by Mary Kubica
Pearl has no idea that I’m here.
As I hover in the distance, completely blanketed by the thick fog and the branches of dense shrubbery, I see her take a gardening spade to the earth and start to dig.
Quinn
Outside the day is cold. It’s sunny, but that doesn’t mean much. The sun reflects off the glass of the buildings, subduing me. Slowing me down. It’s in my eyes so that I can’t see, and I need to see as I scurry through the masses of people, looking forward, looking backward, hurrying on my way to Millennium Park. I turn around quickly, making sure I’m not being trailed.
The temperatures stick around in the midforties as, up and down Michigan Avenue, workers hang holiday lights on the buildings and trees. It’s too early for this, only November, and yet within days Mickey and Minnie will arrive to lead the parade, the Magnificent Mile Lights Festival, which Esther and I went to together last year.
But this year we won’t be going.
I consider the red line singed across my neck in the shredded photograph and think, This year I might be dead.
The streets are busy. Sandwiched somewhere in between the morning rush and the noon hour, the streets are still congested with people, hordes of them standing at various intersections, waiting for their turn to cross. Cabs soar by, much too quickly for the allotted speed of thirty. I stand at the intersection, waiting for the light to turn green. I watch as a cabbie slams on the brakes, startling a woman in the center of the street. She drops her yoga mat and flips him off, but he breezes past her, anyway, uncaring.
And then I scurry on to Millennium Park.
Millennium Park is a ginormous park right in the heart of the Loop, complete with a garden and band shell, an ice rink, a fountain with reflecting pool and, of course, the legendary Bean. It has a name, one I can’t think of right now as I hurry right past it, but for most of us Chicagoans it’s aptly known as the Bean. It looks like a bean. If it talks like a bean and walks like a bean, then it is probably a bean.
Tons of people gather at Millennium Park each day, locals and tourists alike. It’s a hotspot. Kids kick around in the reflecting pool, being spat at by the faces of Crown Fountain. They lie on their backsides beneath the Bean to see their warped reflections in the steel plates like a fun-house mirror. They dine in outdoor cafés; they listen to live music on the lawn of the pavilion, catching some rays under the warm, summer sun. They follow paths and bridges through the gardens and eat ice cream beneath the tall trees.
But not today.
Today it’s too cold.
I didn’t think of this when considering a nice, public place to meet the detective.
I’m early. While I wait for the detective to show, I try to hide among the stripped November trees, but they’re transparent, see-through. They offer no disguise. Tourists with a camera pass by and ask that I take their picture. I back away. I say that I’m in a hurry. I can’t be slowed down.
I make the decision to steal away into a local coffee shop to kill some time. I order a latte and take a seat in back. There is a newspaper on the table that someone must have left behind, and I hold it to my face so I won’t be seen. I think about the photograph scattered in a million pieces on Esther’s bedroom floor. It’s a threat, a blatant threat. She wants to take my life. Esther took that photograph and then marked it up with a red pen, a thin line across my neck—a telling sign she wants me dead.
I sip my latte, my hands shaking so badly it’s no wonder it spills. I avoid eye contact. I check my phone three times: Where is Ben?
When the time comes, I hasten out to meet the detective right where we said we’d meet: on the west side of Crown Fountain. There are wooden benches there that frame the periphery of the fountains and pool. When I arrive, the detective is already there. I know it’s him because, well, because he looks like a cop: big and stocky and grim. My guess is that he’d be a drag at holiday dinner parties but that’s neither here nor there. He doesn’t wear a coat, as if completely unaffected by the autumn air that all but immobilizes me. His shirt is a button-down and he’s wearing black jeans. Do people still wear black jeans? I wonder as I stride around the reflecting pool and take aim on Detective Robert Davies. Apparently they do.
I’m nervous. Petrified, in fact. I can’t help but wonder what he wants with me. Is this standard protocol in the case of a missing person? I don’t know. I’m wishing that Ben would have returned my call, that he were here beside me right now, a half step ahead as we reach out our hands and make introductions with the grisly detective.
