Detective Davies tells me that he first met Esther a year or so ago when he was investigating the death of Kelsey Bellamy. It was more or less an open-and-shut case, he says. The girl had food allergies, which I know. She ate something she was allergic to; she couldn’t get to her medicine in time. Hundreds of people die from anaphylaxis each year. It’s not that common, and yet it happens. That’s what the detective tells me. Negligence might have played a part in Kelsey’s death, yes, and at the time Esther took a great deal of blame. “People pointed fingers,” he says. “People always want to point fingers. They need someone to blame.” But once Kelsey’s death was ruled an accident, life went on for Esther and for Detective Davies. There was no doubt in his mind that Esther hadn’t purposefully tried to tamper with Kelsey’s meal. “I’ve seen a lot of liars before,” he tells me, “but Esther wasn’t one of them. She passed a lie detector test with flying colors. She cooperated with the investigation. She was an exemplary witness, and clearly contrite. She felt terrible about what had happened to Kelsey. She owned up to it right away—the mix-up with the flour—and was never defensive. I can’t say as much about most witnesses, and certainly not the guilty ones.”
He pauses for a breath and then continues. “Esther called me Saturday night, out of the blue. We hadn’t spoken in months, nearly a year. But she had something to show me,” he says, adding on, “She seemed spooked,” and there’s such conviction in his voice I find myself holding my breath, forgetting to breathe. Esther was spooked. But why? The very thought of this makes me want to cry. Esther was sad, Esther was scared, and neither time did I know.
Why didn’t I know?
What kind of friend am I?
“She didn’t say much on the phone. She wanted to tell me in person. She’d received something, a note. I can only assume it had to do with Ms. Bellamy,” he says.
My heartbeat accelerates and, tucked up into the sleeves of the aqua sweater, my hands begin to sweat.
“When did she call you?” I ask.
“Saturday night, nine o’clock or so,” he says. Nine o’clock. Shortly after I left for that stupid karaoke bar, leaving Esther behind in her pajamas and a blanket. Did Esther purposefully wait until I’d left to call the detective? Was she even sick?
Esther had received a note, I wonder. But no. I consider the notes to My Dearest. Esther wrote those notes. He must be mistaken. The signature line most clearly reads: All my love, EV. Esther Vaughan. She’s signed her name to the letters. They’re hers. Aren’t they?
Is it possible that Esther is somehow My Dearest?
I’m a tad bit skeptical to say the least.
“I have the notes,” I tell Detective Davies then, reaching into my purse and thrusting the two typewritten notes into his hand. “I brought them with me.”
I’ve been carrying them around with me in my purse because I couldn’t think of another safe place to leave them. But I’ve read them, of course, many times, and neither says a thing about Kelsey Bellamy. As Detective Davies’s eyes scan the notes, he, too, seems unimpressed, though he asks if he can keep them, anyway. I nod my head and watch as he slips the notes carefully into some sort of evidence pouch where later I imagine they’ll be dusted for fingerprints and some sort of forensic analyst will try and find the make and model of the typewriter on which the notes were typed.
The notes are completely madcap, don’t get me wrong. They are. But inside, there’s no grand confession, no mention of Kelsey Bellamy. Somehow he’s got it all wrong. He must have misunderstood what Esther said or maybe she was lying or in the very least stretching the truth. Maybe Esther was trying to mislead the detective. But why?
“There was nothing else?” the detective asks, and I say no. “There must be more,” he says, but I assure him there’s not. The look that crosses his face makes me believe I’ve failed again. In some way, I’ve let him down.
Or maybe I’ve just let Esther down. Right now, it’s hard to say for sure.
“But what about the photograph,” I ask, “of me? The one Esther put in the paper shredder, my face with a slit across the throat. That was clearly a threat. She wants me dead.”
“Or...” suggests Detective Davies as I feel the bile rise up inside of me like an active volcano, threatening to erupt. “Maybe whoever sent Esther the letter took the photo of you, too. Maybe that’s who wants you dead.”
Alex
The ground looks hard. Not frozen solid, but hard. The top layer, the sod, seems the hardest to get through as she begins digging into the cold morning earth with her gardening spade, pressing on the steel with the sole of a suede boot. The sod binds together, a million sheaths of grass, clinging together, refusing to let her through. It’s hard work, but Pearl forces her way in, gouging out the land bit by bit. I watch in awe as she thrusts the cold, hard earth up in the blade of the shovel, tossing it into a pile behind her slender frame. As she does, she begins to sweat, a cold sweat that congeals on her skin and makes her shiver, and as I watch from a distance, she removes her coat first, followed by the hat, tossing them both onto the dew-covered lawn, and I’m reminded of the day at the lake, Pearl undressing bit by bit and then walking into the frigid water.
As the steel blade hits topsoil, the work gets easier; the earth puts up less of a fight and the pile of dirt begins to rise. She digs and digs, and, watching her, I lose all track of time. I’m hypnotized by her movements, but also more than a little terrified. Who is this woman and what is she doing? Why is she digging up the remains of the dead Genevieve? It feels suddenly moronic that I followed her here. Suddenly stupid. Anyone with half a mind would have immediately called the police or run in the other direction, not trailed her. But now here I am, hiding in the bushes of an all-but-abandoned cemetery while some wackadoodle unearths a corpse from the ground. I squat down to the hard, cold earth, making certain that as the fog rises I won’t be seen. I don’t want to even think what she’d do to me if she knew that I was here. For now, the bushes will keep my secret for me.
As I watch from a distance, I dredge up what knowledge I have of the little girl who’s buried in that grave. I don’t know much; she was gone before I was born. But what I’ve heard about Genevieve is that after her death the town’s members lifted the rudimentary wooden casket from the trunk of her family’s car and dropped it into this very trench in the cemetery, hastily, without the praxis of a visitation or a funeral or a procession. Instead, the body was ushered rather quickly from the car and to this ditch and nobody ever bothered to ask why. People were glad she was gone. Though she might have only been five years old, she was a delinquent, the kind of child that wreaked havoc on their own children and homes, tormenting kids, vandalizing property, chasing neighborhood dogs. That’s what I’ve been told. It wasn’t as though anybody wanted to see a little girl die, but still, they were glad she was gone. “Her mother had her hands full,” neighbors have said over the years, staring at that forsaken house, mumbling under their breaths something to the effect of, What a damn shame.
As far as I know, no one comes to visit Genevieve’s grave. I can only assume her family split as soon as they abandoned that old home and buried their child in the ground.
In time Pearl’s shovel begins to fill with silt and sand, followed by clay, terra-cotta-colored clay soil, and then, later—in the moments before the steel blade hits hollow wood—bits of broken-up rock fragments, gray like stone. It comes up in chunks, rocks that appear hard to carry. They must be heavy and as I watch on she takes her time, losing speed.
But then I hear the sound of metal on wood, and know that she’s arrived at her destination, the reason for which she’d come here.