“Good.”
“So where were you?” she asked him.
“I was telling him why we may be willing to talk.”
“Okay.”
Sadie Goldberg slowly felt her way down the stairs. Abe turned his owl eyes on me again and said, “Mr. Squares tells us that there is a little girl involved here.”
“Her daughter,” I said. “She’s probably about twelve years old.”
Sadie clucked a tsk-tsk. “You don’t know where she is.”
“That’s right.”
Abe shook his head. Sadie moved next to him, their bodies touching, somehow fitting together. I wondered how long they’d been married, if they had children, where they’d come from, how they came to these shores, how they ended up in this business.
“You want to know something?” Sadie said to me.
I nodded.
“Your Sheila. She had”—she raised two fists in the air—“a special something. A spirit about her. She was beautiful, of course, but there was something more. The fact that she’s gone . . . we feel lessened. She came in and she looked so scared. And maybe the identity we gave her didn’t hold up. Maybe that’s why she’s dead.”
“So,” Abe said, “we want to help.” He wrote something down on a piece of paper and handed it to me. “The name we gave her was Donna White. That’s the social security number. I don’t know if it’ll help you or not.”
“And the real Donna White?”
“A homeless crack addict.”
I stared down at the scrap of paper.
Sadie moved toward me and put a hand on my cheek. “You look like a nice man.”
I looked up at her.
“Find that little girl,” she said.
I nodded once and then again. Then I promised that I would.
28
Katy Miller was still shaking when she arrived at her house.
This can’t be, she thought. It’s a mistake. I got the name wrong.
“Katy?” her mother called out.
“Yeah.”
“I’m in the kitchen.”
“I’ll be there in a little while, Mom.”
Katy headed for the basement door. When her hand reached the knob, she stopped.
The basement. She hated to go down there.
You would think that after so many years, she’d be desensitized to the threadbare couch and water-stained carpet and so-old-it’s-not-even-cable-ready television. She wasn’t. For all her senses knew, her sister’s body was still down there, bloated and decayed, the stench of death so thick it made it hard to swallow.
Her parents understood. Katy never had to do laundry. Her father never asked her to fetch his toolbox or get a fresh bulb from the storage room. If a task required a trip into these bowels, her mother and father tried to take it on for her.
But not this time. This time, she was on her own.
At the top of the stairs she flicked the light switch. One naked bulb—the glass fixture had broken during the murder—came to life. She crept down the stairs. She kept her line of vision up and over the couch and carpet and TV.
Why did they still live here?
It made little sense to her. When JonBenét was murdered, the Ramseys had moved across the country. But then again, everyone thought that they killed her. The Ramseys were probably running away from the stares of neighbors as much as the memory of their daughter’s demise. That, of course, was not the case here.
But still, there was something about this town. Her parents had stayed. And so had the Kleins. Neither had been willing to surrender.
What did that mean?
She found Julie’s trunk in the corner. Her father had put some kind of wooden crate under it in case of a flood. Katy flashed back and saw her sister packing for college. She remembered crawling into the trunk as Julie packed, pretending at first that the trunk was a protective fort and then, after that, pretending that Julie might pack her up too, so that they could go to college together.
There were boxes piled on the top. Katy removed them and put them in a corner. She examined the trunk’s lock. There was no key, but all she needed was a flat edge. She found an old butter knife with the stored silver. She stuck it into the opening and turned. The lock fell open. She unsnapped the two clasps and slowly, like Van Helsing opening Dracula’s coffin, she lifted the lid.
“What are you doing?”
Her mother’s voice startled her. She leapt back.
Lucille Miller moved closer. “Isn’t that Julie’s trunk?”
“Jesus, Mom, you scared the hell out of me.”
Her mother came closer. “What are you doing with Julie’s trunk?”
“I’m . . . I’m just looking.”
“At what?”
Katy straightened up. “She was my sister.”
“I know that, honey.”
“Don’t I have a right to miss her too?”
Her mother looked at her for a long time. “And that’s why you’re down here?”
Katy nodded.
“Is everything else okay?” her mother asked.
“Fine.”
“You’ve never been one for reminiscing, Katy.”
“You’ve never let me,” she said.
Her mother considered that. “I guess that’s true.”
“Mom?”
“Yes?”
“Why did you stay?”
For a moment, her mother seemed ready to give Katy the usual rebuff about not wanting to talk about it. But—what with Will’s surprise visit to the curb and her working up the courage to pay her respects to the Klein family—this was turning into a rather bizarre week. Her mother sat on one of the boxes. She smoothed out her skirt.
“When a tragedy hits you,” her mother began. “I mean, when it first hits you, it’s the end of the world. It’s like being dumped in the ocean during a storm. The water tosses you and thrashes you and there is nothing you can do but try to stay afloat. Part of you—maybe even most of you—doesn’t even want to keep your head above water. You want to stop fighting and just sink away. But you can’t. The survival instinct won’t let you—or maybe, in my case, it was because I had another child to raise. I don’t know. But either way, like it or not, you stay afloat.”
Her mother wiped the corner of her eye with one finger. She sat up a little and forced a smile. “My analogy isn’t holding,” she said.
Katy took her mother’s hand. “It sounds pretty good to me.”
“Maybe,” Mrs. Miller allowed, “but you see, after a while, the storm part is over. And that’s when it gets even worse. I guess you can say you’re washed up onshore. But all that thrashing and tossing has caused irreparable harm. You are in tremendous pain. And that’s still not the end of it. Because now you’re left with an awful alternative.”