What Has Become of You (14 page)

. . . Galvez, 11, was found strangled to death behind the Dumpster that is located behind the Buck Street Laundromat.

.
 . . first homicide in Dorset in 35 years, and the first strangulation death of a minor in Maine since the Ivan Schlosser killings of the 1970s and ’80s.

. . . the medical examiner estimates that the strangling took place between 7 and 8 p.m
.
She was last seen riding her bicycle up and down her street at 6:30, and she was due back indoors at 7. The bicycle was later recovered in Moyer Woods.

Vera stopped to take a longer look at one of the articles near the end of the pile, an article with a title that caught her interest:
SUSPECT ARRESTED IN GALVEZ SLAYING
.

Vera knew as well as anyone that newspapers often got things wrong. Even the headline wasn’t exactly right; the word
slaying
had a bloody connotation, and Angela Galvez had not bled—at least not outwardly. She examined Ritchie Ouelette’s mug shot at length, and while Vera knew you couldn’t judge a killer by his face—history had presented many baby-faced killers and would present many more—she did not think she was looking into the eyes of someone who would strangle an eleven-year-old girl to death.

Not for the first time, she wished she could talk to Ritchie Ouelette. If only the police would let her meet with him! But when she had called the state prison to ask if such a thing could be arranged—describing herself as a writer who was thinking of writing a profile of Ouelette—the person over the phone had said, “What, you want to touch his hand on the other side of the glass or something? That’s only in Hollywood movies, ma’am.”

She wished, for that matter, that she could see Ritchie’s hands in the newspaper picture. One might be able to tell something about a strangler, Vera thought, by looking at his hands. She knew from seeing televised glimpses of Ouelette being led in and out of a courtroom that the suspect’s hands were slim and almost girlish, hands befitting an accountant. Whoever had strangled Angela Galvez—especially if it had been a manual strangulation—would need hands strong enough to break the hyoid bone. Hands unafraid to get dirty. Vera looked down at her own hands, contemplatively furling and unfurling her short, stubby, ink-stained fingers, looking at her close-bitten fingernails and the little rims of dirt that somehow always besmirched them.

She put the newspapers back, since there was no one there to tell her not to, and took one last look at the copy of the local paper that someone had left spread-eagled on a table. Not one word of Sufia Ahmed’s demise. She couldn’t imagine why not, unless she had dreamt the whole episode in the park. To have believed a dream like that would mean that she’d lost her mind.

Was that possible? She dug her wallet out of her purse and took out the business card of Officer Gerard Babineau, one of the policemen whom she’d greeted at the scene—a stout, girthy man with sad, dark eyes. She remembered talking to him, remembered him asking her to call him if she thought of anything else to add to her statement of finding one of her girls under the tree. All real, every last bit of it, and the holes in her memory didn’t make it any less so.
I’m not crazy,
she thought, looking down at the card,
and here is my proof. Here is the proof in my hand.

 • • • 

The streets along Portland’s fishing piers in the area known as the Old Port were populated with small, independent shops with wares that catered to out-of-staters and to residents who were willing to shell out a little extra money to jump on the “buy local” trend. Stopping to look in the windows of boutiques and import stores, Vera wondered if she looked as disoriented as she felt. As she lingered at the window of a new wine bar, a gray-haired gentleman in a fisherman’s cap stopped and said, “It’s a nice place. Have you been inside?” She hurried away as though she had nearly been caught shoplifting. She didn’t slow down until she came upon the old discount shop where she sometimes liked to buy marked-down frozen dinners and frozen pizzas—the same food she’d been buying since she was a young college girl. She had to laugh when Facebook friends of hers—most of whom were people she knew only remotely—posted descriptions or even photos of what gourmet concoctions they were serving their families on a particular night. Was that part of being an adult—eating healthier, more expensive, more adventurous food and telling the world about it? Was this part of where Vera had gone wrong?

