The Drowning Girls (24 page)

“No,” I said, kneading Danielle’s shoulders with my thumb. “No, baby. Don’t think that way. We don’t know what she was thinking. Maybe it was completely unrelated to all of that.”

“But I never even answered her texts.”

I remembered what Fran had told me about Kelsey—the inappropriate relationship, the sleeping pills. I’d been turning it over in my mind since that conversation. Had another “inappropriate relationship” ended, causing her to attempt suicide again?

“She told me that she took some pills last spring, but she said it was no big deal, that she wasn’t trying to hurt herself,” Danielle said. “It was all over some guy, I guess. Her boyfriend.”

The song wound down, the plaintive question dying out:
Why, oh, why, can’t I?
The final chords faded, the room was quiet and then there was a faint buzz of static before the song began again.

Danielle’s voice came thick with tears. “I just feel so horrible...”

I rubbed her shoulder through the blanket. “It sounds like she’s had problems for a long time, and now she can get some professional help.”

* * *

I felt pretty horrible myself. I was a counselor, for God’s sake—I was trained to see when there was something wrong, to recognize a person in a fragile state. I’d dismissed Kelsey Jorgensen as manipulative at best, a home wrecker at worst. But she was only sixteen, still a kid in many ways and a troubled one at that.

Over the years, I’d counseled a number of traumatized students. At first, they’d been hesitant to tell me what was wrong, but after a few minutes, the floodgates usually opened and it all came spilling out—the abusive boyfriends, the unemployed parents, the threats and bullying. My first year at MLHS, I’d had a girl come in—Cassie, a name that still weighed on me—and I hadn’t asked the right questions. She’d wanted to know how to prevent a pregnancy, and I’d given her a pamphlet and information for a local clinic and sent her on her way. I still wondered: if I’d called her in every week, if I’d talked to her parents, would she have ended up pregnant at fourteen, the father a nineteen-year-old friend of her older brother?

In the same way, I couldn’t stop thinking about Kelsey. Had I missed the signs that Kelsey was crying for help, dismissing them as the silly behavior of a self-absorbed teenage girl? I didn’t have all the facts, of course—until she was being loaded into the ambulance, I’d never heard about a previous suicide attempt or a relationship with a teacher. And I’d never been able to prove a relationship with Phil, although I believed it, deep down.

Still, as a counselor—I’d failed.

* * *

I’d struck out with his laptop months before, but I’d never tried his phone. As soon as he was asleep, I tiptoed around to his side of the bed and took the phone off his nightstand. I was quiet on the stairs, and I sat on the couch in the den in the dark, startled by the outline of my reflection in the wall of windows. That other Liz, the shadow one, would have been shocked to see what I was doing.

Phil hadn’t changed the password to his phone—it was the street address of our old house, our first house together. When I keyed in 1-5-2-7, the phone came to life. He’d configured his phone to receive his work emails, and I went there first. It was horrible, like peeking inside his personnel file. As I worked my way backward, I saw emails that were short and snappish, that all but blamed Phil himself for the house fire and the vandalism in the clubhouse, that ordered him to keep everyone calm about the mountain lion. When he’d been hired last summer, the tone had been more friendly. It wasn’t hard to see that he was on his way out, that the bloom was off the rose. He would need more than the old Aussie charm to buy him more time.

His personal email account was there, too. It was a shitty thing to do, but not hard to rationalize. Sure, I would have been upset if he went through my email—but I had nothing to hide other than the odd credit card receipt for a new pair of shoes that he never would have noticed on his own. No, this was the noncheating spouse’s prerogative, to find the evidence and be able to plan an action, or to be reassured that nothing was going on, after all. His inbox was a collection of emails from his brother, Zeke, in Corfu—mostly chitchat. There were a few mentions in his recent emails about looking for another job, or as he put it, keeping his options open. What options were those, and did they include Danielle and me?

Scrolling through his folders, I found one called “Legal.” I clicked on it, heart pounding. The messages were all from Montgomery, Lahovary & Fitch—the website he’d been browsing in December, when he hadn’t been able to minimize the screen fast enough. I opened each of the emails, but they were all administrative—appointment reminders and receipts. Apparently Phil had been meeting an attorney every other week for months, tossing down three and four hundred dollars each time.

