Eva
I was almost out the door when the police showed up. They didn’t ask me to stay—which I found fascinating, relieving, and yet irritating—but of course I did. I wasn’t about to leave just as things were getting interesting!
Moments before, I’d just shrugged off Hillary’s nosy questions, told her that Miles was concerned about a wounded animal, fascinated by the fire, and wouldn’t come back when called, and I told her I didn’t want Morgan dragged into it. Rabies, distemper, wasting disease, blood, guts. It was an easy enough leap to make. She seemed satisfied with that, but I wasn’t, of course. I knew it was more complicated, that this was part of the story, the secret, that Hannah was keeping.
So I lied to one child in service of the other. These are the things mothers do, whether they admit it or not.
Morgan came down and apologized, which was really unnecessary, but it was so like Morgan to try to keep us all tethered and sane. Who would think that the youngest of us could prove to be the axis, the ground wire? That of all the combinations of DNA, Morgan’s would be the one we all revolved around?
Hillary made coffee, because police always want coffee, don’t they? But I saw the way they surveyed the foyer, living room, kitchen. I knew that a request for coffee just gave them more free time to look around, to notice, to ponder. Coffee was just a stalling tactic! It took quite a few minutes to brew coffee. Oh, the things you learn late in life. Never too late to be fooled. Never too late to come out on top either.
They asked me polite questions about having my family all living nearby, how long I’d been in the area, if I worked or volunteered. They weren’t writing anything down. They weren’t considering me a witness or a suspect or a useful nosy neighbor. No. They weren’t really even looking at me. I was just something to work around while they waited for the coffee and silently assessed the value of Hillary’s modern art, custom furniture, hand-blown glassware, and coffee mugs thrown by a potter in upstate New York. Everything in that house was distinctive and original, signed by someone. Whether you recognized the name or not, it didn’t matter. That the items were subtle and neutral, hardly overtly artsy, nothing like the funky colorful vases I’d collected from students at the Wayne Art Center, didn’t matter either. That wasn’t really the point.
Hillary told people she lived to support the arts in every form. But when I was feeling the most cynical, I thought it was because she couldn’t bear to have the same things other people had. She’d always shared with her sister growing up: mascara and a curling iron and even a hairbrush and one single oversize chenille robe. After all, they were never both in the shower at the same time, so why not? They’d almost shared a single personality when it served them. But now, she didn’t want to share with the world. She wanted to be different, to stand out, in her own way.
Finally, the coffee was ready and Morgan sent off to fold her laundry, the endless pile from camp that Hillary had threatened to throw away instead of wash. They had two washers and two dryers, but that didn’t mean anyone in that house enjoyed using them.
The two men sipped politely, and one took a macaron from the plate Hillary had set out. But really, why the pretense? Did the police have to sip coffee and eat snacks at every house on the street? Was investigating anything like trick-or-treating for detectives? Or were they lingering for a reason? Was there perhaps more to this than a fire?
At last, the tall one put his mug on the counter and got to the point. Video. They’d noticed cameras at the front door, aimed at the street, and were asking every neighbor with them to have a look.
“Because of the fire?” I asked.
“Because a body was found,” he said.
My hand flew up to my mouth when I heard the word body, but Hillary kept her cool.
I’d been with Hillary the evening the cameras had been installed; Morgan and I had taken turns posing on the front steps, pretending to be burglars, just to test it. It had been fun but surprising to see how spooky we both looked. Nothing looked innocent in the murky black-and-white of night vision, not even a little girl and an old lady. Especially an old lady.
Hillary explained politely that they could only watch in real time on her phone, that the footage wasn’t saved.
Oops. I suddenly had a deep interest in my nails and cuticles.
“There should be a thirty-day history saved to the cloud,” Carelli said. As if he was reading from a manual. As if he’d looked it up. As if people tried to weasel their way out of this every damned day, and he had it memorized.
Oh, how that term annoyed me—cloud. But I supposed, given how unreliable and fleeting it could be, there wasn’t really a better word.
“Is there?” Hillary replied quietly in an offhand tone. She glanced at me briefly, probably because I couldn’t help looking at her. We both knew that she knew about the saved history. We’d discussed it in detail with Morgan the night of the installation! We’d gone back an hour later and looked at ourselves at the front door and laughed. History. Cloud. Laughter. That night, they all mingled together as one.
Hillary logged on to her account and went back to the Saturday before Labor Day, the day the little girl had been reported missing. I looked over their shoulders, trying to be inconspicuous. Trying to be incurious. Three in the afternoon to midnight, they skipped through in fifteen-minute increments, the light changing ever so slightly frame to frame, like jump cuts. Streetlights, motion timer lights, one car’s headlights. One car they watched backward and forward until I was dizzy, determining color and make (BMW, gray or blue). It seemed odd to me that there was only one car, going in one direction, in nine hours of footage. It was the weekend! And yes, the weather had been bad, rainy, awful, but still. But they said nothing, and I knew better than to open my mouth and make a random comment.
