Part 30 (1/2)
”But he doesn't want the truth. The kind of girl he thinks I am, he's never going to find anyway.”
”So, you just figured out what kind of girl Craig wanted, and decided you'd pretend to be that?”
”Isn't that what everyone does?”
”What? No!”
”No? What was all that cla.s.s-ring c.r.a.p with you and Mary about? Seems to me like you had her game all figured out, and played it pretty well for a nice long time.”
Perry sat up. He put his hand to his Adam's apple, where she'd bit him. It was damp, and when he looked at his fingers, he was surprised to see a drop of blood on them. ”What the h.e.l.l are you talking about?” he asked. ”Mary's the one who had me figured out.”
”No,” Nicole said, shaking her head, still smiling. ”You knew she wanted that whole Eagle Scout thing. Small-town boy. Good daddy someday. Gonna work at the Edwards and Son Lawn Mower Shop in Bad Axe and tinker with the minivan on weekends. She thought all that ambition-the scholars.h.i.+ps and the grades and the SAT scores-was all about making sure you could buy her a nice little house on the outskirts of town and an engagement ring a year or two after you got your high school diploma, and started with the babies. And that game worked out really well for you, didn't it? You had the sweetest girl at Bad Axe High for three years, and then you ditched her. Did you ever once tell her the real story-that your actual plan was to go to a fancy university, maybe study something like philosophy? Go to school for about ten more years, and then maybe travel around Europe with a backpack for a few more? Jesus Christ. Poor Mary must still be lying awake at night wondering what the h.e.l.l happened, who the h.e.l.l she was actually dating all that time she was dating you.”
Perry's heart was pounding-not just in his chest, but in his throat, throbbing against his Adam's apple. It was pounding in his wrists, his legs, his temples. He was out of the bed without knowing he'd stood up, looking down at Nicole, who was looking up at him, still with that f.u.c.king little smile-and he wanted to say something horrible to her, something that would change her life, something that would scare her, something-but he couldn't. He never would. Looking down on her smiling up at him, he couldn't even maintain the desire to say it.
Jesus.
No wonder Craig was such a dupe and he himself was such a chump, a backstabber, a lying a.s.shole.
She was so beautiful. Plato's ideal, as he now knew from Philosophy 101. She always had been, but now he could see it for what it was, even knowing that it wasn't what it appeared to be: Her face was tilted sweetly, like that of a sparrow or a kitten, and she wore that ludicrously girlish smile, and Perry was suddenly reminded of what must have been her second-grade school photograph. Pigtails. No front teeth. Frozen in black and white wearing a little bit of lace around her collar and a silver cross, and then he remembered with perfect clarity sitting behind her in fourth grade, Mr. Garrison's cla.s.s. They were talking about sanitation, and Nicole had raised her hand and asked Mr. Garrison, ”What happens to the p.o.o.p after it's flushed down the toilet?” and all the other kids, especially the boys, were doubled over with laughter at the sound of the word p.o.o.p coming out of the pretty little mouth of Nicole Werner, who turned around to Perry then, horrified, blus.h.i.+ng two bright spots on her cheeks, looking straight at him, as if for help, and Perry was incredibly relieved that he'd reacted, himself, too slowly to laugh, and was able now to look her in the eyes, shrug his shoulders, as if to say, Who knows what these idiots are laughing about? Who cares?
Now he was looking at her, lying half-naked on his bed, the strap of her silky top slipping over her beautiful, womanly shoulder, and Perry couldn't open his mouth, but he knew by her expression that he was asking her with his eyes to tell him, Is that who I was? Is that who Mary thought I was? Is that what I did? How did you know when even I didn't?
Instead of answering, she stood, gathered her jeans off the floor, slid them up, and he watched, remembering only a few months before, when he'd found her standing on the front steps of G.o.dwin Hall wearing that bulky sweats.h.i.+rt-homesick and sad-and how she'd put her head on his shoulder and cried, and the helpless way his mouth had opened, and nothing had come out. Had she really been homesick and sad? Or had that, too, been some kind of test?
