A Bookmarked Death (8 page)

Chapter Fifteen

G
IN
F
ACTORY
S
TREET
was half a mile from the campus in a working-class neighborhood that did not seem interested in becoming gentrified. Rossi’s Italian Butcher and I Am Your New Cleaners! appeared to have been facing off on the corners for decades. I had been here once before, the late January morning I had learned that Elisa was a student at St. Brennan’s and rushed up to Massachusetts. After catching a glimpse of her on campus, I had driven to this street and sat for over an hour waiting for her to return to her dorm.

Today I had no trouble parking in front of the residence hall, sliding in behind Hannah’s creaky blue Honda. A sign warned us that there was an hour maximum for nonpermit parking, but I doubted we would be here that long. My best guess was that we would not find Elisa here, an idea that shattered like a dropped glass when Hannah cried, “Look, Mom, there’s her car!” She was pointing to a black VW Passat farther up the street.

“Are you sure it’s hers?”

“It has her Rhode Island license plates.”

Jane, seeing Hannah holding the balloons, moved back to the van and extracted the roses. Even if Elisa had not been able to let us know she would not be at graduation, she would be glad to see Hannah. I thought for a moment about letting her go up alone to not overwhelm Elisa. But then the darkest thought intruded. Sending Hannah up to find her sister’s body would be a terrible mistake.

The residence hall had probably been built in the 1920. It had a door with decorative black iron bars and a brass plaque that read “Montfort House.” I was sure it had first been a hotel, then purchased by the college to use as a dorm. We crowded into the tiny black-and-white tiled foyer and clustered around the buzzer system. Hannah had her keys out, but I said, “We should ring the room first.”

“Well,
duh
.”

Behind her, Jane gave me an amused glance.

Hannah jabbed at the button twice.

The lobby stayed silent except for our breathing. We waited another minute, but there was no confirming buzz.

“Try again,” I said. “Maybe she was in the bathroom.”

When there was no answer a second time, Hannah said, “Let’s go up. She’s on the fourth floor.”

The inner lobby was a collection of faded floral couches, porcelain lamps with tarnished brass bases, coffee tables with magazines that looked decades-old. The room could have passed as the set for a Tennessee Williams play.

Hannah moved quickly to the elevator and pressed the button. The doors opened immediately as if it had been waiting for us.

“Why did she want to live here instead of in her own apartment?” I asked as we reached the fourth floor and followed the frayed maroon runner.

“She wanted to be like everyone else. All her friends live here.”

The closer we got to her room, the more frightened I felt. Had I overestimated Elisa’s strength? Just because she had sounded calmer the last time I talked to her didn’t mean she had accepted the deaths. As a tiny girl she had been resilient, able to deal with setbacks. Though she would campaign tirelessly for what she wanted, disappointment never crushed her for very long. But being denied a trip to the playground was far different from losing both parents at the same time. They had been her world, Ethan especially.

Her comments about guns and shooting that weekend at the house chilled me. What if we unlocked the door and found . . .

“I don’t know what we’re going to learn if she’s not here,” Jane complained from behind me. “We should have tried harder to find her on campus.”

“This was
your
idea,” Hannah reminded her.

“Why don’t you let me go in first,” I said.

Both my daughters stared at me.

“What are you talking about?” Hannah said. “She’s probably left a note for
me.
She knew I was coming.”

A note. A cheerful clue at the end of a treasure hunt, explaining everything. But that was Hannah.
Magic or tragic.

Elisa’s room was at the very end of the hallway, on the left.

“Knock first,” I warned.

“You think I don’t know anything?” Hannah gave me a furious look and banged on the door. We were all at the edge of the precipice.

Hannah waited just a moment, then inserted the key and pushed the door back. But none of us stepped inside.

“Liss?” Hannah called into the silence.

When there was no answer, we did move inside. It was a typical college dorm room, though the layout with one window at the end made me think of a hotel again. There was also an unsettled feeling, as if someone had packed in a hurry. The closet door was ajar, showing gaps and bare hangers, but plenty of clothes were still hung inside. The desk chair was pushed askew as if someone had gotten up quickly to answer the door and never righted it. Yet the desk itself had been wiped clean of books, computer equipment, and photographs.

