We Were Never Here, page 16
On Wednesday, police confirmed to CNN that a body found by police in Arroyito, a remote area in Chile’s mountainous Elqui Valley, was his.
On Thursday, Chilean National Police told CNN that they had completed an autopsy overseen by an American consular official. Police have not released information about the cause of death but confirmed they are treating the investigation as a homicide.
The García family is now working to bring Paolo’s body back to the United States, police said.
“Right now we are grieving and desperate for answers,” said Rodrigo García, Paolo’s father and the owner of Castillo Development, a Los Angeles real estate development firm. “The police must figure out who did this and make him pay.”
Paolo García was born in California but spent most of his life in Barcelona. He had dual citizenship in the United States and Spain.
García was regularly out of touch for weeks at a time during his travels, so it’s unclear how long he was unaccounted-for before his family reported him missing. The man’s personal effects, including his passport and wallet, were not with him, so local teams are investigating where in the area he may have stayed, according to Spain’s Agencia EFE news agency.
On Wednesday, Paolo’s sister Elena García said her brother wanted to live life to the fullest. Paolo had been saving up for the trip for years, and he was “very excited to see new countries and meet new people,” Elena said.
The last time they spoke was on March 23, when Paolo messaged his sister to say how amazing his trip was.
“He wanted to explore the world, to live life without regrets,” Elena said.
I looked up. Kristen was still reading, stone-faced.
Each revelation was like a bass drum, struck. Boom: Paolo was American. Boom: Paolo came from a wealthy family, one with the resources to not stop until they’d gotten justice. Boom: This news might grip the nation, handsome Paolo as the next photogenic Natalee Holloway. Shit.
And Paolo had a family. A sister. Jesus. Now they weren’t shadowy stand-ins in my imagination; they had names, voices, lives. Suddenly all I wanted was to google the sister, learn everything I could about this poor sibling-less Elena, jam my thumb onto the bruise. Why isn’t there a term for someone who’s lost their brother or sister? There are orphans and widows and widowers. This seemed worse.
Finally Kristen stopped reading. She blew a breath out through pursed lips, then tapped her screen.
“What are you doing?” I asked.
“Replying to Nana. Then my phone goes off again. Yours too.”
“Christ.” I held down the right buttons, then tossed my dead phone onto the table like it disgusted me. “It’s a lot, right?”
“It’s not ideal.”
“Not ideal?”
“Nothing about the autopsy. The cause of death or state of decomposition. And now they’ll probably start asking around in all the touristy towns. I still think we’re fine, since he hadn’t even had time to check into a hotel, but—”
“He’s American, Kristen. The freaking American consulate is involved.”
“I know—I can’t believe he didn’t mention that.”
“He had a sister.” I slapped at my phone. The guilt I’d been holding back breached the dam and gushed into my stomach. “He had a family. And they’re grieving, Kristen. Because of us.”
She looked bewildered. “Hitler had a mom too. That didn’t make him less terrible.”
“They found him! It took them less than two weeks! And his family’s loaded! We’re so screwed.”
She looked right at me, holding eye contact even as my gaze flitted around the room. “Emily, it’s fine.”
“How is it fine?” I realized my breath was high in my chest, tight and quick. My throat felt like it was shrinking and I stood, rummaged in my purse, and closed my lips around my inhaler. Began the sweet countdown from ten to one.
“Are you okay? You want some water?”
“I’m not okay.” I sat down roughly. “How are you so calm?”
“Because we were smart. Because we did everything right.” She splatted her palm onto the table. “They found him in a town we were never seen in. We don’t even know exactly where we were. And the body must have deteriorated—they don’t know exactly when it happened. There’s nothing tying us to it.”
