Reconstructing Amelia (14 page)

Kate

JUNE 30, 1997

He called me up to his office today to tell me that my memo of collateral estoppel was the best he’d ever read by a summer associate. That’s like having the president come out of the Oval Office to give you a pat on the back. It never happens.

I can already tell that the best way to get over Seth won’t be another boy; it’ll be by being the best summer associate Slone, Thayer has ever seen.

Kate

NOVEMBER 27

Kate was standing in the kitchen, finger poised over the coffeemaker, when there was a knock at the kitchen door. It was barely light, only a few minutes past seven a.m. She hit Start and made her way over to the windows. When Kate peered out, there was her next-door neighbor Kelsey, bouncing foot to foot in running pants and a bright yellow Nike shell, a knit cap pulled low over her short pixie hair.

Kelsey had six-year-old twins, whom she stayed home with full-time, and a gorgeous Brazilian husband, who was as visibly devoted to her as she was to her children. Kelsey’s idealized image of motherhood had always made Kate feel inadequate. Not because of anything Kelsey did, but because of how unconflicted she seemed. She wanted to be a full-time mother, and so she was. There was no push and pull, no wobbly balancing act in which someone was forever the loser—Amelia, Kate, her job.

In the weeks since Kate’s friends had gone home, Kelsey had been a lifesaver. She’d dropped off casseroles, bought groceries, and done laundry for Kate, all without being asked and without the expectation of a thank-you. She’d almost seemed disappointed when Kate had told her that she’d be going back to work and would no longer be in need of her help.

“Are you locked out?” Kate asked when she opened the door.

“No, no, I’m fine,” Kelsey said, waving a hand. She was still bouncing back and forth on her toned legs. “I just wanted to check in and see how your first day back was.”

“Oh, yeah, it was—” Kate hesitated, suddenly unable to recall anything that had happened at the office.

Ever since she’d gotten that text about Amelia’s not jumping, everything had been fuzzy and hard to keep track of. It didn’t help that she’d stayed up half the night reading Amelia’s texts. She’d started with the ones between Amelia and Sylvia, because they’d seemed least likely to be too upsetting. She’d marveled at the intricate minutiae in their conversations. A rogue pimple, someone’s poor choice of shoes, an accidental hallway brush against a particular boy, the details of the strange dream one of them had had the night before—all of them topics worthy of dissection in the seemingly nonstop stream of messages that passed between the two girls. There were so many texts that it was hard to believe the girls were ever physically in the same room. But they had been, almost until the very end.

M
AKE A RUN FOR IT
, I’
LL COVER YOU,
was the last text Sylvia had sent Amelia when she’d been in Mr. Woodhouse’s office.

Sylvia had admitted to Molina that she’d helped Amelia sneak out of the headmaster’s office minutes before she died. But when Sylvia had ducked into the bathroom afterward, Amelia had disappeared. Like everyone else, Sylvia had had no idea what could have driven Amelia to the roof, or off it.

“Are you okay, Kate?” Kelsey asked. She’d stopped bouncing and was staring at her, concerned.

“Yes, I’m sorry. I’m just distracted.” Kate shook her head hard. “I was making coffee. Do you want to come in and have some?”

The invitation was an impulse, an unfamiliar one. As helpful as Kelsey had been recently, the two women had never sat down alone over coffee. But Kate wanted to now. She wanted to sit with Kelsey and pretend the two of them were close friends.

“Oh sure,” Kelsey said, looking taken aback. She checked her watch. “But I should probably make it quick. Gabriel’s with the boys, and he’ll need to leave for work in a few minutes.”

Kate went to get the coffee as Kelsey sat down at the kitchen table. When she came back, she placed a mug down in front of each of them, the whole time telling herself that this was the way this kind of thing was done. An impromptu invitation, a casual conversation. This was how spouseless, childless people survived being completely alone. Maybe she was supposed to offer muffins or cookies or something, too. She had neither. Kate could feel Kelsey staring at her.

“I’m sorry, I know I’m acting strangely—”

“No, no, not at all,” Kelsey said, quickly and unconvincingly. “I’m the one who knocked on your door at seven a.m.”

