Hidden Bodies by Caroline Kepnes
“A wave.” Forty pontificates. “A wave never goes away. Like, what if the ocean just stopped? What then?”
Forty blathers. His words aren’t words anymore, just sounds, as I read the news, the unbelievable news.
The Little Compton Police Department received an anonymous tip regarding local girl and Brown graduate Peach Salinger. Authorities won’t reveal details about the tip but they do confirm that they have reopened the case. They were wrong that it was suicide. Or at least, they think they were wrong. The language is delicate, hesitant, but the message is clear. They think Peach Salinger was murdered. And they have started a brand-new investigation. Oh, fuck. Double thousand triple fuckity fuck. Forty starts slapping the surface to create waves and I have no patience for the whale in the water anymore. I have to get out of here. I have to deal with this.
I put my phone in my pocket and I walk to the hole in the mud. He’s half gone, pupils warbling toward the underside of his skull where that poisoned pink brain slows to a halt. He’s going, but I can’t wait. I can’t sit here, not with an investigation open on the other side of the country.
“Hey, buddy,” I say. And when he swims toward me, I lean over and push Forty Quinn’s head under the water. My hands are on fire. The water is at least ninety degrees and the air is hot and I feel my body become a furnace, the heat rises, curling around my arm like something out of a Dr. Seuss poem. He isn’t like Henderson. He doesn’t struggle. He is weak. Dark yellow piss whispers out of his soft, vile dick. Dehydration. I look up at the sky and I wait for his unconscious body to stop flailing.
Finally it’s over. Monty Baldwin is dead. His fake ID is stuffed into his brick of coke. The condom wrapper is a godsend, more DNA, not mine. I pull my hands out of the water. I catch my breath. At some point the butter knife fell into the water with him and it’s there, glistening at the bottom. I’ve never tried cocaine before. I dip my finger into his bag. I do like he did, one tiny bump. I shake. But maybe that’s just that feeling you get when you’re next to a brand-new corpse.
45
THERE is no way around it. I have to lie to Love. I am on the phone with her while I wait in the JetBlue Terminal at McCarran Airport. They have slot machines here too and I am leaving Las Vegas and I am going to Little Compton but I can’t tell Love that.
I have no explicit plan. It’s probably stupid of me to return to the scene of the crime. But I can’t stay in Vegas and wait for the police to find Forty and I can’t go to LA and sit on the sofa with Love and refresh the search engines for information on Peach Salinger. Because the truth is that I fucked up. I left the mugofurine, my one loose end, and I won’t let it be my undoing.
Besides if I’m going to be caught for murdering that depressive, vicious Salinger, I’d rather it happen there. This is why dads don’t let their kids visit them in prison, why people dying from cancer don’t want their picture taken. This investigation could expose that mug of piss and I don’t want Love to have to see me in handcuffs.
Love is on the phone, silent, sighing every few seconds, a signal that she wants me to stay on. It is never a good thing when a woman is silent. I have to keep asking if she’s there.
“Yes,” she says. “Why?”
“’Cause you’re not saying anything.”
“What do you want me to say?” she asks. “I’m irritated. I’m sick of this. I can’t get anything done and I don’t know if my brother’s dead and it sucks.”
“I’m sorry,” I say. “I’m trying.”
“Did you start at Caesars like I said?”
And I say yes and we retrace my steps again and I promise to keep trying. “You know he’ll turn up,” I say.
“Which casino are you at right now?”
“Planet Hollywood,” I lie.
She sighs. “He doesn’t like their tables.”
“I know,” I say. “I remember you said that, Love. But I’m trying everything. Unless you want me to come home . . .”
“No,” she says. “God, no. I’m sorry. I’m just tense.”
“I know, it’s okay,” I say.
I know she wants to stay on the phone and say nothing, but my flight to Providence, Rhode Island, is boarding.
“You there?”
“Yes! Joe! Stop asking me! Are you there?”
“I’m here,” I say. “I’m not going anywhere.”
She cries. I tell her it’s okay and now I’m gonna have to wait. I can’t board with Group A. People are real assholes about their suitcases and I’m nervous there won’t be room for mine, but Love comes first. Suddenly she is laughing.
“I’m watching Friends,” she says. “It’s the one where—”
“Shit,” I say. “I think I see him.”
I hang up and rush to the Jetway. It’s a shitty thing to do, but watching Friends while you’re on the phone with your boyfriend is also a shitty thing to do. I text her: Sorry. False alarm. I love you.
She writes back: XOXOXOX
I wish she had said I love you but then again, I have to prepare myself for change. I go online again because I still can’t believe it. I watch a press conference with Peach’s parents and her mother is identified as Florence “Pinky” Salinger. She is an old version of Peach, with fuller lips and broader shoulders. “I repeatedly told the police that while my daughter battled depression, she was not suicidal.” She breathes. “While it is comforting that the authorities are now treating my daughter’s disappearance as a crime, a murder, it is deeply disconcerting that the police declined to investigate until someone called in an anonymous tip.” The woman heaves. The woman has no soul. No wonder Peach was so terrible. “It is a sad state of affairs when a mother’s instinct and knowledge means nothing to a detective. But we are grateful that my daughter’s murderer will at last be brought to justice.”
