It doesn’t make her un-murdered, either. From her family and friends, the real Nikki was stolen forever. The living girl has been erased, and in her place marches a death’s-head, a warning. A panel in my memory slides open, and here comes the whole gory parade again, images I’ve seen, stories I’ve read: the little girl strangled in the basement, the stabbed woman, the bludgeoned woman, the woman severed in half, the woman who put her mouth around a loaded pistol, the woman bound at the wrists and ankles, dragged through icy black water. Nikki. Nikki comes at the end, flopping behind a dark boat. No. Not at the end. There is one more pale figure, straggling along, and she wears Kim’s face. Then my face.
The freeway exit finally opens to the dense, honking slow-and-go of Hollywood. The traffic becomes nasty enough to keep me alert to it, every Lexus and Range Rover fighting for its slot. I’m grateful, because I want to stop thinking and feeling. I’d like to be as simple as the car I’m driving, as plain as the alley I turn down, as empty as the dark, narrow garage I slide into, just a slot in a row, with a broken door and a history no one knows. The car coughs as the engine stops, and I have to slink and twist to get out of the garage without touching the dusty chrome or the cobwebs on the garage wall. I emerge to the smell of my neighbor’s wilting roses.
My bungalow is part of a 1920s courtyard with a dozen apartments. Our walls are peeling; our pipes run slow, but the old clay rooftops look pretty and everyone’s got the same high ceilings. My neighbors include a retired Ice Capades star, a Hollywood makeup artist, an old man with a carefully preserved British accent, and some bearded twentysomethings with band aspirations.
I know everyone well enough to feel a protectiveness descend as soon as I stride down our walkway, but they’re not real friends. Everyone here liked Greg for his gregariousness, and I think they got the impression I’d run him off until his face started appearing all over TV with headlines like “Gallery of Death?” Once my neighbors avoided me out of loyalty to him; this week they avoid me out of pity.
My bungalow looks dark and cold, the windows black. I always forget to leave lights on to fake the appearance of someone inside. It takes a while to dredge out my keys, even though I just tossed them in there, because my purse is so stuffed with the recorder, the flash drive, my phone. The rest of the courtyard notices this, I’m sure. And my tired, aching swaying as I search. Where’d she stumble home from? There the keys are, wrapped in the handle of the recorder. My keys, museum keys, gym locker key, even the stupid key to Greg’s gallery, all on a ring. It amazes me how quickly things get lost. Or maybe not lost. Enmeshed. Tangled up so badly that you can’t separate one thing from another.
The branches beyond my patio fence toss and heave. I jump. Drop the keys. Pick them up again. Avoid looking at the bush. I don’t want to see the possum again.
Gold key in the heavy screen door, silver key in the inner door, even these small rituals of entry seem sadder and clumsier when you’re entering a house where you live alone. All these months, and still I am not used to it. I push inside, hear my phone buzz with a text: I really hope you’ll get some rest. Jayme.
I drop the phone back into my purse. Then I click on the living room light, illuminating my blank walls, my Fitzgerald biography lying closed on the coffee table. I go to my computer and turn it on, hoping to read Yegina’s original message about Don. As the machine wheezes and grinds, taking forever to boot up, I see dust streaks on my arm. Stupid too-tight garage. I go to the bathroom to wash.
The faucet warms up slowly, so I run the cold over my skin. Soap, rinse. Night air gusts through the open window, giving me goose bumps.
I don’t remember leaving the window open.
I do, however, recall leaving the Fitzgerald biography whacked down on the table in that spine-ruining way that my mother always told me not to do. I do remember feeling a twinge of guilt about it.
Someone was here.
Or is here.
Steve Goetz isn’t Kim’s killer. This means there is someone else. There has always been someone else. And that someone knows who I am, and might even know what I’ve been doing.
YOU’D BETTER WATCH OUT FOR MAGGIE. What if Greg was framed by the same person who sent him the note about me? And what if that person intended to implicate me next?
Untangled backward, the logic would be simple, believable: jealous Maggie kills Kim, then frames Greg.
Meanwhile, the real murderer gets away.
It wouldn’t be hard to construct my guilt: just find a way to break into my not-very-secure bungalow and hide more objects from the crime. Then an anonymous tip. The police would follow the clues and recalibrate their case: Greg framed by Maggie, who did the actual deed. Jealous ex-lover. Again, this theory doesn’t point to a stranger. It points to someone who knows us, who knows where we both live. Someone from our circle of acquaintances. Maybe even someone from the Rocque.
The bathroom doesn’t lock. I wash my arm and hands again, noting with sudden acuteness my nail-bitten fingers. My ugly and vulnerable palms.
This is crazy. I must have moved the book myself and forgotten.
But I didn’t. I left it upended, bending the pages.
The house throbs with quiet. My purse is by the door, with my keys and phone. If I run, I could grab it and be outside in less than a minute.
But what if a killer is standing right outside my door?
I could climb out the bathroom window, but he would hear me doing it, burst in. Besides, I want my car keys and my purse so that I can drive far away.
I could yell. I could yell out the names of everyone in the courtyard. How long would it take for them to recognize the cries and come running? How many people heard Kitty Genovese screaming? He could kill me before they arrived.
I turn off the faucet and stand there with my dripping hands. Then I wipe them on a rough red towel. I could just stand here and listen until I hear a noise; if I don’t hear anything, then maybe he’s gone. A long time passes after this decision, but it’s probably just a few minutes.
Something creaks upstairs.
I throw open the bathroom, looking left and right, sprint to the kitchen. The kitchen is empty, my breakfast dishes messily stacked in the drain. I grab Theresa’s knife from the counter and stagger into the living room, ascertaining that, yes, the biography is in a different place, and, yes—worse—my desk is different, too. The drawer where I keep staples and scissors is slightly ajar. But this room is also empty. A broom stands in the corner. I hold the knife high.
Five steps. I’m at the door. The living room light pulses. The back of my neck feels sunburned; even the motionless air in here chafes against it. I fling the knife into my purse, grab my keys, and bolt outside into the courtyard, slamming my doors behind me.
If my neighbors glance out their windows now, I am a shadow fleeing across the grass, head down, not stopping to breathe until I get in my car and lock it. I drive eight blocks away, making sure I am not followed before I park, dig in my purse for my phone.
Out comes the recorder, then my wallet, the knife, the flash drive, wrappers and receipts, a lipstick, a cinema ticket, until there’s nothing inside but a few stray pennies, jingling when I shake the leather. I know I dropped the phone in here, so I search again, hands fumbling through my possessions. Then I prop the purse open in my lap and swipe the silky interior, in case a hole has developed in a seam, in case things have fallen through.
When I finally look up, the street is also empty, the cars parked, the houses locked and glassy. Nothing moves but the jacaranda trees, waving their dark, bugle-shaped buds at the evening. The trembling comes from so deep inside me, it makes my teeth knock together. Someone was there, in that room. Someone took my phone, the way he took Kim Lord’s phone and sent messages to convince people that she was still alive. Why? I don’t know how long I sit there, but it doesn’t help. Neither does driving away, east.