Two Days After the Flight
When I woke, it was 6:30 a.m. and my mind was immediately filled with plans. I needed to start laying breadcrumbs that would lead the police to Trent.
I was just thinking about how to do that and I picked up Stephanie’s phone to see if she had any messages. There was a text from that guy Robert. When I opened it, the first thing I saw was a picture of a cat in a chair licking its paw. The text read:
Hi Mama, I miss you. I’ll see you tomorrow! Love Freddie (and your favorite cat-sitter)
Aha, so Robert was the cat-sitter she had told me about. Now what was my chess move? As I was pondering this, a second text came in from him:
Opened your package. It’s bigger than I thought. Lots of options and settings. I think you’ll love it. It will make you feel great. Would you like me to put it next to your bed?
What the heck did that mean? Did Steph order a vibrator and ask her friend to bring it in? That was the only thing I could think of. How scandalous! A news director!
Nibbling my fingers, I lay in bed thinking. What would be a natural first thing to say to a friend to buy myself some extra time and to set up Trent, and what to say about the vibrator my cat-sitter had just opened? Sitting up, I started crafting a text, then read it over several times:
Thanks for the pic! So cute. Hey—I know this is super unexpected but I met an amazing guy at the conference and I’m actually going back to his place with him! Can you watch Fred for a little longer? I’ll be back in touch to let you know when I’m returning. Thank you so much! And regarding the package, go ahead and put it in the bedroom. Maybe I won’t need it anymore now that I met this guy, ha ha! Thanks.
That sounded good. I was acknowledging the picture of Fred and acknowledging the vibrator, plus setting up that I had met a guy and gaining some extra time. Taking a deep breath, I hit send.
The text back from him was almost instantaneous.
Girlfriend, you call me right now. I want every detail.
Clearly I wasn’t going to call him, but nibbling my nails more, I thought of the pluses and minuses of responding to him again via text. I didn’t want to give away too many details just yet, didn’t want to engage much. Ten minutes passed and he wrote again.
Don’t you dare ignore me when you have news like that!
I kept ignoring it and went to take a shower. When I got out, I had missed a call from him and there was another text.
You can’t drop a bomb on me and then ghost, uh-uh, ain’t fair. Who is this guy?? Is he cute? Is he a news director? Does he have a nice tush? At least tell me his name and where he’s from.
Jesus, Robert, lighten up, I thought as I toweled off and rifled through the rest of Stephanie’s clothing in her closet. Today I was going for the long flowery dress. I still needed to look like her for a few days so that I could get to Western Union today and get through security to Atlanta tomorrow.
Continuing to ignore Robert, I used Steph’s makeup and perfume, put on her watch again and her jewelry, wore her clothes, carried her purse, packed everything else into her rolling carry-on carefully, stripped the bed as best I could to help the housekeeping staff, wiped down the bathroom for the same reason, and waited patiently until I knew the conference had started and everyone would be in the room hearing from speakers on topics that still confused me.
This was my time to slip out the side door again for a final time. I was never coming back here. I removed the DO NOT DISTURB sign from the outside handle and rehung it on the inside.
With all of Stephanie’s items, plus the few I had brought, in her bag, I rolled it down the hall to the staircase and walked down this time, the bag not heavy, getting to the lobby. Slipping out the side door, I went to the minivan and drove to Western Union a few miles away. After a short wait in line, I had only to present Stephanie’s photo ID and credit card and to know my password as an extra security measure, and I was handed $5,000 from each account, walking out with $15,000 in cash.
I wanted to be done with the minivan, so I took that back to the rental-car place and got an Uber back to my motel, asking the driver to stop for fast food so I could order some lunch. That way I didn’t need to go out again.
Shedding each part of the tools that got me to this point and advancing my plan felt great. Car gone, money here, dead body gone, evidence planted. I was doing well. Back at the motel, I counted all of my money: $18,000 from Steph’s accounts, plus some I still had from my job in Madison.
