by Andrea Mara
“But what if she thought she was?”
He stands up and starts pacing, pushing his hand through his hair, over and over. The room is small, and he reminds her of the fly, buzzing up and back. He stops then.
“No. I can’t accept that. She jumped because she was heartbroken about Marcus, not because she was afraid of our parents.”
She changes tack. “Does Shannon have a laptop we could look at?”
“She did, but we never found it – it wasn’t in her apartment after she died. I guess she loaned it to someone or left it in to be repaired.”
“I imagine all her emails and messages are on her cell phone anyway,” Cleo says. “Actually, do you mind if I look at her text messages?”
He nods, but there’s nothing of interest – her mom confirming lunch plans for the following weekend and some messages with friends arranging a night out.
Cleo swipes through the screens on Shannon’s phone, and in among the apps on the third page, she spots a WhatsApp icon.
“She used WhatsApp to message too?”
“No, just the text on her phone,” Chris says. “Why?”
“She has the app installed – is it okay to have a look?”
He nods and she clicks in.
That’s where she strikes gold. There’s a long chain of messages with someone called Taryn, right up until the morning after Shannon’s death, when Taryn suggested they meet for coffee, not knowing her friend was in the city morgue. Jesus.
Cleo scrolls back and starts to read.
Shannon: I fucked up, I think I’m pregnant.
Taryn: No! Did you do a test?
Shannon: Not yet. It might be too soon. It’s just a very strong feeling right now. Everywhere. I feel sick, I’m tired all the time, my boobs hurt a little.
Taryn: You know that could literally be tiredness and PMT. Plus you have been hitting it hard with the booze lately – that’ll take it out of anyone.
Shannon: Maybe. Anyway, still on for dinner on Friday?
Cleo skips past dozens of messages about dinner and what they’re watching on Netflix, looking for more pregnancy conversation.
Shannon: My period is late.
Taryn: How late?
Shannon: Two days.
Taryn: Come on! Two days is nothing. Just do a test already!
Shannon: I will. Soon. I feel a bit weird about it.
Taryn: Because of who it is?
Shannon: Yeah. What kind of a moron gets knocked up by an ex who’s now living with his new girlfriend?
It’s too hot in the apartment and Cleo wants to take off her coat but she’s stuck staring at the phone, scrolling through the life of a dead woman. This was always coming – of course it was Marcus. She should feel anger, or at the very least hurt, but there’s nothing. It’s like watching a story unfold on a screen, one that has nothing to do with her life.
She keeps reading.
Taryn: Don’t be so hard on yourself. You’re not the first, and you won’t be the last.
Shannon: I’ve asked him to call tonight, and I’m going to tell him.
Taryn: WTF?
Shannon: I’m sick of going through this on my own.
Taryn: But you’re not even sure if you are! If this is a way to get him to go back with you, it’s not going to work. Please don’t do this. Not until you test.
Shannon: I have a back-up plan. I have some other stuff I need to discuss with him, something way bigger than a poppy-seed-sized fetus.
Taryn: ???
Shannon: I’ll fill you in sometime. It’s not something I can talk about easily. Coffee tomorrow?
Taryn: Sure. But think about what you’re doing tonight. It could backfire x
It’s Shannon’s last message, sent the day she died. The next one is from Taryn the following morning, chasing up the half-made coffee plan.
Chris is sitting down again, lost in his own thoughts, but when Cleo looks up, he snaps out of it.
“Did you find something?”
She passes him the phone. “Yeah. I’m guessing she wasn’t pregnant, but she certainly thought she was.” She stops and wonders for a second about the can she’s opening. “And she was telling Marcus. The night she died.”
Chapter 40
Chris is pacing again, but now he’s a bull, not a fly. When he punches the wall, Cleo jumps. He turns back to her.
“You think he did it? He pushed her?”
“I don’t know, but I think it’s a possibility. What was her apartment like – was the window high up off the floor?”
He shakes his head. “No, it was a glass door, leading out to a small balcony with a railing.”
“And if she was out there with Marcus, could he have pushed her? Logistically, would it work?”
He winces. She needs to choose her words more carefully. Lauren or Ruth would be a hell of a lot better at this kind of conversation.
“I’m sorry. I just mean could he have done it?”
Chris sits again, dazed.
“She was tiny. Five feet tall and weighed not much more than a hundred pounds. If he wanted to, yes, he could have pushed her over the railing. Oh my God.” He looks at Cleo. “What do we do?”
“We call the police. That’s what we do.” It sounds like she’s taking charge, but her mind is reeling. She wants to sit still, to make the world stop spinning for just a minute, but Chris is up again and rummaging through a drawer, flinging sheets of paper on the floor.
“Chris, are you okay?”
“The number for that cop – the one who spoke to me after I sent an email to your mom. He was good to me, understood about grief. He gave me his card, but –” he sits down on the floor, “I can’t find it.”
