Callie
She babysits Opal during another PT session, flips through the Baby Doe file for the thousandth time while Opal naps, pauses over Jenna’s statement.
That girlish signature, the penmanship you can see the strain in.
How scared she must have been, down in the station in an interview room.
She is relieved that at least it was Frank Caputo who questioned her and took the statement.
Frank would have been gentle, would have been delicate.
Would not have pushed her more than he had to.
She marches through the facts again. Sabrina Riley disappeared right around the time the baby was found.
Her father died two years later. Annabelle gone too, though who knows the timeline on that.
So what’s happened to the house? She’s still on Jane and Damien’s Wi-Fi so she pulls up directions.
A half hour the opposite direction from home, but what’s that matter?
It’s technically her day off. Adrian is away for a conference in Wyoming.
She’s got nothing to do besides stare at cobwebbed corners of her cabin, listen to the low drone of her neighbor’s radio.
She can’t see the house until she’s nearly upon it, the driveway hook-shaped so the house doesn’t come into view right away.
It is bigger than she thought it would be, a Colonial that must have been beautiful once.
Dormered windows, a wide wooden front door, a portico above it—most of the windows broken, the paint peeling and weathered away, but graceful lines to it.
The lawn is covered in a jumble of debris: a busted lawnmower and a stack of car tires, a sofa with a shovel laid across the cushions.
A boat engine but no boat in sight. Along the lower roofline the places where the gutters should be are bare—the originals were probably copper, pried off and sold for scrap.
She gets the Maglite out of her trunk, takes a breath, approaches the front door. She doesn’t think there will be anyone there—the house too far gone, too remote, even for squatters, but still she can’t help but wish she had her personal weapon on her instead of locked up back at the cabin.
The porch is soft with rot, the wood giving under her boots. The lock has been forced years ago, the front door open a quarter inch already. She nudges the door open with her toe and is hit with a wave of cat piss, catches the flick of a tail around a doorway as she steps over the threshold.
She’s right—squatters once, as far she can tell by the ancient sleeping bag slouched over a camelback sofa, a litter of Dinty Moore cans in the middle of the room, clothes strewn across the floor.
“Police,” she calls, putting the word out in front of her like a shield, the way she has so many times before. Waits for a groan of the floorboards, a door creaking closed: nothing. “Police!” she yells again, her voice echoing through the rooms.
Inside, that same juxtaposition of elegance and rot.
Wainscotting on the walls, a pendant in the center of the ceiling, rococo with flowers and boughs of fruit, from which a chandelier must have hung once.
The smell of cat piss so strong it makes her eyes sting.
The elegant turn of the banister, the stairs furred with dust and grime a quarter inch high.
She takes a lap around the lower floor, the kitchen like a time capsule.
Mouse shit scattered on the shelves of the pantry.
A few half-empty bottles of spices. Off the kitchen a narrow set of stairs, the kind that had been used by servants once.
Or for a girl sneaking out the back of her house.
The stairs creak, announcing her every move.
Perhaps Sabrina Riley had known exactly where to place her foot, how to calibrate her weight, so she could move through the house unheard.
Though it would have gotten harder as her pregnancy progressed.
As her stomach pushed her center of gravity off balance, as her feet and ankles swelled, as her body became unfamiliar to her.
Wallpaper along the upstairs hall, water-stained and faded with age, patterned with vines that twist together and come apart again.
The landing is thick with dust, a scrim of footprints through it like someone danced or fought a long time ago.
The smell from the bathroom is so putrid that she has to pull her shirt up over her nose to keep from gagging, and even from outside the doorway she can make out dark sludge around the base of the toilet, the shower curtain ripped from its rings and bunched over the rim of the tub.
She closes her hand around the delicate brass knob of the first door to her right, turns it and finds what must have been the primary bedroom, a wood sleigh bed, the headboard carved with pine boughs, the bedsheets stained yellow with time.
