ‘I don’t care’ and ‘fuck off’ in a single, well-practised thrust of the shoulders. But it was also a solid sign of comprehension, and a concrete response.

  ‘You can call me whatever you want,’ she finally answered. ‘It doesn’t matter any more.’

  I was startled at the strong accent with which she spoke. With her first full sentences it came out noticeably, and the elongated vowels and reassigned consonants of country bumpkin drawl clashed with he
r simple beauty. Her ‘whatever’ came out ‘wat-evuh’ and her ‘doesn’t matter’ was a punctuated ‘don’t mattuh’. I couldn’t immediately tell whether it was authenticity or affectation, but Emma had the motions to go with the sassy tones. There was a tedious roll of the eyes and a dismissive flick of the head. Ain’t much for ya, fukkuh. Piss off.

  ‘Why is that?’ Dr Marcello asked, keeping his attention focused. If he was as surprised by her voice as I, he didn’t show it. ‘Why doesn’t it matter what I call you?’

  ‘Nothing matters now I’m here. It’s all done.’ She rolled her eyes again. Her arms remained folded across her chest.

  ‘Your life isn’t over,’ he said. ‘You were fortunate – you didn’t harm anyone but yourself. The car’s totalled and you probably offed the tree, but it didn’t go further than that.’

  When she laughed, the sound was pitiful. Mournful. I remember I was amazed that someone who seemed so determined to be brash could exhibit such a contrary emotion.

  ‘Didn’t harm no one!’ she jabbed back, her eyes suddenly going glassy. ‘That’s the whole problem. I’ve harmed plenty, and no one knows.’ She swung her head my way, stared into my eyes, as if I might understand what she felt the doctor didn’t.

  I lowered my head, unsure how to meet that stare. I had a clipboard across my lap, intended for clinical notes on prescriptions the doctor might require, but I found myself scratching illegible lines across it with my pen. Muscle memory was moving my hands.

  ‘Is that why you were taking the drugs?’ Dr Marcello asked. Suddenly my own throat caught slightly. The mention of the pills – it wasn’t the first. But the attempt at suicide, it suddenly hit me. Not as simply a clinical fact, but as a memory. One I’d worked so hard to push away.

  The pills …

  I swallowed hard.

  ‘Was it guilt?’ Dr Marcello continued. ‘Guilt over the people you feel you’ve hurt in your life? The Xanax, the Valium – you had a lot in your system.’

  God, Evelyn. I shoved the memory away. Back into its box. This wasn’t the time. The past was the past. This woman wasn’t my sister.