15
Stevie waited until eleven before reaching into her bag and pulling out a pair of blue nitrile gloves from the tiny compartment
in the front. They were always there, squashed under keys and trash and cords.
The hall was silent. Even Murph seemed to be asleep down at Benny’s. Getting in was no trouble at all. These apartment door
locks were toys. The real strength came from the dead bolts on the inside, but there was no one inside, so that was undone.
All it took was a gentle wiggle with her fake Ellingham security card and the door gave way. It was barely a crime to break
into a lock that weak.
Though the apartment was dark, it was a velvety dark, tinged with the light pollution that trickled through the drawn blinds.
Stevie used her phone to see, even though it was unlikely anyone would notice if she turned on the lights. She had no idea
what she was looking for, but that was the nature of the job. Don’t look for anything—look at everything. Observe the picture. Understand the environment.
She began in the kitchen, because Helen was a baker. That was her workshop. It wasn’t a large kitchen—just an open galley, but every inch of it was used with intention. Those supplies lined on the counter in their matching jars, the labeled spots for the tools.
And then there was the cash. She came upon the first of the cash Mitzi had mentioned in the silverware drawer—two hundred
tucked into the back, under the serving spoons. There was another hundred in the pocket of an apron, two hundred in the napkin
holder on the table. There were twenties scattered around the living room like leaves—under the remote, between the books.
A lot of money for a humbly furnished place, with its old television and worn but stable furniture.
The books, though. They were everywhere. Books about the paranormal, about psychology, about food. Novels old and new, shelved
not by genre or color or author name but more by age. Specks of bird poop were in evidence on all the shelves, but so were
signs of cleaning. This was not a dirty house.
It was equally important, maybe more so, to note what she didn’t see, and what Stevie didn’t see—as she worked her way around the shelves, the counters, the surfaces—were photos. No mementos. Nothing that indicated
that Helen had a past of any kind. That was weird. Someone of Helen’s age should have had printed photographs.
There was something else, something her eyes had caught and her brain was still working out.
Something wasn’t right. This happened to Stevie a lot—she just had to wait until her mind let her know what it had found.
She went to the desk in the meantime to have a look at that pile of printouts about her.
The ones about Stevie were on the top; under those were:
Gluten-Free Lemon Drizzle Cake with Buckwheat Flour
How to Use Aquafaba in Baking
5 Foods You Need to Eat to Promote Heart Health
Lady Darling’s Tarot Time: The Tower Reinterpreted
20 Things Doctors Won’t Tell You About Heart Disease
Free Legal Forms: Will Template
Side Effects of Lisinopril
How to Entertain Your Bird When You Are Not Home
How to Use the Senso A874 Talking Toy for Birds
CNN: DNA Reveals Identity of Remains Found in 1998
That last one didn’t seem like it would be part of Helen’s world but was all too familiar to Stevie.
At the top of the article was a picture of a girl with a broad smile, a face peppered with freckles, and a head of frizzy curls. It looked like a school photo, with the angled shoulders and directed smile. Stevie read the text:
The mystery surrounding the identity of human remains found in the Vernooy Kill State Forest finally has an answer. In April
1998, two hikers went out with their dog for a day’s exercise. A few hours later, their dog unearthed a human humerus. Two
more bones, an ulna and a clavicle, were recovered by police from the same general area, as well as a green jade bangle bracelet.
A search in the following month recovered an extensively damaged skull, indicating severe head trauma. All the bones showed
signs of charring, suggesting someone had tried to burn the remains.
In 2012, an initial profile showed that the remains were of a female, a fact that investigators had suspected. Last year,
the remains were sent to a Texas laboratory for further analysis. Using genetic genealogy, a match was finally made to Melissa
Long, a 17-year-old who went missing in 1976.
Melissa was from Leesburg, Virginia. After showing little interest in high school, she left home in 1975 to follow the band Led Zeppelin on their North American tour and remained in New York City.
She kept in sporadic touch with her family, ending with a phone call to her brother on September 19, 1976, asking him to drive from Virginia to Ellenville, New York, to pick her up, saying that she wanted to come home.
Her brother noted that she sounded distressed but gave no reason.
She never appeared at the pickup point, and her family never heard from her again.
They mounted a decades-long search for her.
