Stalker Girl (20 page)

 

The next day she got the answer to her question from good old dependable ShiraZ.

Carly clicked on the
photographer extraordinaire
link, thinking she’d find flowers and sunsets or maybe some arty industrial landscapes. But instead she found herself face-to-face with Brian. Actually, all three of them: Brian and Liam and Avery, sitting backstage at Train all sweaty and smiling. She knew it was Train because she recognized the ratty couch. She’d sat on it enough times to know its stains and holes and cigarette burns intimately. Backstage at Train was quite the pit. But the black-and-white picture made it look cool and glamorous. The picture taker had perfectly captured that fired-up, we-killed-tonight glow the guys had after a good show.

Carly clicked through the whole series, which was aptly titled “Gig.” It began with the guys unloading the van in the alley behind the club and then went through the whole show; sound check; guys onstage; crowded dance floor; the obligatory after-show mingle with fans cramped into Train’s tiny greenroom; then equipment packing; van loading; and finally the empty, trash-strewn club at three a.m.

After she clicked through the whole series, she went back to get a better look at a shot of Brian onstage. This picture blew her away. It was the Brian she knew. The Brian she thought
only
she knew. His eyes were closed, his head was bent slightly over the neck of his bass. She could tell that in his mind he was in that place he’d once described to her as “a warm red room where all that exists is rhythm.”

She was about to click to the next picture when she glanced at the people crowded in front of the stage: the usual gaggle of girls staring up at Avery, practically salivating, and of course the skinny hipster wannabe boys with their eyes homed in on Avery’s guitar. Some—the smart ones—studied Brian’s bass. Then, off to the side of the crowd, she spied a familiar profile.

Her own.

She wasn’t exactly skilled with photographic software, but she was highly motivated, and within minutes she managed to crop the shot and zoom in on herself.

It was not a pretty picture.

She had her arms crossed in front of her chest. Her face was mostly in shadow, but she could see the way her eyes were narrowed and her mouth scrunched up in a tight, ugly frown. She wasn’t looking at Brian. She wasn’t admiring or appreciating or adoring him. She was glaring at another girl who was admiring and appreciating and adoring him.

And this wasn’t just any other girl. It was that girl she’d made the scene about, from Up All Night Records.

This was the night she’d made that scene.

The night Brian dumped her.

She clicked back to the after-show shots. She’d clicked through them quickly the first time, thinking they were generic crowd scenes. On closer inspection, she saw that they were focused on Liam and Avery and their groupies. In the first one, they were chatting up two smiley girls. But then off to the side, slightly out of focus, you could see Brian talking to the Up All Night girl. Diagonal to them, a few feet away, there she was, leaning against the wall and scowling in all her jealous ugliness.

In the next photo, two more girls had joined the Liam and Avery Admiration Society, and she’d gone from standing cross-armed and glaring to striding across the room, ready to claim her man from the would-be interloper.

Carly cringed as she clicked to the next picture. Liam and Avery were at the center. There were five girls now, three of them talking to Avery, the other two clearly settling for Liam while waiting to talk to Avery. But Brian was also in the frame. He was smiling, talking with his hands like he did when he was excited. The girl was smiling, too. From this angle Carly could see that it was an innocent, friendly conversation. The girl wasn’t leaning in, breasts first, like those girls surrounding Liam and Avery. But out at the edge of the picture, there Carly was, making her way toward them, ready to bust it up.

She couldn’t believe what she was seeing. The final seconds of her relationship caught on camera.

In the next one, Brian wasn’t smiling anymore, and the girl looked surprised. Maybe even a little scared.

And who could blame her? Carly looked downright scary. The wrath of a woman scorned and all that. She’d positioned herself between them and had Brian by his resisting hand. Carly was smiling at the girl, a deranged don’t-you-mess-with-my-man smile.

The next shot was a close-up on Liam and Avery’s drama. They had their phones out and were taking numbers. The Up All Night girl was nowhere to be seen. Brian was talking to someone just outside the frame. He had both hands in his pockets, and his face had that awful look of annoyance Carly had seen just two days before when she’d done that stupid, desperate stop-by.

In the rest of the pictures Brian mostly had his back to the camera. But there was one that clearly showed his face. He was inside the van, sitting in the driver’s seat, the door still open. Avery sat next to him in the passenger seat, checking his hair in the rearview mirror. Brian was looking directly into the camera, smiling.

The way he used to smile at her.

IN A
matter of hours, after putting her considerable Bellwin School informational-literacy skills to work, Carly had filled several pages of a brand-new notebook with the highlights of Taylor Deen’s charmed life.

She came from a well-known Greenwich Village family. The kind of family whose weddings and deaths and home remodelings got written up in the
New York Times
.

Her mother, Judith Monroe Deen, was the only child of Ben and Sadie Monroe, founders of the Monroe Gallery, “the epicenter of the sixties art scene.” One article mentioned an unverified rumor that Sadie Monroe had been “romantically linked” with Bob Dylan before marrying Ben and that she was the Sadie mentioned in one of his more obscure songs. According to
Contemporary American Art
magazine, the Monroe Gallery was still considered “one of the art world’s center rings.” Getting a show there was considered “a clear indication of an artist’s having ‘arrived.’”

Ben and Sadie Monroe died tragically—together— when their car ran off the road and tumbled into the sea in Jamaica, where they spent part of every winter at what their lengthy obituary called a “rustic island getaway.” A thousand people, including Sir Paul McCartney and his then-wife, Linda (Stella’s mother), who once showed her photographs at the gallery, attended the memorial service. Taylor’s mother, who was only twenty-one at the time, inherited the gallery and the brownstone that held it, as well as the rustic island getaway.

