The Lost Girls

by Jessica Chiarella

  “Why?”

  “Because you don’t know Colin,” he replies. “If you did, you’d know that killing that girl—”

  “Sarah,” I say, cutting in.

  “Right,” he says carefully. “If you knew Colin, you’d know that killing Sarah was something he was . . . capable of, I guess.”

  “What makes you say that?” I ask.

  “That bar fight?” he says. “His prior arrest? It wasn’t the first time he got violent over nothing. You should have seen him, even with Ava sometimes. And she loves him more than anyone in the world.”

  “He hurt Ava?” I ask, the heat going out of me, icy sparks of rain on my skin.

  “No, nothing like that,” Ted says quickly. “But, just his temper. It was out of hand. And their father was a bastard. Neither of them will really go into it, but he was really violent with Colin when he was a kid.”

  “So why does Ava disagree with you about Colin?” I ask.

  “Because she’s his sister. She loves him; she can’t see him the way other people can,” he replies.

  “Or maybe she sees him better than other people,” I counter. After all, I’m willing to consider Ava’s point of view. I’m not sure if I trust Ted’s yet. “Look, what’s the worst that can happen? If he’s guilty, we won’t find anything, and he’ll stay in prison. If he’s not, maybe we can help with his next appeal.”

  “I don’t want Ava getting more invested in the possibility of his innocence than she already is. It’s already sucked up enough of her time and our life as it is,” he says, and I can hear the simmering resentment in his tone. I think of what Ava said at the hospital, of the years she’s waited to begin their life together, numbing herself with work and exhaustion and the minutiae of Colin’s case. The years she’s made Ted wait.

  “And anyway, you know how these things go,” he continues. “All you have to do is ask the question, make an argument. If enough people are listening, no matter what you find, it’ll never be over.”

  “Colin said that you don’t like him,” I reply, though it’s a cheap argument. I can see it now, though. How troublesome it must have been to Ted, to have such an unruly brother-in-law. To have Ava’s attention divided, drawn away from him. After all, Eric already knew my whole story when he married me. Ava was someone else back when she met Ted. Tragedy came for her later.

  “I was always the bad guy, for him. Just because I wanted him to take some fucking responsibility for his life,” he says. “And now look where we are.”

  “I’m sorry,” I say, though I’m not. It just seems like the sort of thing you say to someone like Ted, someone who is bemoaning the single flaw in his perfect, placid existence. The good job. The beautiful house. The beautiful wife. “But I gotta say, I understand where Ava is better than most people. And even if nobody in the world agreed with her, I don’t think she’d ever stop trying to get him out.” It is a similarity between me and Ava. Both of us, with our lost siblings. How neither of us will ever stop until the world gives them back to us. One way or another.

  “I have to go back in,” I say, and reach for the handle on the door.

  “Wait.” He moves fast, his hand around my forearm, stopping me from opening it. It’s an electric feeling, the way he grabs me, and my brain’s response is a rush of something that is both fear and excitement. I have to focus on not reacting, not letting the muscle memory of a hundred fights kick in, the instinct that wants to step forward and snap my hand toward my head to break his grip. Instead, I let his hand remain on my arm. Every part of me still awash with the drug, every hair on my body standing on end, until he realizes how close he is to me. Or perhaps he realizes that I’ve stopped breathing.

  He releases my arm, but he doesn’t step away. He’s close enough that I must tip my head back to look him in the eyes.

  “I’m asking,” he says, “please reconsider. This is not a family you want to get wrapped up in.”

  “I’m sorry,” I say again. It’s all I can manage. I do not trust any of my instincts in this moment. I’ve learned that I cannot always recognize when I’m putting myself in danger.

  “I don’t think you are,” he says, and the flash of those teeth might be fury or the tease of pleasure. I can’t tell, with him.

  “We should go inside.” The rain is picking up now.

  When he shakes his head, a droplet of water falls just below my right eye. But then he steps back, holds up both of his hands, as if he’s pleading innocence.

