Ruby’s heart was still hammering when she walked into her studio. She double-checked the door and windows were securely locked, and then she lay down on her bed, hand to her chest, trying to calm herself. The guy at the front desk was clearly harmless. The Whole Foods man was just making conversation, and there was no way that creep from the dating app would know where she lived. They never even exchanged full names. She knows that, reasonably, but the strange feeling of being both in and outside of her body persists, even here in the safety of her room, so that she feels acutely aware of her heart in her chest and separated from her own limbs at the same time. It does not help that whenever she closes her eyes, she can see flashes of red at a young girl’s temple, the twist of bare legs, yellow hair floating. She had tried her best with Detective O’Byrne—‘I turned left here, no wait, I came down the stairs from the right, there’—but all she could really remember about yesterday morning was what he already knew: there was a dead girl in Riverside Park, and she found her, and it was obvious that something very, very bad had happened to the girl before Ruby came along.
She now knows that I was strangled to death; the latest headlines scream it. When she first encountered this awful detail, she immediately put her hand to her own throat, applied pressure to the cartilage she could feel straining under her skin. How depraved would a person have to be to take a life in this way, she wondered, her eyes filling with tears. To use their bare hands, to look up close at the pain they were causing. To imagine it, even a little, was horrific.
He’s out there somewhere, she thinks. The man who did this. Right now, he could be down the street, or at Whole Foods, or there in her building. He could be any man she’s met in New York City. The thought is terrifying, and she resists it as hard as she can, wriggles her fingers and toes, cycles her legs in the air, trying to focus on her body, her breathing, anything that feels like it’s hers alone. She has an instinct that something got rearranged when she was down by the river, that there was a before Ruby, and now there is an after Ruby, a woman who no longer feels at home in her own body, as if the violation of someone else has somehow seeped into her own skin.
But nothing actually happened to me, Ruby reminds herself. All I did was find the girl. I was never in any danger.
And yet. What if that young girl thought she was safe, too? Right before that very, very bad thing happened to her—did she have any idea of what was coming?
It is impossible for Ruby not to imagine this.
And now, finally, slowly, I begin to take shape in Ruby’s mind. A person begins to form beyond the blood and bruises, the broken things. A real person, a young girl who had a whole life, and she must have been so scared in those last, awful moments. This thought makes Ruby sit bolt upright. She has been wondering about the kind of man who could do such awful things, but this suddenly feels like the wrong question. Who on earth was the girl he did those awful things to?
Who is she?
From her new home base of fear and confusion, twenty-some hours after she discovered my body down on the rocks, Ruby Jones sets out to find me again.
‘Thank you,’ I whisper, as she reaches for her laptop, begins to search online for anything and everything she can find out about the case. Because, even if she doesn’t fully understand this yet, Ruby has deliberately chosen not to forget me. When forgetting would no doubt be the easier path for her to take.
She has so much to learn. About herself. About dead girls. It is most definitely not going to be easy. But in this moment, what matters most is this: Ruby has decided to hold on to me just as tightly as I find myself clinging to her.
Unlikely she was prostituting.
Does not appear to have been sleeping rough.
Clothing suggests she was lower to middle class.
Crime scene tape flaps above the rocks. Police dogs have been brought in, grid searches have been completed and repeated. The heavy rain has made things harder, stirred up the ground, surfaced the muck of other mornings and washed away footprints and any other impressions he—the perpetrator—might have made on the only morning that matters. The most they have to work with right now, then, is my body. The impressions I have left behind, and those things he has pressed onto me.
There is evidence of a struggle.
My case file fills up with notes like this, a padding of words around the bare bones of the crime. Physical evidence packaged and labelled at the scene is examined. Samples come back from the lab, and databases are searched. The first forty-eight hours are critical, they say. But as time ticks down, there is no revelatory discovery, no match, no name. Led by Detective O’Byrne, a dozen men and women have turned me into their question, but the answer eludes each and every one of them.