The girl sat in one of the mismatched upholstered chairs in the hotel room, and Leo sat in the other, where he had waited for her to arrive. The window looked out on a courtyard, but the heavy curtains were closed. The girl didn't seem to mind. Leo was still startled that she had come. She'd dropped her bag on the faded striped bedspread and said she had no trouble finding the place.
"So," Leo said.
"So." She tugged her black skirt so it hung further over her crossed legs.
"Where did you first meet him?" He wanted to get to the point, but carefully, afraid he might bore her or frighten her away.
"At a party."
The black skirt had a pointy, uneven hem, and she wore it with a cowgirlish blue denim jacket and black flip-flops. Her bare ankles were pale, her hair was streaked dark and light, and her eyes were outlined in black. Montana Goth, he thought. She was called Sasha Linden. Under the make-up her features were immature and undefined.
"What kind of party?"
"Just some keg, at a house," she said.
"Was it a high school party? Why was he there?"
"He knew the kids who were having it."
He imagined Troy Grayling in a dark room full of teenagers, sipping cheap beer from a plastic cup.
"How old were you then?"
"Fifteen."
She was eighteen now, he knew from the trial. Troy Grayling, who had killed Leo's daughter, was twenty-four. Thinking of Grayling made Leo's vision go fuzzy with rage. He blinked a few times. His wife, Helen, had taught him to think down the physical symptoms of the anger. He could slow his pulse if he concentrated, but it was hard to concentrate. Helen thought he would have a heart attack at fifty-three and she would be left alone: no daughter, no husband. She was back at their hotel, reading a novel, thinking he had gone to swim at the Missoula Y.
The case had taken almost two years to come to trial. The trial took three weeks, and the jury had returned a guilty verdict the day before. Leo and Helen had been in the courtroom every day, and it had been harrowing. Each morning in the gallery, confronted with the blank and mildly surprised look on Troy Grayling's face, Leo thought about charging the defense table and prying the young man's eyeballs out of his skull with a ballpoint pen. Or of bringing a knife in Helen's expensive handbag, which no one ever searched, to draw across Grayling's throat: the satisfying pop of the trachea, the sudden, warm flow of blood. No conviction could be satisfying like that. He had touched his own throat during the testimony, feeling for the right spot.
This girl, Sasha, had been a child when she met Grayling; he tried to remember that.
"Were you fifteen when you first slept with him?"
There was a pause, and then she said, "Yes."
"Was he the first?"
Another pause. "Yes." It sounded provisional, and he wondered about the sordidness of her childhood.
"Did he seem dangerous to you? Back then?"
She pulled one foot up on the chair, hugging her knee—the skirt was long and loose enough for that—and considered the question while pulling on her darkly polished toes. It was a childish gesture, not a seductive one. "A little bit," she said. "Not in a bad way."
"It was a good kind of danger?"
"I mean that's just how Troy was."
Leo blinked some more, and forced himself to breathe. He had spoken to his daughter the night she disappeared. It was late in New York, and would have been dark in the wooded canyon outside Missoula where she was housesitting. She was studying forestry at the University of Montana and had been telling him about her fieldwork, which she loved, when she stopped abruptly and made a funny noise, then said, "Give Angela my love," and hung up. Leo hesitated, called back to no answer, and then called the Missoula police. He didn't know anyone named Angela. It had to be a code for trouble: Emily was being told by someone to act natural. He spent some time describing the problem to the operator, and searching his email inbox for the address Emily had sent. When the police arrived at the canyon house, it was empty. There was a cut window screen and a full cup of cold coffee by the phone, no sign of struggle. They never found the knife, and Leo guessed it was at the bottom of the river that drifted through town. A pair of hikers, not of the search party, found Emily's body in an unused railroad tunnel in the mountains. It had been a bad moment when the district attorney showed the photographs in court. Leo had seen them before, but not projected on a six-foot screen.
Troy Grayling was the only suspect, with a DNA match, but he never confessed, so questions were left unanswered. He said he had been fishing near Whitefish, hours away, on the night she was taken. His slow-witted brother and his parents swore it was true.
Lying awake at night, Leo had gone over the decisions that might have led to a different outcome. If he had objected to Emily's housesitting in a remote house. If he had tried to keep her on the east coast for college. If they hadn't sent her at fifteen to the outdoor leadership course in Wyoming that convinced her to want bigness, ruralness, westernness. Leo designed office buildings for a living and wondered if forestry was a direct challenge to him. But he had loved her adventurousness, amazed that he and quiet Helen, who taught fourth grade in a private school, could produce such a fearless girl.
