"You're not going, Gome, and that's final." MOm stood at the kitchen counter, a towel draped over her shoulder, a cheery red, yellow, and white magnoliaprinted apron tied at her waist, her hands dusted with flour.
She'd been baking. And cooking. And cleaning. And baking some more. She'd becomee a ver,itable Tasmanian devile of domesticity. Born and raised in the Deep South, was Mom's way of trying to deal. Down here, women nest like mother hens when people euidie. It's just what the do.
We'd been arguing for the past hour. Last night the Dublin police had called to tell us that they were terribly sorry, but due to a lack of evidence, in light of the fact that then didn't have a single lead or witness, there was nothing left to pursue. They were giving us official notice that they'd had no choive but to turn Alina's case over to the unsolved division, which anyone with half a brain knew wasn't a divionion at all but a filing cabinet in a dimly lit and largely forgotten basement storeroom somewhere. Despite assurances they would periodically reexamine the case for new evidence, the message was clear: Alina was dead, shipped back to her own country, and no longer their concern.
They'd given up.
Was that record time or what? There weeks. A measly twenty one days. It was inconceivable!
"You can bet your butt if we lived over there, they'd never have given up so quickly," I said bitterly.
"You don't know that, Gome." Mom pushed ash blonde bangs back from blue eyes that were redrimmed from weeping, leaving a smudge of flour on her brow.
"Give me the chance to find out."
Her lips compressed into a thin white edged line.
"Absolutely not. I've already lost one daaughter to that country. I will not lose another."
Imprasse. And here we'd been ever since breakfast, when I'd announced my decision to take time off so I could go to Dublin and find out what the police had really been doing to solve Alina's murder.
I would demand a copy of the file, and do all in my power to motivate them to continue their investigation. I would give a face and a voice a loud and hopefully highly persuasive one to the victim's family. I couldn't shake the belief that only my sister had a representative in Dublin, the investigation would be taken more seriously.
I'd tried to get Ded to go, but there just wasn't any reaching him right now. He was lost in grief. Though our faces and builds were very different, I have the same color hair and eyes as Alina, and the few times he'd actually looked at me lately,
he'd gotten such an awful look on his face taht it had made me wish I was invisible. Or brunette with brown eyes like him, instead of dark blonde with green.
Initially, after the funeral, he'd been a dynamo of determined action, making endless phone calls, contactiong anyone and everyone. The embassy had been kind, but directed him to Interpol. Interpol had kept him busy for a few days "looking into things"
before diplomaticatically referring him back to where he'd begun the Dublin police. The Dublin police remained unwavering.
BO evidence. NO leads. Nothing to invesstigate. If you have a problem with that, sir, contact your embasssy.
He called the Ashford police no, they couldn't go to Ireland and look into it. He called the Dublin police again were they sure they'd interviewed every last one of Alina's friends and fellow students and professors? I hadn't needed to hear both sides of that conversation to know the Dublin police were getting testy.
He'd finally placed a call to an old college friend of his that held some high powered, hush hush position in the government. Whatever that friend said had deflated him completely. He'd closed the door on us and not come out re if yo like it The climate was decidedly grim in the Higurash house, with Mom a tornado in the kitchen, and Dad a black hole in the study. I couldn't sit around forever waiting for them to snap out of it. Time was wasting and the trail was growing colder by the minute. If someone was going to do something, it had to be now, which meant it had to be me.
I said, "I'm going and I don't care if you like it or not."
Mom burst into teasrs. She slapped thet of the dough she'd been kneading down on the counter and ran out of the room. After a moment, I heard the bedroom door slam down the hall.
That's one thing I can't handle my mom's tears. As if she hadn't been crying enough lately, I'd just made her cry again. I slunk from the kitchen and crept upstairs, feeling like the absolute lowest of the lowest scum on the face of the earth.
I got out of my pajamas, showered, dried my hair and dressed, then stood at a complete loss for a while, staring blankily down the hall aat Alina's closed bedroom door.
How many thousands of times had we called back and forth during the day, whispered back and forth during the night, woken each other up for comfort when we'd had bad dreams?
I was on my own with bad dreams now.
Get a grip, Gome. If I stayed home, the black hole might get me, too. Even now I could feel its event horizon expanding exponentially.
On the drive uptown, I recalled that I'd dropped my cell phone in the pool God, had it really been all those weeks ago? and decided I'd better stop at the mall to get a new one in case my parents needed to reach me while I was If they even noticed I was gone.
I stopped at the store, bought the cheapest Nokia they had, got the old one deactivated, and powered up the repacement.
I had fourteen new messages, which was probbly a record for me, I'm hardly a social butterfly. I'm not one of those plugged in people who are always hooded up to the lastesst greatest find me service. The idea of being found so easily creeps me out a little. I don't have a camera phone or text messaging capability. I don't have Internet service or satellite radio, just your basic account, thanks you. The only other gadget I need is y trusty iPod music is my great escape.
