Nowhere Girl

by Susan Strecker

  Riding was a proper sport, immersed in tradition. “Oh God. I know who you’re talking about. She’s hard to miss. Is the horse okay?”

  “Yes, he’s stable.” He came out of the stall and put on a plastic glove that came to his bicep. “I’m going to do an internal exam now. Does he need ace?”

  “No,” I said, taking Bliss’s muzzle in my hands. “He’s perfect. He’ll stand like a rock.”

  Hazel stood in the aisle while I petted Bliss and talked to him about which of the three yearlings was his favorite. Dr. Stewart pulled a few nuggets of hard manure from him. I kept thinking of Savannah the day she’d gotten Bliss. We’d waited on a tack trunk until past midnight when a Brookledge truck finally lumbered down the narrow drive of the barn. She took his temperature to make sure he hadn’t gotten shipping fever, made him a warm bran mash, and stayed with him through the night. From that first moment, she was the only person Bliss trusted. Every day, she’d lean her face down near his muzzle and whisper to him. Then she’d swing a leg over his back, her gold hair flying, her face so relaxed and happy it was as if she were lit from the inside out. Hazel kept touching my arm and giving me little sounds of encouragement, and then, about twenty minutes into it, we heard a motor in the drive, and she went out to see who it was.

  I talked to Bliss in a low voice, telling him it was okay and to hang in there, and though he rested his muzzle in my hands a few times, for the most part, he concentrated on Dr. Stewart. When the door opened, I turned, and there was Brady standing in the light of the barn. I went to him, and Hazel took my place at the stall. Even though I didn’t want to leave Bliss, I walked into the lot with him. The sun was hot overhead, and I saw Brady’s bike next to my car.

  “I tried to call back,” he said. “But I couldn’t get you.”

  “Yeah,” I told him. “The cell reception here sucks.” I heard Bliss whinny, a sad, troubled sound. “Listen, I have to get back to my sister’s horse.”

  Brady looked helpless; it seemed like he didn’t know what to do with his hands. “Do you want me to wait?”

  I still had a splitting headache, and I felt both flattered and slightly guilty that Brady had driven all the way out here. “If you want.”

  “Okay,” he said. He put up a hand and backed away. “I’ll stay as long as I can.”

  “As far as I can tell, it’s an impaction,” Dr. Stewart said when I went back in. “Pretty good-sized one. More Banamine and mineral oil should do the trick. Do you have some paste on hand?”

  “Plenty,” Hazel told him. “He’s already had one dose.”

  “That’s okay. He can have more now and then again in four hours. I have a nasogastric tube in the truck. I’m going to pump him full of mineral oil and electrolytes to rehydrate him. Let’s keep him hand walking until he passes manure.”

  While I walked Bliss around the ring on a lead line, I talked to him. I told him I loved him and that he was all I had left of Savannah and please, I knew he couldn’t live forever, and I didn’t want him to be in pain, but he’d given me the scare of my life. I walked him slowly and tried not to cry, tried to tell myself he was going to be fine, tried not to see Savannah the first time we went out into the woods and she’d looked for fallen logs, for places to jump Bliss, who seemed light as air with her on his back. It had been a sight like you might see in a film, the light filtering between the leaves and Bliss moving like liquid through the trees. And I remembered feeling unafraid. Nothing could happen to Savannah when she was with Bliss; he was part of her good luck.

  It was after noon when Bliss finally stabilized. He passed a pile of hard, pebbly manure. I made him a warm mash, put a cooler on him, and watched him in his stall. He immediately lay down, but this time it wasn’t to try to roll the pain out of his gut. He stretched flat out on his side, and a minute later, he was snoring. I walked Dr. Stewart out to his truck, and Brady’s bike was gone. After the vet drove away, I noticed a notepad right where the motorcycle had been. In Brady’s scrawl, I saw a work schedule for the week. I picked it up and brought it into the tack room and tried his cell. I called later that day, after Bliss and I had been walking again. Still no answer.