Her red handcart filled, she stood in line behind a woman paying with food stamps, a woman whom the middle-aged cashier seemed to know well; they were deep in conversation, ignoring Vera and the others who gradually fell in line behind her. Vera shifted her weight from foot to foot and tried to keep a pleasant expression on her face, one that wouldn’t reveal the impatience she felt, when she heard the words “. . . another one got killed.” She looked up sharply.

“Yeah,” the woman with the food stamps was saying, “it’s not just Portland that’s getting bad. There was another one of ’em shot a few months ago right next to the apartment where my niece lives, near the old Italian sandwich shop that shut down. And it was drugs. It’s always drugs, with them. Always drugging and raping and killing. They took a retarded girl off the street and brought her to a hotel room and just raped her and raped her until they were done with her. And this goes on
every day
. Don’t think the police don’t know what goes on.”

“It’s different over where they live,” the cashier said, waving her hand as though Africa were somewhere on the other side of the street. “Back there they live like animals, and then they come over here and get help from the state. Get good jobs, too. I wouldn’t mind a little help from the state myself, you know? But they say I make too much money. Huh! Minimum wage is too much, I guess!”

Another one of ’em.
Vera knew they were talking about the Somali refugees; she had heard such things expressed before, quite vocally, from Maine residents of a certain mind-set. To such people each Somali was just
another one of them
, and the dead girl in the park was just
another one who got killed
. It was not surprising that news of the death had leaked before the news stories even appeared; that was the small-town grapevine at its finest and most functional. But Vera was nonetheless shaken, and not a little offended, to the point where she was tempted to abandon her frozen foods and leave the store.

Instead, she spoke up before she could stop herself.

“Few of them get good jobs,” she said to the cashier. “They get the jobs most other people don’t even want. The girl I think you’re talking about—her father was a
doctor
, for crying out loud.”

Both the cashier and the customer looked at her, and the cashier said something in an undertone. The customer laughed and collected her grocery bags: “Later, Cheryl! Call me!” she brayed. The clerk was curt as she rang up Vera’s purchases, not replying even when she said “Thank you” in her meekest voice.

Coming out of the store, Vera took slow, deep breaths to calm herself down; she checked her cell phone, then compared that time to the folded bus schedule in her pocket. There was just enough time to get home for the six o’clock news.

 • • • 

Home again, a tall glass of vinegary wine in hand, she flipped compulsively between the three local news channels, waiting to see which one would first mention the dead girl in the park. By Dorset standards, this had to be front-burner news. And for once the news did not disappoint.

There it was, finally—the story she was looking for, and a name and a smiling face.

Sufia Ahmed. Fifteen years old.

She did not realize she was holding her breath until the end of the news report; she was holding her breath to see if her name would be mentioned in conjunction with the story, as she had asked the police to withhold this information from the media. They had honored her request, referring to her only as “a woman” who had come across the body in the park and had made the report to police. This, Vera thought, was a lucky break.

Relaxing a little, Vera took in the photo on the news, seeing Sufia’s tentative-looking smile and wide eyes, the absolute youthfulness striking her anew:
fifteen.
She listened to the story of how Sufia’s family had relocated to the United States when Sufia was just seven years old. Of how Sufia’s mother was employed as custodial staff at the food court in the mall and that her father was a pesticide sprayer. The newscaster did not say that Sufia had been strangled—such an ugly word,
strangled
, as Jensen had said—but she did say her death was considered a homicide, and that the police had “several leads” in terms of a suspect. Coming to the last sentence of the news story, the newscaster said, “When asked if the homicide might have a racial motive, Officer Gerard Babineau said that the police were unable to comment on this at the present time.”

A racial motive.
What did that even mean? Vera wondered. Was it a reference to the black-on-black scenario that the bigoted grocery store clerk had assumed? Or was this innuendo, planting the seed of an idea that this had been a hate crime—directed against the Somali population, or perhaps at Muslims in general?

