Ellen Graham led Shelly to a closet and slid the door open. A row of white lights blazed on without any switch being flipped, and Ellen Graham stepped into it—into that light, and into that closet—turned a corner, and seemed to disappear before Shelly’s eyes.
Shelly followed, but hesitated, and then she realized that this closet was the size of most rooms. A closet the size of a small apartment, or a trailer. It could not have been called, even, really, a walk-in closet. It was a space that could have been lived in. The only thing closetlike about it was the row after row of garments crammed together along the walls, and the fact that there were no windows.
Ellen Graham turned to look at Shelly and then tossed her arms up in the air, as if either to reveal something miraculous or to try to express the total futility of some unending task, and then she stood up on her tiptoes and pulled down a small black-enameled box, opened it, and turned it toward Shelly, as if to present her with the contents.
Black satin, bearing jewelry.
A pair of earrings.
Two grapelike clusters of opals and rubies dangling from elaborate Victorian-scrolled gold settings. These were the kinds of jewels that were kept under glass at Holyrood or Buckingham Palace. When Denise had worn them, they must have hung down to her shoulders. They must have weighed a ton, cost a fortune.
Ellen Graham picked one of them up and said, “They were my grandmother’s. She was Italian. A countess. You don’t have to believe me. You can look it up on the Internet.”
Shelly nodded, and immediately regretted it, thinking the nod might make it appear that checking out Ellen Graham’s grandmother’s pedigree on the Internet was something she planned to do.
“I let Denise borrow these for the Spring Event. She was wearing a white dress we bought together in Chicago. She was so excited. I’d never even let her touch these before.
“My daughter is an angel, Shelly, but no one could claim that, when it comes to material things, she’s overly responsible. She lost four cell phones between her senior year in high school and when she disappeared.
“Still, she knew what these were worth, and what they meant.”
The Spring Event. Josie’s description of it. The tequila. The coffin. Shelly wondered if Denise disappeared before or after.
“And that fucking little bitch,” Ellen Graham said, her voice cracking on the last word before she snapped the enameled box shut and tossed it back on the shelf above her daughter’s sweaters and dresses. “Josie Reilly! That fucking little bitch who came here with one of those other little Omega Theta Tau brats with a trunk full of my beautiful daughter’s things. But no earrings. No white dress. ‘Where are those?’ I asked. How stupid was I?”
Ellen Graham was acting out a scene now, reading from a script.
“‘Have you seen, by any chance,’ I asked, ‘a white dress and a pair of beautiful Italian earrings worth about twenty thousand dollars?’
“‘Oh, no, Mrs. Graham. Golly. We went all through Denise’s stuff. We brought you everything! We never saw a white dress or any Italian earrings. Denise was long gone before the Spring Event. Maybe she was wearing them when she left?’”
Shelly watched, waited for the scene to play itself out.
“Well, that didn’t make sense, did it, Shelly? Why would Denise be wearing her Spring Event outfit if that was still three nights away? But, you know, I was confused. I was desperate. The police and the university and the Pan-Hellenic Society—everyone was looking into this. Everyone was working so hard. Wearing ribbons. Making phone calls. I just felt grateful not to be Nicole Werner’s mother by that time. That mother had it worse than I did, I thought. I felt lucky anyone cared at all about Denise’s disappearance with that on top of it.
“And, of course, these girls were so sweet. And so beautiful. Josie, and this other girl, Amanda Something. They could have been Denise. Their hair, and their clothes, and their ‘likes’ and ‘you knows’ and the little mannerisms, their pretty manicures. I thought, Okay, my daughter wore her grandmother’s earrings and her Winter Event dress and got on a bus, and—and what?
“And by the time these girls brought me her things, it had been six weeks already. Six unbearable, sleepless weeks. And then the summer was over and the police told me they were ‘working’ on the case.
“So I sat down at the computer and looked her up—Nicole Werner—mostly because her parents were the only parents on earth I could think of who had it worse than I did. Maybe there was some kind of perverse satisfaction in that. I read every word I could find about the accident, and the funeral, and the memorial service, and the sorority and their fucking cherry trees, and then I came across one very, very interesting item.
“I came upon a photograph of that pretty dark-haired girl who’d brought Denise’s belongings home. She’d been, it seemed, Nicole Werner’s roommate. And there she was in this photograph, standing at a lectern giving a little speech during the dedication of the cherry orchard, supposedly two weeks after my daughter disappeared, and that little fucking slut was wearing my goddamned Italian countess grandmother’s earrings.”
Shelly saw it, herself, then—the Googled image—suddenly before her: Josie Reilly in a sweet, tiny, black dress, gripping the sides of a lectern with both hands, wearing sunglasses, a branch full of blossoms lit up behind her head, and the bright glinting blur of Ellen Graham’s grandmother’s earrings dangling from her ears.
Those earrings hadn’t even registered on Shelly until now. If she’d noticed them at all she’d have assumed they were some kind of costume jewelry, something Josie had bought at the mall—at Claire’s, or Daisy’s, one of those places where sorority girls love to stock up on baubles.
“It was September by then,” Ellen Graham went on, despite the shaking of not only her voice but her whole body, “and I called in my baby brother, who’s a bouncer at a bar in Ypsilanti—six feet tall and two hundred pounds of solid muscle—and we went straight to the Omega Theta Tau house and sacked the place. When we found them in her room, Josie Reilly pretended to be astonished that the earrings were my grandmother’s. She claimed Denise had given them to her, told her they were costume jewelry. When I pointed out that I hadn’t let Denise borrow them until just before she disappeared—well, it didn’t make any difference. Those girls have a story and they’re sticking to it. But I know for a fact that my daughter wasn’t gone before the Spring Event. She was there, and she wore her dress, and she wore those earrings. I just don’t know what happened after that.”
“What about her phone? Did the police check the cell phone records?” Shelly asked. “And her attendance in her classes?”
“She’d lost her cell phone the week before. One of the four. We were getting her another one. And the only class she had from Monday until Wednesday was a lecture with three hundred students in it. Her violin lesson had been canceled because the professor was sick. It’s a huge place, as you know. No one was keeping a record of where she was or wasn’t.
“And those sorority bitches. Those lying little bitches. Denise was a girl who was Twittering and Facebooking and texting all day, and so are those other girls. They’ve got messages flying from one end of town to the other twenty-four/seven. So if they had no idea where my daughter was, why wasn’t there one single message left on her Facebook page after the day she disappeared? How come I can’t find one single girl who posted a word on the Internet saying, Gosh, I haven’t see my sorority sister in six months, anyone know where she is?”