The Drowning Girls (9 page)

“Oh, please!” Myriam laughed. “It’s a business like anything else, with a bottom line. There are no background checks, clearly. And we’re reaping the results of that right now.”

The parking lot was beginning to fill with BMWs and Mercedes and Infinitis, with men and women hoisting golf bags over their shoulders, calling hellos to each other. I felt myself detaching, the air growing thin. I remembered what Fran Blevins had told me about the vandalism at our house, the fixtures missing, the holes kicked in walls. That had been blamed on workers, too—on the riffraff that would drive twelve miles down the winding access road just to find an empty home to vandalize. There was no use in pointing out that the workers had been done by five, the trucks loaded and back through the security gates by the time Danielle had left for Kelsey’s house, and Phil and I had headed into town for dinner. This was how it was at The Palms, how it had been with the mountain lion and how it would be with this: suggestion was truth, and truth was incontrovertible.

“The thing to do is to keep this quiet,” Myriam was saying, switching back into organizational mode. “If anyone asks, it’s a plumbing problem that came up overnight. We’re going to do some kind of free drinks at the bar and just eat the cost...”

A silver Lexus pulled into the clubhouse parking lot, coming to an abrupt stop near us. “Ladies,” Sonia Jorgensen said, stepping out in a gray dress and heels. “I thought I’d check in, see how everything was going.”

“Someone vandalized the bathrooms,” Daisy told her. “You should see them—filthy things written on the walls. It’s a disaster.”

“
Not
a disaster,” Myriam corrected her. “A problem, yes. But I’ve got it under control.”

Sonia shook her head. “My God. We can’t even be safe from that, out here.”

Someone called for Myriam, and she turned away, her face set in that smooth mask of efficiency and control. Daisy and Helen trailed her, and Sonia and I were left staring at each other.

“It’s horrible, isn’t it?” she asked.

“Horrible,” I agreed.

She glanced down at the watch on her wrist. “I wish I could stay to help them out, I really do. I have this big meeting with a client in San Jose today, and I’d better get on the road.”

“Are the girls still sleeping, then?” I asked. “I hope they didn’t keep you up too late.”

Sonia’s forehead wrinkled, two parallel lines forming at the bridge of her nose. She spoke slowly, as if I were a simpleton. “The girls are at your house. They spent the night with you.”

“What? No. Danielle asked if she could spend the night with you.”

We stared at each other.

“Well, they aren’t at
my
house. Kelsey sent me a message late last night saying she was with you.” She opened her car door and reached across the driver’s seat for her cell phone. While she tapped a few buttons, she told me, “I didn’t think to call you. I just assumed...”

No, why would you?
I thought.
When have you ever?

“Danielle said she was spending the night at your house,” I repeated. “She left around...I don’t know, seven?”

“Kelsey, you need to pick up this minute,” Sonia barked into the phone. “You call me back right now or there will be hell to pay.”

“Maybe they’re at Hannah’s,” I offered.

Sonia scoffed. “I don’t think so.”

“Can I borrow your phone? Mine’s back at the house.” I took Sonia’s phone, punching in carefully the digits of Danielle’s number. It rang four times before her voice came on the machine.
Hi, you’ve reached Dani
... “Danielle,” I said at the beep. “This is your mother. You need to come home ASAP.”

Sonia held out her hand impatiently and I returned her phone.

“But where—? I don’t understand where they could be,” I said. “Neither one of them can drive. Maybe I should go find Phil...” But I glanced in the direction of the clubhouse and knew this was a bad idea. He had enough on his hands.

I felt a sudden cramp, a fresh wave of nausea. Our girls were unaccounted for, and the bathrooms of the clubhouse were vandalized. The two things must be unconnected, they
had to be
. This was how my mind worked when it came to Danielle. I went for the worst-case scenarios: Danielle was missing for twelve hours, so she must have been abducted. Or she’d done something unthinkable, and she’d run away.