There was no mention of Angela Galvez. Two young females had been murdered in Dorset in the last six months—how could the news overlook what seemed to be a pattern in the making? Had the cops, too, chosen to overlook it because they wanted to close the books on the Galvez case now that Ritchie Ouelette was in custody? Or perhaps it wasn’t even a choice; perhaps, Vera thought, the local police and media really were that obtuse.

No sooner was the news report over than Vera’s phone started ringing. Not recognizing the local number of the incoming call, she stared the phone down and blanched a little when the phone buzzed with a voicemail notification. A half hour later, the phone rang again; two phone calls in one afternoon was never good news, and when Vera decided to brave her email a little later in the day, she divined the reason behind these earlier calls. Her email in-box, ordinarily so inactive, had begun to explode with activity.

There was an email from Jensen Willard, dated on Friday, with an attachment icon in the corner next to her name. Vera felt she didn’t have the heart for one of Jensen’s emails right now. She skipped ahead to one of the newer emails from Sue MacMasters.

To:
[email protected]

From:
[email protected]

Dear Vera,

Are you okay? I just got a call from Harold Finister about the Ahmed girl. I know she was one of your students. I’ll never forget what it was like the first time I lost a student. I could not have been more upset if it had been my own child. Just know that I’m here if you’d like to talk and that I will be reaching out to the student’s other teachers as well. Harold will be sending out an email to all staff and faculty about how to move forward, so please stay on the lookout for updates.

Sue

There was a mass email from Lucy Grivois, the school counselor, discussing the effects of grief and loss on the adolescent girl and what teachers should expect to see over the next few weeks, given the “untimely passing” of one of the girls’ own classmates. And there was a long email from Dean Finister, announcing that school would meet on Monday morning for a two-hour assembly. Grief counselors would be available, as would the services of Detective Helen Cutler, who was coming to speak to the girls about personal safety and area crime statistics in a manner that, Vera gathered, was planned to be reassuring. After the assembly, the school would be closed until Thursday, the day after Sufia’s memorial service (“which all staff and faculty are encouraged to attend”) on Wednesday.

At the closing of his email, Finister wrote, “As you can imagine, the loss of another young life in Dorset seems almost too much to bear, coming so close as it does to the loss of my niece Angela. I know how difficult the healing process can be, and how much harder it must be when that loss is of one’s young peer.” Vera tried to imagine Finister saying all this, in his pinched, nasally voice, and somehow couldn’t.

Thinking, Vera got up from her computer and took a yellow legal pad off one of her kitchen shelves; with pen in hand, she began to write rapidly.

1. Angela Galvez: Eleven, female, Hispanic-American, strangulation. Body recovered behind local Laundromat. Death attributed to Ritchie Ouelette, twenty-five.

2. Sufia Ahmed: Fifteen, female, African-American, strangulation. Body recovered in park. Killer unknown at present time.

That was all she had to go on, but she studied the two short entries as though they might provide a more telling clue. She thought some more, paused long enough to print up the photograph of Sufia Ahmed, then downloaded a photo of Angela Galvez—a pretty child with her hair smoothed back in a headband—and printed that up, too. She cut off the white edges of both printouts with a pair of scissors, then taped each on the wall above her laptop, side by side, where she could look on them as she worked or typed. After some more thought, she went back to her milk crate in the closet and dug deeper into her papers, this time withdrawing an old folder filled with yellowing newspaper cuttings until she took out Heidi Duplessis’s smiling school photo that had been reproduced in the
Bond Brook Gazette
. She taped Heidi up alongside the other girls, to keep them company. Together, the trio might whisper their secrets to her.

Up onstage in the auditorium, the Wallace School Madrigal Singers were warbling through “Over the Rainbow.” The girls’ voices overlapped and wrapped around one another, the high notes soaring to the ceiling of the auditorium; the last of these notes clung like tremulous moths to the fluorescent lights.

