XIII.
FIFTY VERY SWEATY minutes later, I’m standing across the street from the building where Sarah Reaves used to live. It’s a beautiful prewar brownstone with a forest-green awning and stone trim and wrought-iron balconies. Actually, all the buildings on her block look like that; I could be in a scene from an Edith Wharton novel. I peep in through a lit first-floor window. Burnished pots and pans hanging along the wall, stained walnut cabinets, acres of marble counter space. I bet somewhere inside there’s a custom-made dining table built out of reclaimed telephone poles and it costs more than a year of my rent. Everything is quiet, as if this street were hermetically sealed away from the interminable traffic roar of Third Avenue. I grew up less than ten miles from this spot, and if you had brought me here as a kid I would have asked you what country this was.
It’s only now, suffused in the discreet, undeniable wealth of my surroundings, that I think to ask: How the hell could Sarah have afforded to live here? Iris must have been helping her out with the rent. On top of subsidizing her Strobinex prescription and potentially her Columbia studies as well? Unless Sarah’s benefactor was Mister Misfortune. From what Jude said, Sarah was thinking of that man right until the end; it’s possible he remained in her life in some residual form. Whoever it was, that person would know, obviously, that Sarah was on Strobinex.
I hit doorbells at random until someone buzzes me in, probably mistaking me for their food delivery. The inside of the building is old but well maintained. Sarah’s apartment is—technically was—unit 3A. There are four apartments to a floor: 3A forms a right angle with 3B and faces 3D across the landing. On the wall above me, a security camera. Excellent.
3B’s door is decorated with stickers of bats and ghosts and pumpkins, and also a magnificently abstract frenzy of a crayon drawing that could be the work of a very young child or any number of artists in the Bushwick galleries Max drags me to. The doors of 3C and 3D are both bare. A pair of women’s rain boots sit slouched outside 3D; they look like something Coraline might wear. I channel Inspector Yuan, stroke my chin, and then ring the bell for 3B.
A woman opens the door. “Can I help you?” she asks, her tone calibrated to polite doubt. She’s in her late thirties and has the plump, rosy look of an Alpine milkmaid, albeit a harried one. I can hear the high-pitched glee of a children’s cartoon through the doorway.
“I hope this isn’t a bad time,” I say. “I was wondering if I could talk to you about Sarah Reaves.”
Her face puckers like I pressed a suction cup to her skin and pulled it away, and I know that she’s the one who noticed Sarah was no longer around. “I’m sorry,” she says, “who are you?”
“I’m a friend of Sarah’s,” I say. “I was.”
She blinks at me. I focus on beaming forth my petite, soft-spoken Asian femaleness, someone who could not possibly be a threat in any way. “Why would you want to talk to us?” she says.
I explain that I’ve been trying to understand what happened, why Sarah would take her own life like that, and I heard that Sarah’s neighbors were the ones who found her, so to speak. “I talked to her sister as well,” I add, “but she doesn’t really want to say much about it.”
A man calls from inside the apartment: “Mel, who is it?”
She glances over her shoulder, then back at me, and I can feel that something has changed. The mention of Iris. “I’m not sure how much we can tell you,” she says. “We’re in the middle of dinner.” And then, like she’s resigned herself to this outcome, “Do you want to come in?”
According to my mother it’s a sign of good manners to refuse an offer twice before you accept, but who has time for that? “Thanks!” I say.
The woman, Melanie, introduces me to her husband, Doug, and their son, Brandon. Middle of dinner turns out to mean Brandon goggling at the iPad propped up on the table before him while his parents, one crouched on either side, take turns trying to sneak spoonfuls of mush into his mouth. “This is the only way he will eat,” says Melanie, sounding vaguely apologetic.
“Gotta do what you gotta do,” I say, although I’m judging them for letting their child glaze into a screen zombie.
“That’s what I always say,” says Doug, right as Brandon flings up his fat little arm in excitement at something in his cartoon and whacks the spoon out of his father’s hand.
Melanie confirms she was the neighbor who called the police, and I indulge in a flush of detective pride. I’d figured that the Good Samaritan would be someone who, like Sarah herself, was around during the day, and the mother of a young child seemed like a promising option. “I should say I didn’t know her too well,” she says. “It’s just that we were on the same schedule and after a while we started talking.” Most mornings, Sarah would be heading out for her yoga class right as Melanie was bringing Brandon to his enrichment activity of the day. Sarah’s yoga studio lay in the same direction as Brandon’s music school and kids’ gymnasium, and they often walked the three or four blocks together.
