The Shining Girls A Novel Read online

  The chafe marks on her wrists would indicate that her hands were tied, although the restraints have been removed. Wire probably, by the way it has bitten into her skin. Blood has formed a black crust over her face, like a caul. She has been slit sternum to pelvis in an inverted cross, which will lead certain factions among the police to suspect Satanism before they pin it on gangbangers, particularly as her stomach has been removed. It is found nearby, dissected, the contents spread on the grass. Her guts have been strung from the trees like tinsel. They are already dry and gray by the time the cops finally cordon off the area. This indicates that the killer had time. That no one heard her shouting for help. Or that no one responded.

  Also entered into evidence:

  A white sneaker with a long streak of mud down the side, as if she skidded in the dirt as she was running away and it came off. It was found thirty feet from the body. It matched the one she was wearing, which was spattered with blood.

  One ruched vest, spaghetti straps, sliced up the center, formerly white. Bleached denim shorts, stained with blood. Also: urine, feces.

  Her book bag containing: one textbook (Fundamental Methods of Mathematical Economics), three pens (two blue, one red), one highlighter (yellow), a grape lipsmacker, mascara, half a packet of gum (Wrigley’s spearmint, three sticks left), a square gold compact (the mirror is cracked, possibly during the attack), a black cassette tape, ‘Janis Joplin – Pearl’ handwritten on the label, the keys to Alpha Phi’s front door, a school diary marked with assignment due dates, an appointment at Planned Parenthood, her friends’ birthdays and various phone numbers that the police are going through one by one. Tucked in between the pages of the diary is a notice for an overdue library book.

  The newspapers claim that it is the most brutal attack in the area in fifteen years. The police are pursuing all leads and urgently encourage witnesses to come forward. They have high hopes that the killer will be quickly identified. A murder this ugly will have had a precedent.

  Kirby missed the whole thing. She was a little preoccupied at the time by Fred Tucker, Gracie’s older brother by a year and a half, trying to put his penis inside her.

  ‘It won’t fit,’ he gasps, his thin chest heaving.

  ‘Well, try harder,’ Kirby hisses.

  ‘You’re not helping me!’

  ‘What more do you want me to do?’ she asks, exasperated. She’s wearing a pair of Rachel’s black patent heels, together with a filmy beige-gold slip she’d lifted straight off the rail from Marshall Field’s three days ago, shoving the discarded coat hanger deep into the back of the rack. She’d stripped Mr Partridge’s roses for petals to scatter on the sheets. She’d stolen condoms from her mother’s bedside drawer, so that Fred wouldn’t have to risk the embarrassment of buying them. She’d made sure Rachel wouldn’t be coming home for the afternoon. She’s even been practising making out with the back of her hand. Which was about as effective as tickling yourself. It’s why you need other fingers, other tongues. Only other people can make you feel real.

  ‘I thought you’d done this before.’ Fred collapses onto his elbows, his weight on top of her. It’s a good kind of weight, even though his hips are bony and his skin is slick with sweat.

  ‘I just said that so you wouldn’t feel nervous.’ Kirby reaches past him to Rachel’s cigarettes lying on the bedside table.

  ‘You shouldn’t smoke,’ he says.

  ‘Yeah? You shouldn’t be having sex with a minor.’

  ‘You’re sixteen.’

  ‘Only on the eighth of August.’

  ‘Jesus,’ he says and climbs off her in a hurry. She watches him fluster around the bedroom, naked, apart from the socks and the condom – his dick still bravely erect and good to go – and takes a long drag on the cigarette. She doesn’t even like cigarettes. But cool is all about having props to hide behind. She has worked out the formula: two parts taking control without making it look like you’re trying to, and three parts pretending it doesn’t matter anyway. And hey, it is no big deal if she loses her virginity today to Fred Tucker or not. (It is a really big deal.)

  She admires the lipstick print she has left on the filter, and swallows down the coughing fit that is trying to erupt. ‘Relax, Fred. It’s supposed to be fun,’ she says, playing smooth, when what she wants to say is, It’s okay, I think I love you.