Vera did not think this song—so evocative of Kansas, so inextricably tied to sweet, pigtailed Dorothy’s innocent desire to venture away from home—was the right way to memorialize Sufia Ahmed. Nonetheless, she felt great annoyance with herself when a tear began to slide down the side of her nose. She wiped it away brusquely. Was it a good thing or a bad thing for her students to see her crying?

Following Dean Finister’s orders, each Wallace School teacher was sitting with the girls in the grade she was responsible for, and Vera could pick out the faces of some of her own girls from Sufia’s class. Jensen seemed to be absent, but Martha True sat just one seat away from Vera, with an empty seat in between them; Martha wept openly, her hunched, slim shoulders heaving up and down. Vera thought about reaching over to give the girl a one-armed hug, but the act would not have felt natural, and her arm didn’t reach that far, anyway. Still, she felt that she ought to do
something
.

Aggie Hamada was seated one row in front of her, next to Jamie Friedman, and she could see the trace of a Kleenex appearing and disappearing from Jamie Friedman’s purse; at one point she passed it to Aggie, who blew her nose audibly over the last plaintive strains of the song.
Why oh why can’t I?

And there was Harmony Phelps, sitting diagonally across from Vera. Harmony seemed to be bristling with an almost triumphant self-righteousness, as though her most negative suspicions about the world had just come true.

Throughout most of the assembly in honor of Sufia Ahmed’s memory, Vera was in a daze. She saw people come and go from the stage in an aimless fashion, as though they were lost and had wandered up to the podium by mistake. Even Dean Finister fumbled, though he still spent a good fifteen minutes up there, overdoing it as usual and calling Sufia “a testament to the American dream.” (
And what a testament,
Vera thought.
This is what the American dream gets you?
) On the movie screen that hung from the ceiling, Finister showed a collage of recent photos depicting Sufia at home and at school; Vera wondered how he had acquired them. The first slide showed Sufia, larger than life and dressed in a ski outfit, smiling her closed-lipped, tentative smile. In the next she was being embraced by her father, wearing a white dress for her eighth-grade graduation, and last of all was a moment of glory, photographed for all posterity: Sufia holding up a medal she’d received for delivering a winning speech. There was something terribly mawkish about this presentation—each posed photo selected for optimum emotional impact—but Vera cried again, furious with herself for being so easily manipulated.

But it wasn’t about manipulation. It was about Sufia. It was about a girl who had died too soon, in a way that no girl should die. Sufia and she may not have been simpatico, but she did not deserve, Vera thought, what had come to her.

A Somali girl from one of the upper classes, presumably someone who’d known Sufia, got up and spoke of the dead girl’s outstanding citizenship and industriousness and positive attitude. “May God make her presence touch all your lives forever,” she said before bowing a little and stumbling off the stage.

The next speaker was different and seemed to break through the collective sense of paralysis. It was a female police detective—ruddy, rawboned, with a thinning shock of hair that was half gray, half carrot-colored—who introduced herself as Detective Helen Cutler.
Chelsea’s aunt,
Vera thought, leaning forward in her seat a little as the woman announced that she was there to discuss issues of personal safety and self-defense. She moved through a PowerPoint presentation, startling in its lack of emotion after all that had come before, showing slides with graphs about local crime statistics, lists on how to deter a would-be assailant and how to practice safe habits so that one didn’t end up a statistic like Sufia. Detective Cutler spoke with calm assurance, looking out into the darkened auditorium at the sea of blank, mostly white faces.

“This is not a time for terror,” she said, “but it is a time for caution. You can never be too cautious. And you can never have too much common sense. So use common sense, girls. And by that I mean, don’t go out after dark. Don’t tempt fate. Traveling in pairs is always best. But
do
call us if you see or hear anything that you think might be helpful to finding who did this to your classmate. Even if you’re not
sure
it’s suspicious, give us a call on the number you see up here on the screen. In fact, take a second to put this number in your phones right now. Every single one of you should have it.”

