Ruby’s heart was still hammering when she walked into her studio. She double-checked the door and windows were securely locked, and then she lay down on her bed, hand to her chest, trying to calm herself. The guy at the front desk was clearly harmless. The Whole Foods man was just making conversation, and there was no way that creep from the dating app would know where she lived. They never even exchanged full names. She knows that, reasonably, but the strange feeling of being both in and outside of her body persists, even here in the safety of her room, so that she feels acutely aware of her heart in her chest and separated from her own limbs at the same time. It does not help that whenever she closes her eyes, she can see flashes of red at a young girl’s temple, the twist of bare legs, yellow hair floating. She had tried her best with Detective O’Byrne—‘I turned left here, no wait, I came down the stairs from the right, there’—but all she could really remember about yesterday morning was what he already knew: there was a dead girl in Riverside Park, and she found her, and it was obvious that something very, very bad had happened to the girl before Ruby came along.
She now knows that I was strangled to death; the latest headlines scream it. When she first encountered this awful detail, she immediately put her hand to her own throat, applied pressure to the cartilage she could feel straining under her skin. How depraved would a person have to be to take a life in this way, she wondered, her eyes filling with tears. To use their bare hands, to look up close at the pain they were causing. To imagine it, even a little, was horrific.
He’s out there somewhere, she thinks. The man who did this. Right now, he could be down the street, or at Whole Foods, or there in her building. He could be any man she’s met in New York City. The thought is terrifying, and she resists it as hard as she can, wriggles her fingers and toes, cycles her legs in the air, trying to focus on her body, her breathing, anything that feels like it’s hers alone. She has an instinct that something got rearranged when she was down by the river, that there was a before Ruby, and now there is an after Ruby, a woman who no longer feels at home in her own body, as if the violation of someone else has somehow seeped into her own skin.
But nothing actually happened to me, Ruby reminds herself. All I did was find the girl. I was never in any danger.
And yet. What if that young girl thought she was safe, too? Right before that very, very bad thing happened to her—did she have any idea of what was coming?
It is impossible for Ruby not to imagine this.
And now, finally, slowly, I begin to take shape in Ruby’s mind. A person begins to form beyond the blood and bruises, the broken things. A real person, a young girl who had a whole life, and she must have been so scared in those last, awful moments. This thought makes Ruby sit bolt upright. She has been wondering about the kind of man who could do such awful things, but this suddenly feels like the wrong question. Who on earth was the girl he did those awful things to?
Who is she?
From her new home base of fear and confusion, twenty-some hours after she discovered my body down on the rocks, Ruby Jones sets out to find me again.
‘Thank you,’ I whisper, as she reaches for her laptop, begins to search online for anything and everything she can find out about the case. Because, even if she doesn’t fully understand this yet, Ruby has deliberately chosen not to forget me. When forgetting would no doubt be the easier path for her to take.
She has so much to learn. About herself. About dead girls. It is most definitely not going to be easy. But in this moment, what matters most is this: Ruby has decided to hold on to me just as tightly as I find myself clinging to her.
Unlikely she was prostituting.
Does not appear to have been sleeping rough.
Clothing suggests she was lower to middle class.
Crime scene tape flaps above the rocks. Police dogs have been brought in, grid searches have been completed and repeated. The heavy rain has made things harder, stirred up the ground, surfaced the muck of other mornings and washed away footprints and any other impressions he—the perpetrator—might have made on the only morning that matters. The most they have to work with right now, then, is my body. The impressions I have left behind, and those things he has pressed onto me.
There is evidence of a struggle.
My case file fills up with notes like this, a padding of words around the bare bones of the crime. Physical evidence packaged and labelled at the scene is examined. Samples come back from the lab, and databases are searched. The first forty-eight hours are critical, they say. But as time ticks down, there is no revelatory discovery, no match, no name. Led by Detective O’Byrne, a dozen men and women have turned me into their question, but the answer eludes each and every one of them.
‘She is not giving up her secrets easily,’ they say to each other. As if there are better ways for a dead girl to behave.
Detective O’Byrne is different. He doesn’t give up on me so easily. In these earliest days, he thinks about it like this: I am simply a song he can’t quite remember. A melody he used to know, but for now he can only hear a fragment, a note hanging in the air as it repeats, over and over. The name of the song is tantalisingly close, but he can’t quite get there. Can’t get to that place, far enough inside his own head, where other people, other men, sing out. I see him trying hard, see the times he places his thick fingers at both temples and pushes down, elbows against desk, eyes squeezed shut.
The note hangs between us. He knows that he knows.
Someone took a photograph of him like this once. Printed it out, labelled it ‘The Thinker’. It’s still pinned on a precinct wall, some cluttered wall, amongst dozens of other snapshots documenting people and places and murders long solved. No matter that the real Thinker has his hand at his mouth. The photographer recognised the intent, the turning in on oneself, the folding of thoughts over and over until they’ve been reduced to something small and true. The truth wants to be told; Detective O’Byrne knows this most of all. He will get to that place, soon enough, he is sure of it. He will find the man who did this because signatures, calling cards, are always left on the bodies of murdered girls. This is why he keeps coming back to the list of potential weapons. Thumbs his way down the possibilities. Displaced fragments. Round in shape. Something brought down with extreme force against the right temple. Fresh hemorrhage. This came first, she was still alive. Before hands went to neck, before the crushing, the strangulation that killed her. Was that initial strike an accident? A moment of white-hot rage? Both of these things, intertwined? Thumb on words, pressing against the possibilities. Then fingers back to temple. A tap, mimicking the blow of a—what?
