A librarian passes by and I inquire about microfilm, hoping I might find a two-decade-old obituary from the local paper stored there. She stands before me with a pair of bifocals dangling from a golden chain, her hair a latticework of white. She might just be the oldest person I’ve ever seen, and while I follow her through the library and to the microfilm reader squirreled away on the other side—passing two younger librarians who are no doubt faster and more technologically adept than she and thinking this is all a colossal waste of time—it turns out she’s exactly the person I need.
Before we ever even make it to the microfilm machine, she asks of me, “Doing research?” and I say, “I guess you could call it that.”
“What kind of information are you looking for?” she asks in a helpful sort of way, not nosy, and though I hesitate, I tell her. “I’m trying to get some information on that old abandoned home out on Laurel Avenue.”
She stops. “What kind of information are you looking for?” she asks. I have her attention, and whether or not I want it, I don’t know. But I don’t have the first clue how to use a microfilm machine, and so it seems I’m going to need her help with this.
“Just trying to figure out who used to live there,” I say casually, like this is no big deal at all. But her answer is completely unexpected. Her voice and her demeanor change, and she looks at me like I’m either a complete idiot or I’ve been living under a giant sedimentary rock.
“You don’t need a microfilm machine for that,” she says, leaning in close, the smell of her Aqua Net hair spray making me want to retch. “I can tell you who used to live in that house,” she says, her face just inches away so I can see the eroding teeth, the transparency of her corrugated skin, and though I’m expecting the obvious, for her to say something cryptic and obscure about the ghost of Genevieve, what she says turns my world on end and makes me question everything I once thought I knew was true.
My Dearest,
You took my family away from me, and now you need to know how it feels to lose something you love. It was your fault I had to go. I want to be sure you know. They told me I was a bad girl, and that was why I couldn’t stay. But we both know that’s not true.
It wasn’t that girl’s fault. You should know that. It was yours. I wish I could say that I care that she’s gone, but I don’t. It had to be done. It was simple, it really was, a sleight of hand: swapping the flour while you were at work. You really must get better locks on your doors, my dear. You don’t want strangers skulking around your home when you’re not there.
It was priceless, too, watching from my vantage point as you scooped that flour into a bowl, and then fed it to your poor, unsuspecting friend. The grasping at her neck, the vomiting, the scene spiraling so quickly out of control. Better than I could have ever imagined. Priceless, it was. Just priceless. I had to wait days for you to serve that fallacious flour, but it was well worth the wait. Well worth the wait as I watched the scene play out before me, like a performance I had scripted myself. Absolutely perfect.
Unfortunate, really unfortunate, too, that I’d done away with the girl’s EpiPen. That would have come in handy, wouldn’t it have? It’s mine now.
It’s your fault I came back, you know. You’re the one who found me. You could have just let me be. Were it not for you, I never would have discovered that I was already dead.
If only you could see me now, sweet Esther. If only you could see what I’ve become.
I’ve been watching you for a while now, long enough to know your habits, your customs, your routine. I’ve been trailing you to work, to school. On your errands. Did you see me? Did you know that I was there?
I shop where you shop and I dress how you dress. The same shoes, the same coat, the same hair. It wasn’t hard to do. Once you were the only Esther Vaughan, but now I am Esther, too.
You thought that you could change your name, that you could simply disappear. That you could pay me to go. How naive.
You were always her favorite, but if I’m you, then maybe she’ll love me, too.
All my love,
EV
Alex
All the way there, I run, my feet hammering against concrete, though I’m completely anesthetized. I can’t feel a thing.
I pound on the door when I arrive—once, twice, three times—watching as the metal portal shifts in its casing from the momentum of my blow. And then again and again.
She opens the door with a quizzical look on her face, and stands before me, her hair pulled back from her eyes, her gentle hands folded over her abdomen.
“Alex,” she says in a way that is both a question and a statement as I let myself inside and push the door to. “You look like you’ve seen a ghost. Everything all right?”
I can’t reply. There are no words. I fight to catch my breath as Ingrid slips down the foyer and into the kitchen. I listen to the sound of her footsteps as she goes, unable to speak because I can’t summon the breath to speak. I double over, dropping my sweaty hands to my knees, and then, when that doesn’t do it, I squat down to the floor. “Let me get you some water,” Ingrid says from a distance, and before I can say a thing, I hear the sound of a kitchen faucet spilling water into the sink; the jarring noise of ice cubes plummeting from an ice-maker and into a glass; the seagulls outside, cawing in the distance over the sound of a truck that passes by on the abandoned street, the bobbing of tires as they yoyo over the quarried stone. Breathe, I tell myself. Just breathe.
“I didn’t know you were coming by today,” Ingrid calls from the kitchen. “You should have told me. I would have baked something. Banana bread, or...” And her voice carries on, but I can’t hear a thing because I’m stuck on the librarian’s revealing words—newsy and gossipy. Ingrid Daube used to live there, she had said to me as I stood there, mouth agape, in the old library. That was her house. She was a Vaughan until her husband passed, you know, and then she returned to her maiden name of Daube. It’s Dutch, I think, Daube. Of course, no one really makes mention of the fact that that was Ingrid’s home. Such a tragedy what happened there. You do know about her little girl, Genevieve? The librarian had continued to jabber, but by then I’d already begun to run, realizing that for all those times Pearl sat at the café window, staring out across the street, it was never Dr. Giles’s home she had her eye on.
