by Pascal Scott
“Teresa?” Emily called.
Teresa had just taken a sip from the red plastic cup she was cradling in her lap. She swallowed hard and shuddered.
“I so prefer tequila,” she said.
“God, you’re a cliché sometimes,” Emily muttered.
Teresa reached for a throw pillow and tossed it at Emily. Emily caught it midair before it hit her.
“Fuck you,” Teresa said playfully.
“Any time, dear,” Emily replied.
Teresa giggled. “What was the question?” Teresa asked, wide-eyed.
“The question was, if you had to choose between being smart and poor or dumb and rich, which would it be?” Emily repeated.
“Umm,” Teresa pondered. “Just kidding. No choice. Dumb and rich. Con dinero baila el perro y sin dinero bailas como perro.”
“Translation, girlfriend. Some of us took French,” Emily said.
“Ahh, in English. Money makes the world go round. Money governs the world.”
“Uh-huh,” Emily said. “Lizzie?”
Elizabeth didn’t hesitate.
“Dumb and rich. Money is power.”
“So it seems,” Emily said. “Karen?”
In her shiny black shorts and yellow T-shirt displaying the Banana Slugs logo of the athletic department, Karen was the odd girl out. Everyone else was either a women studies major or minor. Karen had no interest in serious academics and was riding through college on an athletic scholarship. Emily had only asked her to join the group because she was twenty-one and could buy liquor legally. Emily, Elizabeth, and Teresa were all eighteen.
Elizabeth was a scholarship student, too, funded by some foundation for former foster children. Emily could never remember its name, even though Elizabeth had mentioned it several times during the two months they’d roomed together in Cowell Residence Hall. But Elizabeth was smart, that was the difference.
Emily and Teresa came from money and didn’t need scholarships or student loans or any of the other paperwork Emily found tiresome. Emily had even balked at having to take the SAT, three hours of mind-numbing tedium. Her IQ had tested high enough to get her into Mensa, “the high IQ society,” and she’d had an A-minus average at Windsor, the exclusive girls’ prep school she’d attended in Indiana. Wasn’t that enough? Not for bureaucrats, small-minded people who her father, the surgeon, had warned her about.
“Smart and poor,” Karen answered. “If you’re smart, you can figure out a way to get money.”
“Spoken like a true jock,” Emily said. “Sports are always funded while women studies has to beg for grants.”
Karen lifted her middle finger to Emily.
“Let’s play a drinking game,” Emily said abruptly, changing the subject. “Truth or Lie. I ask a question. You answer. Then we guess if you were telling the truth or if it was a lie. If you guess correctly, you pass. If not, you take a shot. Any objections?”
“Shouldn’t it be the other way around?” Teresa asked innocently. “If you guess correctly you get to drink?”
Karen snorted.
“No, Teresa, then it wouldn’t be a drinking game,” Emily explained.
“I don’t understand Americans,” Teresa said.
“Nobody does,” Emily responded. “But fortunately for you, Teresa, you’ll never have to. When you get your degree, you’ll go back to Mexico and live on Papa Barrera’s cartel money behind a wall in Polanco with your mirreinas.”
“What’s a mirreina?” Karen asked.
“It means queen,” Teresa provided. “My queens. It’s slang for how you would say, preppies. But, Emily, I would like you to be my mirreina.”
“Ooo, girl,” Karen teased.
“All right,” Emily said firmly, “we’re playing a game. Let’s get started. Lizzie, you’re up first. Truth or Lie. Question. How did you lose your virginity?”
“Oh, fuck,” Elizabeth said.
“Exactly,” Teresa noted brightly.
“Okay, my virginity.” Elizabeth paused. “Believe it or not, I lost my virginity to a woman.”
“Holy shit,” Karen muttered.
“Shut up, Karen,” Emily reprimanded. “Go on, Lizzie.”
“She was my first lover. I’ll call her Mistress G.”
“So romantic,” Teresa murmured.
“Teresa, stop it. Lizzie, continue.”
Elizabeth paused again, this time for effect. “She was much older than I was and more experienced.”
