The Lost Night (Page 20)

Alex, then. Everything tightened at the idea of confronting him, of speaking to the dude who’d spoken so poorly of Edie moments before she died. I had no idea he’d had that revulsion pulsing just under the surface. But it was like jumping into a cold lake: I found his number in his email signature and texted before I could think about it. He wrote back right away: “Whoa hi!”

“Can you hop on the phone?” I typed back. I wanted to just call, since I knew he was literally holding his cell. Ten years ago I would’ve just dialed. Fuck this era.

He took longer to write back this time. “I could call in like an hour? Hope everything’s okay???”

“Please do, and thank you!!” I stood up and walked to the bathroom, staring into the sink and watching the water swirl into the drain. I began to feel that urgent drive, faraway at first and then with growing intensity, somewhere deep in my low back and groin: Keep going.

I opened the notes from the interview with Kevin gingerly, as if winding a jack-in-the-box. It occurred to me that he could be my tiebreaker, the third vote on whether or not I’d made it to the show; then I remembered he’d left for his own concert while we were still pregaming on the roof.

The notes began the same as the others, how they’d met in spring 2009 when Edie and Alex started dating, how she’d moved in with them along with Sarah in April. It was hard to picture the conversation—little Kevin shifting between bad postures while two detectives gave him the third degree, arrested for the first time in his cheery life. It sounded like Kevin started to get emotional next, noting that he and Edie had become better friends and that she’d cried to him about fights she’d had with Sarah and me.

Which would have been surprising enough in its own right, since I could barely imagine them exchanging more than pleasantries, but then this sentence boomed out of the document like a cannon:

       Accomp decedent to ER early August, likely 8/4, when she complained heavy cramping; visible blood. Assume miscarriage. Left + not discussed/told friends. CHK.

Jesus. The ER visit he’d mentioned. I pulled up my email index from that era and searched for August 4, apparently a Tuesday: mundane emails to coworkers and one from Sarah mentioning an upcoming party, reminding Kevin he still owed rent and finishing with “BTW, anyone seen Edie in like a week? Is she officially avoiding everyone or just me?” Kevin had responded about the rent the next day, diplomatically ignoring the stuff about Edie, and the thread had petered out.

Back in the cops’ scribbles, I saw that Kevin went on to say that he’d had a show the night of Edie’s death and had taken his bandmate’s van to Greenpoint. They’d been the headliners, taking the stage around 11 p.m., and he’d only heard the news when he turned his phone back on around 1:00. I verified it on fact-checking autopilot: a tweet from the venue from early August 22, 2009, thanking Static Pony for a BRUTAL NIGHT.

I set aside the detectives’ notes and searched for Edie’s medical records. I saw dental records, an annual OB-GYN visit, and then bingo: admission forms from Mt. Sinai Medical Center, dated “8/4/09, 9:06 p.m.” Retrieved on official police business about a week after the interviews took place. I scanned Edie’s frantic handwriting on the intake forms, noting that symptoms had begun around 5:00 p.m. but she’d never had cramps this intense before and she was experiencing bleeding heavier than any period. Poor thing, on a scale of 1 through 10 she rated her pain a 9. I hit page-down; she was seen by 10:48, where, according to her discharge forms, a doctor determined she’d had a completed miscarriage—confirmed with a surgical dilation and curettage, which sounded scary, and then an ultrasound, which sounded expensive—and had been approximately six weeks along. She was given relaxants, monitored overnight, and released in the morning. And off Edie went, back to Calhoun Lofts. No longer pregnant and with no one to confide in but, oddly, Kevin.

Oh, that poor girl—holing up in her sunless room to mourn and heal in solitude. I returned to the autopsy report, poring more carefully over the organ-by-organ rundown at the end of the document. And there it was, ripe for the noticing:

 Thickened uterine tissue suggested early pregnancy; progressing normally before spontaneous abortion.

Six weeks before early August. Mid-June, shortly before she and Alex split. Had Alex known? Had she been planning to keep it? And why the hell had Kevin been the one to accompany her?

