“It was hanging from the shower curtain pole,” Rueda says, trying desperately to follow the priest’s mental leaps. “You think he saw it when he used the bathroom. It set him off.” He turns to Saenz. “But why?”
Saenz unclips the flimsy little blouse from the rack, holds it up by the shoulder seams. He tosses it on top of the washing machine, takes another tiny article of clothing from the rack. Pink T-shirt, held up, examined, tossed. Nude brassiere. Matching panties.
Finally, he looks at Rueda, those strange light-colored eyes burning. He grabs the clothes with one hand, thrusts them almost in the police officer’s face. “Libby Delgado was not a small woman.”
She puts a down payment on the house on Caridad Street because the neighborhood is quiet and there is greenery all around it; it’s not far from La Mesa watershed, the air is cleaner than elsewhere in the city. When she looks up at the night sky, she can see hundreds of stars.
She puts a down payment on the house because it is isolated and not easy to find. The house has high walls and a sturdy gate. It’s in a part of the city that is still considered too far from the center of things. The area is underdeveloped; there aren’t many public transport options. People imagine that rapists and the ghosts of the unquiet dead lie in wait in the carabao grass grown tall and wild in the vacant lots that line its highways and streets. They’re not too far wrong — a bloated body is dumped in the grass nearly every other month. It isn’t until years later that the megamalls set up shop, and developers start snapping up the land and property values shoot up. Most of the grass is cleared away but the ghosts linger.
She puts a down payment on the house and never tells anyone where it is, so that it will be easier to keep her mother safe. She’s not so afraid of ghosts, but she knows that monsters are real.
“We’re assuming someone else was staying with her. Another woman.” Rueda hands the priest a mug of coffee, black and strong, just the way he likes it. “Who was she? Was she there when Libby was killed?”
Saenz shakes his head. “It’s not a big house. If someone else was there, she would have been found, she would have been dragged into that massive struggle somehow. You only have two blood samples, Libby’s and the killer’s. Highly unlikely that whoever owned those clothes was there when Libby died.”
“Who, then? Houseguest? Lover?”
“Don’t know.” Saenz scowls into the liquid in his mug. “Don’t know who Libby Delgado is, either.”
“Sure we do, we—”
“No,” the priest cuts him off sharply. “Don’t fall into that trap, Mike. We know only what she wants us to know. We need to find out what she’s hiding.”
Saenz talks like she’s still alive.
The house can’t hold her mother; she eventually goes back to her husband, thinks that he can be saved, that this is what a good, strong Catholic marriage should be. It’s funny-sad, when Libby thinks about it. She lost her own faith ages ago. God is dense, deaf, dead, a one-trick pony, putting people on this earth only to forget about them.
The next time God forgets about them, she calls the police. Later, she calmly gives testimony. Her father is put away for a while, but he gets out soon after, slap on the wrist, that’s just how it is. Her mother stays and stays. Libby tells her, You can always come live with me. But you have to choose. She almost says, You have to choose me. But she doesn’t, because it won’t happen. And she cannot keep dashing herself over and over again on the jagged, treacherous rocks of her parents’ lives.
She never speaks to them again. Cancer kills her mother before her father can, a minor miracle. She goes to the funeral but she stands way off in the background, where nobody can see her. When she gets home, she throws every photograph, every keepsake, every card and gift and letter — every single thing that reminds her of her family — into a box. Then she marches out into the backyard and sets the box on fire. She stands close, sticks a hand briefly into the licking flames to see how it feels: the bonfire of her history.
Watches it all burn.
Libby’s desktop and laptop computers are filled with spreadsheets, charts, graphs, and documents for work. When she surfed the Internet, she checked the market indices, read newspapers, shopped for books and shoes. Her bookmarks include dozens of news websites, online booksellers, auction sites. She did not maintain a blog, did not keep a diary of her thoughts, at least not one that Saenz has discovered. And although he can easily ask Rueda to find someone who could sniff out her electronic trail, hack into her e-mails, an acute sense of propriety prevents him from doing so. Her planner does not give him much to work with, either. Aside from meetings at work, she recorded little of her life, a few lunches and dinners, the occasional party.
But after thumbing through it for the fourth time, the priest notices something. There are appointments with people whose names she spells out clearly — Vicki and Faye and Jorge — and others where she only writes initials. It could be something, it could be nothing, but it’s unusual. People often write a certain way and stick with it — names, dates, numbers. It becomes second nature, instinctive. To write full names for some and initials for others, it’s a deliberate thing. Why would you do that? Why don’t you want us to know who you were meeting? AS and FJ and the last one, first appearing in late October, EV? Who were they?
Her latest credit card statement arrives a few weeks after her death. Rueda forwards it to his office along with the rest of the mail, just bills and flyers. Saenz studies the document carefully. You bought a plane ticket. Just four days before you died. Where were you going? The thing that itches in his brain unfurls pale, gelid tendrils, coils them around its fat, glistening lobes.
He makes a telephone call to Rueda, and Rueda in turn makes a series of calls to other people. A day passes, two days, three. On the fourth day Rueda calls back. The flight was headed to General Santos City on the morning of December 31. But the ticket wasn’t for Libby, it was for an Evangeline de Vera.
EV.
“Do we know who she is?”
“My people are checking.”
“Call me when you know. Oh, and Mike...?”
“Yes, Father?”
“We need to know if de Vera made that flight, and if she’s back in Manila. And if not — we want her back.”
The first time it happens, she surprises herself. She finds herself telling the woman sitting across from her (colleague, twenty-six, married two years, miscarried once because of the beatings) that she’ll help. The words come out before she can censor them, before she can think about the implications. She lays down the ground rules, making them up as she goes along, realizing only much later that they make perfect sense. Don’t call him, don’t meet with him in person, don’t tell him where you are. Communicate only through your lawyer, the lawyer I’m going to introduce you to, he’s a good man. She lets the woman stay at the house in Lagro for a few weeks; when the time is right, she sends her away to a relative in another city, someone the woman trusts.
It’s more than a year later when she receives word of the annulment from the woman herself; a telephone call, exhausted but happy, and so very grateful. It’s a long conversation. After she hangs up, she breaks open a bottle of wine, puts on some Cole Porter — the Classic Cole album by Jan DeGaetani — and dances slowly in the living room in her bare feet.