She picked up her phone. Nothing back from Selena.
She flipped on the television, scrolled through the news channels. Nothing at all about a missing girl. Opening her laptop again, she did a search. Nothing.
“I’m not sure I’m with you on this one.”
Pop again, this time standing in the corner. He’d bought this house for them. This is going to be our forever home, he’d told her. The place where we can really be who we are. And that had been true for a time. But the wolves were already at their heels then, though neither of them knew it. And forever isn’t forever.
“I don’t see what you have to gain here. They probably don’t have that much money. And that Selena, she’s not biting.”
She felt herself bristle; she didn’t like having to defend herself to Pop. She shouldn’t have to. The student had far surpassed the teacher.
“This one is not about the money,” she said.
“Ah. One of those.”
She opened the laptop again, visited Selena’s social media pages, which had no security settings whatsoever. Her life out there for everyone to see—her friends, where she worked, where her kids went to school. Where she spent her time, where she shopped. The entirety of her life, just out there like chum in the water for any shark that happened to swim by. Stupid.
Selena hadn’t posted anything since her happy pictures from the weekend. What a bunch of liars everyone in the world had become with their inane social media feeds; Selena’s husband was fucking the nanny and she took the time to make everyone in her life jealous of her pretend-perfect little family.
Selena Murphy, formerly Selena Knowles, was nothing special. Not the school homecoming queen. Not the valedictorian of her class. Just a pretty, upper-middle-class girl, with a traditional upbringing. Smart. Good grades. NYU graduate. Successful in her chosen profession—marketing and publicity, of all things. Lots of friends. Happy marriage （or so she’d like everyone to believe）。 She was a mother of two adorable boys. No, she was nothing special, a normie as Pop liked to call them—except that she had everything.
“You’re not jealous. Of her.”
Pop was over by the fireplace now. He was as she had last seen him, eyes glassy, a hole blown though the middle of his chest. She heard the echo of her own voice, carrying over years. Please don’t leave me here. Pop, please.
“I’m not sure it’s jealousy, exactly,” she said. “It’s just that it doesn’t seem fair, does it? That some people have everything. That things are handed to them. That they walk through life not even knowing what it’s like to want and struggle, to live without a safety net. You can see it on her face, can’t you? That blank entitlement, that ignorance to critical truths of the world.”
“So, this is about social justice?”
They both knew it wasn’t. That it ran so much deeper. That it was personal. “Maybe,” she said anyway.
He laughed. “I got bad news for you, kid. You can’t con a con.”
She threw a throw pillow at him and it landed softly by the hearth. She could still hear the echo of his laughter.
Pearl and Charlie slipped right into it. It only took her a couple of days to forget Pearl, to become Anne. And Charlie with his new glasses, his crew cut growing out into its natural salt-and-pepper color, became Pop, the father she never had, never even knew she wanted. Somehow, he’d managed to age himself ten years. Or maybe with his other look, the round specs, the baseball hat, the black hair dye, he’d been able to capture a youthful essence for Charlie. Charlie, the young hipster Stella had brought home, the bookstore marketing whiz, he was someone else, too. A man she used to know, one she remembered fondly but knew she wouldn’t see again.
“Think of your discarded selves as other people, distant family members. You know them; they’re part of your life. They’re characters, you can take pieces from them, use those pieces to flesh out your current self. But keep it simple. The more lies you tell, the more you have to remember.”
Pearl enrolled in an online high school. In the tiny isolated house, she got up and made breakfast for them. She took her online classes in the morning, while Pop went out to look for a “job.” When her schoolwork was done, she’d wander down the dirt road, finding the trailhead. And she’d walk and walk through the towering pinyon-juniper, aspen, spruce, cottonwood, her head filled with silence, her senses alive—the smell of sagebrush, the cerulean blue of the big sky, the whisper of wind. The sun hot and the air dry.
Everything inside her felt more alive as she became Anne, and left Pearl and Stella behind—distant figures in a life that seemed more like a dream. She rarely thought of Stella, which she knew was odd—but it was as if everything that came before had ceased to be real, even her mother. Who someone had murdered. Who? But even the urgency of that question had faded.
The case around Stella’s murder and Pearl’s disappearance quickly went cold. It fell out of the news within a matter of weeks. Charles Finch, Stella’s lover, the bookstore manager, also missing, was a person of interest in the murder and Pearl’s disappearance. The pictures that were circulating of her and Charlie—it didn’t even look like them anymore. She felt reborn.
About a month into their new life, Anne was online, searching for news stories, and she came across a feature article about their case. With no suspects, no sightings of the missing Pearl, local police were frustrated. A cold case investigator had been hired by the department, a man named Hunter Ross.
“We know that Stella Behr was murdered in cold blood, strangled in her own home. Her fifteen-year-old daughter Pearl is missing. Charles Finch, Ms. Behr’s lover and the manager of her failing book store, also disappeared that night,” he was quoted as saying.
“We have come to learn that the man known as Charles Finch was a fiction. None of the information on the job application we found is accurate. Name, address, Social Security number were all falsified.”
There were pictures, of Pearl, of Stella, of the storefront. They apparently only had one picture of Charlie. It must have been from Stella’s phone; he was smiling devilishly at the camera. There was a bit about Pearl—how she was a star student, but a loner with few friends. Teachers described her as polite, intelligent, always distant.
Her heart thumped as she scrolled through the article. The pictures there looked fake; the story sounded like a catalog of lies.
There was a timeline of the night of Stella’s murder, including a neighbor sighting of Pearl and Charlie leaving the house, bags packed, Pearl apparently acting of her own free will. Another man, not matching Charlie’s description—this one tall, muscular, with long blond hair and a full beard—had been seen arriving and leaving quickly a short time later earlier that day.
“A woman is dead. A young girl is missing. And the man at the center of this mystery is a ghost. My guess is that Charles Finch is a con, and that he’s moved on to his next mark. Maybe Pearl is with him—likely in the thrall of whatever con he might be running on her.”
She stared at the picture of Charlie. In the photo, he was in character, whatever character he was playing for Stella—the attentive lover. He played another character for Pearl, the caring friend. She looked deep into the eyes, and recognized something there, something from her own inner self—a vast emptiness, an icescape frozen and barren.