The cemetery is quiet, short of silent save for the sound of Pearl gasping for air. She fights for oxygen in the still November air. I’m guessing her throat is as dry as the bedrock. Even I am thirsty and I’m not doing the work. She sweats in exertion, while the numb air freezes my lungs, making them ache and burn. It’s cold, winter coming quickly. Too quickly. The grass around us is a faded green, a sage green, quickly losing color, becoming dormant for the winter season ahead. It’s brittle to the touch and no longer burgeons out of the ground. Soon it will be covered with snow. The fog begins to rise, and as it does, the world materializes before me: granite and marble headstones, grotesque, ill-proportioned trees, and the church: a small, one-room rectangular Protestant church, white, with a stacked limestone base and clapboard sides. The windows are plain, no frills, as is the entire building, an 1800s structure that’s been outdone by the more modern, hip churches popping up around town. I’m not even sure if anyone uses this place anymore or if it’s just for show, a dead thing, a cadaver, hollowed out like all these bodies buried beneath the ground.
And then all of a sudden Pearl tosses the garden spade aside and stops digging. She’s reached a box, a wooden box that itself is mostly decomposed. She can’t lift the box—it’s wedged too tightly into the earth, in the final stages of decay. It crumbles to bits in her hand, and so instead she pushes what’s left of the lid aside and peers inside.
From this angle I can’t see inside Genevieve’s grave, but I watch for Pearl’s reaction. What I see is a look of smug satisfaction as if she was hoping to prove something to the world, and that’s exactly what she did. She puts her hands on her hips; she smiles.
She leaves the garden spade where it is, the mound of dirt piled sky-high, the gravesite exposed so that all of the world can see.
And then she wipes her sweaty brow with the back of a sleeve, picks up her coat and her hat to leave.
But she doesn’t leave. Not yet, anyway. Before she goes, her eyes rove the cemetery, from the old church, to century-old headstones, to me. For a second, I’m half certain her eyes linger on my hiding place, there behind the evergreen trees and leafless bushes where I squirrel myself away and try desperately to hide. She shakes her head. She sneaks a sardonic smile. She sighs.
But if she sees me, she doesn’t say a thing. And then she turns and goes.
I don’t move right away. Instead, I wait. I wait for a long time, until the squeak of the cemetery’s iron gate tells me that she’s gone for good. And then I wait some more, just to be sure. And only then do I rise to my shaky feet to see what she’s discovered inside that grave.
Nothing. Absolutely nothing. That’s what Pearl discovered.
The wooden box decomposing in the hard earth is completely empty.
Quinn
Before I climb into Detective Davies’s car, I insist on seeing a driver’s license plus one more photo ID. Vehicle registration and proof of insurance. You never can be too careful about these things. I’ve seen enough legal thrillers and murder mysteries to know the cop isn’t always the good guy. But in this case, I think he is. And this is why: he’s not that nice. He’s not that friendly.
“Good enough?” Detective Robert Davies asks when he hands me the State Farm card, and I say, “Yeah. Good enough,” as I open the door and slide into an unmarked Crown Victoria that’s parked in the public lot off Columbus. The car reeks of the fast-food bag that lies open on the passenger seat. He scoops it up before my rear end has a chance to squash it flat, and tosses it into a nearby garbage can. It’s much warmer in the car without the cold and the wind, but the dreariness of the enclosed parking garage is still unsettling.
Detective Davies pulls out of the narrow parking spot too quickly and down the garage ramp so that my insides continue to turn. There’s a blare of his horn—warning others that he’s coming through at breakneck speed—as he guns the engine out onto Columbus and drives me home.
As he drives, the bile again rises up inside my chest until I feel that I could vomit. My head swims with dread. My hands shake, a tremor that makes the rest of me exhausted and dizzy. My heart, itself, has grown wings and can fly, and there it sits in my chest, flapping its birdlike wings, threatening to soar out of my body.