A divorce attorney.
What else could it be?

I clicked on the icon for his texts. They were mostly from me, quick, impersonal notes about dinner and groceries and reminders, the to-do lists that comprised the backbone of a marriage. They were just short bursts of language, but I could read the coolness in my voice, in my “picking up pizza” and “almost home.” There were texts between him and Danielle, and those were more personable—smiley-face emoticons and inside jokes.

I saved the pictures for last. He was horrible at organizing his photos, never deleting or moving them, so there was always a continual, chronological roll of images. The most recent ones were of the burned house, then the fire itself, flames shooting above the roofline. There were dozens of Christmas photos—Allie and me side by side in the kitchen, Danielle and Mom hugging, Danielle opening her gifts. My throat clogged seeing them. What I wouldn’t give to have Allie next to me right now, telling me that I was crazy or urging me to get to the bottom of it. I scrolled past random shots of The Palms—repairs that needed to be made, mostly, a few shots of the homes in Phase 3 in their nearly final stages.

There’s nothing here, I told myself.

And then I saw it—in thumbnail, a dark photo with a white blur in the middle. When I clicked on it, the image became Kelsey Jorgensen in a pair of sweatpants, her chest naked, wet hair gleaming. A pool—
our
pool—glistened in the background.

Fuck
.

I dropped the phone, which bounced off my thigh and thumped onto the rug.

There would be no talking his way out of this one. I could march upstairs, flip on the light switch and hold the phone in front of his face.
Here she is, your girlfriend.
What in the world was his plan—to divorce me and take up with Kelsey, maybe waiting until she turned eighteen to declare his love publicly? Or had it been a fling, something he’d ended, leaving Kelsey to swallow a bottle of pills?

I picked up his phone again, bringing the screen to life. Chronologically, it fit into the week of Thanksgiving break, when Danielle and I had been in Riverside. It fit into the timing of that horrible Tweet:
Where a sophomore hottie has sex with her 37yo neighbor and wants more
. Had he been replaying our little pool scene from last June, with a younger and more willing companion?

I’d made huge decisions before. When I found out I was pregnant the spring of my freshman year in college, I’d told my boyfriend. He’d held my hand when I cried, promising that he would come up with the money for an abortion. I’d decided to have the baby on my own, to be a single mother working odd jobs and taking classes part-time, so I could give us a better life down the road. Every single decision I’d made then seemed difficult, monumental. Take Danielle to the emergency room when she had a high fever in the middle of the night? Call in sick when she had a cold and risk losing the shitty job that was keeping us afloat? Buy the more expensive diapers and skip the fresh produce, or load up on fruits and veggies and treat the diaper rash?

In comparison, this wasn’t a huge decision at all. I didn’t need a massive list of pros and cons. In the morning, I’d find a lawyer of my own. Danielle and I would move out, move on. “I’m getting a divorce,” I said to the quiet of the den, and what surprised me was how
not
scary it was. They were just words like any other words, an oral confirmation of the thoughts I’d been having for weeks.

What I did next didn’t take much thinking, either. That would come later, when I was crawling back into bed, shivering so hard I had to clamp a hand over my mouth to keep my teeth from chattering.

This was about getting rid of evidence.

This was about getting, in my own way, revenge.

I grabbed one of Phil’s sweatshirts, a massive hooded thing that he’d draped over a chair in the den, and I slid his phone into the pocket. It was going to be a trick to disable the alarm without waking anyone. I played around with the options on the keypad, finally finding a button for volume control. No one would be able to hear the Other Woman announce “Garage door open” and “Back door open.” In the garage, I slipped my feet into an old pair of Phil’s boots, dried mud caked into the treads. When I walked, they left crenellated trails of dirt, like Hansel and Gretel’s bread crumbs.

I took a flashlight off the workbench and used it to light up Phil’s tool chest, which was disorganized at best. Still, it was easy enough to find a hammer in the mess—the sturdy wooden handle, the cold steel head.