  “Fine,” he says, and walks down the alley to the street, leaving me there, breathless, at the back door. When I touch my face, brushing away the droplet clinging to my lower lashes, my fingers come away red.

  * * *

  * * *

  “THAT’S KIND OF fucked,” Andrea says, not even trying to edit herself, which is how I know she’s a bit too shaken by my story.

  We’re having breakfast in the same bistro in Lakeview where I got the call about the Jane Doe all those months ago. I wonder if Andrea remembers that this was the place, or if the memory has faded enough that this is just another café in her rotation, a place to meet and discuss business matters over a latte and a scone. There’s a strange symmetry to it though, as I look around at its mosaic tabletops and its gleaming copper espresso machine and the leggy ivy plants hanging from the ceiling. The last time I sat in this bistro I was married, and owned a home, and was engaging in extended negotiations with my husband about the prospect of children. Now I’m fighting the cocaine blues, the drumbeat of a headache behind my eyes, and all that is lost.

  “I mean, admittedly I was . . . altered,” I say, reaching for a word that doesn’t sound as childishly irresponsible as “high.” I know Andrea considers my conduct in the wake of my divorce to be something of a second adolescence, or at least a second bout of undergraduate abandon. I’ve done what I can to dispel the impression of immaturity—that cardinal sin—now that I’m one half of a podcasting enterprise and she’s the other. But it’s not so easy when I spend my evening doing lines in the employee bathroom.

  “I might be making more of it than there actually was.” I don’t tell her that I can’t quite remember how hard he grabbed me, that I woke this morning half expecting to see a line of shadowy finger marks inside my forearm. That there was one false note of disappointment ringing in my chest when I found nothing. Because the sort of mature, professional persona everyone expects from Andrea and me, in the wake of our success, is not very compatible with the part of me that thrills at balancing on a sharp edge between irresponsibility and true danger.

  Andrea glances at her bag, which hangs off the back of the chair beside her. I know what she’s thinking—that we should be recording this. I shake my head when she catches my gaze.

  “It’s not relevant,” I say.

  “It feels relevant,” she replies.

  “What am I going to do?” I ask. “Admit that I was high? And that he asked me to back off the case?”

  “Threatened you,” Andrea retorts.

  “He didn’t,” I say, and then replay the whole exchange again in my head, just to be sure.

  “But he thinks Colin has the potential to be a killer,” she says. “That is relevant.”

  “Look, if I talk about it on the podcast, it fucks us. I lose credibility because of the coke, and it puts us in a tough spot because it makes Colin look guilty. There’s a good chance Ava will cut us loose for publicly questioning her brother’s innocence. And Ted will definitely stop talking to me if we make the conversation public, especially after he asked me to keep it from Ava.”

  “Okay,” Andrea says, holding up a hand. “Okay, but will you do me a favor and at least take some contemporaneous notes about how the conversation went? Just so, if it needs to come up later, we can be on a little bit of stable ground?”

  “Sure,” I reply as one of the baristas drops off our breakfasts.
A slim glass layered with Greek yogurt parfait for Andrea, and avocado toast with poached eggs for me. She looks at my plate wantonly as I cut into one of the eggs, orange yolk spilling over the bread. “Want some?” I ask.

  “God no,” she says. “I would one day like to fit into something that’s not overalls or elastic-waist pants.”

  “Please,” I reply, because Andrea is one of those women who gained so little weight while pregnant that, up until her third trimester, you could tell she was pregnant only when you saw her from the side.

  I remember how excited Eric was when Andrea and Trish announced that their withdrawal from the sperm bank seemed to have done the trick. I think he imagined it would end our years-long uneasy truce in the matter of reproduction and finally convince me it was time for us to start trying. But that was the thing about Eric. He saw his own desire as a kiln, a place of creation. And if he wanted something badly enough, the heat of his wanting could make it so. It was as if he’d already forgotten his childhood. That when his friend had died, all the wanting in the world would not conjure her back up.