I wanted to believe her. But she hadn’t been the one to spearhead this operation. And when I was the one in charge, something always went wrong. “How do you know we did everything right? You were freaking out the whole night!” I counted the loose ends on my fingers: “Someone could have seen our car, or seen us getting the shovels or putting them away—there was that light. Or someone remembers us from the bar. Or maybe we left something of his behind in the suite—it was dark, and we were hustling. We didn’t even have proper cleaning supplies. Or, or what if the rental car had built-in GPS or satellite tracking or something, and they can track where we—”
“Emily.” Her hazel eyes bored into me, so calm and earnest, greenish in the evening light. “Those things aren’t true. We didn’t leave anything in the suite. Nobody was tracking our car. And no one saw us doing anything. But even if they did, you’re forgetting the most important reason I’m not worried.”
My eyes felt like storm clouds—heavy drops threatened to fall. “And what’s that?”
She lifted my phone and held the dark screen out to me at face level. I frowned at it, then shook my head, confused.
“No—look into it,” she said. My focus shifted to the ebony mirror, streaked with oil and with a spidery crack webbing out of the left corner. Then my focus slipped one level deeper, and I saw the image, like a Magic Eye picture: myself, my own face, young and sweet-looking. We used to joke that while Kristen had Resting Bitch Face, I had Resting Happy Face—strangers always stopped me to ask for directions, and men on the street never told me to smile (instead finding other egress for their harassment). I understood: This was not the face of a murderer. I rolled my lips inward and leaned away.
“Now, we’ll turn our phones back on and you’ll check your work emails and that’s the end of that. Okay?”
Her nonchalance unnerved me, and repulsion fluttered in my torso. But the urge to strain away from her felt different this time. Less primal, more cerebral.
I gazed at the antler chandelier, then nodded, because there was nothing more to say. But for once, her confidence wasn’t reassuring. It felt obstinate, unearned.
And it couldn’t drown out the loudest line from that article, the phrase already looping in my brain: desperate for answers.
Kristen, of all people, should know that desperate souls stop at nothing to get what they want.
CHAPTER 22
I woke early and blinked into the filtered light; birdsong wafted through the open windows and I closed my eyes again, savored it, knowing something bad was brewing, too, though I didn’t remember what.
I couldn’t hold it off for long, and my eyes snapped open at the frigid thought: Paolo’s body, policemen like ants poring over the Elqui Valley. The land out there did look like anthills, come to think of it. Fox-colored and sandy. Perhaps to the right-sized giant, the Andes were little mounds teeming with two-legged insects.
Last night I’d briefly considered asking Kristen to take me home, but that wouldn’t accomplish much; Kristen was the only one who could commiserate, and I’d rather be despondent here at the lake than in my darkened apartment. Now I tossed off the covers; there was nothing to do but go on with my day. I’d carry my coffee out to Grandpa’s Pier. Bring some reading material, something to occupy me when thoughts of Paolo inevitably popped and frizzled in my mind.
As the coffee maker burbled, I perused the wooden bookshelf in the living room. An entire section was devoted to religious titles: devotional Bibles and books by millionaire televangelists and a dog-eared copy of The Purpose Driven Life. A bound workbook of daily devotions from King of Kings, the church where Nana and Bill were congregants, with a large crucifix on the cover. I thought back to my conversation with Aaron—how he’d liked the built-in community. My own brushes with organized religion had been minimal; when I went to the occasional youth-group outing at the local megachurch in high school, it was more out of yearning for new friends than interest in a higher power.
I’d liked most of what I’d picked up during those youth services, though—how Jesus hung out with sex workers and lepers, all his Zen-like kōans about turning the other cheek, giving a man the shirt off your back, not pointing out the speck of sawdust in someone’s eye when there’s a log in your own. He seemed like a cool guy, nonjudgmental. Very different from how Kristen described King of Kings Lutheran Church and School. What a name.
I found a Stephen King (ha) book in the back and stepped outside. Small ferns bowed along the shaded footpath, giving the site a Jurassic feel, out of time. I paused to dig a pebble out of my shoe and grabbed a tree trunk for support. It was a pine, its pretty skin cracked and valleyed like a pan of crinkle-top brownies, and so old the lowest boughs were a few feet over my head.
