The Drowning Girls Read online

  But that would have been too simple, and nothing with Kelsey Jorgensen would ever be simple.

  I suspected Kelsey from the moment I received Myriam’s text, before I even saw the damage. She was capable of it. She was probably capable of anything.

  Myriam met me just inside the clubhouse, near the fancy chairs and the sofa where no one ever sat. She was pacing, her pupils dilated. Panic was her drug. “How could this happen? I don’t understand. I expect a certain amount of security at The Palms—”

  “I need to see it,” I said, brushing past her. The clubhouse was a sprawling building, with administration offices and community mailboxes on the right, dining and conference rooms on the left. Down the middle was a long hallway with public restrooms, each branching off to men’s and women’s locker rooms. Halfway down the hall, my shoes sank into the wet carpet.

  Myriam stopped, probably not wanting to damage her fancy shoes. “I figured it must have been a plumbing problem, a burst pipe or that kind of thing...”

  I pushed open the women’s door first, regretting that I wasn’t wearing waders. By this time my shoes were soaked, the hems of my jeans dripping.

  Myriam called, “What happened to the alarm, anyway? Aren’t you in charge of that?”

  I ignored her.

  The bathrooms had always struck me as clean and warm, spa-like. The walls were white bead-board panels, the floors a wood-grain porcelain laid on the diagonal, creating a seamless line into the locker room. Now the bathroom was a nightmare—blue spray paint crisscrossed the walls, FUCK and PUSSY and SUCK MY DICK sprayed on the wood panels, the mirrors, the stall doors. One of the toilets was still running, water still gushing onto the floor. I splashed into that stall and reached behind the toilet for the lever that shut off the water. The culprit was a clogged toilet, a dozen rolls of toilet paper crammed into the bowl. The inside of that stall had been sprayed, too—a blue blur of paint that stretched around three panels. Stepping back to get the bigger picture, I read YOU HAD YOUR CHANCE.

  No matter what Myriam said, this wasn’t the random work of vandals, people with too much time and a general bone to pick. This was a message.

  For me.

  “What are you going to do?” Myriam demanded, when I squished past her in the hallway, my soles heavy. “Where are you going?”

  “I’ve got to make some phone calls.” I rounded the corner and stopped in front of my office. I tried the handle, expecting to find the door unlocked, my files trashed, blue spray paint on the walls. But the door was locked, and when I swung the door open, leaving my key in the door, the room was just as I’d left it yesterday.

  “Well, what am I supposed to do? People are arriving. We can’t have them coming in here, and without any bathrooms—” Her voice rose to a shriek.

  “Myriam, it’s okay. I’ll take care of it right now. We’ll say there was a burst pipe, and we’ll get some portable toilets down here.”

  “I hardly think that people who pay for this kind of experience—”

  “Excuse me.” I turned my back on her, reaching for the desk phone. When I turned around, she was gone. I had some personal phone numbers for Parker-Lane executives, and over the next half hour I worked my way from the bottom up the chain, repeating vandalism and water damage until the porta-potties were on their way, as well as an emergency restoration-and-cleaning service, an impressive team that arrived in econo-sized vans loaded with pumps and hoses and fans and guys in white hazmat suits.

  While I waited for them to arrive, I took my phone and snapped photos of the damage, of the message I figured had been left specifically for me. YOU HAD YOUR CHANCE. It had been a mistake, I saw now, to delete the picture Kelsey had sent me. I’d been seeing headlines in my mind: Phil McGinnis, a thirty-seven-year-old pedophile from the Livermore area... I’d been thinking of the implications of being caught with it, like a sicko with his kiddie porn. But it had been evidence, hadn’t it? I could have shown it to Liz, explained the situation. I could have it now, to pair with her taunt in the bathroom. It would have formed a narrative, a trail of proof.

