There was Julie’s witness statement too, the first part of it—I hadn’t managed to get any more with my phone camera. She went into the house. After that I must have fallen asleep because when I woke up she was calling my phone …
I skimmed the rest. I already knew it.
I clicked to the next picture—my wall.
I was back to the start.
I had quite literally hit a wall.
I put my phone down. I felt even more sorry for Paris. Somehow, knowing she was really Lily … it made her seem smaller. More exposed. Younger.
She wasn’t much older than you, I reminded myself.
There was nothing in the case file, absolutely nothing. Like Dwight had said. Paris had just disappeared, and there were literally no clues to follow. I couldn’t believe it. I couldn’t believe I just had to … stop.
“You’re not giving up that easily?” said the voice.
“Huh?”
“On finding her. You’re not giving up, are you?”
“What do you want me to do?” I said. “The police don’t know anything.”
“So?”
“So a teenage girl isn’t going to solve a case the police can’t solve. Just …” I thought of Paris’s body, weighed down, at the bottom of the ocean. Bloating. Hair floating. Fish swimming through her clothes.
Ugh. Stop.
“Okay, then, just let her die,” said the voice.
“What do you want me to do?” I said again.
The voice fell silent for a moment. “Isn’t that boy coming to pick you up? Maybe he’ll have ideas.”
I checked my watch. The voice was right: it was time for you to pick me up—you had your break at eleven a.m., and we’d agreed to keep looking for Paris.
“I thought you didn’t like him?” I said to the voice.
“I don’t.”
“So aren’t you going to instruct me to break up with him? To, I don’t know, tell him to **** off or you will make me cut off my fingers?”
“You’ve made it clear you won’t respond to threats like that,” said the voice, in a weirdly reasonable tone.
“Right.”
“Anyway, I don’t need to,” it said, cruel again, mocking. “You’re going to mess things up yourself.”
“What? Why?”
“Have you told him about me? About … this?”
I sat up straighter on the bed. “No.”
“Well, there you go. A lie that is sure to blow up in your face. ‘Oh, sorry I didn’t mention that I’m a psycho.’ ”
“I’m not a psycho.”
“Semantics.”
I sighed. “Besides it’s all … I mean … I shouldn’t be with him anyway. It’s not the right time, with Paris, and …”
“Love is no respecter of right times,” said the voice. But not in a kind way.
“Oh, go away,” I said.
And it did. I felt it go behind its curtain, and the stage of my mind was clear. I closed my eyes for a long moment. Maybe I should tell him, I thought.
But then he will never look at you the same way again.
Maybe I shouldn’t be seeing him anyway. Maybe I’ll tell him we can’t be seeing each other. If my dad found out … If Paris …
Yeah, right. You tell him that. You tell him you don’t want to see him.
Look. I’m capable of having a conversation with myself even without the voice.
Well.
Why start holding back now?
I went downstairs, still turning everything over. Paris, the lack of evidence, the voice, the fact that I was lying to you.
You’re not lying to him; you’re just not telling him something.
Yeah, right.
As I waited on the porch I felt empty; scooped out like an avocado skin. Paris was gone, and I had failed to do anything about it. I’d failed her. Just like I failed my mom.
A clip played over and over in my head, a YouTube video on repeat—me lying on my bed, the white noise drowning out my phone so that I couldn’t hear it ringing, couldn’t hear Paris calling for my help. I might as well have handed her over to the Houdini Killer myself. And now there was nothing I could do to help her, nothing I could do to help find her.
I stood there, waiting for the voice to come back again and comment. To say, “Yes. You’re worthless.”
Or,
“You disgust me.”
Or,
“It’s your fault she’s dead.”
But the voice didn’t say anything.
Strange.
A couple of minutes later you pulled up, one arm out the window of your pickup. You were wearing your Ray-Bans; the sun was shining brightly. There was a hummingbird hovering in the air over the rosebushes Mom planted, which had grown out of control, its red breast quivering. A few songbirds were chirping—our neighbor Mrs. Cartwright puts seed out for them.