No, that wasn’t completely true. As I moved closer to it, I saw that one photo in a tortoiseshell frame stood alone—the picture taken at our reunion weekend. Colin and I were in the center, with Jane, Jason, Hannah, and Elisa all crowded around us, laughing as we waited for the delayed timer to go off. The fact that Elisa had framed the photograph and displayed it on the desk as her family meant something, didn’t it? And yet she had left it behind.

I studied the rest of the room, turning to the single bed that was neatly made. Moving closer, I caught my breath. Sitting as desolately as if he had been abandoned at a bus depot was Sheepie, Elisa’s pet lamb since babyhood. It was the stuffed animal I had pressed into her hands at our reunion.

“I don’t get it,” Hannah cried. “She didn’t leave a note or anything!”

I turned away from Elisa’s rejection of us. Evidently she believed what she had said on the phone. Because we had insisted on finding her, she had lost her family. We had taken away their lives. Perhaps their deaths had brought her to her senses and had poisoned the brief happy interlude with us, even with Hannah.

Hannah discovered something else. “She left her phone,” she gasped, pointing to the top of the dresser. “She didn’t take her phone!” In the next moment she was holding the smartphone and scanning it, then punching in keys. She looked over at me, stricken. “All my messages are here, unread. She didn’t even get my messages!”

I turned back to the closet and had a vision of Elisa selecting enough clothes for a week or two in Barbados with the Crosleys. But that was impossible. I had talked to her here after they had died. Yet the image would not go away. I had to make myself remember that Ethan and Sheila were lying in refrigerated boxes in the mortuary.

“Did she ever talk about any relatives from the Crosleys?” I asked Hannah. I knew that Ethan had no siblings, but Sheila might have had brothers and sisters.

“Why would she leave her phone behind?” Jane demanded at the same time.

Hannah’s eyes were filling, her fist to her mouth. “I don’t know! She would never leave her phone behind. And why is her car still here? Something terrible’s happened to her!”

I’d forgotten the car. Besides the phone, that was the most frightening thing of all. I couldn’t shake my terror that something catastrophic had happened to her. It might not even be related. She could have been struck down and injured just crossing the street. “What about a purse? Did she use a purse?”

“Yes, it was leather with a lot of little compartments. She got it somewhere in South America.”

Then we were opening drawers, sweeping our hands over the closet floor, kneeling to look under the bed. I found a semester’s worth of dust, a balled-up white athletic sock. A copy of
Swamplandia!
that might have been bedtime reading.

We could not find the purse anywhere.

That was the worst news yet.

If she was planning to end her life somewhere else, she would have taken her purse to get where she was going or for identification purposes afterward. Still, it didn’t explain her missing clothes or photographs. “Was her computer a desk model or a laptop?” I asked Hannah.

“Laptop. But her printer’s gone too. And a lot of books. I’m taking her phone!”

“You can’t.” Jane reached out a hand to stop her. “What if she comes back for it and it’s not here? She’d never get your messages then.”

Hannah’s tears were tracking down her face now. “What’s the point? She doesn’t
want
to get my messages. She doesn’t want to see us again, any of us. She thinks Dad killed her parents and—”

“But that’s
crazy
.” Jane looked appalled. “Why would she think that?”

I was not surprised that Hannah knew, only that she had not mentioned it immediately or called me when she found out. “Did Elisa tell you that?”

She stared at me as if I were the enemy. “She got a letter from her father saying that if anything happened to him, to blame Dad. And by the time she read it, something
had
happened.”

“Hani, listen to me. Your father hasn’t done anything to the Crosleys. That was just spite to try and spoil our relationship with Elisa. His dying so soon after was a coincidence. Besides, I talked to Elisa after she got that letter and she certainly wasn’t blaming
you.
She didn’t want Dad here today, that’s true, but she specifically told me she wanted you to come. She wasn’t sure about me though.” The way I said it, it could have been a joke, but no one smiled. “Do you think her friends know where she is?”

“They’re probably at graduation,” Hannah said. “Or gone home for the summer.”

