The people on the list are cooperative. Which is a bit of a waste since they seem to know very little about Libby Delgado. Worked at a foreign bank, in a fairly senior position. Comfortable but not rich. Parents dead. No siblings. Bought the Lagro house a little over a decade before. Rented an apartment closer to her workplace but always spent the weekends in Lagro. Didn’t employ a maid or any kind of household help. Kept to herself. The people on the list are perfectly helpful but also perfectly opaque.
Something itches in Saenz’s brain, sly and relentless and maddeningly out of reach.
He asks to be let into her house again. Rueda comes with him. Everything remains as they had left it on New Year’s morning. She had few relatives, and she wasn’t very close to any of them. There has been no mad scramble for her worldly possessions, something rare in this part of the world.
Saenz walks through the house, muttering to himself. Rueda follows him around, careful not to distract him. The priest stops at a small utility room just off the kitchen, looks down at a little pile of clothing dumped on the floor beside the washing machine. Odd. Then he walks a little farther down and finds a tiny bathroom.
“Your boys dust in here?” he asks.
“Guest bathroom? Yes.”
Saenz fully alert now, almost buzzing. “The coffee cups.”
A beat, then Rueda understands. “You think he used the bathroom. You want to see if we can find a match.”
“The living room was trashed, and the upstairs. But no other signs of struggle or disarray anywhere else.” The priest moves back toward the washing machine, his eyes narrowing to focus on the pile of clothes on the floor. “Except in here.”
He bends to pick up a blouse, and the rest of the small pile comes up along with it. He is momentarily confused and then he realizes that they’re all still attached to a small, blue plastic clothes rack. Saenz carefully plucks through the clothing until he finds what he is looking for.
“Hook’s broken.”
Rueda comes closer. “So it was torn off the—”
Saenz darts off before he can even finish, looking around for a pole or makeshift clothesline—anywhere the rack could have been hung from. He finds the broken-off plastic hook on the floor of the shower stall in the guest bathroom.
“It was hanging from the shower curtain pole,” Rueda says, trying desperately to follow the priest’s mental leaps. “You think he saw it when he used the bathroom. It set him off.” He turns to Saenz. “But why?”
Saenz unclips the flimsy little blouse from the rack, holds it up by the shoulder seams. He tosses it on top of the washing machine, takes another tiny article of clothing from the rack. Pink T-shirt, held up, examined, tossed. Nude brassiere. Matching panties.
Finally, he looks at Rueda, those strange light-colored eyes burning. He grabs the clothes with one hand, thrusts them almost in the police officer’s face. “Libby Delgado was not a small woman.”
She puts a down payment on the house on Caridad Street because the neighborhood is quiet and there is greenery all around it; it’s not far from La Mesa watershed, the air is cleaner than elsewhere in the city. When she looks up at the night sky, she can see hundreds of stars.
She puts a down payment on the house because it is isolated and not easy to find. The house has high walls and a sturdy gate. It’s in a part of the city that is still considered too far from the center of things. The area is underdeveloped; there aren’t many public transport options. People imagine that rapists and the ghosts of the unquiet dead lie in wait in the carabao grass grown tall and wild in the vacant lots that line its highways and streets. They’re not too far wrong—a bloated body is dumped in the grass nearly every other month. It isn’t until years later that the megamalls set up shop, and developers start snapping up the land and property values shoot up. Most of the grass is cleared away but the ghosts linger.
She puts a down payment on the house and never tells anyone where it is, so that it will be easier to keep her mother safe. She’s not so afraid of ghosts, but she knows that monsters are real.
“We’re assuming someone else was staying with her. Another woman.” Rueda hands the priest a mug of coffee, black and strong, just the way he likes it. “Who was she? Was she there when Libby was killed?”
Saenz shakes his head. “It’s not a big house. If someone else was there, she would have been found, she would have been dragged into that massive struggle somehow. You only have two blood samples, Libby’s and the killer’s. Highly unlikely that whoever owned those clothes was there when Libby died.”
“Who, then? Houseguest? Lover?”
“Don’t know.” Saenz scowls into the liquid in his mug. “Don’t know who Libby Delgado is, either.”
“Sure we do, we—”
“No,” the priest cuts him off sharply. “Don’t fall into that trap, Mike. We know only what she wants us to know. We need to find out what she’s hiding.”
Saenz talks like she’s still alive.
The house can’t hold her mother; she eventually goes back to her husband, thinks that he can be saved, that this is what a good, strong Catholic marriage should be. It’s funny-sad, when Libby thinks about it. She lost her own faith ages ago. God is dense, deaf, dead, a one-trick pony, putting people on this earth only to forget about them.
The next time God forgets about them, she calls the police. Later, she calmly gives testimony. Her father is put away for a while, but he gets out soon after, slap on the wrist, that’s just how it is. Her mother stays and stays. Libby tells her, You can always come live with me. But you have to choose. She almost says, You have to choose me. But she doesn’t, because it won’t happen. And she cannot keep dashing herself over and over again on the jagged, treacherous rocks of her parents’ lives.