Sonia swore, hopping into her car. “They’re at the Sieverts’. I’d bet on it. Are you coming?”

Wordlessly, I went around to the passenger side, motivated by Sonia’s confidence. She turned around in the parking lot and took the corner quickly, coming to a stop when we’d reached the Sieverts’ driveway. Mac’s gigantic truck was parked diagonally, blocking two of their four garage bays.

It was as if we were playing a game, but I didn’t know the rules. “Why would they be here?”

Sonia was out of the car, faster in her heels than I was in my tennis shoes. “Deanna told me they were doing this wine-tasting tour, two nights in Napa.”

“But why would they—” I tried again, but Sonia was already ringing the doorbell, once, twice, her thumb jamming against the button. When that didn’t produce an immediate result, she pounded against the door with the flat of her palm. “I do not have time for this,” she muttered.

I pressed my face against the pane of glass to the right of the Sieverts’ door, taking in the dark flooring, the mail on the entry table. The doorbell chimes reverberated through the house. “Someone’s coming,” I said. It was a shirtless Mac Sievert, a pair of athletic shorts slung low on his hips. He spotted me looking through the glass and hesitated before moving toward the door.

As soon as the lock was unlatched, Sonia pushed against the door, sending Mac hopping backward to get out of the way.

“Hey! Look, it’s not my fault. Before you get all upset—”

Sonia was already inside their house, looking around. I followed her, noting the huge expanses of open space, the tasteful clutches of furniture. One of Mac’s T-shirts was draped over the back of a chair. By the staircase I spotted a pair of turquoise Converse, laces still tied. Danielle’s shoes.

“Where’s Danielle?” I asked.

Mac ran a hand through sleep-rumpled hair. “I just wanna say, it’s not a big deal. They were here last night, watching a movie, and then it got late, so...”

Sonia was racing up the stairs, another impressive feat in her heels.

“Hey, are you just allowed to... I mean, I’m not a lawyer or anything, but—”

“My husband is a lawyer,” Sonia told him. “You’re eighteen, right? And our daughters are underage.”

Danielle’s backpack was at the top of the stairs, and I picked it up tenderly, as if I were holding on to a lost relic from childhood. I gave the zipper a tug and looked inside—her school binder, fat with papers; a pair of pajamas; a Ziploc bag with her toothbrush. I felt a whoosh of relief. She was here, she was alive. She wasn’t smuggling drugs in her backpack, or, for that matter, cans of spray paint. I could deal with the rest.

Mac’s bedroom was on the right, through a set of double doors. The room was dark, and it took me a moment to get my bearings. It was larger than the master suite in my home, larger than some of the apartments I’d lived in when it was just Danielle and me and a load of baby paraphernalia. Mac’s room had a billiards table, heaped with pool cues and balls, discarded clothes, a row of empty Corona bottles. On one side of the room, a big-screen TV was bolted to the wall, and asleep in front of it on a futon was Danielle, her knees tucked to her chest inside an oversize 49ers hoodie. On the other side of the room, Sonia was yanking Kelsey out of a king-size bed by her elbow. In her jeans and skimpy tank top, blond hair matted to one side, Kelsey might have been an embarrassed starlet, her image caught by waiting paparazzi.

I stood over Danielle and put a hand on her shoulder. She opened her eyes and stared at me, then sat up. Yesterday’s mascara was a dark smear across her cheekbones, like war paint. “Mom,” she croaked. “I’m so sorry.”

I held up a hand, silencing her. “We’re leaving. Now.”

“What did I tell you?” Sonia was asking Kelsey. “No more messing around, no more getting into trouble. Six months without trouble, and we would buy you that car. Now the clock resets.”

“Nooooo,” Kelsey whined. “It wasn’t even my fault.”

From the doorway, Mac said, “It was nothing. They were just hanging out here and then everyone got sleepy, and I said they could stay. It was no big deal.”