The bills looked great spread across the cheap, thin duvet of the motel bed. Eating tacos from Taco Bell, I thought about how I’d be enjoying real Mexican food soon. My eyes drifted to Steph’s phone. I noticed she had two more missed calls from Robert and remembered I had not returned his morning texts asking me for more information. It was probably time. Still acting like happy, in-love Stephanie, I wrote:
Hey! Sorry I didn’t get back to you. Really busy day here at the conference. He’s amazing. His name is Trent McCarthy and he’s from Atlanta. We really hit it off and I just need to roll with this. Can you give me a week? I’m going to go back to Atlanta with him. I’ll send you some pictures!
Pictures would be part of my paper trail for the police.
Well, aren’t you just the Queen of the Nile?! Of course I’ll take care of Fred. Have an amazing time and call me when Trent is out of earshot. I want to talk to you! Every. Single. Damn. Detail.
I didn’t respond. Instead, I picked up Steph’s phone and called United Airlines, asking to be on the same exact flight Trent was on. I still had it memorized from the paper in his hotel room.
“You’re lucky, just a couple of seats left,” she said. “That route fills fast.”
“I’ll take anything,” I responded. “My name is Stephanie Monroe, and I have my credit card right here.”
In no time at all, we had it booked. I leaned back in the bed and kicked my feet around in joy, stifling the urge to scream along with it. I was kicking ass and taking names.
The rest of the day and night I stayed in at the motel, not wanting to draw attention to myself. I had my money and had formulated my plan, but to be sure I didn’t make any missteps, I sketched it out on the motel paper using their pen. Both items felt cheaper in my hand than the versions at the hotel Stephanie had stayed at. There, the pen was heavy, the paper thick. It felt important when you were writing. Here, it was a Bic ballpoint that looked as if someone had chewed on the end of it, and it was missing its cap. The paper was of a thin, almost scratchy quality. Just another way the class system in America rewarded people like Stephanie, Trent, Allison, and Drake and cared little about people like me. The toilet paper was another example. It had been so soft and fluffy at the Hilton. Here I barely wanted to use it, it was so cheap.
Well, I would be jumping social classes soon, that was for sure. I tried to picture how people in Mexico would perceive me. I’d have nice clothes and jewelry and smell like Italian perfume. I smiled at the thought. It was my turn.
I made a list of Steph’s cell phone contacts—who I thought they were and how I was going to respond to each. For Robert, it was falling in love and going to Atlanta. For people at work, it was a more ambiguous “something came up”–type thing, as I thought running off with a guy might seem odd to them at first. For her son, it was simply going to be that I was extending my trip. That one gave me a pang. I knew what it was like not to have a mom in your life, but if he had one good parent around, he still was doing better than me. He’d get over it.
Then there was Raven. I needed help with something else from her, a new ID. I couldn’t cross the border as Stephanie. That would ruin the whole thing. Texting Raven again, I offered her an extra $1,000 to help me get a fake passport for Mexico.
When do you need it?
ASAP. It’s urgent.
Do you plan to come back to the US? Mexican authorities don’t look nearly as hard as US authorities. If it’s one way, I can do it. But it’ll cost you $2,000, not $1,000.
I paused before texting her back. This was a pivotal moment in my life. Would I ever return to the only country I had ever been in? Ever? The answer was clearly no. I would be much safer there, and I would just have to build a new life.
Never coming back
I felt the finality of those words as I hit send.
OK, then text me a photo of you against a wall that looks like a passport photo. It doesn’t matter what your hair looks like. I just need your face and I’ll have my buddy do some digital work. What kind of hair do you want?
My eyes went to the box of hair dye.
Black pixie cut. I’ll pay you in cash in person when I see you. Coming tomorrow.
I stood against a blank part of the wall of the motel, the paint on it a dullish gray, and snapped a selfie, then texted it to Raven, who gave a thumbs-up.