They skipped through past midnight, 1:00 a.m., 2:00 a.m., nothing. All the way to morning.
Carelli sniffed loudly and rolled his head to one side, which made his neck crack. That’s how close we were all standing; I heard the sickening crack of the man’s bones.
“Sorry we couldn’t be more help,” Hillary said breezily, as if I was somehow part of the equation. “More coffee?” she offered.
“Maybe a splash,” Thompson said, and Hillary made that tight smile, the one that kept her from frowning. But I knew it was as good as a frown. She couldn’t keep that from me. She went to the pot, poured him more, then returned it to its base. She turned it off with a flourishing click, as if that was the end of that.
We watched him sip, and Carelli took another macaron, chewed. They said nothing; we said nothing. Hillary took a breath, trying to keep her annoyance in and failing.
“Aren’t they delicious macarons?” I said.
“So good,” Carelli said.
“I’m partial to the strawberry. You must have a long night ahead of you,” I added, trying to help the cause.
“Yes, you should take a few with you for fuel,” Hillary said. “I’ll wrap them for you now.”
“Before you do that,” Thompson said, “could we scroll back, please, to Friday afternoon and evening?”
Hillary blinked. She asked what the date would be, as if she couldn’t subtract one day from another. As if she couldn’t remember what date Saturday had been. As if she hadn’t been a math minor. As if she didn’t know that was the night before the girl went missing. She did as she was told.
I was slightly at an angle behind her; I could see the curve of her jaw, her cheekbone, lit by the harsh light of her screen. And there, at 8:00 p.m., a figure approaching the door. Frame by frame, in shadow. I kept waiting for the shadow to grow in height, but it didn’t. The size remained small, so small, as the girl with the blond hair stepped up on tiptoe to ring the doorbell. A dress, not a nightgown. White lanyard around her neck. The tiny holes of her missing teeth. It broke my heart, that incomplete set of teeth. That she hadn’t lived to know the joy of them growing back in. And then, the front door opening, closing, the light sweeping out and back. Ten minutes passing as they clicked through them, as if ten minutes were nothing. As if ten minutes couldn’t mean the world. Then, at last, footage of her leaving. Her small frame hopping down the steps as if she didn’t have a care in the world. We watched as she grew fuzzy, out of focus, blurred into the foreground of the yard until finally, she was erased into gray. I felt Hillary’s shoulders move down into her ribs, as if she was safe. But the tiny hairs on my arms stood upright, vibrating their antennae warning.
“Probably selling candy for camp or something,” Hillary said dismissively.
No one said her hands were empty. Or that it was awfully late for a six-year-old to be out.
The detectives didn’t look at each other or at her or at me. They just stared straight ahead at the screen.
“Camps are usually finished by now,” the taller one said quietly, but Hillary said nothing.
“When we didn’t answer, she probably came in and looked around. Kids. Curiosity.”
“And no one around here locks their doors,” I added sunnily, though I doubted it was true. Back in my day, certainly. But now? Why would someone go to the trouble of an elaborate alarm system with cameras and notifications and then not lock their doors?
“No internal cameras?”
“What? No.”
“No nanny cam?”
“No nanny or cam.”
“Had she ever been to your house before? If we download all your footage from this summer, would we see her?”
This shocked me. I felt like they were anticipating us, asking us basically if we would lie to them. Entrapment!
“I don’t believe so. I only know her in passing, waving to her mother in the yard.”
“We will need to understand your family’s whereabouts that night.”
“Morgan was at camp in Vermont,” she said quickly. “I believe we were en route to get her.”
“We?”
They looked at me, and my hands immediately, instinctively went up in protest. Don’t drag me into this, my body said with every molecule.
“Well, me and my friend Jane. Our kids were there together, so we drove up.”
“And she can corroborate this?”
“What?”
“Provide an alibi?”
I’ll admit these were upsetting turns of phrase. Corroborate. Alibi. They stopped me in my tracks, too. I thought of all the technology available to people now, these apps and cameras and devices worn flapping on people’s wrists. Someday, the police will not need lie detection tests; they’ll know our blood pressure, our heart rate rising and falling, while standing next to us.
“Yes, of course. Jane Tartan. She lives in Wayne.”
“And where was your husband?”
She thought a long time before she answered. As if there wasn’t an enormous family calendar in the kitchen screaming the answer to part of that question.
Camp pickup, color coded in pink.
Poker night, color coded in blue, for Ben.