The Drowning Girls

by Paula Treick DeBoard

  She was sick. That was the only word for it.

  It had come to the point where things could only end badly.

  Still, I couldn’t help it; I dreamed about her all night long—hair blond and wet, body young and sleek. I didn’t want to think about her. I wanted not to think about her at all, ever, but she wasn’t going to let me.

  It wasn’t until the following afternoon that I thought about her swimsuit, and I rushed out to the pool. The pieces of black fabric were floating separately, the trunks near the deep end, the top near the steps. Not knowing what else to do, I brought them inside to dry and added them to my bag of evidence. What if Liz had come home and spotted the bikini in the pool—what then? We were on shaky footing as it was; there was no way I could explain this.

  In the garage, I found a yard of twine and tied it tight around the latch on the inside of the gate. The fence was only four feet high, though, intended for an unobstructed view of the course. It was low enough for Kelsey to climb over, but for that matter, she might appear next at the front door, naked beneath a trench coat.

  When Liz called, I realized I’d forgotten completely about Thanksgiving; I’d heated a frozen pizza and worked my way through it, piece after cold piece, scanning the laptop footage for any other sign of Kelsey. If she had a sickness, it was rubbing off on me.

  Liz had stocked the bottom drawer of the fridge with beer before she left. Had she envisioned me sitting on the couch in the dark, downing one drink after another? I watched the live feed until my eyes grew bleary, empty bottles accumulating on the coffee table in front of me. Had my neighbors at The Palms envisioned this, when they’d voted in favor of video surveillance?

  It was dusk when I saw a bit of movement on one of the live feeds, from a camera on the walking trail beyond the Mesbahs’ house. My eyes were so tired by then and my mind so clouded by what I thought I would see—Kelsey, shirtless, her nipples high and hard—that I almost convinced myself I’d seen nothing at all. It had merely been a shadow, a white blur on a gray background. The sun had set; the sky was a deep purple sliding into black. I leaned forward, almost off the edge of the couch, my face close to the screen. And there it was again.

  This time it was definitely real.

  This time it couldn’t be dismissed as a figment of Deanna Sievert’s imagination.

  The mountain lion was more muscular than I would have expected, its body meaty, haunches rolling with each step. All along I’d been imagining a starving thing, nothing but ribs and bone and luminescent eyes. This cat was massive—its paws thick, tail swinging, alert. I was seeing it from behind, watching as it passed from one camera’s range to the next. First the back of its head, a neck that was more like a torso, then the rippling back and its powerful hind legs. Something was hanging from its mouth—a rag doll, a child’s stuffed animal. Its limbs dangled limp.

  Shit.

  It was Virgil, the Zhangs’ pet. Helen took that dog everywhere she went, including into the dining room at mealtimes, where I’d seen her slip it scraps under the table. Of course it was against the rules to have a dog—any animal—in the dining room, but that rule didn’t seem to apply to the Zhangs. Myriam was the only one who complained, but she was too close to Helen to do it publicly. Besides, it had been well natured, watching the rest of us quietly from wide-set eyes.

  But now it was, plainly, dead.

  The mountain lion disappeared from the last frame on the walking trail, just beyond the Berglands’ house. I got to my feet, slipping on my shoes. Beer sloshed in my stomach. If I had a rifle, or Victor’s handgun, maybe I could go after it, take it down. Not that I was a trained marksman, especially at the range I would need for safety, and in the growing dark.

  The Zhangs were home; earlier, I’d seen the twins walking past with their tennis rackets. I could call Helen, speak to her calmly. Say I’d seen something suspicious on the video feed and ask her if Virgil was in the backyard. But of course, he wasn’t.

  I grabbed a flashlight from the garage and slipped out the sliding door. “Back door open,” the Other Woman warned me. In the backyard, the water lapped hungrily against the edge of the pool. The gate was padlocked, but it was easy enough to get one leg up and hop over the fence. The mountain lion must have done the same thing in the Zhangs’ backyard, helpless Virgil dangling from its jaws.

