Bright Young Women

“I knew you would do this,” my mother declared with a sick sort of triumph. Her face was ruddy, pin-cushioned with beads of sweat. “I said to myself—maybe it’s better Ruth doesn’t come. Because I knew you would only make it about yourself. But I extended an olive branch, and now here I am, doing exactly what I knew I would spend the day doing. Comforting you, when I’m the one who needs comforting.”

I was grateful to her for giving me such a hammy display of her cruelty, which up until that point she had doled out discerningly, at a rate meant to keep me coming back for more. She had made it so easy—not just easy, but pleasurable—to walk away from her. I got on my bike, and I rode to the water, where the breeze was, and Tina too.





PAMELA


Miami, 1979

Day 540

In the hotel room, the phone rang at the same time the door opened.

“I have to answer,” I found myself saying, impossibly, to Ruth’s mother and to Tina. Neither acknowledged me. The two of them were staring each other down like longtime rivals in the ring.

“Pamela?” Mr. Pearl said. “Do you think it’s possible you can move your flight?”

I felt like I could breathe again. I was still going to testify. “Of course,” I said through my long exhale. “What day should I leave?”

There was an awkward pause. “Good question,” Mr. Pearl said with a laugh that made me queasy. It was the laugh of someone who had battled an irrational toddler all day and had lost the will to live. “Judge Lambert wants to meet with you in his chambers tomorrow morning. And then he will decide whether or not you can remain on the witness list.”

I wanted to sit down, my feet were blistered and aching from standing all day, but I also didn’t want to have to iron my dress again. It wasn’t computing. That it might not matter. Because I might not testify. “And then he’ll decide? What is going on, Henry?” I didn’t think I’d ever called Mr. Pearl Henry before.

“The defense filed another motion to strike your testimony today. Based on evidence that it was influenced by your relationship with Martina Cannon. The prosecutor provided a sworn statement from the mother of one of the missing Lake Sammamish girls.”

I stared at the author of this statement, right there in my hotel room, her back up against the wall as if Tina had physically threatened her, though Tina was only standing by the door with her arms crossed and her foot tapping impatiently. I spoke calmly through my mounting hysteria. “What does this statement say?”

“The mother believes her daughter ran away due to her psychological troubles. Apparently, she was committed for a period of time, and there was talk of sending her back to the facility. Her belief is that Martina Cannon manipulated and took advantage of her daughter, and Ms. Cannon’s insistence that Ruth was killed that day is really just a refusal to accept that Ruth realized the way they were carrying on was wrong and ran off.”

“And yet,” I said in a bladed voice, “I don’t see what this has to do with me.”

“It doesn’t. It shouldn’t. The judge just needs to speak to you and make sure you are of sound mind and that you haven’t in any way been manipulated by Martina. You haven’t, have you?”

“No!” I cried.

“That’s what I figured, but I needed to ask.”

“What happens if he decides I have been? Influenced, that is.” I glanced at Tina, whose foot stilled above the carpet at that word. Influenced.

“Look,” Mr. Pearl said sternly, but then he didn’t follow up with anything for some time. Look where? At what? I nearly screamed. “In cases like these…” He trailed off, less sure-footed. My heart sank. He was going to say some version of what my father had been saying to me for months. I could feel it. “Where there are serialized killings…” My knees buckled, and before I knew it, I was sitting on the edge of the bed. To hell with it. I’d iron the dress again. Or maybe I wouldn’t even have to. I brought a hand to my mouth, leveled by the thought that some technicality would keep me from telling everyone the truth, from winning this for Denise. “You rarely get a conviction for all the victims,” Mr. Pearl said in a sad jumble of justifications. “But because there are so many of them, the silver lining is that in some of the cases, at least there is strong forensic evidence, and that’s how you nail these guys.”

“Like how they got Al Capone on tax evasion charges,” I said drolly.

Mr. Pearl groaned. “I am doing everything in my power to win this case for Denise and Robbie and all you girls. But if Judge Lambert decides to strike your testimony, there is strong forensic evidence in the Kimberly Leach case. He won’t get out of Florida alive, I promise you that.”

I closed my eyes. I’d wanted him to say it. But now he had, and I wished for the moment back, to maintain even a fraying thread of hope. Without my testimony, The Defendant would win. I did not know that I would get out of Florida alive if I couldn’t testify.

“Eight forty-five sharp tomorrow. Okay?”

I’d be there at eight thirty.

Ruth’s mother spoke before the phone’s headset met the base. “This young woman deserves the truth,” she said to Tina, the most blatant attempt at magnanimity as I’d ever seen. “You may not be able to accept it. But that doesn’t give you the right to go around peddling your delusions to people in vulnerable situations.”

“Do you know the psychiatric definition of a delusion, Shirley?” Tina raised her dark eyebrows expectantly and waited to see if Shirley felt like taking a stab. “No? Okay, well”—Tina leaned back against the door and said through a yawn designed to infuriate—“it’s a false sustained belief despite incontrovertible evidence to the contrary.” She patted her mouth. “Sorry. You’re so textbook it’s boring.”

Shirley gasped. “You are a wicked person.” With me, she pleaded and pointed. “That is a wicked person right there.”

Tina did not bat an eye. “There were eyewitnesses who put Ruth at Lake Sammamish that day, talking to a man who fits The Defendant’s description. Even more damning…” Tina threw her arms up to the ceiling, like Shirley was never going to believe this one, and Shirley turned one cheek against the wall as though Tina had backhanded her, though they were as far apart as the square footage of the hotel room would allow. “Ruth was happy, and you don’t run away from a life that makes you happy.”

Shirley peeled her face off the wall. “How come her body was never found, then?” She laced her fingers in a beggar’s prayer and shook them at me. Please. Let this sink in. “It’s been five years. They found the body of the other girl who went missing that day. But not Ruth’s. That’s not strange to you?” Shirley threw me a reproachful look—have some sense, it seemed to say.

“Because no one’s looking for her!” Tina thundered. “That other girl’s mother was on every news outlet that would have her. She showed up at the police station every day for three months. She was a goddamn dog with a bone!” Tina banged a fist on the wall and cried out in frustration. “But you. The only thing you’ve been relentless about is making sure no one looks for her! If the mother of a missing girl is telling the detective assigned to her daughter’s disappearance that, actually, nothing suspicious is going on here, they believe you.”

“They do,” Shirley said, and she did this sickening little shimmy, pleased as punch with herself, “because I am a mother. And what are you? You have nothing.”

At this, Tina stumbled, injured, reduced. I felt a protective fire ignite within me, as though Tina were not just my sister but my younger one. In grief, the world treated me like I had seniority anyway, because there was nothing about mine that others found unsavory.