I shrugged gamely, though an unease was pooling in the pit of my stomach. “Of course. Happy to help.”
“I would love it if you could tell me a little bit about Denise.”
I found the cue lazy and impossible to answer. “Anything?”
Carl brought a hand to the back of his neck and looked up at me with a chagrined half smile. His hands were sprawling, calloused things. He’s not as tall as Brian, I thought, almost as a rebuttal to the other thought that was forming, which was that Brian sometimes reminded me of a middle school boy who had hit a sudden growth spurt, hunching and hairless in his gawky new body.
“Fair enough.” Carl tapped his pencil on his notebook, thinking of a way to rephrase. “I’ve gathered Denise loved clothes. Maybe you could speak a little on that. I always like to start by giving the reader a good visual.”
“She was a fastidious dresser,” I said.
Carl seemed delighted. “Fastidious.” He jotted that down. “Great word. Are you an English major?”
“Political science.”
“Pamela is planning on attending law school,” Aunt Trish said grandly.
“My parents certainly would have preferred that to J-school,” Carl said self-effacingly, so that he was in the clear to ask the million-dollar question. “And what about boys and dating?”
“Denise didn’t have time for dating,” Aunt Trish interjected.
“A beautiful girl like Denise?” Carl looked at me long enough that I could pick out feline-like flashes of yellow in his eyes. “I don’t believe it.”
“Denise was asked out a lot,” I said carefully, “but she was picky about who she went with.”
Momentarily, both Aunt Trish and Carl were appeased. Carl moved on. “And what did Denise want to do with her life? I hear she had plans to work at the new Dalí Museum.”
“She did,” Aunt Trish said. “We have a photograph of her and Dalí. He was her biggest fan.”
“I’d love to see that,” Carl said. “And any other photographs of Denise that the family might want included in the piece.”
Aunt Trish shot me a look before she left. Do us proud.
Alone, Carl put his hands on his knees, leveling with me. “Gestapo’s gone,” he whispered, and laughed a little.
My stomach pitched. The reporter working on a piece about Denise could see right through the duress I was under to portray her in a positive light. I had better think fast.
“How old are you?” I asked.
Carl leaned back in surprise. “Why?”
I took my shot. “You look young enough to have graduated from J-school this decade. Which means you’re a student of new journalism.”
Carl closed his notebook and wrapped his forearms around his rib cage, lips curling into a small smile, as though I’d said something devastatingly cute. “And what do you know about new journalism?”
“One of my sisters is studying to be a journalist, and she said it’s not as objective as traditional journalism.”
“That’s subjective,” he teased.
“You’re asking me about Denise’s romantic life,” I said, hoping I sounded as imposing as my bigwig father, “instead of focusing on the quality evidence.” Quality evidence, how I loved that term. It made me feel like I knew what I was talking about.
“Being?”
“That I saw him. And it wasn’t someone she knew. That any of us knew.”
“The attack has all the markings of something personal,” Carl pointed out, “given that Denise’s injuries were particularly brutal.”
I thought about Denise’s peaceful sleeping face. “You didn’t see the other girls.”
Carl gave me a strange look. “The fact-checker at the Democrat isn’t even sure if I can use the word rape to describe what he did to her. Is it technically rape? You probably know how the law defines it better than I.”
I felt my face go slack. I swayed, made woozy by that word. Not rape; that I could handle. Technically, I could not. “Sheriff Cruso doesn’t like to upset me, apparently.”
Carl told me then what was done to Denise with the Clairol hair mist bottle she’d purchased just the week before. In the beauty aisle at Walgreens, Denise had hand-selected the object that punctured the lining of her bladder and caused a fatal internal bleed, saying, I heard Clairol holds up better in the humidity than White Rain. I covered my face with my hands, thinking about what Denise looked like when she was in pain. The year before, she’d stepped on a nail in the basement on her way to pull out the Christmas decorations. It went through her shoe, and one of our sisters, premed, had propped Denise’s leg on an overturned milk crate and told her to turn her face away. I remembered the way Denise had clasped my hand and looked up at me, still wearing the Santa Claus hat she’d discovered among the ornaments and fake pine garlands. Her lower lip was quivering, and I saw what she must have looked like as a little girl when she fell off her bike. I stifled a sob now, seeing that face, imagining how much more this would have hurt.