Figure out the weapon and you figure out the man.
For Detective O’Byrne, failure is not an option. It’s nothing personal, he thinks. Just his job. He would obsess over any case this complex, has to make it his priority. That’s what he’s paid to do, and what he does well.
It’s nothing personal. He is not making it personal when he puts his head in his large hands and aches over the already indisputable details of this case. Those grim facts written out across a young woman’s body that he knows for sure to be true.
There is evidence of a struggle.
Something you should know. I did not want to die. I don’t know if it makes any difference, but when the time came, I fought really hard to stay in my body. I tried my best, but I just couldn’t hold on. I did not want to die. And now I am—
Well. Ruby and Detective O’Byrne are not only ones looking for answers. Turns out they don’t teach you how to be out of the world any more than they teach you how to be in it.
TWELVE
U OK?
Ruby has been staring at her phone screen for twenty minutes. It is the first message she has received from Ash in three days. Three days. It’s been three whole days since she found Jane’s body. Jane. That’s what the media call the girl—me—now. Jane Doe, an unidentified white female found murdered in Riverside Park. Blonde. Thought to be aged between 15 and 24 years
old. 5'5 tall, 125 pounds. A scatter of freckles across her nose. No identifying marks, no tattoos, and no major dental work done. She looks like no one and everyone, and they have named her Jane.
The girl is now Jane.
Police say they are investigating every single tip phoned in. They hold press conferences, their faces like stone. Standing at podiums, they warn women to be careful, to avoid situations. News stories lead with Vicious Attack and Brutal Slaying; the growing consensus is that this was a random attack, which puts my murder on the tip of all the tongues up here where it happened, though the whole city is spooked. Who is she, people ask? And how could this have happened? Nobody young and pretty gets murdered in New York City these days. Correction: nobody young and pretty gets raped and murdered in New York City these days. Quotes from ‘police sources’ on the exact nature of the assault dominate the story in the tabloid papers. It makes Ruby feel sick to her stomach.
(Others delight in it. They crawl right into the muck.)
Is Ruby okay, then? No. Like I said, she has not chosen the easy path here. She could have let me go already, turned me over to the people whose job it is to think about me. Instead, her need to know who I am has come on like a fever; after her interview with Detective O’Byrne, she has stayed holed up inside her room, moving between the bed and the bathroom, as if taking a third or fourth shower might cool her down. It never does, so she crawls back under the sheets, half wet, stares at the ceiling, until she switches on her laptop again, goes back to her search for fresh headlines and threads of new information about the investigation. The city honks and buzzes outside her window, beyond her closed blinds there are millions of people going about their days and their nights, doing the things they always do, good or bad, or both, but Ruby wants to shut all that living out. Now that she feels closer to the dead.
Cassie says she should come home. Says she was right to question Ruby’s safety and the wisdom of her travelling alone.
Away from her laptop, there is only one safe place Ruby can think of.
The precinct is on a regular, residential street decorated with thin-trunked trees. Spears of metal make the first-floor windows of the street’s ornate row houses look like little jail cells, but for the most part, the location feels innocuous, homely, and Ruby would not have guessed there was a police station nestled in the neighbourhood. When she’d walked here for her formal interview, she’d followed the blue dot on her phone and was confused when she arrived, thinking: this is a street where people should be making dinner and playing with children, not investigating robberies and assaults and all the hidden, broken things. But then again, so much happens behind closed doors. Perhaps, she reasoned, it made sense for the police to slot themselves in amongst all that domesticity, amongst the kitchens and lounge rooms and curtains being closed around everyday life.
Best to keep the police close to home, maybe.
Seventy-two hours after my murder, on a grey-skied morning, Ruby finds herself returning to the precinct. She walks past the building a dozen times, but she never goes up to the entrance, cannot bring herself to do more than hover across the street. It is enough for her to stare at the front doors, to know there are people like Detective O’Byrne and Officer Jennings, that kind policeman, working away inside. Solving crimes, helping people, keeping them safe. Just a few days ago, she thought, This is how people go crazy. Now she understands she had no idea back then. What it means to need answers no one can give you.
Her body was found by a jogger. Such a famous line. Two anonymous women connected by just seven words. Just how close had they come to each other that morning? Close enough to change roles, play each other’s parts?
The victim is estimated to be in her mid-thirties. She is 5'7, 155 pounds. She has brown hair, and brown eyes. She has a tattoo of a heart on her right wrist.
Was Ruby’s life decided in the time it took to put on her running shoes? Had she arrived in the park just a few minutes earlier, might she have been the one in danger?
(How close do we all come?)
