“So you’re a cop.” She nods, disgusted. “We already told you everything, and you did nothing.”
“I’m not a cop,” Margot assures her. “I’m someone who’s had her life ruined by someone dangerous, too. I want you to know that people are interested in your granddaughter, in what happened. Theydocare.”
The woman is silent, watching her as if weighing up whether Margot can be trusted.
“Diane was trying to make it as a model, right? Was she having any luck?”
The woman purses her lips, then reluctantly crosses the floor toward a desk pushed up against the wall.
“She was doing okay with it,” Pearl says as she strains to reach for something on the desktop. “She’d had meetings with a couple agencies, was doing cleaning work to make money, get straight again. Here.” She thrusts a pile of photographs toward Margot. Margot takes them and flicks through a series of headshots of Diane, a face that commands attention, one that seems as if it belongs to someone whose name you would one day know. There are some candid photographs, too: Diane in the sunshine, tongue bared as she’s about to lick a Popsicle; Diane in her cleaning company’s apron, a bold logo on her chest.
“I tried to show these to the police.” Pearl’s rheumy eyes meet Margot’s. “I wanted them to know she was a person, with a family and a life. All the press printed was a paragraph, made it sound like she’d accidentally stepped into the wrong alleyway and got herself killed.” Her eyes close. “It wasn’t like that.” Pearl’s voice grows more urgent. “He’d thought about it, that bastard—whoever it was that took her.”Her tone tightens. “There were things he did to her; they had to be planned. But the papers didn’t even talk about ’em.”
This she hadn’t expected. “Are you able to tell me about those things?” Margot feels her palms growing clammy. She thinks of Cheryl Herrera and the arrow, Emily Roswell’s tattooed knuckles.
Pearl eyes Margot cagily, then spits out, “He choked her.”
Margot can feel the vitriol, the scorch of anger, in the words. Another strangling.
“He dressed her. He…put a coat on her, some designer thing.”
A coat. He dressed her. Just like he dressed Cheryl Herrera in the wig.
“He put suspenders on her. Left her body to be seen like that. Put it on show for everyone, like she was some shop mannequin.” Pearl’s hand goes to her mouth.
Margot’s mind is reeling, searching for traction. She knows she should comfort the old woman, but she’s trying to order her own thoughts. Diane was strangled, the body dressed and posed. That’s more than enough to suggest that this is the work of the same killer. What else can the cops be looking for?
Pearl stands there, her body fragile, her face wracked with grief, with rage. Then Margot remembers something—something Barbie Cook mentioned at the party.
“She’d been writing letters, I heard—to a movie director, Mason Clarke.”
“To who?”
“Can I borrow these pictures?” Margot asks. “I’ll return them; I’ll bring them right back here to you. I promise you that.”
Pearl hesitates.
“I need to show someone Diane’s picture,” she coaxes. “I need to ask them some questions—if you’ll allow it. I think it could help us find her killer.” She searches Pearl’s face, the hollow cheeks, the soft, crepey skin of her neck. “I know what it’s like when no one will believethat what you say is true,” Margot says softly. “I know what it’s like to feel discarded. Please. Trust me.”
The woman closes her eyes for a moment, and then opens them. When they meet Margot’s, she sees something in them she recognizes—a steeliness, a warning.You’d better find out who did this,they say.
Pearl hands over the photos.
Five days missing
There are thingswe fear as women. Everyday, pedestrian things. Things that lift the hair on our necks, that stiffen our vertebrae, that ratchet our already heightened nervous systems to a state of alert.
Perhaps he sits an inch too close to us on a public bus. Perhaps we hear his footsteps behind us on a street that’s just a little underlit.
He might be that guy from work, the one who made an advance, the one we had to rebuff—maybe it pissed him off; maybe we denied him something he felt he was owed.
Maybe it’s missing the last train home. Or those several agonizing seconds it takes to get the key out of our purse on the front doorstep at night. Maybe it’s smiling in the wrong way at the figure on the street corner, sensing him watch you, eyes boring into your body, as you go.
It can be coming upon an intruder in our own homes—here for the television and the jewelry but deciding that while he’s here he might have something else, too.
It’s locating the door in every room.
It’s the sizing up of peers, of neighbors, of colleagues, of the guybehind the counter at the store, the one sitting a few seats away from you in an otherwise empty movie theater.