Fred Long, her brother, said of the discovery, “We’ve been looking for Melissa for a long, long time. I am just glad to have
my sister home, to bury her with our parents. They never gave up the search. I only wish they could have lived long enough
to see it end.”
The case is classified as a homicide.
What would you do if you knew someone was going to commit a murder?
No one would care about these printouts. They were going to get thrown away. Stevie would take them with her when she left,
just because. It’s not stealing if it’s trash.
It was time to go into the room she least wanted to enter.
The bed was still in the position the paramedics had left it in, pushed diagonally away from the wall to make space for them
to access Helen. There was a discarded latex glove on the bureau. The blinds were a bit askew from where people or a gurney
had knocked against them. In her mind, Stevie could still see Helen there, bunched up on the floor between the wall and the
left side of the bed.
What was wrong with that picture? Helen clearly slept on the right side of the bed.
That was the one with the pillows and the bedside table covered in medications and personal items. Helen must have been sitting on the side that was mostly covered in books, the one with the bedside table that had nothing but a lamp on it.
Stevie walked over and opened the drawers.
They rattled as she did so, as they were largely empty.
There was nothing but an old watch in the top one.
The bottom one had an apron from one of Helen’s hotel jobs with three hundred dollars in twenties in the front pocket.
What was Helen doing on this side of the bed? Had she been looking out the window? Stevie reached over and twitched the blind.
The view wasn’t much—a corner of the building opposite, but no views into other windows. She switched on the flashlight on
her camera and got down on the floor to look under the bed. There was something there, something flat and just out of her
reach. She pushed the bed over a bit more until she could grab it.
It was a calendar. A smallish one, maybe eight by eleven, printed on cream-color cardstock. The front had the words ROLLING
THUNDER CO-OP 1977 in amateur hand-lettering, printed in a muddy brown, along with a grainy photograph of a storefront. At
the bottom: Peas to the People! Ellenville, New York. Each month featured a picture of hippies in plaid shirts or jeans and T-shirts with beans and corn or working the register
or . . .
There it was, in 1970s sepia—April’s photo showed three girls in cutoffs and halter tops smiling and holding bread.
The girl in the middle had blond hair that had been rendered copper by the photo tint and time.
She had a slight gap between her teeth, and Stevie could just make out a small mark on the webbing between her thumb and first finger. A bird.
Helen.
So here it was, the first thing in the entire apartment that told anything about Helen’s past. If this calendar was for 1977,
the photos would have been taken before that so the calendar could be printed. Which meant it was likely that Helen had been
in Ellenville, NY, in 1976, just like the missing girl, Melissa Long.
A girl who had been murdered.
The calendar would probably be thrown away too. She could take that. Just to think. As a remembrance, along with the printouts.
Stevie was checking the peephole to see if the coast was clear to leave when her brain dropped a gentle hint: turn around.
She did. What was it? What was flapping around in the back of her thoughts like a bag caught in a tree? Something noisy and
out of place . . .
Out of place. She moved toward the kitchen automatically. The problem was here, in the heart of Helen’s home. She let her
focus go soft and took the space in one more time.
There it was—the light brown sugar was between the cake flour and the white sugar.
When she had gotten Murph’s pineapple when the paramedics needed him caged, she had noticed the flours and sugars were lined up like with like.
Everything was in order. Now the jars were scrambled.
They were in the same general places, but not in the way Helen had them arranged.
It wasn’t likely that the paramedics had gone in there and moved the baking supplies around.
So who had moved them? Why?
Stevie looked around the apartment through new eyes. The changes were everywhere. That cushion hadn’t been propped up like
that on the sofa, had it? Those books—is that how they’d been arranged on that shelf? Was she imposing something on the scene
that wasn’t there because she was freaked out about the jars? And these things were miniscule. Inconsequential. And all not
something the police or paramedics would likely have done.
In Stevie’s experience, the more inconsequential the details were, the more sinister, because those things were the accidental
by-product of some unseen hand writing violence on the scene. If someone had been in there, they hadn’t been looking for money.
There was money everywhere, like it was set out in an Easter egg hunt for toddlers. It had not been taken.
A familiar sensation crept over Stevie, one that had recently been displaced by pain and heartache. A small feeling with a
hot touch:
Fear.