S
helly found them on the Internet with no trouble: the parents of Denise Graham, the Omega Theta Tau “runaway.” As the desperate tended to do in a computer age, they’d created a website: BringBackDenise.com.
There she was on Shelly’s computer screen—a blond beauty with big blue eyes. If it hadn’t been for the coloring, she could have served as Josie Reilly’s stunt double. The same straight, shiny, shoulder-length hair. The smoky eye makeup. The perfect gleaming teeth.
In this photograph, Denise Graham was wearing a lacy tank top. She was sitting in a plaid armchair that had the look of family room furniture. There was a longhaired cat in her lap. Denise Graham was petting it, smiling.
PLEASE! DENISE GRAHAM IS OUR BELOVED, BEAUTIFUL, BRILLIANT DAUGHTER. SHE DISAPPEARED FROM HER SORORITY IN MARCH, AND HAS NOT BEEN SEEN SINCE.
The bright red capital letters went on to scroll out the details. The time and date of her last contact with her parents. Her height and weight (5’5” and only 115 pounds). Also, her favorite foods (nachos, Dr. Pepper) and various nicknames (Shiny, Sweeties, Neecey)—as if she, like the cat in her lap, might need to be coaxed out from under a porch or a vehicle with these pet names.
The Grahams’ phone number was there, too—how many prank phone calls, Shelly wondered, had this inspired?—along with their address, their email addresses. They lived only thirty miles from the university town where their daughter had disappeared.
T
wice Shelly picked up the phone to call them, and twice she composed emails to them, and then she decided she would simply drive to Pinckney and introduce herself, because, really, what did she have to offer them, or to ask them? Better that they should see her standing there humbled on the doorstep by their grief.
Or so she’d thought until she pulled up in front of their house.
It was one of those lavish new subdivision
homes
, the type built to appeal to people who, Shelly imagined, wanted a kind of English country life without the country. It had a winding cobblestone path through some bright green bushes bearing red ornamental berries. A light snow had begun to fall, and everything about the place looked like an advertisement for a lifestyle, the lifestyle being lived in nearly identical houses all throughout the subdivision, except that here the lawn hadn’t been mown or the hedges trimmed, and the mailbox at the end of the driveway appeared to have been struck by a car (little black door hanging open, side dented). And every window in the house had drawn shades or curtains pulled across it. Although there were two cars parked at crooked angles to each other outside the closed garage, it looked, from the outside, as if no one had been home for many months.
Shelly was about to back up, turn around, when the front door flew open and a woman in a hot pink bathrobe hurried, barefoot, onto the front steps and began to wave her arms wildly in the air, as if flagging down an ambulance or trying to help land a plane.
There was no doubt who she was.
The resemblance was uncanny. Here was Denise Graham, the runaway sorority girl, aged thirty years. Frantic, exhausted, maybe medicated or a little drunk. Having spent the last eight months in the desperate hope that every time the phone rang, the mail came, or a car pulled into the driveway it would bring her lost daughter home to her. “Who
are
you?” Denise Graham’s mother called out to Shelly, and Shelly had no choice now but to park the car and get out.
T
he living room was a gracious shambles. Newspapers were piled up on the leather sofa. Mail was scattered across the antique coffee table. There was a stain (coffee? Pepsi?) in the center of the plush white carpet. The cat Shelly recognized from the website was sitting in front of the cold fireplace, stone still. Only its eyes moved when Shelly sat down in the only chair that wasn’t piled with papers.
“I want to tell you right away, Mrs. Graham,” Shelly said, “that I don’t—”
“Call me Ellen,” the woman said, as if the interruption, the intimacy of a first name, might change the course of this conversation and lead her to her daughter. She took a place on the couch across from Shelly without bothering to clear a place for herself, sitting down on a newspaper, a few pieces of junk mail. Her robe spilled open over her chapped-looking knees, and she didn’t bother to pull it back into place. Out of respect, Shelly looked away, but the only other thing to look at in the room besides Ellen Graham or a messy pile of something was the cat, unnerving in its calm return of Shelly’s gaze.
