Maggie
They were lucky: the door to the suite was still open. Maggie didn’t know if it was ineptitude on the security guard’s part or if one of the other girls was home and just being very, very quiet, but she didn’t care. Down the hall, she’d noticed other girls streaming in and out of another door freely, no keys. Not everyone locked their doors. Why? Why had it been locked before and not now? That question would have to wait.
She was just glad that they didn’t have to get anyone else involved to get inside. They’d listened at the door before entering—two heads up against the wall—to the singular sound of an empty apartment. The hum of a refrigerator, the drip of a bathroom sink, the creaking of someone walking on the floor above. The sound of nothing, really, but the kind of sounds that had kept Maggie up for years. The sounds you could never get rid of, no matter where you lived or how well you insulated yourself or how much red wine you allowed yourself. (Two glasses, no more, except on holidays. Except when your daughter went to college and you missed her. Except when it was a Saturday.) Her sister said she’d sleep better if she stopped watching true crime shows at night, but Maggie thought they calmed her. It took her a few months to realize they made her feel closer to Frank, like the old days when he used to tell her everything about every case he worked.
Inside, it was clear from the row of open doors that no one was home yet. But those doors had all been closed earlier. The girls come and gone, clearly, perhaps waiting in another room. How had they missed them? Another party in their hallway? Or had they crept up the stairs at the end of the hall to avoid Maggie seeing them in the common room? Maggie imagined some kind of alert on an app, like Waze—Cop ahead. Parent on the side of the road. Seek alternate route.
Maggie thought back to move-in day, when she’d asked Taylor (who seemed the friendliest, the most reasonable of all the girls, not stiff and formal like Fiona, not ditzy like Annie) if she could have their phone numbers, in case of emergency. Emma had intervened, a look of horror on her face. “Mom,” she’d cautioned. A stop sign, a red light, in one word.
“It’s okay,” Taylor had answered, and Emma had said No, no, it wasn’t and stopped the transaction. Emma had turned to Taylor and said, “only child,” and Maggie had wanted to add, “only parent.” But embarrassing her daughter had not been part of the plan. She’d wanted her to be happy, to fit in. Not be the weird girl with the overprotective mother and dead father. And now, part of her regretted that decision, but she also knew that none of those girls would answer her call anyway. But would they answer Emma? She wasn’t sure.
In Emma and Fiona’s room, she heard a sudden peal of laughter from three floors below, on the sidewalk, and when Maggie glanced instinctively toward the window, she noticed it was open an inch.
“This wasn’t open before,” Maggie said.
“Huh. I think you’re right.”
“I know I am.” Maggie was, first and foremost, a mother. She’d come late to the role of wage earner and left early the role of wife—for even she would admit, long before her husband had died, she’d stopped being a wife, just dropped it off her resume, allowing it to fall from the to-do list forever. Mother was what she was and what she’d been good at. She could live forever on four hours’ sleep, hush a crying baby with a few swings of her arms, whip up cupcakes on short notice from just a few things in her pantry. She was smart enough to edit a term paper, calm enough to teach parallel parking, and she’d always known when she came home from a night out if someone had thrown a party in her absence. She’d notice the smallest thing wrong—the fireplace poker turned sideways, the bottle opener tossed into the wrong drawer, all the Crystal Light packets used up—and just know. Compared to those things, an open window was a big thing. A big thing a mother would notice.
She went to the window, looked down. She stood there watching the kids on the sidewalk, two boys and a girl, which was always trouble. The worst combination imaginable. If there was a third boy, there would be a chance of overruling each other. If there was a second girl, there would be a chance of getting away. Maggie stared at them as if she could will their motives to be pure. They laughed hysterically at something and swayed in that way that said drinking but not drunk. She didn’t recognize them; it was clear they were just out for a walk, just passing by, just stopping because one of them said something so funny, the other two almost wet their pants. They weren’t important, but suddenly, everything was important. The window was open, the sky was inky, people were laughing outside, and her daughter was missing. How did all these things fit together? Suddenly, there would always be an addendum, a phrase at the end of every thought, action, and piece of news. Da dum da dum da dum and my daughter is missing.
“Too high to jump,” Carla said.
The words didn’t calm Maggie; they put more ideas in her head. Jumping?
“I guess the roommate waited for us to leave, came home for a minute, and cracked the window.”
“To blow-dry her hair,” Maggie said. “To keep her cool.”
“Or to vape, more likely.”
“Girls blow-dry their hair a lot,” she said defensively.
“College kids vape a lot,” Carla said. “Take a look.” She pointed to a couple down on the sidewalk, passing something between them.
“Damn, I feel old,” Maggie said, and Carla smiled.
“The phone sounded like it was in the bureau,” Carla said. “Why don’t you look, so I can keep my job.”
Maggie opened the top drawer. Inside was a pile of bright lace thongs and bras that weren’t her daughter’s, couldn’t be her daughter’s—and underneath them was Emma’s white iPhone. She put it in her pocket and nodded her thanks to Carla.
