by Linda Barnes
Residual height meant the body had been so badly charred that portions of it were missing. I skipped to the findings section, read that the cause of death was asphyxiation due to the inhalation of smoke, with carbon deposits in the tracheobronchial tree. The inhalation of carbon monoxide was also listed, with carboxyhemoglobin saturation at 15 percent. Global charring with some body mutilation. Inhalation of smoke meant that Denali had been alive when the fire was set. She hadn’t been murdered first. The arson wasn’t a blind. So much for that theory. I flipped the pages, looking for the tox-screen results.
Ethanol: negative in the blood, positive in the urine. I wasn’t sure what that meant. Positive for carbon monoxide. I scanned the list. Amphetamines, barbituates, benzodiazepines. A positive hit on the benzos, but what did that signify? Anyone planning to kill herself, certainly anyone planning to kill herself in such a terrible way, might have taken whatever drugs she had on hand. Why save them?
The receptionist’s voice startled me. “Miss Carlyle?”
I shielded the pages. “Yes.”
“Mr. Matheson will be tied up for some time. Perhaps you’d care to make an appointment for another day.”
“No,” I said. “I’m fine.”
“Perhaps you’d care to mention what this concerns?”
“I’ve just spoken with Ted Fitch, and I have some questions concerning Denali Brinkman.”
She nodded crisply, turned, and made tracks down the hall again. I went back to the beginning of the autopsy report, learned that the body had been presented to the ME in a blue body bag, that it was wrapped in a tannish white sheet, that the remains were mixed with a quantity of collapsed and burned construction debris, including drywall and fragmented glass. The body had been basically intact, but the distal phalanges of the right foot were broken away. Soft tissue was extensively charred and macerated, and had a moist, pasty texture. I turned the page to the internal examination, read about Brinkman’s cardiovascular, pulmonary, and gastrointestinal systems. A life weighed in grams. The last line on page seven read “Identification made from dentals records.”
Beaubien had included a glassine envelope of autopsy photos. I hoped he’d copied them, not stolen them. I’d known he’d get them somehow, wouldn’t want me to miss the gore.
The room smelled faintly of lilac. There were soothing paintings on the walls, one of them a view of the old Yard, dominated by Massachusetts Hall. A stern-faced portrait hung over the fireplace, probably one of the early presidents of the university. There was a framed photo of a young John F. Kennedy in graduation robes and mortarboard, one of seven U.S. presidents who had attended Harvard. Every so often, the young man with the newspaper cast a reverent eye at the picture.
Where had they come from, these young people? Harvard admits from every state in the union, as well as from overseas, and takes pride in the diversity of its freshman class. These kids all looked the same, polished and well dressed, bright and white.
I was avoiding the autopsy photos. Another young woman entered the room, glancing around with apparent delight, her face dimpling as she gave her name to the receptionist. Had Denali Brinkman come here to take her freshman tour? Had she sat on the edge of her seat, wondering whether JFK had sat there before her?
Photos are photos—no more, no less. They don’t include the smell of charred flesh. Still, I’d never seen a body so badly burned, so blistered and charred. It was a human figure, no doubt about that, but— I inadvertently raised my hand to my mouth, but I don’t think I made a noise.
The photos were safely back in their envelope, so I must have put them there. I could understand why the ID had been made through the teeth. I couldn’t see anyone—father, mother, lover—recognizing that ghastly, blackened, skeletal face. I paged through, found the dental chart. All thirty-two teeth, three cavities.
The cheerful young woman in the black suit was ushered to an inner office. The stalk-necked boy and his mother followed. I felt inside my backpack, found a banana with intact skin, fairly well browned, but edible. I wasn’t hungry after what I’d been viewing, but it was nice to know I’d have something to fall back on when it got late.
The receptionist called my name. I stood, anticipating success, and approached her desk.
“Mr. Matheson said to tell you he’s referring all queries concerning Ms. Brinkman to Legal Services. He suggests you make an appointment.”
“He won’t see me.”
“Correct.”
