“Look, I’m not involved,” he’d told him. “Anything I do know is the shortest of updates from the super. Mackenzie is apparently a total nonstarter. He had an alibi for the entire evening.”
And yet Topaz had been determined he should be a suspect. There had to be a reason, however flimsy. Unless she had latched on to him as an alternative suspect, to take the heat off her friends.
He let himself out into CID, and glanced around vaguely until he found Hanson, who was standing alongside the big black-and-white printer as it spewed out pages.
“Can you look into something for me, please?” he asked her.
“Sure,” she said, glancing down at the printer display and then back up with a smile.
“There was a schoolteacher of Aurora’s. An Andrew Mackenzie. I want to know if anything was said about him in the original reports, and what lines of inquiry were pursued.”
Hanson nodded. “I’ve got ten more pages to print, and then I’m on it.”
16
Aurora
Friday, July 22, 1983, 11:30 P.M.
It was somehow the loneliest she had ever felt, despite the music and the laughter and the occasional cajoling. They wanted her to dance, to drink, to enjoy herself. She knew why. She was a constant irritation. A nagging sense of non-fun. But the more they pressed, the more she could feel herself retreating inward. The more she became rigid and isolated.
She’d rarely had anyone to talk to at school parties, either. Her closest friend, Becky, was never allowed to go to any of them. Her mother, who looked after her alone and generally seemed to confuse love with feeding up, wanted her home safely as soon as school was done, in spite of Becky’s desperation to join in.
Earlier in the year, it had seemed like her loneliness had been solved. Kind, lovable Zofia had arrived like a ray of sunshine into Aurora’s life. She’d come with Aurora whenever she was going to be dumped somewhere with Topaz, and she’d chattered away to her in her strange English and made her feel like she was liked.
And then Zofia had been snatched away again. All because of one stupid night.
The thought of all that was still too fresh and too painful. She closed her eyes against it briefly, and against finding herself alone again, and feeling like she was separated from these friends of Topaz’s by hundreds of miles.
When she opened them again, it was all still the same. She was still here.
She found herself watching Jojo after that, reassured by the difference between her and the other girls. Jojo chose to dance on her own, and to lose herself in the rhythm without ever worrying how she looked. Once or twice, Aurora found herself envying her. She wondered if she could be like her if she tried: capable, and wild. Aurora thought Jojo was quite beautiful in her wildness.
Perhaps that was the only way to be, when she could never be like her sister and her hip-grinding sexuality.
Even Benners was dancing: head back, bouncing on his heels, one hand tucked into his chest so that he could hold his hip flask. He’d stopped looking like the Benners she knew.
But it was Benners who eventually tired of the movement and came to sit with her. He dropped down next to her heavily and then had to use a hand to steady himself. He laughed, and swigged from the hip flask.
Aurora could smell the alcohol on him. She wondered if she smelled of the lemonade she was making her way through.
“I’ve felt like that before,” he said with a grin.
“Like what?”
“Like I wasn’t part of anything. Like I was totally alone and unnoticed, and the more I thought about it, the more alone I became. Actually, it happens to me quite often.” He nodded at her obvious surprise. “Too much thinking. If you think and think and think, then it becomes like a barrier between you and everything else. You can’t enjoy anything, and all you’re focused on is how wrong it all feels. How much you wish you were somewhere else.”
“I suppose so.” Aurora nodded.
“But I’ll tell you something,” Benners went on, leaning toward her to speak earnestly. Puffing fumes into her face. “And it’s important, Aurora. Because you’re this smart person and you’ve got a lot to give. A lot more than most of these.”
He paused, waiting, and Aurora dutifully asked, “What?”
“You should never wish you were somewhere else,” he said, picking up her hand and squeezing it for emphasis. “Never. No matter what you’re doing, embrace it. Being away in your world and your head is important sometimes, but so is living. You need to let real life into your experiences. You need to feel all this and let yourself get caught up in it. And that’s about making a decision. A decision to enjoy it.”
Aurora shook her head slightly. “It’s just not really my thing.”
“That’s not what you should be saying,” he said, for a moment almost aggressive. “You should never say that. You haven’t tried it. How the fuck do you know if it’s your thing? You need to tell yourself that everything is your thing. And if you want to get joy out of your life, you should launch yourself into everything that happens. Because once you’ve done that, and…committed to it, and embraced it, it will be your thing. There’s nothing out there that isn’t for you. You just need to give the world a chance.”
She studied his fierce expression. She had a strange sensation of being poised on the edge of something. She wondered whether he was right, and she had a choice. Whether she could be more things than she believed. Whether she was losing out on some part of herself.
Benners swigged again from his polished silver hip flask, and then paused. He looked at it, and then held it out toward her.
“It’s your choice,” he said with a level gaze.
And then Aurora took a breath in and held out her disposable plastic cup. She let him fill up her cup with whatever it was he was drinking. It went into the lemonade like oil into water.
Benners smiled at her. A real, warm smile. He held up the hip flask. “To giving everything a chance,” he said, and she drank as he did, almost appreciating the burning tang in her drink after so much sickly sweetness.
17
The phone-records clearance had arrived from the chief super by the time Jonah was back at his desk, and he immediately sent it over to Intelligence for action. Which meant, generally, filing an online form request through each network provider.
It was actually laughably easy to request phone records. Only a very few carrier companies required proper authorization. It was an issue that Jonah had always found disquieting. It should take more than a simple online form to grant access to every call and text message someone had made for some months.