The Little Black Dress Page 4

  She was at least as smart as I was, so we were in all the advanced placement classes together, and then we really lucked out that year because we were allowed to take modern dance instead of team sports, so PE wasn’t the hell it had always been in the past. Dance class made us look even more cool, so we were about as cool as you could get in high school without being a cheerleader.

  Carmen’s biggest problem was her attractiveness. Even with wearing the same damn dress every day, she attracted unwanted attention, attention from the teachers for being so smart and pretty, and attention from boys for being so damn sexy. But the Jocks were by far the worst of them.

  High school boys in LA could pretty well be broken down into four groups: the Jocks, the Surfers, the Nerds, and the Hopeless Geeks.

  The Jocks were all the sporty guys—the guys who were actually good at sports. The Surfers didn’t give a shit about anything but the surf. The Nerds were the smart guys who were totally uncool no matter how cute they might be, because they weren’t Surfers or Jocks, but they pretended not to care. And the Geeks, well, they were the poor pathetic ones even we could ignore.

  My little brother was a total nerd, but he really didn’t care.

  It had become perfectly clear to me, almost from day one, that Carmen, no matter how gorgeous she was, no matter how sexy she looked in that little black dress with her wavy black hair swirling around her lovely shoulders and her thousands of brightly colored bangles jangling around her slender wrists, had a thing about boys. Preferring girls as sexual partners was one thing, but it seemed to me she bore a great antipathy toward the entire male sex that verged on hatred.

  She tried not to let it show, but I could see it, a deep rage that boiled beneath her beautiful surface every time a guy tried to make contact with her. Usually she smiled a totally fake but effervescent smile and put them in their place in such a sly and beguiling way they didn’t even know they had been put down.

  I wanted to ask her what all this rage was about, but now I knew better. It made me wonder about her father. Actually, I wondered a lot about her father. I was afraid to ask Carmen herself, so I tried to ask her mother, but all I ever got out of her was a lot of drunken sighing, accompanied by incoherent comments like “Oh no, dear. He’s dead, and that’s the end of it. It’s so very sad…,” and then she would stagger off to the liquor cabinet for a pick-me-up.

  I finally got my chance at Christmas, when Carmen’s older brother James came home. All this time he had been at a military academy in Virginia, but now I finally got to meet him, and happily, I liked him right away. I could see he was truly fond of Carmen, and she was truly fond of him.

  He was awesomely polite, very Southern gentlemanly, and very soldierly. I was hanging out over there a lot, so I was there on Christmas Eve. Angela was drunk as a skunk as usual, but charmingly so. We were all drinking eggnog, but Carmen refused to have any alcohol in hers. I guess the example of her dipsomaniac mother turned her off to drinking, but I thought it was fun—and it warmed me up and made me feel totally comfortable. They had a fire going in the living room and an unbelievably tall tree her brother James had brought home on the top of his car.

  By midnight, Angela had stumbled off to bed, and I could see Carmen was bored and wanted to go to bed too. She was signaling me to come along with her for a little cuddle before I went home, but I pretended not to notice and just sat in front of the fire with James, sipping my eleventh eggnog until Carmen shook her stunning head and called good night before trouncing off to bed.

  I wasn’t attracted to James or anything. He was just Carmen’s older brother, and I wanted to be alone with him so I could ask him about his father. He didn’t look anything like Carmen, but I guess he looked a bit like Angela. He was blond, which made me realize Angela’s hair was probably really blonde too, and not bleached as I had assumed. He was kind of thick around the middle, not very fit for a soldier, but I guess he was one of those nerdy kinds of soldiers. I think he was studying intelligence or “intel,” they called it.

  I waited until I was absolutely certain Carmen was far away in her back bedroom, and then I began, speaking as quietly and as casually as I could. “You know, no one here ever talks about your father,” I said, choosing my words carefully. “I’m sorry if I’m out of line, but can you tell me anything about him at all? Whatever happened to him? How did he die?”