She never speaks to them again. Cancer kills her mother before her father can, a minor miracle. She goes to the funeral but she stands way off in the background, where nobody can see her. When she gets home, she throws every photograph, every keepsake, every card and gift and letter—every single thing that reminds her of her family—into a box. Then she marches out into the backyard and sets the box on fire. She stands close, sticks a hand briefly into the licking flames to see how it feels: the bonfire of her history.
Watches it all burn.
Libby’s desktop and laptop computers are filled with spreadsheets, charts, graphs, and documents for work. When she surfed the Internet, she checked the market indices, read newspapers, shopped for books and shoes. Her bookmarks include dozens of news websites, online booksellers, auction sites. She did not maintain a blog, did not keep a diary of her thoughts, at least not one that Saenz has discovered. And although he can easily ask Rueda to find someone who could sniff out her electronic trail, hack into her e-mails, an acute sense of propriety prevents him from doing so. Her planner does not give him much to work with, either. Aside from meetings at work, she recorded little of her life, a few lunches and dinners, the occasional party.
But after thumbing through it for the fourth time, the priest notices something. There are appointments with people whose names she spells out clearly—Vicki and Faye and Jorge—and others where she only writes initials. It could be something, it could be nothing, but it’s unusual. People often write a certain way and stick with it—names, dates, numbers. It becomes second nature, instinctive. To write full names for some and initials for others, it’s a deliberate thing. Why would you do that? Why don’t you want us to know who you were meeting? AS and FJ and the last one, first appearing in late October, EV? Who were they?
Her latest credit card statement arrives a few weeks after her death. Rueda forwards it to his office along with the rest of the mail, just bills and flyers. Saenz studies the document carefully. You bought a plane ticket. Just four days before you died. Where were you going? The thing that itches in his brain unfurls pale, gelid tendrils, coils them around its fat, glistening lobes.
He makes a telephone call to Rueda, and Rueda in turn makes a series
of calls to other people. A day passes, two days, three. On the fourth day Rueda calls back. The flight was headed to General Santos City on the morning of December 31. But the ticket wasn’t for Libby, it was for an Evangeline de Vera.
EV.
“Do we know who she is?”
“My people are checking.”
“Call me when you know. Oh, and Mike … ?”
“Yes, Father?”
“We need to know if de Vera made that flight, and if she’s back in Manila. And if not—we want her back.”
The first time it happens, she surprises herself. She finds herself telling the woman sitting across from her (colleague, twenty-six, married two years, miscarried once because of the beatings) that she’ll help. The words come out before she can censor them, before she can think about the implications. She lays down the ground rules, making them up as she goes along, realizing only much later that they make perfect sense. Don’t call him, don’t meet with him in person, don’t tell him where you are. Communicate only through your lawyer, the lawyer I’m going to introduce you to, he’s a good man. She lets the woman stay at the house in Lagro for a few weeks; when the time is right, she sends her away to a relative in another city, someone the woman trusts.
It’s more than a year later when she receives word of the annulment from the woman herself; a telephone call, exhausted but happy, and so very grateful. It’s a long conversation. After she hangs up, she breaks open a bottle of wine, puts on some Cole Porter—the Classic Cole album by Jan DeGaetani—and dances slowly in the living room in her bare feet.
It happens again, once, twice, word gets around. She forks out her own money, and if she doesn’t have enough, she works the telephone and writes e-mails, she calls in favors, asks a few trusted friends. She seems to know instinctively how to do this, she becomes an expert, she could write a manual. She falls into it as though she were meant to do it, born to do it, weaving it seamlessly into the fabric of her life.
When her father dies, the relatives ask her to please come. She refuses but she says, Send me the urn. When it arrives, she drives to a rundown gas station along Regalado Avenue, heads for the restroom, locks the door. She empties the contents of the urn into a filthy toilet bowl and flushes them down the drain. And flushes. And flushes. And flushes.
The woman who knocks on Saenz’s door is in her fifties, short and plump and well dressed. He immediately pegs her for a teacher. He signals her to come in with a wave of his hand.
She seems nervous, and Saenz reminds himself to be gentle. You remember how that goes, don’t you?
She is Professor Josephine Atienza, one of Libby’s former teachers at the University of the Philippines. She says she read in the papers that Saenz was helping with the investigation. The words tumble out one after another, she keeps talking even as she roots around in her handbag for something. There’s a certain desperation in her speech and her actions, as though she must get this business in his office exactly right.
When the professor finds the slip of paper she’s looking for, she pulls it out and hands it to Saenz.
“Libby came to my office just after Christmas. She said she urgently needed a place to stay in GenSan. I was born and raised there, so she came to me. A short-term stay of a month or two. I asked her why GenSan of all places, and she said she was working on a project.” Professor Atienza taps the paper with her forefinger. “That’s the place I recommended.”
Saenz studies the paper for a moment, then looks up at the professor. “She lied to you,” he tells her.
Anger flickers in her eyes but it’s quickly replaced by resignation, and she swallows down whatever she may have been thinking of saying. “Libby never lied. She just left out the truth.”
