Page 43 of Sinful Reality

“Kind of like a collection.” She sets the small bone in the human pile and pokes through for another. “I could make more money if I worked for her and just made things up.”

Minka snorts and hits dial on the number Soph sent over. “Do it. I wanna watch.” But of course, she drops her smile and straightens her back as the line connects.

“H-hello?”

“Hi, Mrs…” Panicked, her eyes swing up to me.

“Mackenzie.”

“Mrs. Mackenzie! Yes. Hello. My name is Minka Mayet, and I’m a medical examiner.”

“Did you find Janiesa?” Her voice trembles, fear rolling through the line in waves we can feel all the way over here on the West Coast. “Medical examiner means?—”

“No, ma’am. I was actually the medical examiner on one of the girls from before. Alana Lyons. Perhaps you remember her?”

“Oh gosh, yes.” Her breath shudders. “Yes, I remember her very well. She was such a sweet girl.”

“You remember her case, or…?”

“I met her before she…” She sniffles. “Before her abduction. I met her several times, in fact.”

“Really?” Minka’s eyes widen and follow my hands as I reach for my phone and hurriedly open the notes app so I can write things down. “You didn’t meet all the girls, though, did you, Mrs. Mackenzie?”

“Beatrice,” she croaks. But she shakes her head from side to side. “And no, Doctor Mayet. I didn’t meet them all. Alana, though, lived near us before Arthur and I moved the kids out to where we are now.”

“Mrs. Mackenzie?” I clear my throat to make her aware I’m here. I can’t fucking help it. “So sorry to interrupt. My name is Detective Archer Malone. We’re trying to collect more information for this case, since obviously another girl has gone missing.”

“Of course.” She sniffles while, on this side of the line, Minka does the same. “I already spoke to a different detective this week. He said it’s likely I’d get more calls. I’m happy to help, though I’m not sure what more I could say.”

“We’re mostly looking for your memories of the days and weeks leading up to each disappearance.” Minka wipes her nose and scowls, because each brush of the tissue on her already sensitive skin stings. “We’ve established that we’re searching for a man. Age bracket?—”

“Twenty to fifty back then,” she finishes with a sigh. “So probably forty to seventy now, right? You want me to remember a man who regularly visited that area alone. Someone who made a habit of sitting on the edge of the park, or wandering, or even stopping by my coffee cart and lingering a long time. He was probably always on his own, probably didn’t talk a lot, his eyes were often focused on the kids, and chances are, he paid for everything with cash.” She stops and swallows the crackle in her voice. “Right?”

“Right.” I turn at the counter and bend to rest my elbows on the steel. Because fuck it, I’m tired too. “I know you’ve heard these questions a million times, and I know the not-knowing is probably sending you insane. But if you could think, even if it feels irrelevant…”

“I told the police about anyone I considered a little out of place,Detective. I told them back then. They’ve arrested none of them, so I guess they ruled them out. I’m not sure I could recall the details anymore.”

“What if we asked you to tell us what was happening in the city back then?” Aubree questions. Fuck me, a third voice we didn’t introduce from the get-go.Gilbert’s gonna want to slaughter us.“Doctor Emeri, ma’am. I work at the office of the medical examiner. I’m not a cop, so I’m not really equipped to ask questions.” She sets a bone back on the steel table and wanders closer. “But I know that my mother had this gift for helping us remember. We were taught to associate the outside world with what we’re trying to recall. So if I had a math test coming up, she would take me for a walk around the garden. We’d talk about the different varieties of plants she’d put in that past year, and we’d discuss the fundamentals of whatever math concept I was trying to learn. It felt so silly,” she admits with a snicker, “like there was no way purple daisies could help my memory. But they weren’t dark purple, nor were they light. It was almost like a printer running out of ink. As if rememberingthatpurple would help me absorb fractions. But alas,” she stops to lean against her table, folding her arms and crossing her ankles, “it did. I suppose it was like a meditation of sorts. She took me into the fresh air and yattered on about colors and flowers and pretty things. She cleared my mind of the very subject causing me stress and then filled it again, but only with relevant details. So maybe we could try that now.” Softly smiling, her eyes flicker to mine. “We know you remember the day Alana went missing. You’ve thought about it a million times. You know what you ate for breakfast, what time you started work, what you were wearing, and who you spoke to. But what about the day before that?”

“Uh…” The woman hesitates. “I’m sorry. I don’t?—”

“Don’t worry about what you ate. Tell me about outside. It was January, so Christmas had just passed. The lights and decorations were probably still up. The weather was bitter as hell. The wind kept sneaking under your coat, and you wore a scarf, I bet, because you worked outside a lot. Unfortunately, the sleeves of your coat were chunky and long, so they made your job a little more difficult.”

“Gosh.” She releases a soft laugh. “Yeah. You’re pretty close. I had this knee-length jacket back then that had a hood I pulled on and tightenedwith the cords. I looked like an idiot,” she snickers, “but without it, my ears hurt too much, so after a while, I didn’t even care. I wore it every single day for several consecutive seasons. There was a winter dance thing on that week.” She grunts and moves, like pushing off her sofa and heading somewhere else in her home. The fact she’s in New York means she’s hours ahead of us and closing in on dinnertime. “There was a hall about two blocks up from where I worked. Like a PCYC type place, but it was for dance and performing arts. It was no Juilliard,” she adds on a small exhale. “It catered to the low- and no-income families. There was no budget for performances, and never did the kids have matching costumes. But it was something the neighborhood enjoyed doing, and the kids—girls, mostly—loved to dance. Every parent with a daughter knows it’s not a cheap sport, and those high expectations excluded even middle-income families sometimes. Butthishall provided kids with something to do, and a show to put on that cost nothing except time.”

“What was the place called?” I question, my thumb poised over my phone, ready to write it down. “The name of the building? Or the business? Or even the dance teacher?”

“I don’t know that it had an actual registered business name. It was just ‘the dance hall’. Anyone who lived there knew about it. Classes were free, and teachers volunteered their time for fun. If I recall correctly, the hall used to be a church, maybe? But even then, I couldn’t say for sure…”

“Alright.” Aubree, with her calming tone and meditative voice, draws Beatrice’s focus back to her. “So you said there was a parade on that week? Parades cost money.”

“Not this one.” She opens her fridge, the sucking seal audible through the line. “It was just a few dozen kids freezing their little toes off, dancing along the street, while cars blocked the intersections to keep them safe. It was only for an hour, and it happened most years I was there, so everyone expected it, and no one complained.”

“How was the weather?” Aubree asks. “Was it snowing?”

She snorts. “It wasalwayssnowing. I think it was two days before Alana went missing… maybe three,” she ponders. “A tremendous storm had blown through. Snow covered the roads, and where we lived, there was never enough funding for a full-time plow. This created a kind of mini-ecosystem each year, if you understand what I mean. Only locals, since outsiders couldn’t really drive in. It meant everyone felt kind of safe.” She stops and sighs, the sad sound blowing along the line. “Which inevitably means whoever hurt those girls was a local. I hate to think it, since everyone basically knew everyone. But the logic is right there. It means, chances are, I’ve met him, whoever he is.”

“Good.” Aubree plays with the sleeve of her coat, rolling the hem back and forth. “So your neighborhood was essentially locked down. You’re still working, still serving coffee to the locals. It’s a low-income area, and you had a park right there in the middle, so even with the poor weather, moms still brought their kids out to the swings. Did you move your cart around a lot, or was it in mostly the same spot all the time?”

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