Across the table from me, Brandon is making mewing noises at the screen. Poor kid can’t even talk properly and he’s busier than a CEO.
I ask if Melanie noticed any changes in Sarah in the last months before her death. She tells me that, if anything, Sarah seemed happier. “The new medication she was taking for her migraines was really helping.” Melanie stops, possibly remembering that this awesome new drug was what Sarah overdosed on. “Plus she was dating again, and it was going well.”
“She told you that? About dating?”
“A few times. She said it was really working out for her.”
I say, “Her sister told me she killed herself because she was still upset over a breakup.”
Melanie glances at her husband, who is crouched on his knees with a roll of paper towels and a spray bottle of one of those useless all-natural cleaners; the spoon that Brandon smacked away had spattered a wide arc of mush across the floor. “Well,” she says, “her sister would know better. Sarah never talked about specific relationships with me.”
So much for finding out more about Mister Misfortune from Melanie. “Have you met her, Sarah’s sister? Iris?”
Only after Sarah died: Iris introduced herself and thanked Melanie for her help. Since then, Iris has been coming over on the weekends to pack up the apartment and both Melanie and Doug have spoken to her. “She’s nice,” says Melanie.
Doug heaves himself to his feet. “She’s competent.”
I wasn’t sure how Melanie would feel about discussing the day Sarah’s death was discovered, but she talks like she’s been making the rounds with this story at dinner parties. I can’t blame her: I would certainly listen. Unfortunately her observations tend to focus on her own deeply traumatized emotional state and a generalized impression of noisy, urgent activity that sounds like the find-the-body scene in every police procedural I’ve seen.
“To think,” says Melanie, “I almost didn’t call.” The way she says that makes me suspect she and her husband might have disagreed on whether she should. “I was afraid I was just overreacting and the police and ambulance and everyone would show up and everything would be fine. Although of course that would still have been a better outcome than…what actually happened.”
A neat lead-in to my next question, about timing, because it seems excessively neighborly for Melanie to have started worrying about Sarah after only a few days, especially if they weren’t close. “Overreacting to what?”
“Well,” she says, “some of Sarah’s migraines could be pretty bad. I thought she might have fallen or injured herself somehow. Especially after I tried knocking a couple of times.”
Plausible, except that she was also just telling me how well Strobinex was working for Sarah. I wait. She glances at her husband again. “And about a week before that we heard her arguing with someone.”
Aha. “In her apartment?”
Melanie says, with that same apologetic tilt in her voice as when she told me about Brandon’s need for entertainment during mealtime, “The walls are thin.”
“They were fucking loud,” says Doug. “Sarah was, anyway.”
Melanie says she and Doug couldn’t make out what the argument was about, but Sarah sounded extremely upset. “At one point I think she even said something like, Wouldn’t it be better for you if I just killed myself?”
“She was hysterical,” says Doug. “And her sister was totally calm. It was bizarre.”
My heart donkey-kicks the wall of my chest. “Sarah was arguing with her sister?”
“We think,” says Melanie.
“It’s the same woman,” her husband says to her. “No doubt about it.” He tells me that he recognized Iris’s voice the first time he spoke to her.
“Did you tell the police?” I ask.
“I told them what we overheard,” says Melanie. “At the time I didn’t know that was Iris, though. I hadn’t met her yet.”
Doug says, “Wouldn’t have made a difference to them anyway. A suicide is a suicide.”
Melanie says to me, “They were in and out so quickly. I guess it was obvious, what happened.”
Doug says, “Our super told me the cops looked at the security footage, and the only person who knocked on Sarah’s door in the last three days before she died was a takeout delivery guy.”
So much for that. I wonder what Iris and Sarah were arguing about. If my theory about Sarah’s story—the matchmakers, Murkstone Banderby, some corporate caper—is correct, maybe Iris asked Sarah to stop investigating and Sarah said hell no. Given Sarah’s readiness to co-opt her sister’s identity for her own purposes, I doubt she would have held back because such a story would implicate Iris. In fact, that might have incentivized her. What if Iris then goaded Sarah into her suicide declaration, knowing her neighbors would overhear and present that to the police as evidence of suicide? Or saw an opportunity to commit the crime after Sarah made that statement? And, of course, Iris would be too smart to let herself be caught on the security camera. Anyone who could disguise a murder as convincingly as our killer has would be.
I thank Melanie and Doug, wave farewell in Brandon’s direction—his mother tries to make him say goodbye, but he spontaneously combusts when she puts his cartoon on pause—and head back down the stairs.