He had argued with Emily about her choices, to test her resolve, but her grey eyes would only get solemn and sure, and her chin would lift stubbornly. Her favourite book at seven had been The Lorax, Dr Seuss on corporate greed: "I am the Lorax. I speak for the trees. I speak for the trees, for the trees have no tongues." She read it in the apartment in Chelsea, which they bought before Emily was born because it had a little square of garden. The chopped trees in the book had triggered in her a fierce indignation and fear for the planet. Even as a child she wanted vast forests, not gardens.
She was their only child, born when he and Helen were both in their thirties, and they had been happy with one. He wondered now if that had been a mistake, if having other children might have helped now, but it was hard to imagine other children. Emily was so particular and real to him, still. The way her hair curled around her small ears, the faces she made at his jokes, her breathless laugh. When she was in high school, a man tried to pull her from her bicycle, and Emily had roared at him, pushing him off, and ridden home. She described the scene in the kitchen, crying and shaking and laughing at the sound she had made, trying to imitate it with all the adrenaline gone. She was slight but very strong. Leo had been proud of her and frightened for her. He had wanted to kill her attacker and to keep her in the apartment for the rest of her life. He wondered why she hadn't fought off Troy Grayling that way, and guessed the man had surprised her. She had been talking on the phone, and then the knife was at her throat. There were marks on her throat, when they found her, where he hadn't cut her deeply but had held the blade against the skin. Grayling must have whispered to her to get off the phone as if nothing was wrong, and she must have believed he would kill her if she didn't. But she was clever. She sent her father a signal, knowing he would understand.
The girl was looking at him, waiting. She had said, "That's just how Troy was."
He tried to pretend that this statement could be reasonable. "What do you mean, that's how he was?"
The girl shrugged. "He had an edge."
"Is that what you call it?"
"He didn't do anything," she said, but she watched him for information about her performance. It was an infantile expression: a child's attempt at lying. She had been the same way in court.
"The DNA match?" he asked.
"He was framed by the cops."
He tried a new way in. "Tell me about Troy's family," he said. Using the man's first name filled him with disgust.
"You saw them," she said.
The mother had a dark blonde braid and tight lips; her husband was in a wheelchair. "What happened to the stepfather?" Leo asked.
"He got shot in a hunting accident," she said. "By his best friend, when he was a kid."
Leo paused to think about Montana. He had never given the place any thought before Emily decamped for it. "Does that happen a lot here?"
"Just sometimes."
"Is he close to Troy?"
"It's a weird kind of close," she said. "They used to get in fistfights in the house. Jim is really strong. He knocked Troy down once and rolled over his arm with his wheelchair, and broke it."
"Does Troy hate him?"
"Not really. They go to a church where people get saved all the time, and after the fights Troy goes and they make up."
"Has Troy been saved?"
"Sure," she said.
"Have you?"
"No!"
"Are his parents like parents to you?"
She thought about it. "No. I think they'd like to be."
"But you have your own."
"Yeah." She was tired of this line of questioning. "Why did you ask me to a hotel room?"
"To talk in private."
"I thought maybe you wanted to fuck me," she said. Again the unguarded, infantile, waiting gaze.
He coughed in surprise. "No."
"Didn't you think about it?" she asked.
He hadn't. He had watched her testimony and felt only horror at her loyalty to Troy Grayling. When the trial ended abruptly, the girl seemed like a source of information; he had needed to talk to her. But now he felt the reflexive sexual response. He tried to stay focused.
"Did Troy know my daughter?" he asked. "I'm not trying to get you in trouble. I just want to know."
She said nothing.
"If they had known each other, how might they have met?"
She sighed, and looked around the dim room.
"Sasha," he said. "Did he know Emily?"
"I don't know."
"But it's possible?"
"Missoula's not huge or anything."
"Had he seen her?"
"Stop asking me!"
"Tell me about him. What did he like to do?"
She thought about it. "He played the drums," she said. "He was good at pool. He was a runner in high school, and he still sometimes went running. He said it calmed him down."
"Where did he run?"
"On the river trail, or at the track."
"Which track?"
"The one at the college. Anyone can use it."
He sat looking at her. Emily had run at the track, he knew that. Slight Emily in running tights, jogging on the rubbery track in the clear air.
"So he'd seen her," Leo said. "Did he talk to you about it?"
"No," she said.
"But you know he'd seen her."
"No."
"I won't get you in trouble, they already have a conviction. It's just between you and me."
"Fuck off."
"Did he talk to you about her?"
"He didn't tell me anything."
"Did you think he would do something? What did you say?"
"Stop," she said.
"Were you part of it?"
"No!"
"Were you jealous?"
She said nothing.
"You were."
"He already had me." Her voice was high and strained.
