We Lie Here: A Thriller, page 24
“You didn’t think Elizabeth disappeared under suspicious circumstances?” Shane asks. “I know the report says voluntary missing adult.”
Detective Stall says, “Not at all. She left the cabin on her bike, which we later found down the road.”
“That could also mean someone snatched her off the bike,” I say.
“Nah,” the man says. “People wanted me to arrest the neighbor, Don Sumner. Arrest him for what, I kept asking. Just because he was a little racist didn’t mean he had anything to do with this. And Maryam Marsh never pressed charges against him after the incident in the store. I guess he thought that her being nice meant more than just her being nice. She rejected old Bud, and he lost it. That had nothing to do with what happened to her kid.”
“Maybe old Bud lost it again on Liz this time?” Shane says. “And instead of assaulting Elizabeth like he assaulted Maryam, he murdered her.”
“Nope,” Detective Stall says. “Elizabeth got tired of the family thing and decided to go. Adults have the right to leave, especially if they’re under a lot of stress, and it sounds like this lady was. Stressed and bored. At least, that’s what her husband said.”
“She was married?” I ask.
“Yep. He . . . I can’t remember his name. I’m retired now. Anyway, he said that she was on a break, that they were taking a moment. That she’d always do this, and that she had a history of mental illness—but that she was fine.” He pauses. “She mailed him a letter about a week after she left, which was also the day she showed up at our substation in Lost Hills.”
Shane and I both say, “What?”
“Yep. I wasn’t there that night, but Marsh talked to one of the deputies on duty. She explained the situation and even signed an affidavit. Once she showed her ID, we called the family, but we couldn’t tell them where she was, not without her consent. That isn’t in the file?”
I shake my head. “I haven’t seen it yet.”
“I’ll send it to you.”
I give him my email address.
“There’s no active case,” he says. “Everyone overreacted. I stuck around for nearly a year, checking in every couple of months, adding to the files, jotting down notes, observations . . . We took every missing person investigation seriously. The circumstances surrounding them don’t matter. And I resent that people thought race had something to do with this.
“I don’t see color. She could’ve been Black, white, or purple, it didn’t matter to me. The available evidence was inconclusive. We didn’t give up. But you gotta remember what we were dealing with. It was obvious she needed help. Her family failed her.”
Shane and I roll our eyes at each other.
“It was an interesting case,” the ex-cop continues. “I was a fan of her father’s music, y’know? Poor thing. She was simply an unbalanced young woman who let life get the best of her. Frankly, I get it. Sometimes, I wanna leave this place, too. Most of us swallow it. Elizabeth Marsh said, ‘Forget it.’”
I close my eyes. “Yeah.”
“Fortunately,” the former detective says, “there ain’t no mystery here. As much as I like cold cases, this ain’t one of ’em.”
After we end the call with Detective Stall, Shane digs through the tub, pausing at a videocassette rubber banded to a crumpled piece of paper. “You have a VCR?”
“At home. But what does this paper . . . ?”
I begin to read.
Dear Detective Stall:
I couldn’t care less that they think I’m missing. I know where I am, and I’d appreciate it if everybody BACKS OFF and LEAVES ME ALONE! I’m leaving this city of poison and traitors and heading to a place of peace and soft water. If you want, I will come meet with YOU before I go. I will also sign an affidavit if that means being left alone. I don’t want to see anyone else. They are trying to destroy what’s left of me. Please don’t let them!
To my family and friends:
It is June 30, and I am alive and well. How many times must I leave? How many times will you drag me back? After all that I’ve been through, I’m tired of trying. I just want to BE. I don’t want anything, just the clothes on my back and some of the money my mother and father left me. You know I’m hard to please. You always wanted me to be perfect. Perfect is exhausting. I want to blame you for not seeing that, but I won’t. Doesn’t matter now anyway. I miss us. Before . . . her. I’m still here for you. Are you here for me?
Please let me exist the way I want. I love you, but please leave me alone. Trust me: it’s better this way.
