Nowhere Girl

by Susan Strecker

  “Love,” he said, his voice pleasant. “Move on. I’m not going to yawn.”

  I felt my cheeks get hot, but I took him speaking first as a win.

  “Indeed I shall,” I said, doing my best to imitate him. “Moving on. Moving on.”

  “And the spunky girl is back.” He tried to reach his hand toward me, but he was, of course, shackled to the table. He closed his eyes, took a breath in, and spoke. “Not all murders are intentional. They don’t all begin with a plan and end with a death.”

  I scribbled those exact words in my notebook. The police’s original profile of Savannah’s killer was that he was disorganized. A transient killer. Patrick and Jon Caritano had gone through the twenty-seven boxes of notes and evidence and had decided that Savannah’s killing was not really frantic but fervent. Even passionate.

  “They might not begin with a plan to kill, but by definition, all murders have to end with a death,” I said.

  He flicked his fingers at me. “Don’t bore me trying to be coy.”

  “I wasn’t. How could a murder not end with a death?”

  “Let me ask you”—Larry leaned back—“how many people have you duped into doing your investigative dirty work under the guise of research?”

  I immediately regretted not preparing notes. I had thought an unscripted, fly-by-my-intuition session might garner more information, but I felt untethered, shaky. “I don’t know.” The truth was, I kept a running tally of the people I’d interviewed for my books. But this felt too personal, even more intimate than admitting I tried to lie next to my dead sister in the morgue.

  “Of course you know.” The way he stared at me without blinking made me think he either wanted to fuck me or kill me. Or both. And not necessarily in that order.

  I realized Larry knew everything about me. “One hundred and forty-four. Most were offenders, followed by law enforcement and then victims.”

  “How many victims?”

  I spent the least amount of time with victims. In the end, it was very personal for them, and they never really knew why it had happened. “Not very many.”

  “How many offenders?”

  “Eighty-two felons.” I emphasized the word.

  “You are very persistent,” he said evenly, watching me, “to put yourself in so much danger.” There was something hypnotizing about his mouth; it was a deep burgundy and full, and it made me sick to think where it had been.

  “I’m quite safe,” I said.

  “I heard there were a whole team of guards in the room when you interviewed the chap who bludgeoned his teenage daughter’s best friend.” How could he possibly have known that? Was there some underground secret society of criminals? Honor among murderers?

  “Ah yes,” I said, trying to keep my voice as even as his. “That chap was even more dangerous than you. So while you get chained to the table like a farm animal”—I nodded to his handcuffs—“that offender managed to kill three other inmates before he was executed.”

  “Having so little self-control does not impress me. Tell me again his name?”

  I didn’t want to say a perpetrator’s name. My job was to honor victims, not sensationalize murderers. “What’s your point?”

  He shifted sideways in his seat and crossed his legs. I watched the fluid, almost graceful movements of a body that hadn’t seen sunlight in more than a decade. “I’m surprised your loved ones allowed you to take such an unnecessary risk. I would have thought your shrink hubby would have nixed that interview.”

  I felt pierced, but I also knew naming Greg’s profession was his way of letting me know he had access to personal information. His nails were buffed as if he’d had a manicure.

  “If you didn’t sneak in here against the advice of your friends, how would you know that I kept something from each girl that reminded me of my mom? I took my first lovely lass’s earrings. With her ears still attached, of course. And another sweet thing had on the most delicious shade of lipstick. I couldn’t part with, well, you know.” He said this as if every human being did such revolting things. “Her lips. They were so delicate.”

  I wanted to vomit, but I sat there and watched that disgusting, beautiful mouth, the dark eyes rimmed with long black lashes girls would have killed for. I made myself keep eye contact with him.

  “Kudos to you for not flinching. Even one of the shrinks here, a Dr. Robert somebody or other, poor slob, had to leave when I told him how I cut off my fifth girl’s labia because it was so full and round like dear old Mom’s.”

