They nodded their farewells, and Rawlins headed up toward the dinner, the interaction looping on repeat in his mind as he tried to make sense of it. She had flirted with him, undeniably, and he had flirted right back, and it wasfun.The rapport they shared was somehow both charged and effortless; there was aneaseto talking with Ellsbeth that disarmed him.
But at the end of the conversation, something had shifted. Ellsbeth hadlied.Or at the very least, she had deliberately concealed the truth. It may have been for any perfectly innocent reason—she was on her way to a medical appointment, perhaps, and didn’t want to get into her health conditions, or say the wordgynecologistto her teacher. And he certainly didn’t have the right to surveil her whereabouts. Still, something in her avoidance left him feeling empty, uneasy. He could not imagine why, but he was certain:She was hiding something.
Ellsbeth
The police department smelled like ammonia and new carpeting. Ellsbeth waited at the reception desk for several minutes while the woman behind a computer finished talking on the phone.
“Hi,sorry,” the receptionist finally exhaled. She turned her attention to Ellsbeth. “Can I help you?”
“I’m here to see Officer Marcos.”
“He’s out right now.”
“Really? When I called, they said he’d be here at the end of the day.”
“Sorry, he’s out.”
Ellsbeth sighed. “I can wait.”
The receptionist blinked eyelids heavy with mascara. According to a plaque slotted into the bulletproof glass, her name was Rosa. “You’ve been here before, right?”
“Yeah, last spring. A few times.”
“You’re the one with the sister?”
Ellsbeth nodded.
Rosa sighed and scribbled something on a Post-it note. “Look, I’ll tell him you came by, but I don’t know if it’s going to be much help.” She gave Ellsbeth a pitying glance, then returned her attention to her computer screen, waiting for Ellsbeth to leave.
A month after Bertie’s funeral,Ellsbeth had driven alone from New Jersey to Newlyn in order to speak to a police officer who had handled Bertie’s case. She knew she couldn’t explain on the phone, and she had spent the entire eight-hour car ride rehearsing exactly what she would say when she finally was in front of someone. Whatcouldshe say that wouldn’t sound insane, or like she hadn’t gone mad with grief?My sister, Bertie Storer, committed suicide here on campus, do you remember her? Well, you said she committed suicide. I was taking the Arcanus—do you know about the Arcanus?—and I did a scrying ritual. It’s probably not worth getting into what that is. But I saw her bleeding. And it looked strange to me. It didn’t look like a suicide.There were plenty of people in the general public who viewed arcane mechanicals as sinister and off-putting, especially after the Maxwell Keene disaster. Ellsbeth certainly couldn’t expect the police officers to give her words any weight, but maybe if she could see Bertie’s file herself, the anguish and uncertainty that had been with Ellsbeth since that day might be put to rest.
It didn’t look like a suicide.That thought had repeated on an endless loop in her brain since the Arcanus, like a thumping heartbeat in Ellsbeth’s head, a constant companion that burned her from the inside. Sometimes with rage, sometimes with shame, sometimes as a taunt, but always there.
She had tried to explain to her parents what she saw during the scrying ritual, but they had met her with blank faces and confusion. They were broken and deep in mourning. Ellsbeth felt cruel, asking them to trust her amateur ritual enough to unravel their daughter’s death, forcing them to wade through the grotesque details when they needed to find a way to move forward and make peace.
But Ellsbeth had seen the image in the basin with her own eyes and she couldn’t get it out of her head.
It didn’t look like a suicide.
Bertie had been in a bathtub somewhere, a clawfoot tub with white linoleum stained pink with her blood. Her body was contorted and unnatural—a foot hanging over the edge of the tub, her waist twisted, and her arm thrown over her head. There was violence to the scene. The way it looked to Ellsbeth, someone had put her there.
In the weeks since, there were moments when she had halfconvinced herself that her memory was lying to her. Maybe grief and trauma had distorted her recollection of the scrying image. Had Bertie’s legs really stuck out at that terrible angle? Was the blood really splattered across the room? The memory of what she had seen became distorted and grotesque in Ellsbeth’s dreams. It burned itself onto her brain like a ghost image on a fuzzing cathode-ray television. If she could see Bertie’s file, make sense of it slowly, perhaps the nightmarish uncertainty would diminish.
When Ellsbeth finally arrived at the Newlyn police station that day, her breath stale and knees tight from the drive, they hadn’t made her wait long. Officer Marcos had been kind and sympathetic, leading her to sit in his office and offering Ellsbeth a small Styrofoam cup of coffee. When she told him that she was Bertie’s sister, his face sagged with genuine empathy.
“I was hoping to see her file myself,” Ellsbeth said.
Officer Marcos’s mouth tightened as he tried to gauge exactly how much trouble this mourning family member would be. “I can get you the file,” he said. He pulled his hand through his thinning hair. “But I’m telling you, I’ve seen this before. People looking for big answers where there aren’t any. Conspiracy theories. Foul play. Young suicide is…it’s unthinkable. It’s hard for anyone to accept.”
“I would like to just see her file, please,” Ellsbeth said.
Officer Marcos sighed, the first indication of impatience, and left the room. When he returned, it was with a thin manila folder with a single piece of paper inside.
“This is it?” Ellsbeth said. She turned the paper over in disbelief, as if it could have been hiding a ream of detailed reporting underneath. “This is one page.”
“Some cases don’t require much investigation. This is a standard report.”
“Nineteen-year-old female. Found in bed. Lacerations consistent with suicide.That’sit? That’s everything you have on her?” Ellsbeth was aware that she was raising her voice, that other officers in the precinct were turning their heads, but she couldn’t help herself. “This was aperson. This was my sister.And she didn’t die in bed! She was in a bathtub.”
