“Was she in the game?” Margot thinks about Beverley’s theory that the killer might be using prostitutes. Well, she knows plenty of girls around Golden Point who had to resort to that to get by. Ray does, too.
“Folks won’t like you poking around.” He avoids the question.
“Was she?” Margot can’t help thinking of her mother blotting her lipstick in the mirror, heavy perfume in the air, the rush of the cold streaming in through the door as she stepped out into the darkness.
Ray considers for a while, stroking his glasses chain. “She may have done it on the side,” he relents, “but I heard she really was making a go of the modeling.”
Margot nods. She knew it. “Does she have family around here?”
“Her grandma Pearl owns the junk store on the corner,” Ray says eventually. “Less of a store, more of a shack. Posters in the window. You won’t miss it. But hey.” He fixes Margot’s eye, warns, “She’s just lost her granddaughter. Go easy.”
He’s already chopping powder by the time the door slams shut behind her. She leaves Duke tied up outside. Ray won’t mind. Duke looks like a watchdog, even if he acts like a poodle. She turns back when she is halfway down the next lot and sees the security guard bending to place a bowl of water beside the animal as he pats its head.
—
Ray was right.Diane’s face is plastered across the windows of the junk store. She is captured in multiple iterations of the same pose, with the same wide smile, the same dark bob sharp at the chin. She was beautiful—that’s clear—like someone you’d see on a TV talent show, in a sequined dress shining under studio lights.
Margot can relate to wanting to find your way out of the life, the situation, that you were born into. She herself had started out just like Diane. Her mother had tried, as best she could, to raise her well, but it was hard when she had no money, no electricity, no food. Margot had learned then that beauty, that appealing to men, was a means to better your situation. So she studied it. Studied how best to get a man’s attention. How best to manipulate those around you into believing you are something you are not. She had no qualms about acknowledging her own beauty. After all, she cannot take any credit for it. She did not select the genes that gave her this face; her body was a gift from her mother. It cannot be arrogant, surely, to admire the work of others. She became a master at convincing people that she deserved to be in the room, that she had a command of herself and her body. It made them want to be near her. It’s how she ended up meeting Stephen. Shenever would have found herself at the same party as someone like him had she not looked the way she looks, had she not held herself the way she holds herself—unapologetically on show, never doubting that women wanted to be her and men wanted to be with her. It was all an act, of course. A ruse. A lie honed from childhood. Diane, too, had been using her looks, to try to find her way out of life at Golden Point. And she was close, so very, very close, until everything was taken away from her.
Justice for Diane, the posters read, and Margot feels a stab of hatred for the newspaper editors, the news network producers, who have no doubt heard about Diane’s murder but didn’t deem it consumable for their audiences. Murder stories—or, rather, what makes agoodmurder story—so often hinge on the social standing of the victims. Like with the “Career Girls Murders,” the name slapped by the media on the murders of Emily Hoffert and Janice Wylie in Manhattan a couple of years ago. Janice, who worked as a researcher forNewsweek, was the daughter of an influential advertising exec. Schoolteacher Emily was the daughter of a high-powered surgeon. Their faces were splashed across the newspapers, highlighted on the evening news. White Working Women were under threat! The stories ran for weeks. This crime against Diane was just as brutal, the details just as appalling, yet one dominated the headlines while the other is being swept under the carpet.
Margot pushes on the door and a crude bell signals her entrance. In a corner, an elderly woman reclines, fingers pinching the bridge of her nose. The rest of the shop, Margot can see, is full to the roof with pots, pans, kitchen gadgets, all cracked and crumbling facets of life polished up and put on sale. The posters in the window are snatching all the light, so the space is gloomy, sprinkled with spiraling motes of dust.
“Lost?” the woman levels from the corner.
Margot resists the urge to smooth down her skirt, to plaster a smile across her face.
“You must be Mrs. Howard Murray.”
The woman rocks in the chair, then sighs. “I am she.”
“I’m Margot Green. I wanted to ask you about Diane.”
The woman’s eyes snap up. Margot can see, then, the jarring resemblance—the high cheekbones, the hazel eyes, a beauty passed down by blood. She imagines Pearl decades earlier, the same age as Diane, in front of a mirror, fixing her hair, fastening a necklace around her throat.
“Diane never did nothing wrong.”
Margot shakes her head quickly. “No.” She steps forward. “I’m trying to find out who might be responsible for what happened to her.”
“Who are you to care?” Pearl eyes Margot’s dress, her shoes, her jewelry. “Newspapers don’t care. Damn police don’t care.” She rocks back and forth in the chair.
“I grew up here,” Margot says. “I know what it’s like to come from a place like Golden Point.”
The woman watches her, shoulders rounding guardedly.
Margot continues, determined. “I want people to know about Diane. I think it’s possible she was killed by someone who has killed two other women already.”
“What?”
“Both young, like Diane. Beautiful.”
“You know who did this?” Pearl hauls herself from the seat, fists clenched beside her, and Margot can see the delicate bones showing through the skin.
“We don’t know who yet.”
The woman tuts, starts to turn away.
“But we’re trying to find a link between the girls. Maybe it was someone they all knew. Maybe there’s something connecting them that we’re not yet seeing.”
