The Girl in the Water

by A J Grayson

  Emma Fairfax glared at Dr Marcello, her eyes pitying and condemning at the same time.

  ‘I don’t feel nothing,’ she answered. Her eyes rolled and her arms crossed tighter at her chest, defiant. I escaped the clenched feeling in my chest enough to see Dr Marcello underline the phrase as he transcribed it onto his notepad. A sentence fairly well drenched with possible interpretations.

  ‘So you feel you don’t sufficiently register emot—’

  ‘I’m not speaking psycho-shit, Doctor,’ she snapped. But she wasn’t angry. ‘I don’t feel I’ve hurt others. I know it. It’s a fact.’

  There was a sob in her eyes and it shook her tongue. She stopped talking, tossing her hair aside in a show of dismissiveness. I don’t care. Nothing can make me care. The forced denial of someone who cares deeply – more than they wish or want.

  ‘Can you tell me about that?’ Marcello asked. He’d drawn a firm line across his paper. This was a new area, one that hadn’t come up in our brief encounters to date.

  My heart was racing. The conversation was taking me in new directions, too. The memories were hitting like a flood.

  The pills.

  The death.

  My sister’s absence.

  I could barely stay in the moment.

  ‘It weren’t supposed to turn out the way it did!’ Emma cried out. There were tears then, streaming down her cheeks and pooling at the curve of her chin before falling onto her lap.

  ‘What wasn’t, Emma?’ Dr Marcello kept his voice soft.

  ‘It were bad. We all knew it were bad. But it got out of hand.’

  She wasn’t registering his questions, so he stopped asking them.

  The sob was back, this time long, vocal and heart-wrenching. A few words fumbled out from between Emma’s lips, but none of them had anything to do with the car accident.

  ‘Emma,’, Dr Marcello leaned in towards her in a carefully practised, unthreatening way, ‘I’m not sure what we’re talking about. Fill me in. Why don’t you start with where, with when?’ Concrete facts, sometimes easier for traumatized patients to deal with than emotions.

  She gazed more through him than at him.

  ‘You don’t want to know,’ she said. ‘These nice looks you give me, the “it ain’t so fuckin’ bad, you’re a good girl” sentiments, you’re not gonna have ’em for long if I tell you what … what …’

  Her throat seized up. She wanted to be defiant, but a sob stopped her.

  Marcello leaned forward. Despite the torrent of my memories, my emotions, I leaned forward too.

  ‘Emma, there’s nothing you can tell us that will cause me to change my desire to care for you.’

  It’s a lie he’d been trained to tell. All of us, actually, even if we’re just pharmacists in a prison ward – and we’re taught to believe it, too. Our goal is to help the patient. Nothing can change that. There’s nothing they can say that ought to cause us to look at them differently. No deed a person has done that devalues his worth or affects our duty to care.

  But it’s a lie. A terrible, dreadful, hideous lie. Maybe I was never meant to become a man of Dr Marcello’s moral objectivity, maybe my own experiences meant I couldn’t maintain that ruse of unflappable dispassion, but reality’s reality. There are things a person can say – things a young woman can say, in a little room beneath fluorescent lights before an analyst and a pharmacist at a metal table – that should make any human person change their mind radically about them. Things a person can say that show they’re not people at all, but monsters. Monsters whose existence makes the world itself groan, repulsed by more than their actions.

  Repulsed by their very existence.

  17

  Amber

  I have to get home. I have to get to my husband.

  I’ve managed, somehow, to go through the remaining motions of the day. No customers want newspapers after 3.00 p.m., and if you haven’t caught your glossy copy of Esquire by lunch, chance is you’re not going after it until tomorrow – so the second half of my days tend to be even quieter than the first. There is always a bit of restocking to be done, some tidying up of the reading areas. An attempt at making the periodicals service desk, which I like to think of as my own, slightly more presentable beneath its stacks of papers and magazines.

  As customary as the flow of the day is, however, I near its end with anxious relief. Anxious for reasons that are still difficult to understand. The day has been a haze, and every time I exhale I’m propelled through its fog, back into a maze of very different thoughts.

  A maze that keeps drawing me towards my husband.

  I don’t know precisely what it is I want to tell David, in light of what I’ve learned today. Something happened – last night, this morning, somewhere inbetween. The bridge from yesterday to today involves him.