  When Bliss finally passed a mound of softer, normal-looking manure, I made him another soupy bran mash to help rehydrate him and tried Brady one more time before I left, but he didn’t answer. It was almost three, and I decided to drive to his house and drop the pad in his mailbox. He’d told me once where he lived, a little rental on Cove Road, a cul-de-sac near the high school. Gabby and I had ridden by it a few times on spy missions, a compact white cape with sea grass and perennials planted around the perimeter that I imagined were courtesy of Colette.

  A smattering rain spit down even while the sun was shining, and I drove with the windshield wipers squeaking intermittently. The driveway was empty, and I parked in the street and walked across the yard to drop the pad in the old-fashioned mailbox by his front door, where I saw other mail, mostly catalogs. And then I went back to my car. That’s when I heard it: a sort of singing sound coming from the back. It was so melodious, high pitched and lovely, that I stopped to listen. The voice carried on the slight breeze, and when the raindrops fell, it was as though they were somehow in time with the song.

  I crept along the side of the house, past a bunch of kindling, following the song. When I was about to turn the corner, I saw a slight wisp of a woman standing in the midst of a huge garden of daisies. Her black hair was loose around her, and her long, thin arms appeared pale, like a child’s in winter. She was the one singing, her tone pitch-perfect. Like her voice, she was beautiful. And the oddest thing was that she was wearing nothing from the waist up. Her breasts were heavy and turned up at the end. Tied around her waist was a gauzy sarong. I stood there watching her as she rhythmically, patiently pulled at weeds.

  The song was French, I knew that much, but I didn’t know the words. I stood there listening to her singing and wondering if she was cold. Maybe it was the hangover or how emotionally wasted I felt from Bliss, but I had the comforting thought we might actually become friends. Save Gabby, I didn’t have many friends. My friends were the characters who populated my books, heroes who found ways to circumvent and catch perpetrators. My confidants were the black letters on the page I strung together to make sentences, paragraphs, scenes, chapters, books. They never seemed to fail me. Now I wondered if this woman might be a kind of kindred spirit. The way Brady had described Colette, with so much to give but so little desire to live, was seductive. She seemed childlike, perhaps a little crazy or maybe free-spirited, but harmless.

  She stopped the beautiful singing and started talking. She spoke quickly, hurriedly, as though trying to convince someone of something, as though defending herself. Again, the words were French, but I saw she was working something out, talking animatedly to the willowy flowers in her yard. Watching Colette alone in her garden, unburdening herself of her grief to the flowers, dirt on her knees, I suddenly felt terrible for trespassing, and I tried to steal away. Except I had forgotten about the kindling, and when I backed up, I snapped a few twigs. With nowhere to go, I stood stock-still, willing myself to become invisible. Colette stopped talking, but she didn’t turn her head toward me. After a few seconds, she picked up a trowel and went back to work digging in the dirt in silence.

  “Oh my God,” I texted Gabby out of habit. “Went to Brady’s house and saw Colette standing in her garden naked talking to herself. It was sort of creepy. She’s really beautiful.”

  It took her about fifteen minutes to return the text, and by that time, I was already home, unlocking the door. She wrote: “Let’s go to Cookies so you can tell me about her.”

  I stood in my kitchen with my phone in my hand, feeling like I might cry and wanting to confront her again about everything she’d written in that notebook. “Sorry,” I wrote, “going to yoga with Greg on Sunday.” I thought of Chandler telling me that day at lunch how my family wasn’t direct with anyone. But really, I realized, going into my b
edroom and dropping my dirty clothes on the floor, I didn’t know how else to be.

  CHAPTER

  33

  “Thanks for dropping off the notebook,” Brady said the next day on the phone. I was in my office working on Devils when he called.

  “No problem,” I told him. I didn’t know if I should mention Colette or not, so I didn’t.

  “How’s Bliss?”

  “Good. I checked on him twice in the night and went back when I got up today. He seems fine this morning. I’ve never been so happy to muck a dirty stall.”

  “That’s great, Cady.” It really sounded like he was relieved, and I was touched that he cared enough to ask. “How about tomorrow to prep for and see Larry?”

  “Um, I can’t. I promised Greg I’d twist myself into a pretzel.”

  “Oh-kay.” Brady drew it out like it was two words.

  “Yoga,” I told him.

