Reconstructing Amelia (6 page)

“I wouldn’t be so sure,” Gretchen said, her voice lifting into an I-told-you-so singsong. “In any case, I think it’s good progress. Forward momentum. A look on the bright side.”

Kate felt her stomach tighten. “Bright side?”

“Yes, Katherine, to this whole, terrible mess.”

“Mess?” As though Amelia’s memory were a thing that could be swept up and discarded into a trash can.

“You’ll get angry at me for saying this, but someone needs to.”

Gretchen could always render herself simultaneously the hero and martyr, even in situations that had nothing to do with her.

“Needs to say what?” Kate heard herself ask, even though she did not want to know.

“Amelia is gone, Katherine, and that is a horrific tragedy,” Gretchen said briskly. “But it’s also a fact of life. A life which, last I checked, you were still here living. Personally, I think it would be easier for you to move on if you took advantage of some of your newfound freedom.”

“Freedom?” The word came out sounding gummy.

“Come now, dear, don’t be deliberately obtuse,” Gretchen said. “
I
was a working mother, too, remember? I know the stress of being forever torn between work and home. Freedom from that, that’s what I mean. Who knows, maybe you’ll even have time to meet someone now. Stranger things have happened. You could start all over again. And Amelia would want that for you. She would want you to be happy.”

Kate’s heart was pounding in her ears. She could have imagined that in some small, dark corner of her mother’s heart, she would see Amelia’s death as a chance for Kate to get on the straight and narrow. But saying it out loud was monstrous, even for Gretchen. Kate was gripping the phone so hard she thought she might snap it in half.

“Mom?”

“Yes, dear?” Gretchen sounded so pleased with herself. Like having offered Kate this brutal insight had been a grand act of selfless charity. “Oh, wait, hold on.” There were some voices in the background on Gretchen’s end. “Lee just popped in. There’s a
Times
reporter on the other line for me. Apparently, I agreed to do some interview. I don’t even recall what this one’s about.” She laughed breezily. “In any case, what was it you were going to say?”

“Fuck you, Mom,” Kate said calmly. “That’s what I was going to say: fuck you.”

Kate placed her phone gently down into its cradle and stared at it. She kept waiting for the receiver to explode. It didn’t. Nothing happened. It was liberating, and oddly embarrassing, that it had taken her this long to stand up to Gretchen, to tell her mother how she really felt about anything. But she was done making people happy, behaving well, being polite. She was done being a good girl.

Kate exhaled in a long stream, her shoulders sagging forward. Her computer had finally started up, her e-mail in-box open in front of her. There were only a handful of new messages since she’d checked from home the evening before, far fewer than there would have been in the days before Amelia died. Now that Kate was back in the office, though, people would probably take that as an invitation to stop pulling punches. And a part of Kate was looking forward to getting swallowed by the grind of her job, even if it was a job that meant nothing to her anymore. Kate was still staring at her e-mail in-box when her cell phone alerted her that she had a text message.

“Here we go,” she muttered as she dug around in her bag.

Gretchen was never just going to take being told to fuck off.

Finally, Kate laid her hands on her phone and pulled it from her bag. She looked down at the message on the screen.

Amelia didn’t jump.

Kate snapped her eyes closed. No, that message hadn’t said what she thought it had. It wasn’t possible. Kate squeezed her eyes even tighter before finally opening them. But when she looked down at her phone again, the message was still there. A
MELIA DIDN’T JUMP
. She read it three times more, and yet the words remained the same. Kate’s heart was pounding as she rested her phone gently on the center of her desk. Then she rolled her chair slowly away so that she could stare at the phone from a safe distance.

Please
, was all she could think.
Please don’t do this to me. Please don’t torture me.

Why would someone play such a sick joke? And
who
? Kate had been too startled even to check whom the message was from. She was leaning over her desk, peering at her phone for the sender, when her office door opened. Kate bolted upright.

“What in the world?” Kate’s secretary, Beatrice, asked. She was staring at Kate as if she’d lost her mind. “I was about to call security when I saw your lights on. What are you doing here?”

“Beatrice, you scared me,” Kate panted, a hand to her chest.