Kate smiled down into her coffee cup and tried not to cry. Kelsey was so sweet and generous. She was the kind of person who was meant to be a mother, not someone like Kate, who’d been too distracted by her own ambition. If Kate had been less busy, if she’d paid closer attention, maybe she’d have been able to prevent whatever had happened to Amelia.

“I got an anonymous text yesterday saying that Amelia didn’t jump. It has me, I don’t know, rattled.”

“Oh my God!” Kelsey gasped, cupping a hand over her mouth. “That’s awful. Who would do something like that?”

“I don’t know.” Kate shook her head. “But I think whoever it is might actually be telling the truth.”

“Really? I thought the police—” Kelsey stopped herself. “Oh, I guess I don’t know any of the details. But I didn’t realize there was ever any question.”

“There wasn’t.” Kate took a sip of coffee. “At least, not according to the police. But I never had that much confidence in the detective who did the investigating. He seemed in such a hurry to get on to a more exciting case or something.” Kate hated the way she sounded, defensive, accusatory, desperate. “Deep down, I also never believed that Amelia would kill herself. And now, with this text. Last night, I found some suspicious notes in her room, too.” Kate shrugged. “All of it together—it seems like maybe there was something going on in Amelia’s life that I didn’t know about. That I probably should have. Something not good.”

“Oh,” Kelsey said. She looked down at the tabletop, shifting uncomfortably on the bench. “Listen, I didn’t tell you this before because there didn’t seem to be any point. But now, I don’t know.”

Kate’s stomach clenched. “What?”

Kelsey took a deep breath, then wrapped her hands tight around her mug.

“I saw Amelia with a boy a week or so before she died. Here, going into the house.”

“Really?” Kate’s heart picked up speed. “A boy, here?”

Going into the house to fool around, surely. It didn’t have to be that, but how blind was Kate going to be? How long was she going to let herself believe that having good grades and being a star athlete equaled
not
having sex? Amelia had asked Kate outright just weeks before she’d died about when she had first started liking boys. Kate had taken Amelia’s “academic research” excuse at face value. It wasn’t so much that she’d
actually
believed it at the time; the question had set off alarm bells. Maybe she’d allowed herself to believe it because it was easier that way.

“He could have been just a friend. I don’t know,” Kelsey said, but it was obvious she didn’t really think that. She paused, looked down, took another deep breath. “I only saw them on the steps, on their way inside and again when they were leaving.”

“Amelia hanging out after school with a boy in our empty house doesn’t exactly sound like friends to me,” Kate said. “It’s embarrassing how naive I’ve been. But Amelia was such a good kid. I got lulled into a false sense of—”

“It wasn’t after school, Kate.”

“What? What do you mean?”

“It was in the middle of a school day,” Kelsey said quietly. “I’m sorry. I don’t mean to belabor the point. Maybe it’s not even important, but it feels like it could be.”

“The middle of the day?” Kate asked, sounding angrier than she’d intended.

Amelia skipping school? She wouldn’t have believed that any more than she believed Amelia had cheated, if Kelsey hadn’t seen it with her own eyes.

“I’m sorry I didn’t say something about it before . . . I just . . .” Kelsey’s voice was wobbly. She looked sick with worry. “I didn’t want to tell you anything upsetting if it didn’t matter. But now that you’re saying that you think maybe Amelia didn’t kill herself. And there was something about that boy. I don’t know, he made me uncomfortable.”

“He made you
uncomfortable
?”

“Not him so much as the way Amelia seemed with him. She was nervous or sad or something. I only saw them together for a few seconds, so it was hard to tell. But her body language was off.”

“You saw Amelia cutting school and going into our empty house with a boy that made her, and you, uncomfortable, and you didn’t think you should tell me?”

“I figured I’d ask Amelia about it when she babysat the next time. Encourage her to tell you. But then there was no next time. I was afraid if I said something to you directly that you might feel like I was judging your parenting. I’m so sorry, Kate.” Kelsey’s voice cracked, then her eyes got wide. “Oh my God, what if that boy had something to do with what happened to Amelia?”

When Kate got off the F train at Bryant Park, it was misting and dark, as if the sun had never fully risen. As she crossed the street and headed west on Forty-second Street, the rain picked up from a mist to a drizzle. Kate heard her phone alert with a new message as she stepped up onto the far sidewalk. She paused out of the rain to read it, bracing herself for another message about Amelia.