  Robert Shaffer, Greg’s friend, had told him not to let me near Cauchek when he’d come for dinner with his wife, Daisy, a few months ago. Greg had told him—braggingly, I felt—that I was doing research in a high-security prison. It seemed that all the psychiatrists within a fifty-mile radius knew Larry Cauchek.

  We sat there for a few minutes. Me staring at his shackled hands, waiting for him to tell me what I wanted to know, him staring at my neck, waiting for me to break. The joke was on him. I broke 6,021 days ago.

  Finally, I shut my notebook. “I’m bored,” I told him.

  And for one instant that perhaps no one but me would ever notice, alarm or maybe even panic crossed Larry Cauchek’s face. He wanted me to stay. He needed me to. If I left, I got the upper hand.

  “Ah,” Larry said. “Our girl is not as tough as she lets the world believe.”

  I stood up. “Fuck you, Larry,” I said without emotion. “Guard.” I hated calling Brady that, but I never wanted Larry to know about our friendship. I heard Brady outside the door.

  “Why don’t you stay for tea?” Larry tented his hands in his shackles. “I tell wonderful stories over tea.”

  “No.” I stepped away from my chair. “It’s a beautiful day. I’d much rather be in the sunlight.”

  And where there was once panic on Larry’s face, I saw now pure hatred, and then it was gone. Back to a poker face.

  Brady walked past me, and I followed him. I made myself not turn back to Larry.

  “See you later, love,” Larry called to me.

  “Maybe,” I said back, but I didn’t turn around.

  “I did it,” I told Brady when we were safely upstairs in that little waiting room. “I sat with that animal, and I didn’t let him get the best of me.” I threw my arms around him, and I actually kissed him. I kissed him. And he kissed me back in that tiny room. And I felt … nothing.

  “Whoa.” Brady broke first, holding me at arm’s length, but he was smiling.

  “I got him where it hurts,” I said, trying to pretend I hadn’t kissed him again and wondering why I got as much of a thrill out of kissing him as I would have if I’d kissed a stone wall. “He needs me; I’m the only entertainment he gets from outside. When I come back, he’ll tell me everything.”

  Brady went from smiling to deadpan. “Don’t do that, Cady.”

  “Do what?”

  “Start thinking of him as a regular guy. This isn’t someone who made a mistake when he was a kid. He’s a methodical fucking serial killer.”

  “I know,” I said while he led me out to the main hall. “That’s what I wanted—a serial killer. That’s the whole reason I’m here.”

  “You’re a hard girl to take care of,” he said, almost to himself. “I have to stay on my shift. You going to be okay?”

  His face was red again, and he looked hot—I mean not only handsome hot but hot as in boiling up. “Yes,” I said. We were standing in one of those vestibules with the metal doors on either side of us, and we could kiss again. No one would see us, but neither he nor I moved to do it; if anything, Brady seemed in a hurry, ready to get the hell out of there or maybe just late to get back to work. I couldn’t tell.

  “And, Brady,” I said, not wanting to forget my manners, “thank you. You can’t imagine what this means to me. This will help me so much with my novel.”

  Brady watched me for a minute and then blinked. “You bet,” he said, and he opened the metal door behind me so I could get my thin
gs.

  Out in the sunshine, I pulled my phone from my purse and wrote to Gabby. Things with her were still entirely weird, but I was trying to pretend they weren’t. “I kissed him again. No spark.” I waited for her to respond, and when she didn’t, I sat in my car thinking about why kissing Brady had been so easy. Since that first day I saw him in the parking lot, I’d been telling myself that I still had a crush on him, that my marriage wasn’t working. But now, after kissing him three times and feeling nothing since the first time, I understood that whatever I’d felt in high school was long gone. If my marriage ended, it certainly wouldn’t be because of Brady.

  Finally, my phone beeped with a text from Gabby. “Come to the library. You’ll never believe what I found.” I thought about telling her I was busy, but I couldn’t avoid her forever.