“I can see
that
.” Beatrice looked Kate up and down with wide, disapproving eyes. Beatrice, a mother of six children, treated Kate and her other assigned lawyer as if they were her seventh and eighth. “I thought we’d agreed you’d take at least six more weeks working from home. Jeremy didn’t pull some of his oh-please, you’re-so-talented, you’re-the-only-one garbage, did he? Because I swear, I’ll—”

“Jeremy didn’t call me back in.” Kate shook her head. “I needed to get out of the house.”

“So you came here?” Beatrice asked. “Back to
work
?”

“I didn’t have anywhere else to go.” Kate glanced over at her phone. She thought for a second she might tell Beatrice about the message, but it felt premature. She was still hoping she’d imagined it.

“You had best keep your door closed,” Beatrice said. “Otherwise, these vultures will have your carcass picked clean by lunchtime.”

Beatrice’s face froze then, as though she wanted to stuff her inadvertent reference to death back into her mouth. Kate wanted to tell Beatrice not to worry, that it was okay. But all she could think about was that text.

Amelia didn’t jump.

It was especially cruel, given how long it had taken for Kate to accept that Amelia
had
killed herself. The notion that Amelia had been caught cheating—on an English paper, no less—was especially absurd. Detective Molina informing Kate that all the preliminary physical evidence pointed to Amelia’s having committed suicide hadn’t really convinced her otherwise, at least at first.

Instead, Kate had wanted someone to blame, and the school had been her primary candidate—a faulty lock on the roof, inadequate supervision, an inherently dangerous condition. Kate had also considered the possibility that Amelia had been pushed, but not very seriously. Someone wanting to hurt Amelia was almost as unbelievable as her wanting to hurt herself.

And Detective Molina had done his investigating—he’d searched Amelia’s room and talked to her teachers and friends; he’d checked her computer and her phone; he’d looked for signs of something that could have caused a fall, a dip in the roof surface, something that Amelia could have tripped on. He’d looked for evidence of a struggle, too. But there had been nothing, except the word
sorry
on the wall. A week later, Molina had called to inform Kate that the medical examiner had made the preliminary finding of suicide official. And that was that: Amelia had killed herself.

The whole thing had taken nine days. Nine days to be told that the daughter she had been best friends with, the daughter she had looked after and laughed with and loved, had been someone she hadn’t really known. That she’d been someone filled with a sadness so great it had taken her last breath and yet Kate had somehow missed all the signs.

They’d had a handy explanation for that, too: impulsive suicide. It happened more than anyone knew, or so said Dr. Lipton, the school psychologist from Grace Hall. People apparently routinely decided to kill themselves and then went ahead and did it all within hours. No giving away prized possessions, no suicide note like in the after-school specials of Kate’s youth. According to Dr. Lipton, Amelia’s getting caught cheating could easily have been the trigger, especially if she’d already been feeling emotionally overwhelmed by problems with a friend, a breakup, trouble at home. Just the ordinary stress of being a teenager could have been enough to set the stage. And Kate’s arguing otherwise only made her feel more responsible.

“You sure you should be here?” Beatrice asked. She sounded even more concerned now, probably because Kate had been sitting there, staring at the floor, for God knows how long. “You really don’t look okay.”

There was a knock on Kate’s office door before Beatrice could press her for an answer. Standing there in the doorway behind Beatrice was Jeremy. He was wearing a sharp navy suit and striped tie that set off his blue eyes. Kate hadn’t seen him since the funeral, but they’d talked a couple of times by phone, and Jeremy had sent several e-mails—brief, but flawlessly kind—checking in on her.

“Hi,” he said quietly, staying near the door.

“Hi,” Kate said, trying to pull herself together.

“You’re back.”

“I’m back.”

As they stared at each other, Kate could feel Beatrice watching them, looking from Jeremy to Kate then back to Jeremy. Kate knew Beatrice’s eyebrows were raised without even having to look at her. People talked about Jeremy and everything he did and everyone he did it with. They always had. Much was made of too many cases assigned here, too many dinners behind closed doors there. Some of it might have been true—parts definitely were—but most of it certainly wasn’t.

Kate’s phone vibrated again then, rattling loudly against her desk. A second message. Kate sucked in some air as she leaned tentatively to look at it.

Amelia didn’t jump. You know it and I know it.

Kate clamped a hand over her mouth and tried not to cry.