Love,
EMM
If Elizabeth Marsh visited the police station in Malibu and provided this statement, why did Felicia keep looking for her?
And why did both women come to Palmdale?
And where is Elizabeth Marsh right now?
Wait . . .
Did Elizabeth Marsh kill Felicia Campbell?
47.
Our house sits at the end of a cul-de-sac. I heard someone say once that in lesser neighborhoods, a cul-de-sac is called a dead-end street. Behind our house on that cul-de-sac is desert that stretches until forever. In lesser worlds, that desert is called wasteland, barren nothingness baking beneath the sun. Here, though, the desert moves with sage and chaparral, lizards and coyotes, and it’s interrupted by a forest that burns only to be revived by the very thing that killed it.
My house sits in the middle of a desert at the end of a cul-de-sac. As I pull up, it looks abandoned, as though hours ago the land didn’t burble with the click of forks and spoons against midprice china and stemware. There are secrets here that are actively being kept, and I will keep tugging that line until the anchor sits in my lap.
Yes, Elizabeth Marsh could’ve killed Felicia Campbell. She was supposed to see my cousin on the night she walked into the lake.
Maybe they did meet, and life turned left.
Maybe Ransom can pull the phone records from that night.
Elizabeth Marsh may no longer be missing, and this case may be closed, but my fascination burns bright. And on Sunday, after the anniversary party, I will present my mother with a bulleted list of topics to discuss.
Today, the attic smells of smoke and cedar, and the air is thicker than usual. The wood-slatted walls seem closer, and I feel like I’m wedged between the ground and the grave. I flip through Mom’s senior yearbook again to look at those pictures of Elizabeth Marsh that my mother neglected to scratch out.
There’s Liz, on stage at the winter concert and dancing as Clara in The Nutcracker. There she is, Most Popular and Most Talented.
Back in my bedroom, I find the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater audition tapes from the plastic tub and slip one into my DVD/VCR.
Elizabeth Marsh, wearing a black unitard, poses in a dance studio. There’s a long, mirrored wall behind her. The most beautiful song in the world plays—“Clair de Lune”—as she swoops and spins, her arms remaining perfect in her adagios and grand allegros. In her second piece, she moves to African tribal drums, thrashing and bent, her arms wild and wheeling, followed by her body slowing like she’s nearly frozen and breaking through ice.
By the time her perfect bun comes undone, I’ve stopped breathing and my pulse is racing. Shaken, I stop the tape and turn away from the television.
Yeah, my mother would’ve loved Elizabeth Marsh up until Liz ascended over Mom’s station at school. When she disappeared, Liz was twenty-eight years old. Over twenty years have passed since then, and she’s had time to live a whole other life.
My hands and knees are still shaky, and I’m having a hard time catching my breath. My bedroom is too small, too gray. Although air thrums between the walls and windows, each molecule has been loaded with dust and tobacco. What’s the true color of paint on these walls? What more could I see if I cleaned the windows with a bucket of hot water and vinegar?
I grab the videotape that was rubber-banded to Elizabeth Marsh’s statement and slide it into my VCR.
Closed-circuit television video. The caption in the lower right says LASD LOST HILLS. A woman wearing a baseball cap and a hoodie enters the station close to midnight. For ten minutes, she talks to the officer at the desk, then sits in the small waiting area with a clipboard and pen. She returns to the officer, hands him the clipboard, and leaves.
And she leaves, I guess, for good.
I turn my attention to the latest box I brought down from the attic. It sits beside the plastic tub I took from the cabin.
I look through the contents: Mom’s track meet ribbons, her honor society pin, the car key to her ancient VW Jetta.
I find another manila envelope. Inside, there’s an itinerary for a flight to Saint Croix on October 12, 1998. There’s a piece of notebook paper with an address scribbled in purple ink.
26 Mount Welcome Way Unit C
Christiansted, VI
Laptop open, I type Elizabeth Marsh again into a generic people-finding site. Sixteen results, like the last time I’d searched. She wouldn’t be the Elizabeth Marsh with nearly ninety birthdays behind her. Since she left her friends and family in 1998, she wouldn’t be the Elizabeth Marsh who died in 1997. The Liz Marsh in the Virgin Islands could be her.
