The Ghost Network (4 page)

Smelling disaster, Tse instructed the theater manager, Lilia Greene, to speak to the audience before the second opening act, the singer-songwriter Lissie. Greene informed the well-dressed throng that Molly Metropolis was suffering from food poisoning and the price of the tickets (minus processing fees and shipping costs, if applicable) would be refunded. Tse called SDFC. The head of their in-house pubic relations team, Kelly Applebaum, immediately issued a press release. Quoting the release,
The Hollywood Reporter
called Molly’s absence “a sudden illness,” and published Tweets from fans angrily leaving the venue. Someone logged into Molly Metropolis’s official Twitter account using the iPhone Twitter application and wrote: “To all my amazing Chicago monsters. I would give anything in the world to be with you right now and not cold & alone.”
^g

A quiet search party—consisting of dancers, security personnel, Berliner, and Nix—scoured the dark and icy city. Applebaum’s staff monitored news sources and gossip sites for any Molly Metropolis sightings. They didn’t find anything, no trace of Molly Metropolis in Chicago and no whisper of her whereabouts on the Internet. They wouldn’t find her rental car for two more weeks, abandoned in a region on the border between Michigan and Indiana called Michiana, in the driveway of a rarely used lake house. All of her clothes, costumes, and personal possessions were left behind at the venue and the hotel; not a single shoe or pair of underwear was missing.

Molly Metropolis didn’t appear the following morning. Applebaum informed Molly’s family and called the police. Normally, the CPD waits forty-eight hours to file a missing persons report, but Molly Metropolis’s fame made it unlikely that she could move idly around the city without being spotted, so police Sergeant Jordan Pierce decided to waive the usual time limit. Pierce and a team of detectives interviewed each member of Molly’s touring crew. Nix gave the longest interview; Berliner gave the shortest.

The next day, SDFC executives and Applebaum officially canceled Molly’s January 12 show in Detroit. In their official statement to the press, Applebaum and SDFC claimed Molly Metropolis still suffered from food poisoning–related complications, namely “dehydration and exhaustion.” They closed the release with, “Molly Metropolis apologizes to fans in Chicago and Detroit and will appear at scheduled Atlantic City and New York City performances.”

Applebaum did all she could to hide the truth, but the Gossip Media smelled a rat. Gossip websites
The Superficial
and
TMZ
speculated that Molly was suffering from complications from drug use
or anorexia. Perez Hilton, on his influential gossip blog Perez-Hilton.com, posted an entry titled, “Where Have All the Mollies Gone?” accompanied by a concert photo from a previous tour date, with a Photoshopped dribble of a white substance spilling out of Molly’s nose, meant to allude to cocaine use (a common characteristic of Hilton’s altered images). Perez thought the food poisoning story was “too convenient,” the kind of things celebs’ reps always say.

On January 14, a freezing and overcast Monday in Chicago, the chief of the CPD, Jody Peter “J.P.” Weis, and Applebaum, speaking on behalf of SDFC Records, called a 9:30 a.m. joint press conference. They announced that Molly Metropolis had been missing since January 9 and they detailed the actions taken to find her. The video of the press conference was uploaded to YouTube where it has been viewed approximately 250 million times, as of this writing.

Elsewhere in Chicago on January 14, Caitlin Taer was nursing three separate obsessions: becoming a professional music critic, the Molly Metropolis song “Apocalypse Dance,” and the prices of hardwood flooring—none of which helped to improve her unsatisfactory post-collegiate life and, despite growing up near the city, her hatred of Chicago winters.

Short and curvaceous, with curly dirty blonde hair and a small smattering of freckles, Taer was also a trendy dresser, who spent most of the summer in long jean shorts and thin backless T-shirts. When winter set in, she wore skinny jeans and giant, thick sweaters. She also wore a black down winter coat that covered her from chin to ankle.

Born and raised in a southern suburb of Chicago called Flossmoor, Taer spent her childhood dreaming of living in Chicago, according to her journals. At age eight, she compulsively played and
sang along with a cassette tape of Frank Sinatra’s “My Kind of Town (Chicago),” given to her by her father, and covered her walls with black-and-white poster prints of the city’s impressive skyline at night with the word “Chicago” in a white cursive along the bottom—the kind of images purchased by tourists.

