The Good Girl Read online

  “Kind of abstract.”

  This is apparently the wrong thing to say. “You think it looks like shit?”

  Another man would laugh. He’d say he was kidding and kill her with compliments. But not me. Not with her.

  I slide into the booth. Any other girl, any other day, I’d walk away. Any other day I wouldn’t have approached her table in the first place, not the table of some bitchy-looking, pissed-off girl. I leave small talk and flirting and all that other crap to someone else. “I didn’t say it looked like shit.”

  She sets her hand on her coat. “I was about to leave,” she says. She swallows the rest of her drink and sets the glass on the table. “The booth is all yours.”

  “Like Monet,” I say. “Monet does that abstract stuff, doesn’t he?”

  I say it on purpose.

  She looks at me. I’m sure it’s the first time. I smile. I wonder if what she sees is enough to lift her hand from the coat. Her tone softens and she knows she’s been abrupt. Maybe not so bitchy after all. Maybe just pissed off. “Monet is an impressionist painter,” she says. “Picasso, that’s abstract art. Kandinsky. Jackson Pollock.” I’ve never heard of them. She still plans to leave. I’m not worried. If she decides to leave, I’ll follow her home. I know where she lives. And I have plenty of time.

  But I try anyway.

  I reach for the napkin that she’s crumpled and set in an ashtray. I dust off the ashes and unfold it. “It doesn’t look like shit,” I say to her as I fold it and slide it into the back pocket of my jeans.

  This is enough to send her eyes roving the bar for the waitress; she thinks she’ll have another drink. “You’re keeping that?” she asks.

  “Yes.”

  She laughs. “In case I’m famous one day?”

  People like to feel as if they’re important. She lets it get the best of her.

  She tells me that her name is Mia. I say that mine is Owen. I pause long enough when she asks my name for her to say, “I didn’t realize it was a hard question.” I tell her that my parents live in Toledo and that I’m a bank teller. None of it is the truth. She doesn’t offer much about herself. We talk about things that aren’t personal: a car crash on the Dan Ryan, a freight train derailing, the upcoming World Series. She suggests we talk about something that isn’t depressing. It’s hard to do. She orders one drink and then another. The more she drinks, the more open she becomes. She admits that her boyfriend stood her up. She tells me about him, that they’ve been dating since the end of August and she could count the number of dates he’s actually kept on one hand. She’s fishing for sympathy I don’t offer. It’s not me.

  At some point I scoot closer to her in the booth. At times we touch, our legs brushing against one another without intent beneath the table.

  I try not to think about it. About later. I try not to think about forcing her into the car or handing her over to Dalmar. I listen to her go on and on, about what, I don’t really know, because what I’m thinking about is the money. About how far cash like that will go. This—sitting with some lady in a bar I bet my life I’d never step foot in, taking hostages for ransom—isn’t my thing. But I smile when she looks at me, and when her hand touches mine, I let it stay because I know one thing: this girl might just change my life.

  Eve

  After

  I’m looking through Mia’s baby book when it hits me: in second grade she had an imaginary friend named Chloe.

  It’s there in the yellowing pages of the album, written in my own cursive in blue ink somewhere along the margin, sandwiched between a first broken bone and a wicked case of the flu that landed her in the emergency room. Her third-grade picture covers part of the name Chloe, but I can make it out.

  I gaze at the third-grade picture, this portrait of a happy-go-lucky girl still years away from braces and acne and Colin Thatcher. She flashes this toothless grin with a mop of flaxen hair engulfing her head like flames. She’s splattered with freckles, something that has disappeared over time, and her hair is shades lighter than it will eventually be. The collar of her blouse is unfolded and I’m certain her scrawny legs are cloaked in a pair of hot pink leggings, likely a hand-me-down from Grace.

  There are snapshots lining the pages of the baby book: Christmas morning when Mia was two and Grace seven, sporting their matching pajamas while James’s greasy hair stood on end. First days of school. Birthday parties.

  I’m seated at the breakfast nook with the baby book spread open before me, eyeing cloth diapers and baby bottles and wanting it all back. I put in a call to Dr. Rhodes. To my surprise, she answers.