Now Nicole put her arms on either side of his face and kissed him (a quick, sweet, nons.e.xual parting kiss) and said, ”Hey. It's okay. We come from the same place, Perry. I know who you are, and you know who I am. I'll see you around, okay?”
70.
Sh.e.l.ly found them on the Internet with no trouble: the parents of Denise Graham, the Omega Theta Tau ”runaway.” As the desperate tended to do in a computer age, they'd created a website: BringBackDenise.com.
There she was on Sh.e.l.ly's computer screen-a blond beauty with big blue eyes. If it hadn't been for the coloring, she could have served as Josie Reilly's stunt double. The same straight, s.h.i.+ny, shoulder-length hair. The smoky eye makeup. The perfect gleaming teeth.
In this photograph, Denise Graham was wearing a lacy tank top. She was sitting in a plaid armchair that had the look of family room furniture. There was a longhaired cat in her lap. Denise Graham was petting it, smiling.
PLEASE! DENISE GRAHAM IS OUR BELOVED, BEAUTIFUL, BRILLIANT DAUGHTER. SHE DISAPPEARED FROM HER SORORITY IN MARCH, AND HAS NOT BEEN SEEN SINCE.
The bright red capital letters went on to scroll out the details. The time and date of her last contact with her parents. Her height and weight (5'5” and only 115 pounds). Also, her favorite foods (nachos, Dr. Pepper) and various nicknames (s.h.i.+ny, Sweeties, Neecey)-as if she, like the cat in her lap, might need to be coaxed out from under a porch or a vehicle with these pet names.
The Grahams' phone number was there, too-how many prank phone calls, Sh.e.l.ly wondered, had this inspired?-along with their address, their email addresses. They lived only thirty miles from the university town where their daughter had disappeared.
Twice Sh.e.l.ly picked up the phone to call them, and twice she composed emails to them, and then she decided she would simply drive to Pinckney and introduce herself, because, really, what did she have to offer them, or to ask them? Better that they should see her standing there humbled on the doorstep by their grief.
Or so she'd thought until she pulled up in front of their house.
It was one of those lavish new subdivision homes, the type built to appeal to people who, Sh.e.l.ly imagined, wanted a kind of English country life without the country. It had a winding cobblestone path through some bright green bushes bearing red ornamental berries. A light snow had begun to fall, and everything about the place looked like an advertis.e.m.e.nt for a lifestyle, the lifestyle being lived in nearly identical houses all throughout the subdivision, except that here the lawn hadn't been mown or the hedges trimmed, and the mailbox at the end of the driveway appeared to have been struck by a car (little black door hanging open, side dented). And every window in the house had drawn shades or curtains pulled across it. Although there were two cars parked at crooked angles to each other outside the closed garage, it looked, from the outside, as if no one had been home for many months.
Sh.e.l.ly was about to back up, turn around, when the front door flew open and a woman in a hot pink bathrobe hurried, barefoot, onto the front steps and began to wave her arms wildly in the air, as if flagging down an ambulance or trying to help land a plane.
There was no doubt who she was.
The resemblance was uncanny. Here was Denise Graham, the runaway sorority girl, aged thirty years. Frantic, exhausted, maybe medicated or a little drunk. Having spent the last eight months in the desperate hope that every time the phone rang, the mail came, or a car pulled into the driveway it would bring her lost daughter home to her. ”Who are you?” Denise Graham's mother called out to Sh.e.l.ly, and Sh.e.l.ly had no choice now but to park the car and get out.
The living room was a gracious shambles. Newspapers were piled up on the leather sofa. Mail was scattered across the antique coffee table. There was a stain (coffee? Pepsi?) in the center of the plush white carpet. The cat Sh.e.l.ly recognized from the website was sitting in front of the cold fireplace, stone still. Only its eyes moved when Sh.e.l.ly sat down in the only chair that wasn't piled with papers.