  James just looked at me for a few moments. I could see he was startled by my question, but he was too polite not to answer. He took another sip from his glass and said simply, “Well, they think he committed suicide.”

  “They think he committed suicide? Don’t they know?”

  “Well. It wasn’t all that clear. He was out on a hunting trip with some friends. They were the ones who found him, but it turned out that he was shot with his own handgun.”

  “Oh, that must have been awful for you,” I said, horrified.

  “Yes. It was pretty awful,” James said, strangely calm. He stared into the fire, then turned to look at me. “It was really awful for my mom.”

  In for penny, in for a pound, I thought. “Is that when she started drinking?”

  James surprised me by laughing ruefully. “Oh no, that had started long before Dad died.”

  “Do you miss him?” I asked.

  James turned back to the fire. He put his glass down on the coffee table and leaned forward to pick up the fireplace poker. He began to poke at the logs until the top one burst into flames with a roar, and the sudden heat warmed my face. Then he sat back, chewing on his lower lip. “No. I wouldn’t say that exactly, but I will tell you he was one hell of a father.” He nodded at the fire and kept biting his lower lip. “One hell of a father,” he repeated. He stood up then and looked down at me. “I left home as soon as I could. I sent myself to military school!” And he gave a grim little laugh.

  “He was that bad?” I asked. Now we were getting to it. I had always wondered why there weren’t any pictures of Carmen’s dad in the house. Now I desperately wanted to know more, but James was turning to go.

  “Yes. He was that bad,” he said finally, turning to look at me again, not even trying to smile. “I was selfish. I should never have left them alone with him.” And then he was at the door, and I was getting up, and I knew I wouldn’t learn anything more that night, but then he turned back to me and whispered, “Please don’t tell Carmen I told you anything about him.” I nodded and he added, “Don’t tell anyone, will you promise?”

  “Of course. Of course,” I said. “I’m so sorry that I brought it up… I just wondered… and no one would tell me anything….”

  James was such a gentleman; he had quickly brought me my coat from behind the front door and held it for me while I slipped it on.

  “Don’t worry,” I assured him as we walked down the hall. “I won’t say anything. I’ll see you all tomorrow with your Christmas presents,” I added, changing the subject.

  James opened the front door and watched to make sure I made it safely across the street to my own darkened house. I turned and waved after I found my key and opened the door. Then I went straight to the medicine cabinet and got out two aspirin. I would have a terrific hangover tomorrow if I wasn’t careful, but it was worth it. I felt that much closer to understanding some of the mystery surrounding my beloved Carmen.

  CHAPTER 6

  THE ABYSS

  IT TOOK them three days to find Carmen’s body after we reported her missing that April afternoon. It had already been the worst three days in my life, but with the discovery of her body, I felt as if the world had simply opened up and dropped me into an abyss so deep I would never be able to crawl out of it.

  Highway workers uncovered her body lying in a drainage ditch behind the Stop & Shop off the Pacific Coast Highway in Malibu. The creeps had tossed her body from the car or van or whatever they’d used on the very night they took her. Maybe I should have been thankful she’d been killed the night they took her and that she hadn’t had to suffer too long. />
  The police had been interviewing me every day since Carmen disappeared, wanting to know everything about her, who she hung out with, who she dated. I was in a fog through most of it, thanks to my mom’s Valium, which she was feeding me for breakfast. I had stopped eating and was living on Red Bull. Fortunately, I was able to mumble the same answers over and over, because the answers to their questions were simple: Carmen spent nearly every waking moment with me.

  They still went ahead and interviewed Carmen’s teachers and classmates. With their usual police-academy tunnel vision, they just assumed she’d run off with a boyfriend. It was only after they found her brutalized corpse that they considered she had actually been abducted.