I exited through the back of the garage, a door we rarely used. Again, no mechanical voice stopped me—and no human voice, either. When we’d lived in Livermore, there was always some kind of noise, even late at night or early in the morning—a trash can being dragged to the curb, a dog barking, someone’s stereo thumping, blocks away. Noises at The Palms had always seemed primitive to me, the sounds of water and grass and wind, of insects and animals. I crossed our backyard in this near-silence, the hem of my pajama pants whisking moisture off the lawn. I had to use the flashlight to open the gate. There was a simple locking mechanism, just a latch and a hook, but at some point Phil had tied it with a bit of twine, maybe to keep the gate from blowing open. Once I was through, I glanced back at the house, expecting to see Phil at our bedroom window, his outline filling the frame. But the house was dark.

Mindful of the surveillance cameras, I kept my head down as I crossed the walking trail, the hood covering my face. I didn’t feel recognizable, even to myself. On the security footage, I would only be a person taking a late walk, there and gone. Halfway across the fairway, I turned around to look at The Palms. I’d be leaving it soon enough, for good, and I almost felt a nostalgia for the orderliness of it, the quiet dignity of the homes facing the golf course. If I only had to worry about myself, I could keep walking right now, past the ranch land and out onto the main road and on and on. It was just a grown-up manifestation of the fantasy I’d had as a child—that a better life was just around the bend, and I could find it if I tried.

I stopped at the far end of the golf course, where the greens ended abruptly, cut off by a low fence and the sparse, weed-choked grass of neighboring ranch land. The rain hadn’t come, but a general dampness had, allowing weeds to sprout, full of new life. If there was a mountain lion, I was firmly in its territory and too far away for my scream to be heard. Life was funny like that sometimes—ironically funny, the kind that presents as terrifying in the actual moment.

I removed the case from Phil’s phone—it was too soft, too flexible to be damaged—and flung it like a Frisbee over the fence, off the official grounds of The Palms. I had to get onto my hands and knees to get the right amount of leverage, and then I made the first strike with the hammer, the screen splintering like a spider’s web. It made more noise than I would have thought, but even if the sound carried in the dark, it would have been unidentifiable. It was best to be quick, sure. I brought the hammer down repeatedly, breaking apart the phone’s innards. Somewhere in the mess of innards that came spilling out, there was a GPS tracker, and I didn’t want Phil to be able to track it out here. I raised the hammer and brought it down, smashing and battering and pummeling. What was that movie Phil loved so much, he could watch it any time it was on television? I could picture the trio of men in their shirtsleeves and ties and khakis, beating the crap out of a faulty printer. With each motion I told myself I was getting rid of something, and I was taking back something that belonged to me.

In the yellow beam of the flashlight, the results looked like a miniature plane wreck, the parts littered across a field. I gathered them in the hem of Phil’s sweatshirt and then walked up and down the fence line, scattering them like apple seeds—the little metal bits, the jagged pieces of plastic.

I was careful, retracing my steps, the hammer hanging low in the double pocket of the hoodie. I kept my head down on the walking trail, hands balled in my pockets. I was a person finishing my walk, looping back. I retied the twine around the latch as I passed through the gate and retraced my steps around the pool shed, into the garage. I stepped out of Phil’s boots, kicking them under the utility sink out of sight. In the morning, I’d toss his hoodie in the wash with a load of towels. I returned the hammer to the yellow toolbox and the flashlight to its spot on the workbench and entered the darkened kitchen. At the alarm pad, I reactivated the sound.

Upstairs, I passed Danielle’s darkened room and slid into the bed next to Phil. The hems of my pajama pants were wet, and I thought about slipping them off and tossing them onto the floor. I was about to do that when Phil rolled over with a groan, his arm landing on my hip.

Get your hands off me
, I thought, but my heart was thumping too loud for me to move.

“Were you downstairs?” he asked.

“I was thirsty,” I said into the darkness. I glanced over at him, but he was already asleep.

PHIL

On Sunday morning I woke up to the sun already streaming through the windows. I must not have set an alarm on my phone, or I’d slept through it. My dreams had been like nightmarish movie trailers, little flashes of Kelsey unconscious, inert, her icy blue eyes staring up at me. I’d had such good news, too—a job offer with salary and full benefits, not to mention moving expenses. I’d been a different version of myself in that interview, a better one. I was the old confident Phil, talking about the future as if success were a guarantee, not simply one of a roster of options.