I considered my options. I could lurk by the back door of Byerly. Fine, except I didn’t know what Matheson looked like. I could stake out the parking area, but I didn’t know what kind of car he drove, if any. If I worked smack in Harvard Square, I sure wouldn’t bother with a car. I’d take the T.
Frustration ate at me, but I had no string to pull. I didn’t know why Albert Brinkman had changed his mind about suing Harvard, and I didn’t know what it had to do with the office of undergrad admissions. Possibly, Theodore Fitch had pulled a fast one; maybe there was nothing to know.
I’d go home, call Geary. Call Beaubien, thank him for the report. I swallowed a bitter taste and took a final look around the elegant room, trying not to think about what fire had done to perfect Denali Brinkman, rowing champion, petite, blond, brilliant Denali. At perfect Harvard.
I glanced at the young man with the Wall Street Journal, who was still waiting, still hoping for the big yes, the dream future. I felt sad, and it wasn’t just from staring at the photos of Denali’s body. I felt sad for the teens who sat in the perfect armchairs, and for the teens who’d never sit there, for the hopeful and the hopeless. I considered the earnest young man. What did he expect? That this storied place would somehow change him, mold him, make him into someone special and different and unique? I pondered the new crop of Harvard freshmen, culled from the best and the brightest, the small fish about to take a dive into the big pool.
Would they find success here, or failure? Would they find despair? Like Denali Brinkman.
CHAPTER 29
My cell had been getting a workout. I decided to make a few calls from home, use the bathroom, grab a Pepsi without paying two bucks for the privilege. I’m glad to report I’d already visited the facilities when all hell broke loose.
“All hell” may seem extreme when used to describe two teenage girls, but believe me, it’s not. When I encountered them as I stepped out of the bathroom into the hall, I didn’t recognize the first one, period. What the hell is she— I stopped even as my mouth opened to ask her the question. The second one was Paolina, but not Paolina as I’d seen her before.
My little sister, five three, barely fifteen years old, has got the all-American ideal figure, the heavy breasts and boyish hips, and the whole package was practically on full display. She wore shorts that started low on her hips and ended high on her thighs, with a waistline drawstring begging to be tugged. Her shirt was—well, it was transparent, and she wasn’t wearing a bra. She was perched on heels I wouldn’t wear to impersonate a hooker, a thankless task I used to perform for the police department.
“That’s not what you’re wearing to the party.” The words were out of my mouth before I could stop them.
She and her friend goggled at me. The friend—I recognized her now—Aurelia—my God, she’d grown—wore a skirt the size of a Band-Aid, paired with a low-cut tank top. Both girls wore makeup, their lips glossily painted, their lashes caked with mascara.
“You gotta problem?” Aurelia asked.
I considered possible retorts, knew enough to watch my mouth. “Halloween, right?” wouldn’t go over big, and they wouldn’t know what I meant if I asked whether I should drop them off at the Greyhound bus station, where the professionals congregate.
I sucked in a deep breath. One of the things about kids, one of the saving graces, is that when you look at them, you see more than a simple imprint; you see layers. When I look at Paolina, I see her at fifteen, yes, but underneath I see the faint outline of the twelve-year-old, the
ten-year-old, the little girl. When she was small, Paolina dressed up as a policeman, as a fireman, trying on life. She was trying on femininity now, and I knew I had to be careful.
“Paolina,” I said. “Look at me.”
She clenched her jaw.
“Aurelia, you’re not my responsibility. You can wear whatever you like. You can leave or you can stay, but if you stay, you’ll be quiet.”
She pulled a face but kept her mouth shut.
“Come into my room. There’s a better mirror, better light.”
I led them in, watched as they pranced in front of the full-length glass. To my eyes, they were just this side of ridiculous, just this side of pathetic. They looked like plastic dolls, like wanna-be Barbies. But that was through my eyes. Through theirs, they were glamorous, sexy women. Hot.
“Do the shoes hurt, Paolina?” I sat on the unmade bed, feeling creaky and ancient, at least ninety-five.
“No. Not really.”
“They will hurt,” I said. “You could sprain an ankle. No more volleyball.”