Terry Riley is not of much interest to Callie.
Some teenage pregnancies are hidden because of incest, but Callie doesn’t get those cues from this case.
Riley was probably gone too long, too checked out, to mess with his daughter.
Daughters, rather. Probably, if Callie had to guess, he never had any idea of the pregnancy.
She crosses the hall so she’s on the other side of the stairs.
The next room is so clearly a teenage girl’s room.
A four-poster bed with finials carved into pine cones.
A little painted nightstand with an alarm clock on it.
A collage of faded pictures on the wall above the bed.
Supermodels with their big hair and high-waist jeans, teenagers who look ravaged by hard drugs: all stark bones and wan, miserable faces, their eyes protruding from their starved flesh.
It seems like it hurts, to exist in those bodies.
She thinks about Opal, wonders when there will be a time when girls aren’t told how to look, won’t be forced to contort themselves into one thing only for the fad to pass and then they’re handed the next template.
Curvy and womanly, big hair and lashes and all-American smiles, a girl who would eat a burger, lick her fingers, wash it down with a Cherry Coke.
Or waifish and impossible to please, a ladder of rib bones protruding through their chests.
“Fuck that,” Callie says to herself. She tries to imagine Annabelle and Sabrina Riley’s teenage years. No internet, no cell phones. Just two girls trapped in this house with the magazines they thought could tell them the rules of being women in this world.
She opens the doors to a hulking wardrobe, which is empty save for a few metal hangers and improbably, a single dress pressed to the side.
Pink, sweetheart neckline, with a frothy bundle of fabric flowers at each shoulder.
Callie can’t help but touch the bodice, which is stiff with wires and scratchy tulle.
Under the bed, a cardboard box. Iris, it says, written in marker on the side.
She nudges it into the light with the toe of her boot, lifts the lid.
Inside, a doll. Mice have made its hair into a nest so it is mussed and matted, woven with scraps of paper.
There’s a second box under the bed labeled Hannah but she doesn’t open it.
The dead, unblinking eyes of Iris are enough to give her the creeps.
She moves on to the next bedroom. Annabelle’s.
They are mirror images on each side of the wall.
The same twin bed and wooden nightstand in ballet-slipper pink.
Another wardrobe like Sabrina’s, with its carvings of fairies and vines.
The same hooked rug on the floor. The desk in this room is tidy and when Callie opens a drawer she finds notebooks.
Stacks of yellow Post-it notes. And in the bottom drawer, an SAT prep book.
She flips it open, each test problem solved in delicate but deliberate pencil strokes.
On the shelf above the desk there’s stacks of textbooks, piles of spiral-bound notebooks. A yearbook, green cover with gold foil accents. 1989–1990.
Callie cracks it open, scans the rows of black-and-white pictures of kids that still have baby fat in their cheeks, mouths crammed with braces.
She finds Sabrina Riley first, looking not much happier than she did in her mug shot, a little softer, rounder in the cheeks, the same hungry gleam to her eyes and point to her left incisor.
That foxlike face. A tangle of necklaces against her chest, above the lacy edge of a push up bra.
Next to her, a girl with slightly darker hair smiling with her mouth closed.
Her face is wider than Sabrina’s, and their expressions set them apart, but the similarity is striking, as though there was a printing glitch and two photos of the same student appeared in a row.
“There you are,” she whispers.
Callie flips to the back of the book, where there’s an insert of creamy blank pages. They are pristine, save for a single note written on the third one.
Annabelle,
Thank you for all of your hard work on the yearbook committee this year. I hope you are pleased to see your work on these pages. Where would we be without your layout skills? You are a star and I’m so excited for all of the things in your future.
Enjoy your summer, Miss Hamilton
She doesn’t know what makes her do it, but she finds Jenna among the freshman. She’s skinny, with narrow shoulders and a big, guileless smile that makes Callie’s chest ache.
She snaps the yearbook shut and tucks it under her arm.