They wanted me to start in one month.

On the flight home, I’d rehearsed all the things I would say to Liz. There were about a million schools in the greater Los Angeles area. Once she got a job, we could settle close to where she worked, and I would do the commuting. We wouldn’t be that far from Riverside—an hour or so on a Saturday morning, every weekend, if she wanted.
Please
, I would say. I would get on my knees if I had to. I would throw myself at her feet.
Please, let’s get out of here
.
We need to do this.
Kelsey’s suicide attempt was proof of this—the longer I stayed, the worse it would get.

But when I’d arrived home on Saturday night, Danielle was in tears and Liz had snapped into full mother mode. I caught her going into Danielle’s bedroom, a cup of tea balanced in her hand.

“Not now, Phil,” she said, but I put a hand on her arm, and she looked at my hand as if it belonged to a stranger, a man who had grabbed her on the street.

“It’s really important, Liz. I know that things between us—”

She pulled away. “Seriously, Phil. There’s no way I can possibly have this conversation with you now. Can you try to understand that? Kelsey could have killed herself.”

I’d gone to bed resolving to have the conversation in the morning, to sit Liz down and tell her that I’d accepted the job, that we would have to start figuring out things, fast. She would want to finish out the year at Miles Landers, and that would probably be best for Danielle, too. In the meantime, I had to find a place for myself, and we’d have to figure out where Liz and Danielle could stay. It would only be four months, and I could come up every weekend once I was settled in.

I reached over to Liz’s side of the bed, but it was cold; she was already up for the day. I fumbled for my phone to check the time. It was usually on the nightstand, but I couldn’t find it now. I leaned down and felt around the bed skirt, sweeping my arm blindly under the nightstand. Nothing.

I looked in the pockets of yesterday’s pants, then in the bathroom. I headed downstairs to peek between couch cushions, beneath catalogs and magazines. It wasn’t in the kitchen; it wasn’t plugged in and charging in the dining room next to my laptop. I figured Liz was outside with a cup of coffee and a book, but she was gone, too, the Toyota missing from the garage. Desperate, I knocked once on Danielle’s door and stuck my head in.

She sat up in bed, alarmed. Her eyes were still red-rimmed from the night before. “What’s going on?”

“Sorry. I can’t find my phone. Can you call it with yours?”

We did this for ten minutes, Danielle calling and me searching high and low. I usually turned the ringer off before going to bed, but I should still have heard a vibration. Maybe the battery was dead; it had been at 40 percent last night, when I’d last checked my email.

“It’s probably in your office,” Danielle said, but I knew it wasn’t. I hadn’t been back to my office since the interview, and I’d used my phone last night—I even remembered setting my alarm for seven thirty, thinking I’d get up early to make breakfast for the three of us, to butter up Liz for a talk.

Danielle thought for a minute. “Don’t you have that app, the one that you can look up on your computer to find the phone’s GPS coordinates?”

“I don’t think so,” I said. But I booted up my laptop anyway and tried various websites, none of which worked.

And then I thought:
Liz.

“Where did your mom go?”

Danielle shrugged. “I don’t know. Maybe to get groceries?”

“Can I use your phone? I want to call her.”

Danielle sighed elaborately, as if it were a huge imposition to let the person who paid for her phone actually touch it, but she handed it over without further complaint.

I dialed Liz’s number and got her voice mail. “Hey,” I said to the recording. “It’s me. Can you give me a call—or Danielle, since this is her phone?” I waited, but she didn’t call back.

“She never picks up when she’s driving,” Danielle pointed out.