There was nothing much to do until the next day, so I spent a lot of time lying on the lumpy bed staring at the ceiling, which was painted a boring beige and covered in a texture that reminded me of mosquito bites. It occurred to me that I should be sure Glenn hadn’t gone public about my disappearance, so I called up the website for Stephanie’s TV station and scrolled around. No stories on me, thank goodness, but there were a lot of stupid videos about things like a baby giraffe at the zoo and the “World of Weddings” show at the expo center that weekend. Who created this kind of dumb stuff? Was it someone’s actual job to do so? Scrolling further, I came to the national news section, and a headline caught my eye: “AI Voice Cloning Gaining Popularity.”
This brought back a memory of something Anna had taught me.
“Check this out,” she said one night after closing, leaning her elbows on the long bar, a tray of empty beer bottles and dirty glasses next to her. “I recorded my mom’s voice and then put it into this software and it sounds just like her! It only cost me five bucks and was super easy.”
She hit play first on the original audio of her mom and then on the replica. In the original, her mom was talking about a recipe for casserole, but in the fake she was telling Anna how much she loved her.
“How did you get the fake voice to do that?” I asked.
“You can write whatever you want, and the voice will read it. It just needs to learn the voice first, then it can say anything, and I do mean anything.”
At the time, I had just laughed, thinking how weird it would be if I could get my own mother’s voice to say whatever I wanted. Maybe she could finally tell me she loved me, that she was sorry for the awful ways she had treated me. But that seemed too bizarre and ultimately unsatisfying, so I hadn’t thought much more about it until now.
Quickly I opened the article on the Channel 3 website and scanned it, taking in details. Another possible step in my plan began to formulate. Texting with Stephanie’s friends and family was one thing, but I could really fake them out if I could get her voice to leave them a voice memo.
Sitting up and googling Stephanie’s name, I hit “Videos,” and watched with joy as several popped up: her speaking at a Rotary Club banquet, her being on some panel at a university, even a video posted by her own station where she was reading a mission statement about how committed they were to local news.
That one was the winner, winner, chicken dinner. It had the best, cleanest audio and was about a minute and a half long. Anna had told me the sample needed to be at least one minute. I couldn’t remember the exact website Anna mentioned, but the article on Stephanie’s station’s page listed several, and I fished around until I found one that came with a free one-month trial.
Uploading Stephanie’s voice took just a few minutes, and afterward the site asked me to type in whatever I wanted the fake voice to say. I was thinking ahead to the various texts I planned to send Robert from Atlanta, to draw out that Steph was in love at first and later in harm’s way.
There would be one from Trent’s house, one or two from sightseeing, and one from Trent’s station. Voice cloning could be perfect for one of those. That would also be about the time I would be dropping the first hints that Trent wasn’t the super guy I had made him out to be, so I composed this into the software program for her voice to read:
“Last stop: Trent’s station! He’s the boss here and he’s very bossy with me—tells me exactly where we should go and what we should do and I just follow. Talk soon!”
Reading it over a few times, I was satisfied and hit “Create.” Within minutes, my clip was ready. My heart pounded as I hit play.
Holy crap, it sounded like Stephanie. I couldn’t believe it. I was giddy with possibilities now. Maybe she would even call 9-1-1 herself near the end of her time with Trent!
Speaking of Trent, it was time to plant the first seed with Anna too. I needed her to think that I had also met a wonderful new guy. Later that relationship would also take a dark turn, and I would be dead at his place too. For now, it was time to answer her original texts about whether I was OK. I picked up my phone.
Hey Anna—I’m more than OK. I met a great guy named Trent McCarthy. He makes me feel safe and beautiful. More details when I can!
OMG, Jasmine, that’s awesome. I’m so excited for you!
Perfect! I was a genius. Filled with adrenaline at my tremendous smarts, I stood up in the middle of the motel room and felt like dancing. Stephanie’s phone had Spotify, and I randomly picked a song.
The Temptations song “My Girl” started blasting out:… my girl, talking ’bout my girl … Yeeessss … What a good song. Flying around the motel room in ecstasy, I belted out the words. I wasn’t sure if the girl in the song was me or Stephanie, but either way, I felt more alive than I had been in years.