“So?”
“I think we need to compromise here.”
“I’m not gonna wear the same thing I wear to school,” she said. “It’s a party. And I was gonna wear a bra. I just couldn’t decide what color.”
What color would be moot with a different shirt. It’s so damn unfair, I thought, how quickly kids grow up, how fast their bodies mature, how slowly caution catches up.
“Do you remember the perfume?” I asked Paolina. “My very best perfume.”
“That Sam gave you.” She sat on the floor, cross-legged, a child and a woman, and Aurelia joined her, a tumble of color on the rug. I should have known that’s what Paolina would remember about the perfume, that a man gave it to me. She’d always adored Sam.
“What about perfume?” asked Aurelia. “Oops, sorry. I’m like not supposed to talk.”
Paolina said, “When I was like a baby—”
“You were nine.”
“I poured it all over me. I must have used a tablespoon.”
“A shovel,” I said. “She had to take two baths,” I told Aurelia. “We could have bottled the bathwater and sold it as eau de cologne.”
“It wasn’t that bad,” my sister said, but she was smiling. It’s one of her favorite tales. She’s always loved retelling the stories of her childhood with me, the time she almost got lost at Fenway Park, the day she crashed her bike into a rosebush. Once, she told me she didn’t think her mother remembered any stories about her, just stories about her brothers.
“You remember what I said?” I asked.
“I’m not sure.” She knew; she was teasing.
“Come on,” I said.
“‘A little bit goes a long way.’” We spoke it together, singsong. She said it in Spanish and I stuck to English.
“I think we’ve hit another one of those moments, honey. You are beautiful. You are both so beautiful.” Girls, especially girls who grow up without fathers, need to hear those words often, I think. I tell Paolina how beautiful she is at every opportunity, but I’m afraid she’ll never believe it until she hears it from a man old enough to be her father. “But right now, the way you’re dressed is like way too much perfume.”
“The boys like it.”
“You like a guy wears his shirt open to his belly button, his pants so tight that you can see everything he’s got?”
Aurelia giggled.
“It’s better to be cool,” I said. “Understated. Sophisticated. Give them a hint, a little taste.” I wanted to wrap them both in heavy overcoats, but I knew it wouldn’t fly. “Paolina, if you wash your face and start over, pick some clothes that whisper instead of shout, you can wear my perfume tonight. Just a touch.”
God knows it wasn’t what I wanted to say. I wanted to lock her in her room and forbid her to ever wear anything half that revealing. I wanted to preach at her, warn her to be careful what she pretended to be, because when you dress up for a role and play it in the real world, it’s a role you can get stuck with forever. I remembered my father’s angry red face as he yelled similar phrases. I remembered how little they’d meant to me then, and I held my tongue.
“Could I still wear this blouse? With a black bra?”
“A white one would look better. But different pants, maybe those pale blue ones. And sandals? You’ve got such pretty feet.”
Aurelia asked my opinion on her outfit then, and the conversation loosened up. They scrubbed off the mascara and started over. I let them use some glittery powder I’d gotten as a free sample, and they took turns sniffing my special-occasion perfume. Finally I took charge of the flask and told them that if they passed muster when they came down to my office, I’d instruct them in the art of perfume application.
I paused in the hallway and inhaled deeply, aware that I’d escaped a potential disaster, escaped to fight another day. Why, I wondered as I made my way downstairs, do I keep my temper in check when I deal with Paolina, let it rip when I’m with Leon? I care about my little sister. We’ve been together a long time. I love her and I need our relationship to last. I guess I didn’t feel that way about Leon, not yet. Maybe I was testing him in some way, trying to see what he’d put up with. Maybe I was good with kids, lousy with men.
I didn’t fight with Sam Gianelli. That’s not how I lost him. I could go back to him tomorrow; he’d be there. I almost laughed, almost. There I was, a grown woman, telling myself a fairy tale as “happily ever after” childish as any the girls in my bedroom could have invented. If I went back to Sam, he’d still be who he was and I’d still be who I am. He’d still be mob and I’d still be a cop.
