Lonergan searched the wallet. “Besides the license and the school ID, there’s a dorm key card; Social Security card; Starbucks rewards card, two ticks left on; a folded-up dry cleaner’s ticket; and a butt load of quarters in a coin purse.”
“For her laundry,” Foster said. “The machines.”
“Wouldn’t know. Didn’t go to college. I went to the Marines instead. Didn’t need quarters.”
Foster lifted her head out of the backpack. “No cell phone. What nineteen-year-old kid doesn’t have a cell phone?”
“Ainsley probably tossed that too.”
“Maybe it was tossed,” she said, “and maybe it was Ainsley.”
“You’re complicating my life, here.” Lonergan walked away, sliding his phone out of his pocket as he went. “We’re going to find her clothes, her phone, and that knife at the bottom of the river,” he called back to her. “Count on it.”
She stared at the lonely spot where Peggy Birch had been found. They didn’t know much at this point, despite Lonergan’s confident pronouncements, but at least they had her name and a way to contact her people.
She called to a PO. “We need a thorough search all along here, please,” she said, pointing along the riverbank, a quarter mile at least toward the lake. “We’re looking for anything that could be hers. And could someone get me another update on the guy they took to the hospital? Thank you.”
She gripped the pink backpack as though she were keeping it safe for Birch, who’d carried it just a few hours ago, likely giving her bag little thought or care. Just a pack, until it was everything.
Foster tilted her head up past the destruction and the mess and the work to the wide, open autumn sky. “Peggy Birch.”
CHAPTER 5
Amelia breezed into her studio, peeled off her jacket, and flung it on the slouchy, catchall couch pushed against the wall. She had gotten Bodie settled back at his apartment, but that hadn’t settled her. In fact, the opposite was true. Bodie was out of Westhaven and on his own again. As long as he’d been in there, she hadn’t had to worry where he was or what he was doing. He’d been somewhere he couldn’t harm himself or—she loathed to say—anyone else.
She looked around her place at the blank canvases leaning against the walls, the paint-splotched floors, and the unused paint—ready for her brushes—stacked in a corner. Then she stood in front of the large painting that ran almost half the length of the space, floor to ceiling. She approached it almost reverently and took in the swirls of color, the brushstrokes, the smell of the oil paint, and placed her hand on it as though feeling for a heartbeat. Hers. All of it. Bodie needed something that was his.
She rolled her sleeves up, anxious to get started, and slipped into a big shirt that served as a painter’s smock. She felt restless, uneasy for the first time in a month, because Bodie was outside, where anything could happen and where whatever happened, she would have to fix it.
Following women. Stalking. That was what he was into? It was creepy, but she couldn’t pretend she didn’t know when he’d begun to obsess over pretty girls with big blue eyes, though he always seemed to vacillate between wanting them and fearing them. She could pinpoint it to the very day, in fact, the very moment when they discovered at twelve who their father was and what he did in the basement he’d padlocked shut. Until it wasn’t. Until they ventured below . . . and saw. Bodie became awkward and sullen, disconnected afterward. She found art. She discovered that she could pour everything she felt or thought or feared into a canvas and have her world all make sense. She could bring order to chaos, perspective to the incomprehensible. Art, her art, was life and emotion, the air in her lungs, her every breath. It was alive, and it was hers, and no one could take it away.
Amelia slipped out of her shoes and socks and stood barefoot on the painter’s tarp surrounded by the painter’s things that saved her and fed her and made her different from her brother.
She heard a rattling from the back room and turned to see her studio mate, Joie Lenk, stroll up front, startling when she saw her.
“Oh shit! I didn’t hear you come in,” Joie said. “How long have you been here?”
Amelia smiled and watched Joie, her brown face dusted and smeared with plaster of Paris. She wiped her hands clean on a wet towel. Joie was artsy through and through, from the purple streak in her dark curly hair down to her plaster-splattered pink Crocs.
“Not long,” Amelia said. “I didn’t think you’d be here.”
Joie stuffed the towel into the pocket of her dusty overalls. “I had a spark of inspiration and wanted to test it.” She padded over to her work in progress, a sculpture of Winged Victory that she’d been working on for months, only Joie’s Nike wore combat boots and a Wonder Woman tee. The plaster creation stood six feet tall, its wings spanning three feet across, the piece commissioned by a women’s outreach center in Andersonville. “But I didn’t expect to see you today. It’s Monday. You never come in on Mondays.”
“I needed to paint,” Amelia said.
“Well, if you want the place to yourself, I can bounce. That inspiration I thought I had isn’t panning out.”
“No worries,” Amelia said. “Stay. I don’t mind the company.”
The scrape of dog claws on hardwood broke their exchange. They’d woken Winston, Joie’s English bulldog, whose doggy pad was in the back room.
“Uh-oh,” Joie said. “You’ve done it now. Prepare yourself.”
Amelia waited for it, grinning as Winston, a waddling meatball of a thing, ran into the room, his nails clicking against the floor, mouth open, pink tongue out. The dog made a beeline for her. Though Winston went home with Joie, Am knew he loved her best, and the feeling was mutual.
She plopped down on the dusty tarp and scratched Winston behind the ears, rubbing his belly and kissing him on the snout.
Joie peeked from behind the plaster. “You’re spoiling him.”
Amelia gave him one last snuggle. “He deserves to be spoiled. He’s a prince.”
Joie grumped. “A prince that eats like a horse.”
“All right, boy.” Am stood and dusted off her jeans. “Enough cuddles for now. Next time it’s my turn.” Winston studied her for a moment, his big head cocked to the side, then waddled away and plopped down at Joie’s feet.
Joie donned protective glasses, ready to get started. “Everything okay with your sister?”
Am smiled. It was one of her many reinventions, necessary to fit who she was now. A new person who had a younger sister, not a twin brother prone to mental breakdown. This new person also had a mother in Florida and a father who’d died when Am was just eighteen. She had added in a hardscrabble upbringing in a small midwestern town far from here. It made her success now all the more impressive to people. It also made her seem interesting, industrious, relatable. The truth was, she hadn’t laid eyes on Tom Morgan since he’d dropped her and Bodie off at the University of Michigan with their tuition paid and a nice nest egg set aside. Then he’d ghosted them. He was just gone, moved, without leaving a forwarding address. Bodie, she knew, was fine with that. He had feared their father and needed to believe that he was dead. But Amelia knew he wasn’t dead. She could still feel him, sense him, and she wasn’t afraid. Where could he be now? she often wondered. Was he in another country? Had he chosen a new name? She supposed, in the end, it didn’t really matter. He’d made his mark. “She fell and broke her ankle,” Amelia replied. She conveyed just the right amount of sympathy and concern. “My sis has always been a bit of a klutz. Six weeks, then out of the cast and back to her life.”