  CHAPTER

  35

  Gabby and I had rarely ever been in a fight, and in truth, this couldn’t be considered one, because she didn’t know I was mad. I owed it to her to talk about what she’d written about Savannah. But I was being ridiculous. There was no way she could have hurt my sister. Besides, she was my best friend. I didn’t know what I’d do without her. Her friendship for the last twenty-something years was like being given oxygen as I was about to suffocate. It was amazing in a small town how quickly a lone wolf can get kicked out of a herd, how much people wanted to turn their faces away from what hurts. But Gabby had stuck by me, and I realized, driving from the prison to the library, I counted on that more than I liked to admit.

  We were an odd couple. Gabby was tiny with slight features, and I was wide open and heavy. She was dark with crazy-beautiful curls. I was blond with straight hair. We’d always been tight and had a little circle of friends we ran around with, not the fast, popular girls that accepted Savannah but smart girls who did well in school. Even these friends petered out when Savannah died, calling less. But Gabby was always there.

  My family had lived through a lot of firsts after Savannah was killed. Thanksgiving and Christmas, the first day of my junior year and our birthday, and Gabby had been with me for every one. When we stared down the barrel of the first anniversary of Savannah’s death, instinct told me my parents were going to try to keep me home. But I wanted to go to school, to the safety of people who probably weren’t thinking about Savannah, the smell of old gym clothes and lockers lined with pictures of boy crushes. Even the monotony of geometry would be a relief. But mostly, I wanted to be with Gabby, who I knew would understand.

  My parents had appeared at my bedroom door, all smiles and stiff backs, holding a breakfast tray of french toast, a glass of pomegranate juice, a clementine, and a vase of daisies. They were smiling tight, uneven smiles. Good intentions seemed to be stamped on their foreheads, their bright souls shining through.

  I’d been up since four, steeling myself for exactly this scene, making a list of reasons why I needed to get the hell out of the house. I was ready for their tentative knock, the tender offer of my favorite breakfast. But the daisies on the tray knocked me to the ground, and I found myself fighting tears.

  Someone had sent an obscenely large bouquet of them to the funeral, and I’d clutched one during the service. Instead of He loves me; he loves me not, I chanted in my head, They’ll find him; they’ll find him not. They’ll find him; they’ll find him not. They’ll find him. I stopped before I knew the answer. As they lowered Savannah’s casket into the earth, my mother had slipped through the wall of black suit coats and skirts and placed the bouquet gingerly on the casket as if she were trying not to wake it. On the way home from the cemetery, I’d rolled down the window in the limousine and let the flower I’d been holding float to the black pavement.

  Now as my parents put the breakfast tray on my new canopied bed, those daisies seemed to be taunting, pointing their petals at me. “Thanks,” I told them. “But I’ve got to get going.” I tossed back the covers.

  “This is cause for celebration,” I wanted to say. The first day of no more firsts. We’d made it through everything. Or … almost. There was one first I didn’t think I’d ever get to: the first time I could stand in line for pizza at school or mill around outside the movie theater with Gabby without feeling like everyone was looking at me. There she is. There’s that girl. The one whose sister was murdered. I felt like they all blamed me for not being able to walk home after school anymore, for having to lock their doors and live in a town that shut down at dusk with a nine o’clock curfew. Someone they knew got killed, and it wasn’t because she’d skipped town on a Greyhound to Trenton or New York City or was shooting up with the dropouts who hung out at Finley’s in Kingston.

  Always supportive, my parents cleared the tray and put me on the bus.

  School was the same. That was the strangest part about this new world—time kept ticking, the sun kept rising, people kept working, the person who murdered my sister kept breathing. My English teacher made an example of me for screwing up the possessive form of it. Ms. Tonzola tossed a pop quiz at us the last fifteen minutes of calculus. Only Gabby seemed to know that it was the anniversary, and she showed her support simply by hugging me hard and fiercely when she spotted me by my locker during morning announcements.

  During study hall, the long-term history sub chose Gabby and me to empty the recycling bins in the east wing. We were heading through the language arts wing when the lecherous bio teacher came out of his classroom and flashed his crooked smile. Gabby lowered her voice. “Cleaning his beaker,” she said as he continued down the brightly lit corridor. When he was out of view, she sang in perfect pitch, “After ten long years, they let him out of the home. Excitable boy, they all said.” I grinned for the first time that day. “How you doing?” Gabby asked in her interested, never pushy voice.

