“Officer Marcos,” she said with as much confidence as she could muster, “I want every file available on Roberta Storer. Everyclassifiedfile.” Ellsbeth pulled a Post-it note from the table and a pen from her purse, and wrote her email address in clear and careful block letters. “Email the scanned files here. Do you understand me?”
“Yes.” His voice sounded far away.
Ellsbeth’s heart was still pounding. “Are there classified files? Is there more to the case than you’ve shown me?”
“Yes.”
Ellsbeth’s skin tingled and vibrated. It felt like she was watching the proceedings from somewhere above her body.
She had been right.
It wasn’t grief, or insanity, or self-importance.She was right.
“Okay,” Ellsbeth said. “Okay, okay. Once you send the files to me, delete the record of the sent email, and you’ll forget this entire interaction. If I ever ask you anything else about Roberta Storer, or this case, you’ll be completely honest with me.”
Officer Marcos gave a slack nod, and a strange feeling of disquiet settled in Ellsbeth’s stomach. There was something ghoulish about seeing someone like this, almost real but slightly hollowed. Like Officer Marcos had become a wax figure of himself.
“Thank you,” Ellsbeth said. He didn’t reply.
She let herself out of the back room. As soon as she left the station, she started walking up the block, taking long, fast strides, as if the distance would dislodge the memory of Officer Marcos’s blank face fromher memory. It would be worth it, she told herself, if it would lead her to the truth about Bertie’s death. It was all worth it. But as she felt the moisture from the snow on the grass creep up through the thin soles of her shoes, Ellsbeth knew that all sorts of people told themselves things like that all the time.
The first page of thefile was so heavily redacted that bile rose into Ellsbeth’s throat. What if this was what it all was for? A blurry scan of a page filled with black ink. But the file Marcos had sent was thirty-eight pages, all stampedConfidential,and Ellsbeth exhaled when she scrolled through quickly, feeling her eyes catch on specific phrases—“moved after death,” “blunt force trauma,” “blood loss.”
And then there were the photos. Ellsbeth turned away from the laptop when she realized that pictures of the bathroom where Bertie’s body was found were included in the file.
Thankfully they were grainy from the scan, and in black and white, but Ellsbeth still retched, feeling the saliva in her mouth go thin and sour. She vomited twice into the small wastebasket underneath her desk, a yellow bile the texture of wallpaper paste. Her eyes watered from the force of it, and then the tears started, hot and stinging. They were messy, cruel, heaving sobs, the sort that started deep in her chest, like each retch was trying to exorcise something permanently lodged inside her. It became hard to breathe.
Before she knew what she was doing, her fingers were fumbling for her cellphone, and she scrolled numbly until she found Rawlins’s number. She didn’t know what she would say when he picked up—maybe she just wanted someone to hear that she was crying, someone to know that she felt alone and scared even if she didn’t have the words to tell them.
The phone rang and then went to voicemail.
Ellsbeth hung up without leaving a message. She somehow felt calmer, as if even making an overture toward the outside world had tethered her back to reality, anchored her free-floating grief and hopelessness. She forced herself to drink a glass of room-temperature water from the sink before she returned to her laptop screen.
Bertie was discovered in the bathroom of her freshman dormitory at 6:21 a.m., though the police report indicated that she died several hours earlier, likely around 2 a.m. The immediate cause of death was blood loss, though there were lacerations and evidence of blunt force trauma on her body.
The police officers had interviewed several students in Bertie’s dormitory. Her roommate was a pre-med student who also rowed crew—she left the room before dawn and was often studying late. She just said that her roommate had seemed like a really nice person. “She didn’t seem depressed or anything, but I guess I didn’t really know her that well, to be honest.” A girl across the hall told the police officer that Bertie had recently begun talking about a boyfriend. The officer asked if the boyfriend treated her badly, or if he had broken up with her. “No,” the girl replied in the transcript. “She said things were going really well. I remember that. It was only a few weeks or so, but she was excited about him. I think he was a senior. Chem major, I think. Banestooth, maybe.”
Ellsbeth’s heart sank. Bertie hadn’t told her that she had been seeing a boy.
When Ellsbeth played back the memories she had of her and Bertie together, they were moments of closeness, of laughter and a natural ease they had every time they were in the same vicinity no matter how much time had passed. It took reading those words on a page, from a girl who lived across the hall from Bertie for a semester whose name Ellsbeth had never heard, for the sinking shame to metastasize inside her body. Maybe she and Bertie had not been as close as she told herself they were. They were four years apart in age; Ellsbeth had chosen to get her undergraduate degree a seven-hour plane ride away. Ellsbeth hadn’t texted as often as she could have. She checked in occasionally, but it hadn’t been enough. There were things that Bertie chose not to share with her, and all Ellsbeth longed for in that moment was one more chance with her little sister, an opportunity to hold her tight to her chest, to be the one who made phone calls, who sent random text messages in the middle of the day, who asked how things were and had the patience to always listen to the answer. If Ellsbeth had one more chance, she would be the big sister that Bertie deserved. But there were no more chances. The finality of Bertie’s death crushed herlike an ocean’s worth of water pressing down onto her body. It suffocated her in regret.
Ellsbeth looked at the photographs again. They were no worse than the nightmares. Than the memories. They were exactly what she had seen in the scrying ritual. Even the fuzziness of the scanned images reminded her of the way the surface of the water in the ritual had rippled the scene. She wasn’t crazy. She had been right.
Bertie was bloodied and beaten.
There were cuts up both of her arms, but there were also three deep parallel cuts across her chest, near her clavicle.
“Coroner report: suicide. At the request of the university, no autopsy was performed.”
No autopsy was performed.
Ellsbeth read those words over and over, until they dissolved into their individual syllables and stopped making sense. Her body had injuries and lacerations! No autopsy was performed. Did the university have that much power? To stymie a police investigation, brush something grotesque under the rug with the most palatable explanation and hope that most people wouldn’t look too closely?
Apparently, it did.
Ellsbeth studied the photographs for so long that she stopped registering the subject as a person, as a bathtub, as a room. It became shapes, geometry. She traced the blood splatter as if she were capable of deciphering what that might mean. There was clothing on the bathroom floor, sopping wet. A button or a pin had popped off Bertie’s blouse, and Ellsbeth stared at it. It was brass, carved with some sort of animal. Ellsbeth had never seen Bertie wear it. Yet another reminder that her little sister might have become a stranger to her.
Rawlins had texted her.Is everything okay?Suddenly, Ellsbeth’s entire body was heavy. The thought of responding to him felt daunting and impossible. She saw Rawlins’s call, and watched it go straight to voicemail. Ellsbeth put her phone intoDo Not Disturbmode and crawled underneath her duvet without taking her clothes off.