”I want to tell you right away, Mrs. Graham,” Sh.e.l.ly said, ”that I don't-”
”Call me Ellen,” the woman said, as if the interruption, the intimacy of a first name, might change the course of this conversation and lead her to her daughter. She took a place on the couch across from Sh.e.l.ly without bothering to clear a place for herself, sitting down on a newspaper, a few pieces of junk mail. Her robe spilled open over her chapped-looking knees, and she didn't bother to pull it back into place. Out of respect, Sh.e.l.ly looked away, but the only other thing to look at in the room besides Ellen Graham or a messy pile of something was the cat, unnerving in its calm return of Sh.e.l.ly's gaze.
”Okay, yes,” Sh.e.l.ly said, ”and you can call me Sh.e.l.ly. But I want you to know that I don't have any information about your daughter. I'm with the university, but I work-or, worked-at the Chamber Music Society. The only connection I have here is to one of your daughter's sorority sisters, and I've been reading about your daughter, and about another incident at the sorority-”
”Nicole Werner,” Ellen Graham said. ”That accident happened the night my daughter disappeared.”
Sh.e.l.ly nodded, although the accounts she'd read put the disappearance of Denise Graham at least a week before Nicole's death.
”I'm not a professional in any way,” Sh.e.l.ly continued, ”and I probably have no business-”
Ellen began shaking her head. ”I don't care about that,” she said. ”I don't care about anything except finding Denise. Who cares about being professional or even polite? That's gotten us nothing. We don't care if you're just plain nosy, if it's morbid curiosity. We just want someone to help us.”
Ellen Graham's hands went to her knees then. She began to scratch at them absently, rocking back and forth.
Sh.e.l.ly paused, trying to decide where to go from here. She took a breath and said, ”I was the first person at the scene of the accident. Nicole Werner's accident. I saw what happened, and I know that what they're saying happened didn't happen. I'm trying to find out what actually did happen. I don't know if it had anything to do with your daughter-”
”Denise,” the woman said, as if she'd been waiting for an excuse to say the name.
”Yes,” Sh.e.l.ly continued, ”with Denise. But I know, now, that either the university, or the police, or the newspaper, or the sorority, or all of them together are willing to lie. They're covering something up. They've got something to hide. They're-”
”Who is this girl, the one you know from the sorority? Is her name Josie Reilly?” There was no mistaking the tone of Ellen Graham's voice when she said the name: bitter hatred. Fury, and anger, and derision.
”Yes,” Sh.e.l.ly said, astonished. ”How did you know?”
”I'll show you how I know,” Ellen Graham said.
Although she stood up, her body seemed to retain the shape of the sofa, the posture of someone who'd been sitting in it, slumped, so long that she had become it. Sh.e.l.ly followed her to the stairway, where there was more plush carpet and piled-up debris-magazines, paperbacks, unopened envelopes. Ellen Graham simply stepped over the piles and around them, so Sh.e.l.ly did as well, and then they were in a long hallway hung with photographs of a girl who had to be Denise: Denise in a ba.s.sinet, zipped into what looked like a lacy pink envelope. Denise with pigtails, riding a tricycle. Denise in a startlingly low-cut blue satin gown, hand tucked under the arm of a boy in a tuxedo. Denise squinting into sunlight, wearing a mortar board.
They stopped in front of an open door.
”This is Denise's room,” Ellen Graham said, as if Sh.e.l.ly could have mistaken it for anything else.
There were piles of stuffed animals on the bed-the prized, expensive kind of stuffed animals (endangered species with personalized name tags and hand-painted gla.s.s eyes), not the dragged-through-the-mud-since-preschool kind. There was a complete set of the World Book Encyclopedia on the bookshelf, ceramic cats holding the volumes in place. The only mess in this room was on the bulletin board, which was three layers thick with snapshots of adolescents in bikinis, or on bicycles, or driving boats, or singing into microphones, and glossy pages torn out of magazines, greeting cards emblazoned with YOU'RE THE BEST and WAY TO GO, GIRL, and small, dried-up things that must have been mementos from parties and dances and dates.
The girl's violin was out of its case, lying on its side on top of her dresser.