Nowhere Girl (10 page)

Allay appointed Assistant Chief Gerry Polson as acting chief.

Fisher, 58, didn't respond to messages seeking an explanation for why he stepped down.

The chief's exit comes during two investigations involving him. One relates to a federal complaint filed by Deputy Chief Gillian Maves, who alleges she was denied a promotion because of gender-based discrimination.

Another focuses on an accusation from Detective Patrick Tunney that Fisher tried to force him to resign. Details of that case are under investigation and not yet on public file.

I read the last two sentences again. And then I thought about Patrick sitting in my living room, trying hard not to break some precinct oath not to talk. Was all this related to Savannah? I went on to read more about standard retirement notices, deputy city managers, starting salaries, and votes of confidence, but I wasn't really reading it. I was thinking about the night Savannah's case had landed in the basement of the police station.

Patrick had stopped by the house that night after dinner to tell us the case was being moved to cold storage. It was December then, and he'd brought with him the smell of wood smoke and snow. He was a year older than when we'd met, still boyish in the roundness of his face, still with the ability to make me feel calm when he was around, to make me believe everything might be okay. He sat on our couch with his hat in his hands and told my parents that while he'd never stop searching for Savannah's killer, it was no longer an active case. “I know this is horrible,” he'd said. I'd gone completely still. “I know how this feels.” But he seemed almost relieved that the case was now inactive. He talked for another thirty minutes, doing his best to convince my parents that Savannah's murder had been a crime of opportunity. That the perpetrator saw a pretty girl crossing the school yard and grabbed her. Her story had been all over the news for months. We became a morbid kind of famous. The restaurant was booked to capacity almost every night for a year. Everyone knew about me, Savannah's twin, and how I'd told the police exactly where to find her. Since her case was never solved and the cops thought someone took her because she was pretty, I was going to make sure that he didn't come after me too. It wasn't that I cared if I died. I really didn't; I already felt dead without Savannah. But I had to stay alive for my parents. They'd already buried one child. I couldn't let them bury another. And if Savannah got killed because she was pretty, then I'd make sure I never was.

I felt numb, somehow removed from myself, and I remember drawing inward as though I were looking out from a long way away. When my parents got up to walk him out, I'd sat alone in the wing chair without being able to move or speak.

That was when it had gotten bad. That was the point I always went to when I thought about Sound View and what led me there. I might have been able to deal with Savannah's murder if I thought her killer would actually be caught. I'd started cutting myself after she died. I'd wake up every morning feeling like I was inhaling water instead of air. Cutting was the only thing that stopped me from feeling like my lungs were being crushed. But even that didn't work as well as it once had. And now knowing the police were giving up on my sister drove me to chat rooms. It wasn't sex I was after. It wasn't online shopping or the weird community of other people whose sisters had been killed. It was necessity. I'd needed to find a way to stop the pain.

I turned the page of the newspaper. “We're hoping for stability,” the article quoted the new chief as saying, “and we're certainly headed in that direction.”

“Hey,” Patrick said when he answered as if he knew it was me, as if he'd already programmed my number into his phone.

“What happened with Fisher?”

I heard him intake a breath. “I can't say. At least right now. If it goes to court—”

“I'll help you.”

“What?”

“I'll help with Savannah's case any way I can.”

Silence. I thought maybe somehow we'd lost the connection, but then Patrick's voice came through—strong, deep, and somehow so relieved.

“Thanks,” he said. “I needed to hear that, today of all days.”

“I'm here,” I told him. “I don't care what it takes.”

 

CHAPTER

11

My mother hadn't wanted me to see Savannah in the morgue. “Please,” I'd said. We were about to leave the hospital. David and my father had already started toward the exit, and Fisher was writing on his pad after asking us if we knew anyone who'd want to hurt Savannah. Did she have any enemies? “She's barely sixteen,” I wanted to tell him. “She's beautiful. She's always laughing. Everybody loves her.”