She straightens her jacket, as if it matters what she looks like, and steps back from the podium. I wonder what it’s like to be a mother and you’re going to give a speech for reporters about your dead daughter and still, you go and get your hair and makeup done.
The broadcaster explains that the Salinger family intends to use all their resources to resolve this homicide case and the video ends.
We take off and it’s strange to be going back to Little Compton, to think of a time when I was so in love with Amy. I haven’t thought about her or our trip in so long, about Noah & Pearl & Harry & Liam, about Charlotte & Charles and all that food and all that sex. I remember the way she tasted and I remember the blueberry-stained sheets and the sound of her voice when she said she would try to learn to trust. If I never took Amy to Little Compton, would we still be together? Is life predestined or do you change it by shoving your way into small, quaint towns because you’re fascinated by how out of place you feel there?
It’s a risk, going back to Little Compton. But I’m doing it for Love; our love can never be safe so long as the mugofurine is out there taunting me. And really, it’s like love itself, like drinking. We all get our hearts broken. We get fucked up and throw up and we cry and listen to sad songs and say we’re never doing that again. But to be alive is to do it again. To love is to risk everything.
WE land in Providence and no flight was ever this fast. I text Love: My phone died and I’m gonna crash. Nothing yet, wish I had better news. Love you.
She writes back immediately: Ok
I buy some crap in the airport. A candy bar that’s too big, a copy of Mr. Mercedes, and a Red Sox cap. I walk directly to Budget Car Rental. There’s no way to rent a car without showing an ID and providing a credit card. I do these things. What I have going for me: I was only here with Amy this summer, a vacationer. That guy who was here in the winter, that guy who smashed up his car and killed that girl? His name was Spencer Hewitt.
I don’t get a convertible. I get a Chevy. I start it up and I drive into my life, into my past, my future, my genetic coding, my mistakes, my possible salvation, my probable doom, Little Fucking Compton.
46
After I checked into my shitty motel, I went into a sleep coma. Vegas will fuck you up. I think I went twenty-eight hours without so much as a nap. I woke up on the cruddy, low-thread-count bedspread in a pile of my own drool. I showered in the stifling, tiny shower and I used the terrible small rectangles of bad soap, and I drove to the public parking lot that’s closest to the beach near the Salinger house. And I started walking. As if you can just walk into a fucking crime scene. Before I even got there, I saw the activity, the police cruisers and the TV news vans, the various Salingers in their winter clothes, and I had to back off.
I pretend to be a guy walking on a beach relaxing and meanwhile, that fucking house fills up with people who might find my mug of piss. I need to get in there so I try to get in there.
I drive to Crowther’s and order a shit ton of food to go. I buy one of their T-shirts. I go to the Salinger house and park as close as I can. The TV vans are gone—news is only news for a little while—and there is only one cop. I put on my Red Sox cap and I lift the heaving box of food and I trot toward the house, the way any delivery guy would. I knock on the door, the way any delivery guy would. Nobody answers so I ring the bell, the way any delivery guy would.
A guy who can’t be more than twenty and looks exactly like Peach walks up. He’s wearing a Yale T-shirt and scratching his head. He looks like he’s never held a rake or scratched a lottery ticket in a 7-Eleven. “What’s up?” he asks.
“I have a delivery,” I say, as if this isn’t completely fucking obvious. “Can I get in there and put this down?”
The Salinger’s eyes roll to the side of his oval head. “Mommmmmm!” he calls out.
“Buddy,” I say. “My back’s breaking here. If I could get in there and get this down.”
But now his mother is here. “Trot,” she says. “Don’t scream.” She looks at me. “I’m sorry,” she says. “We’re requesting that all flowers and food and gifts be sent to the battered women’s shelter in Fall River. Peach was very passionate about women’s rights and we just don’t need the food.”
Peach was not very passionate about women’s rights. She was passionate about women’s pussies. She wanted to fuck Beck, which is why I killed her. Salingers. This bitch just stares at me. “Do . . . you . . . speak . . . English?” she asks.
NO, BUT I SPEAK CUNT. “That’s so great of you,” I say. “But my boss would have my ass if I drove to Fall River. You sure I can’t just get in there and leave this with you?” Meaning, get in there and steal the keys that are undoubtedly on the kitchen table because rich people, particularly the ones on the East Coast, really like to throw their shit on the kitchen table.
The bitch sighs. “You poor thing.” She reaches for her purse. She thinks I want a tip. “You take this and you keep that food.” She slips me a five-dollar bill and gives me a fake smile, the kind people do when they want you to know you’re faking it. She closes the door and locks it and now I’ve been made by not one but two fucking Salingers, so it’s not like I can show up here tomorrow in a UPS uniform. Not that I have a UPS uniform. All I have is a heaving box of food.
I drive to my shitty motel room. I eat. I text Love: Still nothing and yes I am the asshole who got sucked into a blackjack table for hours
She writes back: I’m not your parole officer. You don’t have to report to me! I know you’re working hard. I’m helping my dad with some Pantry stuff.