“Detective Murphy. It’s okay, I have his number – he took on the case when Marcus attacked me.” Cleo walks over and sits on the floor beside him. His hand is on the ground and she covers it with hers. “I’ll call him for you.”
Chris closes his eyes and nods, then listens as she makes the call.
Detective Murphy doesn’t pick up at his office, so she tries his cell. That goes to voicemail too. She leaves a message, giving Chris’s number.
For a while, they sit, saying nothing. Cleo has cramp in her leg, and needs air, but can’t leave him like this. The fly is still here, buzzing through the silence. There’s no air in the apartment. Outside, an uptick in car horns and slammed doors remind her that it’s lunchtime, and she hasn’t eaten for hours. But still she waits.
Her phone rings, startling them, and Chris raises his eyebrows in an unspoken question – Detective Murphy? But it’s Ruth, checking that Cleo got in okay, and confirming dinner plans.
“You should go,” he says, when she finishes the call.
“Are you sure?” She tries to keep relief from her voice.
“Go. I’ll let you know if Detective Murphy calls. Though what good it will do with Marcus dead, I have no idea.”
“But if she was pushed, wouldn’t you want to know?”
He picks at the carpet, not answering at first, and suddenly it’s clear – there’s a part of him that doesn’t want to know.
“I can’t decide which is worse – imagining her so lost that she takes her own life, or thinking of her horror, knowing he was going to push her over.” His voice breaks on the last word. He swallows.
“I think truth is important,” she says softly, and he nods.
Cleo stands up awkwardly, shaking out pins and needles, still not sure about leaving him.
“What do you think the ‘something else’ was?” he asks.
“I’m sorry, what?”
“In her messages to Taryn, she wrote that there was something else she wanted to discuss with Marcus – something much bigger.”
He looks up like he’s waiting for her to tell him the answer and make everything okay.
“I don’t know what it could be – but I didn’t know Shannon.”
Chris looks confused, then shakes himself.
“Of
course. I forgot. It feels like you’ve been here forever.”
It feels like that to Cleo too, though it’s only been a couple of hours. She really needs air.
“Maybe you have a think while we’re waiting for Detective Murphy to call, and I’ll think back too, in case there’s anything that happened when Marcus was living with me?”
He nods, and this time she’s really going, making her way to the door. She hears it close softly behind her as she runs down the stairs, and out into the flinty October light.
Ruth’s mouth forms a perfect “O” when Cleo gets to the bit about the last message to Taryn, and she puts down her fork. They’re in Danté’s, Cleo’s favourite Italian restaurant, because Ruth is the kind of friend who remembers details like that. The chat and the wine are working in tandem like a salve and Cleo is starting to unwind. She hasn’t heard from Chris yet, so Detective Murphy must not have called. It’s only six though, she thinks, checking her phone again.
“Jesus. Do you think it’s possible that Marcus . . . I mean, he couldn’t have, could he?” Ruth asks.
“Killed her? I don’t know, but when I consider it, it doesn’t seem impossible. And that says something, right? I mean, if I asked you could your dad or your boss or your creepy colleague who always hugs you too hard at office parties have killed someone, what would you say?”
“No! Of course not.”
“Exactly. That’s the reaction you’d expect. But if you ask me if Marcus did it – or could have done it, I can’t give you an emphatic no. That’s telling in itself.”
Ruth nods slowly, her fork still lying on the table. “Jesus, that’s . . . I don’t even know what to think. That you could have been living with someone capable of that?”
Cleo signals to the waiter to bring more water. Jetlag is kicking in and her mouth feels like sandpaper.
“Well, I guess the bit where he tried to beat me to death in my apartment was an indication – right?” She smiles at Ruth, but Ruth doesn’t smile back.
“My God, that poor girl. What she must have gone through that night. One way or another, I guess.”
Cleo’s cell beeps, but it’s not Chris – it’s Lauren, wondering if she’s had any luck proving Chris is VIN. That’s going to be a long story, and not one she’ll be overjoyed to hear. Cleo turns the phone face down.
“I know. It’s shit. All of it. And there’s nothing we can do right now, so let’s talk about you instead. How’s work?”
Ruth is an analyst in an investment firm, and works insane hours most of the time. She rarely takes vacations, she gives the job two hundred per cent all the time, and as far as Cleo can see she gets no recognition for any of it. Her boss is lazy and a bully, and no matter what Ruth does she finds fault. So when Ruth puts her head in her hands at Cleo’s question, she’s not surprised.
“That bad, huh?”
“Worse,” comes the muffled response from behind her hands.
“Go on, spill, what’s she done now?”
Ruth looks up. “It’s not what she’s done – this time it’s me.” She sighs. “You know I told you before that when I get really mad at people at work, I type out an email telling them exactly what I think of them, but I never send it?”
Cleo nods. It’s not a therapy that would lend itself to bar work, but she can see how it could help in an office environment.