On warm weekends in the spring, her mother would take her shopping on Michigan Avenue. They woke up early and walked to the train station on sidewalks bracketed by dewy grass. They traveled to the city on the Metra Electric Line, from the train station in downtown Flossmoor to the Randolph Street Station in the middle of downtown Chicago, at the shopping district along Michigan Avenue known as the Miracle Mile.

Because the train took her to Chicago, Taer also developed a passion for Metra Electric. She didn’t want to play with the electric train sets her parents bought her to try to feed her obsession, but they had to watch her closely because she would occasionally run away to the train, sometimes just to sit by the tracks and watch it go, sometimes to try to climb aboard.

Once when she was ten, she made it all the way into the city by smartly sticking near a woman with three other kids; the conductors assumed she was with the family. When the train reached Randolph Street, its final stop, young Taer followed a familiar path from the platform to the underground station’s exit, emerging onto the intersection of Randolph Street and Michigan, directly into the bustle of the Loop, full of hope. Unfortunately, she didn’t know where to go next. The rush hour crowds were thick, and commuters, in their hurry, jostled her. A homeless man started shouting. Very quickly, Taer realized that she shouldn’t be in the city alone. She began crying and screaming loudly until a security guard from the train station noticed her. After the security guard calmed her down enough to figure out where Taer came from, a young conductor escorted her home. He let her play with his Game Boy and bought her Skittles, which her mother would never let her eat. Taer’s love of the
city remained untarnished. The story of her solo visit to Chicago quickly became family lore.
^h

In 2000, Taer began her freshman year at Homewood-Flossmoor High School. Physically, she had matured earlier than most of her female classmates and attracted attention, mostly mocking, from the boys. She wore baggy shirts to hide her breasts (“They seemed to grow, like, every second that year,” Taer recalled in one of her journals) and defensively shouted “asshole” at every boy she caught looking down her shirt. The taunts didn’t stop until her senior year, when such teasing suddenly seemed immature.

Gina Nix attended the same high school. The girls knew each other marginally. They didn’t run in the same circles, but Taer’s best friend played on the same field hockey team as Nix, and sometimes they hung out at sports parties. Nix didn’t care much about the typical social hierarchies, but Taer was hung up on them.

“At these parties,” Nix told me during our first interview, in my Chicago sublet’s sunny kitchen, “I would just be, like, leaning on the wall having a beer, relaxed, and Cait would be very tense. I didn’t know her well enough to understand that was just her default mode. She was very intense, very intense. Very intense eyes. And she thought because I played field hockey and she was on the newspaper, which I guess was nerdy, that I should be some kind of bitch to her, which I never was. At that stage in my life, I couldn’t handle people that were so keyed up and I think she didn’t trust people who appeared to be okay with everything. She said she didn’t like ‘chill people,’ I remember that. She told me that at a party once and I thought she
was insulting me. Later, she told me that I made her nervous because she thought I was cool.”
i

During those high school years, Taer and Nix were quietly going through twin crises of sexuality. Both in the early stages of coming to terms with being a lesbian, they receded from the conversation whenever anyone said the word “gay” and barely dated anyone. Nix used her devotion to sports as an excuse; Taer pretended to have an unending crush on a boy who didn’t like her back. Nix explored lesbian porn links on her brother’s computer. Taer fantasized about a friend from gym class who took off her shirt in the locker room to show off the quarter-sized hickeys her boyfriend had left on her breasts. Besides the newspaper for Taer and field hockey for Nix, high school bored them both.

Taer went to Oberlin College
^j
in Ohio. Nix went to the University of Chicago (U of C), where she met Molly (still going by her given name, Miranda) in a nineteenth-century fiction class. Nix and Taer didn’t stay in touch. If Facebook hadn’t been invented their first year of college, they might never have thought of each other again. Instead, they “Friended” each other sometime during their college years and remained marginally aware of each other’s love lives and music tastes.