Three years after her parents’ obituary, Judith Monroe made the
Times
again for her wedding to R. Conrad “Duffy” Deen III, heir to the Deen furniture fortune and “independent scholar” of modernist art. This wasn’t one of those three-paragraph jobs under a smiling studio portrait of the couple but a full-length article with details about how they met (at a dinner honoring an artist she was showing in the gallery), where they went for their first date (an experimental dance performance in Tribeca), and what the guests were served at the reception (poached salmon with a caviar cream sauce, just like at the dinner where the bride and groom first locked eyes across a crowded room).

A few years after the wedding, Judith and Duffy appeared in the Home section of the
Times
. They’d just done a major overhaul of the brownstone in anticipation of the birth of their first child. The smiling couple was pictured in the doorway of the nursery, each with a hand on Judith’s swollen belly. The room looked nothing like the fluffy stuff you’d see in a Pottery Barn Kids catalogue. No baby animals. No fairies. No balloons. Instead they’d painted the walls deep red and hung abstract impressionist prints, which they thought would be “far more interesting to an infant’s mind.”

Carly checked the date and did the math. That lump was the future Taylor Deen.

True to her Village roots, and perhaps to that early exposure to fine art, Taylor grew into an artist herself. She’d been winning photography prizes, showing and publishing her pictures since she was ten. Her list of accomplishments included honorable mention in the Shoot Nations global youth photography contest and first prize in the
New York Times Magazine
contest for high-school students, as well as regional and national placement in the Scholastic Art & Writing competitions.

Once she ruled out the Up All Night girl, Carly had been half hoping that Brian’s new “someone” would turn out to be one of those girls who were always trying to get his attention online or hanging around gigs slipping the guys their phone numbers and inviting them to parties.

If Brian had hooked up with a status-seeking groupie, Carly would know that he was just passing the time. It wouldn’t last. He’d get bored. Not that she thought he was going to come back to her. She didn’t. She just wanted to have mattered to him. She wanted what they’d had to mean as much to him as it did to her. If he were with one of those girls, Carly would be okay with it because she’d know that what she’d had with Brian was so much better. So much more real.

But this wasn’t a girl looking for status. She didn’t need it. She had plenty of her own.

Carly’s image search yielded plenty of pictures
by
Taylor Deen, but only two measly pictures
of
Taylor Deen. One was taken when she was twelve, at an awards ceremony. Carly could see she was pretty, but she was a young-looking twelve, skinny and gangly. There was a more recent one on her school’s Web site, but it was a group shot of kids who’d gone on a service trip to fix houses in New Orleans. Taylor was on the side, half in shadow, eyes half closed, talking to someone off camera.

There was no way Carly could friend her, so she couldn’t get past the worthless thumbnail that showed only one eye and half a nose. If she wanted to see Taylor, it was going to have to be live and in person.

 

All she wanted was a glimpse. A face to go with the name. And so the following Saturday morning she took off to stake out the Deen family’s brownstone until she got it.

THE PROSECUTOR,
a friend of a friend of Taylor’s family, was threatening to charge Carly with stalking in the fourth degree, a class B misdemeanor in the New York State criminal code, punishable by a $500 fine, three months in jail, and/or a year’s probation.

“
And
/or?” Carly’s mother asked. “Are you sure it isn’t
either
/or?”

“Yes,” Carly’s lawyer said. “I don’t think anyone’s ever gotten all three. And I’ve only heard of one or two cases where someone actually did time, but theoretically, yes. If she’s charged, she could have to pay a fine, do time,
and
have her whereabouts monitored by the state for a year after that. And the family wants an order of protection.”

“A what?” asked Isabelle.

“A restraining order.”

Carly studied the blonde woman in the dark blue suit sitting across the shiny, dark wooden table.
Her
lawyer. A lawyer of her very own. Of all the things she’d ever lain awake wishing she had, a lawyer wasn’t one of them. But now she was very glad to have one.

Susan G. Whitman, Esq., was a friend of a friend of Nick’s, a criminal-defense attorney who had agreed to meet with Carly, her mother, Nick, and—fresh off an early-morning flight from Ohio—Carly’s father, Professor Tim Finnegan. The last time they’d all been in the same room—for the Bellwin School ceremony marking the end of eighth grade—the mood had been a bit more celebratory.

No, Susan explained, it didn’t matter that Carly never intended to cause her specific person any fear.

“Intention has nothing to do with it. All that matters is whether what you did would cause a reasonable person to be concerned about their safety. And what you did . . .”

“I know, I know,” Carly said. She placed her elbow on the table, cradled her forehead in her hand, and closed her eyes, wishing she could disappear. Or turn back time. Or wake up.

She wouldn’t care if she woke up in that awful triangle with the flimsy curtain in the crappy sublet. Or on the hard futon in the guest room/office/storage room at her father’s. Anywhere but the hushed conference room of Babcock & Whitman, Attorneys-at-Law, Specialists in Criminal Defense.

But the room was no figment of Carly’s imagination.

It was clean. The walls, painted a soft yellow, displayed cheerful photographs of the great outdoors: snow-capped mountains, fields of blooming wildflowers, a seascape with a cavorting whale. The table looked freshly polished, and the cushioned chairs were as nice as the ones in her mother’s office. Yet there was something in the air of this room. Not exactly a smell. A heaviness. Something she could almost taste. She imagined it to be the collected desperation of all the accused who’d ever sat around the big table.