I waited another half hour, but she didn’t return the call. Eventually, I took a shower, retracing my steps through the bedroom one more time looking for my phone. Had Liz taken it for some reason? Was she looking for something, or maybe checking up on me? She’d seemed suspicious about my overnight trip, and I was eager to tell her the truth. At least she wouldn’t find anything from Kelsey on my phone. All those files were on a flash drive tucked away in my briefcase. I had this thought while I was in the shower, and then I hurried to rinse and throw on clothes and rush downstairs to check the inside zippered pocket of my briefcase, but the flash drive was still there, as well as the Ziploc bag with Kelsey’s thong and bikini. I laughed, stupid with relief—I’d carried this briefcase onto the plane, into my interview and never thought about it once. Kelsey had been out of my mind as soon as she was out of my sight.

But at least Liz hadn’t found that. I could only imagine her disgust if she knew that I’d kept Kelsey’s underwear. And if she did have my phone, there was nothing incriminating there.

Except—

Shit.
Shit
.

I’d copied the picture of Kelsey, half-naked and pulling on her clothes, onto the flash drive. But had I ever deleted it from my phone? I tried dialing Liz and got her voice mail again.
Hi, you’ve reached Liz McGinnis...

Assuming she had seen Kelsey’s picture, what had she done with my phone? Had she taken it as evidence to show someone—Kelsey’s parents? The police, even? And then I remembered last night, waking up to Liz’s movements in the bedroom, afraid as always that it was Kelsey climbing into bed next to me. She’d been cold, shivering as if she’d been outside.

Because she had been outside.

I practically raced back to my laptop. The video surveillance software was still loaded on there, although I hadn’t checked it once since I’d reviewed the fire footage. What was the point?

It took me a while to find her, but she was there. The clock in the upper right corner of the screen read 2:19 a.m., and she was just a flash on the screen—a hoodie pulled up around her face, the hem hanging to her lower thighs.
My
hoodie. She must have left through our back gate and crossed the walking trail, heading out to the golf course. I slowed down the feed and waited. It was 2:42 a.m. before she reappeared, head down, carrying a flashlight in one hand, the light off.

* * *

Liz came home late that afternoon with a bag of groceries. The leafy ends of a head of romaine poked out of a brown bag like an alibi. I was sitting in the den, my laptop open in front of me.

“Hey,” she said, and then called upstairs, “Danielle! Come on down to help me with dinner.”

“She’s not here,” I said, loud enough so that she turned to look at me, really look at me. She was wearing black pants and a button-up blouse, several steps up from her usual weekend clothes. “I sent her to Hannah’s.”

“Why?”

I said, “You would know the answer to that if you listened to the messages on your phone.”

Liz froze, looking at the kitchen peninsula, where she’d dumped her purse.

“Don’t bother anymore. The messages are all from me, and I can tell you in person now.” I’d told Danielle that there was an important conversation I needed to have with her mother, and she’d protested, insisting that she should probably be there, too.
You can’t be
, I told her and finally, she’d accepted it. Now I said, “We need to talk, Liz.”

“Let me put these groceries away first.”

“Forget the groceries,” I said.

Maybe she heard it in my voice this time, because she came into the den and sat in one of the club chairs perpendicular to me.

I told her, “We’re going to talk,” and she let out a long sigh, as if she were completely deflating her lungs. On my lap, the monitor displayed the surveillance footage, the screen split into twelve different views. One camera covered the tennis courts, where the Zhang brothers were engaged in a fierce volley of shots from the baseline. It had been a beautiful, cloudless day, but The Palms felt deserted now. I took a deep breath. “You went out last night. In my sweatshirt.”

She didn’t say anything.

“Do you want to see the footage? I have it all cued up. I found my sweatshirt in the dryer. And you came to bed with your pants wet. They’re dry now, but there’s some mud along the hems.”

She looked at me, waiting.

“You did something with my phone. I have no idea what. I walked all around the walking trail and the golf course with Danielle’s phone, dialing my number.”

Her face crumpled. “I found the picture! You bastard, you sick, opportunistic bastard. While we were gone for Thanksgiving! And all along, the two of you...”

I leaned forward. “There was no two of us. She’s sick. Did you look at that picture? I took it from our bedroom window because she came over to the house, jumped in our pool and took off her suit. She knew you were gone, she knew I was home by myself.”

“No.” She closed her eyes, shaking her head. “You’re not going to convince me this time that you’re this innocent husband and I’m the crazy jealous wife. You had that picture on your phone. A naked teenager, on your phone, since November.”

