“You could ask her now.”
“I can’t find her. She goes through these times when she doesn’t answer. And I keep thinking, what if she knows the police are looking for her now? We’ll never find out the truth. She’ll just vanish into thin air.”
“Well, she will call you eventually. She wants something from you. She’s addicted, in a sense. At least from what you tell me. And when she does, just casually suggest getting together because you were never able to pull it off that other time. She’ll either agree or she won’t. Call the detective as soon as you set a plan.”
I told her that was exactly what I was going to do.
When we parted that night, Becky thanked me again for calling her. She had been surprised to hear from me and asked me why I reached out just then. I confessed that I wasn’t really sure. She told me then that she’d almost called me, to ask if we might have lunch or coffee, and wasn’t sure why she felt that way either.
“Destiny, I guess,” she finally said, and asked if she could hug me. There was something about her, a straightforwardness and complete lack of cant, that was so appealing.
Two days later, Esme texted from yet another phone number. I’ll tell you the truth. I promise this time.
Quickly, I texted back: All this time you’ve wanted to see me. You wanted to warn Stefan he was in danger. You wanted to tell me something big. Then you just disappeared. I know you are afraid. But if you know some surprising truth about that night, just tell me.
She texted back: It’s not just about that night. It’s other things, too. If I tell you the truth, you can’t tell anyone else.
Not even Stefan?
No one else. Don’t talk to Jill. Don’t talk to the police. No one. Things could happen to me. I could get killed.
No one’s going to kill you.
You don’t know. You don’t understand!
And then she was gone again. I nearly threw the phone across the room. Sleep was lost to me now. I finally got up and paced until the sun rose. I wondered if I would ever be able to see a sunrise again and think only about the weather. With Molly at my heels, I desultorily inspected our raised garden, the wreckage of the tomatoes I planted every year, determined every time to give the tender plants my most valiant effort, an effort which I then, at least for the past several years, abandoned by July. As if reproaching me for my desertion, many fat fruits hung heavy on the vine. Others were regrettably smashed on the ground. I made a pouch of my sweatshirt and began to fill it... I would make myself busy, I would make marinara sauce and freeze it. I had once been a devout gardener; I used to have ordinary pursuits.
It was when I was making my way back heavy-laden to the patio that I noticed something: Footprints in the mud around the rosebushes Stefan had replanted were just a few feet from the back door. It had rained a few nights before, washing the snow nearest the house to mud. Then the mud had frozen. So that meant...night before last or the night before that, someone stood there, yet again, facing the windows to our family room, forty inches of air and an eighth of an inch of glass from our vulnerable lives. The shoe prints were running shoes, but with a different pattern from the Nike Air Max I wore when I took walks. How did I know the pattern on the bottom of my running shoes? I knew because I often used a garden tool to dig the dirt and gravel out of them before I put them in the washing machine. And these prints were not my size. I set my foot heel-to-heel within one print. They were noticeably larger, by perhaps almost half an inch.
Fifteen minutes later, Esme called me. It would later seem like something that would happen on TV, my struggling to extract my phone from my pocket, spilling all the tomatoes onto the patio flagstones, where they lay seeping like small organs. Was she out there, watching me? Or did only the hoodie figure do that? Was privacy the most ridiculous of illusions? She said softly, and to me chillingly, “I still remember the sounds. Stuff hitting the walls. Yelling. I should tell you. I have to get it over with.”
“And so you should. You have to get this off your chest. We should really meet, now, before you go away.”
“I’ve waited too long,” she said.
“Tell me more,” I said, and listened to her breathing. “Tell me the rest.”
Silence. Breathing. Then not even that.
I was the one who finally disconnected. Then I stood with my hand on the phone receiver. Did I understand just what I was asking for? If Esme was indeed as sick as I believed that she must be, was she the one drawing me close, then pushing me away, in a game intended to entice me to throw away caution, to come to her, on her terms?
Was it not really Stefan she wanted to hurt, but instead me, to punish Stefan by taking away yet another person he loved?
Of course, if she and I did meet, there would be police at the ready, but would they be close enough and quick enough to save me? Dire things happened in seconds. They happened every day.
14
I finally spoke with Pete Sunday and we met at a local coffee shop.
“I wish I had better news,” he said. “We basically came up empty. I don’t know who this girl is, or if she even exists and I can’t find anyone who ever saw her. We’ll have to ask Stefan what else he knows.”
Before I agreed to that, he told me there was no Emily Lundgren or Lindquist in Black Creek anywhere near to Belinda’s age. There were six with similar names, but five were women in their forties and fifties, and one was a three-year-old girl. There were also plenty of female students from Chicago at the school, at least a couple of dozen in Belinda’s year, more in the year before and after, but none of them, to my surprise, was named Emily or Esme, and a search of their records showed that none of them looked anything like the girl in the picture I’d shown to him. Among that number were also several girls named Emma, but the only one from Chicago was Emma Doll, an Olympic speed skater who was African-American and whose face was famous around the world. Pete had spoken with Emma Doll, now a senior, and though she knew about the case, she had never met or seen Belinda before her death. There were girls with the surname Lundgren or Lindquist. One of them was called Caroline Lindquist and she had, in fact, known Belinda fairly well, she told Pete Sunday. In fact, she had been so shaken by Belinda’s murder that she had taken the semester off. Caroline was a name on the list Jill made of Belinda’s close college friends. Had Stefan somehow confused the first and last names?
Of course, it was possible that Esme was not the girl in the picture.
Pete wanted me to know that he hadn’t given up.
He thought that my suggestion to Esme that we meet up in person was spectacular, and we created a plan. As soon as a place was set, I would inform him and he would find a way to be there as well, undercover, with other police to back him up. He promised that I would be safe.
As for the solitary figure in the hoodie, who somehow felt bold to haunt and despoil our lives according to his whim, a few rosebushes one time, maybe next time a piece of wire strung at neck height in the dark, Pete had no idea. Did he know Esme? Was he sent by her? All we knew was that he watched, and that he bided his time.
I had put way too many hopes in a basket that turned out to have a hole in the bottom.
I went to bed.
For once, nothing was required to shove me down into sleep and keep me there.