It happens again, once, twice, word gets around. She forks out her own money, and if she doesn’t have enough, she works the telephone and writes e-mails, she calls in favors, asks a few trusted friends. She seems to know instinctively how to do this, she becomes an expert, she could write a manual. She falls into it as though she were meant to do it, born to do it, weaving it seamlessly into the fabric of her life.
When her father dies, the relatives ask her to please come. She refuses but she says, Send me the urn. When it arrives, she drives to a rundown gas station along Regalado Avenue, heads for the restroom, locks the door. She empties the contents of the urn into a filthy toilet bowl and flushes them down the drain. And flushes. And flushes. And flushes.
The woman who knocks on Saenz’s door is in her fifties, short and plump and well dressed. He immediately pegs her for a teacher. He signals her to come in with a wave of his hand.
She seems nervous, and Saenz reminds himself to be gentle. You remember how that goes, don’t you?
She is Professor Josephine Atienza, one of Libby’s former teachers at the University of the Philippines. She says she read in the papers that Saenz was helping with the investigation. The words tumble out one after another, she keeps talking even as she roots around in her handbag for something. There’s a certain desperation in her speech and her actions, as though she must get this business in his office exactly right.
When the professor finds the slip of paper she’s looking for, she pulls it out and hands it to Saenz.
“Libby came to my office just after Christmas. She said she urgently needed a place to stay in GenSan. I was born and raised there, so she came to me. A short-term stay of a month or two. I asked her why GenSan of all places, and she said she was working on a project.” Professor Atienza taps the paper with her forefinger. “That’s the place I recommended.”
Saenz studies the paper for a moment, then looks up at the professor. “She lied to you,” he tells her.
Anger flickers in her eyes but it’s quickly replaced by resignation, and she swallows down whatever she may have been thinking of saying. “Libby never lied. She just left out the truth.”
The woman’s husband is Korean, and he is something of a sexual sadist. She wears a scarf at her throat, the bruises fading now from ugly purple to mottled yellow. She tries to explain the things he does to her in the bedroom, but she can’t quite find the words because nothing in her life before him has prepared her for this, for the kind of assault he inflicts, for the level of filth he subjects her to; she has no vocabulary for it. She looks about ready to crawl out of her skin.
Libby sits back and listens to the woman try to tell her story in between great, wracking sobs. At some point, she looks out the window, at the trees beyond. She hasn’t tuned out; she’s just hearing the story in another woman’s voice. After a while, all these women tell their stories in that same voice.
Saenz used to think that when he got to this age, sleep would come more easily. Not true; or perhaps, just not true for him. He cannot remember the last time he slept seven or eight hours straight, it seems an impossible luxury. He stays awake for long stretches, sometimes longer than twenty-four hours. When he finally collapses from exhaustion, his mind struggles mightily against the tide of sleep. He snaps awake in an hour or less. It takes him another hour or two to fall asleep again, and the cycle starts over. He’s always so tired, it’s become an agony to put one foot in front of the other every day. Some days he feels tethered to the earth by the leaden weight of his own aging body, and he prays for release.
It’s been several months now since they found Libby Delgado. Every day that passes, the man who killed her slips farther away from their grasp. Lab tests, requests for information, paperwork, everything moves slowly, as it always does in Manila. Rueda tries his best, he always does, that’s why Saenz likes him, but the system is what it is, it’s like swimming in cold porridge. The DNA, the hair, the fingerprints don’t match anything on record, but given the state of record-keeping in the country, it was always going to be a long shot.
She pulls him into her gravity every night, even though there’s nothing left of her but a few handfuls of ash in a marble jar somewhere. Who are you? he rasps out when he wakes from his fragmented dreams, his uneasy sleep. He reaches for his cell phone, he can’t help it, he’s drawn to those eyes, so very angry, so very alive in her dead face.
The ground rules are clear. No direct contact with him. Always through a lawyer, or the police if necessary. It is the First Rule, a kind of detox to break his hold on the woman’s mind and will. It gives her a chance to see through all the little tricks calculated to make her feel small and defective and unworthy. It forces her to start hearing her own voice and thinking her own thoughts again.
The Second Rule is: If you break the First Rule, you never tell him where you are.
From the pension house on Pioneer Street in GenSan, Rueda’s people manage to trace Evangeline de Vera to the home of a cousin in the same city. They bring her back to Metro Manila, and all the while she demands to know why. When they tell her, she is utterly stunned, she had no idea. She has had no access to Manila newspapers these last few months, and her cousin’s family doesn’t watch the news on television.
She and Libby had little in common, don’t move in the same circles. Evangeline is in her late twenties, tiny, blandly pretty. Barely got past high school. Used to work as a waitress at a karaoke joint, where she met the Korean businessman she eventually married. She has no children, no job.
Rueda asks Evangeline how she met Libby, why the older woman would buy a plane ticket in her name and pay for it with her own credit card. She says she hadn’t known Libby very long, and she doesn’t remember how they met. But she insists they were friends; she was short of cash for a trip she needed to make to see her family, and Libby was kind enough to lend her money for a flight and accommodations.
“But you’re married. Why didn’t you just ask your husband for the money instead?” Rueda probes.
Both the inspector and the priest — one inside the room, the other watching the exchange from outside — are quick to notice the brief moment of hesitation.
“He was... out of town.” She won’t look directly at Rueda. “Traveling.”
Unnecessary, Saenz thinks. People add unnecessary emphasis or detail when they’re lying.
When they take a break, Rueda asks him, “What if it’s true? What if that’s really all there is, and we’re wasting our time?”
Saenz holds up both hands in exasperation. “She can’t — won’t — tell us how she met Libby. Who introduced them. Exactly how long they’ve known each other. Why she couldn’t ask her husband for the money. She’s being evasive. She’s terrified.”
On a hunch, he asks Rueda to bring him Libby’s planner and the clothes they found near the washing machine at her house. When they arrive, both men go back into the room where Evangeline is waiting. Rueda introduces the priest. The tension that ripples through her small frame is unmistakable.
Saenz sits across from her, and Rueda takes a seat in the corner.
The priest does not ask her questions. Instead, he tells her a story — her story — in his low, quiet voice, reading off dates and entries on the planner. He tells her that she met Libby at her office on the 28th of October last year. Someone named Gemma introduced them. They met again several times, without Gemma, but never again at Libby’s office, always in a public place — a fast-food joint, a café, a park.