  But even as I had the thought, I knew it wasn’t true. I’d wanted to say something to Liz last night. I’d had my chance, even with that damned arcade music beeping in the background. And I couldn’t get the words out, afraid in my attempt to prove my innocence I would only sound guilty. It would be the same now, if I tried to explain the vandalism, the YOU HAD YOUR CHANCE. How would I do that, exactly? There’s this fifteen-year-old girl who’s obsessed with me, and she wrote me this message because I didn’t take her up on her offer...

  I slogged back down the hallway to the maintenance closet, where I knew there was a can of beige spray paint, one used for quick fixes in the dining room to cover scrapes and gouges made by chairs and table legs. By the time the crew arrived, I’d covered the message completely with quick spritzes.

  “I already took some pictures,” I explained, giving the crew a show-around. “I didn’t want any of our residents to get upset by the graffiti.”

  * * *

  Jeff Parker himself met me at the clubhouse at eleven while the tournament was in full swing, guests gamely using the portable toilets in the parking lot. Due to the noise of vacuums and high-powered fans, lunch was moved out to the patio area overlooking the putting green. My phone buzzed relentlessly with messages from Myriam and a few from Liz. She was probably worried about me, wondering how she could help.

  While Jeff Parker surveyed the scene, conversation impossible over the high pitch of machinery, it occurred to me that I’d known it was coming—this or something like this—from that first day when she’d settled into the chair across my desk and told me that she was bored. I’d heard the warning bell then, that sign that something was off-kilter, that something about this girl was just not right. Jeff made a note on a pad he’d pulled from his shirt pocket, and I allowed myself to play out an alternate ending, one in which I’d flirted back, let her hand linger on my arm, not pulled away when she brushed her leg against my mine. But there was no way to entertain the thought and not take it all the way, to sex in my office late at night, the door locked, carpet burns on our knees and elbows. There was no way it didn’t become the nightmare it had threatened to become all along.

  I didn’t have to hear Jeff’s words to understand what he was saying when he turned to me, finally.

  A fucking mess.

  JUNE 19, 2015

  6:02 P.M.

  LIZ

  It was the most beautiful sound I’d ever heard—first a whine like squealing brakes, then, coming closer, the looping wail of a siren. Danielle screamed, “I hear it!”

  “Go,” I gasped, coming back to myself, to the present. “Flag them down on the street.”

  Danielle turned and ran.

  I blinked sweat from my eyes, trying to visualize the ambulance darting through The Palms, slowing for the speed bumps or dodging them or taking them full strength. Everyone must be hearing the sirens—the Jorgensens, too, if they were home. Not likely, considering their track record. Where was Hannah? Why hadn’t she come back?

  The ambulance would come to a stop in front of our house, with its grass that needed to be mowed, the overgrown flower beds—things Parker-Lane wasn’t doing for us anymore, things I’d stopped caring about. The attendants would pass our front porch, heaped with unopened newspapers, push through the massive double doors that were too grand, too pretentious, that told a lie: wealth and privilege live here. A good life is lived here. Then they would scan the boxes I’d stacked shoulder-high to the right of the entryway—Bathroom, Books, Movies, Goodwill—and wonder how we’d screwed it all up.

  It seemed like only a second later that a woman was leaning over me, a hand on my shoulder. “Ma’am, we’re going to take it from here.”

  I crab-walked clumsily out of the way, collapsing back onto my elbows.


  A man was there, too, her partner. “What’s her name?”

  My tongue stuck in my mouth, thick and unfamiliar. “Kelsey. Kelsey Jorgensen.”

  “All right, Kelsey,” the woman said, feeling for a pulse. “You just hang in there. We’re going to help you out.”

  It’s too late, I thought. But I clung to her words like an anchor that would stop the world from moving, just for the moment.

  The female paramedic identified herself as Moreno, the male as Richards. She might have been my age, a few wrinkles creasing her face, her hair pulled into an unyielding braid. He seemed impossibly young, his shirtsleeves bulging with muscle. I followed their movements dumbly—the duffel bags unzipped, the machines unloaded and activated.

  “We’ve got a head wound here,” Moreno said, taking over the compressions. “She hit her head and went in the pool?”