Nix and Taer graduated college in May of 2008. Molly Metropolis hired Nix as her new assistant, while Taer moved back to Chicago to pursue a career in music journalism. As of January 14, when the CPD announced Molly’s disappearance, Taer still wasn’t progressing in her occupation of choice. Very occasionally, she wrote for the popular music news and criticism website Pitchfork.com
and the
Chicago Tribune
music blog
Sound Effects
, for which she was barely paid. Taer never wrote professionally about Molly, but wrote about her frequently on her personal Tumblr blog, caitmusic.tumblr.com. She posted the audio of “Apocalypse Dance” with the following caption:

THIS. THIS FOREVER
.

I’m so deeply in love with this song, it’s a little bit sick. There are just a few perfect pop songs in this world—“Like a Prayer,” “PYT,” “Toxic,” etc.—and this has joined the ranks of Prince, of Justin Timberlake, of Madonna. This is the Molly song people will play forever.

Because her work with the
Chicago Tribune
and
Pitchfork
wasn’t translating into more paid opportunities with other outlets, Taer worked as a barback and sometimes bartender at a bar called Rainbo, in a neighborhood known as the Ukrainian Village. (Deceptively named, Rainbo is a dive with a reputation for being a favorite of local musicians, not a gay bar.) Sometimes, she sold clothes to resale store Buffalo Exchange for grocery money. Taer lived in Humboldt Park, a grungy but cheap and gentrifying area near the more expensive and yuppie-filled Wicker Park neighborhood. Her apartment was on the top floor of an unkempt walk-up on the corner of North Monticello and West Thomas Street, with no architectural distinctions to speak of and at least two warped window frames that let in cold air.

She spent each day’s otherwise empty hours obsessing about her carpet. Taer hated her apartment’s carpeting with an intense fervor most people generally reserve for sentient beings. She paid for a steam cleaning, a huge expense in relation to her income, but while her roommate’s dust-related allergy attacks stopped for a few months, the cleaning didn’t improve the color or texture of the dingy gray-white carpet.

Taer petitioned her landlord for a flooring upgrade; she preferred Brazilian Cherry Wood, but would be satisfied with anything, really, so long as it wasn’t carpeting. Her landlord refused. Taer wanted to move, but didn’t want to break her lease or deal with a subletter. She pouted, instead, to her diary: “It’s like I’m trapped in hell.” Her frustration didn’t subside until Molly’s disappearance distracted her.

On January 14, scrolling through her Facebook page’s News Feed, Taer clicked on a link one of her friends posted to the YouTube video of Weis and Applebaum’s press conference.
^k
She watched the full thirty-minute press conference, lying in bed, scribbling dismayed thoughts into her journal. When Weis mentioned that Taer’s old acquaintance Regina Nix was the last person to see Molly Metropolis, Taer got out of bed. She quickly read through articles from the
Trib
, CNN, and
Oh No They Didn’t
, looking for quotes from Nix. She called her editor at the
Chicago Tribune
, David Hurwitz, and asked if they had spoken to Nix. He hadn’t, but one of his journalists had been trying to contact her for a longer, more thoroughly researched piece on the hours before Molly Metropolis disappeared. If Taer got an interview with Nix, she could get a contributing credit on the piece. She called in sick to her shift at Rainbo, put on a heavy sweater and her quilted coat, and caught the Metra Electric Train Line from the Millennium Station (a renamed and refurbished Randolph Street Station) to Flossmoor. Taer was hoping Nix was hiding out at her parents’ house.

Taer wrote in her journal while riding on the Metra, her handwriting shaky due to the train’s constant motion:

I know it’s not really a journalistic hunch like in the movies, but I’m pretty sure Gina went home. I was thinking about
that party at Rachel’s senior year when everyone just knew Gina was having sex with Christopher Brooks, of all fucking people, in the bedroom. A few of us went around the yard and looked through the windows, which was terrible of us. She didn’t leave her mom’s house for the rest of the summer. That’s where she goes to hide.

If she didn’t find Nix at home, Taer planned to ask Nix’s mother to help find her.

After arriving in Flossmoor, Taer walked to her own house, ate lunch with her mother, and asked to borrow the family car. She drove through Flossmoor’s small downtown to a neighborhood called Heather Hill and tentatively knocked on Nix’s door. Nix’s mother, Diane, answered and led Taer to the small living room at the back of the house. Nix was lying on the couch, wrapped in a blanket, listening to Philip Glass with her eyes closed. Diane left them alone.