28
If she hadn’t avoided Watergate for so long—if she had let the fact into her mind—she would have seen this all so much sooner.
All that running through the woods when the path had been visible the whole time.
“The basement door,” she said. “It’s alarmed, right? Because, um . . . Murph. The bird. When he flew out, you know, this little
kid saw him? Orion. From the fourth floor. And he threw something out the window to try to get Murph’s attention . . . like,
a toy? And I saw them, and they were wondering if they were allowed to go and get it from the back alley. Could I get it for
them?”
It was rambling nonsense, but rambling nonsense works way more often than it should.
“I’ll turn the alarm off for five minutes,” Al said, holding up a cookie. “Go get it. He’s a nice kid. Always draws me a birthday
card.”
Stevie staggered down to basement and pushed open the now-unalarmed door.
She stepped out into the place where Benny had fallen—this dark channel between the buildings, a forgotten pocket of blank brick walls, bags of de-icer, and trash bins.
She looked up to the top-floor windows and counted out the ones that were part of Lance and Mitzi’s apartment.
The next two over were Benny’s, and the metal rail she had hit on the way down was right below.
It was a stark space, but a fairly clean one.
It didn’t take long to find what she was looking for.
It had rolled or bounced off some distance from where Benny’s body had landed and must not have appeared to be part of the scene at all. It was a piece of junk.
It was a small plastic pineapple cup, the foil cover still partially attached. Stevie felt around in her pocket for one of
the clean napkins she had taken from the diner to use as a tissue and picked it up.
Her mind was burning and clear. She knew what had happened to Benny, and at least some part of why. It was time to go and
get the rest of the story.
The elevator seemed smaller when Stevie rode it back up to the eighth floor. There were images in the marbleized paneling.
There was a dragon with a pipe in its mouth. How hadn’t she noticed that before? It had seven lopsided teeth and a long tail.
And the eighth-floor hall itself seemed to have elongated.
She knocked on Sophie and Imogen’s door. There was no answer, but she could sense that there was someone just behind it, looking
through the peephole.
“You might as well talk to me now,” Stevie said woozily. “I know about Dean Grant. And I have this.”
She held up the small plastic cup to the peephole.
“It’s going to have fingerprints on it, maybe,” Stevie said. “Or some trace. How careful were you? I’m guessing not very,
because I don’t think you meant for this to happen. Or I can stand out here talking loudly . . .”
She heard Sophie’s voice from within: “Let her in, Imogen.”
Imogen opened the door enough for Stevie to pass through.
“Don’t speak. Soph, don’t speak . . .”
“Dean was here on Christmas Eve,” Stevie said. “He signed in to see you. But he went to see Helen, didn’t he? Is Dean why
you’re here, in this apartment?”
“It’s not like that,” Imogen said quickly. “When I went to graduate school for stage management, we had to do a Monument Movement
course. It was just a thing we had to do for a few days in the first semester, like a bonding thing. The director of the program
was really into it and said it would make us better theater professionals. Lots of theater people are into it. It’s just . . .
it’s like a therapy that gets you used to criticism, which you get a lot of in theater. I kept it up for a while. When I met
Sophie, I got her into it as well.”
“I was at a low point at that time,” Sophie said. “Well, not in my personal life . . .”
A smile to Imogen.
“. . . but I was questioning some things in my career. What kind of an actress I wanted to be. Did I want to try to remain
onstage or should I move to Hollywood and try to get film or television roles? Had I aged out already? Was I selling out by
taking some roles that paid more but that I didn’t enjoy?”
“Sophie’s hard on herself,” Imogen said.
“Monument helped,” Sophie said. “At first. At its basic level, it’s group therapy with some yoga thrown in. But the more you
advance in Monument, the more one-on-one you get with Dean. I started doing some of the advanced courses. In those, you had
to do a lot of what Dean called emotional heavy lifting. He would make you talk about things you’d done that embarrassed you.
That shamed you. That you wanted to forget or hide. He would say, ‘You need to take down the broken foundations and build
something new.’ But, you see, Dean is not a therapist. He has no training, and no scruples in this matter. I didn’t realize,
for instance, that he was recording us. I would find that out long after I left. I haven’t had contact with the group for
over a year. Neither has Imogen. But then we were coming to New York for the show, and I put feelers out to friends to see
if anyone knew about a good sublet. And then I got a call from Dean. He said he knew of a place. A Monument member bought
it but hadn’t moved in because they had to go to LA, so it was empty, and they offered us a great deal on it. It was perfect.