Did any of her friends and family think she’d disappeared to the Virgin Islands?
Yearbook in hand again, I stare at the mystery woman’s winter concert picture. In some ways, she and Mom resembled each other. The same sharp cheekbones. The same almond-brown eyes. Mom’s beauty is serrated, though. She’s red pepper and cinnamon. Liz Marsh is smoked paprika and brown sugar.
No wonder Daddy fell for her and then settled for Mom.
I gasp and hold my breath.
Settled.
Throat tight, my eyes flit from the box and the plastic tub to the cluttered bureau and the Jack and Jill bathroom.
Mom, I didn’t mean that.
Guilt pulls me down for using that word—settled—and for thinking that my mother is somehow less than this wounded stranger. Elizabeth Marsh tried to come between my parents and then left behind loved ones who feared that she’d hurt herself and would come to hurt them, too. If anyone’s less, it’s her, the woman who didn’t stick around.
I pick up a pen and aim it for the young woman dancing as Clara in The Nutcracker. I could complete the job Mom didn’t finish. I could black out her face from the yearbook.
But my pen hovers over this picture and . . . Crap. I toss the pen to the other side of the room and toss the yearbook back into the box.
I may be Bee McG’s daughter, but this act of obliteration feels . . . yuck. I’m a lot of things—obsessive, hyperanxious, a bit of a snob. But I am not . . .
Evil.
48.
Mom is waiting at the bottom of the staircase, and her face is tight as an oyster shell. A mummy’s arms aren’t crossed as tight as my mother’s arms right now. Her lips have twisted into an impossible knot across her face, and her nostrils are so flared that she’s stealing all the oxygen.
I’m in trouble.
In the den, Dominique stretches on the couch and sips from a glass tumbler of Coke and olives. On TV, a troop of Naked and Afraid teammates are trying to make shoes from the hide of a dead impala. My sister looks away from the show and curls her lips. “Look who’s decided to show up.”
The nerves in my temples twitch. “Y’all knew Shane was coming. I didn’t skip the dress shop trip for the hell of it.”
“Why didn’t he stay here?” Mom asks. “Something wrong with our house?”
I hold up my hand. “Mom, it would’ve been weird for my boyfriend and me to sleep in my childhood bed. And we had work to do, and we needed to tape things on the wall, and I didn’t want all of that here.”
“What kind of work?” Dominique asks. “You missed helping with party stuff. I had to—”
“Actually do something for a change? Drive to get your dress altered?” I grit my teeth and place my hands on my hips. “Tell me, Dominique, what all have you done?”
She sucks her teeth, mutters, “Whatever,” then stalks to the kitchen.
I drop into the chaise longue. Something pokes in my back. For a moment, my spirits lift, and I reach behind me, hoping that it’s my lost Beloved. No, it’s just the remote control.
Mom is still glaring at me. “You’re not participating.”
I frown at her. “You’re actually serious?”
“You’re more interested in dead-ass Felicia than your own mother.” Her eyes well up and she shakes her head. “So hurtful.”
I slap my thigh. “Can you not? You’re putting on, and lately I’ve been giving in just to keep the peace, but as I look at all my effort—from my depleted bank account to the thousands of text messages and vendors contacting me, I know what I’m doing, and I have evidence of it. So just stop, Mom. Please?”
Her eyebrows lift and she gapes at me. Those manufactured tears return to their ducts and reset for another occasion.
“Your dress?” I ask.
“Upstairs in the closet,” she says, twisting the honeybee pendant on its chain.
“And you said Cece’s . . .”
Mom nods. “Arriving Thursday and meeting with Kayla about the case. She has a mortuary driving up on Sunday to take Felicia back to LA.” She pauses, then adds, “Felicia had a brain tumor. Glioblastoma. Her doctors gave her eighteen months.”
I gasp and hold my neck. “Who told you that?”