  When I tell her about the imaginary friend, Dr. Rhodes takes off in psychological analysis. “Oftentimes, Mrs. Dennett, children create imaginary friends to compensate for loneliness or a lack of real friends in their lives. They often give these imaginary friends characteristics that they long for in their own lives, making them outgoing if the child is shy, for example, or a great athlete if a child is clumsy. Having an imaginary friend isn’t necessarily a physiological problem, assuming the friend disappears as the child matures.”

  “Dr. Rhodes,” I respond, “Mia named her imaginary friend Chloe.”

  She grows quiet. “That is interesting,” she says and I go numb.

  I become obsessed with the name Chloe. I spend the morning on the internet trying to learn everything there is to know about this name. It’s a Greek name that means blooming...or blossoming or verdant or growth, depending on what website I search, but regardless, the words are synonymous with one another. This year it’s one of the more popular names, but back in 1990 it ranked 212th among all American baby names, slipped in between Alejandra and Marie. There are approximately 10,500 people in the United States right now with the name Chloe. Sometimes you find the name with an umlaut over the e (nearly twenty minutes is lost trying to find the meaning of those two dots over the vowel, and when I do—its purpose simply to differentiate between the o and e sounds at the end of the name—I realize it’s been a waste of time), sometimes without. I wonder how Mia spells it, though I won’t dare ask. Where would Mia have come up with a name like Chloe? Perhaps it was on the birth certificate of one of Mia’s prized Cabbage Patch Kids, flown in from Babyland General Hospital. I go to the website. I’m astounded to find new skin tones for this year’s babies—mocha and cream and latte—but no reference to a doll named Chloe. Maybe another child in Mia’s second-grade class...

  I research famous people named Chloe: both Candice Bergen and Olivia Newton-John named their daughters Chloe. It’s the real first name of author Toni Morrison, though I highly doubt Mia was reading Beloved in the second grade. There’s Chloë Sevigney (with the umlaut) and Chloe Webb (without), though I’m certain the first is too young and the second too old for Mia to have paid any attention to when she was eight.

  I could ask her. I could climb the steps and knock on the door of her bedroom and ask her. That’s what James would do. He’d get to the bottom of this. I want to get to the bottom of this, but I don’t want to violate Mia’s trust. Years ago I’d seek James’s advice, his help. But that was years ago.

  I pick up the telephone, dial the numbers. The voice that greets me is kind, informal.

  “Eve,” he says and I feel myself relax.

  “Hello, Gabe.”

  Colin

  Before

  I lead her to a high-rise apartment building on Kenmore. We take the elevator to the seventh floor. Loud music pours out of another apartment as we make our way down the piss-stained carpeting to a door at the end of the hall. I open the door as she stands by. It’s dark in the apartment. Only the stove light is on. I cross the parquet floors and flip on a lamp beside the sofa. The shadows disappear and are replaced with the contents of my meager living: Sports Illustrated magazines, a collection of shoes barricading the closet door, a half-eaten bagel o
n a paper plate on the coffee table. I watch silently as she judges me. It’s quiet. A neighbor has made Indian food tonight and the scent of curry chokes her.

  “You okay?” she asks because she hates the uncomfortable silence. She’s probably thinking this was all a mistake, that she should leave.

  I walk to her and run a hand down the length of her hair, grasping the strands at the base of her skull. I stare at her, placing her upon a pedestal, and see in her eyes how she wishes, if only for a moment, to stay there. It’s a place she hasn’t been for quite some time. She forgot how it felt to have someone stare that way. She kisses me and forgets altogether about leaving.

  I press my lips against hers in a way that’s new and familiar all at the same time. My touch is assertive. I’ve done this a thousand times. It puts her at ease. If I were awkward, refusing to make the first move, she’d have time to reconsider. But as it is, it happens too fast.

  And then, as quickly as it began, it’s over. I change my mind, pull away, and she asks, “What?” short of breath. “What’s wrong?” she begs, trying to pull me back to her. Her hands drop to my waistband, her drunken fingers clumsily work my belt.

  “It’s a bad idea,” I say as I turn away from her.