The woman’s husband is Korean, and he is something of a sexual sadist. She wears a scarf at her throat, the bruises fading now from ugly purple to mottled yellow. She tries to explain the things he does to her in the bedroom, but she can’t quite find the words because nothing in her life before him has prepared her for this, for the kind of assault he inflicts, for the level of filth he subjects her to; she has no vocabulary for it. She looks about ready to crawl out of her skin.
Libby sits back and listens to the woman try to tell her story in between great, wracking sobs. At some point, she looks out the window, at the trees beyond. She hasn’t tuned out; she’s just hearing the story in another woman’s voice. After a while, all these women tell their stories in that same voice.
Saenz used to think that when he got to this age, sleep would come more easily. Not true; or perhaps, just not true for him. He cannot remember the last time he slept seven or eight hours straight, it seems an impossible luxury. He stays awake for long stretches, sometimes longer than twenty-four hours. When he finally collapses from exhaustion, his mind struggles mightily against the tide of sleep. He snaps awake in an hour or less. It takes him another hour or two to fall asleep again, and the cycle starts over. He’s always so tired, it’s become an agony to put one foot in front of the other every day. Some days he feels tethered to the earth by the leaden weight of his own aging body, and he prays for release.
It’s been several months now since they found Libby Delgado. Every day that passes, the man who killed her slips farther away from their grasp. Lab tests, requests for information, paperwork, everything moves slowly, as it always does in Manila. Rueda tries his best, he always does, that’s why Saenz likes him, but the system is what it is, it’s like swimming in cold porridge. The DNA, the hair, the fingerprints don’t match anything on record, but given the state of record-keeping in the country, it was always going to be a long shot.
She pulls him into her gravity every night, even though there’s nothing left of her but a few handfuls of ash in a marble jar somewhere. Who are you? he rasps out when he wakes from his fragmented dreams, his uneasy sleep. He reaches for his cell phone, he can’t help it, he’s drawn to those eyes, so very angry, so very alive in her dead face.
The ground rules are clear. No direct contact with him. Always through a lawyer, or the police if necessary. It is the First Rule, a kind of detox to break his hold on the woman’s mind and will. It gives her a chance to see through all the little tricks calculated to make her feel small and defective and unworthy. It forces her to start hearing her own voice and thinking her own thoughts again.
The Second Rule is: If you break the First Rule, you never tell him where you are.
From the pension house on Pioneer Street in GenSan, Rueda’s people manage to trace Evangeline de Vera to the home of a cousin in the same city. They bring her back to Metro Manila, and all the while she demands to know why. When they tell her, she is utterly stunned, she had no idea. She has had no access to Manila newspapers these last few months, and her cousin’s family doesn’t watch the news on television.
She and Libby had little in common, don’t move in the same circles. Evangeline is in her late twenties, tiny, blandly pretty. Barely got past high school. Used to work as a waitress at a karaoke joint, where she met the Korean businessman she eventually married. She has no children, no job.
Rueda asks Evangeline how she met Libby, why the older woman would buy a plane ticket in her name and pay for it with her own credit card. She says she hadn’t known Libby very long, and she doesn’t remember how they met. But she insists they were friends; she was short of cash for a trip she needed to make to see her family, and Libby was kind enough to lend her money for a flight and accommodations.
“But you’re married. Why didn’t you just ask your husband for the money instead?” Rueda probes.
Both the inspector and the priest—one inside the room, the other watching the exchange from outside—are quick to notice the brief moment of hesitation.
“He was … out of town.” She won’t look directly at Rueda. “Traveling.”
Unnecessary, Saenz thinks. People add unnecessary emphasis or detail when they’re lying.
When they take a break, Rueda asks him, “What if it�
��s true? What if that’s really all there is, and we’re wasting our time?”
Saenz holds up both hands in exasperation. “She can’t— won’t—tell us how she met Libby. Who introduced them. Exactly how long they’ve known each other. Why she couldn’t ask her husband for the money. She’s being evasive. She’s terrified.”
On a hunch, he asks Rueda to bring him Libby’s planner and the clothes they found near the washing machine at her house. When they arrive, both men go back into the room where Evangeline is waiting. Rueda introduces the priest. The tension that ripples through her small frame is unmistakable.
Saenz sits across from her, and Rueda takes a seat in the corner.
The priest does not ask her questions. Instead, he tells her a story—her story—in his low, quiet voice, reading off dates and entries on the planner. He tells her that she met Libby at her office on the 28th of October last year. Someone named Gemma introduced them. They met again several times, without Gemma, but never again at Libby’s office, always in a public place—a fast-food joint, a café, a park.
He tells her that she met Libby three times at a hospital, first in late November and twice in December. He says that Evangeline was either sick or injured—the entries in Libby’s planner switched from meet to visit the first two times, and to pick up on the third. He tells her gently that it would be relatively easy for the police to check on the circumstances of these hospitalizations. He tells her that Libby booked the flight and paid for it four days after pick up EV from hosp.
Evangeline is gripping the armrests of her chair so hard that her knuckles jut sharp and white through the skin of her hands.
Saenz draws the clothes out of the plastic bag they came in. “These are yours,” he says, laying them on the table and pushing them across to her. “You stayed with her after you were discharged from the hospital. You left them to dry in the guest bathroom when you flew off to GenSan.”
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