  I kept my back to the line of houses and swung the beam of the flashlight across the fairway, alert for any sign of movement. Farther out, the flashlight beam alighted on a small red-and-white bundle, like a discarded wooly sweater. I swung the light in wider circles, trying to spot the mountain lion. Was it still out there, lurking in the dark, or had it returned to wherever it was from, sated?

  I approached the little hump on the greens, moving slowly, as if my legs were waterlogged. If the mountain lion returned, I was dead, anyway. Even sober, I would lose at a footrace.

  What was left barely resembled Virgil. Helen had once explained to me that Bedlingtons had their ears and the sides of their heads shaved, leaving the top fuzzy.

  That part of Virgil was visible now, but the rest of him was a mess of blood and fur and entrails. I took a step away, heaved once and brought up a six-pack of Corona.

  I was my own worst enemy, really. If I hadn’t been looking at the video feed in the first place... Jeff Parker had said, You have better things to do than stare at some grainy surveillance footage all day long. But apparently I didn’t. I’d spent Thanksgiving alone, and that was the best I could come up with. If I’d been with Liz and Danielle, we would have been eating pumpkin or apple pie by now, telling stories about Liz’s childhood. Someone else would have discovered Virgil’s mangled body, either late that night or early the following morning, and I would have learned about it from a message on my voice mail. “What is it?” Liz would have asked, seeing my grimace.

  But I wasn’t at a safe remove—I didn’t have objectivity or distance. I had a mind clouded with the slow, impending horror of Kelsey, the estrangement from Liz, the secrets upon secrets I was keeping for what seemed, now, no discernible purpose. This would be the beginning of a new nightmare, involving everyone at The Palms in one way or another. It would make the news; Deanna, prophet of doom, would return to remind us of her close encounter in August. Myriam would call an emergency HOA meeting; Victor would return to his nightly patrols, and we would be lucky if he didn’t pluck off a jogger or two on his quest to rid the neighborhood of danger. There would be a wine-and-cheese fund-raiser at someone’s house, the monies designated for a memorial bench to Virgil Zhang.

  And I was just so sick of it all.

  I was sick of this place. I was sick of the life I’d wanted for us. All that happiness and security had only been a mirage, evaporating as soon as we approached.

  I stripped off my T-shirt and laid it next to Virgil’s body, then rolled him over with a nudge of my foot until he was completely on top of the cloth. The smell coming off his body was foul, and I retched again, bringing up beer and pizza. Still, I managed to tie the corners of the shirt together in a makeshift bundle and carry Virgil back to my house, his body swaying next to me.

  For once Kelsey Jorgensen was nowhere to be found, not hiding in some bushes, giggling and waiting to pop out at me, not naked in my pool. I worked as quietly and quickly as I could, retrieving a shovel from the garage. The far corner of our lot, next to the fence, was the best place. The dirt was thick and wet, having been hit by the sprinklers that morning, but it was harder work than I could have imagined. My body was weak and heavy by the time I’d buried Virgil and tamped down the soil, evening it out over the general area.

  I didn’t sleep much that night. It was like that Poe story with the dead man’s heart beating in the other room. Only with Virgil, what I kept hearing was the bark that Myriam had pronounced so irritating. What I kept seeing were the dark button eyes, open and staring, wondering what the
hell I was going to do about the situation. I worked on the laptop until early morning, carefully deleting and splicing the digital file until it showed nothing at all—no mountain lion carrying a pet in its jaws, and no man sneaking out onto the golf course and returning ten minutes later shirtless, holding a bloody sac in front of him.

  It was surprisingly easy to do—a few snips, and I’d rewritten history. I’d removed myself from the story of Virgil Zhang, and for that matter, I’d removed his story, too.

  JUNE 19, 2015

  6:21 P.M.

  LIZ

  The ambulance gone, I closed the front door behind us and leaned against it, my heart racing. Danielle and I stared at each other.

  “You need to tell me,” I said. “Right now, before we get in that car, before we—”

  “What do you mean? I already said—”

  I grabbed her by the arm. “You’re going to tell me now.”

  “I told you!”

