Maggie
The summer before, when Emma was helping her at the salon with ads and social media, Maggie, Chloe, and Emma had gotten into a discussion about mean girls. Maggie had told them about Beth Flaherty’s slumber party in high school, when she’d been tricked into putting a yogurt and honey mask on her face and then they’d whistled for Beth’s two large dogs, who came bounding down the stairs, jumping on her, licking frantically. She was certain they were going to bite her face off, and the screams she emitted would have brought anyone else’s parents running, but Beth’s parents were drunk at a block party. Maggie had never recovered her social status with a few of those girls, who ate yogurt in front of her tauntingly at the cafeteria for years. Then Chloe had talked about being the last girl to get her period in high school and her friends coming in to class wearing tampons as earrings and necklaces. And Emma had not been surprised or even appalled. She had calmly told them how Sloane Adams had created a fake Instagram account and pretended to be a boy flirting with a girl in their class who had Down syndrome. Set up a date and everything, then broke the girl’s heart and recorded it all on video.
“Okay, you win,” Chloe had said. “That’s some CIA-level shit right there.”
“You never told me about that,” Maggie had said, frowning.
“I’m telling you now,” Emma had replied.
That interaction encapsulated their relationship. Emma would always answer a question; Emma would always come clean. But it would be on her terms. It was like living with someone on time delay; Maggie never knew when her daughter would hold on to something or how long she’d choose to cling to it, enjoying the secret or processing its meaning before she casually tossed it to her mother. Maggie thought of that now as she looked around the table at these girls who barely knew her daughter. What were their motives? What were they capable of?
As the girls signed up and took stacks of posters and colorful thumbtacks, Maggie took a deep breath and approached Taylor.
“How nice of you to come,” she said evenly.
“Oh gosh, of course. Anything for Emma.”
“I assume you’ve already spoken to the police?”
“Well, I wasn’t much help. I haven’t seen her in days.”
“So let me get this straight—now that you’re upright and sober—you’d do anything for her but not worry that you hadn’t seen her for days?”
Taylor’s eyes narrowed so slightly that she probably thought Maggie wouldn’t notice. But Maggie was used to looking at women and girls, used to the micromovements they made in the mirror when they looked at their hair and tried to decide if they loved it or hated it or wanted to have Botox or liposuction. She was used to strangers not telling her the truth with anything but the tiny flickers of movement in their faces. Was that women’s intuition? Or just being a good hairdresser?
“Oh, Emma was always in and out,” Taylor said. “So busy. We never knew where she was.”
“Really?”
“Really,” she said and smiled.
Because that was the exact thing Emma had told Maggie about her roommates. That they were busy and didn’t spend much time in the dorm. But would saying that now, spitting it into Taylor’s face, betray her daughter? She thought so, so she said nothing. At the time, Emma’s comment had made Maggie happy. That her only child, used to quiet if not peace, had plenty of alone time to think and study. But now she wondered if she’d been foolish.
“So when she moved all her stuff out of Fiona’s room, that didn’t faze you?”
“Well, we figured she just needed her stuff. A girl needs her things, right?”
Taylor cocked her head jauntily, and the move was so obvious, so calculated, it made Maggie sure of one thing. Taylor was a terrible actress. She would never work in this town or any town, let alone New York or LA.
Maggie took the posters from Taylor’s hand. “We had plenty of volunteers show up before you,” she said. “But thank you anyway.” She didn’t want to waste the posters. She could practically picture Taylor walking around the corner and throwing them into recycling.
“Wait, what? But I want to help.”
“Oh, I think you’ve done enough already.”
Taylor took a deep breath, offered another fake smile, and left.
As Maggie worked her way around the room, handing out posters, thanking the girls, one of the girls asked her if she’d checked with health services.
“No, I don’t think so. Why?”
“Sometimes girls leave school abruptly because they’re having a health crisis.”
“A health crisis?”
“Yes. You know, a complicated problem or an embarrassing problem? Something they’re ashamed of, maybe? Related to health?”
Maggie offered her a tight smile. How many ways could this poor girl try to say something awful without saying it?
“I think she’d come to me with that,” Maggie replied.
“Maybe,” the girl shrugged. “But it’s worth asking. And she was—is—Catholic, right?”
“Yes,” Maggie said. “Yes, she is. And I’ll check, thank you.”
When they were finished, she called Kaplan and was surprised when he picked up the phone.
“I was just about to call you,” he said.
“Really? Why?”
“Well, you called me, so you go first.”
“I was wondering if you’d contacted the health center on campus.”
“I have,” he said.
“Oh,” she said.
“Sorry to take away the pleasure of you yelling at me.”
“Well, what did you find out?”
“Emma made an appointment last week but didn’t show up.”
“An appointment for what?”
“She didn’t say.”
“She didn’t say, or they wouldn’t tell you?”
“Judging from the intelligence of the person I spoke to, it’s hard to answer. But there are HIPAA laws protecting patients. So we don’t know if she needed a flu shot or a shrink.”
“She had a flu shot.”
“Okay.”
“So…why were you calling me?”
“We got partial handprints in Emma’s room that didn’t belong to one of the girls.”
“But that could mean anything, right? It could mean a party.”
“If there had been a party, there would have been multiple handprints and fingerprints. And the, uh, position of these prints would indicate an intimacy.”
“You’re talking in code,” Maggie said with a sigh.
“Above the bed,” he said simply.
“Oh.”
“They’re not in the database, though. And there was no DNA on any of the sheets.”
“So you have nothing,” she said simply.
“Spoken like a cop’s wife.”
“Widow.”
“Well, there is one thing,” he said.
“Which is?”
“The reason I called it a partial and not a full was that one of the fingerprints was missing.”
“And the other ones were there?”
“Yes. So we might be looking for someone with an amputated finger or a finger in a splint.”
Maggie’s breath caught in her throat. “What about a Band-Aid?” she asked.