I returned to the main index. There was a folder named D_ASUSEEEPC that I’d been avoiding because I found its name so inscrutable, but finally I opened it and gasped, all the blast-from-the-past sensations pinging around my skull. There was a screengrab of an old computer desktop, files and icons everywhere like stickers on a little girl’s notebook. Asus was a kind of computer. I Googled the folder name and there it was, Edie’s clunky old laptop: the Asus Eee PC 100HE. There was just one other file in the folder, a Word document. I clicked on it and felt my breath catch in my throat.

The suicide note. The Word document had been opened at 8:12 p.m. and then auto-saved at 11:44, around the time when the first responders appeared. I cross-referenced time stamps: My Flip cam video ended at 11:11; the 911 call came in at 11:32. Damn—a part of me had hoped I’d absolve myself here, that somehow I’d wandered into the room with a camcorder minutes after Sarah had called the cops. A video I’d coincidentally deleted shortly after, assuming it was a gross drunk record of us embarrassing ourselves. Only to rediscover it almost exactly ten years later. It rushed up through me again like a geyser, a sharp What the fuck?

But an autosave told us nothing. I opened the Word file; it was so old I could only view it, not access it. It blinked back at me, three mini sentences I hadn’t actually seen with my own eyes (as far as I knew), but that we’d heard about and discussed among ourselves:

I love you. I’m sorry. Goodbye.

All at the top left of the page, uncentered, unstyled, ugly. That didn’t seem like Edie, either—she was a visual creature, she liked symmetry and pretty, arty things. She would have centered the note, a few inches on the top and bottom, that middle I’m marking the center like a spire.

How easy it’d be for someone else to fake the note. Three sentences, no detail. Really, it couldn’t have been more than a two-step cover-up, one easily gleaned from decades of TV watching: Press her fingerprints onto the gun and leave it near her; grab her laptop, open a file, and hastily type something out. (Had she used a password? If so, her closest friends would have known it; we were constantly passing around computers, pulling up YouTube videos or photos or music for all to enjoy. Which meant our fingerprints would be on everything as well.)

I checked for tags on the file, any additional information. I rubbed the edges of my fingernails across the flat pads of my thumbs and stared hard. What was I missing?

I got up and poured a glass of water, an old trick a former boss had taught me to do whenever I was stumped. Walk away, come back to it with fresh eyes. I slid the suicide note aside and checked online what metadata a circa 2009 .doc file typically shows. Something slid into place: Date Created. Why had the embedded info on this file shown me Last Opened and Saved At, but not the creation date? I checked again—the Created On listing was blank, two little hyphens where a date should have been. What a bizarre thing to be missing.

There was nothing else in this folder, nothing else from her Asus. I selected another one and felt something rip through me.

Five death-scene photographs—all time-stamped JPEGs. They were still just a string of letters and numbers, their file names, but if I double-clicked I could see Edie the last way that any of us saw her.

My heart banged. I guzzled my glass of water, spilling a little onto my chest. My hand shook as I set the cup back on its coaster.

I filled my lungs up with air and pushed it out. One look, all at once, careful and thorough just to see if there was anything odd in the periphery, anything investigators had missed. I would keep my eyes moving, not on Edie’s, not on her bruise-ringed gaze.

I moved the pointer, ready to click, then sat back again. Could I do it? Face the nightmare that’d haunted Sarah for months? Would this fuck with me, too, weave its way into a dream or vision or made-up memory of the moment after the gun went off, me standing there with the recoil still pulsing through my arm?

I balled both hands into fists, mashed them into my chin, a bad silent-film actress pantomiming indecision. Then my right hand jolted out and double-clicked.

A notification. Password-protected. Pursuant to New York State law, inaccessible without a key.

Annoyance took over, and I played around with different apps and programs and ways of seeing previews, all to no avail. I gave up and Xed out of the folder, awash in relief. Tomorrow I’ll ask Tessa to find a way to access them for me, I thought showily, knowing full well I never would.

I chose a folder labeled SWMODEL399MM, then realized it contained technical specifications about the bullet and gun. I moved on to the next folder and gasped: the 911 call, a recording and a transcript. My mouse hovered over the audio file, but I couldn’t do it; instead, I opened up the text.

       NEW YORK POLICE DEPARTMENT

 Brooklyn, NY

 9-1-1 CALL TRANSCRIPT