But he’s not. Ben isn’t here and so I have to make do. While a knight in shining armor is great, this time I might have to save my own day.
I sit beside the detective on the cold, wooden bench. I tell him my name and he tells me his, though of course I already know. The space is not entirely vacant; there are other people here. It is, after all, Chicago. But the people are few, and they’re all caught up in their own thing, taking photos of the big buildings, feeding the pigeons French fries, arguing with children. No one looks at the detective and me.
Detective Robert Davies is losing his hair. Male pattern baldness, I believe they call it. He’s got a receding hairline. But his hair is brown—no gray anywhere—so I bet he’s happy about that. Must be hard to get old.
He takes out a tiny notebook. “How long has Esther been missing?” he asks, and I tell him, “Since Sunday.” But then I amend, feeling somehow more guilty for this admission, for the fact that it’s now been five days since I’ve seen Esther with my own two eyes, “maybe Saturday night,” and at that my gaze falls to my hands, to a blue chalcedony ring on my right hand, an oval stone on a sterling silver band. I can’t bring myself to look the detective in the eye.
Her words return to me, Esther’s words: I’d be a killjoy, Quinn. Go without me. You’ll have more fun. The martini bar on Balmoral, its grand opening. That’s what I remember. I also remember Esther sitting alone on the apartment sofa, wrapped up in pajamas and a comfy plissé blanket in a sea-foam green. The last time I laid eyes on my friend.
“We’ve spoken before,” he tells me knowingly when I hesitate for a split second, not quite sure I want to admit to Esther’s disappearance out the fire escape. His eyes are sharp, like an eagle or a hawk. There are lines on his forehead, a prominent schnoz. I’d bet my life he doesn’t smile, not once, not ever. “You and I,” he says again, “we’ve spoken before,” and I say I know. Of course I know; it was just this morning, and I remind him of our phone call a sole two hours ago as I stood in my apartment making arrangements for this little tête-à-tête in the park. I’m pretty sure a small huff emerges from me, or at the very least an eye roll—certainly he can’t be that incompetent that he doesn’t remember our conversation this morning—and at that—great Scott!—he smiles.
I pray this isn’t a harbinger of what’s to come.
“We’ve spoken before today, Quinn,” he tells me derisively, and it’s then that I remember the first thought I had when I pressed End on my cell phone following our call: I’ve heard that voice before.
But when?
I try to connect the dots, to place his voice somewhere else, to match this voice to another voice, and it’s then that it comes to me, these words: It’s a confidential matter. We had an appointment this afternoon. She didn’t show.
The man on Esther’s phone Sunday afternoon when I found it forgotten in the pocket of that red hoodie. Detective Robert Davies was the man on the other end of the line, the one who refused to leave a message. I’ll call back, he’d said. But he didn’t call back. Not then, anyway. Not until today, on account of my missing-persons report. But he didn’t call Esther; this time he called me.
“You called Esther the other day,” I say. “You were supposed to meet. You had an appointment.”
The detective nods his head. “She didn’t show,” he says,
and I solemnly admit, “By then she was already gone.
“Why were you planning to meet?” I ask, but I’m guessing he won’t tell me this on account of its confidentiality. It’s a confidential matter. But to my surprise he does, but only after I tell him what I know. I lay it all on the line this time; I tell him everything. The disappearance out the fire escape, the strange notes, the death of Kelsey Bellamy. And then I show Esther’s phone to the detective, the threatening message still here on the display screen: Payback’s a bitch. He seems rapt by this, for a fleeting bit. He holds it up close to his eyes so he can see the words more clearly. Seems he’s losing his vision, too. Presbyopia, it’s called—I’ve seen the commercials for progressive lenses—and again I’m stricken by the fact that aging must stink, not that I would know.
“Esther sent that to me,” I say.
