I find myself glancing around for you, a shadow who might emerge from behind the trees, a dark form in my periphery. I think that Bailey is right; you’re not done with me. These texts and emails. You’re teasing me. I feel you nearby. What do you want?
A northern cardinal perched in the bush flies off in a startling flash of red, as I push through the picket fence and follow the small white arrow sign that reads: Jones Cooper Investigations. Long retired from the police force now, he has hung out a shingle. According to his bare-bones website, he specializes in finding missing persons just like Bailey Kirk. It doesn’t say anything about how he helped a traumatized girl disappear. That’s our little secret.
Ghosting.
It means one thing now. But once it was used to describe the event in which a person takes the identity of another person of about the same age who has died. The living fraudster then slips into the life of the deceased person and takes on that identity. One person becomes another person.
It helps the enterprise if the deceased person has no living family. If he or she was born in one state and died in another, died young, without debt, never earned a paycheck. All of those things make it easier to slip into another skin.
It’s not identity theft as we know it now. The point isn’t to use someone’s information for illegal financial gain. The point is to disappear. To shed an old life, one that’s not working for you, and move into another. It’s harder now than it used to be. Government databases—birth and death registries, criminal records, fingerprint and DNA gathering—are computerized, and states can communicate with each other in a way that they couldn’t in the past.
But back when I was just a broken, abused kid who had survived a nightmare and needed to leave my ugly legacy behind and start fresh, I had help. I wouldn’t have been able to do it alone.
I knock on the door and after a moment, it opens.
Jones Cooper has barely aged, still tall and powerful, square jawed and thick through the middle. Maybe his hair is a little thinner, maybe there are a few more lines around his eyes and on his brow. But mainly he’s the same, as comforting and familiar as an old oak.
“Look at you,” he says, extending his hand. “You’re all grown up.”
We shake; he’s not a hugger.
“Am I?” I ask with a smile. “I’m not sure I feel like a grown-up.”
“No one ever feels like a grown-up,” he says, patting me on the shoulder. “We’re all just figuring it out as we go along.”
“Good to know,” I say, as he ushers me inside.
The room is sparsely furnished, as I would expect it to be knowing him. The only nod to decor of any kind is an oil landscape on the wall, a dark and haunting stand of trees.
“I know you stay in touch with Maggie,” he says. “She tells me that you’re doing well.”
He motions for me to sit, and I sink down to the gray couch that looks as if it will be stiff, but is surprisingly soft as he takes a seat in the chair behind his desk. There’s an ancient computer, a landline, a big Rolodex. Time has not advanced here in Jones Cooper’s office; it’s like the late ’90s.
“I have been well. Thanks to everything you and Maggie have done for me.”
Dr. Maggie Cooper, therapist, mentor, friend, she helped me put the broken pieces of my psyche back together, and remains my go-to when I’m overwhelmed by memories, when Dear Birdie is out of her depth. If this was any normal breakup, maybe I’d have called her for a session to manage my feelings of loss, which for trauma survivors are always layered. But this is not a normal breakup. This is something else.
“So we have a problem,” he says, not one to beat around the bush. “There’s a private detective asking questions.”
He glances down at his desk and picks up a card, hands it over.
“A guy named Bailey Kirk employed by a big, wealthy, high-tech firm called Turner and Ives. They’ve unearthed some of our secrets, it seems. He came here. I missed him but he left this. Later we traded messages.”
I look at the simple white card, feeling a rush of anger, undercut by fear. I’m not trying to blow up your life, he said last night.
“He’s not the only one who’s digging into the past,” I say.
The whole story comes out in a wild, disjointed tumble. Torch, your disappearance, the storage unit, Bailey Kirk, the missing women, the cigarette butts at Jay’s grave, the man in the woods. It must sound crazy, rambling, but he rubs at his chin, smoky eyes focused on me, making all the right affirming noises.