“Were they drinking?” I asked.

“No, those are mine. Seriously, it was just—”

“You’re not twenty-one, either,” I reminded him.

“Yeah, but...” His smile was sheepish.

Sonia stormed past us, jerking Kelsey along like a marionette. “I don’t have time to deal with this now, but believe me, your parents are going to hear about this.”

Danielle was on her hands and knees, digging underneath Mac’s couch. She pulled out a textbook, one that Mac had probably shoved under there during the first week of school and never looked at again. She looked up at me. “I can’t find my shoes.”

“They’re downstairs,” I said.

She pulled the 49ers sweatshirt over her head, pulling her own T-shirt up in the process and revealing a knobby ridge of spine. I fought the urge to help her disentangle herself. “Thanks,” she said, handing the sweatshirt to Mac.

“No problem.”

Downstairs, Danielle stuffed her feet into her Converse, and we did the walk of shame down the Sieverts’ sidewalk, into the bright sunlight. Sonia and Kelsey were already backing out of the driveway, the Lexus pointed in the direction of the white house with its marble columns. Down the street, cars filled the clubhouse lot.

It was only once we were inside our house that we spoke—Danielle first, the beginning of a dozen apologies I would hear over the next few weeks.
I thought we were going to spend the night at Kelsey’s house
and
Mac invited us over to watch a movie
and
It was just a bad decision
and
I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry.

I doubled over, resting my hands on my thighs to steady myself. I didn’t realize until that moment that I’d been shaking, anxiety rendering me breathless.

“Mom?” Danielle’s voice was wobbly with tears. “I didn’t mean to—”

But the panic seeped out, like water through a colander, leaving only anger.

I’d trusted her, and she’d lied. She’d come close to getting away with it, too. If she’d come home and hopped in the shower, I might never have known.

“Sit down,” I told her. “You’re going to start again, from the beginning.”

PHIL

It had been wishful thinking, that day in the upstairs hallway. Give her a little shake, utter a little threat and hope it would all just go away.

But that would have been too simple, and nothing with Kelsey Jorgensen would ever be simple.

I suspected Kelsey from the moment I received Myriam’s text, before I even saw the damage. She was capable of it. She was probably capable of anything.

Myriam met me just inside the clubhouse, near the fancy chairs and the sofa where no one ever sat. She was pacing, her pupils dilated. Panic was her drug. “How could this happen? I don’t understand. I expect a certain amount of security at The Palms—”

“I need to see it,” I said, brushing past her. The clubhouse was a sprawling building, with administration offices and community mailboxes on the right, dining and conference rooms on the left. Down the middle was a long hallway with public restrooms, each branching off to men’s and women’s locker rooms. Halfway down the hall, my shoes sank into the wet carpet.

Myriam stopped, probably not wanting to damage her fancy shoes. “I figured it must have been a plumbing problem, a burst pipe or that kind of thing...”

I pushed open the women’s door first, regretting that I wasn’t wearing waders. By this time my shoes were soaked, the hems of my jeans dripping.

Myriam called, “What happened to the alarm, anyway? Aren’t you in charge of that?”

I ignored her.

The bathrooms had always struck me as clean and warm, spa-like. The walls were white bead-board panels, the floors a wood-grain porcelain laid on the diagonal, creating a seamless line into the locker room. Now the bathroom was a nightmare—blue spray paint crisscrossed the walls,
FUCK
and
PUSSY
and
SUCK MY DICK
sprayed on the wood panels, the mirrors, the stall doors. One of the toilets was still running, water still gushing onto the floor. I splashed into that stall and reached behind the toilet for the lever that shut off the water. The culprit was a clogged toilet, a dozen rolls of toilet paper crammed into the bowl. The inside of that stall had been sprayed, too—a blue blur of paint that stretched around three panels. Stepping back to get the bigger picture, I read
YOU HAD YOUR CHANCE.