“That’s what I wanted to talk to you about, Liz. I’ve wanted to tell you for months, only you wouldn’t listen. You had these crazy accusations...” I pulled the flash drive out of my pocket and loaded it into my laptop. “There’s more, too. I’ve been gathering evidence because I thought I might need it, in case she accused me of anything. Here.” I clicked on my own photo, the one I’d allegedly emailed to Kelsey.

Liz recoiled when she saw the picture. “What the hell? You go walking around our backyard naked?”

“That was the night of the Mesbahs’ party. Remember? We were drinking, and we got into the pool...”

She snatched the laptop from me and held the screen six inches from her face. “How do I know it was that night?”

“I can prove it. Zoom in a little more, to the right. See it, on the grass?”

“It’s your shoe,” she said.

“Yeah, remember? I kicked off my shoes and one of them went flying—”

“And I found it on the grass the next morning.”

I leaned back. “We heard someone out there, remember? Someone was at the gate, and you got out of the pool.”

Liz sat back in the chair, pulling her legs to her chest. “What are you saying? Kelsey Jorgensen took this picture? She was trying to humiliate us or something?”

Not
us
, I thought.
Me.
“I didn’t know she was out there, obviously. I had no idea. But she’d been hanging around my office, being kind of flirty. Well, you know how she is. I didn’t think anything of it at first.”

She raised an eyebrow. “At first?”

“Liz, she became obsessed with me. There’s the underwear—well, you know about that. She told me she’d left me something in our bedroom, but you found it before I did. And she sent me this picture of herself. She wasn’t naked, but it was revealing, and—”

Liz put a hand to her temple, as if she were fingering out a knot. I was the knot.

“Anyway, I deleted the picture, and right after that, the clubhouse was vandalized.” I set the laptop on the coffee table and clicked on the folder labeled “Bathroom.” Liz tilted her head to the side, trying to understand the spray-painted messages, the taunts on the walls. She looked at the laptop and then back up at me. “See? This was why I was talking to her that day, because I knew that she was responsible for what happened.”

Liz’s head jerked back. “But I asked you. I confronted you about all of this in October. You had a chance to tell me everything, and you denied it. You lied to me.”

“I know. I know. Because—you had it all wrong. You were thinking I was the one—”

“No, you were innocent all along. Is that what you’re saying?”

Not completely. I hadn’t moved out of the way when she kissed me, and I hadn’t looked away when she stood in front of me, naked. I’d threatened her—twice. But yes, I was innocent in that I hadn’t sought it out, any of it. That had to count for something, didn’t it? “Liz, believe me—”

She cut me off with a laugh. “You had to think about the question?”

I leaned forward, putting a hand on her knee. “I wanted to tell you, but I didn’t want to involve you or Danielle. But it’s gotten to be a huge mess. She might have taken the pills because of me. I saw her that morning, before I left. I told her I was going to Seattle, but—that was a lie, because I didn’t want her to know—”

Liz put her hands to her temples. “I don’t understand what you’re saying. It’s like you’re speaking another language. Why would you tell her anything? Why would you talk to her at all, when you wouldn’t even talk to me? I’m your wife, Phil. Doesn’t that count for anything?”

“Listen.
Listen
. Of course it does. I was going to tell you, I just didn’t know how—I knew you would assume I was some kind of pervy weirdo for suggesting it. So I went to a lawyer.” Her eyes grew wide. “Yeah, I talked to someone who could give me legal advice. That was a mistake, I realize now. I had to take money out of our savings, but it’s okay. It’s okay now, because—”

“What was his name?”

“What, the lawyer? Jacob Fitch. But I’m not going back there. I’m trying to tell you, there’s a way out. I’ve found us a way out.”

“You’ve found us a way out,” she repeated. “You had this problem you didn’t tell me anything about that you suddenly expect me to believe, but you and your lawyer figured it out.”

“No—forget him. This whole thing was my mistake. I handled it wrong. I see that now. Back in the beginning, I should have put my foot down with her. When you invited her to the house, I should have told you that she was bad news. I should have called the police on the vandalism. And then the house—my God. I should have called the police then. I still could.”