“How old were you?” Teresa interrupted.
“Teresa! Shut the fuck up. Let Lizzie tell her story.”
Teresa shrugged and made the “zip” motion with her fingertips over her lips that had formed a pout.
“I was seventeen. She was more than twice my age. And she was married. Her husband was even older.”
“But you were in love,” Teresa added, showing no indication that she could stop herself. Elizabeth continued before Emily could reprimand Teresa yet again.
“Oh, no, not at all. And I wasn’t horny or anything like that. I was curious, that was all. And I was afraid of being raped. It had nearly happened already twice while I was in foster care, and I thought that being raped would be the most awful way to lose your virginity. So I told Mistress G that I didn’t want to be a virgin anymore. She said she could take care of that. I thought she meant that she’d arrange for me to have sex with her husband. So you can imagine how shocked I was when she said no, she would do it herself.
“And she did. She was the most gentle lover that I could possibly imagine. She took me into their bedroom and undressed me before she undressed herself.”
Elizabeth turned her head to look directly at Emily. Their gazes locked.
“She slipped into a leather harness and buckled herself up with a long dildo. She lay a white towel on the sheet and told me to lie on my back. I said, ‘As you wish, Mistress.’ She stroked my body with such tenderness it nearly broke my heart. First she let her fingers caress my neck, then my breasts, then my belly, and then she touched me between my legs. I melted at her touch.”
Elizabeth held Emily’s stare.
“She entered me slowly, carefully. It hurt, but I had expected that. She told me to wrap my legs around her waist, and I did. I had never felt so exposed, so open to another human being. She fucked me with her cock, slipping in and out—I was so wet for her—until I felt the dildo break through. I bled, I really bled. The white towel turned bright red with my blood.
“When we were finished, she touched my face gently, and I realized the one thing she hadn’t done that would have made it all perfect.”
“What?” Teresa said in a voice just above a whisper.
“She hadn’t kissed me.”
“Oh, no,” Teresa protested. “How sad for you.”
“Wow,” Karen said.
“All right, girls. Truth or Lie, that’s the game,” Emily reminded them, bringing them back to the present. “Karen, what do you think? Truth or Lie?”
Karen lifted her chin from the chair and frowned in thought. “Truth,” she said finally.
“Teresa?”
“Oh, true, so true. And so beautiful! Yet sad.”
Emily leveled her piercingly blue eyes at Elizabeth. Elizabeth didn’t blink.
“It’s unanimous. Truth,” Emily pronounced.
Everyone waited. Elizabeth let them wait.
“Well?” Emily prompted.
Elizabeth smiled. She had good, straight teeth, but they were not so white as Emily’s.
“Lie!” she announced. “I lost it to a creep in care. It was rape, not love. It was awful.”
Teresa gasped.
“Jesus,” Karen said.
“Oh, my God, Elizabeth, I am so very sorry for you,” Teresa added.
Elizabeth’s gray eyes brightened to a color that was almost blue. “Don’t be. It was years ago. I’m over it. And look what it taught me.”
There was a moment of baffled silence.
“Which is what?” Emily asked.
Elizabeth faced Emily again, locking gazes with her once more.
“It taught me how to lie,” she said before turning back to the others. “Fooled you all! Truth or Lie. It’s a game, girls. Drink up now.”
Simultaneously, the three girls did as they were told. They lifted their glossy red cups.
“Damn, girl. You’re one helluva liar,” Karen said, putting into words what everyone else was thinking.
“Drink to the count of three,” Elizabeth ordered. “Starting now. One…two…Emily, you’re not drinking.”
Emily was sitting dumbfounded, with a stupid expression on her normally smug face.
“It’s your game, Emily,” Elizabeth taunted. “Don’t you want to play?”
Emily put the cup to her lips. “Yes,” she said.
Chapter Twenty-nine
Yes.
That was the first thing Elizabeth had noticed about her, after her sense of style and her air of self-confident superiority. The way she enunciated her words, saying yes instead of yeah or uh-huh like everyone else. Like she was on stage, performing or about to audition for a part. Like some entitled beauty queen contestant. Yes.
