“Most of us unartsy types wouldn’t make that connection. So maybe that’s a reach.”
“And there’s the point. She knew I would know.”
“What about the other girls who were suspects? They must have gotten letters, too.”
“I have no idea about that. I haven’t seen them since the day of the interviews. The police told us not to speak to one another. I didn’t know any of them personally. Different majors and dorms. Only one sorority girl. We were scattered across campus.” On purpose, I thought. So we wouldn’t be able to warn each other. “Pierce’s mother saw me at his funeral. We met over the coffin before I became a suspect. Maybe she fixated on me.”
“Maybe. But here’s the thing. The letters were delivered by mail for years. A variety of postmarks, all hundreds of miles from you.” His finger traced a circle on my arm, a habit of his. “Hand delivery, that’s a big step up.”
He reached across the table, and I slid my fingers on top of his.
“You believe me, right? You know that I’m OK about your daugh-the little girl? You could have told me from the beginning.” There wasn’t reproach in his voice, just reassurance.
“Yes.” I wondered at how something that had built inside of me like a terrible storm could end like this, without casualties.
Mike’s reaction to my news about my daughter said everything I would ever need to know about his love for me. He had pulled the car over immediately, switching off the ignition.
“I don’t know where she is,” I had said stonily. “I gave her away.”
It was several interminable seconds before he turned and grabbed my shoulders. His eyes had shone like slick blue glass. “I can’t believe you held this in. I wish you had told me. Although I can understand why you didn’t. That kind of violence… it’s intimate. Worse than a bullet.”
My heart physically hurt inside my chest at that moment. I had realized almost too late that Mike was one of the few guys who could understand, who wouldn’t take it personally, who knew up close and personal that victims of violence don’t follow a playbook. Some people let it go; the rest of us don’t.
“It wasn’t the rape or the murder that made me keep secrets from you,” I told him. “It’s just that it all led to the baby. I hated myself for giving her away. The guilt overwhelmed me. I had worked up the courage to go back and get her. Then my parents died and the grief took over everything. I could barely get out of bed. I called the nuns once, hysterical. She’d already been adopted. To talk about it made it more real. By the time I met you five years later, it was buried so deep, it seemed more normal not to talk about it.”
That was hours ago. I’d finally breathed all my secrets into the air and it felt like they’d flown away, at least for the night. Mike flipped off the kitchen lights and I followed him to bed. Too tired to make love, we wrapped ourselves around each other. For a little while longer, while the rain fell, no one was missing. Mike shut out everything else but me.
“Three words,” he murmured in my ear.
“Just one,” I replied. “Lucky.”
Day five missing.
Someone had looped a scraggly yellow ribbon around Caroline’s mailbox.
I stood once more at the door of her house, knocking for the sixth time. Maybe Maria had car trouble. Or changed her mind. It was still awfully early. A little after eight. On the phone, I had told her I wanted to return the files. I now had a full set of copies. I wanted to put everything back and then figure out how to drop a hint to Mike so he could execute another search warrant with everything in place and no one the wiser.
Almost a week now, but part of me still didn’t believe Caroline was anything but alive and crazy, probably in Mexico at this very moment, a Four Seasons spa employee wrapping her in seaweed like a human sushi.
As I considered sitting down on the stoop and giving Maria another fifteen minutes, the door opened a crack.
Her face was red and puffy, and she’d abandoned the uniform for jeans, sneakers, and a tight black gold-lettered Santana T-shirt that showed off her plump breasts.
She pulled me inside, gripping my arm tightly, setting off a trickle of fear.
“What’s wrong? Did something happen? Is Caroline back?”
She shook her head.
“The FBI is getting involved,” I assured her. As was First Baptist. Flyers of an unsmiling Caroline littered the trees, store windows, and bulletin boards. I felt Caroline’s disapproval, sure she would consider it demeaning to be displayed in something other than a gilt frame.
Maria’s thick brown hair stuck up like a hip-hop artist’s; her eyes were dilated, black and wild, rimmed by dark crescents of smeared mascara. Is she high?
She channeled us on a straight path up the formal staircase without saying a word. The house was still asleep. Lights off. My presence felt more wrong than ever. Still, I followed her back into the closet.
The bookshelf had already been pushed away, a rectangle of bright light behind it.
I stopped short at the doorway, the threshold of disaster.
Papers littered the floor, the desk, the reading chair. The file cabinets gaped open, a few lonely folders still hanging, spared. One small square of Oriental carpet stood out in the debris, as if that is where Maria stood while twirling and flinging files and papers like a human tornado.
“I know,” Maria said. “It is bad.”
I found my voice, and it moaned.
“Maria, what have you done?”
“I had to find it. My file. I spent all night going through them. I thought maybe mine was mixed up in someone else’s.” She fidgeted with a strand of hair and spoke so fast I could hardly understand. Her eyes were like two black moons. “Maybe it is not so bad. I put all the old files over there.” She gestured toward the desk. As far as I could tell, every file had been trashed and tossed aside, completely compromised. “And the newer ones here.” She made a circular motion that encompassed the floor space.
“No, Maria. It’s bad.” I knelt on the floor, distractedly picking up an empty file folder. Whoever the hell Meredith Lindstrom was, her life story was now scattered somewhere on this floor. My head pounded. Caroline’s files, organized in alphabetical order, tidily stored in a cabinet, had been overwhelming enough to consider. I couldn’t imagine how, in a day or even ten days, anybody could make sense of the maelstrom beneath my feet. And what Maria and I were doing in this room at all… well, now, amid the destruction, it struck me in the gut as not just wrong, but dead, dead wrong.
“Maybe she doesn’t even have a file on you, Maria. Maybe she only said she did.” My mind was charging ahead, recalculating my plan.
Throw the files from your purse on the floor with the rest. Get out. That’s what my little voice said.
“I told you, I saw it. She showed it to me. My file is bad.”
With a burst of clarity, I realized Maria wasn’t talking about illegal relatives being shipped back to Mexico.
“What is it, Maria? What does she have on you?”
“I don’t want to say.”
“Say.”
“OK. OK.” She took a breath. “When I first came here, I could not find good work. I danced in a club. It was the only way I could make enough money. To send home. My mother and sister… don’t know how I supported them.”
“You were a…?”
“Puta.” She spat out the word.
I was going to finish that sentence with stripper, but OK.