  Then the interviews started all over again. I must have gone over those ten minutes about five thousand times. I had nothing new to offer them, and they had nothing new to offer me. What I really wanted was to know what had happened to her. However gruesome it was, I needed to know exactly what had happened to Carmen in those ten minutes and what happened to her once she’d been abducted, but the police wouldn’t tell me anything. I was too young to be given access to any details of the autopsy, and I wasn’t allowed at the inquest. All I knew was what I heard on the news like everyone else.

  What they told the public was that there had been three perpetrators, and that’s all they would say. They told Angela privately that they knew this because they had found three different specimens of DNA on Carmen’s body and clothes, but these wouldn’t be much help because none of the guys’ DNA was in the system. They also collected some fibers from clothing and some hairs that could belong to the perpetrators, but nothing to match them to either. One bit of helpful information was that the hairs belonged to Caucasians. They took some hair samples from me to rule me out of the mix they had collected. They also took a sample of my DNA for the same reason.

  Forensics also had fibers from the upholstery inside the vehicle, but these turned out to be a generic upholstery fiber found in most high-end utility and off-road vehicles, like SUVs or sports vehicles, although this seemed to be their biggest clue. It narrowed down the list to maybe one hundred thousand in the Los Angeles area. They didn’t seem to have much else to go on, and it didn’t look like they would ever catch the creeps who killed her.

  Carmen’s brother James had flown home as soon as he heard she was missing, and now he was staying with his mom across the street. I would stumble over there at least once a day, trying to be supportive and to ask if they had heard anything new, but we were all so shell-shocked we weren’t really much comfort for each other, and poor Angela could only go through the motions of her usual Southern hospitality. Once we had determined none of us knew anything more, all we could say to each other was “Why?” And after that, I think we each wanted to be alone to weep. I am not convinced grief likes company. The police kept stopping by, though, to ask more useless questions—and they took some DNA from James too, but he didn’t mind. We were all willing to do anything to help.

  Carmen had been wearing her little black dress when they took her, so after the police had gotten all the evidence they could from it, they gave it back to her mom. Angela cleaned it and then sewed it up in the places that had been ripped and torn. It was practically in shreds when she got it back, but she fixed it up nicely, and when they released Carmen’s body, she brought it to the funeral parlor, and they dressed Carmen up in it for her funeral.

  Angela asked me if I wanted to come with them to pick out the casket, but I told her I couldn’t face it. The existence of Carmen’s coffin was an impossibility I could not reconcile. After all, there shouldn’t be a coffin because Carmen shouldn’t be dead. She should be with me, dancing at the Sugar Shack. She shouldn’t be dead and lying in a coffin.

  I couldn’t come to grips with it. It didn’t seem right or fair that I was never going to see her again. I couldn’t face the fact that there was going to be a funeral. Then James told me it was going to be an open casket, and somehow that made me feel better. I was not sure why, but even though I knew in my heart she was really dead and she wasn’t in her body anymore, I wanted to see her again. I needed to see her again.

  Carmen’s funeral was being held at the Angelus Rosedale Cemetery in Santa Monica, the one near the beach filled with palm trees. Everyone from our class would be there along with loads of press. It was now a famous “unsolved murder of a schoolgirl” case, and it had caught the public’s attention. They had already started issuing warnings on television and radio advising all young women not to leave their houses without a buddy or to even cross the street alone.

  Angela had arranged a private viewing just for close friends and family the morning before the “public funeral.” Her relatives who had flown out from the East Coast would be there, as would James and I, along with my parents.

  I was glad to have James there. He met us at the entrance to the funeral home and offered to walk me over to the open casket. It was the first time I had ever been inside a funeral home, but I had seen every episode of Six Feet Under, so I knew what to expect. All the same, this would be the first time I had ever seen a real dead body, and not just any dead body; it was Carmen.

  As he escorted me up to the dais, all I could do was hold on to his arm for dear life and keep looking straight ahead, staring at the back of one of Carmen’s aunts. She was wearing an expensive-looking hat, and I kept wondering if I should have worn a hat too.

