The Forgotten Girl (34 page)

It looked like a driver’s license photo. Not many people look good in those, but the girl from the store did. Her hair was piled on top of her head, and she wore a friendly smile, a far cry from the look of fear she flashed at me when I had spoken to her the previous evening.

“Do you know her?” Reece asked.

I cleared my throat. A little of the emotion from the grocery store welled up in me again.

“I think I know what this is about,” I said.

“You do?”

“Yes,” I said. “After what happened with Gina, and then the way this girl acted in the grocery store when I spoke to her, you’re over here thinking I’m some kind of serious creep. Someone who is stalking strangers now and not just my ex-wife.”

“What happened in the grocery store?” Reece asked.

“If you just let me apologize to her, I will,” I said. “I’ll call her or write a note—”

“The grocery store. What happened?”

I took a deep breath. I told him I saw the girl in the store and she reminded me very much of someone I once knew. When I told Detective Reece that she reminded me of my college
girlfriend, his eyebrows rose again, even higher than when he’d seen the beer cans. I said I had just wanted to talk to the girl, to ask if she might be related to Marissa’s family, but when I had approached her she took off, dropping her groceries on the floor at my feet.

Reece took this all in, and when I was finished, he asked, “Did she say anything to you?”

“She said, ‘What is it?’”

“That’s it?”

“That’s it. She acted like I was Attila the Hun. She ran off. Maybe she’s had a bad experience with a man before and is skittish out in public. I don’t know.”

“Who did you think this girl was related to? Your ex-girlfriend?”

“My girlfriend from college. I guess technically she was my ex-girlfriend. She broke up with me right before . . .” I couldn’t bring myself to say it. I held the image of the girl in my mind, and I could see Marissa’s face there as well, the two of them as vivid as anything. A piercing stab of nostalgia traversed my chest, hitting every major organ and even some minor ones. I felt like I couldn’t breathe.

“Before what?” Reece asked.

“Before she died,” I said. “She died in a house fire one night when we were twenty. Right here near Eastland’s campus. She and her three roommates were killed. But right before the fire, a couple of days before, I guess, she broke up with me.”

“She broke your heart,” Reece said. It wasn’t a question. He must have read something on my face or in my voice. I knew I couldn’t hide my feelings for Marissa, then or any other time.

“She did,” I said. “Completely.”

“And what was her family’s name?” Reece asked. “The
ex-girlfriend, or girlfriend. Whoever she was. What was her family’s name, and where did they live?”

“Her name was Marissa Minor. Her family lived in Hanford, Ohio. It’s about an hour from here.”

“I know it.” Reece wrote something down in a little notebook he had pulled from his jacket pocket. His fingers were stubby, the nails bitten. “And you thought maybe this girl in the grocery store was related to your ex-girlfriend, and so you wanted to talk to her. Instead, you spooked her.”

“It all sounds far-fetched and ridiculous, I know. At least, you’re making it sound that way.”

“I’m not making it sound any way. It sounds the way it sounds.”

“Look, Detective, I have to get to work. I had a shitty, embarrassing night last night. And I’m sorry if I bothered that girl in the store. If you just give me her name or something, I’ll apologize. I know you’ve checked my record. You did six weeks ago. And you know I’ve never been arrested and never hurt anybody. I’d just like to make this go away, if I can.”

“And you think an apology will make it go away?” Reece asked.

“It seems like the gentlemanly thing to do,” I said. “I apologized to Gina when she called you.”

Reece put away his notebook. He looked around the apartment again, his eyes passing over the clutter, the beer cans, even the impassive officers who still stood by the door. One of their radios crackled, but the officer ignored it. He pressed a button, silencing the sound.

“You can’t apologize to this girl,” Reece said. “This girl from the grocery store.”

“What do you want me to do, then?” I asked. “You can’t
charge me with anything. It’s not a crime to talk to someone in a store.”

“You can’t apologize to her because she’s dead. She was found dead in a motel out on Highway Six sometime last night.”

I studied Reece’s face after he had delivered those words. I looked for some sign that he was joking, that he was trying to scare me by saying something so patently ridiculous and absurd. But he wasn’t joking. The news hit me like a blast of cold air. My body tensed, locked up. I felt a pain at the base of my skull and realized I was clenching my teeth as tight as I could.

That girl, that beautiful young girl, couldn’t just be gone, the sudden extinguishing of a light.

“What happened to her?” I asked. The question sounded dumb to my own ears, insufficient to the gravity of the situation. But there was nothing else I wanted to know.
What happened?

Reece continued to study me, as though I were a specimen in his lab. He reached up and rubbed his chin, his thumb and forefinger easing over the freshly shaved skin. He seemed to have decided something.

“She was murdered,” he said. “Most likely strangled, although we’ll wait to hear from the medical examiner’s office for the official word.”

Then I felt cold inside, as though the bitter wind that had first buffeted me had been internalized. I shivered, my torso shaking involuntarily.

“Murdered?” I said, sounding dumb again.

Reece nodded. “Are you sure you don’t know this girl? I mean, outside of chatting her up in the grocery store.”

“I don’t know her,” I said. “I never saw her before yesterday. Never.” But then some things started to come together in my mind. I was telling the truth—I had never seen the girl before.
And when I had spoken to her, I hadn’t said my name or identified myself in any way. So if I didn’t know who she was, how had the police ended up at my apartment—

“You didn’t know her,” Reece said. “But she seemed to know you.”

“What do you mean?” I asked. “Why are you here?”

“This young woman you talked to in the grocery store, we examined her body when we found her. In her pocket she had a slip of paper with your name and address written on
it.”