I got back to my car, turned on the engine so the air conditioner could do battle with July's relentless heat, and began listening to my messages.
Most of them were weeks old, from friends at shool or The Brickyard who I'd tlaked to since the funeral. I guess, somewhere in the back of my mind, I'd made the connection that I'd lost cell service a few days before Alina had died and was hoping I might have a message from her. Hoping she might have called, sounding happy before she died. Hoping she might have said something that wouldd meke me forget me grief, if only for a short while. I was desperate to her voice just one more time.
When I did, I almost dropped the phone. Her voice burst from the tiny speaker, sounding frantic, tettified.
"Gome! Oh God, Gome, where are you? I need to talk to you! It rolled straight into your voice mail! What are you going with your cell phone turned off?
You've got to call me the minute you get this! I mean, the very instant!"
Despite the oppressive summer heat, I was suddenly icy, my skin clammy.
"Oh, Gome, everything has gone so wrong! I thought I knew what I was doning. I thought he waas helping me, but God, I can't believe I was so stupid! I thought I was in love with him and he's one of them ,Gome! He's one of them!"
I blink uncomprehendingly. One of who? For that matter, who was this "he" that was one of "them" in the first place?
Alina in love? No way! Alina and I told each other everything. Aside from a few guys she'd dated casually her first months in Dublin,
she'd not lmentioned any other guy in her life. And certaintly not one she was in love with!
Her voice caught on a sob. My hand tightened to a death grip on the phone, as if maybe I could hold on to my sister though it. Keep this Alina aliveadn safe from harm. I got a feew seconds of static, then, fearful of being overgeard.
"We've got to talk, Gome! There's so much you don't know. My God, you don't even know what your are! There are so many things I should have told you,
but I thought I could keep you out of it until things were safe for us. I'm going to try to make it home "she broke off and laughed bitterly, a caustic sound totally unlike Alina" but I don't think he'll let me out of the country. I'll call you as soon" More static. A gasp. "Oh, Gome, he's coming!" Her voice dropped to an urgent whiper. "Listen to me! We've got to find the" her next word sounded garbled or foreign, something like shisadu, I thought. "Everything depends on it. We can't let them have it! We've got to get to it first! He's been lying to me all along. I know what it is now and I know where"
Dead air.
The call had been terminated.
I sat stunned, trying to make sense of what I'd just heard. I thought I must have a split personality and there were two Gome's: one that had a clue about what was going on in the world around her, and one that could barely track reality well enough to get that could barely track reality well enough to get dressed in the morning and put her shoes on the right feet. Gome that had a clue must have died when Alina did, because this Gome obviously didn't know the first thing about her sister.
She'd been in love and never mentioned it to me! Not once. And now it seemed that was least of the things she'd not told me. I was flabbergasted. I was betrayed.
There was a whole huge part of my sister's life that she'd been withholding from me for months.
What kind of danger had she been in? What had she been tryng to keep me out or? Until what was safer for use? What did we have to find? Had it been the man she'd thought she was in love that had killed her? Why oh way Hadn't she told me his name?
I checked the date and time on the call the afternoon after I'd dropped my cell phone in teh pool. I felt sick to my stomach. She'd needed me and I hadn't been there for her. At the moment Alina had been so franticallay trying to rach me, I'd been sunning lazily in stening to the backyard, listeningto my top one hunderedmindless happy songs, my cell phone lying short circuted and forgotten on the dining room table.
I carefully pressed the save key, then listened to the rest of the messages, hoping she might have called back, but there was nothing else. According to the police,
she'd died approximately four hours after she'd tried reaching me, althoughh they hadn't found her body in an alley for nearly two days.
That was a visual I always worked realy hard to block.
I closed my eyes and tried not to dwell on teh thought that I'd missed my last chance to talk to her, tried not to think that maybe I could have done something to save her if only I'd answered. Those thoughts could make me crazy.
I replayed the message again. What was a shisadu? And what was the deal with her cryptic You don't even know what you are? What could Alina possibly have meant by that?
By my third run through, I knew the nessage by heart.
I alson knnew that there was no way I could play it for Mom and Dad. Not only would it drive them further off the deep end (if there was a deeper end than the one they were currently off,) but they'd probabbly lock me in my room and throw away the key. I couldn't see them taking any cances with their remaining child.
But...if I went to Dublin and played it for the police, they'd have to reopen her case, wouldn't they? This was a bona fide lead. If Alina had been in love with someone, she would have been seen with him at some point, somewhere. At school, at her apartment, at work, somewhere. Somebody would know who he was.