  It took me a moment to realize this was a question. “I don’t know. I was inside. But we pulled her out and she was bleeding.” My body had gone from aching to numb, my arms heavy at my sides.

  Moreno paused to allow Richards to slice open Kelsey’s shirt from hem to neck. Beneath it she wore a lacy pink bra, and beneath that her chest was still, only springing to life when the compressions resumed.

  “Is that her blood leading to the house?” Moreno asked.

  I stared stupidly at a thin trail of red drops leading back to the sliding door. “I don’t know,” I said. And then I remembered banging my big toe in my rush to get outside. Now, as if on cue, it began to throb. And it was a mess—the nail dangling crookedly, bubbles of blood rising from the bed. “No—that’s not her blood. I tore my toenail.”

  She glanced at my foot, dismissing it. “Okay. Tell me what happened here. Who saw her go into the pool?”

  I looked around and found Danielle in the oblong shadow of the roofline. She was shivering, arms clasped over her skinny chest. Just below her jutting hip bone I spotted the tattoo. From this distance, it looked like a smear of dirt. “Danielle, come here. Tell us what happened.”

  Her voice was small, nervous. “I don’t know. Hannah and I were upstairs, and then we came down and she was just...floating there.”

  “Did you let her in the house?” I demanded.

  “No! I didn’t even know she was back here, until...”

  Moreno looked back and forth between us. “So how long could she have been in the pool? A few minutes? Five? Ten?”

  “Maybe five minutes?” Danielle’s voice rose at the end, as if she were in fact making a guess, or asking a question she hoped I would answer for her. She smelled of chlorine and suntan lotion, of salt and coconut and sweat. I squinted into the dark interior of the house, but there was no sign of Hannah.

  “Eighteen minutes,” Richards said, as if he were answering the question for us. I held the number in my head, turning it around, trying to understand its importance. Then I realized: that was the length of the 911 call, the spell during which I’d leaned over Kelsey, breathing, pushing, pleading, praying. It had seemed like forever. Still—eighteen minutes was way too long, a colossus of a number.

  “Do you know if she was drinking? Did she take anything?”

  Danielle shook her head.

  “She was on some kind of medication,” I offered. “For depression, I guess. But I don’t know what, or if she was still taking it.”

  Moreno glanced quickly from me to Kelsey, and I understood what she was thinking. How in the world could this girl be depressed? But when I looked down at Kelsey, she didn’t look like any version of herself now. She was a patient, a victim. The cut on her head had been covered with stretchy pink gauze that crisscrossed her forehead in a giant X. Her chest had suddenly sprouted leads and tubes, the wires leading back to a defibrillator. An oxygen mask covered her mouth.

  I bent at the waist, suddenly dizzy. The afternoon was coming back to me, hard and fast. I’d had too much wine, and I’d thrown it up in the upstairs bathroom. What had happened before that? I remembered yelling at Kelsey, remembered the shocked look on her face. But then what?

  I’d fallen asleep, leaving Danielle and Hannah the house to themselves.

  SEPTEMBER 2014

  LIZ

  I let Danielle cry it out, tracks of mascara trailing down her cheeks. I let her plead her innocence, her sobs uncontrollable, hands over her face so that it was difficult to tell what she was saying. She’d gone to Kelsey’s house first—that part, apparently, had been true—but then they’d eventually drifted over to Mac’s to watch a movie, and once they were there, they’d just decided to spend the night.

  “What about Kelsey’s parents?” I demanded.

  Danielle shrugged. “They weren’t home yet when we left.”

  “What movie?”

  “Um, I don’t know. Three guys on a road trip?”

  I stared at her. “And you were drinking.”

  Danielle leaned forward, the heels of her hands gouging at her eyes. “One. One beer, I swear. It wasn’t even good. I was just drinking it because—”

  “You’re fourteen, Danielle,” I reminded her. “Fourteen. There is no excuse.”

  She spoke into her hands. “I know.”

  “Is there anything else you want to tell me?”

