Before You Knew My Name, Jacqueline Bublitz [best book club books for discussion txt] 📗

a person slips out of your life so easily. Sometimes forgetting is simply waiting too long.

Time ticked on until one day, as she scrolled through an online fashion magazine, Tammy came across a story about a recent spate of unsolved murders across the country—Is There a Serial Killer on the Loose?—and there was my face. Or a face enough like mine, so that if she closed her eyes and laid the sketch from the article on top of her memories, she could recognise the eyes, and the nose, and my mouth (though she thought at the time: Alice would never look so prissy). Still, she tried to argue the worry away. This was some random girl in New York, and Alice was back in town with Mr Jackson, still fawning over him, no doubt. The niggle was enough, however, for Tammy to call my cell phone. A month ago, she’d missed a call from me; there had been no further contact since then. When she tried my number after seeing that sketch, it went straight to voicemail.

Hi, you’ve reached Alice Lee. But you probably already know that. Leave a message and I’ll get back to you as soon as I can!

She thought, then and there, about going to the cops. But what would she say? Oh, hey. That picture of a dead girl looks a lot like my best friend. Where does she live? Um … I guess I don’t know these days. Maybe New York City? She was always talking about moving there. Besides, what if the cops came over? There were a lot of things her dad, not to mention her boyfriend and his brothers, would want to keep hidden from someone in uniform. It was easier to believe that some friendships simply run their course.

But last week, as the temperature got higher, and the grey sky pushed down on the lake, Tammy drove back to town. Told Rye she wanted to collect some cash from her mother. Pulling into the gas station on the edge of town, she saw Mr Jackson standing at one of the pumps, looking at his phone. She rolled down her window.

‘Hey, Mr Jac–Jamie. How’s Alice doing?’

Later, in the telling of it, she’ll swear he jumped at the sound of my name. ‘You should have seen the guilty look on his face,’ she’ll say. ‘The way he said I don’t know what you’re talking about! and got out of there as fast as he could.’ But the truth is, it was fear she saw and recognised. She was the one to drive home as fast as she could.

Walking into her old bedroom, she went straight to her collection of silly portraits we’d taken together over the years. And looking at those laughing, oblivious faces, she knew. That Alice Lee would always get back to her. She would never disappear for good.

Not if she had any choice in the matter.

‘Mom!’ Tammy went and lay down in bed with her mother and brought up the story about my murder on her phone. ‘Mom, I think something bad happened to Alice.’

Tammy told her mother everything she knew.

The truth, at that moment, began to unfurl.

I am on my way to being found.

So is he.

EIGHTEEN

THIS IS WHAT I WAS WEARING THE MORNING I WAS MURDERED. Grey sweatpants, fluffy on the inside, with frayed ends and an elastic waist, so I could wear them comfortably low on my hips. Powder blue Victoria’s Secret briefs, cotton, with a little heart and pink VS on the front. The kind of underwear you buy in a set of five for twenty dollars. Everyday underwear. A black bra under a purple T-shirt. A purple parka, light and downy like a quilt. Purple jacket, purple T-shirt. Blue cotton briefs, a plain black bra, and an old pair of sweats. And near-new sneakers, dirt-caked from climbing down onto the rocks, and the struggle. They found me in the bra and the T-shirt. Catalogued me in the bra and the T-shirt. Made an assessment of my social class, my occupation and my intentions that morning, based on my hair and my orange nails, and these few items of clothing he left behind.

The missing clothes are in a backpack, stored in a private locker. In the basement gym of a building downtown. People, hundreds of them, walk past this locker every day. Some have even read about me, followed the Riverside Jane case. One or two went to the vigil that night. Wondering who could do such a thing to a young girl. Looking askance at men on the subway whenever they travelled uptown, walking past that downtown locker twice, five, ten times, a day. Sweats, blue underwear, a pair of sneakers, and a jacket, the blood stains I left behind more like rust these days. And a camera, a vintage Leica. Film and Summar lens missing. An object stolen twice in just a few weeks, now wrapped in plastic inside a basement locker, code: 0415.

Every riddle has an answer. No matter how long it takes to solve, the answer was created at the exact same time as the question. This is what Detective O’Byrne thinks, as he sounds out my real name for the very first time, starts putting the small facts of my life together, with the help of Tammy’s stories, and the results of Gloria D’s DNA test (‘I thought she was with Tammy,’ my former guardian cries, over and over. As if this explains her carelessness).

‘Alice Lee,’ O’Byrne says, thinking about all the people who let me down. ‘Who did this to you, kid?’

I thought my name would be enough. That my identity was the riddle they were all trying to solve. But for O’Byrne, it is just the beginning. My name was only ever a clue. For him, the real puzzle is what happened down there by the river.

At least it’s me the Detective directs his next question to. As if I have a say in the matter:

‘How