We were almost to the glass doors when I'd turned to my mother and whispered that I needed to see my sister. Dr. Bassett and my mom looked at each other, and Tunney, who must have heard, offered to stay with my father and David in the private waiting room until we were ready.

Years later, I'd learned my dad had been asked if he wanted to see Savannah, and he'd said no. When David finally told me, it was late at night in my Princeton apartment, and he'd come to help me pack up for the summer. We'd smoked half a joint. It was May, right after finals, and the air coming in my six-foot windows was balmy and humid. “He couldn't handle it,” David had said. And my mild-mannered brother, who never seemed to get terribly angry, suddenly shouted, “If it was my daughter, I'd make sure I saw her!” He turned to me, and his eyes were wet, maybe from the pot or maybe because he was furious. “I'd never leave that fucking building until I laid eyes on her!”

But the day Savannah was murdered, David and my father stayed in the tiny waiting room while Dr. Bassett led my mother and me down two flights of stairs. It was at least ten degrees cooler than Emergency, where we'd been standing shivering when the ambulance came in after blowing through four red lights and still not arriving in time to save her.

We entered a brightly lit room. In the center of the back wall, a large window was covered with a plain white curtain. Next to that was an ominous black
CALL
button. Dr. Bassett touched my shoulder, and then she stepped forward and pressed the button. I watched her speak into a small metal grate. “We're ready,” she said. The other side of the glass buzzed, and the curtain moved.
We're ready. We're ready.
I'd never be ready for this. I closed my eyes, thinking maybe when I opened them, I'd be back at school in that leather chair while Mrs. Wilcox typed away, that this was some horrible nightmare. I couldn't possibly be about to see Savannah's dead body, waiting to begin what was left of my life. My mother took my hand in hers, and I opened my eyes.

Savannah was on a rolling metal table under a sheet. My first thought was that she must have been cold. Standing next to her was a guy with red, curly hair, earbuds snaking out from under his scrubs. I could tell by the way his knee was jiggling he was listening to music. I wanted to kill him. Dr. Bassett tapped the glass, and he stepped forward. She made a twirling gesture with her hand. The kid with the earbuds reached for the top of the sheet. And then he pulled it back.

She was naked. I knew this from her bare shoulders. Her blond hair was spread like a fan, and her face was tilted slightly to one side. She was stark, stripped of color except for the purplish bruises on her neck.

I'd only seen Savannah use makeup once. Cass, a junior she smoked with behind the school, had driven her to Blue Mercury on Palmer Square, and she'd come home with fifty dollars' worth of liquid foundation, lip gloss, liner, and navy mascara to match her eyes. She never told me where she'd gotten the money. She just sat still while I made her up exactly like the article in
Glamour
said. When I was done, she'd paused in front of the mirror and then washed her face with Noxzema, muttering something about clowns and hookers. I'd made her bed and did her laundry for a month in exchange for her leftover makeup. I needed the foundation to cover the pink blotches on my forehead and chin, the blackheads that sprouted like tiny constellations on my nose. So the fact that she looked bare now did not have to do with makeup; rather she was so completely un
done
. And then I knew.

“Where's her necklace?” I turned to my mother.

My mom's eyes were on Savannah, but her body was angled away as though it could not stand to bear witness. “Michelle,” she asked Dr. Bassett, her voice shrill, “did they take off Savannah's necklace while they examined her?”

Dr. Bassett hit the button on the wall again. “Andrew,” she said loudly. “Did you remove a necklace from Miss Martino?” He startled and then pulled out his earbud and answered her with a nonchalant no.

He took her necklace
. “We have to go back.” I pulled my mother toward the door. “We have to find it.”

Dr. Bassett moved us up the stairs, pushing past nurses and orderlies and hustling us to the same waiting room we'd been in before. She cornered Officer Tunney, and I heard her say the words
missing
and
cataloged.

Tunney turned to me. “Cady, can you describe Savannah's necklace for me?”