No matter what Myriam said, this wasn’t the random work of vandals, people with too much time and a general bone to pick. This was a message.

For me.

“What are you going to do?” Myriam demanded, when I squished past her in the hallway, my soles heavy. “Where are you going?”

“I’ve got to make some phone calls.” I rounded the corner and stopped in front of my office. I tried the handle, expecting to find the door unlocked, my files trashed, blue spray paint on the walls. But the door was locked, and when I swung the door open, leaving my key in the door, the room was just as I’d left it yesterday.

“Well, what am I supposed to do? People are arriving. We can’t have them coming in here, and without any bathrooms—” Her voice rose to a shriek.

“Myriam, it’s okay. I’ll take care of it right now. We’ll say there was a burst pipe, and we’ll get some portable toilets down here.”

“I hardly think that people who pay for this kind of experience—”

“Excuse me.” I turned my back on her, reaching for the desk phone. When I turned around, she was gone. I had some personal phone numbers for Parker-Lane executives, and over the next half hour I worked my way from the bottom up the chain, repeating
vandalism
and
water damage
until the porta-potties were on their way, as well as an emergency restoration-and-cleaning service, an impressive team that arrived in econo-sized vans loaded with pumps and hoses and fans and guys in white hazmat suits.

While I waited for them to arrive, I took my phone and snapped photos of the damage, of the message I figured had been left specifically for me.
YOU HAD YOUR CHANCE.
It had been a mistake, I saw now, to delete the picture Kelsey had sent me. I’d been seeing headlines in my mind:
Phil McGinnis, a thirty-seven-year-old pedophile from the Livermore area...
I’d been thinking of the implications of being caught with it, like a sicko with his kiddie porn. But it had been evidence, hadn’t it? I could have shown it to Liz, explained the situation. I could have it now, to pair with her taunt in the bathroom. It would have formed a narrative, a trail of proof.

But even as I had the thought, I knew it wasn’t true. I’d wanted to say something to Liz last night. I’d had my chance, even with that damned arcade music beeping in the background. And I couldn’t get the words out, afraid in my attempt to prove my innocence I would only sound guilty. It would be the same now, if I tried to explain the vandalism, the
YOU HAD YOUR CHANCE.
How would I do that, exactly?
There’s this fifteen-year-old girl who’s obsessed with me, and she wrote me this message because I didn’t take her up on her offer...

I slogged back down the hallway to the maintenance closet, where I knew there was a can of beige spray paint, one used for quick fixes in the dining room to cover scrapes and gouges made by chairs and table legs. By the time the crew arrived, I’d covered the message completely with quick spritzes.

“I already took some pictures,” I explained, giving the crew a show-around. “I didn’t want any of our residents to get upset by the graffiti.”

* * *

Jeff Parker himself met me at the clubhouse at eleven while the tournament was in full swing, guests gamely using the portable toilets in the parking lot. Due to the noise of vacuums and high-powered fans, lunch was moved out to the patio area overlooking the putting green. My phone buzzed relentlessly with messages from Myriam and a few from Liz. She was probably worried about me, wondering how she could help.

While Jeff Parker surveyed the scene, conversation impossible over the high pitch of machinery, it occurred to me that I’d known it was coming—this or something like this—from that first day when she’d settled into the chair across my desk and told me that she was bored. I’d heard the warning bell then, that sign that something was off-kilter, that something about this girl was just not right. Jeff made a note on a pad he’d pulled from his shirt pocket, and I allowed myself to play out an alternate ending, one in which I’d flirted back, let her hand linger on my arm, not pulled away when she brushed her leg against my mine. But there was no way to entertain the thought and not take it all the way, to sex in my office late at night, the door locked, carpet burns on our knees and elbows. There was no way it didn’t become the nightmare it had threatened to become all along.

I didn’t have to hear Jeff’s words to understand what he was saying when he turned to me, finally.

A fucking mess.