I think of Esther, sad and scared, and me not knowing. Was she really sad and scared, or were these things simply a charade? Who is Esther, really? Is she even Esther or is she Jane? The questions all but take over my mind until I can no longer see straight and I can scarcely think.
Detective Davies drops me off at the front door of my apartment building. Before I can turn around to say goodbye to the detective or thank him for the ride, he speeds away quickly, with Esther’s cell phone and the letters to My Dearest now in his possession. He plans to see what his tech guys can extract from inside that phone—Esther’s call activity and voice mails, her videos and photos.
In my hand, I carry his business card, and in my head, a directive: call if anything happens, if I find anything, if I hear from Esther, if Esther reappears. Just call.
As I step from the car, I peer to the window of our unit, of Esther’s and my unit, and half expect to see her, standing there, staring down at me. But of course Esther isn’t there. The cloudy window is bare, just the window coverings and the reflection of the other side of Farragut Avenue staring back at me.
But then I see a woman standing beside the locked door, pressing a button repeatedly on the intercom panel with a hand. She waits with a toe tap for a reply that doesn’t come. She stands before the door, clutching what I know to be Esther’s powder blue, quilted satchel in her leather-gloved hands. She’s a small woman; she can’t be taller than four foot ten with bulky hair that must weigh as much as the rest of her. I’d bet my life she weighs eighty-nine pounds. Everything she wears is tight: tight pants, tight coat, tight boots.
“Can I help you?” I ask precipitately, my eyes glued to that purse. I have a sudden, overwhelming desire to reach out and clutch that purse in my hands, to hold it. That’s Esther’s, I want to bark out loud, and I stare at my hands, which, before me, continue to shake. I’m worried. Worried for Esther. The detective’s story leaves me feeling panicked and utterly confused—even more so than I already was—this strange twist of events that takes me from mad to scared to worried. Instead of thinking that someone is after me—that Esther is after me—I’m worried for Esther.
But still, there are so many questions running in my mind: What about Kelsey Bellamy, and why did Esther change her name to Jane Girard, and seek out a roommate to replace me? Why did she take fifteen hundred dollars out of the ATM? This makes no sense to me, none at all.
“Are you Jane...” the woman at the intercom panel begins, followed by a pause while she peers at some card in her hand and finishes with, “Girard?” Are you Jane Girard?
Who is Esther Vaughan anymore? I wonder. Do I even know Esther?
I shake my head quickly. I say no, that I’m not, but I’m Jane’s roommate. Quinn. I say it, anyway, even though I’m guessing she doesn’t care about my name. She’s come for Jane.
“Oh, good,” she says, a great wave of relief washing over the inflated facial features—the big eyes, the big smile, the big hair. “I found this,” she says as she thrusts the powder blue satchel into my hands, “in a trash can of all places,” and I take it, grateful to have something, some part of Esther, to hold. I press it close to me; I breathe in the scent of Esther that’s begun to wear away and be surpassed by a grungy city smell, mixed with this lady’s forceful perfume, the heavy scent of jasmine and rose.
“You found her purse in a garbage can?” I repeat, just to be sure, and she nods and tells me how she was about to toss in her coffee cup when she saw it lying there on top of a jillion fast-food bags, the blue of the satchel catching her eye.
“It’s a pretty purse,” she says. “Much too pretty to just throw in the trash. I figured it was an oversight,” and then she says how she didn’t want my roommate to worry. “I know I’d be worried if I couldn’t find my purse.”
“That’s really kind of you,” I say, and it is. Of course it is, if she doesn’t have some ulterior motive. Right now I’m not sure of anything, other than the fact that I’m tired and twitchy all at the same time. My head hurts; my hands shake. If any more questions fill my mind, it might just explode.
What was Esther’s purse doing in a garbage can?
“What garbage can?” I ask, and she points in the direction of Clark Street and says aimlessly, “Over there.”