He looks at me questionably. “What would make you say that? Why do you think Esther sent this text to her own phone?”
This is something I never paused to consider. Why would Esther send this text to her own phone? Why not mine?
“I’m not sure,” I say. “Maybe she knows I have her phone. Or,” I begin, but then stop quickly and shrug it off. I don’t know why Esther would have sent that text to her own phone. “She killed her last roommate,” I reveal quietly instead, the words themselves a betrayal to Esther. I whisper the words so that Esther can’t hear. “Kelsey Bellamy,” I say, and then, “She’s trying to kill me, too.” I tell him about the shredded photograph, the candid shot of me walking down the street in my plum sweater, the mark of a red pen slicing my throat in two. A threat.
“Esther isn’t trying to kill you,” is what he says to me. He says it like he’s sure, like in his mind there’s no doubt about it. Like he knows.
“What do you mean?” I ask, and, “How do you know?”
And then he goes on to explain.
Detective Davies tells me that he first met Esther a year or so ago when he was investigating the death of Kelsey Bellamy. It was more or less an open-and-shut case, he says. The girl had food allergies, which I know. She ate something she was allergic to; she couldn’t get to her medicine in time. Hundreds of people die from anaphylaxis each year. It’s not that common, and yet it happens. That’s what the detective tells me. Negligence might have played a part in Kelsey’s death, yes, and at the time Esther took a great deal of blame. “People pointed fingers,” he says. “People always want to point fingers. They need someone to blame.” But once Kelsey’s death was ruled an accident, life went on for Esther and for Detective Davies. There was no doubt in his mind that Esther hadn’t purposefully tried to tamper with Kelsey’s meal. “I’ve seen a lot of liars before,” he tells me, “but Esther wasn’t one of them. She passed a lie detector test with flying colors. She cooperated with the investigation. She was an exemplary witness, and clearly contrite. She felt terrible about what had happened to Kelsey. She owned up to it right away—the mix-up with the flour—and was never defensive. I can’t say as much about most witnesses, and certainly not the guilty ones.”
He pauses for a breath and then continues. “Esther called me Saturday night, out of the blue. We hadn’t spoken in months, nearly a year. But she had something to show me,” he says, adding on, “She seemed spooked,” and there’s such conviction in his voice I find myself holding my breath, forgetting to breathe. Esther was spooked. But why? The very thought of this makes me want to cry. Esther was sad, Esther was scared, and neither time did I know.
Why didn’t I know?
What kind of friend am I?
“She didn’t say much on the phone. She wanted to tell me in person. She’d received something, a note. I can only assume it had to do with Ms. Bellamy,” he says.
My heartbeat accelerates and, tucked up into the sleeves of the aqua sweater, my hands begin to sweat.
“When did she call you?” I ask.
“Saturday night, nine o’clock or so,” he says. Nine o’clock. Shortly after I left for that stupid karaoke bar, leaving Esther behind in her pajamas and a blanket. Did Esther purposefully wait until I’d left to call the detective? Was she even sick?
Esther had received a note, I wonder. But no. I consider the notes to My Dearest. Esther wrote those notes. He must be mistaken. The signature line most clearly reads: All my love, EV. Esther Vaughan. She’s signed her name to the letters. They’re hers. Aren’t they?
Is it possible that Esther is somehow My Dearest?
I’m a tad bit skeptical to say the least.
“I have the notes,” I tell Detective Davies then, reaching into my purse and thrusting the two typewritten notes into his hand. “I brought them with me.”
I’ve been carrying them around with me in my purse because I couldn’t think of another safe place to leave them. But I’ve read them, of course, many times, and neither says a thing about Kelsey Bellamy. As Detective Davies’s eyes scan the notes, he, too, seems unimpressed, though he asks if he can keep them, anyway. I nod my head and watch as he slips the notes carefully into some sort of evidence pouch where later I imagine they’ll be dusted for fingerprints and some sort of forensic analyst will try and find the make and model of the typewriter on which the notes were typed.