“Cece.” Mom settles on the couch. “Shane’s a nice guy. He complements you.”
I blink, then waggle my head to focus on Mom’s comment. “Yeah, he’s wonderful.” I tuck my leg beneath me. “Question . . .” My underarms dampen with swampy fear sweat. “Elizabeth Marsh . . .”
Her breath catches in her chest. Her face hardens again.
I say nothing and wait.
The air feels smoky, stale, and I want to open the windows. Back in the wilds of South Africa, the naked and afraid white people are roasting impala meat over an open fire.
I aim the remote at the television. Poof! Black screen.
Mom crosses, then uncrosses her legs. She feigns interest in the dark television screen, but she’s too jittery to demand the remote control. Finally: “Liz used to be my best friend. We met in junior high school. She helped me in Spanish. I helped her in Algebra. I was fire, she was ice, and we got sweatshirts that said so. When we got to high school, everything changed.”
“You became rivals,” I said.
“Eventually.” Mom plucks string and lint from her socks. The threads drift to the carpet. “Money started to matter. And then there was Felicia. Her parents had a lot of money, and my dad was just a regular guy who helped maintain the highways, and my mother . . . Well, you know about her. Anyway, we were solidly middle-class, but the Campbells . . . Cece was singing all around the world with Anita Baker and Peabo Bryson . . . And she knew Liz’s father—he had been a composer and . . . Again, my father had a great job with Caltrans, but I mean . . . he smelled like tar most days.”
Poppa had always brought us stray dogs he’d found on the highway, and once I was older, he’d shown me pictures he’d taken at the scenes of highway accidents. Those afternoons with him and those glossy snapshots of twisted, charred metal and broken windshields had been some of my favorite moments.
“Anyway,” Mom says, “in junior high school, Felicia and I were more like sisters than cousins, but then she started with the cotillions and ski weekends, and Liz . . . Her parents could afford that stuff, too, and so she and Felicia started doing those things together. My own blood chose Liz over me. And then my best friend chose Felicia over me.”
“Is that why you scratched her out of the yearbook?” I ask.
Mom nods. “And boys made it worse, because we all wanted to be the girl on the football captain’s arm.” She cocks an eyebrow. “Believe it or not, every girl wanted your father, including Liz. He and Liz dated for a moment, but then Rob got his mind right and chose me.”
“And Liz?”
“She never stopped trying to steal him away, even when she got married and started her own family. She got a little extreme every now and then. She had these spells.” Mom stares at the carpet. “Maybe I should show you . . .” She hops up from the couch and darts up the stairs.
As I wait for her to return, the den quiets, the walls crunching and closing around me.
“Found them.” Mom returns with a sheath of papers. “Feels like I printed them out a hundred years ago.” She also holds a miniature photo album and opens it to the first page.
There’s Mom wearing her green-and-white track uniform, her long neck stretched, her chin cocked, hands on her hips, three medals on blue ribbons hanging from her neck.
There she is, in the middle of her clique of five girls—including Felicia and Elizabeth Marsh—wearing sweatshirts and the whitest sneakers in the world. A yellow roller coaster corkscrews behind them.
There they are, Mom and Elizabeth Marsh, wearing airbrushed tank tops—flames for Mom, snowflakes for Liz. Toned arms around the other’s shoulders, their cheekbones bronzed, and their lips glossed.
“Good times,” Mom says, “and then she left. I came up from LA to help search for her, even though she’d been nasty and bitter toward me. It was hurtful, but I reminded myself that she needed serious help, until she started sending me this stuff.”
She hands me printed-out emails.
Bee, you long-legged bitch. Rob will never love you like he loves me. I hope you have a heart attack while you’re driving. That way, I know you’ll die for sure.
And . . .
I see you made lasagna using the tomatoes from your garden.
And . . .
Rob felt soooo good inside of me last night.
“And she sent postcards,” Mom says, offering me two.
A Disneyland postcard:
You know what I’ve been doing lately? Standing outside your window and just staring at you.