Had she given away books, clothes, or computer equipment to them before they’d left? I didn’t know if that was something she often did or if she had had a darker purpose. If only I’d realized how desperate she was still feeling. If only I had been astute enough to know she should not be left alone. It would have been hard to come up here with everything that had been going on with Colin, and she had acted as if she didn’t want me here, but still—I was the parent.
I should have known
. If I had failed her a second time by my carelessness, the assumption that things usually worked out fine. I would never forgive myself. Never.

Hannah laid the phone back on the dresser where she found it, handling it as gently as if it were a rare porcelain teacup.

All I wanted to do was check with the police and local hospitals. Yet I couldn’t do that while Hannah was here.

Jane laid the roses on the end of the bed. “No sense in carrying these around.”

“Right.” Hannah released the balloons she had been clutching for hours. They shot to the ceiling, where they bobbed gently. “Happy Graduation! Congratulations, Graduate!”

I hated the way the roses looked lying in their green florist’s paper, too much like highway memorials left where a death had taken place.

“What about Sheepie?” Jane asked suddenly.

I sighed. After we thought that Elisa had drowned in Stratford-upon-Avon so long ago, I had wrapped him up carefully in tissue paper and placed him in a carton with her tiny dresses, toys, and photograph albums. We had unpacked the box last November, and the first time I saw Elisa I had hoped the little stuffed animal would stir some long-buried memory. Obviously Sheepie meant something if she had kept him in the center of her bed.

Still, if she was just going away for a few days, she wouldn’t have taken him. She was not a toddler anymore.

I moved to the bed and picked up Sheepie, thrusting him into my bag. “If she doesn’t come back for her stuff, he could get tossed out and be lost forever.”

“I don’t know,” Hannah said slowly. “If she comes back and finds he’s not here . . .”

“
If
she comes back,” said Jane darkly.

That was the question I didn’t want to face.

Lost forever.

Chapter Sixteen

A
TEARFUL
H
ANNAH
wanted to get back on the road to Ithaca, but I insisted that she have something to eat first. None of us wanted to go to the Purple Pig, though I had a brief, hopeful flash of us sitting at a table and Elisa bursting in, full of smiles. But I knew that would not happen now. In the end we stopped at an IHOP. Food not for celebration, but for comfort, for fuel. Food to get us through the next few hours. We ordered pecan pancakes drenched in syrup, sausage patties, and sweet juices instead of coffee.

It was already early afternoon, but the restaurant was crowded. We sat at the table not talking.

Adding more syrup, cutting the sausage with the edge of my fork, I forced myself to eat and tried to get a read on Elisa’s room. If she had taken the time to pick out particular clothes to bring and pack up her laptop and printer, it meant she had left of her own accord. Unless she had given those away. But who would want her memorabilia? I could understand her leaving the photo of us behind, but why her smartphone? Sitting in the buzzing restaurant, I realized I should have searched her room more closely. I hadn’t even looked in the wastebasket! Why hadn’t I looked at what she was throwing away?

Should I suggest going back? I glanced at my daughters. Jane was picking moodily at her pancake stack, her head bent. Hannah was chasing the last bit of syrup with a sausage bite. Her mouth drooped with desolation and her eyes were sad. I knew I couldn’t put them through visiting the room again. Besides, I had to get to the police.

Out in the parking lot I questioned Hannah, making sure she was not too upset to drive back to Ithaca by herself. I had not wanted Elisa to drive back to Boston alone, but once she had gotten here safely I had abandoned her. How long would it take me to learn to do the right thing?

“I guess I’ll see you guys at graduation,” said Hannah. “
My
graduation. When are you getting there?”

I looked at Jane. She had said she was planning to get to the house Friday night. She and Colin and I would drive up the next morning. “I thought we’d be there around lunchtime Saturday. Is that good? Is there anything going on Saturday night?”

“Just a concert and a dinner for people whose parents can’t come.”

“We’ll go out to dinner somewhere nice,” I said, though I was too worried about Elisa to get my pleasure from the idea of food.

Hannah shook her head. “We can’t. Everything’s already booked.”

“There must be a Taco Bell,” Jane teased. “We like Southwestern food.”

“We’ll find something,” I said quickly, grasping Hannah in a tight hug.