The notes are completely madcap, don’t get me wrong. They are. But inside, there’s no grand confession, no mention of Kelsey Bellamy. Somehow he’s got it all wrong. He must have misunderstood what Esther said or maybe she was lying or in the very least stretching the truth. Maybe Esther was trying to mislead the detective. But why?
“There was nothing else?” the detective asks, and I say no. “There must be more,” he says, but I assure him there’s not. The look that crosses his face makes me believe I’ve failed again. In some way, I’ve let him down.
Or maybe I’ve just let Esther down. Right now, it’s hard to say for sure.
“But what about the photograph,” I ask, “of me? The one Esther put in the paper shredder, my face with a slit across the throat. That was clearly a threat. She wants me dead.”
“Or...” suggests Detective Davies as I feel the bile rise up inside of me like an active volcano, threatening to erupt. “Maybe whoever sent Esther the letter took the photo of you, too. Maybe that’s who wants you dead.”
Alex
The ground looks hard. Not frozen solid, but hard. The top layer, the sod, seems the hardest to get through as she begins digging into the cold morning earth with her gardening spade, pressing on the steel with the sole of a suede boot. The sod binds together, a million sheaths of grass, clinging together, refusing to let her through. It’s hard work, but Pearl forces her way in, gouging out the land bit by bit. I watch in awe as she thrusts the cold, hard earth up in the blade of the shovel, tossing it into a pile behind her slender frame. As she does, she begins to sweat, a cold sweat that congeals on her skin and makes her shiver, and as I watch from a distance, she removes her coat first, followed by the hat, tossing them both onto the dew-covered lawn, and I’m reminded of the day at the lake, Pearl undressing bit by bit and then walking into the frigid water.
As the steel blade hits topsoil, the work gets easier; the earth puts up less of a fight and the pile of dirt begins to rise. She digs and digs, and, watching her, I lose all track of time. I’m hypnotized by her movements, but also more than a little terrified. Who is this woman and what is she doing? Why is she digging up the remains of the dead Genevieve? It feels suddenly moronic that I followed her here. Suddenly stupid. Anyone with half a mind would have immediately called the police or run in the other direction, not trailed her. But now here I am, hiding in the bushes of an all-but-abandoned cemetery while some wackadoodle unearths a corpse from the ground. I squat down to the hard, cold earth, making certain that as the fog rises I won’t be seen. I don’t want to even think what she’d do to me if she knew that I was here. For now, the bushes will keep my secret for me.<
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As I watch from a distance, I dredge up what knowledge I have of the little girl who’s buried in that grave. I don’t know much; she was gone before I was born. But what I’ve heard about Genevieve is that after her death the town’s members lifted the rudimentary wooden casket from the trunk of her family’s car and dropped it into this very trench in the cemetery, hastily, without the praxis of a visitation or a funeral or a procession. Instead, the body was ushered rather quickly from the car and to this ditch and nobody ever bothered to ask why. People were glad she was gone. Though she might have only been five years old, she was a delinquent, the kind of child that wreaked havoc on their own children and homes, tormenting kids, vandalizing property, chasing neighborhood dogs. That’s what I’ve been told. It wasn’t as though anybody wanted to see a little girl die, but still, they were glad she was gone. “Her mother had her hands full,” neighbors have said over the years, staring at that forsaken house, mumbling under their breaths something to the effect of, What a damn shame.
As far as I know, no one comes to visit Genevieve’s grave. I can only assume her family split as soon as they abandoned that old home and buried their child in the ground.
In time Pearl’s shovel begins to fill with silt and sand, followed by clay, terra-cotta-colored clay soil, and then, later—in the moments before the steel blade hits hollow wood—bits of broken-up rock fragments, gray like stone. It comes up in chunks, rocks that appear hard to carry. They must be heavy and as I watch on she takes her time, losing speed.