Ellie followed the jab series with alternating hooks and uppercuts, then started to throw in front and roundhouse kicks, the appearance of Julia’s words still fresh in her visual cortex.
I understand why other kids would assume my life is easy. No one wants to hear a spoiled rich girl complain. I know some kids who would kill (maybe in some cases literally)
She had scratched out the parenthetical. It had probably been an attempt at humor, but she’d concluded correctly that it just didn’t belong there. She had tried to block the words out completely, but Ellie had been able to piece them together beneath the scratches.
I know some kids who would kill to have the “privileges” I know I have. But sometimes I wonder if maybe their lives aren’t actually better. Or at least more free. No one expects anything from a kid who has nothing.
I’m constantly being told how lucky I am, but the truth is, my so-called privileged life
Ellie felt her heart pound in her chest.
She could almost hear Julia’s thoughts as the girl held the tip of the pen above the page, trying to choose the right words to complete the sentence. That this life is harder than it seems. That this life can be challenging. That this life sucks. That this life- hurts.
Yes, Julia had settled upon that word. Maybe she had even recognized it was a little melodramatic. She hadn’t suffered from actual, physical pain or paralyzing depression. But she would have felt injured from the pressures of her life that no one wanted to hear about. And so what if she was melodramatic? She was sixteen years old, after all. Shouldn’t she be allowed to be a drama queen? Shouldn’t she be allowed to be a lot of the things other teenagers were permitted to be? And wasn’t that the purpose of the letter?
She pictured Julia writing the word she finally selected on the page: my so-called privileged life hurts.
It hurts to be told that I’m not allowed to waste my potential. It hurts to hear that more is expected of me because more has been given to me. It hurts to believe that I can never amount to the person I’m supposed to be. It hurts to feel so alone every second of every day, even when I’m surrounded by other people. And it hurts to know that I have all of these feelings but am not supposed to voice them.
Ellie could hear blood racing through her veins. Her damp hair was plastered against her scalp. Her arms and legs began to ache, but she kept working the leather of the bag.
Julia’s thoughts moved in errant directions a few more times as she wrote, requiring more scratch marks on the page, but the words were flowing more easily now. She would have felt her emotions pouring from her like the ink from the pen, like Ellie’s sweat from her pores.
And then the tear had fallen to the notepad, hitting the letter f in feelings, blurring the shape into an amorphous blob. And then words began to fail her. It was time to wrap things up.
And that is why I have decided to kill myself.
Ellie continued to kick the bag. No forced entry. No signs of a struggle. Cuts consistent with self-infliction-the bathwater and a 0.16 blood-alcohol content helping the blood flow. One bump on the back of her head, but Ginger at the medical examiner’s office thought it consistent with collapsing against the tub after Julia slit her wrists.
And then Ellie started hearing snippets of voices from throughout the day.
Katherine Whitmire pleading, “You have to do something. It’s my daughter.”
The EMT saying, “There’s nothing for us to do here.”
Max, wanting to say more, but leaving it at, “You’re okay with that?”
Rogan, saying they screwed up. “You really got to get yourself right on this one.” Even Jess, asking if she was all right.
And then she heard voices from her past. You just have to learn to let it go, Ellie. How many times had she heard that damn phrase over the years? As if she could just open her hands and release the fact that her father’s brains had been blasted out the back of his head by his own gun. As if she could simply set aside her own past like a discarded shopping bag.
Ellie threw a flying punch as she worked through her own thoughts.
When Ellie’s mother tried to explain that Jerry Hatcher would never kill himself, no one listened to her-not the Wichita Police Department, not the city attorney’s office that made the call on whether to release his pension, not the neighbors, no one-no one except Ellie. And look where that had gotten them.
So today, when Katherine Whitmire had implored her, “Please listen to me,” of course she hadn’t. Ellie had wanted to scream at her: “Take a lesson or two from the tale of Jerry Hatcher.”
But Ellie didn’t want to be that kind of cop. She didn’t want to be the person who joked around about the girl’s crappy mother, like those EMTs. She didn’t want to passively check off the boxes like the medical examiner she called Ginger. She didn’t want to be the cop who didn’t at least pause to ask why Julia Whitmire’s suicide note had been handwritten, not typed, and on a notepad that was nowhere to be found in her home.
Ellie didn’t want to be like everyone else.
Then, like she’d been sucker-punched in the head, Ellie realized what had really been nagging at her about that scene at the Whitmires’. She suddenly stopped pummeling the bag. She held her gloves to her chest and bent over while she caught her breath, favoring one side to forestall an oncoming cramp.
Rogan had a good point. She had to get herself right on this one.
PART II
Chapter Fifteen
As an investigator, Ellie firmly believed she was best at her job when she could live inside the heads of her victims. That kind of empathy hadn’t been as important to her when she was working property cases and vice busts. But coming up on two years of cases in the homicide squad, she knew that some little part of her would always be able to imagine what the final moments of each of those lost lives had been like for the victim.
Ellie liked to think she had a natural ability to imagine the life of another person. She’d grown up watching people. She noticed patterns. She read facial expressions. She had a good sense for what made people tick.
But, other than imagining what it must have been like to write that suicide note, Ellie was having a hard time inhabiting the world of Julia Whitmire.
She surely did remember the emotions that came with being a teenage girl. She also remembered the pressure to mold one’s body into perfection. You don’t become Miss Teen Kansas with all that baby fat.
And she knew what it was like to pine for the attention of a parent. She had idolized her father. He protected people. He was like a superhero in the battle between good and evil. She remembered playing on the basement floor in the makeshift office he had created, the walls decorated with photographs of the victims of the College Hill Strangler and a map filled with pins-red for known kills, yellows for suspected. Ellie would bounce her psychedelic- colored rubber ball and pick up jacks, offering questions and theories for her father as she played. Usually he shushed her, but the days when he’d actually talk through the case with her, despite her mother’s scolding that it “wasn’t right”? Those were Ellie’s most cherished memories of her father.
But, in too many ways, a life like Julia Whitmire’s was so completely unlike anything in her prior experience. From a three-bedroom wood-frame ranch house in Wichita, Kansas, Ellie could never have dreamed of having the independence that Julia Whitmire enjoyed. Once her dad was gone, to describe their family as middle class was overly generous. Ellie had never been east of Kansas City or west of Dallas until she followed her brother up to New York City.
She’d told herself at the time that the move was to allow the one responsible Hatcher child to keep an eye on the other, but in retrospect she knew she had hungered for a different life. As much as was missing in her life, though, she’d never been unhappy. And she’d definitely never been ungrateful.
She had no idea how to get into the mind of a girl like Julia. With the Whitmires’ money and the streets of New York waiting just outside her townhouse door, Julia already had a more sophisticated life than most people could ever imagine. And yet she was miserable.