  In my immediate surroundings, Chloe has kept to herself throughout the afternoon. Demonstratively. She hasn’t spoken a word to me since our exchange in the morning, and I linger now with her promise of an email with a few more details before the day’s end. I’m sure it will come, and equally sure that she’s delaying sending it simply to rub in her displeasure with the bizarre nature of my reaction earlier. I’m going to have to apologize to her eventually. Chloe may be a nut when it comes to social skills, but she’s not a liar, and if she says I talked to her about all this, then I have little choice but to believe her. The evidence is there. At least my outburst was minor, more odd than offensive. She’ll get over it soon enough. If she doesn’t, a gift will certainly do it. There are few crises in Chloe’s life that a Mars bar or a pack of Marlboro Reds can’t remedy.

  But I’m a different story. My interior state is neither as manic nor as mutable as Chloe’s. My ups stay ups and my downs downs, with a long haul required to change them. It’s always been that way. From childhood. My mother yells at the ten-year-old version of me in a burst of anger – a skill she’d expertly cultivated – and the next two months are sulky, all the weather grey and dismal. My father lashes out and strikes (‘It’s just a goddamn slap, Amby’ – such a deplorable nickname, though linked to one of the few vivid memories I retain of him – ‘Used to hand them out in schools, back when children knew their place’) and I’m down for weeks. I remember those emotional pits. They were always deeper than I’d thought they’d be, their walls made muddier by the betrayal of people who shouldn’t have pushed me into them in the first place. Still, you crawl out eventually. Chloe would probably have coiled up some internal spring and bounced out in an instant, smiling by the time she arced back down to earth. I had to climb, fingers in the mud, dirtied and darkened by it all, carrying the grime with me. But there’s always an upper rim, even to the deepest pit.

  Then there are the highs, too, with me just as long in life as the lows and stirred up in their own, unique ways. The kind words from a friend. The gold star on a childhood art assignment. Bumping into just the right man on just the right walk. They catapult me onto mesas, those things. From their heights a person can see the whole world, and on that world the only thing that shines is bright, golden sunlight. It’s all a matter of the right prompt.

  The details Chloe brought me, and the bits and pieces I already knew – they aren’t the stuff of mesas or mountaintops. You’d think I might be interested simply by the fact of something out-of-the-ordinary happening in our area, even if it does involve a death. A curiosity. There’s something exciting in that. Instead, the details drag my emotions down, against my will and beyond my control. I can smell the mud of a pit I can’t yet see. It smells of moss and roots and decay, and something about it terrifies and depresses me. I’ve been in pits before, and I remember how dark the world can be.

  I’m about to experience it all anew. I can feel it. And once again, I can’t explain why.

  18

  The second body was a man’s. He was middle aged, slightly overweight but overall in decent form: lean, not too thin, not too fat. His silver hair matched a grey buttondown shirt that wasn’t of
f the rack. Attention to fashion was visible everywhere. Upturned, contrasting-colour cuffs. Alligator-print belt. Perfectly polished shoes. What looked to have been a good hairdo, before the struggle changed that.

  He lay prone on the unyielding tile floor. His skin was already bluing, and his eyes, like hers, were wide open, though they didn’t sparkle with light. They were hollow, sucking in the grey ceiling rather than reflecting the light of the sun or moon.

  There was no serenity surrounding him. His end had been violent, and the signs of the violence were everywhere. Rips marred the silver shirt. Bruises that looked like they might have come from fists speckled the skin of his arms. A wild look of recognition was frozen on his face. He’d seen what was coming. He couldn’t escape it.

  And a knife-wound flowered at his side, bleeding now only a few remaining drops into the crimson pool that had emerged beneath him.

  This was reality.

  But it wasn’t the way the story was supposed to go. No story should ever be written this way, with this kind of character, or this kind of turn. They were things to be written out, edit away. So that the real story, the good story, could emerge from their absence.

  And so the work had begun, and would continue, until the right ending came.

  19

  Amber

  It’s not so much a commute home as a race that begins as the workday ends. My step out the door is a sprint and I aggressively dodge traffic as I speed down the highway, ignoring my headache and trying as hard as I can to ignore the frustration caused by other drivers. By the time I park on the street outside our apartment I’m already jumping out the door. Feet on the pavement, then the lawn. My laptop and my satchel swing at my side, but I hardly notice them. I’ve become a woman of singular focus.