  ‘Then why do I feel like I’m having a heart attack?’ he says, clutching at his chest. ‘Maybe we should just be friends?’

  She feels bad for him. But also for herself. She blinks hard and stubs out the cigarette, three drags in, as if it was the smoke making her eyes water.

  ‘You want to watch a video?’ she says.

  So they do. And they end up fumbling around on the couch, kissing for an hour and a half, while Matthew Broderick saves the world on his computer. They don’t even notice when the tape runs out and the screen turns to bristling static, because his fingers are inside her and his mouth is hot against her skin. And she climbs on top of him and it hurts, which she expected, and it’s nice, which she’d hoped, but it’s not world-changing, and afterwards they kiss a lot and smoke the rest of the cigarette, and he coughs and says: ‘That wasn’t how I thought it would be.’

  Neither is being murdered.

  The dead girl’s name was Julia Madrigal. She was twenty-one. She was studying at Northwestern. Economics. She liked hiking and hockey, because she was originally from Banff, Canada, and hanging out in the bars along Sheridan Road with her friends, because Evanston was dry.

  She kept meaning to sign up to volunteer to read textbook passages for the blind students association’s study tapes, but never quite got round to it, the same way she’d bought a guitar but only mastered one chord. She was running for head of her sorority. She always said she was going to be the first woman CEO of Goldman Sachs. She had plans to have three kids and a big house and a husband who did something interesting and complementary – a surgeon or a broker or something. Not like Sebastian, who was a good-time guy, but not exactly marriage material.

  She was too loud, like her dad, especially at parties. Her sense of humor tended to be crass. Her laugh was notorious or legendary, depending on who was telling. You could hear it from the other side of Alpha Phi. She could be annoying. She could be narrow-minded in that got-allthe-answers-to-save-the-world way. But she was the kind of girl you couldn’t keep down. Unless you cut her up and caved in her skull.

  Her death will send out shockwaves among everyone she knew, and some people she didn’t.

  Her father will never recover. His weight drops away until he becomes a wan parody of the loud and opinionated estate agent who would pick a fight at the barbecue about the game. He loses all interest in selling houses. He tapers off mid-sales pitch, looking at the blank spaces on the wall between the perfect family portraits or worse, at the grouting between the tiles of the en-suite bathroom. He learns to fake it, to clamp the sadness down. At home, he starts cooking. He teaches himself French cuisine. But all food tastes bland to him.

  Her mother draws the pain into herself: a monster she keeps caged in her chest that can only be subdued with vodka. She does not eat her husband’s cooking. When they move back to Canada and downsize the house, she relocates into the spare room. Eventually, he stops hiding her bottles. When her liver seizes up twenty years later, he sits next to her in a Winnipeg hospital and strokes her hand and narrates recipes he’s memorized like scientific formula because there is nothing else to say.

  Her sister moves as far away as she can, and keeps moving, first across the state, then across the country, then overseas to become an au pair in Portugal. She is not a very good au pair. She doesn’t bond with the children. She is too terrified that something might happen to them.

  After three hours of questioning, Sebastian, Julia’s boyfriend of six weeks, has his alibi corroborated by independent witnesses and the grease-stains on his shorts. He was tinkering with the 1974 Indian motorbike he’d been restoring, the garage door open, i
n full view of the street. Moved by the experience, he takes Julia’s death as a sign that he has been wasting his life studying business science. He joins the antiapartheid student movement, has sex with anti-apartheid girls. His tragic past clings to him like pheromones that women find impossible to resist. It even has a theme song: Janis Joplin’s ‘Get It While You Can’.

  Her best friend lies awake at night feeling guilty because, even through her shock and grief, she has worked out that the statistical significance of Julia’s murder is that she is 88 per cent less likely to be murdered herself.

  In another part of town, an eleven-year-old girl who has only read about the case, only ever seen Julia’s valedictorian photograph from her school yearbook, takes out the pain of it – and life in general – very precisely with a boxcutter on the tender skin inside her upper arm, above the line of her T-shirt sleeves, where the cuts will not be seen.

  And five years later, it will be Kirby’s turn.