This was the wrong time for her to use the phrase parole officer and I don’t want to talk to her until I’ve destroyed that mug of piss. I wish I could change things. I wish I had taken care of this mug before we met.
Miss you, she writes, and most girls would throw hissy fits if their boyfriend went into silent mode in Las Fucking Vegas for several hours, especially while said girl was in the middle of a family crisis.
My phone buzzes and now she’s calling me.
“I just wanted to hear your voice,” she says when I answer.
“How you doing?” I ask her. She starts in about a difficult woman at work, Sam, and I yawn and the room is cold and I walk to the window to close the blinds and I left my headlights on. “Fuck,” I say.
“What’s wrong?” she asks. “Are you okay?”
“Yeah,” I say. “I left my lights on. It’s fine.”
I grab the keys and go outside—the bitter cold—and I turn off the lights and I run back inside and Love asks me where I am. “A diner,” I say. “The Peppermill.”
She says she’s glad I’m eating and she wants me to rest. She says I sound tense. I tell her I sound tense because I am tense. She tells me that when they were in college, Forty disappeared for two months. “Right after I got married,” she says. “Two months, Joe. You know you can’t stay in Vegas for two months.”
“I won’t, but I can’t give up yet,” I say.
“Promise me you’ll take care of yourself,” she says.
I promise her. And then I make shitty motel coffee and go on Tinder. Fortunately, there aren’t that many girls in the area. I swipe and I swipe and I swipe. I swipe while I piss and I swipe in the bed and I swipe in the car and then I find her. Jessica Salinger. I recognize her from a picture of the family in the article. She’s a prettier version of Peach and she’s less than a mile away. This is what I needed to know, that she was still here; her fucking Facebook and Twitter are private but her pussy, apparently, is open. Humans. I will never understand.
I shower. I shave. I dress. I run out to my car and thank God I noticed the lights because my battery works and I need it to work, I need to get to Scuppers now, the place I went with Supercunt. It’s the only joint in town, really, this time of year and I go in and the first thing I notice are the tall chairs at the bar, brown as opposed to the white leather chairs at the Bellagio. And two chairs are of particular interest to me because one contains Jessica Salinger, the other has the friend I was banking on, and there is plenty of room for me at the bar.
It’s quiet—some fucking Sade in the background; really, Rhode Island?—and I have no competition. There are two other dudes here, construction workers I think, they’re both wearing rings, more interested in the news than the girls. There’s no band to get in the way of things and tease the young girls, there’s no crowd, not even with all the excitement involving the dead girl. New Englanders are stingy and they hibernate at night, as if going out makes you into some kind of whore.
Of course I am not gonna go for Jessica Salinger. That would be too creepy since I was just at their house today. I have to put the moves on the friend, the one I knew she’d be out with, because girls like Jessica always have a friend around, and she’s always a little shorter, a little more drunk, a little more down to earth, literally. This friend is tapping her straw and removing it from her cocktail. This friend is bored. This friend is gonna be mine. Easy.
It’s been so long since I hit on a girl in a bar, but I know how it works. All you do is stare into the girl’s face, reflected in the mirror ahead. You let her friend notice you staring. You don’t look away. She meets your gaze in the mirror and you crack up and you apologize—it’s so good to start with sorry—and you tell her that you didn’t mean to stare but you couldn’t help it.
“You’re just so gorgeous,” I say. “And I don’t mean that in a creepy douche kind of way and I’m not gonna try and pick you up when I see you’
And then I take all my marbles away and flag the bartender and order a gimlet—I want to know why Forty was so into them—and now the girl puts her hand on my arm. “What’s your name?”
“Brian,” I say. Like Brian from Cabo. “Brian Stanley.”
“Well,” she says. “I’m Dana and this is my girlfriend Jessica. Are you here by yourself?”
“Yeah,” I say. “What about you girls? Are you here by yourselves?”
Jessica rolls her eyes and this is exactly what I want. My gimlet comes. I sip. I ask Dana what she’s doing here and she tells me she’s here to provide moral support for her friend Jessica. Jessica is feeling more invisible by the second—it won’t be long now—and I sip my gimlet slowly. Dana is Jessica’s roommate in New York and Dana is a first-year law student and Dana loves this cute little town and Dana loves this song and she loves this bar and Jessica does not love being a third wheel. She stands. “Do you guys mind if I get out of here?”
I apologize—I am Mr. Manners—and Dana says she should go and Jessica says that’s ridiculous. She says she’s tired. Dana doesn’t know how she’ll get home. “It’s not like New York where you can just call a cab,” she says. “No, I should go.”
Jessica says she’ll be in the car. Jessica Salinger has no use for me. I tell Dana it’s unorthodox and presumptuous but I could give her a lift home if she wanted to stay.
“Thank you,” she says. “But I don’t even know you.”
“Yeah,” I say. “I’m sorry. I wasn’t trying to . . .”
Two hours later, Dana is a teetering drunk girl and she’s in good hands with me. I help her out of the bar. I open the car door for her. “Just like Say Anything!” she says.