What Has Become of You (13 page)

The next thing she remembered, she was walking home in the direction of her apartment. How she had ended up on foot was a puzzle; the beach was a twenty-minute drive from her place, so it was possible that Jimmy Stewart had either ditched her or, more likely, dropped her off somewhere at her behest. She always enjoyed a walk when she’d reached that level of intoxication. The wind on her flushed cheeks always felt good, and in such instances she liked to imagine her legs chugging along like forceful little pistons:
left-right-left.

She remembered walking through Dorset Park, a shortcut. This was atypical and, she imagined, indicative of exactly how drunk she was; normally she avoided the park at night, preferring the safety of the well-lit sidewalk, but the drinks she’d consumed must have given her some bravura. Part of the reason why the park was to be avoided, she thought, was because she could sometimes hear a man in there, whistling from the deepest recesses of the trees—a whistle that was sometimes fluent and complex and sometimes staccato and repetitive. She took this to be a code—a drug deal in progress, maybe, or a male prostitute soliciting clients. Things to avoid, at any rate.

She did not remember hearing the whistler during this particular walk home in the dark. When asked about it later, she could recall seeing or hearing no one. No one, that is, until she came upon the figure under the tree.

At first she hadn’t known it was a figure, hadn’t seen it as such. It was fabric that she noticed first—fabric of skirts so voluminous that she thought she was seeing someone’s tarp, bunched and abandoned on the ground. Then she realized she was seeing the traditional dress worn by Somali refugees. It was not unheard of to find a Somali sleeping on a park bench or even in the grass, though Vera could not ever recall seeing a woman in that condition; it was the men who passed out there, the wiry young men who’d had too much to drink.

She was inclined to hurry on past, not wanting to meddle and not wanting to be hounded for spare change if the woman under the tree happened to notice her pass by. Yet something about the way the woman was sitting made Vera take a second look.

Closer now, Vera could see that the woman was not
sitting
under the tree, as she had first thought. She was in a crouching position, with her back against the tree trunk; her skirts were hiked up to midthigh, creating the bulky silhouette of cloth Vera had seen from afar. The woman’s knees were slightly parted, almost splayed, in the posture of childbirth; she thought about a student she’d had once, a boy from the Sudan, whose name, Tharjiath, spoke to a literal truth, translating roughly to “he who was born under a tree.” And that was exactly how he had been born, as his mother stopped working in the fields long enough to push him out into the world—a story so cheerfully recounted in one of Tharjiath’s compositions that Vera had never forgotten it.

But this woman, the woman in the crouching position, was not giving birth. Vera knew it even before she saw that the woman’s head covering had been half pulled off and twisted around her neck and before she saw the improbable angle at which her neck lolled.
The woman was not giving birth.

Nor was she even a woman. She was a girl. A girl Vera knew.

A passage from the Rainer Maria Rilke’s
Sonnets to Orpheus
came to her: sonnet no. 2, which she had memorized and written an entire analysis of at Princeton:

She was almost a girl and forth she leaped

From this harmonious joy of song and lyre,

Shining through her springtime veils and clear,

She made herself a bed in my ear

And slept in me.

The girl, this almost-girl, was not asleep. This Vera knew. She had seen dead people only in photos before—her family believed in brisk, efficient cremations, no open caskets for any of them—but there was no mistaking death when she saw it in person.

Fully aware of her surroundings all at once, Vera reached into her purse for her cell phone and called 911.

Later, she would wonder why her self-preservation and survivor instincts hadn’t kicked in. Surely it had crossed her mind that whoever had strangled her student Sufia Ahmed could be lurking somewhere nearby and that she herself might be in harm’s way. Most women in her position, she supposed, would have run like hell and called for help once assured of her own safety; still, she didn’t like to think she had been heroic for not running. Heroics had nothing to do with it. When the 911 dispatcher had asked her, “Is she breathing? Can you tell?” Vera had remembered saying, with a pleading note in her voice, “I don’t think so. I don’t want to get any closer to her. Is that okay?” A heroic person would never respond like that.

She would not get closer, but she would not leave her, either. She stayed with her because Sufia was her responsibility now, more so than ever, at least until the authorities took over. When she saw the flashing lights of cop cars entering the park and heard the ambulance not far behind them, she waved them down, herding them in like a traffic conductor.

“Hurry,”
she heard herself say, her own throat sounding constricted. “Hurry, hurry.”