As she stands across from the precinct, Ruby thinks about Detective O’Byrne. By now, she has seen him many times on the news, read every single article about him she could find. It was no surprise to discover he is famous in his field, a respected, much decorated investigator known for solving many of the area’s high-profile cases. The grim stuff, the murders of women and children, cases Ruby skipped over at first, but often returns to in the dark, pressing her tongue against the exposed nerve of violence when she cannot sleep. She wonders how much more Detective O’Byrne knows about this particular murder than what has been shared with the public so far. A girl was assaulted, strangled. A seemingly random attack. The perpetrator’s DNA was found under the victim’s fingernails (and other places Ruby doesn’t like to think about). This is all common knowledge now. But what new secrets has the girl’s body offered up to the medical examiners and photographers and crime scene investigators? Three days on, obviously not enough to give away her identity. Posters with a detailed sketch at their centre have now gone up around Riverside: Do you know this woman?
(A forensic artist has approximated my face, painted a small smile at my lips, coloured right up to the edges of me. It could almost … but the artist has softened my expression, widened my eyes. I look like a girl who knows nothing of the world. Who is going to recognise that?)
There must be more that he knows, Ruby thinks of O’Byrne, today. She can almost see him shifting all of the different pieces from hand to hand, rubbing the truth between his fingertips until it sparks. An odd image, and when she looks down, Ruby sees that she herself is pressing thumb to forefinger, a new and nervous twitch.
‘Does he know who you are, Jane?’
Ruby doesn’t mean to say this sentence out loud, but the words slip from her mouth, just as Officer Jennings quietly comes up beside her. She jumps, their faces mirroring surprise and recognition. He thinks Ruby looks nicer in the light, sexy even, then scolds himself for such an inappropriate thought. Smith sent him outside, said the Australian woman from the Riverside case had been standing out front of the building all morning, and he should probably go see if she was okay.
‘Ah … Ruby?’
She nods and ducks her head at the same time, embarrassed. Jennings is looking at her with concern, and she remembers his softness down by the river. The way he breathed out slowly when she pointed to the body. Officer Smith had wrapped the blanket around her, squeezed her shoulders, but it was Jennings who looked like he wanted to cry.
‘Hi, Officer Jennings,’ Ruby says finally, willing the flush in her cheeks to settle. ‘I … ah, I was just walking past. And I was wondering if there have been any breakthroughs. Or, you know, leads. In the case.’
While she is talking, Jennings keeps glancing back at the precinct doors, his discomfort clear. He should have made Smith do this part. His partner is far better with the traumatised ones, she somehow knows what to say, how to find the balance between professional distance and small comfort. He clears his throat, wishing he’d paid more attention to how Smith does it.
Mistaking this unease for censure, Ruby’s blush deepens.
‘Sorry. I didn’t mean to be a bother. I shouldn’t even be here, and I know I have no right to ask questions. It’s just … I can’t seem to stop thinking about her. I’m going a bit crazy, I think.’
At this somewhat alarming admission, Jennings blinks through his nervousness, remembers something from his training, and takes a step closer.
‘It’s okay, Ruby. Did you want to come inside and talk? Maybe you remembered something? Detective O’Byrne is further uptown today, but I could …’
He trails off as Ruby shakes her head, tears pooling, then spilling down her cheeks.
At the sight of her tears, Jennings reaches over and awkwardly pats Ruby’s arm, then coughs. His own cheeks are burning now. Will he ever get used to the crying?
(Think, Jennings, think.)
‘Um. Ruby, I can ge
t you some phone numbers. There are people—experts in this kind of thing—who can help you. It’s pretty normal to feel upset after what you went through. Witnessing a crime can be traumatic, and lots of people say talking about it helps. So, you don’t, you know, get stuck.’
Mortified that she’s crying again, wanting nothing more than to get away from this awkward conversation as quickly as possible, Ruby nods at Jennings’ suggestion, wipes away her tears with the back of her hand. Giving himself a mental tick for getting it right this time, the young officer practically runs across the street, back to the emotional safety of the station. Returning a few minutes later, he hands Ruby three or four glossy pamphlets, and feels even better when she rewards him with a half-smile.
The booklets he has picked for her all have covers showing a diverse cast of characters talking on the phone or walking together, holding hands. Everyone has a smile on their face, despite the words jumping off the paper. Trauma. Victims. Violence. Grief. Is this supposed to be her world, her people, now?
Ruby doesn’t feel like smiling.
Still, the young officer is clearly pleased with himself, and Ruby can only thank him for trying.
‘I’ll have a read over these for sure. To make sure I don’t’—she waves her hand about—‘get stuck. I appreciate this, Officer Jennings. Really. Thank you.’
‘Don’t mention it, Ruby. You’ve been through a lot. It’s good to deal, right? And come by if you want to talk some more, okay. You’re welcome any time.’
(An odd closing. More to do with her smile than anything else. They both recognise this, and Jennings has the sense to start backing away.)
‘Officer Jennings!’
He has already crossed the street when Ruby yelps out his name, startling them both.
He stops.
Ruby takes a deep breath.
‘Where is she? Can you tell me where Jane is?’
‘Where Jane is?’ Jennings repeats her question, confused.
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