  “Why?” her voice begs. She grasps at my shirt in desperation. I move away, out of reach. And then, it sinks in slowly—the rejection. She’s embarrassed. She presses her hands to her face like she’s hot, clammy.

  She drops onto the arm of a chair and tries to catch her breath. Around her, the room spins. I can see it in her expression: she isn’t used to hearing the word no. She rearranges a crumpled shirt, runs sweaty hands through her hair, ashamed.

  I don’t know how long we stay like that.

  “It’s just a bad idea,” I say then, suddenly inspired to pick up my shoes. I throw them in the closet, one pair at a time. They smack the back wall. They fall into a messy pile behind the closet door. And then I close the door, leaving the mess where I can’t see it.

  And then the resentment creeps in and she asks, “Why did you bring me here? Why did you bring me here, if only to humiliate me?”

  I picture us at the bar. I imagine my own greedy eyes when I leaned in and suggested, “Let’s get out of here.” I told her my apartment was just down the street. We all but ran the entire way.

  I stare at her. “It’s not a good idea,” I say again. She stands and reaches for her purse. Someone passes in the hallway, their laughter like a thousand knives. She tries walking, loses her balance.

  “Where are you going?” I ask, my body blocking the front door. She can’t leave now.

  “Home,” she says.

  “You’re wasted.”

  “So?” she challenges. She reaches for the chair to steady herself.

  “You can’t go,” I insist. Not when I’m this close, I think, but what I say is “Not like this.”

  She smiles and says that’s sweet. She thinks I’m worried about her. Little does she know.

  I couldn’t care less.

  Gabe

  After

  Grace and Mia Dennett are sitting at my desk when I arrive, their backs turned in my direction. Grace couldn’t look more uncomfortable. She plucks a pen from my desk and removes the chewed-up cap with a sleeve of her shirt. I smooth a paisley tie against my shirt, and as I make my way to them, I hear Grace muttering the words “slovenly appearance” and “unbecoming” and “Spartan skin.” I assume she’s talking about me, and then I hear her say that Mia’s corkscrew locks haven’t seen a hair dryer in weeks; there are neglected bags beneath her eyes. Her clothes are rumpled and look like they should be cloaking the body of someone in junior high, a prepubescent boy no less. She doesn’t smile. “Ironic, isn’t it,” Grace says, “how I wish you’d snap at me—call me a bitch, a narcissist, any of those unpleasant nicknames you had for me in the days before Colin Thatcher.”

  But instead Mia just stares.

  “Good morning,” I say, and Grace interrupts me curtly with “Think we can get started? I have things to do today.”

  “Of course,” I say, and then empty sugar packets into my coffee as slowly as I possibly can. “I was hoping to talk to Mia, see if I can get some information from her.”

  “I don’t see how she can help,” Grace says. She reminds me of the amnesia. “She doesn’t remember what happened.”

  I’ve asked Mia down this morning to see if we can jog her memory, see if Colin Thatcher told her anything inside that cabin that might be of value to the ongoing investigation. Since her mother wasn’t feeling well, she sent Grace in her place, as Mia’s chaperone, and I can see, in Grace’s eyes, that she’d rather be having dental work than sit here with Mia and me.

  “I’d like to try and jog her memory. See if some pictures help.”

  She rolls her eyes and says, “God, Detective, mug shots? We all know what Colin Thatcher looks like. We’ve seen the pictures. Mia has seen the pictures. Do you think she’s not going to identify him?”

  “Not mug shots,” I assure her, reaching into a desk drawer to yank something from beneath a stash of legal pads. She peers around the desk to get the first glimpse and is stumped by the 11x14 sketch pad I produce. It’s a spiral-bound book; her eyes peruse the cover for clues, but the words recycled paper give nothing away. Mia, however, is briefly cognizant, of what neither she nor I know, but something passes through her—a wave of recollection—and then it’s gone as soon as it came. I see it in her body language—posture straightening, leaning forward, hands reaching out blindly for the pad, drawing it into her. “You recognize this?” I ask, voicing the words that were on the tip of Grace’s tongue.