  He did, however, manage to convince me to go off the pill for a few months. It’s a concession I’ll never stop regretting.

  “You want to keep playing this out, don’t you?” Andrea asks, her gaze darkening. “This thing with Ted.”

  “Maybe,” I say, though she knows me better than to believe my feigned casualness. “The way I see it, Ted doesn’t want Ava to find out he talked to me. Or that he thinks Colin is guilty. So that might be useful down the line, if we need his help.”

  “The word you’re searching for is ‘blackmail,’ ” Andrea says.

  “I’m not suggesting that I extort him for information,” I reply. “I’m saying there might be a benefit to maintaining this dynamic with him. Where he needs something from me.”

  “The one where he corners you in dark alleys and tells you that you don’t want to get wrapped up in his family business?”

  “Yeah,” I say, finishing off my coffee in one gulp, just a touch vindictive. Andrea only drinks seltzer these days, and I know how she misses caffeine.

  “Do you think Colin might be guilty?” Andrea asks, and it’s the question I’ve been waiting for, because it’s the one I’ve been tumbling around in my mind all morning. Smoothing its edges, a stone against sand. Turning it, again and again, until I can only see my reflection when I look at it.

  “I think it’s possible,” I reply, knowing that this is not the answer Andrea wants. “But I don’t think that should stop us.”

  “You want to waste the goodwill of our audience on a guy who might be guilty?” Andrea asks.

  “I want to find out what happened to Sarah Ketchum,” I say. “If that means we prove a guy like Colin is innocent, fine. But she’s the one I care about here.”

  It takes only a moment for Andrea to nod.

  “Okay,” she says, convinced. “Just don’t let Ava and Ted make you forget that.”

  “I won’t,” I reply, hoping she can’t hear the catch of resentment in my voice. Because this is what I’ve been doing my whole life, chasing the ghosts of girls who never grew up. Who were never given the chance. It’ll take more than Ava and Ted to distract me from that.

  CHAPTER

  TEN

  The first time I cheated on Eric was at Mathilde’s, a dive bar in Wicker Park. Our local, mine and Eric’s. A place where we knew the bartenders, where we had nightcaps after dinners out, and where we pregamed before parties. Where one of the bartenders had lit a match for me to blow out on my birthday, made the whole bar sing to me.

  It happened the day I gave the DNA test to Detective Olsen. Four days after that call at the bistro, four days into recording the first season of the podcast with Andrea. Just as things were beginning to tilt out of my control. Giving my DNA was the thing that finally did it, made the possibility real. That my sister was dead. That I could have an answer.

  I was supposed to be on a run. I’d been tossing and turning in bed for an hour before Eric suggested I take my nervous energy outside, put it to good use. Still, I shut my phone off a block away from home, so Eric couldn’t track my location. I think I knew, as soon as I got out into the night air, that it wasn’t a run I needed.

  Carey, the man-bunned weeknight bartender at Mathilde’s, asked me if I wanted water as I sat down, motioning at my moisture-wicking tee and skintight running shorts.

  “God no,” I replied. “The outfit is just a pretense.” He poured me whiskey, a double, and I spent the next hour searching #bluelizard on Instagram, imagining the tattoo on Jane Doe’s leg. Carey refilled my glass twice as I scrolled through hundreds of photos, finally pausing on a photograph of a woman’s thigh. Posted by a tattoo artist in Bucktown, in 2015. In the photograph, a freshly inked blue iguana tattoo, with a halo of pink inflammation around it, shined in the light of the flash.

  It was almost a perfect match for the tattoo on my side. The same shade of blue, even, a deep cerulean with orange detailing around its edges. Just like the stuffed animal Maggie had as a child. I wondered if it was the same tattoo on Jane Doe’s leg, where she lay in a refrigerated drawer in the city morgue.

  Carey rested his arms on the bar in front of me, drawing my eyes away from the phone.

  “Last call. Want another?” I glanced around. The bar had emptied out, leaving the two of us alone.