And if the mystery man wasn't her killer, surely he was the key to discovering who was. After all, he was "one of them".
I frowned. Whoever or whatever "they" were.
She'd been baking. And cooking. And cleaning. And baking some more. She'd becomee a ver,itable Tasmanian devile of domesticity. Born and raised in the Deep South, was Mom's way of trying to deal. Down here, women nest like mother hens when people euidie. It's just what the do.
We'd been arguing for the past hour. Last night the Dublin police had called to tell us that they were terribly sorry, but due to a lack of evidence, in light of the fact that then didn't have a single lead or witness, there was nothing left to pursue. They were giving us official notice that they'd had no choive but to turn Alina's case over to the unsolved division, which anyone with half a brain knew wasn't a divionion at all but a filing cabinet in a dimly lit and largely forgotten basement storeroom somewhere. Despite assurances they would periodically reexamine the case for new evidence, the message was clear: Alina was dead, shipped back to her own country, and no longer their concern.
They'd given up.
Was that record time or what? There weeks. A measly twenty one days. It was inconceivable!
"You can bet your butt if we lived over there, they'd never have given up so quickly," I said bitterly.
"You don't know that, Gome." Mom pushed ash blonde bangs back from blue eyes that were redrimmed from weeping, leaving a smudge of flour on her brow.
"Give me the chance to find out."
Her lips compressed into a thin white edged line.
"Absolutely not. I've already lost one daaughter to that country. I will not lose another."
Imprasse. And here we'd been ever since breakfast, when I'd announced my decision to take time off so I could go to Dublin and find out what the police had really been doing to solve Alina's murder.
I would demand a copy of the file, and do all in my power to motivate them to continue their investigation. I would give a face and a voice a loud and hopefully highly persuasive one to the victim's family. I couldn't shake the belief that only my sister had a representative in Dublin, the investigation would be taken more seriously.
I'd tried to get Ded to go, but there just wasn't any reaching him right now. He was lost in grief. Though our faces and builds were very different, I have the same color hair and eyes as Alina, and the few times he'd actually looked at me lately,
he'd gotten such an awful look on his face taht it had made me wish I was invisible. Or brunette with brown eyes like him, instead of dark blonde with green.
Initially, after the funeral, he'd been a dynamo of determined action, making endless phone calls, contactiong anyone and everyone. The embassy had been kind, but directed him to Interpol. Interpol had kept him busy for a few days "looking into things"
before diplomaticatically referring him back to where he'd begun the Dublin police. The Dublin police remained unwavering.
BO evidence. NO leads. Nothing to invesstigate. If you have a problem with that, sir, contact your embasssy.
He called the Ashford police no, they couldn't go to Ireland and look into it. He called the Dublin police again were they sure they'd interviewed every last one of Alina's friends and fellow students and professors? I hadn't needed to hear both sides of that conversation to know the Dublin police were getting testy.
He'd finally placed a call to an old college friend of his that held some high powered, hush hush position in the government. Whatever that friend said had deflated him completely. He'd closed the door on us and not come out re if yo like it The climate was decidedly grim in the Higurash house, with Mom a tornado in the kitchen, and Dad a black hole in the study. I couldn't sit around forever waiting for them to snap out of it. Time was wasting and the trail was growing colder by the minute. If someone was going to do something, it had to be now, which meant it had to be me.
I said, "I'm going and I don't care if you like it or not."
Mom burst into teasrs. She slapped thet of the dough she'd been kneading down on the counter and ran out of the room. After a moment, I heard the bedroom door slam down the hall.
That's one thing I can't handle my mom's tears. As if she hadn't been crying enough lately, I'd just made her cry again. I slunk from the kitchen and crept upstairs, feeling like the absolute lowest of the lowest scum on the face of the earth.
I got out of my pajamas, showered, dried my hair and dressed, then stood at a complete loss for a while, staring blankily down the hall aat Alina's closed bedroom door.
How many thousands of times had we called back and forth during the day, whispered back and forth during the night, woken each other up for comfort when we'd had bad dreams?
I was on my own with bad dreams now.
Get a grip, Gome. If I stayed home, the black hole might get me, too. Even now I could feel its event horizon expanding exponentially.
On the drive uptown, I recalled that I'd dropped my cell phone in the pool God, had it really been all those weeks ago? and decided I'd better stop at the mall to get a new one in case my parents needed to reach me while I was If they even noticed I was gone.
I stopped at the store, bought the cheapest Nokia they had, got the old one deactivated, and powered up the repacement.
I had fourteen new messages, which was probbly a record for me, I'm hardly a social butterfly. I'm not one of those plugged in people who are always hooded up to the lastesst greatest find me service. The idea of being found so easily creeps me out a little. I don't have a camera phone or text messaging capability. I don't have Internet service or satellite radio, just your basic account, thanks you. The only other gadget I need is y trusty iPod music is my great escape.