She would take it somewhere private and put in Emma’s password, which she knew, she was sure, was KOALA, which was Frank’s nickname for her. He had always called her things that ended in an a like her name—Arugula, Calendula, Mozzarella, but Koala had started it all. It was one of those sweet things he did every so often that forced Maggie to think highly of him again. He seemed to know exactly when to employ that sweetness, and once Maggie finally noticed that, the manipulation, the ebb and flow of it, it made her angry all over again. It was Frank’s job to manipulate people, but Maggie had been so young when they’d met—just seventeen to his twenty—that she was sure he’d gotten all his practice cajoling her.
Still, the phone was a victory. She could at least start to put together a picture of what was happening—who might have summoned Emma, what they had said, when she last spoke to someone. All texts, group chats, always. The police would be yet another step behind, talking to a not-boyfriend, waiting for roommates who were likely not coming home anytime soon. On a night like this, you could wait for a group of girls, Maggie knew, for a long time. Past the party, the after-party, the drunken hookup, the fourth meal, the walk of shame. They could be here all night, waiting for girls who would be too drunk to even speak to them. And then what would they do? Was it even legal to read the Miranda rights to girls so drunk they couldn’t speak? Was waiting for the drunks a methodology, a technique? She tried to remember an episode of Dateline or a case with the steely Paula Zahn, who dug deep but with hair so soft and eyes so kind that the parents of dead children didn’t even feel the wound, that featured testimony from teenagers who were drunk or high. She couldn’t remember. But that was what was about to happen, and she was pretty sure Kaplan would use it as another excuse to delay.
Go get some sleep, grab some coffee, crack jokes with your coworkers, fill in your lieutenant who says something innocuous like “try again,” try again, fail again, rinse and repeat. Regular citizens wondered why police investigations took so much time, but Maggie knew exactly why. Cops moved on cop time, as if they were saving themselves, storing up their energy, for quick bursts of adrenaline, the pursuits, the chases, the takedowns. In between, you needed to conserve, or you’d burn out.
But Maggie was in a hurry. She didn’t need to save anything up for later; she would happily burn herself out over and over again. As they walked back to the common room, she noticed Carla glance at her watch.
“You don’t have to stay,” Maggie said.
Carla nodded. “I thought I’d maybe wait with you till Kaplan gets back.”
“There’s no need, really.”
“Will you be…okay?”
“I’ll be fine. I’ll just stay here, keep my eye out for the roommates.”
“You’re going to try calling from your daughter’s phone? That’s why you wanted it, right? To see if the roommates would answer her call instead of the RA’s?”
“It’s worth a try. I don’t think it’ll work, but still.”
Carla frowned a little, then nodded. Maggie could tell she didn’t know about teenage girls. How they didn’t listen to voicemail. How they didn’t answer their calls or texts unless someone exciting or important was guaranteed to be on the line. And she had a feeling, a terrible gut feeling, the roommates didn’t want to hear from Emma. That that was why her phone was in another girl’s bureau drawer, and everything else she owned was gone.
“You have Kaplan’s number, right?”
Maggie nodded.
“Well, here’s mine. Call me anytime if you want to talk. The police station in Ardmore is close to your house. And call Kaplan if the roommates show up, okay?”
“Okay,” Maggie said, but in her head, she was thinking, Maybe, maybe not.
She thanked her and waved goodbye and watched through the doorway as Carla pressed the button for the elevator, then got in. She counted to sixty, eighty, a hundred. Long enough for Carla to leave the building. Long enough for her to reach her squad car.
Then Maggie left the sticky, empty common room to wander the other hallways. Quiet now, no laughter or water running. She considered knocking on doors but knew the wrong move could get her thrown out. She also knew the girls she wanted to talk to weren’t the quiet ones. Still, something stuck in her mind. Why would bright girls leave the door unlocked? Unless they were going somewhere very, very close by?
She went out to the elevator, typed in Emma’s password. Koala17, just as she’d assumed. But she stared at the short list of contacts and the handful of apps. No Facebook, no Instagram, no email. What had happened to her daughter’s phone? There was only Uber, Lyft, Snapchat. She opened Uber. Emma’s last ride had been almost a week ago, to Center City. She opened Snapchat and was both relieved and disappointed to see a longer list of contacts, but all of them had coded names and bitmojis, and it was hard to imagine who was who. Still, she remembered another parent telling her about the Snap Map, that you could see the last place a person had chatted from, so she clicked on TayBae, which she guessed was Taylor. Her last location appeared to be on the same block as Hoden House or the one right next to it—Riordan—sent thirty minutes before.
Unlocked door. Roommate gone somewhere close. It added up to a party very, very nearby. But where? Which building? What floor? How many chances would she have to find it before someone realized someone’s mom was raiding all the parties? It was hard to tell. And in thirty minutes, any of the girls could have moved on to the next one.
She walked out into the lobby and flagged down the first scantily clad girl she saw.
“Hey, where’s the best party tonight?” She lowered her voice to a whisper. “I’ll buy the vodka.”