After Detective Cutler had finished her presentation, the school counselor, Lucy Grivois, got onstage to speak about grief counseling available to the students. Coming as she did after Cutler, her voice sounded thin and faded and uncertain. “Sometimes just indulging your grief is all you can do to move on to the next phase of healing,” she said, “and sometimes you just need someone to hold you. Sometimes you just need a shoulder to cry on. If anyone would like to come up on the stage, right now, we have hugs for you. We have hugs for all of you.” Two senior peer counselors flanked her, and upon mention of the “we,” the three of them moved away from the podium and waited at the side of the stage while the Madrigal Singers, their red robes flapping, reentered from the opposite side.
This has got to be a joke,
Vera thought.
Hugs for everyone? There is no way any teenage girl in her right mind is going to go up onstage for a hug.
Then the Madrigals began the first notes of a dreadful song—one that Vera recognized from a commercial about abused and neglected shelter animals—and as the song ramped up and the three counselors waited expectantly, the impossible happened. First, one girl—a red-faced girl sitting near the front, visibly crying—climbed up the stairs to the stage and stiffly placed herself in Lucy Grivois’s arms. Then another girl came up, and then another, until a few girls from every row had risen and formed a line at the foot of the stairs, waiting to hug out their grief.

It’s like watching the Jim Jones cult get up one by one to drink the Kool-Aid—no, the
Flavor Aid
,
Vera thought.
It was Flavor Aid that they actually drank.

Seeing so many of the girls seeming to relish their grief, waiting for their benediction, was too much to process. And for Vera, part of the problem was that it was all too familiar.

It brought her immediately back to the memorial service for Heidi Duplessis, which had been attended by hundreds of students from her high school. Attendance had, in fact, been mandatory for all the students at her school. Oh, the crying and the carrying-on there had been! The people embracing outside the church and sobbing outright! And worst of all, the people who laid a claim on Heidi, scrabbling to make any connection they could find with the dead girl.

She was my friend,
everyone said. Even those whom Heidi had never spoken to.

She said she liked my bracelet once.

She beat me in the eighth-grade Spelling Bee. I came in second. She deserved to win, though—I’m glad she beat me.

My brother used to play softball with her brother Kyle.

Anything for a connection. The students had milled about the reporters, hoping to be quoted for the paper or the evening news, while fourteen-year-old Vera had stood outside the church by herself and had found a reporter’s microphone in her face.
You look awfully sad,
the reporter had said.
Was Heidi a good personal friend of yours?

I didn’t know her,
Vera had replied.
And unlike everyone else, I’m not going to try to insert myself into the story and pretend that I did. People are acting like no one ever died before. But really, death is just a part of life.

That was the line that had gotten her in the most trouble when it appeared in the
Bond Brook Gazette
. It had never occurred to Vera that they would even consider printing it. It was not long after that the notebook in which she kept her private thoughts was stolen by Stephanie Lord, a popular girl from her homeroom, and the items she had written about Heidi became well known throughout the school. Once the notebook had been widely distributed, the phone calls came, and the threatening notes stuck in the vents of Vera’s locker. On one occasion she was even followed home in the dark. The resulting ambush, orchestrated by a particularly hard-bitten group of girls who had not been friends with Heidi but needed little encouragement to rough someone up, had been part of a night that Vera found hard to forget. Sometimes, when she was caught between a state of half sleeping and half waking, she could still hear their jeering, could still feel her face being pressed into the mud of her own front lawn, the sole of a sneaker braced against the back of her neck.

Did you kill Heidi? You wanted to, didn’t you, you crazy bitch?

And she could hear their fists pounding against the windows as they circled her house, still calling after Vera even after she’d broken free and locked herself inside.

Vera was shaky by the time the assembly was over. The students, faculty, and staff were shuffling their way out of the auditorium now, clogging the exits, and Vera saw Sue MacMasters and one of the junior English teachers coming toward her as she rose from her own seat.