I have to say I always considered it a cop-out (pun semi-intended) in the Inspector Yuan novels how everyone chatters away at the inspector whenever he and Constable Zhang come around inquiring about the latest mysterious death. It’s a lazy way to get important bits of information to the detective and the reader: have someone tell them about the turbulent relationship the victim had with his youngest son, or about the overheard muttering between the couple by the lake on how best to drown someone. But now I’m thinking maybe people really do just want to talk about death. How close it got to them, and how, this time, it moseyed on by.
On the second-floor landing I take off my shoes and then tiptoe back up. I noticed when Melanie opened the door that its latch was the slanted type you can lever open if you manage to get a credit card in between the edge of the door and the strike plate. Most people would bolt that kind of door as well. If it’s an apartment that you don’t live in and are just clearing out, though, maybe you don’t think to take the extra step.
I haven’t done this in years—my Bad Influence Friend, Helena, and I used to break into her neighbors’ apartments and move stuff around to mess with their minds (god, we could be such mini-assholes)—and now I can’t seem to slide the card in far enough. I start to worry that Melanie or Doug will hear something and come out, which just makes my efforts more inept. I pull out the card, take a breath, remind myself that toddler feeding is a highly immersive activity, reinsert my card into the gap between the door edge and the frame, close my eyes. Bend and wiggle, as Helena used to say. Bend and wiggle. I feel something give and the door clicks open.
Sarah Reaves’s apartment gives off the vibe of a small studio, five hundred square feet max, browbeaten into posing as a one-bedroom. I guess that’s prime Manhattan for you. At least there’s a row of windows overlooking the street, even if the blinds are scuffed and grayish like they used to be white a very long time ago. The walls are bare, but I can see, in the patchiness of the paint, the shapes of what used to hang upon them. Sarah must have been living here for a while. That, and the fact that Iris seems to have left all the furniture in place for now—Ikea classics mixed in with thrift store finds—makes me feel like Sarah Reaves is a scent that hasn’t been fully aired out of a room.
I do an initial reconnaissance of the space, except all I’m seeing are the various places in the apartment where Sarah could have died. An overdose of Strobinex kills you by inhibiting your body’s heat-production capabilities, in effect inducing hypothermia. And thanks to my clicking down an Internet rabbit hole while researching this, I’ve learned a few fun facts about what victims in the final stages of hypothermia do. Terminal burrowing, for one: crawling into small enclosed spaces. Like here, between the back of the couch and the radiator, maybe. Or somewhere in the bedroom—apparently people like to get under beds and in or behind wardrobes. Sarah might have been naked, too, or close to it. Another weird behavior, the brain like an embattled general who loses it as his siege walls continue to crumble, is paradoxical undressing, which is exactly what it sounds like.
Back in the living room I give myself a full-body shake, demon-exorcism style. Okay. I’ll do what I came here to do and then get the hell out.
Unfortunately it looks like Iris has already been through most of the apartment. All the shelves and cabinets and counters are empty, and taped-up cardboard boxes have been stacked neatly by the front door. Crap, I might already be too late. There’s still the bedroom, but from what I saw when I peeked through the doorway, all Iris was doing in there was sorting through Sarah’s clothes.
I go in anyway so I can say I checked it out. The room is just large enough to fit a double bed and a bedside table and a wardrobe in the corner. The bedsheets have been stripped and clothes laid out across the mattress, sorted by type: coats and jackets, sweaters and cardigans, pants, dresses, skirts. Enough articles of clothing here to outfit a troupe of runaway nuns, and there are more in the wardrobe, along with a mosh pit of shoes. Sarah Reaves wore the same ensemble to all three of our meetings: dark pantsuit, cream blouse, black heels. Her interview getup, probably. It looks like her true fashion style, like her tastes in furniture, tended toward bright colors, thrift shops, and affordable mass-market brands.
I glance across the piles of clothes and I see—really? yes, really!—the silver matte rectangle of a laptop on the bedside table, next to a vintage banker’s lamp. I didn’t recognize it at first because it’s partially obscured by something—a picture frame, looks like—lying flat on top of it. For an instant I feel as psyched as the day of my twelfth birthday, when I decoded the cipher in the missing chemist’s notebook to learn the identity of her kidnappers.
But no, it’s not going to be that easy. If Iris was searching for something that Sarah had written or her notes for the story, Sarah’s laptop would be ground zero. Iris would already have removed all the relevant information that was on it. Unless Sarah concealed things too well.