“I’m not hungry,” is all I manage to say. I force myself upright and begin to plod into the kitchen, one foot in front of the other, one hand dragging along the wall for balance. The room spins in circles around me. There’s the strongest urge to drop my head between my legs and force the blood back up into my brain. I’m light-headed, dizzy, hardly able to breathe.
But Ingrid doesn’t seem to notice.
I’ve taken less than four steps when the sink faucet turns off and the home becomes still, and that’s when I hear the humming of a song, a morose song, a gloomy song, one I’ve heard Ingrid hum before.
A day or two ago I would have said I didn’t know the song, but now I know: I’d recognize that lullaby anywhere.
“Hush-a-bye, don’t you cry,” I say, my feet standing on the line between kitchen and foyer, eyeing Ingrid as she stands before me with my glass of water in her hands. I say the words, but I don’t sing them, my voice trembling, though I try to mask the rippled effect with a plumb posture, like a scared cat arching my back so that I’ll look big.
“You know that song?” Ingrid asks of me with a pleased smile, and when I nod my head in a nebbish, submissive sort of way—exhausted, scared and confused all at the same time—she confesses, “I used to sing that to my girls when they were young,” and without missing a beat, she trills aloud, “Go to sleep, my little baby,” and all I can see is Pearl clutching that old cloth doll to her chest, the gentle hip sway as she oscillated back and forth on the dilapidated floorboards of the old home. Ingrid’s old home.
; Before her eyes can reveal too much, Ingrid turns her back to me and continues the low drone of a somber little lullaby she used to sing while she rocked her baby girls to sleep in her arms. At the kitchen sink she goes through the motions of washing dishes as I stand slackly by, fighting still to catch my breath, completely unsure what to say or do. Do I say anything? Do I do anything? Do I tell Ingrid about the young woman squatting in her old, dilapidated home, the one who dug an empty casket out of Genevieve’s grave and sings the same lullaby that Ingrid now sings?
Or do I turn and slip away, pretending not to see what’s there before my eyes, the way the dots connect, the way the pieces correlate?
My folks gave me up, Pearl had said as we walked lazily around the street, but now I’m not so sure.
It’s midday now, the sun at its highest point in the sky, the time of day it lets itself in uninvited through windows. A cold flurry of air sweeps around the side of Ingrid’s house as Ingrid and I stand in the kitchen. Over the stream of water running from the kitchen sink I hear the front door squeak open against the weight of the wind, causing the walls of the home to whine.
“The door, Alex,” says Ingrid with a jolt. The terror takes over her eyes. “You closed the front door. You locked it.” But whether I did or didn’t, I don’t know.
As a scalloped dinner plate slips from Ingrid’s wet hands and shatters into a million pieces on the kitchen floor, she screams. “Esther,” she says, staring over my shoulder as a low moan escapes from her throat and she beats a hasty retreat from the room, across the shards of glass. The water continues to pour from the faucet, rallying together a thousand polished bubbles in the sink, which threaten to overflow. Bubbles like a bubble bath. “Oh, no,” Ingrid moans, a hand groping for her throat. “No, no, no.”
I turn and there behind me stands Pearl.
“Alex. It’s so nice of you to come,” she says, but never once does she look at me, for her eyes are lost on Ingrid.
“You look just like her,” bleats Ingrid, her voice far away as if she’s underwater, as if she’s drowning in the kitchen sink. “You look just like her. I almost thought you were...” As she steps forward and past me, she reaches out a gutless hand to stroke the rippled locks of ombré hair.
Pearl smiles the most pleased smile, like a child who’s just made a brand-new friend. She runs a hand along the length of the bleached-out hair and offers an ostentatious curtsy so that the hemline of her checkered coat falls down to her knees. “I thought you’d like it,” she says, beaming. “She always was your favorite, after all. I thought you might like me more if I reminded you of her.”
And then she reaches for a knife.
Quinn
When I get to the end of the note, I let out an unsuppressed cry. I can’t help it. It just comes. A hand goes to my mouth with instinct.
In my hands, the note shakes like a leaf in the wind. I can’t stop my hand from shaking. I try to process what I’ve just read, to reread the note, but the words blur before me until I can no longer tell my a’s from my o’s or pronounce the words. The letters and words meld together before my eyes, becoming one. They flit and dart on the typed page, sneering at me: You can’t catch me.
But there are two takeaways that I do gather from the letter: whoever this EV is, she killed Kelsey Bellamy, and quite possibly she’s done something to hurt Esther. She’s pretending to be Esther, running around town, looking and acting like Esther. Who is she? The letter makes mention of family: You took my family away from me, it says, and yet it doesn’t seem like something Esther would do. Esther never talked about her family to me; if it weren’t logistically impossible, I’d say she didn’t have one, that she was raised by dwarves in a woodsy cottage with a thatched roof. Esther shied away when I asked questions; she snapped the lid back on the box of photographs I’d stumbled upon at the storage facility, family photographs, and when I asked who those people were in the pictures, she said to me, No one.