I reached into the neckline of my sweater and pulled out a thin gold chain with a pendant that resembled a slanted, backward
f.
Two together were the Chinese symbol for twins. We'd been wearing them since before I could remember. Our midwife, a kind Vietnamese woman who had delivered most of the babies in town, gave them to my then hippie parents when we were born. “Very powerful, these girls, almost dangerous power,” she had told my mother in her thick accent, and then my parents had told us she had laughed, a silky laugh, a merry, happy laugh that defied what she'd said. It had made us feel like superheroes, and each time we grew, we'd gotten bigger chains to match our size. “We've never taken them off.” I had a terrible feeling that without her necklace, Savannah wouldn't be able to come back to me, wouldn't know how to find me. And I knew she would try. We were the same, after all. She was me. I was her. One zygote.

Tunney spoke a series of numbers and codes into the radio on his shoulder. When he finished, he put a hand on my back. “CSU is still at the scene,” he said over my head to my parents. “If it's there, they'll find it.”

They never did. At my dad's insistence, after CSU finished their investigation, the police searched the woods and the Wolfe Mansion with a metal detector, but Patrick had shown up unannounced four days after Savannah's funeral to tell us in person that the necklace hadn't been recovered. I'd been sitting on the ottoman in the living room when I saw it in a flash, a hand holding it, a closed fist. But that's all I could see. And then my mother had sent me to the kitchen to get coffee. I knew from her nervous eyes and the way she pulled at her fingers she was trying to get rid of me. So after I poured the coffee, I pressed myself against the bird-of-paradise wallpaper and listened as hard as I could above the microwave's soft whir.

Patrick Tunney lowered his voice as if he'd known I'd be eavesdropping, but I managed to make out
assailant
and
taken it.

That night, I took the jewelry box I'd gotten for my fourth birthday off my bureau, white with tiny painted roses and a spinning ballerina that sprang up when I opened it. It played some vague lullaby I'd never been able to name. I pulled out the bottom drawer where I kept my social security card and birth certificate. Swirling the clasp of the necklace around under my chin, I worked on trying to get it unlatched, but I couldn't. And while I struggled with it and my chubby fingers fumbled with its clasp, I realized I'd never take off that necklace.

Before I closed the lid, I had a strange feeling that I wanted to pull the tiny ballerina out, cease her endless dancing to that unknown song so I wouldn't have to see her every time I opened the top, wouldn't have to see her perfect little body, tiny blue eyes, the blond bun and satisfied smile. But I didn't take her out. I left her where she was and closed the lid. When the music stopped, the room I'd shared with Savannah went unbearably still.

It was Emma who had made me get a longer chain for it, so long I could hide the
f
underneath my clothes; it hung almost to my belly. Before that, I'd worn it on my breastbone, like I had when Savannah was alive. It was my senior year in high school, and we'd been at the Sotto Sopra Christmas party.

“What's with this necklace you always wear?” Emma had been in a red lamb's wool sweater, and she tugged at it with her small, perfect fingers. Around us, people were getting drunk on screwdrivers and tequila.

“It's nothing,” I'd told her, reaching for it, but Emma had it in her grasp. She'd raised her shaped eyebrows.

“Anytime someone says it's nothing,” she'd said, “it means it's something. What's the
f
mean?” She had fingered the tiny symbol, and because I was drunk, because Emma smelled of mint and perfume, and because she seemed so sorority-sister intimate, I told her. Told her about the midwife and how we'd never taken them off and how when Savannah died, it had disappeared.

Emma had dropped the necklace and then said, as though somehow erasing me, “Cady, I'm sorry, but that's really creepy.”

In fact, I think that's why David loved Emma, because she wasn't sentimental. There was no chance in hell you could wallow when you were around her. She was a doer. She took action and moved on.

“He wants an overly efficient mother,” Gabby said when David kept dating Emma even after he'd graduated.

“He has a mother,” I told her.

“Yeah, I know,” Gabby'd said, “and now that he's out of the house, he wants another one.”

Off went David, getting stroked by Emma's pretty pink manicured hands. Until one day she stopped stroking.