  David.

  A few bounds and I’m up to the first storey. The key goes into the lock with surprisingly little fumbling, given my state, and this time I do thrust open the door. Not my style, but I do it anyway: full bore, strong swing. I want to see him, all at once, to share what I’ve discovered and to know what he knows. To find out what it is that’s taking place between us, and how it’s connected to the story at the river.

  But the door slams against our corner cabinet and the noise echoes through an empty kitchen. I want companionship and solace; instead, I’ve arrived to an empty home.

  It takes me ten minutes and a glass-and-a-half of a poor South African Zinfandel to calm myself. Marginally. I haven’t been this exercised in as long as I can remember, and there’s only so much that wine can deaden the anticipation.

  It’s 6.42 p.m. when I glance at my watch.

  That mundane reality mingles with expectation and starts to slow my pace. Six forty-two is late enough that if David were coming home as usual at the end of the day, he’d have made it here already. It’s one of the reasons he works a shift that starts earlier and ends at 3.30 p.m.: the commute from San Francisco back to Santa Rosa at the end of the workday is deadly, and San Fran proper was the only place he was able to get a pharmacy to pay him enough for an assistant’s role. The downside is that traffic at the end of the workday never makes it up to the pace of a crawl, so if he’s had to stay late, he’ll go for the norm and stay late enough that the rush has passed before he hits the road. Doesn’t happen every day, but it’s far from infrequent. David’s a hard worker. Late nights come with the territory.

  I command myself to take a few deep breaths, and another long drink, finishing off my glass. Calm will come, I insist to myself, by force if necessary.

  I call for Sadie with a little whistle, hoping canine companionship might help. She swivels around my ankles for a few minutes, shoving her wet snout into my knees and absorbing my coos and ‘good girls’ like they’re drugs; then, fluffed enough to satisfy her ageing frame and happily in receipt of a milk bone I toss her from a jar on the counter, she wanders to the edge of the room and flops back onto her belly. She’ll want a walk later, but that’s something to be saved for David when he gets home, not for me. Sadie’s trained us well. I do the petting, David the walking, and she the content lollygagging.

  So it’s another glass of Zinfandel and a decision to let more alcohol help quell the little freak-out I’ve been experiencing throughout the day. The bottle was already open, cork pushed in loosely and positioned at the front of a little trio of bottles on the counter, when I got home. Inviting. Another one of David’s routine kindnesses, always thinking of me a step ahead, knowing what I’ll want or need.

  I sip the wine in draws that are too long. For God’s sakes, Amber, get a hold of yourself.

  I’m upset at being so easily thrown off balance. I’m a grown woman. My emotional state should be stronger. But the wine has started to soften my thoughts, and within a minute or two I’m less concerned with age or expectation. Wine will do that to you. The magic of the grape. Just let it rot long enough to become magical in the bottle and …

  I giggle. I actually giggle, which startles me, then annoys. Only women who never giggle know how annoying the trait really is. It’s far too girlish for me, in any case, so I do the sensible thing and immediately blame it on the drink. It may be crap, but the wine’s apparently got a kick. And suddenly, I feel I could do with a lot more of it.

  I grab my glass and the neck of the bottle in a single hand, my handbag in the other, and head upstairs.

  My laptop is out of the bag and on my knees within a few minutes, my body settled into a piece of furniture that David and I have never been able to agree on identifying. It’s either a chair (his opinion) or a beanbag (mine). Ikea calls it a Snorfelbörg. But it’s comfortable, whatever it is, and I’m in the mood for comfort.

  The wine is diminishing swiftly in the glass to my left. I’m more at ease, now, that sense coming swiftly. I feel I can sort through my emails without an overload of stress, waiting for David to come home.

  It turns out that Chloe did, indeed, send me a few more materials she was able to track down on the Emma Fairfax murder. Despite having no memory of seeking her help, pulling in the aid of a fanatical detective fiction fan was clearly a good move. Chloe appears to have taken delight in proving her investigatory prowess. Her latest email to me contains three attachments. The first is some regional paper’s write-up on the discovery of the body, based on various police reports and calls. I’m impressed Chloe searched long enough to find it; there are a thousand regional newspapers in northern California, and this is from one even I have never heard of – and I work at the periodicals desk. Chloe may look the ditsy ever-child, but she’s done the greats of her mystery genre proud.

