“Yeah, I’m getting the idea,” I said.
“You’re not a local, I can tell.” Callum leaned back in his chair. “Fell attracts weird types. People who are a bit morbid. No offense.”
“None taken.” I gestured to the article on the table between us. “Viv Delaney was my aunt. My mother was her only sibling, and she’s dead now. I want to find out what happened, because she deserves some kind of justice. But nothing’s going the way I thought it would.”
He didn’t ask what that meant. He just nodded. “Okay, then. You’re not getting the full story on this microfiche. Let’s find some of the papers from 1982.”
• • •
Three hours later, Heather and I were sitting in our apartment, me on the sofa and her cross-legged on the floor. The coffee table was covered in printouts and photocopies, my spiral notebook sat open and scrawled in, and both of our laptops were open.
“This is a bonanza,” she said. “I’ve always done my true-crime stalking on the Internet. I guess the Fell archives room is the place to be.”
“I know.” I wrapped a blanket over my lap. Not all of the articles I’d pulled were about Viv; in fact, very few of them were. Her disappearance was a blip in the life of Fell, just another thing that happened in 1982. “Here’s what I don’t understand,” I said, picking up an article. Viv’s photo looked back at me from the page, a picture I hadn’t seen before. She was alone. Her shoulders were turned from the camera but she was looking back as if someone had called her name, her chin tilted down. The photo was slightly blurry, as if taken from a distance, but it was still clearly her. The other photos had been posed snapshots of Viv smiling, but in this picture her expression was serious, her mouth in a firm line, her brows slashes above her eyes, which were focused on something with deadly intensity. She wore a blue sweater with a handbag over her shoulder, and her bangs were flipped with a curling iron, her hair cut just above her shoulders. No matter how fuzzy the photo or how dated the hairstyle, Viv had been a pretty young woman. “The articles don’t mention a search for her. Literally nothing. It seems like the cops asked around, put a few articles in the paper, and didn’t try much else.”
“Maybe we should talk to cops,” Heather said. She held up a piece of paper. “This article quotes Edward Parey, chief of Fell PD. Let’s see if he’s still alive.”
“Do you think he would talk to us?” I asked her.
Heather shrugged as she typed. “Why not? We’re harmless. What does he think we’re going to do?”
“If he’s still alive, he’s probably retired. Maybe he doesn’t want to talk about old cases.”
“Or maybe he does. If I’d been chief of police, and I’d retired, I’d be bored out of my mind.” She clicked through a few pages. “Doesn’t look like he’s died. It would help if we knew someone who knew him, though.”
“Maybe Callum can help.”
Heather looked up at me, blank.
“The guy who helped me in the archives room today. I told you.”
“Oh, right. Another one of your men.”
I couldn’t help it; I laughed.
“Well, you have a lot of them,” Heather pointed out.
That made me laugh more. “I like that you don’t know how pathetic I am,” I told her. “I don’t think I talked to an actual, literal man in college. One of them might have spoken to me at a party and I nearly choked on my drink. Then I went home and read The Deathly Hallows again so I could tell myself that was why I was crying.”
“My God, we’re truly soul sisters,” Heather said. “Men are not my bailiwick.” At my carefully blank expression, she said, “Relax. Men are my bailiwick in theory. I just don’t like . . .” She moved her hands around, miming a bubble. “I don’t like anyone touching me. Anywhere, ever.”
“I get that,” I said.
“Carly, no one gets that. Not my parents, not boys, not shrinks. Not anyone.”
I thought again about the lineup of medications on our bathroom counter and said, “I do. Not wanting someone’s hands on you. I get it.”
There was a slow arc of seriousness for a long moment. She looked at me, and I could see she wanted to say something important. But in the end she didn’t, and she looked away with a small sigh.
And I wasn’t lying. I did get it. I thought about Callum MacRae, as nice as he was, and I got it. Then I thought about Nick Harkness, and my first thought was that I could picture wanting his hands on me. I could picture it easily, even though he’d never do it.
I smoothed the photocopied page in my lap and looked down at Viv again. At how alive and unrehearsed she was in this picture, like she was just going about her business instead of posing for a camera. And then it struck me that maybe she hadn’t even been aware this picture was taken. Like someone had taken it and she hadn’t seen.
I looked at the bottom of the picture and read: Photo by Marnie Mahoney.
Fell, New York
October 1982 VIV
Helen and Robert were at the Sun Down again. So was the green sedan that followed them. It was still there at seven in the morning; it had been there all night. It was raining and the sun was only a faint grayish tinge through the pour of water.