It took him a second to get his head around this. "What do you mean, he had you?"
"I mean why did he need her?"
"He raped and killed her," he said. "You wanted to be his girl to rape and kill?"
She hesitated. "He wasn't going to kill her."
There was a silence in the room.
"How do you know that?" he asked.
She blushed furiously. "I just know. I know him."
He tried to follow this. "Did he rape you?"
"What do you mean?"
"What do you think I mean? Did he the first time? Or was that his thing, did he make you pretend?"
She looked like she might cry.
"He did, didn't he?"
"Why are you doing this to me?"
He was up out of his chair, and had grabbed her by the shoulders. She was smaller than he expected, and her eyes were huge. "Your boyfriend killed my daughter," he said. "Do you understand? There's nothing I can do to you to match that. You encouraged him, and you lied for him in court. You have no heart, you're rotting. Do you see that?"
She was crying.
"Stop crying!" He threw her back against her chair.
She curled up against the flowered upholstery, her face in her hands.
He paced along the foot of the bed and back again, trying to slow his heart rate. He hadn't slept the night before, too busy planning questions for the girl, and his eyes itched. It had been a mistake to seek her out. He should have flown home with Helen the moment the trial ended. But he had no work to get back to; he had quit his job so he could give full attention to the case. Work had been his way of making order: drafting something out of nothing, finding practical solutions. But since Emily's death he didn't believe in making order, he believed only in chaos and accident. Helen was more hopeful; she had a hardy, low-level feeling about energy in the universe, left over from their sixties youth. It seemed to be some consolation to her. She had taken the year off, too, but he could see she missed teaching, and there wasn't enough of him left to make up for it. He had been deformed by grief. He would always remind her of what they had lost.
"Who else knows he did it?" he asked the girl.
She shook her head.
"His parents? Your parents?"
"Not mine," she whispered.
"Why pretend he didn't do it?" he asked, though he knew the answer.
She sniffed, and straightened her skirt to sit up in the chair. Her eyeliner was smeared. "Sometimes it works," she said.
He sat back down. "You were jealous of Emily."
She wiped her nose with the back of her hand.
"Had you met her?"
She shook her head.
"How could he kidnap someone when he had you, is that it? It was a sexual betrayal, not a criminal act."
She glared at him. He got up and walked to the bathroom, thinking that Helen would expect him to come back soon, smelling of chlorine from the pool. He brought the girl the box of Kleenex, and she wiped her eyes and blew her nose.
He sat. "What are you going to do now?"
She shrugged, folding a tissue around her wet snot.
"You're eighteen. Grayling's in prison. Will you go to college?"
"I can't afford it."
"People work their way through."
"I'm so tired," she said. "I'm just so tired. I feel like I'm a hundred. I thought you just wanted to fuck me. I didn't think there would be all these questions."
"Have you talked to guidance counsellors?"
"They only care about rich kids and smart kids. The rest of us are supposed to get pregnant or married."
"But if you went to them."
"It's too late, I graduated."
"So what will you do?"
She shrugged, and pulled her foot up on the chair again, but more carelessly this time; he caught a length of pale thigh and white panties. He thought she really would go to bed with him, he could fuck her right there on the double bed. White underwear under all the black. He didn't want to feel protective, he wanted to hate her, but if she was going to flash strange, unhappy men, things were going to go badly.
"You have to be more careful," he said.
"Of what?"
"Things like this, like coming to meet me. And men like Troy Grayling. You have to recognise danger."
She smiled sadly. "You're not dangerous."
"But I could be. There will be enough danger in your life without you seeking it out."
"You want to change me."
He weighed the idea. He did want to change her. He wanted to change everything. He had the wild thought that if he slept with her, he could control her, and if he could control one small part of the situation, he might come out the other side a man who could live with himself, a man who could sleep. Or he might destroy what life he had left. He braced for the question he had been afraid to ask.
"So why did he kill her, if he didn't mean to?"
She seemed to be deciding. Then she said, "He drove her home to his apartment, and then he was taking her back to that house. I didn't know anything about it. I really didn't."
He hesitated in the silence, feeling nervous. "Go on."
"He was bringing her home and he saw the cop cars at her house and got scared."
The chill of this information passed through him. "You're lying."
"You wanted to know."
"You're lying," he said. The girl knew he had called the police and was trying to punish him.
"No."
"So he saw the cop cars, but they didn't stop him."
"You can't tell anyone," she said. "They found him guilty anyway. You promise?"
"I promise. He saw the cop cars. He had raped her at this point? At his apartment?" He tasted acid in his throat and felt his mind floating somewhere else, above his body, to the right. He tried not to give in to the nausea.