  “From the beginning.” I shook her arm and she pulled away.

  “Fine. We were upstairs in my room. I was looking for a CD. And then we came back downstairs and I saw Kelsey in our pool. I had no idea she was out there. I thought—”

  “What?”

  Danielle was a messy crier, a trait she’d inherited from me. Her face was instantly blotchy, red patches appearing like a rash of poison ivy. “I thought it was some kind of joke. You know, something dumb, like she was pretending she’d fallen into the pool. So at first I didn’t do anything. And then I saw the blood.”

  I was struck by how small she was, how young. With everything that had happened in the past few months, I’d managed to forget she was still a teenager, not even old enough for a driver’s license.

  “Did you invite her here?”

  “No! Why would I do that?”

  “I don’t know, Danielle. I’m trying to figure out why she was in our backyard in the first place, and how she ended up unconscious in our pool with a gash on her head.”

  She turned away, but I caught her words. “Maybe if you hadn’t been so drunk, you would know why.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “I smelled it on you, Mom! When you came downstairs.”

  “I had a glass of wine.”

  She snorted.

  “There’s no messing around here, Danielle. We’re going to the hospital, and there will be all kinds of questions for us. The Jorgensens will demand answers. The police—”

  “I told you. I don’t know anything!” She wiped her nose with the back of her hand. “Anyway, she’s going to be okay, isn’t she? They said there was a pulse.”

  “I don’t know.”

  Danielle sobbed, “But she had a pulse!”

  I reached out, touching her on the shoulder. For once she didn’t pull away. “I don’t know,” I repeated. I couldn’t shake the feeling of Kelsey’s body beneath my hands, settling like a dead weight between compressions. “Come on, we have to get going.”

  Instead of moving, she pointed at my foot.

  I was bleeding all over the floor.

  * * *

  In the master bathroom, I sat on the edge of the tub, wincing while Danielle made tentative dabs at my foot with a wet washcloth. She was still wearing her blue bikini, and when she bent over, the bony ridge of her spine was exposed.

  My toenail was only attached to one side, where it hung on like a little red flag, bearing the remnants of an old strip of polish. I bit my knuckle, forcing down the pain. When Danielle got up to rinse out the washcloth I asked, “Can you find some gauze for me? I think it’s in one of the boxes in the hallway.”

  She complied wordlessly, discarding several other packages—tampons, a tube of bath salts, unopened bars of soap—before coming up with a package of large gauze strips. I helped her unpeel the wrapping and she applied the strips to my foot.

  I stood, testing it out. “Okay, put some clothes on and meet me at the car.”

  “No ‘thanks’? I did just bandage your disgusting toe.”

  “Thanks.” I pointed. “There’s blood on your shoulder.”

  She rinsed the washcloth in the sink and dabbed at her shoulder, erasing the stain.

  Too late I wondered if I should have said anything about the blood, if it might have been, somehow, evidence.

  I limped past her and took a right turn to the closet I’d planned to pack earlier in the day, a lifetime ago. It was painful even to slip into a pair of open-toed sandals.

  Danielle followed me to the doorway. “I didn’t do anything, you know. Even if she deserved for horrible things to happen to her, it had nothing to do with me.”

  “Get your shoes,” I told her. “We’re following them to the hospital.”

  * * *

  I’d started the car before I realized that I didn’t have my cell phone. I left Danielle in the car and hobbled back into the house. I would have to call someone, once I figured out what was going on—Allie or Phil, or, God help me, the Jorgensens. My phone was resting on the table in the foyer, and when I touched the screen, I saw three missed calls from Phil, all from earlier in the afternoon. On my way back through the house, I spotted another phone on the kitchen peninsula, one in a black-and-red ladybug case. Was it Hannah’s? I brought the phone to life. There was no password screen, and I hesitated for only a second before clicking on the icon for her text messages. Her last exchange had been with Kelsey at 4:30 p.m.

  * * *

  I thought you were coming over.

  Her mom wouldn’t let me.

  Well, you need to come over. We have a surprise for you.

  I’m supposed to stay home.