She stood off to the side only when the cops bent over the body and checked it, uselessly, for a pulse.

Vera stayed with Sufia even after the police cars and the EMTs had arrived. Sufia’s eyes, no longer soft and liquid, seemed to bulge in Vera’s direction, following her wherever she went, as though it were Vera alone, and not these men and women who knelt beside her with cameras and evidence bags, who could make a difference. The officers pulled Vera off to the side, creating a wall with their bodies, trying to stand a little taller so that she could not see Sufia over their shoulders, but she still could
feel
the girl’s eyes as she began to answer questions as best as she could. And the statement she kept coming back to—over and over and over—was not an answer, but a lamentation:

She’s one of mine. She’s one of mine. You have to do something; she’s one of mine.

Vera woke up in her own bed at about ten o’clock in the morning, desperately having to use the bathroom, and the soreness she felt brought some of the previous evening back to her. Intense self-loathing roiled in her stomach, followed closely by a need to vomit. She leaned over the toilet bowl and attempted to heave, and when that didn’t work, she stuck her fingers down her throat until some of the leftover alcohol evacuated her stomach, watery and tart. Still wearing the clothes she had worn out to the bar, she now saw that her dress was inside out, and the bra she’d worn under it was missing. Her favorite bra.
What an impression I must have made on the cops,
Vera thought, and then, on the heels of that:
What a stupid thing to think.

She felt ill, hungover, demoralized, and frightened—but her predominant feeling was one of numbness. The encounter with the man at the bar—the one who’d reminded her, at first, of Ritchie Ouelette—had been the cause of all the problems, she decided. Her irresponsible behavior, intended as no more than a sloughing off, a celebration of having survived a full workweek, had instead become a humiliating personal failure and a tragedy for another young woman’s family. She saw the night’s beginning and its ending as connected, a causal chain in which she was glaringly at fault.

She wondered if the story had hit the news yet. Vera felt that she needed to see it spelled out in order to believe it. Reading a news bulletin about Sufia might make things easier for her, might help her to remember her as a person, as her own quiet, responsible student and not just a dead body in the park. She wanted to see a photo of her—a photo of her from
before
, to cancel out the other image she had. Typing in search term after search term into her online browser window—
Sufia Ahmed
,
Maine homicide
,
Dorset Park body
—she found that there was no coverage about the dead girl. Was it too soon, or was the local media planning to sweep the story under the rug?
If it had been a pretty local white girl or well-connected kid like Angela Galvez,
Vera wondered,
would the story be all over the place by now?

With her laptop still fired up, Vera ran a bath and settled into it to scour the beach sand out of her hair and eyes; she had a feeling she would be picking sand off herself and from the corners of her studio for a while. Even a change of her grit-covered sheets and a thorough sweep of her floor could not rid her of the last of it. This seemed nothing more than an added injury, a secondary source of despair. She lay back in the bath and remembered—quite out of nowhere—an earlier time that hadn’t felt so long ago: a time when her life’s ambition had been nothing more than to live with her parents through their dotage, haunting their upstairs rooms and acting as a hand servant to the end of their days, or to the end of hers if that came first. It had seemed such a quiet, focused, simple way to live. A better way, come to think of it.

Out of the tub and dressed in clean clothes, her hair still sopping down her back, Vera refreshed her Internet search—still nothing in the news. She logged out and, after some thought, went into her documents and pulled up the file called Manuscript.

I ought to retitle that,
she thought,
so as not to confuse it with any future work
—but then, thinking some more, she realized that this thought was too optimistic, too suggestive of prolificacy. The Ivan Schlosser manuscript was the only manuscript she had even thought about since finishing graduate school. She had been stuck on it the way an old record needle sticks to a warp in a groove.

In her dark and self-punishing frame of mind, she thought last night’s gruesome discovery might enable her to work on her book about Ivan Schlosser. A gift in disguise? No, Sufia’s death wasn’t a gift—her student’s slack, dead face imprinted in her memory was anything
but
a gift—but at least she wrote better, she thought, from such dark places.

For Vera, the appeal of the Schlosser case was personal. Not only had Schlosser been a local legend for a time, but also his confession had diffused her connection to Heidi Duplessis. Following his confession, her fellow classmates forgot that they’d ever had Vera on their radar. But Vera didn’t forget. In a strange way, she thought of Schlosser as her rescuer, as someone who had swooped in and saved her from further harm. If not for Schlosser, she might still be haunted by Heidi of the white teeth and tanned face, popular, easygoing Heidi.

