THE KITCHEN in which I’m sitting in Aurora, Illinois, is so quiet you can hear the refrigerator humming, the water dripping from the sink. Gretchen Swanson is a petite woman, with a slump to her shoulders and a lined face, a thick head of curly hair, Santa Claus white, combed neatly. Her eyes are scanning something off in the distance, out a window and over a quarter-acre backyard. I don’t know if she is pondering everything I’ve said to her or if she’s thinking about her daughter, who probably played back there on that now-dilapidated swing set, or swung in the tire that still hangs from the big oak tree.
The kitchen is lit brightly, but a dark pall hangs over everything here, as if something rotten has infested this once-vibrant house, coloring the egg-yellow walls a dingy beige, turning Gretchen’s warm radiance into a despairing reserve. I recall experiencing that sensation after Marta died, how obscene any object of beauty seemed. How dare something be luminous and pretty, I would think, in the midst of such pain and suffering. How dare those people walking down the street laugh and smile. How dare the sky be such a magnificent periwinkle blue.
I look back down at the kitchen table and jump at the sight of a large cockroach. It’s only after I’ve scooted back my chair that I realize it isn’t real; it’s just an ornamental piece, a porcelain figurine. Who would have a porcelain cockroach?
“Sorry,” says Gretchen. “We’ve had that thing for years. Joelle loved it. She…” Gretchen looks off into space again. “When she was a child, she heard that song, ‘La Cucaracha’? You know that song? La cucara-CHA, La cucara-CHA?”
“Sure, of course,” I say with a smile.
“Oh, she heard that on the radio one time when she was just a little one, maybe three or four years old. She started dancing and trying to snap her fingers along with the music. Her little blond curls were bouncing everywhere.” Gretchen allows a smile at the memory. “After that, my husband, Earl, always called her ‘my little cucaracha.’ When she was little, she couldn’t pronounce it. She’d say she was his little cuckoo-clock-ah.”
Gretchen grimaces at the thought, comforting and painful all at once. I stifle my own memories—hours after I received the news, my mother and I waiting for the flight to Phoenix, my mother drinking one Bloody Mary after another at the airport bar while our plane was delayed. All that time, I wondered if there had been some mistake, that infinitesimal possibility that some signal was crossed, that my sister was traveling somewhere overnight and had someone house-sitting for her, that the burned body in her house was not her, that we’d show up at her house in Peoria that night and Marta would walk up in some athletic outfit and backpack and say, What are you guys doing here? Did something happen?
I don’t dare move now, don’t so much as rattle the ice in the glass of lemonade sitting before me. Don’t so much as breathe.
Gretchen closes her eyes and gives a quiet shake of her head—the appropriate response, I came to learn, for such bereavement. It’s so overpowering, so incomprehensible, that trying to make any sense of it whatsoever is futile. You just shake your head and cry.
“All right, Emmy,” she says. I don’t even see her lips move.
I close my eyes, too, and say a quiet prayer. Then I push the paperwork in front of her and hand her a pen. I thank her with a long, warm hug that devolves into tears from both of us.
When I get outside, I click on my smartphone and call the assistant state’s attorney in DuPage County with whom I’ve made contact, a man named Feller.
“Joelle Swanson’s mother just consented to the exhumation,” I say, somewhat alarmed at the enthusiasm in my voice. I’ve been working this guy Feller for the last two days, finally extracting from him, at close of business yesterday, this promise: if you can get the mother to exhume, we’ll get our ME to autopsy her.
As soon as I end that call, I make another one, to a prosecutor in Champaign County, a woman named Lois Rose, who welcomes my call like she’d welcome a kidney stone.
“DuPage County is exhuming Joelle Swanson for an autopsy,” I say to her. “And your guy, Curtis Valentine, isn’t even in the ground yet.”
“Thanks to you, Emmy,” she reminds me. The Valentine family held a memorial service for Curtis in Champaign yesterday—closed casket, obviously—but, at my urging, agreed to hold off on the actual burial for a few days.
“C’mon, Lois. If they’re convinced enough in DuPage to unearth a body, why can’t you guys just move a body from a funeral home to a morgue?”
I pause, alarmed at my callous reference to a body. My sister was a body, too.
Lois Rose makes a noise on her end of the phone, a harsh exhale of air. “Did anyone ever tell you you’re persistent?”
“Once or twice, yes.”
“If I get our ME to do this autopsy, will you stop calling me?”
I actually laugh. And when the call is over, I pause at my rental car and squeeze my fists so tight I fear I might break a bone in my fingers.
“Finally,” I whisper.
Finally, an autopsy—two, in fact—to get the proof we need for the boys at the Hoover Building to give us a team, an army to hunt this monster.