I take a picture so I can be sure to put things back exactly the way they are, and then I pick up the photograph. It’s of the Lettriste-Reaves family unit, back when its members looked delighted to be standing shoulder to shoulder in front of an uninspiring rock formation. Iris and Sarah bookend their parents. Iris is beside their mother, a fair, broad-hipped woman. Sarah leans into their father, who’s one of those otherwise-thin men with a belly. I stare at their small, splotchy faces for a few minutes, willing a grand revelation to rise up at me like one of those 3-D images coalescing from a picture of dots. All that happens is that I feel my chest crumple. They’re such soft, sun-dappled teenagers, the two girls in this picture, so clueless the way we all are about what kind of crap the world is going to dump on us.
I perch myself on the edge of the bed and power up the laptop. No password required, which conforms with the average home computer user’s laziness but, admittedly, not the notion that this is a receptacle for secrets someone would kill to keep.
I take care of the most obvious possibility first: I search for any files that could be related to articles Sarah was working on about the matching industry. The closest I get is a subfolder titled Stories—Relationships with a number of Word documents in it. I open them up one by one. They each contain one or two questions of the brainstorming-session category. DNA compatibility—would that affect free will? Implications of renting/sharing economy—polyamory? communal? more transactional? all of the above?
And: Dangers of matchmakers’ algorithms—emperor has no clothes? or self-fulfilling prophecy? or we lose something important in having all the work done for us?
The file was created in May and last modified in July, before Sarah came to see us. Before, even, she met Charretter.
Here I pause. It’s not unexpected that there would be nothing more substantial; Iris would have deleted it. What’s unexpected, though, is that Iris didn’t delete this as well but left it coded into the laptop’s hard drive, a marker of Journalist Sarah’s interest in the topic.
I open up the web browser’s history and scroll into the past. What was Sarah looking at in the few weeks before she died?
People’s matching profiles. Mostly on Soulmate but also on a few smaller platforms like Swipe Yes and Kismet. I try clicking on a couple of the links but am told I’ve been logged out due to inactivity.
Thesaurus.com. Words such as privacy (synonyms: solitude, secrecy, concealment, confidentiality), predict (synonyms: anticipate, envision, forecast, conclude), taste (synonyms: inclination, preference, appetite, desire), avatar (synonyms: archetype, apotheosis, personification, symbol).
Entries from the Romantick blog. One year ago: Soulmate covering up a massive data breach affecting more than a million subscribers; mainstream media and authorities bribed to look the other way. Seven months ago: A-List, one of the most elitist invitation-only matchmakers, selling customer data to Russian and Chinese secret services for blackmail purposes. Three months ago: Big Three matchmakers populating their own platforms with fake profiles to inflate subscriber counts. Seven weeks ago: federal government secretly funding matchmakers to conduct sociological experiments.
Menus on Caviar: a disposition toward Thai and sushi.
Serenity Yoga’s weekly schedule.
The log-in page of a website called Dispatch.
Gmail: two accounts, with the usernames ilettriste and sarah.e.reaves. Emails to ilettriste have subject lines such as Hello or Your Profile—correspondence with her matches, I’m guessing. I try clicking on those as well but get the same logged-out message. Emails to sarah.e.reaves are largely about upcoming yoga workshops and bill payments.
I scroll further back, to early September, before Sarah Reaves came to Veracity for her intake session. Google search terms such as Veracity LLC, Veracity matching, Veracity detective agency, Komla Atsina. Looks like Sarah was trying to learn more about Veracity, and no doubt striking out.
Now I move forward in time, to the period between Sarah Reaves’s death and the present. Upper East Side real estate sale and rental listings. Recipes of the one-pot or one-pan variety. TV show reviews. The National Institute of Mental Health’s suicide prevention page. Housing Works’s listing of its locations in Manhattan. The occasional piece from the Wall Street Journal’s business and finance section.
I shut down the laptop. Nothing in Sarah’s browsing history about Murkstone Banderby or the matchmakers, Romantick conspiracy theories aside. Nothing suspicious in Iris’s browsing history for someone left to deal with the material and emotional aftermath of a family member’s suicide. A few musings on a potential topic for an article, consistent with Iris’s view that Sarah had plenty of story ideas that she failed to follow through on.
I turn off the bedroom lights and go back out into the living room. Occam’s razor. No explosive investigation into the matchmakers, no carefully planned sororicide.
But the fact remains: Iris Lettriste lied and lied again. Why?
And right then, like I called aloud to her and she’s answering, I hear, muffled but unmistakable: “—take a look and let me know what you think.”
My surroundings zoom back into focus around me like I’ve crash-landed onto the scene. More noises, vibrating in from the other side of the front door. A different voice, all smooth deep notes, and the metallic jangle of keys.
Oh, shit.
The lock clicks. Okay. What would Inspector Yuan do?