PART I The Village
It’s very difficult to keep the line between the past and the present. Do you know what I mean?
—Edith “Little Edie” Bouvier Beale, Grey Gardens
1 NOW
August
Herron Mills Village Police Department, Long Island, NY
“ANNA? WE’RE RECORDING.”
The camera pans up from a long crack in the linoleum floor to rest on the hunched-over frame of a girl. She’s perched on the edge of a wobbly metal chair, cutoff shorts touching the smallest possible strip of a once-blue fabric seat. Her tank top is a bright shock of red in the colorless room. She tightens her arms around her waist, as if trying to make herself smaller or cover the red with the bloodless wash of her skin. Her head is tilted forward, gaze trained on her shoes, and a thick curtain of tangled black hair falls in front of her face.
“Do you understand, Anna? The camera is on.” A white time stamp in the bottom left of the screen notes that it’s August 5, 9:02 p.m.
“Yes.”
“Okay then.” The voice coming from behind the camera is female, but it’s not kind or nurturing or any of those attributes we assign to women like a requirement or curse. Detective Holloway’s words have a jagged edge, chiseled from stone, then left raw. She faces the lens and states the date and time, that this is an interview with Anna Cicconi, a minor who is not, at present, under arrest. Then she turns to Anna. “Go ahead and repeat what you just told Assistant Detective Massey and me.”
The third person in the room is barely visible in the camera frame. AD Massey is in his late twenties and not used to sitting for so many hours on end. He fidgets in a rolling chair behind a small desk, kitty-corner to Anna, letting his senior partner take the lead. Over the past six hours, he has mostly stayed on the sidelines, making the occasional run to the vending machine for soda and slightly stale corn chips. Observing. Taking down notes.
There are no parents, no lawyers. The girl’s father is unreachable, has been unreachable for years. Someone called the girl’s mother, but not until after Anna placed herself at the scene where the body was found. Gloria Cicconi is on her way here now, but the drive across Long Island will take her over two hours, and she had to arm-twist her neighbor into lending her the car first. They told the girl they’d called right away, but no one actually did. Maybe it was a mistake, a wire crossed. Maybe it was on purpose. Maybe the girl should have refused to speak to the detectives until her mother arrived. Maybe things would have gone differently with Gloria’s leonine presence in the room. But that’s not how it happened.
Anna is used to doing things on her own. She has learned not to depend on adults to either take her to task or dig her out when she fucks up. Which has been often. She has grown accustomed to her mother’s display of hollow disinterest in her failures. Why should she expect this time to be different?
The detective steps out from behind the camera, confident now that it’s doing its job, and takes a seat in the empty chair beside Anna. In the shot, she looks close. Too close for comfort. You can see the girl shift slightly to her right. “Go ahead,” she repeats. “What you just told us.”
“About Zoe?” She lifts her head, hair parting to reveal chapped lips, sharp blue-green eyes sinking into dark circles, her already pale face almost ghostly in the white LED lights, one of the Herron Mills Village PD’s recent station upgrades.
“Why don’t you start at the beginning.” It’s not really a question. Detective Holloway extends her hand toward Anna, then seems to think better of it, and drops it down to the chair’s metal arm. “On New Year’s Eve.”
“Okay.” There’s a catch to Anna’s voice, a scraped-out quality. On the recording, it sounds like she has a cold, but really, it’s because she’s been talking to the police for hours already, before anyone decided to press record. They’ve been through quite a dance, the girl and Detective Holloway. It was midafternoon when Anna got here, shaken but brimming with a resolve that quickly wavered inside the station walls. Now, if there were any windows in this room, she’d know it’s been dark outside for more than an hour.
“We started the night at Kaylee’s. Early, like six thirty. She’s five blocks down from my mom’s place, in Bay Ridge.”
“That’s in Brooklyn?”
“Yeah. Yes. In Brooklyn. We, um … we started a lot of nights at Kaylee’s. Her dad’s gone too, and her mom works nights. We’d drink there for a couple hours, then go out. Meet up with Starr and everyone. There are a few bars around that know us, or we’d get on the train, head down to Coney Island. Go dancing.”
“And that’s where you went on New Year’s Eve? To Coney Island?” Detective Holloway’s face is still smooth for a woman of forty. But mascara clumps in the corners of her eyes and a stale film is beginning to coat her tongue and teeth. They’ve been at it since three, and she’s eager to finish this. Place the girl under arrest.
“Yeah, but not out dancing. I never made it farther than Starr’s place. She’s older, like twenty-two? Starr kind of took Kaylee and me under her wing last year, until she moved down to Orlando.”
“When was that?”
“Soon after New Year’s. Starr got a job at one of the parks.”
“Okay. But that night, it was you, Kaylee, and Starr at her apartment in Coney Island.”
“And a couple other people. Kaylee’s sort-of boyfriend, Ian. And this guy Mike we know from around.”
“Around?”
“Like, around Brooklyn. Not from school.” Anna tugs at a thread on her cutoffs until it snaps free from the denim.
“I see. And what time did you leave Starr’s apartment?”
For a moment, Anna is quiet. She leans forward, elbows pressed into bare knees, hair falling back across her eyes. She looks younger than her seventeen years, made small by the camera’s greedy eye and the imperial presence of adults in uniform.
“It must have been nine or nine thirty.”
“Must have been, or it was?” The detective’s voice is sharp.
Anna’s voice, in turn, is a low mumble, the words snagged in her hair. “I don’t really remember. But if I got a ride out to Herron Mills, and got there by midnight, I must have left around then. Or even earlier if I took the train.”
The detective lets out a low breath. “Fine. Then what do you remember?” She sits back in her seat but keeps her hand on the arm of Anna’s chair.
“We were on the balcony at Windermere. The long one that wraps around the front of the house, on the third floor.”
“Who’s we, Anna?”
“Me and Kaylee. And Zoe.”
“Just the three of you?”
“Just the three of us.”
“And where were the Talbots?”
“In the city, at their friend Doreen’s, I think. Not home.”
Detective Holloway stares at Anna for a moment. The girl holds her gaze. “Fine, continue.”
“We were drinking whiskey. Glenlivet, the good stuff. Better than Kaylee and I could ever buy back home.” Something bitter, so slight you might miss it, slips in, then out of her words. “Caden always kept a bottle stashed in this unused stall in the Windermere stable. I guess that’s where we got it.”