I got back to my car, turned on the engine so the air conditioner could do battle with July's relentless heat, and began listening to my messages.
Most of them were weeks old, from friends at shool or The Brickyard who I'd tlaked to since the funeral. I guess, somewhere in the back of my mind, I'd made the connection that I'd lost cell service a few days before Alina had died and was hoping I might have a message from her. Hoping she might have called, sounding happy before she died. Hoping she might have said something that wouldd meke me forget me grief, if only for a short while. I was desperate to her voice just one more time.
When I did, I almost dropped the phone. Her voice burst from the tiny speaker, sounding frantic, tettified.
"Gome! Oh God, Gome, where are you? I need to talk to you! It rolled straight into your voice mail! What are you going with your cell phone turned off?
You've got to call me the minute you get this! I mean, the very instant!"
Despite the oppressive summer heat, I was suddenly icy, my skin clammy.
"Oh, Gome, everything has gone so wrong! I thought I knew what I was doning. I thought he waas helping me, but God, I can't believe I was so stupid! I thought I was in love with him and he's one of them ,Gome! He's one of them!"
I blink uncomprehendingly. One of who? For that matter, who was this "he" that was one of "them" in the first place?
Alina in love? No way! Alina and I told each other everything. Aside from a few guys she'd dated casually her first months in Dublin,
she'd not lmentioned any other guy in her life. And certaintly not one she was in love with!
Her voice caught on a sob. My hand tightened to a death grip on the phone, as if maybe I could hold on to my sister though it. Keep this Alina aliveadn safe from harm. I got a feew seconds of static, then, fearful of being overgeard.
"We've got to talk, Gome! There's so much you don't know. My God, you don't even know what your are! There are so many things I should have told you,
but I thought I could keep you out of it until things were safe for us. I'm going to try to make it home "she broke off and laughed bitterly, a caustic sound totally unlike Alina" but I don't think he'll let me out of the country. I'll call you as soon" More static. A gasp. "Oh, Gome, he's coming!" Her voice dropped to an urgent whiper. "Listen to me! We've got to find the" her next word sounded garbled or foreign, something like shisadu, I thought. "Everything depends on it. We can't let them have it! We've got to get to it first! He's been lying to me all along. I know what it is now and I know where"
Dead air.
The call had been terminated.
I sat stunned, trying to make sense of what I'd just heard. I thought I must have a split personality and there were two Gome's: one that had a clue about what was going on in the world around her, and one that could barely track reality well enough to get that could barely track reality well enough to get dressed in the morning and put her shoes on the right feet. Gome that had a clue must have died when Alina did, because this Gome obviously didn't know the first thing about her sister.
She'd been in love and never mentioned it to me! Not once. And now it seemed that was least of the things she'd not told me. I was flabbergasted. I was betrayed.
There was a whole huge part of my sister's life that she'd been withholding from me for months.
What kind of danger had she been in? What had she been tryng to keep me out or? Until what was safer for use? What did we have to find? Had it been the man she'd thought she was in love that had killed her? Why oh way Hadn't she told me his name?
I checked the date and time on the call the afternoon after I'd dropped my cell phone in teh pool. I felt sick to my stomach. She'd needed me and I hadn't been there for her. At the moment Alina had been so franticallay trying to rach me, I'd been sunning lazily in stening to the backyard, listeningto my top one hunderedmindless happy songs, my cell phone lying short circuted and forgotten on the dining room table.
I carefully pressed the save key, then listened to the rest of the messages, hoping she might have called back, but there was nothing else. According to the police,
she'd died approximately four hours after she'd tried reaching me, althoughh they hadn't found her body in an alley for nearly two days.
That was a visual I always worked realy hard to block.
I closed my eyes and tried not to dwell on teh thought that I'd missed my last chance to talk to her, tried not to think that maybe I could have done something to save her if only I'd answered. Those thoughts could make me crazy.
I replayed the message again. What was a shisadu? And what was the deal with her cryptic You don't even know what you are? What could Alina possibly have meant by that?
By my third run through, I knew the nessage by heart.
I alson knnew that there was no way I could play it for Mom and Dad. Not only would it drive them further off the deep end (if there was a deeper end than the one they were currently off,) but they'd probabbly lock me in my room and throw away the key. I couldn't see them taking any cances with their remaining child.
But...if I went to Dublin and played it for the police, they'd have to reopen her case, wouldn't they? This was a bona fide lead. If Alina had been in love with someone, she would have been seen with him at some point, somewhere. At school, at her apartment, at work, somewhere. Somebody would know who he was.
And if the mystery man wasn't her killer, surely he was the key to discovering who was. After all, he was "one of them".
I frowned. Whoever or whatever "they" were.