Chapter 12 #2
I’d already known from my career of stalking Birdie that she didn’t have a website or social media.
But there were no upcoming exhibitions either, no agent, nothing that made searching for her the traditional way possible.
I spent the summer following old trails of sawdust to churches all over the country, only to find the same thing over and over—she barely existed.
There was a phone number the churches had used, which was now disconnected.
There were checks cashed at a bank close to Evelyn, all of them made out to Mary Cooper.
Her sister’s real name, I remembered. Maybe they shared a bank account?
When I began tugging on the strings at the college instead, they all came loose in my hands.
The address I coaxed out of a work-study intern in the office was her friend Kaitlyn’s address, where she no longer lived.
None of the phone numbers they had on file worked.
She wasn’t close enough to anyone in the Fine Arts Department for them to know where she’d go after being kicked out of her friend’s house.
No one seemed to know anything about her at all, in fact.
She’d been a ghost to them until she’d been caught with her skirt up, and then she’d been a necessary sacrifice, her banishment cleansing Evelyn like the dripping blood of a young bull.
It wasn’t pretty, that summer. I was frustrated and pissed and…
and avid. Starved for Birdie, who I’d snared so carefully over the winter only to have her ripped out of my hands by the end of spring.
I drank and fucked in an attempt to blow off steam, but it didn’t work.
Nothing worked. She was all I saw when I closed my eyes.
She was all I thought about, hoped for, needed, and the worst part was that I couldn’t tell anyone.
Not because she’d been my studio teacher for a semester but because they wouldn’t understand.
Because then I’d have to explain how it all started, and they’d see the ill-made heart inside me.
Sean already suspected that there was something not quite right with his youngest brother, and I didn’t need to add stalking and dubious consent to the catalog of evidence he’d been diligently assembling in his mind.
Kaitlyn Masterson refused to tell me anything, but after she’d left my emails and calls unanswered, I’d taken the liberty of showing up in her office later that summer.
Her shelves were bare, as were her walls, and there was a neat tower of labeled boxes in the far corner.
A guidebook for conversational Italian peeked over the edge of the topmost box.
“Moving?” I asked when she walked through the door.
She came to a stop, face pale, as she saw me sitting in the half-upholstered, half-wood chair in front of her desk.
The chair was tatty and cheap, as was the vinyl woodgrain desk.
Every piece of furniture in here clearly had come with the office when she was hired and would stay with the office when she left.
I had to hand it to Evelyn—they hadn’t wasted my tuition dollars on cushy shit for the staff.
Kaitlyn took a breath and then walked the rest of the way to the desk.
When she sat, I saw that she was wearing the same wraparound cardigan as when she’d come in to give me the full rundown of my legal and academic options should I wish to contest my grade for the studio section, given the circumstances.
The blouse underneath her cardigan had the kind of permanent creases in the front that spoke of vacuum-sealed bags and two-day delivery. It was a miser’s business casual.
“I got a new job,” she said finally. “For the diocese.”
“Kansas City?”
A nod. “On the Kansas side.”
“Congratulations. Enjoy that KBI investigation.”
She looked at me like I was beyond disgusting for bringing it up, like mentioning the investigation was the actual reprehensible thing rather than the reason for the investigation itself.
I didn’t fucking care. I’d happily drag her to the family plot and tell her to give me that look over my sister’s grave.
“I want to talk to Birdie,” I said, not bothering with any other pleasantries.
And to Kaitlyn Masterson’s credit, she didn’t seem to mind that I moved directly to the point.
Underneath that brittle self-righteousness was a shark.
My guess was that the self-righteousness wouldn’t last much longer than a couple of years with the shit she’d see as an advocate for the diocese, and it would be replaced by either resignation or cold ambition.
With the look she gave me as she considered how to answer, I put my money on cold ambition.
“I don’t talk to Birdie anymore,” she said.
“That’s fine. I just need a good phone number or the place she’s living now if you’ve got the address.”
