About my healed neck are ￡1.8 million worth of diamonds on loan from Boodles. The burly security guy assigned to guard it—and, I suppose, as a consequence, me—is stationed just beyond the suite door in stoic silence. He’ll follow the small army of stylists, hair and makeup artists, and assistants down the hall, waiting for me to emerge, and escort me, from a distance, down to the red carpet just across the road from this hotel.
I think of the crowds gathering right now outside the Royal Albert Hall, the BAFTA television crews, the journalists, presenters, and public. The long gauntlet of the red carpet, the massive banks of photographers with walls of flashes. Tonight’s show will be televised live, with only a three-minute delay. The idea of it both thrilling and nauseating.
I look down at my index cards again, my acceptance speech. Should I need one. My scrawled-out handwriting will be my only protection against the vast waves of nerves that I know will crash through my body if my name is called from the podium. That long walk to the stage—past the smiling faces of make-believe superheroes, historical figures, faux-gangsters, and rom-com best friends—to the moment I’ve worked my whole life for. Maybe.
I run through the speech cards again one last time, my hands shaking. Let’s call it excitement.
The speech is short but packed with thanks.
I know how lucky I am. Now more than ever, to even be alive. Luckier than ever after everything that happened, after almost losing myself, after looking into the darkness and seeing so many near-identical faces staring straight back at me.
I am so, so incredibly grateful, but—and there is a but—I know none of this is real. This industry is not fair, the price is so often higher than the reward. I’ve won some things but more often than not, I’ve lost. We all have. And there should be a limit to what we are willing to lose along the way…after all, we’ll need something left once we get there.
Marla lost everything. Emily too. I wish—award gown on, and on my way to the ball—I could have told them that it feels good but it’s not worth losing everything for. This. Standing here, covered in reflected and refracted light. I can tell you firsthand this feeling is only the same one you felt when you won a gold star in school, or when your mum said she was proud, or when you won a sports match. Don’t get me wrong, success is a great privilege, but standing here I can tell you it’s not what I thought it was before I had it.
They never found Marla’s body. They found something else instead.
Once I got back to London, I checked my report number every day until it was removed from the system. Case closed. No body was found in the ravine beneath the sign on that day. No body, no crime.
Marla disappeared one last time.
But Emily Bryant’s body was found. In Lake Hollywood. Apparently, another anonymous tip-off. Nothing to do with me. God knows who called it in, but the LAPD dredged the lake. I remember wondering if Ben himself might have done it to finally close the circle. How he could be sure of maintaining his innocence I do not know. Though without Emily, her recordings, or her best friend I’m not sure how much ties him to her.
They found Emily’s body in a weighted suitcase 180 feet beneath the surface of the reservoir. A homicide investigation was opened.
The story was on the news for a few days. Her postmortem showed the cause of death to be an overdose of heroin; she was dead long before she entered the water. Some speculated that she had been an addict, that she could well have overdosed accidentally or deliberately with someone who then tried to dispose of her body. But Emily was no drug addict. Looking at her glowing headshot on the news, that much must have been clear to everyone.
I waited on tenterhooks for an international call, every day expecting to hear Officer Cortez’s voice, but the call took another month to come through.
I had begun to relax, to think that somehow I was irrelevant to Emily’s story. After all, she was long dead before I even arrived in LA.
It was hard for the coroners to pin down exactly how long Emily Bryant had been dead, though, having only the rate of her decomposition to go by, the lower temperatures this year apparently slowing down decomposition while the high level of bacterial life present in the lake water may have potentially sped it up.
I read everything that surfaced online, becoming once again an expert on Emily. I worked out the time line, her disappearance, my arrival, my departure. My first phone call with Cortez about Emily would have come five weeks after her actual death, making me an unlikely suspect or witness. Though my story of a look-alike might be far more concerning.
When Cortez finally called me she walked me back through what I had told her in February. I reminded her of the part of the story where she herself assured me on the phone that the police had ID’d Emily in her apartment and told me she was fine. Placing the blame right back on the LAPD’s doorstep.
Cortez asked me who the friend of Emily’s was that I had spoken to about her disappearance. I told her I could not remember her name. I kept my answers vague, the time and the distance from those seemingly unimportant events doing most of my work for me. I do not know if Cortez managed to get footage from the Ellis Building of Joanne pretending to be Emily, but it seems unlikely. Lucy told me they wiped the tapes after a month. I’m pretty sure the footage of Joanne would only be another dead end for the LAPD. Joanne didn’t know who hired her. Even if Cortez traced the bank account that paid Joanne, I’m sure it would only lead back to Emily’s bank account anyway. Marla had access to everything through Emily’s computer and phone.
Who knows where that laptop and phone are now. It’s unlikely Cortez found them back in Emily’s apartment, and who knows where Marla was staying. I try not to think of Emily’s empty rooms, those wilted plants, the bowl full of moldy fruit. My emails and texts to Emily are all lost along with those audio files.
I gave my statement to Cortez again: twice. Leaving out anything to do with Marla and anything that might incriminate me.
That call was a month ago and I haven’t heard a thing more. I check the news less these days. I try to forget. But every now and then I get scared. I expect another call, from Cortez, the call that unravels everything I’ve said and lands me in something I can’t ever get out of.
And there’s another thought that haunts me, the fact that Marla’s body was never found. I think of the nighttime animal noises up in Griffith Park and perhaps that’s my answer, but there’s a tiny part of me that wonders if, somehow, Marla got away. If somehow her fall was broken on the way down and somehow, she tumbled to safety and then woke the next day, severely injured but alive. I know it’s not possible but there’s a magic and a terror to thinking she might still be out there, a ghost in a city of visitors.
It must have been true, what Marla told me about her childhood, because no one has missed her. There were no reports on Marla. Emily’s family was plastered across the papers after her body was discovered, photos of her grieving father. He had filed his own missing persons report on Emily a week after Marla fell. That whole time he’d thought she was fine because Marla was texting him back as Emily. And when she stopped Emily’s dad noticed. Cortez must know someone was impersonating Emily but without real evidence, or even a name, Marla’s trail must have gone cold.