“Okay, yes,” Shelly said, “and you can call me Shelly. But I want you to know that I don’t have any information about your daughter. I’m with the university, but I work—or,
worked—
at the Chamber Music Society. The only connection I have here is to one of your daughter’s sorority sisters, and I’ve been reading about your daughter, and about another incident at the sorority—”
“Nicole Werner,” Ellen Graham said. “That accident happened the night my daughter disappeared.”
Shelly nodded, although the accounts she’d read put the disappearance of Denise Graham at least a week before Nicole’s death.
“I’m not a professional in any way,” Shelly continued, “and I probably have no business—”
Ellen began shaking her head. “I don’t care about that,” she said. “I don’t care about anything except finding Denise. Who cares about being professional or even polite? That’s gotten us nothing. We don’t care if you’re just plain nosy, if it’s morbid curiosity. We just want someone to
help
us.”
Ellen Graham’s hands went to her knees then. She began to scratch at them absently, rocking back and forth.
Shelly paused, trying to decide where to go from here. She took a breath and said, “I was the first person at the scene of the accident. Nicole Werner’s accident. I saw what happened, and I know that what they’re saying happened
didn’t
happen. I’m trying to find out what actually did happen. I don’t know if it had anything to do with your daughter—”
“Denise,” the woman said, as if she’d been waiting for an excuse to say the name.
“Yes,” Shelly continued, “with Denise. But I know, now, that either the university, or the police, or the newspaper, or the sorority, or all of them together are willing to lie. They’re covering something up. They’ve got something to hide. They’re—”
“Who is this girl, the one you know from the sorority? Is her name Josie Reilly?” There was no mistaking the tone of Ellen Graham’s voice when she said the name: bitter hatred. Fury, and anger, and derision.
“Yes,” Shelly said, astonished. “How did you know?”
“I’ll show you how I know,” Ellen Graham said.
Although she stood up, her body seemed to retain the shape of the sofa, the posture of someone who’d been sitting in it, slumped, so long that she had
become
it. Shelly followed her to the stairway, where there was more plush carpet and piled-up debris—magazines, paperbacks, unopened envelopes. Ellen Graham simply stepped over the piles and around them, so Shelly did as well, and then they were in a long hallway hung with photographs of a girl who had to be Denise: Denise in a bassinet, zipped into what looked like a lacy pink envelope. Denise with pigtails, riding a tricycle. Denise in a startlingly low-cut blue satin gown, hand tucked under the arm of a boy in a tuxedo. Denise squinting into sunlight, wearing a mortar board.
They stopped in front of an open door.
“This is Denise’s room,” Ellen Graham said, as if Shelly could have mistaken it for anything else.
There were piles of stuffed animals on the bed—the prized, expensive kind of stuffed animals (endangered species with personalized name tags and hand-painted glass eyes), not the dragged-through-the-mud-since-preschool kind. There was a complete set of the
World Book Encyclopedia
on the bookshelf, ceramic cats holding the volumes in place. The only mess in this room was on the bulletin board, which was three layers thick with snapshots of adolescents in bikinis, or on bicycles, or driving boats, or singing into microphones, and glossy pages torn out of magazines, greeting cards emblazoned with
YOU’RE THE BEST
and
WAY TO GO, GIRL
, and small, dried-up things that must have been mementos from parties and dances and dates.
The girl’s violin was out of its case, lying on its side on top of her dresser.
“I haven’t changed anything,” Ellen Graham said. “Before the police came, I made a chart of everything, where everything had been, so that everything would be exactly the way she left it, for when she comes back.” She looked with unnerving ferocity into Shelly’s eyes, seeming to be making sure Shelly understood that Denise
would come back
. “The only difference is that I put her clothes and things from her room at the sorority away, in her closet, when those girls brought me her things. “See?”
Ellen Graham led Shelly to a closet and slid the door open. A row of white lights blazed on without any switch being flipped, and Ellen Graham stepped into it—into that light, and into that closet—turned a corner, and seemed to disappear before Shelly’s eyes.
Shelly followed, but hesitated, and then she realized that this closet was the size of most rooms. A closet the size of a small apartment, or a trailer. It could not have been called, even, really, a walk-in closet. It was a space that could have been
lived
in. The only thing closetlike about it was the row after row of garments crammed together along the walls, and the fact that there were no windows.