  Harper

  24 NOVEMBER 1931

  He sleeps in the spare room, with the door closed tight against the objects, but they burrow their way into his brain, insistent as flea bites. After what seems like days of fractured fever dreams, he hauls himself out of bed and manages to limp down the stairs.

  His head feels as thick as bread soaked in turpentine. The voice is gone, subsumed in that moment of searing clarity. The totems reach out to snag him as he limps past the Room. Not yet, he thinks. He knows what has to be done, but right now his stomach is clenching around the emptiness inside.

  The sleek Frigidaire is empty, apart from a bottle of French champagne and a tomato that is slowly going to mulch, just like the body in the hall. It’s turned greenish with the first hints of a high, rotten smell. But the limbs that were stiff as wood two days ago have softened and gone limp. It makes it easier to shift the corpse over to get at the turkey. He doesn’t even have to break any fingers to pry it loose from the dead man’s grip.

  He washes the scab of blood off the bird with soap. Then he boils it up with two old potatoes that he finds in a drawer in the kitchen. Mr Bartek obviously did not have a wife.

  The only record he can find is the one that is already on the gramophone, so he winds it up and starts it playing the same set of showtunes to keep him company. He eats ravenously, sitting in in front of the fire, foregoing cutlery to tear chunks of meat off with his hands. He washes it down with whiskey, filling the tumbler to the brim, not bothering with ice. He is warm and there is food in his gut and the pleasant fuzz of liquor in his head and the gaudy music seems to quiet the objects.

  When the crystal decanter is empty, he goes to fetch the champagne and swigs it straight from the bottle, until that’s gone too. He sits sullenly drunk, the picked-apart husk of the bird tossed on the floor beside him, ignoring the ticking of the gramophone, the needle scratching uselessly without a groove, until the urge to take a piss forces him, reluctantly, to get up.

  He staggers against the couch on his way to the commode and the clawed feet scrape across the floorboards and catch on the carpet, revealing a corner of battered blue luggage tucked underneath the couch.

  He leans down on the armrest and hooks the suitcase out by the handle, trying to haul it up onto the cushions to get a better look. But between the booze and his greasy fingers, it slips and the cheap catch snaps apart, disgorging the contents onto the floor: bundles of money, a scattering of yellow and red Bakelite betting chips and a black ledger, bristling with colored papers.

  Harper swears and drops to his knees, his first instinct being to shovel it back in. The bundles are thick as decks of cards: $5, $10, $20, $100 banknotes, bound up with rubber bands, and a set of five $5,000 bills, tucked down the side of the torn lining of the suitcase. It’s more money than he’s ever seen. No wonder someone bashed Bartek’s brains out. But then why didn’t they search for this? Even through the blur of alcohol, he knows this doesn’t make sense.

  He examines the banknotes more carefully. They’re arranged by denomination, but separated into variations, all subtly different. It’s the size, he reckons, fingering them. The paper, the color of the print, tiny shifts in the arrangement of the images and the wording about legal tender. It takes him a while to figure out the most peculiar thing. The dates of issue are wrong. Like the view outside the window, he thinks and immediately tries to un-think it. Perhaps this Bartek was a forger, he rationalizes. Or a prop-maker for the theater.

  He turns to the colored papers. Betting slips. With dates that skip around from 1929 to 1952. Arlington Racetrack. Hawthorne. Lincoln Fields. Washington Park. Every one a winner. Nothing too outrageous – score too big, too often, and you draw the wrong kind of attention, Harper reckons, especially in Capone’s city.

  Each slip has an accompanying entry in the black accounts ledger, the amount and date and source printed in block capitals in a neat hand. All of them are listed as profits, $50 here, $1,200 there. Except one. An address. The house number 1818, set against a figure written in red: $600. He hunts through the ledger for the corresponding document. The deed of ownership for the House. It is registered to Bartek Krol. April 5, 1930.

  Harper sits back on his heels, flicking his thumb over the edge of a bundle of tens. Perhaps he is the madman. Either way, he has found something remarkable. It explains why Mr Bartek was too busy to get real groceries. Too bad his winning streak was cut short. Lucky for Harper. He’s a gambling man himself.