  Then suddenly, there we were, standing beside the coffin. James kept trying to turn me around so I would look at her, but even after all those episodes of Six Feet Under, it took all my nerve to turn and face her. I think I must have closed my eyes, finally, and when I opened them, there she was, laid out for all the world to see, looking so beautiful and special, dressed in her little black dress, wearing her silver necklaces and bangles on her wrists. Her eyes were closed, but her lashes were still as long and as black as ever, her lips as full and perfectly shaped. But her dimples were gone. She would never smile that wicked smile of hers again. Her lovely face was frozen and dead. She didn’t look like she was sleeping. She looked like she was dead.

  Those creeps had just picked her up and used her up and thrown her dead body into a ditch like a sack of garbage. They had taken her life. How could they have done that? She was so young and beautiful, and we had our whole lives ahead of us, and now she would never share mine again. At that moment, I didn’t care if I broke down in front of everyone. I stared at her beautiful dead face and held on to James’s hand so hard my fingernails dug into his palm until he finally squealed, and I had to let him go. I stumbled out of the chapel and found myself under a palm tree, and I leaned against it and sobbed.

  I didn’t notice my mother had followed me out. She was standing by another tree, watching me. No one was allowed outside without a buddy anymore. Then some woman came up to me with a little tape recorder and a microphone and a cameraman behind her.

  “You’re her best friend, Lucy, aren’t you?” she asked me. “I wonder if you could just tell us something about Carmen….”

  I looked up at her through my tears and shouted, “Just find them! Find them!” and my mother stepped in and told them where to go.

  CHAPTER 7

  THE HAUNTING

  THE HAUNTING phenomenon started almost immediately after Carmen’s murder, when Easter vacation ended and classes began again. I missed the beginning of this strange interlude because I didn’t go back to school with everyone else after the Easter break. It had been agreed between the school counsellor and my mother that I should stay home and take as long as I needed to grieve.

  But staying at home turned out not to be such a good idea. I spent my days in a stupor of depression and my nights in a Valium-induced trance, my moods vacillating between a catatonic numbness and an inconsolable sorrow. My staying at home meant that every time I looked out our front windows or walked out our front door, I would be confronted by her house. It would always be there, right across the street, a constant re
minder that she would never be returning to it; I would never see her clattering down her front walk, wearing her groovy high-heeled shoes, and smiling at me with her wicked smile.

  Something that really frustrated me was my terrible need to speak to Carmen. I wanted to talk to her about her murder and how badly it was affecting me. I wanted to tell her about her funeral and about her casket and how I couldn’t face any of the details surrounding her death. These were the sorts of things we could discuss. I needed to talk to her about everything. But mainly, I needed to talk to her about the fact that she was dead. It was a paradox I could not reconcile and could not bear to live with.

  The only respite I had from my despair was sleep, and sleep was hard to come by without my mother’s Valium, so I pretty much continued to live on it. I had given up coffee and Red Bull so I could sleep, but I didn’t know if it was the Valium or the valerian tea I was drinking, but I began to experience wonderful dreams: sweet dreams, not nightmares at all, about Carmen.

  My dreams always began with me walking down the stairs to our rumpus room. Everything would be normal, and I would expect to see Carmen sitting on the couch watching a DVD like always, and sure enough, there she was, just the same as ever, stretched out on the sofa in her little black dress. She would look up and smile as soon as she heard my feet on the stairs, and by the time I reached the bottom step, she would be standing up and walking toward me.

  We would meet in the middle of the room and then, as naturally as can be, we would hug. Just hug. We would hold each other close so that I would feel her cheek against my cheek and the warmth of her body against mine, and an overwhelming feeling of comfort and peace would surround us. I felt so at home in her arms, as if we were one person. And I remember thinking, if only this feeling could last forever. But then I would wake up, and a terrible loneliness would descend upon me, and I would know I was really alone, and Carmen was gone forever, and I would never hold her like that again.