Megan Abbott - Bury Me Deep

And the detectives did not wait for her, for when she turned around there they were.

THREE HOURS LATER, three hours of questions and Marion hardly managing a word, just repeating the same stories Joe Lanigan had rat-a-tat-tatted into her head and, with each repetition, the stories getting more jumbled, disjointed, a motion picture with the reels out of order.

Somewhere in her head, she wondered how they identified the bodies. She thought she heard them say something about a Los Angeles police detective matching Louise’s body to missing-person photostats and a nasty voice from somewhere in the dark shanks of her head sneered, You should’ve burned her face. You should’ve burned her face with acid or fire. My God, my God.

She gave them nothing, could not fix her head around anything.

They asked and asked and asked.

But her head was a dust bowl.

Somewhere in her, she was building armies to prepare herself, to fortify herself because she knew it was time. She was nearly ready, nearly ready to tell everything because she felt her guilt and shame more purely than ever and knew what must be done.

But her thoughts were scattered and she worried about Dr. Seeley and her words jumbled in her mouth and she could not hold on to them. She began to doubt the soundness of her own mind.

Joe Lanigan, did you even exist? Did you live to ravish me and then disappear into thin air but to stand behind doors, voice rattling through telephones, creeping under floors, whispering commands, puppet string twisted around your heavy hands as you lift your fingers and everyone dances, dances for you?

They spoke sternly, the edges in their voices sharpening. Even that nice Officer Morley, Detective Morley, grew impatient—he told her she knew more, and he was asking about packing slips and train tickets, and wasn’t it funny that a woman perfectly matching her description had taken that train herself to Los Angeles? Had left the Southern Pacific Station in Los Angeles with those trunks? Could she explain who this woman was if not she?

For a moment, the picture of Sheriff Healy, in full uniform and tin star, twirling Ginny around in the girls’ living room, stuttered into her head.

“Sheriff Healy, is he—”

“Don’t even bother,” said the long-necked one, Tolliver. “Don’t even bother. The sheriff knows all about you. Knows the kinds of things you girls had going on there. It went bad between you three, did it?” He zippered his fingers in the air, a perfect triangle.

Marion looked up at them and said nothing.

You must see that now that I will make sure my name is not brought into this, Joe Lanigan had said to her. I will not let it happen and it won’t happen because of what I am in this town. There are levers and switches and keys and I know which way they all go.

And they kept talking and talking, about witnesses at both train stations, at the soda fountain on Hussel Street, everywhere. She had been seen everywhere. Everyone saw her and identified her and there was no hiding. Even people who could not have seen her said they saw her. Lever, switch, key.

“It was you, Mrs. Seeley, wasn’t it?” said Morley. “It was you on that train and it was you who came to claim those trunks? And if you didn’t know what was in them, why did you tell the station agent that the trunks contained game meat? It was you, Mrs. Seeley, and you knew those trunks held the remains, the butchered remains, of your friends, did you not?”

…and finally

Did you murder those two girls, Mrs. Seeley?

And she stuttered and started and finally gathered herself, gathered herself and summoned Louise’s stalwart hauteur. She thought of Louise and she brought Louise to herself and rose tall in her chair and said, keenly, “Do I look to you, do I look to you gentlemen like the kind of person who could murder two women and do the things you’ve said, that you keep saying, who could cut her girlfriends to pieces and pack them in boxes and perform untold horrors upon their bodies?”

They peered down at her, these two tall men looming and hanging over her.

“And I don’t think I will talk anymore. I don’t think I will. I can’t talk anymore now and I believe I will have a lawyer.”

She was placed in the holding cell.

JOE LANIGAN. Joe Lanigan. Would you really nail me to the cross?

I believe, Joe Lanigan, you would.

She sitting here behind a crossbar and what of Joe Lanigan, sprawling bedwise with his nurse-whore?

Prescription slips, tales of dirty deeds, broken-faced dope peddlers pointing shaking fingers—what did any of that matter? Who would believe her now? Who would believe this dirty thing, wasted and unclean, with drug-addicted husband, this dirty thing a monster in waiting? Who would believe her?

She would mount those gallows steps. She would.

BY THE TIME the detectives reclaimed her, not two hours later, she had toiled herself into some state.

“Where is my lawyer? Where is he?” she asked. She could not keep still. She could not stop her hands wringing. Her head was so full. Her head was so full she could scarce hold it up.

“You’re not under arrest, Mrs. Seeley,” Tolliver said, looming, it seemed, two feet higher than two hours before. “What would you need a lawyer for?”

“You’ll have your lawyer,” Morley said. “But right now, we’ll have some more answers first.”

She looked at Morley, and then at Tolliver. They had some bounce in them, some light in their eyes. They seemed more confident, sprightly. She felt they were circling in, circling in.

“I’d like to know where Mr. Joseph Lanigan is,” she blurted before any sense or thought could stop her. But why should it stop her? Wasn’t this the end of the line? Wasn’t it? Grab any rope, grab and hold on. “Have you brought him in for all these questions?”

“Why would we do that, Mrs. Seeley?” Morley said, looking over at Tolliver and back at her.

“He was friends with the girls, now, wasn’t he? He was friends and spent as many evenings with them as I. He’s there behind everyone you mention. He’s behind them all, lurking. He’s behind Mr. Worth who goes to the papers and says I had a fiery temper and the girls were prone to drinking and wild antics, and all these so-called witnesses and all this. He’s behind them all.”

She felt her face grow stiff. Had she gone too far for nothing? Had she only ensnared herself? She stopped. She put her hand to her mouth and bit it. She bit it like an animal and her skin broke fast and blood swelled across her lips, the salt tingling. She didn’t know what she was doing. She started to laugh and the sound of it was terrifying.

“Mrs. Seeley,” Morley said, face turning white. “Mrs. Seeley…”

They bent down toward her. The way they were looking at her, like they realized suddenly they had captured a tigress, a madwoman, right there before their eyes.

SHE SAT in the holding cell. It might have been many hours, she couldn’t be sure. She knew it was all over. She did.

There was a guard with a harelip and a rolling gait who kept coming in and talking to her. He told her there were reporters all the way from Los Angeles, even New York City, outside. He told her that they were trying to take pictures through the bar windows, had she seen them? He had made them stop, wasn’t she glad? He waved one of the daily papers in front of her and told her that the first four pages were all about her, and wasn’t that something. He said he wasn’t supposed to show her, but did she want a peek? The headlines flashed before her: “SUSPECTED MURDERESS’ DEATH TRUNKS HORRIFIED HOTEL STAFF” and “THE WEIRD ‘SISTERS’: Did Fatal Kiss Spark Blonde’s Jealous Rage?”