“Whoa, what’s the matter?” Jeremy asked, stepping inside the office.

He headed straight for her desk and picked up the phone. His brow was wrinkled as he looked down at the message.

“Who sent this?”

Getting the messages was bad enough. But Jeremy standing there, looking at Kate as if she was some kind of maimed animal? It was entirely too much.

“I have no idea,” Kate said, trying to swallow back her rising tears. “I got another one a couple of minutes ago. Someone trying to get their kicks, I guess.”

“Kicks? That doesn’t make any sense,” Jeremy said skeptically. “You don’t think there could be any truth to it, do you?”

“Truth? No, I don’t think so. The police—” Kate shook her head. Despite her efforts, tears had made their way into her eyes. She looked down at her desk, hoping no one would notice. The worst part was that its being an actual, legitimate message hadn’t even really occurred to her. Kate had assumed that it was just someone harassing her. “But I guess . . . I honestly don’t know.”

“Well, it’s a blocked number,” Jeremy said, looking back down at Kate’s phone. “At a minimum, we should find out who sent it.” He turned and held the phone out to Beatrice. “Would you mind taking Kate’s phone to Duncan in IT? I’m sure he can help us get a number for the person who sent it.”

“Good idea,” Beatrice said, snatching the phone from Jeremy and striding out the door. “Blocked number, my ass.”

Jeremy watched Beatrice leave, then looked down at the floor. Kate felt as if he was looking for a way to leave gracefully.

“Thanks for that. But I don’t want to hold you up, dealing with this. I’m sure it’s nothing, and anyway, aren’t you going to be late for court?” she asked, trying to let him off the hook. “Daniel told me about the subpoena getting quashed. Victor must be happy.”

“Victor, happy? I’m not sure I’d go that far,” Jeremy said finally, looking up at Kate. The morning sun coming in the windows behind her had turned his eyes a sad, watery blue. “For the record, I agreed with you about the Motion to Quash being pointless. You were giving your client sound advice. I thought pursuing it might even open us up to sanctions. But Daniel—” Jeremy shook his head and clenched his jaw. “You know how he is, like some kind of little yapping dog. He wore me down. But I said he’d have to pay any sanctions out of his own pocket. Looking forward to that possibility might have been the real reason I gave the go-ahead. That and we moved into the new apartment that same week. Exhaustion had left me vulnerable.”

Jeremy had never liked Daniel, starting back when he was a summer associate in the same class as Kate, buzzing around Jeremy like an insistent fly. Bald-faced ambition was not a quality Jeremy tolerated, probably because he was so very good at camouflaging his own. But his disdain of Daniel did seem to be about something more. What, Kate did not allow herself to contemplate too deeply. She could have been imagining it anyway. In any case, Daniel wasn’t going anywhere anytime soon. Jeremy’s personal opinions notwithstanding, Daniel was an exceptional lawyer, one of the best in the firm. And Jeremy liked winning more than he disliked Daniel.

“It seems to have turned out all right,” Kate said.

“The fact that it turned out okay doesn’t mean that challenging the subpoena was the prudent course. Good luck is not the same thing as wise counsel. And by the way, we’re going to lose today on appeal, no question. Why do you think I have Daniel arguing the second half of the brief?” Jeremy smiled, looking very pleased with himself. Then his face changed, turned serious again. “Listen, it may not be my place here even to ask—actually, it definitely isn’t. But with this message and everything, are you
sure
Amelia’s death was a suicide? I know they talked about that ‘note’ she supposedly left on that wall near where she fell. But it was really just
one
word, wasn’t it?”

“Yeah: ‘sorry.’ That was it. I kept telling the police that Amelia took writing and words so seriously. That if she’d left a suicide note, it would have been epic.” Kate shrugged, then shook her head. “But maybe I’m just deluding myself. The police certainly thought I was.”

“They confirmed that it’s her handwriting?” Jeremy asked.

Kate blinked at him. Such a simple, simple question. Why hadn’t she thought about getting the handwriting analyzed? She’d been so overwhelmed, upset, vulnerable. Alone. And Detective Molina had acted as if there was something wrong with her whenever she’d asked one too many questions. It was bad enough being the mother of a child who had killed herself. Being regarded as a mother in denial was just unbearable.