“It was a beautiful tribute, wasn’t it, Vera? Oh, I can’t get over how sad it all is. But I think this was a really great idea for the girls, don’t you think? I
hope
it gave them some closure and some peace of mind.”

“I think it did, Sue,” Vera said. She wanted to be kind. Sue looked so beside herself, her eyes widened in what looked like genuine shock.

Vera had almost gotten out the side door when she felt a hand on her own shoulder, and she looked into the face of Detective Helen Cutler.

“How are you doing, Vera?”

“Doing?”

“You don’t remember.” The detective actually looked amused—an expression so out of place in this context that Vera felt the first pricklings of alarm.

“I was on the scene last Saturday morning. In the park. We talked for a while.”

Vera drew a quick intake of breath. “Oh. I remember you now.”

“I doubt that. You were pretty intoxicated.”

“No, I do remember.” Vera rooted around in her memory for something to substantiate this lie. “It was you and—Officer Babineau.”

“Gerry Babineau was one of the other ones who were there,” Cutler acknowledged, still looking bemused. Vera tried to tell herself that maybe this was just the permanent set of the woman’s lips. “You’re looking better now than you did then, I’ll say that much. Do you have some time to talk?”

“Right now?”

“Why not? Someplace quiet would be good.”

“The classroom I normally teach in at this time would be empty.” Vera looked around her to see if anyone was noticing the detective talking to her. Then she reprimanded herself for being so twitchy. “I can . . . I can show you the way.”

As they walked down the hall, Detective Cutler a little too close at her side, she said, “This is really just a follow-up.”

“Follow-up?

“Sure. It’s been a little over twenty-four hours since we talked to you in the park. Who knows—maybe you remember more now than you did then. Something you saw. Something you observed.”

“Oh,” Vera said, entering her classroom and limply settling into the nearest chair. Detective Cutler shut the classroom door behind her and grabbed a chair for herself from one of the tables, scraping it across the floor and positioning it opposite Vera. “I wish I
could
tell you more,” Vera said, “but honestly, I don’t have much to tell. Are you going to tape-record this?”

Cutler, eyebrow raised, took a notepad out of her pocket and tapped it with her pen. “This’ll do.”

Vera, holding her hands in her lap so the detective could not see them trembling, went over what little she remembered of the evening. She was embarrassed to tell her about the married man she had met in the bar—she could not even remember if she had shared this information previously—but she felt she should impart what few facts she could. “I was in the park, but I don’t know exactly why I was there,” she finished. “In fact, I don’t have any consciousness of being there until the moment I saw Sufia and realized who she was. Then I took out my phone and called you.”

“How many drinks did you have that night, Vera?”

“How many
drinks
? I don’t know. I don’t think it was all that many. Five? Maybe five mixed drinks?”

“Well, that’s progress,” the detective said, scribbling in her pad. “On Saturday morning you told us two. Do you get blackouts often when you drink five drinks?”

“Sometimes.”

“Take any medication? Prescription or otherwise?”

“I take a very low dose of an antidepressant. Fluoxetine—that’s generic Prozac.”

“A recent prescription?”

“Oh, no. I’ve been on it for years.”

“Probably shouldn’t be drinking at all then.”

“No,” Vera admitted miserably. “I probably shouldn’t.”

“Do you have any sense, looking back, on how much time passed between the moment you found Sufia under the tree and the time you called us?”

“Just seconds,” Vera said. “It was almost instantaneous. And then . . . well, they got there—you got there—very quickly.”

“Do you remember anything else you saw in the park, besides Sufia and the tree? Anything that looked out of place? Any sign that someone else was around?”

“No, nothing like that.”

“What about touching anything at the scene? Touching Sufia or any part of her clothing?”

“I’m positive I didn’t,” Vera said. “I was afraid. I kept some distance once I knew what I was looking at.”

“Do you know anyone who disliked Sufia Ahmed? Took some issue with her or her family?”