“She’s changed her phone number. And my guess is she’s gone home to Tongie, although I know there’s a place in the Ozarks. She could have gone there instead.”
Tongie—Tonganoxie. Ozarks. I filed all that away. “I don’t suppose you’ll give me any of the addresses?”
“No.”
“For her sake or for mine? Since I am just an innocent student after all.” I flashed her a grin, wide as the Cheshire Cat’s.
I think I unsettled her because she blinked and looked away. “I don’t know,” she said slowly. “I just don’t think it would be a good idea for either of you.”
“Like it wasn’t a good idea for Birdie to keep living with you?”
Kaitlyn looked up with narrowed eyes.
“Reputational risk too high?” I asked. “Understandable, although I guess it does put a price tag on your friendship. What was the price, by the way? High five figures with bad health insurance and limited room for upward mobility? The least they could do is throw in a plenary indulgence or two for you.”
“I’m not telling you anything about her or myself,” she said tightly, and that was fine. I hadn’t thought I’d be able to get an exact address out of her anyway. But hopefully I had enough to go on now.
“Thank you for your time anyway.” I stood and walked to the door, pausing in the doorway.
I didn’t feel charitable toward her, but she had given me more information than I’d had before.
Tongie. Ozarks. So I’d give her something in return, which was my collected wisdom as a deeply amoral observer in the Catholic world.
“Don’t wait things out at the diocese if you’re hoping to climb.
Move to Kansas City–Saint Joseph next—I assume you’re admitted to the bar in Missouri too—and then come back to the Jesuits at the provincial level. ”
That got her attention. “Back to the Jesuits? Why would I do that?”
I glanced over at the guidebook for conversational Italian.
“You want the Vatican one day? Two of the five strong favorites for the spot are Jesuit. This pope might have another decade in him, but not much more. That’s enough time to work your way up to a higher-profile diocese before you ingratiate yourself with the order of the probable new pope.
” I looked her up and down. “No more cardigans. Spend thirty more dollars on your blouses, and make sure you spray the collars with hair spray to keep your makeup from smudging on the inside, or use a decent setting powder.”
She sheepishly pressed her fingers to her neck.
“If you change your hair, go brunette, not blond. Brunettes are serious people to be taken seriously—or so the men around you will think.”
“But—”
“I don’t care what you see on TV. Brunette. And no more flavored vapes.” I flashed her another grin and then left her for good.
It turns out that I shouldn’t have wasted my breath on Kaitlyn because Tongie and Ozarks also got me nowhere.
The only Cooper I could find in Tonganoxie was an M.
Merle Cooper, who owned two houses of decent square footage on a chunk of land.
There was indeed a Mary Geraldine Cooper who owned an old trailer at the Lake of Ozarks, but she’d sold it days before I’d found it, and the real estate agent and neighbors hadn’t seen her since the check cleared.
There were no new Birdie Cooper statues. No new trace of her at all.
My salary at the Kansas City branch of a well-known architecture firm was generous, so I had the money to match my fixation.
Birdie was impossible to find, and strangely, so was her sister, although not in the same way.
She left trails all over the country—police reports, short-lived social media accounts, hospital records—but by the time she hit the system, she was already gone.
Bad addresses, bad phone numbers. The sorts of jobs that didn’t give you pay stubs every two weeks.
Years passed like this. Nothing changed. Birdie was my talent buried in the earth, and no one could tell me where to dig her out.
In my worst moments, my lowest ones, I worried that she’d done something stupid, something desperate.
I’d seen the sadness in her eyes that semester—of course I had; it had cemented my obsession with her—but I knew what ripened on that tree.
I knew what burst from that fruit when it fell to the ground.
I comforted myself with the fact that there would have been an obituary. A social media post by one of the churches that had one of her statues. A fresh flurry of police reports or hospital records involving a thrashing, grieving Busy. Something. I would have known.
I didn’t get along with God, so I didn’t pray, but I told him what was going to happen, how it was going to be: I would find her. I would. I would.
And now?
Now I have.