Her name was Emily Bryson. Elizabeth saw that she’d already hung her initials on the wall above her desk in her half of the dorm room, two tall wooden letters painted sky blue. E.B. Emily Bryson. Next to the initials was a smaller plaque with words engraved in dark wood: Carpe Diem.
Emily extended a long, bony hand as she introduced herself, and who does that? Elizabeth thought. So formal. Elizabeth looked at Emily’s tanned, athletic arms with the soft down of blond hair. She was wearing a white short-sleeved shirt with a green alligator over the heart, white shorts, and Reebok hightops.
“Elizabeth Taylor Bundy,” Elizabeth replied.
“Elizabeth Taylor?” Emily asked, flashing a perfect, bright smile.
“Yeah,” Elizabeth said. “You know, like the actress. I think my mother must have thought it sounded glamorous.”
Emily considered, her slender fingers locked with Elizabeth’s. Emily wasn’t letting go.
“It doesn’t suit you,” she determined, squinting her blue eyes, taking in what she saw, as if she were considering a girl with potential but not there yet. “It’s too regal for you.”
“You two could be sisters,” someone interrupted.
This was Teresa, the exchange student. Emily and Elizabeth looked at each other more closely. It was true. They were both tall: Emily was five-nine in her bare feet. Elizabeth had measured five-eight and a half by the time she had hit puberty, early at age twelve, ahead of the other girls in her class at Fairfax Elementary. Elizabeth had always been self-consciously lanky, the gawkiest kid in her grade, no matter what grade she was in, until junior high when the boys shot up in their first pimple-faced, testosterone-fueled surge of adolescence.
Both were fair with unblemished skin. Emily was more tan than Elizabeth but only because Elizabeth had been living in San Francisco for the last few years. In Los Angeles, her skin had matched Emily’s tone. Emily’s eyes were robin’s egg blue. Elizabeth’s eyes shifted in color from light gray to blue, depending on the light. Emily’s smile showed the dental history of a high-priced orthodontist. Elizabeth’s teeth could have been as perfect as Emily’s if she had been favored by Emily’s circumstances and not thrown into the nominal care of the L.A. County Child Welfare system. Emily was a towhead blonde. Elizabeth was a darker blonde now, but when she had been growing up in Southern California, her hair had lightened naturally from the sun to a shade closer to Emily’s.
“No, not Elizabeth,” Emily mused, still considering.
Her perfectly plucked eyebrows lifted suddenly.
“Lizzie,” she announced. “I’m going to call you Lizzie.”
They shook on it, on friendship and the beginning of their time together as Cowellies. It was Saturday, September 17, 1983.
Chapter Thirty
The refrigerator inside Zoe’s houseboat on Sausalito’s Freedom Dock never lacked for wine, compliments of Martinelli Vineyards. If she had a vice, that was it: wine. Zoe was a convivial social drinker, and she could count on one hand the number of times she had been actually drunk. But she drank regularly, every day, a glass or two or, on occasion, three. How could she not? She had been given wine at the dinner table as a child and taught to sip it respectfully. That was what her family did. They drank wine.
Now Zoe poured a glass before moving to the small bookshelf in her living room. Even when she was a girl, Zoe had always loved being on the water, and when her parents had offered the houseboat rent-free after she turned eighteen and was accepted to USF, she had accepted their generosity without reservation. It had been an easy thirty-minute commute into the city on the daily ferry, first as a student and now as a worker. Life was good. Zoe was lucky, and she knew it.
She picked up her dog-eared copy of Process and Reality and carried it and her wine out onto the deck. Across the marina, the hills were darkening. In their multimillion-dollar homes, commuters were turning on evening lights, entering kitchens, and pouring a strong drink before walking to their own decks to unwind. Sitting in a canvas chair, Zoe took a sip of wine before setting the glass on a wrought-iron table. She considered the weight of the book in her hands, feeling comforted by it. “Does it help?” Stone had asked. “Being philosophical?”