Ellen Graham turned to look at Shelly and then tossed her arms up in the air, as if either to reveal something miraculous or to try to express the total futility of some unending task, and then she stood up on her tiptoes and pulled down a small black-enameled box, opened it, and turned it toward Shelly, as if to present her with the contents.
Black satin, bearing jewelry.
A pair of earrings.
Two grapelike clusters of opals and rubies dangling from elaborate Victorian-scrolled gold settings. These were the kinds of jewels that were kept under glass at Holyrood or Buckingham Palace. When Denise had worn them, they must have hung down to her shoulders. They must have weighed a ton, cost a fortune.
Ellen Graham picked one of them up and said, “They were my grandmother’s. She was Italian. A countess. You don’t have to believe me. You can look it up on the Internet.”
Shelly nodded, and immediately regretted it, thinking the nod might make it appear that checking out Ellen Graham’s grandmother’s pedigree on the Internet was something she planned to do.
“I let Denise borrow these for the Spring Event. She was wearing a white dress we bought together in Chicago. She was so excited. I’d never even let her
touch
these before.
“My daughter is an angel, Shelly, but no one could claim that, when it comes to material things, she’s overly responsible. She lost four cell phones between her senior year in high school and when she disappeared.
“Still, she knew what these were worth, and what they meant.”
The Spring Event. Josie’s description of it. The tequila. The coffin. Shelly wondered if Denise disappeared before or after.
“And that
fucking little bitch
,” Ellen Graham said, her voice cracking on the last word before she snapped the enameled box shut and tossed it back on the shelf above her daughter’s sweaters and dresses. “Josie Reilly! That fucking little bitch who came here with one of those other little Omega Theta Tau brats with a trunk full of my beautiful daughter’s things. But no earrings. No white dress. ‘Where are those?’ I asked. How stupid was I?”
Ellen Graham was acting out a scene now, reading from a script.
“ ‘Have you seen, by any chance,’ I asked, ‘a white dress and a pair of beautiful Italian earrings worth about twenty thousand dollars?’
“ ‘Oh,
no
, Mrs. Graham. Golly. We went all through Denise’s stuff. We brought you everything! We never saw a white dress or any Italian earrings. Denise was long gone before the Spring Event. Maybe she was wearing them when she left?’ ”
Shelly watched, waited for the scene to play itself out.
“Well, that didn’t make sense, did it, Shelly? Why would Denise be wearing her Spring Event outfit if that was still three nights away? But, you know, I was confused. I was desperate. The police and the university and the Pan-Hellenic Society—everyone was looking into this. Everyone was working so hard. Wearing ribbons. Making phone calls. I just felt grateful not to be Nicole Werner’s mother by that time.
That
mother had it worse than I did, I thought. I felt lucky anyone cared at all about Denise’s disappearance with
that
on top of it.
“And, of course, these girls were so sweet. And so beautiful. Josie, and this other girl, Amanda Something. They could have
been
Denise. Their hair, and their clothes, and their ‘likes’ and ‘you knows’ and the little mannerisms, their pretty manicures. I thought, Okay, my daughter wore her grandmother’s earrings and her Winter Event dress and got on a bus, and—and what?
“And by the time these girls brought me her things, it had been six weeks already. Six unbearable, sleepless weeks. And then the summer was over and the police told me they were ‘working’ on the case.
“So I sat down at the computer and looked her up—Nicole Werner—mostly because her parents were the only parents on earth I could think of who had it worse than I did. Maybe there was some kind of perverse satisfaction in that. I read every word I could find about the accident, and the funeral, and the memorial service, and the sorority and their fucking cherry trees, and then I came across one very, very interesting item.
“I came upon a photograph of that pretty dark-haired girl who’d brought Denise’s belongings home. She’d been, it seemed, Nicole Werner’s roommate. And there she was in this photograph, standing at a lectern giving a little speech during the dedication of the cherry orchard, supposedly two weeks after my daughter disappeared, and that little fucking slut was wearing my
goddamned Italian countess grandmother’s earrings.
”