Vera was sure Heidi had never known who she was, though they had gone to the same school. Heidi had been oblivious to the mousy freshman who’d positioned herself behind a speaker at a school dance, glowering at her as she danced with Peter Mercier. She’d had no idea how high Vera’s hatred had risen as she watched her press closer to Peter; as they shuffled around the dance floor in that awkward, swaying slow dance, she could not fathom the depths with which Vera hated every inch of her, cataloging her hatred of the girl from head to toe, from the tips of Heidi’s lightly teased bangs to the soles of her pink Reebok sneakers. She hated her even more as she watched Peter’s hand rest on the small of her back and hover just above the curve of her behind. No, Heidi had had no idea that Vera Lundy, freshman, had summoned as much venom and ill will as she could and had even wished her dead. Wished her
gone
. She couldn’t have guessed that Vera had written as much, in the notebook she carried around all through high school: “If I could find a way to get rid of Heidi Duplessis, I would. I think first I’d duct-tape her to her car, and then I’d shave off her hair with a pair of clippers. If I could kill her and get away with it, I don’t think I’d hesitate.”

Heidi’s body had been recovered in the Androscoggin River six weeks after her disappearance. Dismembered parts of Schlosser’s other victims—Rosemary Trang, the fourteen-year-old immigrant who lived near Durham, New Hampshire, and Margot Pooler, the twelve-year-old from Vermont—had been found earlier that year; at least he had kept Heidi intact, and he later said to the police, “It was because she was so pretty. I could tell from the way she looked at me she was a nice girl, and I felt kinda bad about having to go through with killing her.” Not even serial killers could resist the charms of Heidi Duplessis.

Schlosser died in prison not long after being incarcerated; Vera wanted to understand his motives, to demystify the story that had dogged her through her teen years and had ultimately let her off the hook, albeit with unanswered questions. Thirty-two pages into her manuscript, she had achieved little in the way of demystification; she had, however, outlined a lovely narrative describing Durham, New Hampshire—the scene of the first crime—with the intent to have this bucolic scene disrupted by the description of the first murder itself.

Vera sat at her table with her laptop open and her disorganized jumble of notes in her lap for a long time, staring at her description of Durham. She could not think of another word to add to it. She kept seeing Sufia Ahmed in her mind, Sufia with her skirts bunched up and her head twisted back—the hijab
used as a ligature to strangle her.

Ligature
—now there,
Vera thought,
is a good
CSI
word if ever there was one.
It had been a while since she’d seen that particular word, but Vera’s mind attached it to a document she knew well. She got up, went into the milk crate in her closet, and dug out the manila envelope containing documents, notes, and photocopies that she’d thought might be useful in the creation of the Schlosser book. She took out the copy of Margot Pooler’s autopsy that she’d acquired two years before—the Maine police had never let her have a copy of Heidi’s—and her eye fell to a paragraph in the middle of the first page:

Removal of the underpants tied around the neck of the deceased (known throughout this report as Ligature A) showed that the victim had been nearly decapitated. Accompanying hemorrhage suggests premortem strangulation may have occurred beforehand. The victim’s face was congested, and there was tongue bite. The upper one-third of the larynx was still attached to the head.

Evidence Collected:

1. One white “Peanuts” comic strip T-shirt, child’s size 10.

2. Green shorts with drawstring tie, size Small.

3. Velcro-style sneakers with pink and silver detail.

4. One pair white ankle socks with small pink pom-poms at the top.

5. Pink child’s underpants with “Thursday” stitched on them.

6. One turquoise ring.

7. Samples of Blood (type B negative), Bile, and Tissue (heart, lung, kidney, liver, and spleen).

8. Seventeen (17) swabs from various body locations.

9. Fourteen (14) autopsy photographs.

10. One postmortem CT scan.

11. One postmortem MRI.

The image of the days-of-the-week underpants that had served as a ligature hit her hard, but picturing the little girl’s Velcro sneakers and pom-pom ankle socks was somehow worse. She thought of Sufia’s feet and realized she had not noticed what she had worn for shoes. This bothered her. She should have paid attention. How could she not have noticed what the dead girl had on her feet?

