“Don’t let anything shock you,” a friend said when I told her about our impending move to Texas. “Guns, babies, reputation. They’ll do anything to protect them.”
I let go of the absurdity of the moment, of the foghorn warning in my head, and stood up.
I laid my palm flat on Romancing Mister Bridgerton and How to Woo a Reluctant Lady.
I gave the shelf a push, wondering whether I was entering Caroline’s tomb.
A foot in, and I was still blind. I slid my right hand up and down the wall until it touched a switch that flooded light into a decent-sized room, about 12 × 15 feet.
It took a second for my eyes to adjust.
I didn’t see a lonely, crazy woman decaying on the floor or rolling around in a mad tryst with Mr. Bridgerton.
A gorgeous antique Oriental rug lay at my feet, free of blood.
I smelled roses. Air freshener, I thought, until I saw the vase of fresh flowers on the built-in desk that held a state-of-the-art iMac. My gaze swiveled to a well-stocked glass-fronted refrigerator, a TV/stereo console, and a Kindle resting on a cushy leather chair. I wouldn’t starve or die of dehydration or boredom if Maria shut the door behind me. My eyes fixed themselves on a built-in row of file cabinets lined against the left wall.
How long had Maria been gone? Five minutes? Ten?
I walked over to the computer screen. The pink room’s nasty cat stared back at me from the screensaver. Then he howled, I screamed, and he stalked casually off the screen. Not a screensaver. A video? I peered closer, into that hideous pink room. I checked my watch. The cat was licking his paws. On the wall above him, a Barbie clock was keeping real time.
Caroline was spying on her cat.
I took a shaky breath. My eyes wandered from the screen to the neat stack of flat manila folders of varying thicknesses resting beside it.
The one on top had my name on it.
My hand poised to open it just as my cell phone vibrated in my pocket. I jumped like the cat had leapt out of the screen. Dammit.
I glanced down. A text from Misty.
Lunch tomorrow?
I texted back, K. And thought, Now go away, Misty.
I sat down at Caroline’s desk and balanced the folder on my lap, my heart running laps. I flipped it open. A two-year-old color snapshot of me at an art gallery opening was paper-clipped to the top left corner of the first page. Caught in profile, holding a glass of champagne. I wore a pale blue silk dress from a designer thrift shop in Chinatown and Lucy’s high silver heels. I was slightly drunk, trying to sell an A-list painting to a B-list celebrity.
It was attached to the first page of a report from a private detective agency in Dallas named Diskreet. Not a discreet name. Not even klever.
I refocused on the page.
Birth name: Emily Alena Waters.
Birthplace: Peekskill, New York.
My Social Security number, elementary school, middle school, and high school, college transcripts, SAT scores, hospitalizations, miscarriages, the crash that killed my parents.
The prisoner number assigned to the teenage drunk driver who killed them.
My job history, wedding date, husband’s name and occupation, closest living relatives-every bit blazingly accurate.
It mentioned nothing of the missing year between my sophomore and junior years in college. I thumbed impatiently to the second page.
I learned that my husband was faithful, that a New York adoption agency hesitated to give us a baby because of Mike’s occupation, and that our net worth totaled around $370,000. I shivered, because I knew what had to be coming.
I tore through the file but couldn’t find a duplicate of the rape report. I settled on a paper-clipped bundle of Xeroxed newspaper stories, a more complete set than my own. Each headline drove me a little deeper into panic.
College senior shot to death in car near popular club
Windsor flies flag at half-mast to honor murdered student
1,000 turn out for campus memorial
Police eliminate drugs as motive in frat-boy murder
Five co-eds interviewed in shooting death
My history in a few tidy words.
I was mesmerized by a row of five headshots, a youthful me and four other girls unlucky enough to crawl into Pierce Martin’s web. It could be the same girl photographed five times and cropped into a one-inch square. Pierce’s type. Smooth, shoulder-length brown hair, dark eyes, fresh, bright faces worthy of Neutrogena commercials. Virginal.
Thirteen years ago, we five became sisters of sorts. We’d waited together nervously in a makeshift holding cell outside the campus librarian’s office, the small sitting area where the police came to get us one by one for an interview.
“Fact-gathering,” the police told us.
I was the last one to arrive. The pretty Chi Omega, dressed in a blue cashmere cardigan and about five hundred bucks of Brighton jewelry, raised a hand to go first. I heard something indignant about “my daddy” before the door clicked closed.
The co-ed beside me on the couch compulsively rubbed the rosary trailing out of her purse. The prettiest of us stuck out her hand, introduced herself as “Lisa, pre-med,” and then calmly studied for a biology test at a small table.
A long-legged yogi named Margaret sat in a lotus position in the middle of the carpet and meditated, much to the chagrin of the police officer in charge of making sure we didn’t speak to one another. I guess he decided that even he shouldn’t interrupt a conversation between Margaret and whatever higher power she was channeling.
That left me, chewing my thumb raw, wondering how I ended up here, sucked in by a sexual predator, thinking I should have called my parents for a lawyer even though the police said I didn’t need one.
That turned out to be true. They never even made it to the interview stage with me or Rosary Girl. Maybe some of her vigorous bead rubbing worked, although I didn’t believe so much in the power of prayer at that point. More likely, the police realized they had opened the gate on a rabid dog. Pierce’s parents were major endowment contributors. Alumni royalty.
I had watched the three other girls exit their interviews. They’d obviously been crying, except for Lisa, pre-med, who rolled her eyes at Rosary Girl and me on the way out the door.
“Fucking not guilty,” she mouthed.
The detective in charge directed his attention to the two of us. “I think we have enough for now.” His face had the look of someone who’d eaten a plateful of bad shrimp. What he didn’t appear was the slightest bit concerned about a girl gnawing her thumb bloody and another running rosary beads through her teeth. “We’d like to speak to the Martin parents about our findings before continuing our interviews. This is a delicate matter for you and the campus. We’ll stay in touch. Keep your mouths shut. That’s best for everyone.”
Three weeks later, I stepped off a plane in Rome with a new hair color and never heard a word from the police again.
Now my fingers lingered over a narrow column copied crookedly on a sea of white paper, dated a month after I’d run out of town.
A black pen had made a loop around the third item, which announced that police were declaring Pierce Martin’s murder case inactive “due to lack of witnesses and evidence.”
Who did I have to thank for this lifetime reprieve?
The Chi Omega’s rich daddy? Rosary Girl’s direct line to God?
The incompetent campus policewoman who dismissed my rape report? Pierce’s mother, to protect his reputation, her reputation, after learning more than she wanted to know about her precious son from the police?