It was just what we needed. He mentioned that an old friend of his lived next door and could we keep an eye out to make sure
she was all right. Nothing ever came of it until Christmas Eve.”
She smoothed out some invisible wrinkles in her shirt.
“He rang us up that afternoon and asked us to let him in.
He said he had just gotten a call from Helen and she sounded ill.
He wanted to check on her. There was nothing wrong with that, so I let him in.
Later that evening, she knocked on our door.
When I answered, she just stared at me. She looked awful.
Just . . . gray. Her skin was actually gray.
I was about to ask her if she was all right, if she
needed our help, or an ambulance, but instead she reached out and grabbed my wrist. Dug her fingers in. All she said was,
‘I needed to look at you to be sure. You’re one of his. I can see it.’ I had no idea what she was talking about, but before
I could ask, she went back into her apartment and slammed the door. It was unnerving, but I didn’t think much more of it—but
then she died. Dean called again, wanting to know more about Helen. I had to tell him she had died. He sounded . . . not upset.
Definitely not upset. Then he called again, and this time, things were different. . . .”
“Soph . . . ,” Imogen said.
“I have to,” Sophie said, her eyes filling a bit. “I had a child right before I entered drama school. The circumstances were . . .
not ideal. Painful. Confusing. I wasn’t ready to be a parent, so a friend of the family adopted that child and raised them.
They do not know about me at all. It’s one of the things I was struggling with when I arrived at Monument. He got it out of
me, and then he used it against me. What he said to me was, ‘It would be terrible for your child to find out how she was given
up so you could pursue fame.’ But that wouldn’t happen if I did something for him—if I went into Helen’s apartment and retrieved
something of his.”
The out-of-order jars on the counter. The slight shift of objects. Someone had been there. Stevie was right.
“What was it?” Stevie asked.
“An Hermès scarf,” Sophie said. “Of all things.”
“A what?”
“An Hermès scarf. The designer? Hermès? They’re famous for their scarves. Very high-quality silk, intricate patterns.”
It sounded vaguely familiar to Stevie. But it made no sense. Not money or a document or a poison or anything like that. A
scarf?
“Why did he want a scarf?” she asked.
“He said it had belonged to his mother and Helen had it and wouldn’t give it back. Obviously, it made no sense that Dean would
threaten me like that over a scarf. I didn’t know why he was doing what he was doing, but I knew enough to be worried. I lived
in some rotten London flats and popped open cheap locks when I forgot my keys, so getting in was no issue. I looked all over,
but there was no Hermès scarf in that apartment. I thought that would be enough, but then he showed up at the theater to speak
to me. He quizzed me about everything relating to Helen’s death and her apartment, asked if anything had been removed, and
I said only the bird. He said if the scarf was with the bird then I had to get in and look in the cage. If I didn’t, things
would be hard on me. Hard on my daughter. Hard on Imogen. I didn’t tell Imogen. I didn’t want her to worry. I knew Benny was
working on New Year’s Eve, so when we got home . . .”
“That’s enough,” Imogen said. “I went in. It was me.”
“Gen, don’t,” Sophie said, shaking her head. “I can’t. It’s too much.”
Imogen began to cry silently.
“I broke into her apartment. I looked around the whole apartment first, just in case Benny had found the scarf. I didn’t see it anywhere. So I opened the cage door to get Murph out so I could look in there. It was the most likely place it would be. I used pineapple, because . . .”
“You heard him shouting for it all the time through the wall,” Stevie said. “You, of all people, would have known.”
Sophie nodded.
“There was some already out, on the kitchen bar. I had just opened the cage door and held it out to him when I heard her at
the door. I didn’t think she’d be home so soon. There was nowhere to hide. I only had a few seconds. The window was open a
crack for air. I opened it wider and threw the pineapple that way—so maybe Murph would go for it and fly out, and she’d be
distracted. I dipped into the bedroom and waited. But Murph didn’t fly out. He sat there. And she came in and found the cage
door and window open, and she was panicking, looking around. She saw me in the bedroom, so I ran. She tried to block me and
I must have just bumped her back . . . It was so fast. So horrifically fast. I can still see it. It’s all I see.”
Sophie put her head in her hands. Stevie felt the ground under her feet give way. She had done what she needed to do, and
now there was nothing left holding her up.
“I have to go now,” she said.
She pounded on their apartment door. Stevie remembered seeing Janelle’s confused expression as she fainted.