She realized also that she didn’t know if a ligature had been used in the Angela Galvez murder; she couldn’t recall seeing any mention of it in the clippings she’d collected—but she recalled no mention of manual strangulation, either. If Angela had been strangled by one of her own items of clothing—an ad hoc ligature, created on the spot—then that might mean something. Whoever had killed the Galvez girl might have been the same disorganized type of killer who’d snuffed out the life of Sufia Ahmed, using what was available to him instead of coming prepared.

Only connect,
Vera told herself.
Only connect. Because somewhere in those connections might lie the truth.

The manuscript cast aside, Vera realized she needed to get out of her apartment. If she took a bus into Portland, she could visit the city’s large public library with its extensive periodicals section, and there, with any luck, she might dig up more findings about Angela Galvez. Maybe, for that matter, there was something on one of today’s papers that addressed Sufia’s death as well. She unzipped the wheeled suitcase she used for school and took out three folders stuffed with student writings; she put these in her tote bag, stabbed her feet into a pair of black flats, and put on her coat and hat.

During her bus ride, surrounded by the usual mixture of elderly people strapped into wheelchairs, too-young mothers with squalling babies on their laps, and kids heading into town to the methadone clinic, Vera became industrious and took out her student papers, reading their contents and jotting notes so as not to have to look at anyone near her. She was glad she had thought to bring them along.

First in her pile was Martha True’s journal entry, which began thusly:

Now that I’ve read the first few chapters of
The Catcher in the Rye,
what mostly comes to mind is that my mom and dad might kill me if they knew I was reading this. Up until last year, before I enrolled at Wallace, we were Pentecostals. This is a strict religion that has many rules about what’s acceptable and what isn’t. For example, I wasn’t supposed to cut my hair or wear revealing clothing. My parents strayed from the church because my father had a personal grievance with the pastor. Since then, they have been a lot less strict about things and even decided to send me to a regular school. However, they still don’t use profanity or drink alcohol, and I think they would flip if they knew I was reading a novel where the kid uses profanity, drinks in bars, and discusses sexual content. I am not really bothered by any of this myself, but sometimes I feel sorry for Holden. He might be better off if he had a little faith. Though I don’t attend church now, I’m still involved in a youth group, and ultimately I believe God is good. I know He must be good if he can find it in His heart to love me and my imperfections.

Vera moved the page to the back of the pile and gave a little start when she saw the name at the top of the next sheet. Sufia Ahmed, speaking to her from the dead:

I look up a little about Catcher in the Rye on the internets because sometimes the “slang” is hard to understand. My English is good if it is proper English, and I read it better than I speak or write. My best English area is grammar and punctuations. When I take the ESL I was told those are best, and I am still working on Vocabulary. I use a translation program on the internets sometimes which helps. To me this book is confusing sometimes because of its depiction of Americans. When I live in Somalia the teenage boys and girls do not act like Holden. There is wars in my country and terrible things and hunger and people then grow up very fast. We do not just get to be teenagers. Now in the States it is better, though it is hard for my parents. My father was a Doctor in Somalia and now he does not have the right training, but it is better for me because I will get trainings I need in the future.

Close to tears, Vera read the entry again. She was touched by Sufia’s comment “we do not just get to be teenagers.” Quiet, lovely, pacifistic Sufia, who had thought Vera’s comments about murderers had not been
right
. Sufia, who had written so lovingly of her parents’ work ethic, how proud they were of her for being a daughter who carried on their values. She thought of the community Sufia had belonged to: the neighborhood Somalis who all thought of one another as family, congregating on sidewalks and calling down to friends on the street from their upper-story porches or their high apartment windows. They kept up their sense of family and community even after being relocated to alleged havens like the mostly white Dorset and Portland; only the children assimilated quickly, craving distance from their recent past.

You don’t just get to be a teenager anymore,
Vera thought, putting the sheaf of papers back in her tote bag.
I’m sorry, Sufia.

Ejected from the bus near Monument Square, Vera dodged the slow-moving tourists who seemed to be present year-round and headed to the library to look at the newspaper collections. The reference area was quiet save for one elderly man who had fallen asleep in one of the chairs in the Reading Room; his breath came out as a soft grunt as she turned pages as quietly as she could, not wanting to disturb him across the room. Though the newspapers dated only a few months back, they already smelled musty. The word
strangled
in all of its permutations—
strangled
,
strangling
, and
strangulation
—kept jumping out at her from the articles: