The Drowning Girls (15 page)

I saw that her head was cocked, as if she were listening to all the things I wasn’t saying. “Well,” she said, “are you going to tell me?”

I took a sip of coffee and cleared my throat. “Tell you what?”

“Oh, honey,” she said, with the voice that could always make me melt, even at thirty-four. “Aren’t you going to tell me what’s wrong?”

“What do you mean? There’s nothing...” But my voice cracked, and I set down the mug with a clank. Of course there was. Since we’d moved to The Palms, everything had been sliding away, the ground continually shifting beneath my feet.

She wiped her hands on the dish towel hanging from the oven door and came to me, touching my forearms first and working her way up, until her thumbs were tracing over my cheeks, gently tapping away my tears.

* * *

Our flight was delayed on its return, and it had taken a while for our suitcases to come tumbling down the baggage claim, so it was dark when Danielle and I pulled up to the entrance of The Palms on Friday. After the coziness of real life with my mom, The Palms felt impersonal as a movie set. Beyond the giant security gates, there was hardly a leaf on a front lawn or a weed that dared to poke itself through the mulch in a flower bed.

Maybe because The Palms always looked perfect, it was easy to spot the fliers affixed to the lampposts, their edges fluttering, like one of those “What’s Wrong?” picture pairs Danielle and I used to look at together on the back of
Highlights for Children.
I knew the HOA had a rule about posting fliers, like they did about lemonade stands and garage sales and inflatable Santas.

“Grab one of those for me,” I said, pulling in front of the Browerses’ house.

Danielle unfastened her seat belt and hopped out. Down the street, I spotted Phil’s SUV in our driveway and felt the uneasiness return. In four days, we had exchanged a few texts, but only one phone call, made postfeast, while I was stuffed with turkey and buttery yams.
You can work it out
, Mom had told me, knowing only the barest of details.
Everything can be worked out when you love each other.

She almost had me convinced.

“Here,” Danielle said, handing me the flier as she got back into the car. “It’s that dog.”

MISSING

Virgil Zhang

Virgil is a three-year-old Bedlington Terrier, white, 18 pounds, with a recently groomed and trimmed coat.

He was last seen on Thanksgiving Day in our backyard at approximately 8:30 p.m.

$1,000 reward

The bottom half of the flier was dominated by a picture of Virgil, a fussy, expensive-looking animal, more lamb than dog, and four different contact numbers for the Zhangs. They had doted on Virgil, taking him for walks twice a day and to the groomer every other week.

“Maybe it got out the back,” Danielle said. The Zhangs’ house was another one on the fairway; a low fence separated their property from the golf course, same as ours. “It could be anywhere, poor thing.”

We parked in the driveway and hauled our suitcases up the path, using the front door. For a moment, sliding the key into the lock, it felt as if we were visitors, here with our luggage for a night at a colossal B and B.

Phil was on the couch in the den, a few empty beers on the coffee table in front of him, an open bag of chips. I recognized Marlon Brando as Don Corleone on the TV, paused midsentence. Phil was wearing the same sweatpants from earlier in the week, and his patchy beard suggested that he hadn’t shaved since then, either.

“Hey,” he said.

“Hey.” I bent over the back of the couch and planted a soft kiss on his cheek. And then I joined him, putting my feet up on the table in front of us, not caring if my shoes scuffed the finish. On the flight home, I imagined telling him every little detail of the trip—the expired cans I’d tossed from Mom’s pantry, the game of Trivial Pursuit we’d played, Danielle and me no match for Mom. It had been so long since we’d really talked, since we’d been the real Liz and the real Phil. I’d been packing my head with a mantra about new beginnings, about all great relationships being tested, about not throwing out the baby with the bathwater.

But we didn’t reach for each other. We didn’t talk about how much we’d missed each other or the minutiae that had filled our time apart. For a long time we said nothing, and then I commented, “It looks like Virgil Zhang got out.”

Phil took a sip of beer and said only, “That stupid dog.”

PHIL

I stayed behind over Thanksgiving, telling Liz that Parker-Lane wanted me to remain on-site for the installation of the cameras. This was true, although I’d been the one to suggest it to them in the first place. The main reason was that I needed a bit of time alone.

I made sure Liz and Danielle wouldn’t be coming back for something they’d forgotten, and then I got in my SUV and drove to San Francisco to meet with an attorney. I had a folder with the letter I’d written and revised, the flash drive with Kelsey’s emails and tucked away in the bottom of my old briefcase, a Ziploc bag with the underwear I’d rescued from the backyard the morning after my fight with Liz.

I had three appointments lined up, and I went from one to the next, telling my story. These were free consultations, but I had two thousand dollars in cash with me, filched from our slim savings account. If there was a bottom line to sign, I would sign it.

One cut me off with a raised hand and said he didn’t want anything to do with a case involving a minor and sexual harassment. Another looked from Kelsey’s thong to me, disgusted. He was probably ready to report me to CPS then and there. The third only cringed and commented that he was glad it wasn’t happening to him.

“What do you recommend that I do?” I asked.

“Are you serious about this? Go to the police. File a report.”

I shook my head. Did he think I hadn’t considered this a thousand times over? “She’ll deny it and claim that I’m the one harassing her.”

He looked thoughtful. “I have a buddy from law school who handled a case like this. Lives in Atlanta, though.”

I jotted down the buddy’s name and contact information, but tossed it into the trash on the way past the receptionist’s desk. Atlanta? That would never work.

* * *

At first, residents at The Palms were divided over the video cameras. Rich Sievert wondered if the feed could be hacked by the NSA, if the private comings and goings of residents would be a matter of public record. Myriam wanted to know who
exactly
would be monitoring the cameras, as she had done some research and objected to a number of companies who had received poor customer service ratings.

Until that issue was settled, I was the only one with access to the footage. The software had been installed on my office computer and on my personal laptop, and when I activated it, the screen sprang to life with the live feed from dozens of cameras, each visible through tiny rectangular boxes.

“No one expects you to spend much time on that,” Jeff Parker had assured me. “Just installing the cameras goes a long way toward easing anxiety. If something happens, we can look back on the record. That’s probably enough to deter most of the crime around here, anyway.”

I found the video feed to be strangely addictive, my own private reality show.

Until their lives were on display for me, I hadn’t been interested in the comings and goings of my neighbors. Most of them had cleared out for the Thanksgiving holiday, but I watched the rest of them go about their daily lives—the joggers, the yoga enthusiasts, the tennis players, the golfers, the retired couples, the nannies taking kids to the play structure. Video cameras had been installed in conspicuous areas, and at first the residents were aware of them, sometimes glancing in the direction of the camera or even waving. But after the initial interest, they resumed their regular lives. I caught husbands and wives arguing or kissing; I caught joggers stopping to adjust their bras or pluck a twisted piece of fabric out of a crotch. Brock Asbill patted his nanny on the ass and outside the clubhouse, Mac Sievert smoked a joint with a friend.

I watched for evidence of Kelsey, since the Jorgensens had stayed home for the holiday. They were hosting Sonia’s side of the family, blond and blue-eyed, the lot of them. There was a camera trained on the hallway outside my office; if Kelsey passed by, it would catch her. Another camera was trained on the walking trail behind our house, and if she decided to play Peeping Tom again, it would catch her then, too.

* * *

The night before Thanksgiving, I went to bed with a biography of John Adams that I’d been trying to read since before we moved to The Palms. When I woke, the room was quiet, the moon a sliver outside the window. Then I heard it again, the sound that must have woken me in the first place. It was a slight ping against the window and as I waited, it came again, then again.

I flicked on the bedside light and stumbled toward the window, yanking back the sash. Kelsey was down below, standing next to the pool in her black bikini. I shook my head, ordering myself to wake up.

She waved and stepped onto the diving board. It was a dream, I thought—I’m dreaming of that first day she came to the house. I watched as she took a little hop and did an easy swan dive into the water, which barely rippled. I held my breath, counting, but she didn’t surface. Ten seconds, twenty. I was about to charge down the stairs, dive into the water and get her, when she emerged from the far end of the pool, naked.

She must have been freezing, but it didn’t seem as if she were in any hurry. Looking up at my window, she twisted her hair behind her head, wringing it free of water.

Stop
, I ordered myself.
Look away.

Before, it had been a glance at her cleavage, a kiss full on the mouth—things I hadn’t asked for, things I had to keep reminding myself I didn’t want. Now there was the full sight of her—firm breasts, a narrow waist, the dark V of her crotch. Too late, I remembered I was collecting evidence and grabbed for my phone. She had on a pair of sweatpants by the time I snapped her picture. A moment later, she had pulled a sweatshirt over her head and slipped her feet into a pair of shoes. Without looking in my direction again, she exited through the back gates and disappeared.

I raced downstairs to grab my laptop and looked back through the feed. There she was, passing the camera in her sweats; there, less than ten minutes later, she passed in the opposite direction, her hair hanging wet on her back. After leaving my house, she’d taken the walking trail past the clubhouse and disappeared onto the Jorgensens’ street. How had she explained her absence, then her reappearance a short time later dripping wet, in the middle of a house of relatives?

She was sick. That was the only word for it.

It had come to the point where things could only end badly.

Still, I couldn’t help it; I dreamed about her all night long—hair blond and wet, body young and sleek. I didn’t want to think about her. I wanted not to think about her at all, ever, but she wasn’t going to let me.

It wasn’t until the following afternoon that I thought about her swimsuit, and I rushed out to the pool. The pieces of black fabric were floating separately, the trunks near the deep end, the top near the steps. Not knowing what else to do, I brought them inside to dry and added them to my bag of evidence. What if Liz had come home and spotted the bikini in the pool—what then? We were on shaky footing as it was; there was no way I could explain this.

In the garage, I found a yard of twine and tied it tight around the latch on the inside of the gate. The fence was only four feet high, though, intended for an unobstructed view of the course. It was low enough for Kelsey to climb over, but for that matter, she might appear next at the front door, naked beneath a trench coat.

When Liz called, I realized I’d forgotten completely about Thanksgiving; I’d heated a frozen pizza and worked my way through it, piece after cold piece, scanning the laptop footage for any other sign of Kelsey. If she had a sickness, it was rubbing off on me.

Liz had stocked the bottom drawer of the fridge with beer before she left. Had she envisioned me sitting on the couch in the dark, downing one drink after another? I watched the live feed until my eyes grew bleary, empty bottles accumulating on the coffee table in front of me. Had my neighbors at The Palms envisioned this, when they’d voted in favor of video surveillance?

It was dusk when I saw a bit of movement on one of the live feeds, from a camera on the walking trail beyond the Mesbahs’ house. My eyes were so tired by then and my mind so clouded by what I thought I would see—Kelsey, shirtless, her nipples high and hard—that I almost convinced myself I’d seen nothing at all. It had merely been a shadow, a white blur on a gray background. The sun had set; the sky was a deep purple sliding into black. I leaned forward, almost off the edge of the couch, my face close to the screen. And there it was again.

This time it was definitely real.

This time it couldn’t be dismissed as a figment of Deanna Sievert’s imagination.

The mountain lion was more muscular than I would have expected, its body meaty, haunches rolling with each step. All along I’d been imagining a starving thing, nothing but ribs and bone and luminescent eyes. This cat was massive—its paws thick, tail swinging, alert. I was seeing it from behind, watching as it passed from one camera’s range to the next. First the back of its head, a neck that was more like a torso, then the rippling back and its powerful hind legs. Something was hanging from its mouth—a rag doll, a child’s stuffed animal. Its limbs dangled limp.

Shit
.

It was Virgil, the Zhangs’ pet. Helen took that dog everywhere she went, including into the dining room at mealtimes, where I’d seen her slip it scraps under the table. Of course it was against the rules to have a dog—any animal—in the dining room, but that rule didn’t seem to apply to the Zhangs. Myriam was the only one who complained, but she was too close to Helen to do it publicly. Besides, it had been well natured, watching the rest of us quietly from wide-set eyes.

But now it was, plainly, dead.

The mountain lion disappeared from the last frame on the walking trail, just beyond the Berglands’ house. I got to my feet, slipping on my shoes. Beer sloshed in my stomach. If I had a rifle, or Victor’s handgun, maybe I could go after it, take it down. Not that I was a trained marksman, especially at the range I would need for safety, and in the growing dark.

The Zhangs were home; earlier, I’d seen the twins walking past with their tennis rackets. I could call Helen, speak to her calmly. Say I’d seen something suspicious on the video feed and ask her if Virgil was in the backyard. But of course, he wasn’t.

I grabbed a flashlight from the garage and slipped out the sliding door. “Back door open,” the Other Woman warned me. In the backyard, the water lapped hungrily against the edge of the pool. The gate was padlocked, but it was easy enough to get one leg up and hop over the fence. The mountain lion must have done the same thing in the Zhangs’ backyard, helpless Virgil dangling from its jaws.

I kept my back to the line of houses and swung the beam of the flashlight across the fairway, alert for any sign of movement. Farther out, the flashlight beam alighted on a small red-and-white bundle, like a discarded wooly sweater. I swung the light in wider circles, trying to spot the mountain lion. Was it still out there, lurking in the dark, or had it returned to wherever it was from, sated?

I approached the little hump on the greens, moving slowly, as if my legs were waterlogged. If the mountain lion returned, I was dead, anyway. Even sober, I would lose at a footrace.

What was left barely resembled Virgil. Helen had once explained to me that Bedlingtons had their ears and the sides of their heads shaved, leaving the top fuzzy.

That part of Virgil was visible now, but the rest of him was a mess of blood and fur and entrails. I took a step away, heaved once and brought up a six-pack of Corona.

I was my own worst enemy, really. If I hadn’t been looking at the video feed in the first place... Jeff Parker had said,
You have better things to do than stare at some grainy surveillance footage all day long
. But apparently I didn’t. I’d spent Thanksgiving alone, and that was the best I could come up with. If I’d been with Liz and Danielle, we would have been eating pumpkin or apple pie by now, telling stories about Liz’s childhood. Someone else would have discovered Virgil’s mangled body, either late that night or early the following morning, and I would have learned about it from a message on my voice mail. “What is it?” Liz would have asked, seeing my grimace.

But I wasn’t at a safe remove—I didn’t have objectivity or distance. I had a mind clouded with the slow, impending horror of Kelsey, the estrangement from Liz, the secrets upon secrets I was keeping for what seemed, now, no discernible purpose. This would be the beginning of a new nightmare, involving everyone at The Palms in one way or another. It would make the news; Deanna, prophet of doom, would return to remind us of her close encounter in August. Myriam would call an emergency HOA meeting; Victor would return to his nightly patrols, and we would be lucky if he didn’t pluck off a jogger or two on his quest to rid the neighborhood of danger. There would be a wine-and-cheese fund-raiser at someone’s house, the monies designated for a memorial bench to Virgil Zhang.

And I was just so sick of it all.

I was sick of this place. I was sick of the life I’d wanted for us. All that happiness and security had only been a mirage, evaporating as soon as we approached.

I stripped off my T-shirt and laid it next to Virgil’s body, then rolled him over with a nudge of my foot until he was completely on top of the cloth. The smell coming off his body was foul, and I retched again, bringing up beer and pizza. Still, I managed to tie the corners of the shirt together in a makeshift bundle and carry Virgil back to my house, his body swaying next to me.

For once Kelsey Jorgensen was nowhere to be found, not hiding in some bushes, giggling and waiting to pop out at me, not naked in my pool. I worked as quietly and quickly as I could, retrieving a shovel from the garage. The far corner of our lot, next to the fence, was the best place. The dirt was thick and wet, having been hit by the sprinklers that morning, but it was harder work than I could have imagined. My body was weak and heavy by the time I’d buried Virgil and tamped down the soil, evening it out over the general area.

I didn’t sleep much that night. It was like that Poe story with the dead man’s heart beating in the other room. Only with Virgil, what I kept hearing was the bark that Myriam had pronounced so irritating. What I kept seeing were the dark button eyes, open and staring, wondering what the hell I was going to do about the situation. I worked on the laptop until early morning, carefully deleting and splicing the digital file until it showed nothing at all—no mountain lion carrying a pet in its jaws, and no man sneaking out onto the golf course and returning ten minutes later shirtless, holding a bloody sac in front of him.