The Girl in Kellers Way

by Megan Goldin

  Emily, I think to myself. Now I know my rival’s name.

  Emily flicks her hair behind her shoulders as she takes her place alongside Matt on the podium. Emily has two dimples in the left cheek that give the impression of a perpetual smile. Her posture is perfect. Her hair is dark and shiny.

  Matt whispers instructions into Emily’s ear. The students turn their heads towards me to watch my reaction to this show of intimacy. I respond with deliberate nonchalance.

  ‘As you all know, memory is the process of encoding, storing and retrieving information.’ Matt’s voice reverberates across the room. ‘If any one of these functions is disturbed then the quality of the memory may be affected. Or the ability to recall a stored memory. Sometimes it may even result in a false memory.

  ‘What do I mean by this? Well, let me show you. I gave Emily a list of words to recall. They are on the screen behind her so that you can all follow along. After memorising the words, I asked Emily to watch a brief video on my computer with a neutral subject. In this case, butterflies. Without looking, Emily will now recite as many words on the list behind her as she can remember. Go ahead, Emily.’

  Emily stands with her back to the whiteboard, reeling off the words she has memorised. There are ten of them on the board behind her. She gets seven correct.

  ‘Now,’ Matt says. ‘I am going to show Emily the same set of words, after which she will watch another video.’

  We all wait as Emily memorises the same list of words. She nods her head when she is ready and Matt turns his computer screen towards her and plays another video.

  ‘Go ahead, Emily,’ says Matt when the video is finished. She names the words on the list. This time she gets just five correct.

  ‘In this example, Emily should have been able to recall the words at least as well as she did the first time around. In actual fact, her performance was significantly worse. That’s because this time she watched a traumatic video of a bus being struck by a train at a railway crossing. It affected her short-term memory recall. Now, these are hardly laboratory conditions, but I think you all get the point. Trauma affects memory.’

  Emily walks back to her seat flicking her hair and looking like the cat that got every last drop of cream. How I wish I could wipe that smug smile off her pretty, dimpled face.

  ‘Who here believes that memories can be tampered with? That memories can be deliberately introduced so that we can’t tell if an event actually happened or if we just think it did? A show of hands.’ About half of the room put up their hands.

  ‘The lost in the mall experiment suggests that memories can be planted. A researcher gave his subjects booklets with a number of true anecdotes from their childhood. He also planted a false one, namely that as a child the subject was lost in a shopping mall. He found that a quarter of the participants not only remembered this supposed traumatic childhood event, but even added specific details to the memory. This is a hotly debated area of psychology, but there is plenty of research that shows memories can be caused by suggestion,’ says Matt, looking at his watch.

  ‘We’ll pick this up next week when we discuss in more detail the factors that affect memory. Make sure to read page 142 to 165 of the textbook. And remember your term papers are due in exactly one week,’ he says over the clatter of students stuffing their belongings into their bags.

  Matt’s groupies, including Emily, converge at his desk with questions. He answers them with good humour as he shuts down his laptop and packs his briefcase. I wait for him by the door. When he approaches, he leans in to kiss me with a lifeless brush of his lips on my cheek.

  ‘What are you doing here, Julie?’ His tone is cold.

  ‘You forgot your papers.’ I pull out a folder from my shoulder bag. ‘I came to drop them off.’

  ‘I thought I packed them in my briefcase,’ he says. He did, but I removed them.

  ‘I found them after you left,’ I lie. ‘They were on the floor near the coat stand. Alice probably pulled them out of your bag. She was playing with it this morning.’

  ‘Was she?’ His hand tightens on my arm as we walk through throngs of students. ‘Let’s go upstairs. It’s too noisy here to talk.’

  It’s more of a threat than an invitation. I accompany him through the tide of students moving between classes, looking at their phone screens while they walk.

  Matt guides me towards the elevator. It’s almost full. We get inside and turn around to face the closed doors. My fingers brush against Matt’s ever so softly. Ever so invitingly. I inhale his citrus scent and catch his eye. It’s as if we are a single seething organism. He knows exactly what I’m thinking. We are incredibly attuned at the most basic, animal level, even though everything else between us is so complicated right now.