It does help, Zoe thought now. Philosophy gives you perspective. Zoe had studied enough history to know that it was written in blood by the winners and that the story of Western culture was a tale told by European men. Still, that didn’t negate their contribution to intellectual thought. Alfred North Whitehead was an “old dead white guy,” as the feminists claimed. But that fact alone didn’t repudiate what he had to say.
And irrational as it seemed to the sensible, crime-solving side of her brain, her psychic intuition was telling her that the solution to Emily’s death could be found somewhere in Alfred North Whitehead’s opus. She was off the case; Stone was no longer paying her to work it. Yet Emily’s death wasn’t letting go of Zoe. It nagged at her; it bothered her; it claimed her attention, demanding to be solved. And she missed Stone. She missed their meetings at Café Flore. She missed Stone’s darkly intense eyes and her open, wounded heart.
Closing her own eyes, Zoe flipped the pages until her hand sensed that it had arrived at the one she needed to see. She opened her eyes and read. If you want to understand the present, Whitehead was telling her, you need to understand the past.
Of course. That was it.
****
“I don’t get it,” Stone said.
When Zoe had called saying she had something important to tell her, Stone had agreed to meet for dinner. This time, Stone had insisted they try her favorite restaurant, La Cocina, in the Mission. They sat upstairs at a table tiled in bold reds and yellows, next to a forest green stucco wall. The aromatic smells of sizzling Mexican food wafted up from the kitchen. A brightly colored glossy menu was in their hands.
“That’s all right,” Zoe said. “You don’t need to get it. The important thing to understand about Whitehead’s process philosophy is that change is the ultimate nature of reality. Whitehead called the basic units of change ‘drops of experience’ or ‘actual occasions.’ According to Whitehead, every actual occasion reaches back to what he called its ‘perishing past’ during the immediate process of becoming in the present. Then it—the moment-to-moment actual occasion—moves into the future as a novel entity, an entirely new being. Or a becoming, really. That’s Whitehead’s process philosophy, in a nutshell.”
“If you say so,” Stone said. “But how does that help us figure out what happened to Emily?”
Zoe was about to explain when their waitress reappeared, pen poised at the small pad in her hand.
“Are you ready to order?” she asked.
“Oh, no,” Zoe said. “I’ve been talking too much. I don’t even know what I want.”
“Do you like beef?” Stone asked.
“I love it.”
“I’m so glad you’re not a vegetarian. Mind if I order for you?”
Butches. Zoe set down the menu. “Not at all.”
And she meant it. Sometimes it was nice having someone else make a decision for you.
“Carne asada para la señorita y huarache para mí, por favor,” Stone told the waitress.
“Muy bien, gracias.”
Stone caught her by the sleeve.
“Y otro vino para la señorita y otro cervaza para mí.”
She turned her attention back to Zoe. “You were explaining process philosophy to me.”
Zoe furrowed her forehead slightly. Stone thought she looked cute when she was thinking. Maybe cute wasn’t the right word for someone as brilliant as Zoe. Sexy, maybe that was the word.
“Look at it this way,” Zoe began. “Emily was an actual occasion, to borrow Whitehead’s terminology. You knew her for a moment and then she was gone. The Emily you knew became the Emily you didn’t know. It’s like process philosophy. Although something exists in this moment, it carries with it everything from its past as it moves into the future to create something entirely new. To know what happened to Emily, we need to look at her past. Something in Emily’s past caused her death. We need to find out what that something was.”
“Her past,” Stone repeated. “Makes sense. I guess I should have thought of that earlier, but I was so sure her killer was either Rick or someone at the club.”
“We don’t know that she was murdered.”
“Yes, we do. I do.”
Zoe let this pass. “I’ll start with her father,” she continued.
“I have no money for—”
“I don’t expect to be paid. Let me worry about little details like money.”
“Some little detail,” Stone said. “But dinner, at least, is on me. That much I can do.”
Stone hesitated. By now Zoe was beginning to be able to read Stone’s face.