  “You’re hard to get lately,” he said.

  We sat there on the line. And I had the urge to burst out that I’d seen Colette in his garden half-naked and she was talking to herself. “What about Monday?”

  “Monday it is,” he said. “Breakfast first?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “And unless a horse is sick, I won’t cancel.”

  “Deal,” Brady said.

  And I felt that flutter again in my belly. I wondered again why it hadn’t happened when we’d kissed.

  * * *

  When I went downstairs Sunday morning, there were two folded towels on the counter and two water bottles, already filled. Greg came in from outside, where he’d been pulling weeds since sunrise.

  “Is this okay to wear?” I pulled up my yoga pants.

  He straightened the straps on my tank top. “Perfect,” he said, and it surprised the hell out of me.

  * * *

  “It’s called hatha yoga,” he told me on the drive over. “And it’s not about exertion; it’s about letting your body really wind down and relax. It’s about coming back to your breath, that sort of thing. You don’t have to do anything that feels uncomfortable.”

  I didn’t believe any of this, but I went along with it. With his hair slightly disheveled and his sweats on, he didn’t resemble at all the type A guy who worked every waking hour and spent all our money on fancy cheese, wine, and the symphony.

  The yoga room was light filled. Windows took up the whole south side, but they were above the view line, so all I could see was sky, and no one—thank God—could peek in. A plump woman slightly bigger than I with black shiny hair cut into a bowl shape was showing people where to put their shoes and giving out mats, and Greg took my hand and walked up to her.

  “Tanta, this is Cady, my wife.”

  Tanta opened her chubby arms and wrapped me into a warm hug. “I’m so glad you came,” she said. “I’ve been telling Greg to bring his sweetheart.”

  “We’re probably going to be in back,” Greg told her. “Since it’s her first time.”

  “Sure, sure.” The woman gave me a big smile, and her dangling silver earrings caught the light. “Sit anywhere you like, and, honey”—she touched my chin—“have fun!”

  “Is that the teacher?” I whispered to Greg when we had our mats on the floor.

  He nodded.

  “The heavy one,” I said to clarify. “Tanta?”

  He eyed me. “She’s not that heavy, Cady.”

  I watched her. Tanta carried it well. She wore a tight, plum-colored leotard and leggings, but it didn’t matter that she had some extra weight; she was voluptuous, running her hands up and down her sides like she loved her body. I had expected the rest of the class to be slight, model-pretty girls in Lululemon garb, but most were middle-aged, some wearing worn shorts and kneesocks. When Tanta told us to close our eyes, I felt a kind of buoyancy to be there in that light, warm, quiet room.

  In grade school, Savannah and I had been invited to someone’s birthday party at a dance school, but my mother had gotten the time wrong. When we got there, soft music was playing, some German composer, on low. The instructor, who was doing paperwork out back, told us we could move around the studio if we liked. Savannah had stood at the bar, pretending she was a ballerina. I remembered how I’d closed my eyes and drifted across the wide space, twirling as if my body had no restrictions. When I opened my eyes, the instructor, an older man with a beard in tights and jazz shoes, was watching me. “So free,” he’d said to my mother. And then he’d taken off his glasses as if he’d been crying and wiped them on his top.

  That was how I felt in the yoga class; one posture led to another, and my body felt fluid in the movement, light. At the end of it, we lay in what Tanta called corpse pose, and she led us through a guided meditation. I felt Greg reach over and touch my fingers. I squeezed them back. And for one brief moment, I saw how our lives might be if we let go of all the preconceived notions we carried around, all the defenses and the fears and the ways we learned to see each other that we’d never let go of, and I wondered if Emma had a point. Maybe we were all living in the past, unable to move forward. We were all damaged. Savannah’s death had left us shredded, unable to talk to each other about what it was like to live without her.

  CHAPTER

  34

  Brady was dressed like a movie star from the ’50s in a tight white T-shirt and jeans. He had a double latte on the table waiting for me when I sat down. “How’s it going?” he asked, tousling my hair like I was his kid sister.

  “Hey,” I told him. “Thanks for the coffee.”