She nodded.
"Why did he take her to his apartment, why not stay at the house?"
"I don't know."
"But he wasn't going to kill her."
She shook her head.
"He saw the cars and he got scared."
She nodded again. She looked terrified. She hadn't meant to tell him.
"And then he took her away and killed her."
She said nothing.
"Where did he do it?" The county coroner had said not in the railroad tunnel; there was too little blood.
"I don't know," she whispered. "In the woods somewhere, maybe."
He felt the anger rising again. "Did he think that if he took her home alive, she wouldn't identify him? What did he think?"
"I don't know," she whispered.
"And you're still this fuckhead killer's girlfriend?" He knew, from his floating perspective, that the anger with her was nothing to the reckoning with himself that would come later. But there would be the rest of his life for that. He had cracked Emily's code, he had called the cops, and he had killed her. But what else could he have done??
"I didn't—" the girl began.
"Didn't what?"
"Know what else to be," she said.
He wanted to slap her for her pathetic lack of imagination. He thought suddenly that this was the kind of loyalty that Troy Grayling had expected from Emily—the girl had led him to expect it. I'll drop you at home, this will be our secret.
He imagined telling Helen what he knew, but his mind went blank with fear. He would have to wait a while. He thought he could smell the anger and sorrow on his own body, coming from the damp armpits of his shirt, and he wished he had gone to the pool, where now he would smell of bleach and know nothing.
"I won't tell," he said. They had a conviction. He thought fleetingly that if he had never had a child this couldn't have happened. "But you have to change how you live."
"Why do you care?"
"I don't," he said. "I don't even particularly like you. But I don't see where you're going to get any other concern or advice, so you should take mine. Think about the future. Make some plans."
"I don't know how."
"Figure it out! That's what people do!"
He had to get out of the room. He felt sick with closeness and regret. This girl was not his responsibility. She had started to cry again.
"I have to leave," he said. "You do, too. Get your bag." He pulled three more tissues from the box and handed them to her. She crumpled them in her hand.
"I don't have anywhere to go," she said.
He couldn't drag her out; he had a day rate and didn't want to be seen with a teenager in ruined makeup. "You have your family."
"I hate them."
"I'm sure they want you there."
"You don't know them."
"Then you need to start life on your own. People do it every day."
"Take me with you."
He made an exasperated noise.
"Please," she said.
He took her hands, feeling only a quick revulsion that they had touched Troy Grayling. Her fingernails were painted red and bitten off short. He thought of Emily at eighteen, scrubbed and idealistic, going off to Montana to speak for the trees.
"You're healthy," he said. "You're strong and stubborn and loyal, even if I don't agree with the expression of your loyalty. You're going to figure out what you want to do. You don't have to get pregnant or married, and you don't have to go out with losers and criminals." He put her bag on her shoulder. "You have to leave first. Try not to draw attention."
She pulled her arm away. "I'll call the police," she said. "I'll tell them you tried to rape me. I'll tell them you beat me up."
"You want to go through that investigation?"
"I can give myself bruises."
It was his turn to feel very old.
"Please," he said. "Please take all this ingenuity and do something real with it."
She stepped close to him and he flinched. She wrapped her arms tightly around his waist. "I want to come with you," she said.
He stood with her head against his chest, not knowing what to do. Her hair smelled sweet and clean and she felt malleable and young. Her small breasts pressed against his ribs, her knees bumped his shins. With the desire came panic and dread: he took her again by the shoulders and guided her out the door. She left him with a reproachful look.
When she was gone, his legs gave out, and he had to sit down on the bed. He never should have come. Ignorance had been bad, but it had been infinitely better than this.
He sat until he thought his legs would hold him, and then he went to the lobby, which was quiet in the middle of the afternoon. He dropped the key at the desk and thanked the clerk, who asked him to sign the bill. The young man's face was bland and polite. Leo signed the paper and returned the pen.
The sky outside was vast and cloudless blue and he squinted against it. No policemen came to arrest him, no girl was waiting. He was going to be left alone, to try to explain to Helen about the girl, and what she had told him. Helen would come to forgive him, because that was her way.
He put on his sunglasses. He had thought he had lost all faith in order, but it wasn't true; he had caught himself backsliding. He had sought consolation in knowing and arranging the facts. He had wanted a story and he got one. His daughter had stumbled into danger, and he had tried to change things and got it wrong. And now she was dead. It was a story with a beginning, a middle, and an end, with cause and effect.
The pain was still settling in, making its home in his body, in his bones. He was healthy, in spite of Helen's fear for his heart. There might be decades left for him not to forgive himself in. He started to walk back, with uneven steps, to his own hotel and his wife.