“It doesn’t matter,” she said dolefully when I finally released her. “Elisa won’t be there.”

“You don’t know that. It’s still a week away.”

She didn’t bother to answer, just moved toward her car.

“Oh, for God’s sake,” Jane said when she and I were alone in the van. “Six months ago she didn’t even
know
Elisa. Now it’s all that matters.”

“Well . . .” I wondered if Jane was feeling displaced. “She’s really worried by all this. And feeling rejected.”

Jane nodded, then demanded, “What’s all this about Dad?”

Starting the engine, I told her about the letter Ethan had written Elisa, telling her to blame Colin if anything happened to him.

Jane raised her chin stubbornly. “But how could he know something was going to happen to him? Had Dad threatened him or anything?”

“He says not.”

“What do the police think?”

I turned into traffic. “They’re still investigating.” I didn’t have the energy to explain about the boots.

“That’s ridiculous! Can you see him splashing gasoline around and setting a fire to kill anyone?”

The trouble was, I could. Oh, not Colin specifically, that was hard to imagine. But after a lifetime of reading novels, taking my worldview from fiction, I believed that most people, when pushed against the wall, were capable of anything. Growing up I had been reminded scornfully by my sister, Patience, more gently by my father, that books were not “real life.” Yet one look at the headlines on the CNN Web site—“Parents Turn Daughter in for Sexting” or “Suspect Escapes Through Dog Door”—blurred the line more and more.

I
N
THE
END
, Jane took the train from Boston directly to New York City. I pointed out that it was faster than going back to Port Lewis and taking the train from there, and she quickly agreed. “That way I can at least get some work done,” she pointed out.

I drove her to the nearest terminal, on Station Street, hugged her hard, and watched her go safely inside. Then I double-parked in the next block and took out my phone. “Siri, find me the nearest police station.”

“Checking . . .”

Not only did she locate one, she guided me expertly to Schroeder Plaza.

The multistory building, all gray stone and glass, was large enough to make me wonder about the crime rate in Boston. Feeling intimidated, I went inside and tried to explain to the woman behind the desk what I wanted. She frowned and directed me elsewhere. After feeling like a package that no one knew where to deliver, I was settled into an interview room. It felt calming, though there were no windows or posters on the plain yellow walls.

I stared at the golden area in front of me, my eyes blurring out of focus, and lost myself in a world of sunshine. Beach days, damp sand from my bathing suit under the towel I was lying on. I was twelve again, lost in
Miracle at Carville
, the story of a young Southern woman engaged to be married who discovers she has leprosy. I was so thoroughly back at the beach that I jumped when the door clicked open. I couldn’t remember for a quick moment what I was doing there.

Still escaping into books. . .

Then a man about my age was turning the chair across from me backward and sitting down to face me. He was not in a uniform but a white shirt and a navy striped tie. He smiled. “How can I help you?”

The story ran out of me: Elisa’s sudden silence, the missed graduation, the unsettled state of her dorm room. Her upheaval over the recent deaths of people she was close to. He jotted down a physical description, then went to make the calls I hoped he would. But my beachlike calm had vanished, replaced by a nervous terror that made me sit upright with my hands pressed painfully together. What if he came back bringing terrible news? I could see it clearly, his face a sympathetic mask, a policewoman in tow to offer comfort.

It was 3:25 p.m. when he returned. By himself.

He sat down backward in the chair, the same as before. “Nothing from the hospitals. One unidentified young woman found dead in Castle Island Park but the description is different.”

My heart began a terrible tattoo. People looked different in death. It couldn’t be Elisa. Not now. Not after what we had been through. “How different?”

“About twenty, but African American. I don’t think it’s her.”

“
Oh.
No.” Thank God, thank God! I felt sad for the young woman whose life had been cut short, but all I could think was that it was not my daughter.

“You’ve checked with her friends?”

“Not yet, no. We just found out and I wanted to check with you . . . first.”

He nodded. “No news is good news in this case. Good luck with finding her. It sounds like she’s maybe gone off on a whim.”

Did he really believe that? I gave him a watery smile. Still, I insisted he take my phone number and let me know if anything happened.