I spotted something on the bole of a tree a few feet deeper into the forest. Squirrels scattered as I picked my way over to it. Around hip height, there was a change in the trunk’s texture:
KC
JR
At least, I thought it was a JR. A heart enclosed the carving and I sank my finger into it. It looked old and weather-beaten; I’d been to this cabin perhaps a half dozen times and I’d never noticed this before. Kristen Czarnecki…and a pair of letters viciously crossed out, hacked at with an ax or saw. A childhood crush? I made a mental note to ask about it and headed for the dock.
Johnboats dotted the lake, olive green and boxy. I reclined on a dew-slick folding chair and listened to the sounds of morning: wind rattling the reeds and lush boughs overhead, the splashy kerplunk of lures hitting the water, the sucking smacks of water lapping at the dock. A critter—a chipmunk, maybe, or a mouse—skittered through the brush behind me, and a fish jumped opposite a fisherman’s line, ruffling the smooth reflection.
What a disconnect. The outside like visual Valium, my insides prickling with dread.
Stop. Stop. Stop.
I heard the slap of the screen door, and then the crunch of Kristen making her way down the path. She appeared, mug in hand.
“Morning!”
“Thanks for making coffee.” She eased into the seat next to mine, careful not to spill her brimming cup. I studied her as she took a sip and gazed out at the water. So unbothered by last night’s revelation, as if this were normal, learning that experts just excavated the body you buried. My stomach contorted. God, for one glorious, glimmering moment yesterday, I had convinced myself that Kristen and I were on the exact same page. Couldn’t we time-travel back to that?
We watched the fishing boats for a while. Someone caught a pearly rainbow trout, and the shouts of the men in the skiff sounded as if they were mere feet away. Funny how lakes do that—warp the dimensions of everything around them.
“What is that?” Kristen stared at the air just above her shoulder, seemingly at nothing. Then I spotted it: a caterpillar, perhaps an inch long, squirming like a worm on a hook. Tufts of white fur sprang from a black body.
“It’s a hickory…something. Pretty rare in the Midwest, I think. Hey!”
Before I could stop her, Kristen lifted a twig and sliced it through the air above the caterpillar, sending it tumbling to the dock.
“Why’d you do that?”
She looked genuinely confused. “It was stuck in a spider’s web.”
I groaned. “Kristen, it was trying to spin a cocoon. That was its own silk.”
She leaned over and searched the deck for it, then shrugged. “It was probably going to turn into an ugly moth anyway.”
I didn’t tell her she was right.
* * *
—
Clouds rolled in, gray-blue and engorged, so we headed into town. Kristen parallel parked with confidence, then rooted around for an umbrella in the back seat. Through the rain-spattered windshield, I took in the businesses along the main street: a café, a pizza joint with beer signs glowing in the windows, an improbable barber-and-computer-repair-shop combo. Kristen led us up the front steps of a refurbished home, and the front door jangled as we stepped inside Second Chance Antiques.
Silvery light filtered in from the bay windows, spotlighting swirls of dust. I took a shallow sip of air; the dankness needled at my asthma, and my chest constricted like a corset yanked tight. Second Chance was a wonderland of junk: a labyrinth of tall shelves piled with old dishware and ’80s Happy Meal toys and fusty board games. I lifted a dusty jade elephant and searched for a price sticker—Priya collected elephants.
“I remember coming here as a kid.” Kristen poked a porcelain poodle, inspected the pink bows at its ears. “My mom always let me pick something out. She knew the owner, Greta, who’s the real antique.”
“I didn’t hear you come in!” A tiny woman materialized between the shelves, her voice high and brittle. She shuffled toward us in white orthotic sneakers, her cloud of dyed black hair bobbing.
“Greta! It’s me, Kristen Czarnecki!” Kristen opened her arms and Greta made two laborious blinks, as if her eye muscles were old and tired too. Then her eyebrows shot up and her mouth crinkled into a grin.