  She looked up at me, shaking her head. Huddled on the couch, clutching a throw pillow to her chest, she looked skinny and helpless, like the fourteen-year-old girl I’d almost forgotten she was.

  I remembered the distinctive smell of pot, ripe as cologne. “What about drugs? Did you smoke pot?”

  “Mom. No.”

  “What about sex?”

  She sat back. “Mom!”

  It was a relief to read her shock. “Did you go anywhere else?”

  “No. What do you mean? Where would we have gone?”

  “To the clubhouse,” I said, watching her carefully, alert to any sign that she was being dishonest. I’d always been able to tell when Danielle was lying, because she wouldn’t look directly at me. Her glance might shift down or to the right, as if she were buying time before she could confront me head-on.

  But she held my gaze now. “Why would we go to the clubhouse? It would have been closed, anyway.”

  “What about Kelsey?”

  “What about her?”

  I let this sit, let her words hang in the air.

  She looked around suddenly. “Is something going on? Where’s Phil?”

  I told her what I knew about the vandalism, stressing the thousands of dollars in damage, the disruption to the morning’s tournament.

  “That’s horrible,” she said, wiping her face on the hem of her T-shirt. “Why would someone do that? I mean...you can’t think that I would have anything to do with that.”

  I sighed, watching her. A day ago I wouldn’t have dreamed of finding her on a futon in Mac Sievert’s bedroom, mascara streaked across her face. It had come—the official world of teenagerdom, the world of bad decisions and half-truths. The ironic thing was, I spent my days counseling students who had messed up in one way or another—failing grades, pregnancies, STDs, drug use. I’d wondered, time and again, how the parents had been so clueless, how they could not know what was happening in their own child’s life. But it turned out not to be that difficult. You took your eye off the ball for a minute and it was your own kid.

  “I know you have to punish me,” she said. “I deserve to be punished. You could ground me. Two weeks.”

  I laughed despite myself. Danielle had always negotiated her own punishments. She’d been an incredibly easy kid, responsible and trustworthy and helpful, a single mother’s dream. At nights when I tucked her into bed, she would confess her transgressions to me, as if I were a priest or God. And she was always ready with her own punishment, too—I won’t watch television for a week. I’ll apolo
gize to my teacher. I’ll wash the dishes every night for a month. But she’d missed the mark on this one. “Two weeks? You lied to me, you snuck around, you drank...”

  She closed her eyes, steeling herself.

  “One month,” I said. “You go to and from school only. No one spends the night.”

  Danielle moaned. “For a month?”

  I shrugged. “We could make it six weeks if you like.” This had been my dad’s type of bargaining, where a complaint would get me a worse punishment. It was something I promised myself never to do as a parent, but it slipped out so easily, like a reflex.

  Danielle stood up, defeated. “No, I’ll take the month.”

  * * *

  Phil came home around noon, spotted with tan spray paint. He entered through the garage and undressed in the kitchen, kicking off his shoes, peeling off his shirt and pants and socks. He tossed the socks in the direction of the trash can. One missed, sliding wetly to the floor.

  “So you ended up repainting?” I asked carefully. I’d sent him a half-dozen text messages, none of which he’d returned.

  “A professional’s going to come out on Monday morning,” he grunted, making his way up the stairs. I followed several steps behind. “I just wanted to cover up some of the worst of it. Then we had to get the water stopped and things mopped up—it’s a nightmare.”

  We passed Danielle’s door, which was closed. I’d looked in on her after her shower and found her asleep again, worn-out from all her crying and pleading, and from whatever else she’d done the night before, I suppose.

  “I talked to Myriam,” I said. “I guess it’s good it was found by someone here, rather than one of the guests.”

  Phil grunted. He shed his boxers a foot inside the bedroom and headed directly to the shower, shoulders down. He looked a decade older than the man who had tossed me onto the bed last night, beating his chest mock caveman-style.

  I sat on the edge of the bathtub, steam from the shower stirring the air and settling on the mirrors. “Any idea who it was?”