But it was clear that they were not no one. And now I feel desperate for another look at those images, longing to see a visual of Esther’s family, wondering whether or not the person who penned this note is in those photographs. I need to see. I run through the memories I’ve stored away in my mind, but they’re nowhere. I can’t dredge up the pictures, not that Esther gave me much of a chance to see, anyway, that winter day we stood in the storage unit, looking for the Christmas tree. It was cold that day and outside the snow came down in gobs. We stood in the cold storage facility and, though heated, the concrete walls and floors didn’t do a thing to keep us warm. I think it’s over here, said Esther, meaning the Christmas tree, but instead I lifted the lid off a shoebox of photographs. I was snooping, yes, and yet it didn’t feel like snooping with Esther in the very same room. I didn’t think she’d mind.
But she did mind.
And now, my heart beats fast as the room fades in and out before me, the rose sofa drifting away before drawing near. The windows are suddenly so close I can touch them, and then, just like that, they’re gone. My hearing is fading in and out, too, as if I’m trapped beneath water or have a bad case of swimmer’s ear. I can’t hear.
I never would have discovered that I was already dead.
The line runs over and over again in my mind. What does it mean?
I peer down at the items spread across the floor before me, and there I see Esther’s keys, the three of them, three nickel-plated brass keys on a beaded ring: a key for the main walk-up door, a key for our apartment door, a padlock key for her storage unit.
A padlock key for her storage unit.
I push myself up off the floor and, bringing Esther’s purse along with me, start to run, thinking of one thing and one thing alone: those pictures. I have to see those pictures.
* * *
I scurry down the streets of Chicago, past shops and restaurants, a covered bus stop, a tiny space that feigns to fight off the Chicago wind but doesn’t. Rather the wind whiffles the pages of a Chicago Tribune left behind there on the bus stop bench as I run past, all the way to the storage facility on Clark Street. The storage facility itself creeps me out—lots of doors, empty spaces, a scarcity of people. Hardly any people at all, save for a poorly paid introvert sitting behind the front desk who creeps me out, too. But I can’t let this get the best of me; I can’t let this slow me down.
Once there I use a keycard I find inside Esther’s wallet to unlock the facility doors and get inside. There’s one man on duty, a man who hovers behind a pane of glass typing words into a computer screen. He doesn’t raise his eyes to greet mine.
It’s one almond-colored roll-up door after another, all the way down a long, uninhabited corridor. The floor is some kind of polished concrete that does nothing to mask the sound of my heavy footsteps as I race down the hall, hardly able to tell one door from the next, though I’ve been here before. I rack my mind to remember which unit belongs to Esther. I insert the padlock key into three successive small disk locks but it doesn’t open a single one. I remind myself: I’ve been here before. Think, Quinn, think. Remember. Is it this almond door, or that? There must be a hundred of them, a hundred almond doors all with identical locks. A thousand of them! They all look the same to me. I transport myself in time; I try to remember the one time Esther and I were here. I retrace our steps, and follow the clues: the collection of smaller closet-size units, followed by larger ones with their garage door entrances; the security camera on the wall for which Esther and I danced. I smile at the memory—Esther and I doing an Irish jig for the man at the front desk, laughing, having a ball.
And then it comes to me: unit 203, the same address as my childhood home, the one where my mother and father still live. Fate, I remember was what Esther had called it, but I told her it was more like a stupid coincidence. I see the numbers in my mind’s eye, as I stood there last December, three feet back, watching Esther unroll the d
oor.
I find unit 203.
I insert the key into the lock, when all of a sudden it opens. Presto! I’m in.
I roll up the heavy door and, taking one look inside, I scream. And not just any kind of scream. A desperate, falsetto scream that grabs the attention of the store clerk who comes stampeding through the locked metal door and into the storage unit fast, but not fast enough to catch me before I lose all cognizance of the world around me, plunging to the concrete floor with a whump.
My keys and phone scatter in all directions. The muscles of my bladder contract as urine creeps down the inside of my legs, soaking my tights. My ankle twists from the sheer weight of the rest of me bearing down on the joints and bones, and it’s then that I cry out in pain. My head hits the ground, bouncing up and down on the concrete like a playground ball. To that, I don’t have time to react before I’m lying prostrate on the ground, just inches from Esther, close enough to touch.
She wears her pajamas still, the comfy, cotton pajamas she wore the last time we spoke, when she sat under the warmth of a sea-foam green blanket in our living room and said to me, I’d be a killjoy, Quinn. Go without me. You’ll have more fun. That was what she’d said, and so I’d gone. I’d gone without her and I’d had fun. But now I wonder what would have happened if I had stayed. If only I would have stayed. Would I have been able to protect Esther from this fate?
My eyes take in the boxes, torn open, their possessions scattered at random all around her body. Photo albums. Journals. Esther’s baby books, the ones her mother meticulously put together when she was just a girl, photos of an infant Esther, a toddler Esther, a young Esther. The photos are now all yanked from their plastic sleeves and torn to itty-bitty shreds. Who would do such a thing?