It takes him almost an hour to walk back to Chinatown. All the while he repeats to himself: You can find her through the six cats.
Who is she? How can he find her? How can he help her?
He gets to his car, drives to the dead girl’s place, a one-bedroom cottage in Echo Park. With her key, he enters. He goes straight for the bedroom.
The scent of the place is familiar. It smells like her. He has been here a couple times, but never has he come into this room. He allows himself a moment to take it all in.
He opens the closet’s double doors. She has pushed a four-drawer dresser into the closet, clothes hanging on either side. On top of her dresser are two photos in stand-up frames. One is a picture of her with another girl, much younger. They are laughing, standing arm in arm. Sisters. The other is a picture of a young lady, taken at the beach. The sunglasses the woman is wearing, as well as the color and quality of the print, date it. Most likely, her mother.
Starting with the top drawer, he goes through the contents of her dresser. Bras, panties, socks, scarves, sweaters. What would have been a puerile thrill has become numerous slugs to the stomach. Still, he finishes, digging under the piles of folded fabric, knocking the four corners of each drawer, hoping to uncover a hidden relic of some sort.
Secret photos, perhaps. A bundle of old love letters. A diary.
He moves onto the shelves, finds a leather-bound volume of lined paper with less than half of its pages filled. He reads the first entry. As he reads, her voice rings in his ear.
He closes the book, looks around the room. He shakes his head and feels his forehead with the back of his hand. He’s hot.
He must not get distracted by emotions. There is a task at hand, he reminds himself. Whatever she was doing in the river remains unfinished. He owes it to her to see it through, all the way to the end. He remembers the list of clues he’s assembled: a missing girl, Pavlov, six cats, a bell.
He opens the book again. He tries speed-reading the diary to see if any of these things are mentioned. Nothing. The information is either not there or he’s too impatient to find it.
Frustrated, he turns to the last entry. Ten days ago. It’s an inconsequential write-up, but it gets him thinking: Wasn’t that the night of their last get-together?
Flipping through the pages, he searches for his name. He tries to remember the exact day of their first date. He finds it, an entry about that night. He reads her words. Her voice rings louder.
He rips the page from the book, stuffs the paper in his pocket, slams the book shut.
The ticking of a clock fills the quiet that remains. He’s concerned that he’s been in here too long. He expects a knock at the door any moment, but can’t imagine who would come calling at this hour.
He sits at her desk, digs through papers there. A good number of them are printouts of online reports: girls gone missing, kidnap suspects arrested, and alleged abductors still at large.
A picture is developing in his mind.
Her computer is already on. He moves his finger across the trackpad to wake it from sleep. He starts by pulling up her blog. Though it looks like she posted daily entries, the site has not been updated in ten days. Her previous posts were all things he had seen before: conservation issues, environmental impact discussions, and public policy debates concerning the L.A. River.
He clicks off the browser and begins reading through folders and file names on her hard drive.
An electronic ding sounds off. A flashing window appears in the upper right-hand corner of the screen.
Someone is sending an instant message.
Shepherd_79: god i’m so sick of guys
Shepherd_79: he didn’t call again tonight
He is tempted to shut the program down, make it seem like a glitch. Her friend would never think twice about it. But he doesn’t do anything, thinking it is far less suspicious to do so.
His heart is racing, and he can feel his neck and chest flushing with color. Finding it hard to concentrate on reading her folder structure, he opts to open an image viewer and browse through her digital photos.
Shepherd_79: i should just get over him, right?
The photos are grouped into categories, mostly events: parties and a couple weddings. The largest group of pictures contains shots of the river. He opens them in thumbnail view and scrubs through them, trying to differentiate one from another. They all look the same. Graffiti-covered cement. A hint of water. Chain link, barbed wire, corrugated steel.
He clicks on a couple of images, enlarging them, hoping to read the graffiti. But it’s all senseless tagging in an indecipherable alphabet.
Next are a bunch of shots of storm-drain covers spraypainted in bright, bold metallic colors. The paint looks layered on, the iterations of multiple artists on many different occasions.
There’s something familiar about the shape of these drain covers, the way the upper hinges taper off to points on either side of the large circle.
Shepherd_79: hello?
Shepherd_79: are you ignoring me too bitch!
The messages are getting to him. Someone is closing in on him, has him under a microscope.
He clicks the IM window and types, hitting the keys hard.
CAN’T TALK NOW.
A mistake? Just by typing a few words he has brought her back. A ghost in the machine. Although this ghost is thinner than smoke.
The next image of the drain covers reveals it all. The spray-painted eyes, nose, whiskers. Cats. They are graffitied to look like cats.
Another message comes through IM.
Shepherd_79: sorry… you okay? is there news about your sister?
He jumps up to her bookshelf and starts tearing through books.
Captions under key images begin to point him to a general location. Hopping back onto her computer, he starts opening documents and searching for keywords. Frogtown. Atwater Village. County Flood Control. Mural Registry. He starts sketching on the back of a piece of paper.
After much work, he has a map, a goal. He is about to leave when he notices the IM window is blinking again. He knows he will have to close the program before he leaves. Keeping it open will make for a suspicious scene, even though the books and papers he has pulled out make the ransacked place suspicious enough.
He reads the last communication.
Shepherd_79: what’s the matter?
Shepherd_79: hey! HELLO!
Shepherd_79: Who are you?
(Shepherd_79 has signed off.)
He exits the program. He imagines that Shepherd is heading here, to this house, to investigate. It hardly matters now. He won’t be here. He is heading back to the river.
He knows who she is. He knows how to find her. The rest is fate.
In the dim light of the riverbed, he has trouble seeing the graffiti on the drain covers, but he knows he’s at the right place. Six cats, six drains. The large painted faces hang perpendicular to the ground. During heavy rains they will swing up, releasing torrents of run-off into the violent river come to life. Now they are silent, each recessed into an individual hollow in the channel’s cement wall. He takes a moment for a deep, shaky breath. He twists his wrist to look at his watch, but the time doesn’t even register. His mind is on what happens next.
Really, what is he doing here?
Thoughts crowd his head. He should go to the police, he should go get help, he should just walk away and pray for this day to end. He shakes his head, pulls the paper he ripped from her diary out of his pocket. With a faint click he turns his flashlight on and reads:
In real life, stories never actually end; they simply change. If you are in a loveless marriage, you can’t just type “THE END” and move on to the next story. No, you make choices and you change, your story changes. A main character is swept to the side. A supporting character rises to take on more importance. New characters are introduced.