“He should fry,” Carl said, real hatred in his voice, “for what he put her through.”
I hiccupped once, loudly and excruciatingly, and swallowed the bile that came up with it. It was indigestible, all the methods humans had devised to inflict more suffering.
“Are you planning on putting that in your story?” I asked. “What he did to Denise?” I imagined Mrs. Andora reading what I’d just been told, her hand taloned to her throat as though stoppering some fatal wound.
“Not in the level of detail I just shared with you, but the public is frightened, and they are looking for answers. And I need to address the fact that Roger’s name did not come out of nowhere. You said it first.”
I freed the leather flap of my purse. “Can I show you something?” I fished around until I found the copy of the Wanted poster that Tina had shown me in her car. I watched Carl read it, running his tongue along those big teeth, perplexed at first, then intrigued.
Wanted by the FBI
Born November 24, 1945, in Burlington, Vermont, 5'11''to 6'. Build, slender. Complexion, sallow, law student, occasionally stutters when upset.
CAUTION.
The Suspect is a college-educated physical fitness enthusiast with a prior history of escape, is being sought as a prison escapee after being convicted of kidnapping and while awaiting trial for a brutal sex slaying of a woman at a ski resort in Colorado. He should be considered armed, dangerous, and an escape risk.
The man in the picture was unshaven and in need of a haircut. His jaw was tilted down and to the side, his mouth not so much open as closing, as though he had just finished speaking when the camera clicked. His eyebrows were unruly and raised, bunching his forehead into three distinct lines.
“Where did you get this?” Carl wanted to know, and I told him about Tina, how I believed her but I still didn’t trust her.
“I could hold on to this,” Carl offered. “Do some research. Look into him, and her. See if there’s anything there.”
I hesitated. That sounded very close to teaming up, and I wasn’t sure that was prudent.
“You said this guy saw you, right?”
I shook my head. “He looked in my direction, and that’s when I saw his face. But he didn’t see me.”
“How can you be sure?”
“Because he ran out right after.”
“Maybe he thought you had already called the police. Maybe he thought he didn’t have time.”
A shudder went down my spine as I thought about the idea of time. How you would need a certain amount of it to do what he would have wanted to do to me.
“Can I have that?” I motioned. The flyer. Carl hesitated before giving it back to me. But I wasn’t taking it back; I only wanted to tear off a tab at the bottom. “Write your number down,” I told him, and immediately flushed, hearing myself tell a man I had just met to give me his number. “I don’t want you calling The House,” I added professionally. “I’m not really supposed to talk to press, but I’d be interested to know what you find out.”
Carl scribbled his number down, eyebrows raised amusedly. I pocketed the scrap.
“Denise beat out one thousand candidates for the job at the Dalí Museum,” I said, and waited for him to realize I was giving him material for his story, to flip open his notebook and write all this down, the things about Denise that I never wanted anyone to forget. “She did it by telling Dalí she thought he should object to the chronological order of the gallery, which has been the way modern art has been displayed for the better part of the last century. She called it a postmodern time warp, which appealed to a physics nut like Dalí immensely. She did all of this in Spanish. She practiced in the mirror for weeks. When the public is allowed into the space later this year, it will be the first anti-chronological exhibition ever, and it’s because of Denise. Denise may not have lived long”—I swallowed and tasted the salty fruit salad languishing in my gut—“but she still managed to leave her mark on the world.”
The next day, when Carl ran my beautiful quote alongside a beautiful photograph of Denise, Mrs. Andora made a bouquet out of the funeral flowers and attached a handwritten note that said, With my deepest gratitude. Carl wrote about Denise like she was a human, and that was when I knew I could trust him.
PAMELA
Tallahassee, 2021
Day 15,826
I wake early in my hotel room and walk to campus, dragonflies skirting my feet, phosphorescent flashes in the pale spring sun. There is a campus tour happening and I tag along, learning things I probably should have already known about my alma mater. That the big red circus tent was built in 1947 and offered classes like trapeze flying and juggling in an attempt to integrate men and women when FSU became a coed institution. When we reach the dining hall, I nearly fall over when I hear the student tour guide say that the cafeteria employee known for doling out hugs to all her “babies” still works in customer service for the school and has been written about in Forbes.