“Kristen! You look more like your mother every day.” Greta buried her in a hug, so I couldn’t see Kristen’s reaction.
Greta spotted me and frowned. “Well, hello,” she clucked suspiciously.
“This is my friend Emily!” Kristen presented me with both hands, like a game show host. “She’s visiting from Milwaukee with me.”
“You know who she looks like? What’s-her-name.” She stared hard at Kristen, as if she could figure it out via osmosis. “That friend of yours. The one who was always up here with you when you were little girls. Jamie.”
“I can’t believe you remember that! Jamie, that’s right. She does kinda look like her.” They both turned to me, appraising. I felt an uncomfortable ripple deep in my abdomen.
Greta screwed up her lips, thinking. “That girl, Jamie, I always thought—”
“How are things at the store?” Kristen’s interruption wasn’t as smooth as she hoped, and my antennae went up. Greta looked confused, then grabbed Kristen’s hand. “Oh, y’know, fine. And you’ve been somewhere far away, right? Australia?”
“Yep, Australia! Greta, you are sharp as a tack.”
“It’s running the shop. Keeps me on my toes.” She tapped the side of her head, then gazed at me. “I’m eighty-four years old. Can you believe that?”
I made a grand show of my surprise. To be honest, I would’ve guessed she was in her mid-eighties, but I admired her immodesty.
“I hope I’m half as badass as you when I’m eighty-four,” Kristen offered.
“Language, Kristen.” Greta creased her crinkly brow. “Well, how long are you girls in the North Woods?”
“Just through the weekend. Oh, but I’m moving back to Milwaukee!” Kristen pressed her hands together. “I found an apartment in the Fifth Ward.”
“I’m not surprised. Wisconsin has a way of pulling folks back. People try to leave, but it never sticks.” A phone began ringing in the back of the store, and it took Greta a moment to notice it. Finally she shuffled off and Kristen and I went back to browsing.
After a few minutes, Kristen announced she was going to the coffee shop next door, and I headed to the register to pay.
“You’re enjoying your time with Kristen?” Greta asked as she wrapped the stone elephant in newspaper.
“Yes! It’s so beautiful up here.”
“You gave me a real start. When I saw you with Kristen? I thought you were her little friend Jamie, all grown-up.” She smoothed a long piece of tape on top.
I smiled, unsure how to reply.
She leaned forward. “But of course, you couldn’t be. That would take a miracle.”
I chuckled uncomfortably, the way you laugh when a man in power makes an off-color joke. “What do you mean?”
She handed me the newsprint bundle, and with a spasm of fear, I thought of the melted clump of Paolo’s belongings. Paper wrapped around our darkest secret. And the people in L.A. who’d give anything to uncover it.
“You know what happened to Jamie, God rest her soul.”
My chest clenched up. No way. No way that, in addition to Sebastian and Paolo and Anne and Jerry Czarnecki, Kristen’s childhood friend was…
I narrowed my eyes. “I’m sorry, what?”
She twisted her mouth into a sad smile. “If Jamie walked into my store, well.” She shrugged. “That would mean I was seeing a ghost.”
* * *
—
“So, who’s my doppelgänger?” I kept my voice light as I set a pot in the sink and turned on the tap. Greta hadn’t had any more details to share, just murmurs along the lines of “That poor, sweet girl.” I couldn’t believe Kristen hadn’t mentioned a dead close friend. God, she must’ve been the unluckiest kid alive, tested like Job while the people closest to her dropped like flies…
“No, use the filtered water. And don’t forget the beer.”
“Beer?” I glanced at her.
“Eight years in Wisconsin and you still don’t know how to cook a brat? Typical.” She dug around in the fridge, then emerged with a brimming Brita and a can of MGD. “For cooking. The good stuff is for drinking.”
“And here I was about to boil them in tap water like a Neanderthal.” I refilled the saucepan carefully. “You didn’t answer my question. The friend I look like?”