I know your little secret. Soon everybody else will, too.

Kate’s hands were still shaking when she got into work and found her way to the IT Department. She’d never actually been there before. When she had a problem with her computer, the IT Department came to her. As it turned out, all of Slone, Thayer’s very many critical IT functions were tucked into an unimpressive cubby, down on the second floor near the copy center.

Kate knocked on the door open halfway, but no one answered. She waited another minute before knocking a second time, then pushed it the rest of the way open. Sure enough, there was Duncan, Bose headphones on, facing the window as he played air drums with wild abandon. Kate watched him for a second, but he didn’t notice her. She had no choice but to step up and tap on his shoulder.

“What the fuck!” he shouted, jumping up so fast that he banged his thighs on his desk. “Ouch!”

“Oh, I’m so sorry,” Kate breathed. “I didn’t mean to scare you.”

“Dude, that’s okay,” Duncan said, his usual stoner tone, high and wired. “Just don’t do that again, like, seriously. It’ll permanently mess with my chi. We don’t get a whole lot of visitors down here. You can’t, like, sneak up on us, ever.”

He closed his eyes and took a few deep breaths in through his nose. Finally, he opened his eyes and exhaled deeply. And just like that he was back to the relaxed surfer dude Kate had always known him to be.

She held out her phone. “I got another text like the one Beatrice asked you to trace for me before. You really can’t tell me who’s sending them?”

Duncan took the phone and looked down at the message.

“That’s seriously messed up,” he said after he’d read it.

“Yeah, thanks,” Kate said. “I can see that. I was hoping you could help me with the who’s-it-from part.”

“Oh yeah, right.” He clicked a couple of buttons on the phone and frowned. “They used the phone company site again to route the message.”

“So that’s it? Do you think the police could do something more?”

He shrugged. “In general, I try to steer clear of the po-po. I can’t say what they’ve got up their sleeve, like, policewise. But the phone company would have a record of who logged on from where to send this message, so maybe the police could subpoena it. I guess they’d need probable cause or whatever. I can say that technologywise, with just this phone, the police aren’t going to be able to do anything different than me.” He handed it back to Kate. “Sorry.”

“Thanks anyway,” she said. “Do you think you could maybe help with some other things, like getting everything off my daughter’s laptop, and the texts printed off her phone?”

“Definitely,” Duncan said more quietly. His mouth turned down sadly as Kate dumped Amelia’s phone and computer and assorted wires and chargers onto his desk. “But you sure you want
everything
, like her Facebook page and Twitter and all that? Some of it might be easier to look at online.”

Facebook. Kate had planned never to look at Amelia’s Facebook page. Her daughter would still be so alive on there. Amelia’s friends, she already knew, had been using the page as a makeshift memorial, going on there to leave I-miss-you messages for her. The thought of seeing them was completely unbearable.

“I don’t think Amelia had a Twitter account. She never mentioned it.”

“You sure?” Duncan asked. “Most kids in high school are on Twitter at least sometimes, and they’re texting all the time. Then there’s Facebook. E-mail’s like the new snail mail. Don’t know if she’d bother to mention Twitter. It’s all second nature to them. Like, of course they have it.”

Kate was staring at him. It was too much. There were so very many places where terrible things about her daughter’s life could be tucked. Kate thought again about that text she’d seen to some boy named Ben.
Lucky me
, Amelia had written sarcastically about having Kate for a mom. Reading that had been awful, and it could get much, much worse.

“What do you say we slice it this way?” Duncan piped up, rescuing Kate from her choked silence. “I’ll print out all the Word docs and anything else on her hard drive, and I’ll get you her browser history. On the other accounts like Facebook, I’ll set you up with the passwords. That way you can, you know, take a quick peek,” Duncan said, resting one hand on Amelia’s computer. “Because you don’t want to like get into the deets of your kid’s Facebook page. I mean, I’m twenty-four, and I’m a pretty scrubbed-up guy and whatevs, but my ’rents would stroke out if they saw my whole page. You’ve gotta filter it for ma and pa. I mean, who wants to see their kid doing body shots, like, ever?”