  He glances across at the mess in the hallway. He will have to do something about it before it turns to mush. When he returns. It’s an itch, to get outside. To see if he’s right.

  He dresses in the clothes he finds hanging in the wardrobe. A pair of black shoes. Workman’s denim. A button-up shirt. Exactly his size. He glances at the wall of objects again, to make sure. The air around the plastic horse seems to twitch and shiver. One of the girl’s names reads more clearly than the rest. Practically glowing. She’ll be waiting for him. Out there.

  Downstairs, he stands by the front door, flicking out his right hand with nerves, like a boxer warming up to throw a punch. He has the object in mind. He has triple-checked that he has the key in his pocket. He is ready now, he thinks. He thinks he knows how it works. He will be like Mr Bartek. Conservative. Wily. He won’t go too far.

  He lunges for the handle. The door swings open on to a flash of light, sharp as a firecracker in a dark cellar, ripping through the guts of a cat.

  And Harper steps in to sometime else.

  Kirby

  3 JANUARY 1992

  ‘You should get another dog,’ her mother says, sitting on the wall looking out at Lake Michigan and the frosted beach. Her breath condenses in the air in front of her like cartoon speech bubbles. They predicted more snow on the weather report, but the sky isn’t playing.

  ‘Nah,’ Kirby says, lightly. ‘What’d a dog ever do for me anyway?’ She is idly picking up twigs and breaking them into smaller and smaller pieces until they won’t break any more. Nothing is infinitely reducible. You can split an atom but you can’t vaporize it. Stuff sticks around. It clings to you, even when it’s broken. Like Humpty Dumpty. At some point you have to pick up the pieces. Or walk away. Don’t look back. Fuck the king’s horses.

  ‘Oh, honey.’ It’s the sigh in Rachel’s voice that she can’t stand and it provokes her to push it further, always further.

  ‘Hairy, smelly, constantly jumping up to lick your face. Gross!’ Kirby pulls a face. They always end up stuck in the same old loop. Contemptuously familiar, but also comforting in its way.

  She tried running for a while, after it happened. Dumped her studies – even though they offered her a sympathetic leave of absence – sold her car, packed up and went. Didn’t get very far. Although California felt as strange and foreign as Japan. Like something out of a TV show, but with the laugh track out of sync. Or she was; too dark and fucked up for San Diego and not fucked up enough, or in the wrong ways, for LA. She should have been tragically brittle, not broken. You
have to do the cutting yourself, to let out the pain inside. Getting someone else to slice you up is cheating.

  She should have kept moving, gone to Seattle or New York. But she ended up back where she started. Maybe it was all that moving when she was a kid. Maybe family exerts a gravitational pull. Maybe she just needed to return to the scene of the crime.

  There was a fluster of attention around the attack. The hospital staff didn’t know where to put all the flowers she received, some of them from total strangers. Although half of those were condolence bouquets. No one expected her to pull through and the newspapers got it wrong.

  The first five weeks after were full of rush and people desperate to do things for her. But flowers wilt and so do attention spans. She was moved out of intensive care. Then she was discharged. People got on with their lives and she was expected to do the same, never mind that she couldn’t roll over in bed without waking up from the jagged spike of pain. Or she’d be paralyzed with agony, terrified that she’d torn something when the painkillers suddenly wore off as she was reaching for the shampoo.

  The wound got infected. She had to go back in for another three weeks. Her stomach bulged, like she was going to give birth to an alien. ‘Chestburster got lost,’ she joked to the doctor, the newest in a series of specialists. ‘Like in that movie, Alien?’ No one got her jokes.

  Along the way, she misplaced her friends. The old ones didn’t know what to say. Whole relationships fell into the fissures of awkward silence. If the horror show of her injuries didn’t stun them into silence, then she could always talk about the complications from the fecal matter that leaked into her intestinal cavity. It shouldn’t have surprised her, the way conversations veered away. People changed the subject, played down their curiosity, thinking they were doing the right thing, when actually what she needed more than anything was to talk. To spill her guts, as it were.