  “I’m not toes up yet, so I guess I’m hanging in.” I loved that I could be macabre and sad around her, and she didn’t try to fix me.

  “Do you ever think about him?” she asked, emptying the first recycle bin.

  “All the time.”

  “Is it weird to know he’s still out there?”

  The bell rang, and we leaned against the cream-colored wall to let a mass of students get to their lockers. “Sometimes I wake up in the middle of the night,” I told her, loudly enough that she could hear me above the din, “after having one of my crazy dreams—”

  “Like the one where Ozzy Osbourne helped you with your French homework?”

  “Exactly.” I watched the floor. “I’ll turn on the light to tell Savannah about it, and it hits me all over again that she was murdered.”

  A trio of girls pushed past us, and their conversation had quieted at the sight of us. They stopped at lockers a few feet away. Emma Fisher was one of them, and that’s when I heard my name. Gabby must have too, because we were about to resume our path back to study hall when we both stopped. “Ever notice how many times she says murdered?” I recognized the one talking, a tall girl with jet-black hair who was as prissy and sure of herself as Emma. “We get it. Her sister was killed. Why can’t she be like Matt? He just says that his mom died.” Matt Flaherty was a junior whose mother had fallen asleep at the wheel the summer before.

  “Murdered, murdered, murdered,” Sarah Bryson chimed in. “We know.”

  Emma tossed her hair over her shoulder, and the three of them stopped in front of Emma’s locker. It was Emma’s father who would, in a few days, drop my sister into the basement with the other cold cases.

  I wriggled my arm out of Gabby’s grip and walked over. “Do you know how to conjugate a verb?” I asked with false courage.

  The tall one tucked her hair behind her ear, and something like hatred crossed her face.

  “Let me help you out,” I said. “To eat. I eat. You eat. He, she, it eats. We eat. You eat. They eat.”

  Sarah shifted her weight and gave a quick bark of a laugh. “What’s your point?”

  I felt Gabby’s hand on my back. “Verbs are action words. They mean you’re actively doing something.”
I backed up an inch so I could feel Gabby there. “If I said my sister died, it would mean she did something. She ate. She ran. She died.” I felt myself growing taller. “But somebody did something to her. Someone murdered her.” My voice had reached a pitch I didn’t recognize. “Savannah was murdered.” I couldn’t stop myself. “Someone attacked her, choked her, and killed her. She didn’t do it. Somebody did it to her!” I was yelling at Emma. She had started this, and she’d never let us forget our inability to erase this tragedy.

  A crowd had gathered to witness my meltdown. I might have kept going except Gabby pulled me away. Everyone stepped back for us, backpacks slung over their shoulders, mouths open, and then, as we were about to turn the corner, someone called my name like a cheer. I looked back to see one of those fake gangsta kids who probably hated girls like Emma start clapping, and then everyone was clapping, an ovation of sorts, and after all that time feeling like our town hated me because of curfews and canceled games, I finally knew, on the anniversary of Savannah’s death, that they were on my side.

  * * *

  Before I met Gabby at the library, I stopped by the house to grab something to eat, and Greg was there. He sometimes came home on his on-call days to play his bassoon, and it echoed off the walls. The acoustics in the barren house were horrible. I grabbed my laptop off my desk, stuck it in its sleeve, and popped my head in his study. “I’m going to the library to see Gabby,” I told him. “And I’ll probably stay since I can’t really work with that kind of noise.”

  Greg lifted the mouthpiece from his lips, and I saw spittle on it. “Sorry,” he said. “But I really don’t have anywhere else to practice.”

  “It’s fine,” I told him. “I’m happy to go to the library.” That sweet feeling I’d gotten at yoga had been steadily fading when Greg played his bassoon even while I was trying to write, when he scoffed every time I stopped to look at a baby, and definitely when he refused to even talk about trying to get pregnant again.