  When we reach the third floor, we walk towards his office like impatient teenagers, except I’m wearing boots with high heels and I can barely keep up with his long strides. Matt’s been stand-offish for days. Cold. Correct. The only time everything is normal is when we have sex.

  That’s what I want to do, right there in his office. Spice things up. Isn’t that what the marriage therapists suggest in their magazine columns? We walk towards an office at the end of the corridor with ‘Professor Matthew West’ engraved on a plaque on the door. Matt holds the door ajar for me to enter. I am about to pull him towards me when I realise that we’re not alone.

  ‘Hello, Kate,’ he says with a note of surprise. A woman sits on his couch with her legs neatly crossed. ‘I hope I haven’t kept you waiting.’

  ‘Not at all. You’re right on time,’ she answers.

  Her black-framed glasses are oversized and contrast with her linen pants and jacket. I suspect that she’s a post-graduate student. Or maybe she works for the university.

  ‘Kate, this is my wife, Julie. She dropped by to watch my lecture,’ says Matt, putting his jacket over his chair and unpacking his leather briefcase.

  For a psychologist Matt can be very insensitive to other people’s feelings. I still have no idea who Kate is, all I know about her is her first name. What upsets me most is that he hasn’t made the slightest effort to get rid of her. I shake her hand with a bland smile.

  ‘I’m the new research assistant in Matt’s department,’ she says as she releases my hand. It annoys me that she feels the need to identify herself as someone non-threatening. She’s just a research assistant. Nothing for me to worry about. Oh well, that’s ok then, I want to tell her. Matt would never fuck a research assistant. Matt, of course, says nothing.

  I stand waiting, with a stupid smile on my face, for Matt to reschedule the meeting with Kate. Or for him to ask me to meet up with him in an hour at the faculty club for lunch. Or something.

  He does none of that. He leaves Kate and me to stand around awkwardly while he puts on his glasses and flicks through the file she dropped off.

  ‘We can go over the initial study results together later, or tomorrow,’ she offers.

  ‘No, no,’ says Matt, putting the document aside. ‘We set this up days ago. Julie, you don’t mind, do you?’ It’s hardly a request.

  ‘Of course not.’ I keep my voice upbeat. I don’t want to show my embarrassment at being discarded so casually by my own husband. Let alone in front of a woman who treats him with such familiarity.

  ‘Actually,’ I say, making a show of looking at my watch, ‘I have a lunch arrangement across town so I’d best get going. It was nice to meet you, Kate.’ I smile. ‘I’ll see you later Matt.’

  ‘Yes, enjoy your lunch, darling,’ he says absently. He’s forgotten about me already.

  I close his office door behind me with a strange finality. Only then do I lean against the wall with my hand to my mouth to block the sobs. Tears blur my eyes. A door down the corridor opens. I don’t want anyone to see me in this state. I run down the emergency stairs as if I’m escaping a fire.

  Through a film of tears, I find my car and sit in the driver’s seat, shaking uncontrollably, watching raindrops tap onto
the windshield. When I’ve calmed down, I drive home robotically. I walk through the front door, without any memory of the drive. I don’t even remember which route I took to get here. It’s all a haze.

  I go straight to our bedroom and swallow two sleeping tablets with a mouthful of water straight from the bathroom tap. I curl up on my bed still in my designer outfit. I don’t have the energy to change. I’m overwhelmed by helplessness as I listen to the wind whipping up outside. I drift to sleep to the sound of tree branches scraping against my bedroom window. My last thought before unconsciousness envelops me is of a man with cloudy eyes and a bloodied face shaking his head in disappointment. ‘You’re not safe, Julie,’ he says. The rest of his words are swallowed up by the roar of the storm.

  Chapter Fourteen

  Mel

  Through the one-way mirror of the police interview room, I watched Joe nonchalantly leaning back in his chair, his legs stretched in front of him as if he was hanging out with his crew. His obnoxious smirk was all bravado and adolescent defiance. I could see the fear in his eyes. I’d seen it before; when he broke his arm when he was three, and when his dad died.

