Minerva scrunched her brows together and pursed her lips. The fine web of wrinkles deepened around her eyes and lips. “Well, I don’t see any harm in that. Specially seeing as the two girls were roommates and all. You should have told me right off. You don’t need Mr. Long’s permission for that.”
She picked up the phone and dialed an in-house extension. “Sonya? There’s a lady here who’d like to talk to you about Elysia. You got a minute? . . . Uh-huh . . . Okay. I’ll send her on back.”
James hadn’t mentioned Sonya was Ely’s roommate.
Minerva pointed to the door opposite her desk. “Just go on through to room twelve. I’ll open it for you. It’ll be on your right. She’s expecting you.”
“Thanks.” When I reached the door a buzzer sounded and the lock released.
The bedroom door opened within seconds after I knocked. Neither one of us said a word at first, although we recognized each other. She was the blond girl who had run into James in the hallway yesterday. He’d called her Sunny. There was open distrust in her eyes.
“May I come in?”
I saw the gap in the door start to close, so I pushed my way in and just started talking.
“Thank you so much for seeing me like this. I know it must be very hard on you, losing a friend like that.” I crossed to the far side of the small room, noticing the open suitcase on the unmade bed. I pointed to the other bed. “Was this Elysia’s bed?” She nodded.
I sat down on the smooth navy bedspread. “Had you two been roommates long?”
She closed the hallway door and leaned against it, crossing her arms under her ample breasts. She was wearing a white tank top and green satin jogging shorts. With her long blond hair and shapely legs, she looked like the type of model who is usually photographed draped over an outboard engine or a motorcycle.
“I already talked to the cops, and I’ve got nothing else to say. Who are you?” she asked.
“My name is Seychelle Sullivan. Maybe Elysia mentioned me.”
I saw in her eyes that she did recognize my name, but her defenses weren’t down yet.
“Yeah,” I went on, “we sure had some great times together. Did Ely ever tell you what we did on her seventeenth birthday?”
A hint of a smile sparkled in her eyes, and she nodded. “She told you about the gorilla suit? She once told my friend B.J. that she loved gorillas. Well, I was complaining to him that I didn’t know what to get her for her birthday, and he said, ‘Let’s rent her a gorilla suit!’ And we did. We made her wear it all weekend—even to work. Only she’s such a shrimp, it was the funniest-looking, shortest-legged gorilla you’ve ever seen.” The room grew terribly quiet when I stopped laughing. “I mean was. She was such a shrimp. God, that’s hard to get used to.”
After another long, uncomfortable silence, Sonya stuck out her chin and said, “She called you her guardian angel. But I don’t believe in angels.”
“Yeah, she called me that because I was just trying to look out for her. I knew she didn’t have parents who were going to care, but I cared. A lot. And Ely knew that.”
She shrugged. “Yeah, I guess.”
“And I still care about her now. I care about what they’re saying about her, and I know it isn’t true. I don’t believe Ely’s death was an accident or suicide. I don’t believe she was willingly using drugs again, either. Someone killed her.”
She walked over to the closet and began pulling clothes off the hangers, balling them up and throwing them into the suitcase. “I don’t know anything about that.”
I stayed quiet for a while, knowing the silence would work on her.
Finally she flopped down onto the bed and sat hunched over. She stared at the carpet and rubbed her toes across the fibers. Finally she looked up. “What do you want? I don’t know nothing. Leave me alone!”
“Were you working the door when Ely came home Friday night?”
Her blue eyes glanced up at me with a guilty look, the way Abaco used to look when she’d been left in all day and had peed on the floor in the cottage.
“I don’t think I should be talking to you.”
“Why not? I was a friend of Ely’s. I’m just trying to find out what happened to her. Don’t you want to know what happened to her?”
I almost didn’t hear it, she spoke so softly. “No,” she said, and she started to cry. She had looked so tough, so invulnerable at first, that I had nearly forgotten she was just a kid.
I pushed aside her suitcase and sat next to her. “What is it, Sonya?”
“Sunny, call me Sunny. Ely did. I hate Sonya.” She wiped at her eyes trying to regain her composure, but the tears continued to spill down her cheeks. “Shit, I gotta get out of here.”
“How old are you?”
“Fifteen.”
Oh, man, at fifteen, I was still playing on a girls’ softball team and hanging out on the river with my dad. I was tall and lanky then, dressed in cutoffs and T-shirts to hide what curves I had, and boys ignored me. I had no idea what it would be like to be a little girl in a woman’s sex-kitten body like Sunny’s.
“Where are you from?”
“Indiana.”
“Don’t you think your family misses you?”
She didn’t answer right away. Then she said, “I don’t have a family. My parents died when I was little.”
“I’m sorry. I kinda know what that’s like. My mother died when I was eleven.”
She didn’t say anything for a long while. The room was quiet aside from her occasional sniffles. Finally she looked up, her blue eyes now rimmed in red. “Do you still miss her?”
Decades can go by and you can think you are so over it, and then one little question can just rip it all open again and make the wound as fresh and raw as it was that hot day on the beach. “Yes. Every day of my life.” She nodded and didn’t say anything more for a while as we sat there next to each other each essentially alone with our memories.
She inhaled deeply. “I was raised by my sister and her husband.”
“Where’s your sister now? Maybe you could go back to live with her.”
“I don’t know where she is. Probably dead. She got on drugs, and then she tested positive. She just left.”
There was more to the story, and though I felt pretty certain I knew what it would be, I had to let her tell it.
“That was when Ray started going after me. Then he threw me out because I wouldn’t sleep with him anymore. Said I wasn’t good for anything.”
It was a different variation of the story told by most of the girls in this place.
“Is there anything I can do to help you?”
She turned and looked at me, as though calculating what harm or good I could do her. “You helped Ely a lot. She told me.”
I took a deep breath to keep the quiver out of my voice. “She was my friend. I’m really going to miss her.” Sunny stood up and went into the tiny bathroom. I heard the water running. When she returned, the tears had stopped.
“I might know something that could help you a little. But see, I’m getting out of here. And I don’t have all that much time or money.”
I opened my shoulder bag and pulled a twenty out of my wallet. Her offer hadn’t been well disguised, so I figured there wasn’t any need to try to be tactful. I put the twenty on the bed. She snatched it up and stuffed it in a tiny satin handbag hanging on the doorknob.
“Okay. I came here about four months ago. That’s when I first met Ely.” Sunny went back to throwing things into the suitcase. “She didn’t talk much at first; she was always busy with her work and all. But after a couple of months, she started giving me some hints about how to make it and all. She told me the real story about this place, trying to keep me out of trouble, but by that time, it was already kind of late.”