  “No, I should probably go,” I said, quickly sending the artist a direct message on Instagram—asking for information on that particular tattoo—and dropping some cash on the bar. I didn’t want to wait around for too long. Not with three drinks roiling in my empty stomach, not with the possibility of my big sister on a slab.

  “You sure?” Carey asked. “On the house. If you keep me company while I close.”

  Go home, whispered the voice in my head. Go home, go home. Like the mantra I used in the middle of a nightmare. Wake up, wake up, wake up.

  * * *

  * * *

  I RETURNED HOME two hours later. Stumbled in on unsteady legs, still shaking. I kicked off my running shoes and headed straight for the bathroom, hoping I wouldn’t wake Eric as I crept in stocking feet across the bedroom floor. If he was awake, he didn’t give any indication as I eased the door shut between us.

  I tried not to think about the storeroom behind the bar, with its plastic crates and its black rubber floor mats and the neon light of the jukebox outside its door, turning Carey’s skin from green to blue to orange. The way I’d been nearly nauseated with lust, flushed and shivering in the tiny space, laughing drunkenly into the frayed collar of Carey’s T-shirt.

  Without turning on the bathroom light, I peeled off my running clothes, my skin sticky with sweat, and turned the shower on, stepping into the cold stream before it even had the chance to warm. Lathering my hair with shampoo, taking handfuls of body wash to my skin. Rinsing my mouth, spitting into the drain. Turning the dials to keep the bracing cold. The memory of my college dorm rising in the dark. Of living without air-conditioning, the way cold showers would chase the heat from my skin for the briefest of moments, only until I would step back into the muggy heat, return to the close air of my tiny shared room. That was how it felt that night. Like even the gooseflesh on my skin would be short-lived, like I would only have to step back out into the dark, let my mind wander for a moment, and I would again be consumed with heat.

  * * *

  * * *

  NOW, AS SOON as I step inside McGinty’s, which Silvia promises is Detective Olsen’s after-shift watering hole, I think of that night. Something about the smell of the taps and the blare of the TVs brings it all back. Makes me miss it, that old bar. The life I had before.

  I glance up and find that it’s still the top of the ninth of the evening’s Cubs game. I was hoping they would have finished up losing by now, but it seems they’re stretching out the torture a bit, so I take a seat at the
corner of the bar and order an Old Style. McGinty’s is your typical neighborhood dive bar, sandwiched in between a Mexican restaurant and a liquor store, narrow enough to accommodate only the bar and a few small tables in front, plus a dartboard and an ancient-looking pinball machine next to the bathrooms in the back.

  I recognize Detective Olsen right away. He’s sitting with a few other guys at a table toward the back of the place, and while he and his buddies are all in plain clothes, they’re all clearly cops. I’m not sure if he notices me at the bar, but I can almost feel it when one of his buddies does. It’s that sixth sense again, the one my friends in college would tease me about. Born from a lifetime of wariness, of watching the men around me more carefully than any adolescent girl necessarily should. Looking for a face I’ll recognize. Waiting to see if I’m in danger. I can always tell when a man has noticed me, when I’m being followed.

  So I’m not at all surprised when Olsen’s buddy takes the seat next to me at the bar.

  “Hey, John, can I get another?” he says to the bartender, laying it on a bit thick with his extremely misplaced Chicago accent, which should instead have landed him on the South Side rooting for an entirely different baseball team. But, like everywhere else in this city, the accent is shorthand for social status. And this guy is a cop, pure working class, and proud of it, even if he’s off the beat and in plain clothes tonight.

  “You want another whiskey?” the bartender asks.

  “Nah, I’ll have whatever she’s having.” He motions to my glass. I wonder if he knows he’s a good ten years too old for me. He looks like he’s within a stone’s throw of fifty, with the beginnings of jowls and the slicked-back hair of a Donnie Brasco wannabe. Even on my worst day, I don’t think this man would have made the cut.