  He took a sip of his own. “Are you ready to interview your favorite psychopath again?” he asked, his lips drawn in a tight line.

  “Favorite isn’t the right word.”

  He watched me. “Cady, it’s dangerous.”

  “But he’s chained to the table.”

  “You know what I mean.” He squinted into the sun and then back at me. “Greg must hate me for this.”

  “He doesn’t know.”

  I saw the surprise in his eyes.

  “I mean, he knew the first time, but it was too hard to convince him I needed to go back again. Except for my agent, no one is really thrilled with me interviewing a serial killer.”

  Brady ran his finger around the rim of his cup. “Least of all me,” he said.

  “I have a character in my book,” I told him, “who thinks a serial killer murdered his sister, but really it was her best friend.”

  Brady watched me. When he spoke again, his voice was husky. “That’s fucked up.”

  I couldn’t get that notebook out of my mind. “But I have to get into my characters’ heads. That’s how I write.”

  Brady gripped his coffee.

  “I know you think I’m nuts,” I said.

  “If you tell me what questions you want Cauchek to answer, I’ll talk to him myself.”

  “Thanks.” The sun had shifted, and the slanted rays were hitting my knees in a way that made me feel hot and lazy. “But I need to do it.”

  “Then let me go in with you.”

  I turned sideways so I could look at him. “Don’t take this the wrong way, but I’ve kind of built a rapport with him. I’m not sure he’d be so open if you were there. Besides, he’s vile.”

  Brady checked his watch. “I’m familiar with vile,” he said, gathering his jacket and his backpack, which I assumed contained his prison garb. “I’ll watch from the other room. Everything gets recorded, you know, as long as you’re not a lawyer.”

  * * *

  At the front desk, Brady watched me throw my cell and car keys into a plastic bucket. “Jewelry,” the guard said, and I reached around and undid the necklace that I never, ever took off. I’d kept it on once, and it had dinged, so I knew to leave it behind before I went in.

  “I can’t get it,” I told the meaty guard.

  “Turn around,” Brady said, and I lifted my hair so he could reach the clasp. His hands were warm, and I could feel him fumbling, a little clumsy. Then he drew it over my head. And when I
turned around, his face was bright red as if I’d seen him naked. It was so familiar by now, Brady’s guilt when we got physically close, that it didn’t surprise me. I had to soak my hand in ice water to get my wedding band off, so I’d done that at home.

  Prison was about steel doors. There were so many doors that by the time I got to the interior, I felt I was in some kind of high-security bank vault, and if there was a fire, I’d be totally screwed. Brady left me on a plastic chair in a tiny staff room with the requisite vending machines while he went into the locker room to change, and I watched the video camera above my head that switched from the empty yard with its basketball hoops and razor wire to various cell blocks.

  When we got downstairs, Larry was already in the room, his back to the glass window, chained up. A guy with a burn mark down the left side of his face was standing outside.

  “Butch.” Brady shook his hand, and then said to me, “You ready?” He took me into the room, sighed, and then left.

  I sat down across from Larry, whose posture was as straight as that of a proper schoolboy.

  “Cadence,” he said, smiling, showing me his teeth. “How kind of you to come again.”

  “Cut the shit, Larry. You know why I’m here.” I’d done my homework on sociopaths and knew they felt superior.

  The corners of his mouth turned up in a grotesque smile, making the metal table that separated us seem flimsy. “Indeed, I shall … cut the shit. Cutting the shit. Cutting the shit.”

  I decided to play Dr. Holley’s game from Sound View and be silent until he spoke first, not fidgeting, not breaking his gaze. It was a weak attempt to exert control over someone who was far more calculating than I. Sitting there made me want to scratch my body unnecessarily, pull my hair, pick my nails, anything. As we stared at each other, I remembered something I’d read: profilers often feigned yawning to see if their subject would yawn in return. Sociopaths did not engage in reciprocal yawns, because they lacked empathy. Wanting to know if he really was a sociopath, if there was a bit of empathy left in there somewhere, as casually as I could, I yawned. He continued to stare at me. Pretending to yawn made me have to yawn for real. I yawned again, and my eyes watered. I swiped at them quickly for fear he’d think I was crying.