We’re everywhere, Camille.
I brew a pot of coffee and eat some bread. By the time I’m done, it’s after seven and I’m still worrying about Glynne. If she is a collective member. If she’s spying on me. If she hired me as part of an ongoing assignment . . .
I head upstairs to my room and open up my laptop, go to Facebook, the Niobe group. I find Penelope Chambers on it, of course, though her page is private, and I can’t see anything other than a profile pic of Penelope and three friends standing in front of the Las Vegas sign.
Glynne is not a Niobe member, but her personal page is accessible to me. We friended each other back when she hired me to do her website, and she encouraged me to look through her page and pull whatever photos I think would work.
I go to her page now. All the most recent posts are either paintings or pictures of Glynne posing in front of them. But once I scroll back a few months, I find more personal ones: Glynne splashing around in a swimming hole back in August with two male friends and a Jack Russell terrier. Glynne wishing her deceased parents a happy anniversary by posting their black-and-white wedding photo. A six-year-old “Facebook Memory,” reposted by Glynne last June for whatever reason, of her and Xenia on their tenth anniversary. I skim through all of them.
But when I hit her May 2019 posts, I slow down. In May, Brayburn’s class of 2019 graduated, and Glynne was there for it, in a crimson-and-gold gown and mortarboard, next to her dear friend Dean Waverly. Apparently, she was one of the speakers, too, because she posted a picture of herself at a lectern, not to mention several more with her former classmates, who were celebrating their forty-fifth reunion that same sunny weekend. I look at each picture carefully, taking in Glynne’s body language, the hugs and swoons, reading her gushy, emotive captions . . . until I find the one that makes me stop breathing.
The thing with the truth, it hides in plain sight. It crouches in corners and pounces—but you have to look at it first. You have to stop and face it head-on and then it will leap at you and if you are not ready, you will fall. . . .
In Glynne’s reunion pictures, there are then-and-now cast shots of a play on which Glynne had served as the set designer. I look at the “now” shot first—everyone smiling in front of the Brayburn theater, Glynne included. And then the earlier one, a black-and-white, taken in 1973 of just the cast, onstage in flowing costumes and lined up for curtain call—the writer and star at the center. A life-changing experience!!! Glynne has captioned it. A devastating—and shocking—play about female empowerment by an actress/writer who embodies those two words!!!
The writer and star is Penelope Chambers. The play is called A?layan Kaya.
CALM DOWN, I tell myself. Calm, calm . . .
The name of the play could be a coincidence. Life is full of coincidences. I need more. I need to know Penelope Chambers better, and so I go back to Niobe and type her name into the search bar. I read everything I can find that she’s posted on the page, searching for clues as to who she is.
I don’t find much. Penelope is not what you’d call an active poster. I scroll back weeks, months, a whole year, and find nothing but a few scattered supportive-but-generic comments to new members—odd for someone who actively sought me out, waiting outside a police station after midnight, just to make that connection. You’d think Penelope would be a hard-core Niobe zealot, but it appears she’s more of an occasional visitor, which would make sense if she were spending all her screen time on Kaya.
At last I find what looks to be Penelope Chambers’s only original post, dated April 10, 2016. My loss happened twenty years ago, but the pain is still fresh, it reads. And it details an accident I remember hearing about on the news—a summer camp bus that collided with a car on the New York Thruway and overturned, killing the bus driver and most of the campers, who ranged in age from seven to fourteen. The driver of the car, on a rubbery high from alcohol and pain pills, survived the crash. According to Penelope, he served just five years in jail—far too small a price to pay for her twin boys, who were ten at the time. Now they’re gone and that driver is free somewhere, living his life. He claims the experience was an eye-opener for him. Made him give up drinking and find Jesus or some such nonsense. I don’t care what my children’s death taught him. I’ll never forgive him.