  Yeah, and you always do what yr supposed to, right?

  I’ll come around the back.

  I dropped her phone, and it clattered onto the counter.

  NOVEMBER 2014

  LIZ

  By the Sunday after Thanksgiving, our laundry done and the house relatively clean, I felt antsy. Danielle had two chapters to outline for her history class and had left them until the last minute. Phil had spent the day on his laptop, looking at the new video surveillance software that had been installed there.

  I couldn’t get my mind off Virgil Zhang or the tearful panic of his owners. Earlier that day, I’d joined a search party to walk the golf course, even though Phil insisted it was a futile exercise.

  “They probably left the gate open and he wandered away,” he protested. “It was days ago. He could be miles from here by now.”

  “But wouldn’t he have shown up on a camera?”

  He shook his head. “Not necessarily. I’ve gone over and over that footage.”

  “Dogs don’t just vanish,” Helen had wailed, making me wonder what kind of world she lived in. Had she never seen the classified section of a newspaper before? Vanishing was one of the things dogs did best. She had upped the reward to $5,000 by Sunday night, and I wondered if I should take a day off work to continue the search myself. We could use the money.

  * * *

  On Monday, there were the typical after-holiday tasks to attend to at work—wilting plants to be watered and a dried-out piece of pumpkin pie to be split with Jenn while we contemplated an impressive stack of mail.

  “How was your Thanksgiving?” I asked, forking a bite of stale crust.

  She made a little seesawing motion with her head. “Oh, it was great. Ate too much, of course, vowed to go to the gym in the morning, but then I ended up getting sucked into one of those Black Friday sales...”

  I only half listened, smiling. It was good to be back at work, good to slip again into the routine of things. I stabbed at the last of the pie crumbs with my fork.

  “...and the best part,” Jenn was saying, “is that Christmas is right around the corner. Two weeks of class, a
week of finals and then, bliss.”

  “Can’t wait,” I said.

  “Oh, that’s right. Your sister’s coming, isn’t she?”

  “Yep.” I grinned. “My mom, too. For a week.”

  “Hey—” Aaron stuck his head into the break room. “Got a minute, Liz?”

  “Sure.” I tossed the paper plate in the trash and the fork in the sink and joined Aaron in his office. He was at his computer, his face grim. I closed the door behind me. “What’s up?”

  “Our little friend is back,” he said, adjusting the monitor so I could read the screen over his shoulder. His browser was open to a Twitter account called MLHS Stories.

  “Shit,” I said.

  “Yeah. Looks like it went live again over the weekend, so I spent most of yesterday reading this junk.” He shifted to one side so I could get a better look.

  MLHS Stories was a gossip account that had first flared up a year ago to report on the more salacious exploits of Miles Landers students—and occasionally, staff members. Like most things that fell under the category of trolling or cyberbullying, the account worked on a basis of anonymous reporting. People sent in private messages, which the account owner would then post verbatim. It wasn’t exactly a fact-based reporting system, although many regarded it that way. A year ago, the account had accused an unnamed teacher of having a relationship with a student, and the rumor mill had gone wild for a few weeks, until the feed had suddenly disappeared. Without fuel to add to the fire, the rumors had eventually died down as well, but not before several teachers had been hauled before administrators.

  “Here’s everything since it went live,” he said, scrolling up from the bottom.

  “I hate this junk,” I complained. It was the exact way I didn’t want to see our students—as sex-and drug-obsessed, petty and vicious. I would rather exist in a state of blissful ignorance where students’ out-of-school lives were concerned, except that what happened online had a way of spilling over into our actual lives, producing a stream of crying, hysterical students, their worried/angry/clueless parents and occasional verbal exchanges that culminated in pulled hair or thrown punches. Last spring, an incident of cyberbullying had led a fifteen-year-old in a neighboring district to commit suicide, and our counseling staff had been told, in no uncertain terms, that monitoring social media sites was in fact our business. The senior counselor on staff, Dale Streeter, claimed he couldn’t navigate the internet. I was officially in charge of the beast that was state testing; and that left Aaron to the more unsavory side of student life.