On the opposite side of the glass was a picture of similar vintage of their mother, young and kitted out in the fashion of the times: leggings, T-shirt slipping off the shoulder, big hair. Above it, two more. One of Quincy and Abigail together, at Abigail’s graduation. The other a picture Maddy had not seen, though she instantly remembered the occasion: Thanksgiving at their mother’s house five years earlier, Abigail and Maddy caught in a moment of genuinely unstoppable laughter, their faces hurting with the pleasure of it. Their mother must have taken the photograph; Quincy was in it, looking on and smiling but not caught up in the delirium.
There were other pictures. One with Jessica in college; another with Greg, a boyfriend of that era. And there, at the top right, something she had very nearly overlooked: a scribbled note. Only now did she realize that the scribble was her own.
Abigail, you have nothing to fear. You are smart, capable, energetic and light up any room just by walking into it. That school will be SO lucky to have you. Knock ’em dead. Maddy x
Madison stared at the note for far longer than it took to read it. She could scarcely remember writing it, though it could only have been ahead of Abigail’s interview at the elementary school, which made it about three years old. Harder to absorb was that Abigail had kept it. It had been dashed off, the work of a few seconds. It was, Madison could see now, written on a Post-it. And yet Abigail had treasured it all this time.
Madison looked around, conscious of the policeman watching her, knowing his patience could expire at any moment. On the desk was a box spilling over with costume jewellery, alongside some loose items of make-up. It was no tidier than Abigail’s childhood bedroom.
Something about the disorder hit Madison hard. It was the disorder of day-to-day life, of objects grabbed and put down in a hurry, of the random rush of someone alive. Yet here they were now: as still and silent as exhibits in a museum, never to be moved or used again. They were lifeless because they belonged to someone now dead. Madison felt as if a thick, toxic cloud were growing and spreading through her chest.
She took a last look around, seeing more confirmation of Abigail’s deadness in every item: shoes tucked under the bed, a small shelf of novels, a hair-scrunchy next to the lamp. Each glimpse despatched a sharp stab of pain. She would quickly check the closet and leave.
Inside were more clothes than she was expecting; so many hangers on the rail that she could barely move them along. There were a couple of skirts she guessed Abigail wore for school, but the rest was strictly for going out: a succession of sparkling tops, different pairs of pants, including at least two pairs in leather, sheath dresses and skirts that were more micro than mini.
She thought of Quincy, blaming Madison for introducing Abigail to – what had she called it? – an ‘urban lifestyle’ and reflected it was true in a way. Just after Abigail had graduated college, she had stayed with Maddy for a few months while she found a job and somewhere to live. They had gone out together, Maddy introducing her younger sister to her crowd at the Times. Madison had had to expend a lot of energy that summer, diverting the attentions of reporters far too old, unattractive or married for her baby sister.
Abigail had not dressed like this then, neither of them had. Madison pulled out one hanger at random: a jacket with a high-end European label she recognized only from the fashion pages. She brought it closer to her eyes, to check it was genuine rather than one of the knock-offs you could pick up in Santee Alley. The stitching was usually the giveaway. Judging by that standard, this one was real. She put it back and saw another: equally expensive, equally authentic.
Quincy’s voice was back inside her head. You don’t always know everything. Not even about Abigail.
‘Is there something you’re looking for, Miss? Remember, there’ll be some effects returned to you by the coroner’s office.’
‘Thanks,’ she said, opening and closing drawers, hesitant to rifle through her sister’s underwear. ‘I’m nearly done.’ She took a last look around, aware that everything in this room had once touched the skin of her young, beautiful sister – and that it never would again.
But what made her head throb was the puzzle she had just glimpsed, the puzzle her sister had left behind.
Back in her apartment, she all but had to push Jeff out of the door. He had been waiting for her, sitting in his parked car, for God knows how long. He wanted to see how she was doing, he said, make sure she was OK. She allowed him to come up, accepted his offer of coffee, bought not made, and allowed him to place a portion of youtiao on the table, the sticks of fried bread which he knew she liked. But she would not let him comfort her any longer. She told him she needed to rest. He raised a sceptical eyebrow at that, which she ignored. She hoped he would believe that grief would succeed where meditation, Temazepam and the latest supposedly cure-all import from Shanghai, the saliva of a swallow, had all failed.
Once the door was closed, she cleared the desk, which meant lifting the piles of transcripts and documents about LA’s secret warren of sweatshops off the table and putting them under it, where they could not distract her. She paused as she remembered Jane Goldstein’s parting request for a follow-up story. Then she took a sip of coffee and powered up her trusted Lenovo laptop.
There, lodged in the corner of the screen, was the outline of her Day Two piece, drafted during the long stretch of sleepless nights when she worked at the sweatshop. Of course it was insane for her to think of her job now. Her inner Quincy was adamant: Don’t tell me you’re going to work. Easy coming from Quincy, who identified herself as an ‘SAHM’ on that hideously smug mothers’ website: Stay at Home Mom. Besides, this story was almost written. It made no sense to leave it sitting here on the machine. All it required was a quick read-through. If she sent it over now, that would buy her time with Howard and Jane: she could then spend the next day or two undisturbed, getting on with what really mattered. She’d give it half an hour, no more.
Forty-five minutes later the piece was done. Not as polished as she would have liked; the newsdesk would have to check some of the numbers. But it would do. She pressed ‘Send’ and hoped no one would look too closely at the time-stamp on the email or work out when, exactly, and under what circumstances she had written it. She sought to suppress the rebuke that was rising within her and whose target was herself.
Enough of this, she told herself. This navel-gazing would do Abigail no good. She had to focus on what mattered. The first thing she looked up was ‘heroin’. She read rapidly through the medical and science sites, about the physiology of an overdose, the chemical and neurological reactions. She didn’t know precisely what she was looking for – just that she needed confirmation of her iron certainty that, if Abigail did have heroin in her bloodstream, she had played no part in putting it there.
Every word she read triggered a memory of her once-beautiful sister reduced to a body on a slab, the pale skin drained of all life, her lips edged with frozen blue. She had read enough to know that a heroin overdose brought no pain, just a kind of instant, weightless bliss, but that did not stop her imagining the fear that must have gripped her hopeful younger sister as she understood that she was entering her final moments.
But had Abigail understood that? Nothing that suggested a struggle. Maddy recalled the words and, above all, the expression on the detective’s face as she had said them. How dared she imply that Abigail had been some kind of willing participant in her own death? Of course it was murder, of course it was. Madison just had to get the police to realize it. And soon: she had covered enough homicide cases to know that speed was critical. They always talked about that ‘golden hour’, the period immediately after a homicide has been discovered when detectives are able to gather the most, and the best, forensic evidence from a crime scene. Maddy feared that time had been and gone. That while they played around with their absurd sex-game theory, valuable evidence might be vanishing.
But she could not quite shake off Quincy’s words. You