  I left him to stew for a few minutes longer. I needed the time to switch gears from being a cop to being a parent. I wasn’t sure I could pull it off when I opened the interview room door. It would be just the two of us in that grim room. Its narrow walls were painted a sickly green that wiped away all hope and left only despair. It was deliberate. That stifling room was a precursor to the prison system. A warning of what lay ahead.

  Joe looked at the door uncertainly as I came inside. I wrapped my arms around him and hugged him. Deep racking sobs shook his body. I let him cry it out. When we finally broke the embrace his eyes were rimmed with red, though his cheeks were dry. He wiped the tears in his eyes with his sleeve while I held him. When he finally sat down, he couldn’t meet my eyes.

  I suppose if you’re the son of a cop and you want to get attention then you do exactly what Joe did. You get in trouble with the law. It was a cry for help.

  ‘Joe,’ I said. ‘What’s going on with you?’

  ‘Nothing,’ he said, showing inordinate fascination with his scuffed sneakers.

  ‘They say you were spending time with an older kid who was dealing.’

  ‘Last time I checked, hanging out with a friend was still legal in this country,’ he said defensively, shifting his feet under the table. ‘I didn’t commit any crime.’

  ‘You ran,’ I said. ‘When the police told you to stop. You ran. That’s a crime.’

  ‘A misdemeanour at best,’ he retorted.

  ‘Joe, your dad spent his entire career trying to catch these scumbags,’ I said. ‘He died for it. He was killed by a dealer. You know that. How do you think he would feel if he could see you now? Here? If he knew his eldest son was hanging out with drug dealers?’

  ‘That’s low, Mom.’ Joe’s voice cracked. I’d gotten through to him.

  ‘It’s the truth, Joe.’

  I waited a moment before asking my next question.

  ‘Were you dealing, Joe?’ I searched his eyes. Whatever boyish fear I’d seen in them a moment before had disappeared. They were stubborn and defiant. ‘Joe, were you dealing drugs?’

  ‘Not exactly,’ he said, crossing his arms.

  ‘Explain,’ I ordered.

  ‘Derek, the dude I was with. He needed someone to run deliveries for him. He promised to pay me ten dollars per delivery. You know, to deliver stock to his customers at school. I figured I’d make some pocket money.’

  ‘You couldn’t just get a job at McDonald’s like other kids,’ I said, furious. ‘Look, Joe. Nobody here is stupid. Least of all me. You’ve been seen with this crowd before. I need you to tell me what’s going on in order to help you. Do you understand?’ He shifted his gaze away from me.

  ‘Have you used?’ I asked, making deliberate eye contact. No answer. ‘Joe, have you used drugs?’

  ‘No,’ he said eventually. ‘Well, maybe a bit of weed once, but nothing more. I swear.’

  ‘Then what the hell were you doing with these guys?’

  ‘I told you, they said they’d pay me to sell their stock at school. I was their delivery guy. That’s all.’

  ‘And did you?’ I asked. ‘Deliver?’

  ‘A few joints,’ he said. ‘They wanted me to move on to bigger stuff. That’s why I had that meeting with Derek. He said he’d give me ten per cent of his sales at school. You can earn a lot more money delivering pills and meth than weed.’

  ‘Yeah, and you can go to prison for a whole lot longer as well. Do you really want to spend the next ten years of your life locked up in a cell about half this size, with maybe an hour of yard time a day?’

  ‘Come on, Mom,’ he said. ‘Stop trying to scare me. They’d put me in a juvie centre is all. That’s what Derek said.’

  ‘Derek can say whatever he wants. He won’t be serving the time,’ I told him. ‘I can tell you for sure, Joe, once you get in the system it’s hard to get out. And don’t kid yourself. Juvenile detention is no picnic. Now, I’m going to get myself a coffee. I’ll come back in ten minutes. Make your decision. Either cooperate with the police or face whatever punishment they give you. You don’t get a free pass just because your mom is a cop.’