“Well, this morning, she wanted a report that she’d asked me to have ready for tomorrow. When I said it wasn’t due yet, she peered at me over those tiny glasses she wears to try to look more intelligent, and said, ‘You know Ruth, if you spent less time eating donuts and more time on your reports, you might be able – just once – to deliver something sooner than the very last moment it’s due.’ Obviously, I wanted to stab her on the spot but instead I nodded and walked back to my desk, bright red, with everybody watching me. Of course there was a donut on my desk, sitting there, mocking me. And this is the worst bit – I put it in the trash. Isn’t that the most stupid thing you’ve ever heard? I mean, the report’s not due till tomorrow, and still she managed to embarrass me in front of everyone, and make me throw away a perfectly good cinnamon donut.” She laughs, but it doesn’t reach her eyes.
“She’s a bitch. Forget her. And I’ll buy you ice-cream on the way home. Deal?”
She shakes her head. “That’s not it. I was so mad, I just started typing. Nothing I haven’t written before really. Just telling her exactly what I think of her, her lack of ability, how she lets us do all the work while she takes all the credit, and at the end, as always, I told her that her glasses fool nobody, that we all know she’s going to get caught out for the fraud that she is.”
Ruth looks down at her bowl of congealing carbonara. Cleo waits, but it’s clear where this is going.
“And you . . .?”
“One of my colleagues walked over to my desk, so I had to close the screen. The email auto-saved to my drafts, and when I went back in to delete it, I pressed send by mistake.”
“Oh Ruth. Oh my poor Ruth.”
“I know. What kind of idiot does that? What kind of idiot drafts emails like that at all?”
As Cleo reaches across the table and puts her hand on Ruth’s, something stirs in her mind, but slips away again before she can get hold of it.
“So what happened then?”
“I realised what I’d done as soon as I hit send, and I tried to recall it but it was too late. She’d seen it. Nothing happened for an hour – I basically sat at my desk, trying not to throw up. Then she emailed me and asked me to come into her office. There was a woman from Personnel there with her. She’d reported me. Can you believe it?”
Cleo shakes her head. “Wow. What did the woman from Personnel say?”
“She could hardly get a word in. My boss started by reading out my entire email – believe me, I wanted to die on the spot – then, get this, she started to cry. Actual tears. I don’t know what black magic she used to conjure them up, but she did. She said she’s extremely self-conscious about her glasses, and that comment in particular really hurt. And that she’s going through some medical issues, and finding it difficult to cope generally, and my email had pushed her over the edge. Cue more tears, and Personnel-lady handing her tissues.”
“What medical issues?”
Ruth throws her hands up, almost knocking a tray from a passing waiter. “Who knows? None is my guess. It’s very easy to throw around vague comments about medical issues and being hurt when you want to play the victim.”
“Ah Ruth, I’m so sorry. It’s just shit, all of it. So what happens now?”
“They’re considering what action to take, I’m due to hear from them next week. It’s so over the top. I know I should never have written the email, but my God, taking action over it?” She looks like she’s going to cry.
“We need something stronger than wine now,” Cleo tells her. “This is a tequila situation.”
Ruth makes a supreme effort to blink back the tears, and a watery smile breaks through.
“I’m back in to face her in the morning – I’m not sure tequila is going to help me.”
“Ice cream then. Right?”
She nods, digging her fork into her pasta and pushing it around the dish.
“I’m done with this – let’s get the check.”
It’s only when they’re walking back towards her apartment with two pistachio ice creams that Cleo works out what’s flitting in and out of her memory. Taking out her phone, she excuses herself and calls Chris’s number. The background noise when he picks up tells her he’s somewhere else – a subway maybe, not his apartment. He starts to tell her Detective Murphy hasn’t been in contact and she cuts him off.
“Shannon’s drafts – we never checked them. We looked at her sent items, and her inbox, but what about her drafts folder? If there was a ‘something else’ she wanted to discuss with Marcus, could it be there?”
Chris is quiet for a moment.
“I’m not so sure. If she was
going to talk to him about something, I don’t know that she’d put it in an email to him?”
“But maybe not him. There was an out-of-office response from someone called Hayley working at the New York Sun-Herald – is that a friend of hers?”
“Not that I know of.”
“So maybe Hayley is not a friend, but a contact at a newspaper – maybe there’s something she was going to tell? Something about Marcus and how he was treating her?”
Silence again. They’ve stopped at the corner, a block from Ruth’s apartment. Ruth is finishing her ice cream, Cleo’s is starting to melt in the cup.
“If he was. . . mistreating her in some way,” he says eventually, his voice low and hard to catch in the echoes of the background noise, “I don’t think it would be newsworthy.”
“Not news, but for a feature, maybe. Journalists write about human stories all the time for features – challenges people have come through. Hey, it’s worth checking anyway, right?”