But it wasn’t.
An hour later, I was sitting at the bar at the River Room, swirling a glass of wine in my hand. Daniel was on the barstool next to me, his eyes studying my silhouette.
“What?” I had asked, self-consciously tucking a strand of hair behind my ear. “Do I have food in my teeth or something?”
“No,” he laughed, shaking his head. “No, it’s just … I can’t believe I’m sitting here. With you.”
I had eyed him then, trying to judge his comment. Was he flirting with me, or was it something more sinister? I had Googled Daniel Briggs before our date—of course I had—and this was the moment I was going to find out if he had done the same. Searching Daniel’s name had yielded nothing more than a Facebook page with assorted pictures of him. Holding a whiskey at various rooftop bars. One hand clutching a golf club while the other clasped a sweating beer. Sitting cross-legged on a couch while holding a baby the caption identified as his best friend’s son. I had found his LinkedIn profile, confirming his profession in pharmaceutical sales. He was mentioned in a newspaper article from 2015 printing his finishing time for the Louisiana Marathon: four hours and nineteen minutes. It was all very average, innocent, almost boring, even. Exactly what I wanted.
But if he had Googled me, he would have found more. So much more.
“So,” he said. “Doctor Chloe Davis, tell me about yourself.”
“You know, you don’t have to call me that all the time. Doctor Chloe Davis. So formal.”
He smiled, took a sip from his whiskey. “What should I call you, then?”
“Chloe,” I said, looking at him. “Just Chloe.”
“All right, Just Chloe—” I smacked his arm with the back of my hand, laughing. He smiled back. “Really, though, tell me about yourself. I’m sitting here having drinks with a stranger; the least you could do is assure me that you’re not dangerous.”
I felt the goose bumps prickle across my skin, lifting the hair on my arms.
“I’m from Louisiana,” I said, testing the waters. He didn’t flinch. “Not Baton Rouge, a small town about an hour from here.”
“Baton Rouge born and raised,” he said, tilting his drink toward his chest. “What made you move here?”
“School,” I said. “I got my PhD from LSU.”
“Impressive.”
“Thank you.”
“Any possessive older brothers I should know about?”
My chest lurched again; all of these comments could be innocent flirtation, but they could also be perceived as a man trying to coax a truth out of me that he had already learned for himself. All of my other bad first dates came flooding back to me, the moment I had realized that the person I was making small talk with already knew everything there was to know. Some of them had asked me outright—“You’re Dick Davis’s daughter, aren’t you?”—their eyes hungry for information, while others waited impatiently, tapping their fingers against the table while I spoke about other things, as if admitting that I shared DNA with a serial killer was something I should be eager to reveal.
“How’d you know?” I asked, trying to keep the tone light. “Is it that obvious?”
Daniel shrugged. “No,” he said, turning back toward the bar. “It’s just that I had a little sister once, and I know I was. I knew every guy who ever looked at her. Shit, if you were her, I’d probably be lurking in the corner of this bar right now.”
He hadn’t Googled me, I would learn on a later date. My paranoia about his line of questioning was just that—paranoia. He had never even heard about Breaux Bridge and Dick Davis and all those missing girls. He was only seventeen when it happened; he didn’t really watch the news. I imagine his mother tried to shield it from him the same way mine had tried to shield it from me. I had told him the story one night as we lay sprawled across my living room couch; I don’t know what made me choose that particular moment. I suppose I had realized that, at some point, I had to come clean. That my truth, my history, would be the make-or-break moment that determined our life together, our future—or lack thereof.
So I just started talking, watching as his forehead wrinkled deeper with every passing minute, every gruesome detail. And I told him everything: about Lena and the festival and the way I had watched my father get arrested in our living room, those words he had uttered before being whisked away into the night. I had told him what I had seen through my bedroom window—my father, that shovel—and the fact that my childhood home was still sitting there, empty. Abandoned in Breaux Bridge, the memories of my youth twisted into a real-life haunted house, a ghost story, the place kids ran past with their breath held tight for fear of summoning the spirits that surely haunted its walls. I had told him about my father in prison. His plea deal and consecutive life sentences. The fact that I hadn’t seen or spoken to him in almost twenty years. I had gotten completely lost in that moment, letting the memories spill from me like the rancid innards of a gutted fish. I hadn’t realized how badly I needed to get them out, how they were poisoning me from the inside.