  Mia holds it in her hands. She doesn’t open it, but rather runs a hand over the textured cover. She doesn’t say anything and then, after a minute or so, she shakes her head. It’s gone. She slouches back into her chair and her fingers let go of the pad, allowing it to rest on her lap.

  Grace snatches it from her. She opens the book and is greeted by an influx of Mia’s sketches. Eve told me once that Mia takes a sketch pad with her everywhere she goes, drawing anything from homeless men on the “L” to a car parked at the train station. It’s her way of keeping a journal: places she went, things she saw. Take this recycled sketch pad, for example: trees, and lots of them; a lake surrounded by trees; a homely little log cabin that, of course, we’ve all seen in the photos; a scrawny little tabby cat sleeping in a smattering of sun. None of this seems to surprise Grace, not until she comes to the illustration of Colin Thatcher that literally jumps off the page to greet her, snuck in the middle of the sketch pad amidst trees and the snow-covered cabin.

  His appearance is bedraggled, his curly hair in complete disarray. The facial hair and tattered jeans and hooded sweatshirt surpass grunge and go straight to dirty. Mia had drawn a man, sturdy and tall. She applied herself to the eyes, shadowing and layering and darkening the pencil around them until these deep, leering headlights nearly force Grace to look away from the page.

  “You drew this, you know,” she states, compelling Mia to have a look at the page. She thrusts it into her hands to see. He’s perched before a wood-burning stove, sitting cross-legged on the floor with his back to the flame. Mia runs her hand over the page and smudges the pencil a tad. She peers down at her fingertips and sees the remnants of lead, rubbing it between a thumb and forefinger.

  “Does anything ring a bell?” I ask, sipping from my mug of coffee.

  “Is this—” Mia hesitates “—him?”

  “If by him you mean the creep who kidnapped you, then, yeah,” Grace says, “that’s him.”

  I sigh. “That’s Colin Thatcher.” I show her a photograph. Not a mug shot, like she’s used to seeing, but a nice photo of him in his Sunday best. Mia’s eyes go back and forth, making the connection. The curly hair. The hardy build. The dark eyes. The bristly
beige skin. The way his arms are crossed before him, his face appearing to do anything to conceal a smile. “You’re quite an artist,” I offer.

  Mia asks, “And I drew this?”

  I nod. “They found the sketch pad at the cabin with your and Colin’s things. I assume it belongs to you.”

  “You brought it with you to Minnesota?” Grace asks.

  Mia shrugs. Her eyes are locked on the images of Colin Thatcher. Of course she doesn’t know. Grace knows she doesn’t know, but she asks anyway. She’s thinking the same thing as me: here this creep is whisking her off to some abandoned cabin in Minnesota and she has the wherewithal to bring her sketch pad, of all things?

  “What else did you bring?”

  “I don’t know,” she says, her voice on the verge of being inaudible.

  “Well, what else did you find?” Grace demands of me this time.

  I watch Mia, recording her nonverbal communication: the way her fingers keep reaching out to touch the images before her, the frustration that is slowly, silently taking over. Every time she tries to give up and push the images away, she goes back to them, as if begging of her mind: think, just think. “Nothing out of the ordinary.”

  Grace gets mad. “What does that mean? Clothes, food, weapons—guns, bombs, knives—an artists’ easel and a watercolor set? You ask me,” she says, pilfering the sketch pad from Mia’s hands, “this is out of the ordinary. A kidnapper doesn’t normally allow his abductee to draw the evidence on a cheap, recycled sketch pad.” She turns to Mia and presents the obvious. “If he sat still this long, Mia, long enough for you to draw this, then why didn’t you run?”

  She stares at Grace with a stark expression on her face. Grace sighs, completely exasperated, and looks at Mia like she should be locked up in a loony ward. Like she has no grasp on reality, where she is or why she’s here. Like she wants to bang her over the head with a blunt object and knock some sense in her.

  I come to her defense and say, “Maybe she was scared. Maybe there was nowhere to run. The cabin was in the middle of a vast wilderness, and northern Minnesota in the winter verges on a ghost town. There would have been nowhere to go. He might have found her, caught her and then what? Then what would have happened?”