12. Rosalind
Rosalind
"I did it once a year for five years," she said.
"And then I stopped, because I'd started doing it for the wrong reason.
I wasn't looking for anything. I was visiting.
" She stood in the doorway of a small room with a made bed in it and did not go in.
"You do it. I'll be in the kitchen. Take the dog. "
So I sat on the floor of Casey Marsh's childhood bedroom with a golden retriever and four cardboard boxes and went through a life.
Box one was school. Report cards, a spelling ribbon, a photograph of a soccer team.
A senior yearbook with forty signatures in it, and I read all forty, and thirty-eight of them were ordinary, and two of them were from girls who wrote *call me when you get out of that place* and *don't let them work you to death!
!*, which meant nothing on their own and which I photographed anyway.
Box two was the apartment. This was what the police had released in 2000 and what Rosalind had gone and collected in a car with her sister: kitchen things, a clock radio, a ceramic frog, a laundry basket of clothes that still, twenty-six years later, smelled faintly of a detergent they stopped making.
Box three was the restaurant.
Aprons — three of them, black, with CAbrILLO'S embroidered small on the chest. A name tag.
A laminated wine list from 1996. A staff photograph from a Christmas party in 1997, twenty-two people crammed into a private dining room with their arms around each other, everybody laughing, a banner reading FELIZ NAVIDAD CAbrILLO'S taped crookedly to the wall.
I found her immediately, because she is the one you look at. Second row, left of center, hair up, head back, mid-laugh — the laugh Marisol said you could hear through a wall. Twenty-one years old and absolutely, incandescently alive.
And behind her, with one hand on her shoulder, a big handsome man of about forty-two in a white apron, looking not at the camera but down at the top of her head.
I photographed that too. I photographed it eleven times and my hands were not entirely steady.
Box four was papers, and box four is the one that mattered, and it took me two hours because it was a young woman's filing, which is to say an envelope of things she meant to deal with.
A Chevron card. Three pay stubs. An unopened letter from a community college.
A rent receipt book — the old kind, carbonless, with the yellow copies still in it — for an apartment on Bath Street, eleven receipts, each one for six hundred and twenty-five dollars, each one signed at the bottom by the person receiving it.
Signed C. Tomasetti.
I sat there for a long moment.
Then I went through them again, slowly, and found the thing that actually broke it open, which was not a signature but a number: in the top corner of every receipt, in printed type, the name of the entity being paid.
TOMASETTI FAMILY PROPERTIES LLC.
And the savings passbook was in that box too, the one Rosalind had put on her coffee table like a card being played, and I opened it and read it properly for the first time — four years of deposits in a twenty-two-year-old's handwriting, forty and sixty and a hundred and ten dollars at a time — and then I got to the last page, and there were two withdrawals.
The only two in the book.
*9/14/98 — $2,000.*
*11/2/98 — $4,500.*
Six thousand five hundred dollars, out of a girl's house fund, in the last ten weeks of her life. The second one twelve days before she disappeared, and eleven days before a broken tooth.
I took the passbook and the receipt book into the kitchen and put them on the table in front of her mother.
"Mrs. Marsh. Did Casey ever tell you what these were for?"
Rosalind Marsh looked at the two withdrawals for a long time.
"No," she said. "And I never saw this page. She showed me the book in — it must have been the summer. August. She was so proud of it." Her hand went flat on the table. "Two thousand dollars in September. That's after August."
"Yes."
"What was she paying for?" said Rosalind Marsh, to the ceiling, in a voice that had twenty-eight years in it. "What in God's name was that girl paying for?"
I didn't know. I would not know for five more weeks, and when I found out it was not a payment at all, it was the opposite, and it is the single most heartbreaking fact in this book: Casey Marsh was not paying anyone.
She was buying her way out.
Two thousand dollars in September for a deposit and first month on a studio in Goleta that she never moved into, held in her own name, that the leasing office had records of and nobody ever asked them for.
Four and a half thousand in November for a used Honda Civic from a private seller in Oxnard that she never collected.
She wasn't leaving the area. She was leaving *him* — the job, the apartment she rented from him, the whole apparatus — and staying exactly where she was, eleven miles up the coast, near her mother, with a car of her own.
And the three paragraphs in February of 1999 said *Marsh had reportedly discussed leaving the area*, and the town believed it for twenty-eight years.
She had discussed leaving. She had discussed it with one person. And he was the one who told the police.