Downstairs, I phoned Geary, but he wasn’t in. I didn’t leave a message, decided to bypass the lawyer completely, place a call to Albert Brinkman in Lausanne, Switzerland, instead. Hear it from the horse’s mouth.
It was six hours later in Switzerland, night. I might haul old Monsieur Brinkman out of a soft bed. I had a picture of him in my head, white-haired and frail, too ill to attend his niece’s funeral. I didn’t want to alarm the man. I twisted a strand of hair around my index finger, yanked, decided to risk it. I punched fifteen digits, the phone rang five times, and then the answering machine addressed me in rapid-fire French. I left a message in English, kicked back in my chair, crossed my legs on my desk, and closed my eyes.
I imagined Paolina showing up at the Harvard Admissions office in her ill-chosen party clothes, the glances she’d attract. How did kids learn to present themselves when they came from backgrounds like Paolina’s? What chance did they have? And yet, should everyone have to march to the same drummer, pass through the same cookie cutter, buy the same black suit in order to enter the hallowed portals?
How Denali Brinkman’s application must have delighted Harvard’s Admissions officers. Here was no cookie-cutter kid. What could be better, a smart athlete, a student from a nontraditional background who could be counted as a minority to boot, part American Indian? Harvard keeps track of all sorts of statistics on the makeup of its freshman class, from racial background to the state from which they hail. Where was Denali from? The rower at the Weld had mentioned a western state, Idaho or Wyoming. Not many applied to Harvard from those big open-air states, nothing like the stacks of applications from New York and Massachusetts. Harvard tried for balance in its freshman class, and with so many applicants, it could pick and choose. Denali was tailor-made, a perfect fit, I thought, and the phrase was still in my head when I opened my eyes and noticed the new and unusual paperweight on my desk.
The statuette was small, no more than six or seven inches high. It had a base of silver, topped by crossed oars in gold. It was battered, the rightmost oar bent. I touched it hesitantly, thinking that Denali Brinkman, the beautiful woman in the photo, the terrible corpse in the morgue shots, had touched it as well. Her fingerprints were on the statuette, but what did that matter now? I picked it up.
The note underneath was in Roz’s eccentric hand. “Got this from
Jeannie St. Cyr at Phillips House. She says thanks. Likes her doctor. Hopes this will help you remember your friend Denali.”
I turned it in my hand. It didn’t look like a reward for winning a major race, an Olympic qualifier, more like a high school or camp trophy. Maybe it had been a big race, but a third-place finish, an honorable mention. I checked the silver base for printing, had to pick up a magnifying glass to make it out.
Harsha Lake. Junior Women’s IX. 1987.
I read it a second time, fingering the engraved letters. In 1987, Denali Brinkman would have been five years old. Someone else’s trophy? Who keeps other people’s trophies? You might keep your mother’s cherished awards or your sister’s. If Denali’s mother had been old enough to bear a child in ’82, she would hardly have been a junior rower in ’87. Denali had no sister.
I considered Denali Brinkman, the Admissions officers’ dream come true, recalled the fairy-tale quality of Chaney’s reveries. So sophisticated, so mature. Not like the others. Amazing for a girl her age.
What if Denali wasn’t a girl her age?
I stared at the silent phone. The entire house, seemed eerily quiet and I wondered what Paolina and her friend were up to now. Why had Albert Brinkman dropped the lawsuit? Because the people at the Admissions office had finally done some belated research, knew that Denali had falsified her application, threatened a countersuit for theft of services? It was certainly possible that Denali Brinkman had falsified her application, that she was older than she claimed to be. I reopened the autopsy file, shuffled through the pages. Yes. “Approximate Age,” it said, “20–30 years.” No one had made a note of the discrepancy because they saw what they were meant to see: Denali Brinkman, Harvard freshman. And what was a year or two in the scheme of things?
I thought of the girls upstairs, striving to look older, more sophisticated, then considered the opposite: a woman dressed as a girl. It would be easy, especially for a woman as slight as Denali Brinkman.
“Roz,” I yelled. No answer.