  ‘You can’t use your, you know, influence to get me a warning or something?’ asked Joe. Fear flared in his eyes. God help me, I wanted to tell him that it would all be alright. I had to stop myself cold.

  ‘Joe, I don’t know these cops. This isn’t my station, or my town,’ I said. ‘You got yourself caught way outside my jurisdiction. They owe me nothing. In fact, I doubt I could talk them into bringing you a glass of water. They’re super angry. They say you kicked the arresting officer when he tried to cuff you. They’re talking about an assault charge.’

  ‘Big deal,’ he said as he dragged the side of his shoes against the floor.

  ‘Joe. Look at me. This is a big deal. The only way you’re going to get out of this mess is to tell them everything you know about this gang. Everything.’

  ‘If I do that,’ he said, ‘Derek and his crew will come after me.’

  ‘No, they won’t,’ I said flatly. ‘We’ll set it up so that you’re the last person they come after. Believe me, I’ll make sure you’re not in danger for a second.’

  I turned around before I opened the door. ‘Think about what your dad would have said if he was here.’

  ‘If Dad was alive,’ said Joe, ‘then I wouldn’t be here in the first place.’

  That was really the crux of it. I felt myself turn cold as I closed the interview room door behind me. It clicked as it locked itself. I leaned back against the closed door and stood there, drained. Joe was on the other side and I wasn’t sure I’d ever be able to get him back. Really get him back.

  ‘Did you get through to him?’ asked the arresting officer when I arrived at his desk. He was a young cop in jeans and a casual shirt.

  ‘God, I hope so,’ I said. ‘He’s a good kid. Just a bit misguided, and angry.’ I took a deep breath. ‘Look, I’m going to get a coffee and then let’s sit down and talk.’

  The drug squad and I worked out a deal for Joe. They put him in a holding cell by himself for a few hours and gave him a warning to scare the hell out of him. They also made it perfectly clear it was the first and last time they would be extending such a courtesy.

  When we arrived home, I confiscated Joe’s phone and put him under a strict curfew with minimal computer access. That would be tough to enforce given the overtime I was pulling at work, but I was determined to do it, even if it meant hiring sitters to keep an eye on Joe. Whatever it took, I would do it.

  The drug squad tracked down Derek a week later during a ‘random’ breath test of cars on the highway south of town. Purely by chance, they found packages of drugs taped under the front passenger seat. Exactly where Joe said they would be. I heard the sniffer dogs went crazy.

  The night Joe returned from the
police lockup, I called Bobby, Danny’s younger brother. He’s a detective in upstate New York. He suggested I send Joe and Sammy to him for the summer. ‘To get Joe back on track,’ he said. ‘And to make sure that Sammy never needs an intervention.’

  I hated the thought of being away from my kids for so long. But I saw the benefits. It’s hard raising sons without their dad. They need a father figure. It’s hardwired into their genes.

  I didn’t think much about the Kellers Way case during that week. I was busy with two other homicides.

  What is it about spring that makes husbands and wives turn on each other? This time it was a wife who stabbed her husband with a steak knife after she found incriminating texts on his phone from a woman he was sleeping with. Her best friend, in fact. He died in the ambulance. She was stinking drunk when she killed him. When she sobered up, she tried to hang herself with bedsheets in her holding cell. She wrote a note to the effect that there was no point living without the love of her life. She should have thought about that before she stuck him in the belly with her dinner knife.

  A couple of days later, a body was found wrapped in a plastic sheet in a field behind a remote gas station out near I-95. The victim had been shot. Execution style. Two bullets. Clean into the back of the head. The vic had gang tattoos on his knuckles. It was obviously drug-related. Based on a cash-register receipt for an unopened packet of gum that we’d found in his pocket, I figured it was most likely he’d been killed in Florida and the body dumped as the killers drove up north. I spent a fair bit of time down at the medical examiner’s office for both of those cases.

  When the autopsy report for the Kellers Way victim was ready, Mike offered to walk me through it. His office was on the second floor of the forensics building with a view of an elm tree and a sliver of sunlight running in a diagonal stripe across the carpet. I bought two coffees on the way over.