  And all for me. Without my even knowing I’d asked her for it.

  I swallow more wine. The report that Chloe’s sent indicates it had been updated at 4.48 p.m. this afternoon.

  LOCAL POLICE CONFIRM DISCOVERY IN RUSSIAN RIVER, SONOMA COUNTY, OF THE BODY OF ONE MS EMMA CHRISTINA FAIRFAX OF SALINAS, CALIFORNIA. MS FAIRFAX, AGED 40, WAS UNMARRIED WITH NO KNOWN CHILDREN, HER SOLE NEXT OF KIN BEING AN AUNT RESIDENT IN PHOENIX, ARIZONA, WHO HAS ALREADY BEEN INFORMED OF HER NIECE’S DEMISE. MS FAIRFAX WAS EMPLOYED AS A RETAIL WORKER, HAVING A FEW YEARS AGO CHANGED CAREERS FOLLOWING A LENGTHY STINT AS THE OWNER OF A SMALL-SCALE HAIR SALON. POLICE CONFIRM HER DEATH IS BEING TREATED NOW AS SUSPECTED MURDER, AND THOUGH THEY HAVE RELEASED FEW DETAILS, OFFICIALS HAVE CONFIRMED THE CAUSE OF DEATH AS STRANGULATION, WITH THE MURDER WEAPON SUSPECTED TO BE A ROUGH ROPE OR DOG LEASH MADE OF SYNTHETIC RED FIBER. PRESUMABLY IT HAS NOT YET BEEN LOCATED BY OFFICERS, GIVEN THE POLICE DEPARTMENT’S PHRASING, BUT NO FURTHER DETAILS HAVE BEEN FORTHCOMING FOLLOWING OUR QUESTIONS.

  Regional paper or not, this write-up is decently robust. The beginning traces of a personality are there, together with more details of the woman’s actual death than I’d been able to find before. God, what a way to go. Strangulation. And with a rope.

  I have a profound craving to know more, but the article ends there. ‘No further details have been forthcoming.’ The kind of comment that pulls at you. I�
�ve come to learn we’re wired like that, all of us: the moment we know something’s been hidden from us, there’s little we desire more in the universe than to know exactly what it is.

  The second file attached to Chloe’s email is a screenshot snapped from some sort of chat session. ‘Got this from a friend who worked at the bookshop before you came on. He’s over at the Berkeley Gazette now,’ is her only annotation, and I don’t recognize the ‘KL29906’ that’s the chat nickname opposite hers in the image.

  KL29906: Yeah, saw a picture of the body on a cop’s desk when I went to interview them at the station this morning. Kinda snuck the glance when eyes weren’t on me. Shouldn’t really even be mentioning it, you know.

  Chloe_LUV32: Come on, hon, you know I’m always up for finding out if real-life homicides are as catchy as the ones in my books. I’m sure you can tell me a little about the woman.

  KL29906: Just that she’s a looker, or was. Nice hair, pretty face.

  Chloe_LUV32: Online it says she was just under forty.

  KL29906: Doesn’t look it in that photo, can tell you that much. Would take her for early thirties, tops. A stunner. Looked really peaceful, even with all she’d been through.

  Chloe_LUV32: That all?

  KL29906: Well, unless you want to chat about lunch tomorrow and—

  The screenshot cuts off the conversation from there, and I smile slightly at the thought of why. The wine is making my belly warm.

  There’s a picture forming in my mind. This woman, Emma Fairfax, is no longer simply a name and a collection of vital statistics. She’s apparently beautiful, younger than her years. Pretty enough to be captivating, even to someone seeing a photo of her snapped in the morgue after a rope had been wrapped around her neck and her body deposited in a river. For a few seconds, I wonder what that kind of beauty could look like.

  She has no family, but she works with others. Not on the exalted plane of a social worker or teacher, perhaps, but still – running a salon is people work, and even a cashier chats over the counter. My mental portrait of her expands to frame in a chatty, friendly young woman (I emphasize the ‘young’ in my mind, since as she’s older than me by a year or so, this implies only encouraging things about my own age). Maybe I’m starting to like this Emma. She’s sounding like the sort of woman that, despite myself, I might have wanted to know.