A Quiet Death

TEN

I was beginning the collar, picking up stitches around the neck opening on a pair of circular needles, when Emily called, in tears.

‘Mom? Can I bring the kids over tomorrow? I have to attend a memorial service in DC, and Dante’s got an All-Day Autumn Bliss special going on at Paradiso.’

The following day was Saturday, and I had nothing on my plate, not even one of Dante’s Serene Calm half-day spa packages, so I said, ‘Of course I can. Who died, Emily?’

The question set my daughter off on a crying jag. ‘It’s… it’s… muh… muh…’

‘Honey, I can’t understand a word you’re saying. Do you want to call me back?’

‘No, no,’ she snuffled. ‘It’s for Meredith Logan.’

‘Meredith Logan? Isn’t she that intern who went missing from Lynx News headquarters? She’s dead? My God, how terrible.’

‘I can’t believe you didn’t know that, Mom,’ Emily sniffed. ‘It’s been all over the news.’

‘I’m sorry, sweetheart, but the television has been off more than on in the Ives household lately. I still find footage of the Metro crash a little hard to deal with.’

‘Sorry, Mom. I didn’t mean to be insensitive. But this is mega upsetting! I’ve known Meredith since Parade Night at Bryn Mawr. You met her, remember? Meredith was our garden party girl at graduation.’

‘Oh my God! That Meredith? I thought Meredith’s last name was Thompson.’

‘Logan is her married name, Mom. That’s why I didn’t know about it sooner. I saw the news reports, sure, but Meredith changed her hair color, you know, and cut it off short and kind of punk, so it wasn’t until I got an email from one of our classmates that I found out that it was our Meredith whose body they’d found. I feel like such a shit.’

‘Just go, sweetie. Don’t worry about a thing. Your father and I will watch the kids. Take them downtown for ice cream or something.’

‘Thanks, Mom,’ Emily sniffed. ‘Oh, damn! Do you think you can handle it with your wonky arm?’ she added, almost as an afterthought.

Classic Emily. I could have been trussed up in a full body cast, hanging from the ceiling by weights and pulleys, and she’d still have asked me if I wouldn’t mind watching the kids.

After I’d made pickup arrangements with Emily, I looked up the Meredith Logan case on the Internet. When I saw the girl’s picture, I remembered her well, even though it had been nearly a decade since Emily’s graduation.

Several weeks before, the article said, Meredith’s body had been found stuffed behind a fountain in Lower Senate Park by Capitol Hill K-9 dogs on routine patrol. The autopsy showed that she’d been strangled, but there was no indication that she had been sexually assaulted.

I clicked through from the newspaper article to a Lynx News video clip reporting on the case. According to the reporter, Meredith had told colleagues she was going out to meet somebody for lunch, but she never came back. Lynx News security cameras recorded her leaving the building at 12:45 and turning north on Louisiana Avenue. There were several restaurants in the immediate area where she’d been a regular – Art and Soul, Johnny’s Half Shell, Taqueria Nacional – but nobody at the restaurants remembered seeing her that day. She could have gone further afield, of course, or disappeared into the great maw of the food court at nearby Union Station, but police could turn up no evidence that she had done either.

Conservative Lynx news commentator John Chandler, every silver hair neatly arranged, accused the police of botching the investigation due to jurisdictional squabbles. Interviewed on the set of his show, And Your Point Is?, Chandler hastened to clarify that Meredith was not an intern, as had been reported in the media, but a production assistant. Meredith worked in the And Your Point Is? production office, answering phones, taking deliveries, preparing scripts, picking up lunches, and performing other tasks related to the show. Recently, she had been filling in on the physical set of the production, too. She was a ‘company woman’ with a promising future, Chandler reported, a real trooper, regularly the first to arrive and the last to leave. She would be greatly missed.

Lynx News didn’t exactly have a reputation for giving cops a fair shake, so I clicked over to Channel 4 News where an archived ‘Watch This’ video featured a police spokeswoman responding to Chandler’s stinging on-air criticism. ‘Policing in DC is complicated,’ the woman explained. ‘There are at least twenty-one police jurisdictions in the district. Some overlap and cooperate, while others are exclusive. Meredith Logan’s body was found on Capitol grounds by Capitol Police. The Capitol Police have exclusive jurisdiction within the United States Capitol grounds, and concurrent jurisdiction with other law enforcement agencies including the United States Park Police and the DC Metropolitan Police Force in an area of approximately two hundred blocks around the Capitol complex.’ According to the spokeswoman, all three agencies were co-operating to help bring Meredith Logan’s killer to justice.

Super.

It had taken over ten years of similar ‘cooperation’ before Chandra Levy’s killer was finally brought to trial.

When it came to the Meredith Logan investigation, I was sitting on John Chandler’s side of the fence for once.

The next day, my heart ached as Emily stood on our porch with red-rimmed eyes, her skin so white that her pale yellow hair shone bright by comparison. Pain washed over her face, like when she was a toddler and her Raggedy Ann doll went missing, and the pain was just as real then as it was now.

Emily reached into her tote and pulled out a miniature statue. I recognized it at once – the goddess Athena. A seven-and-a-half-foot tall statue of Athena had graced the Bryn Mawr campus for over a century, and students frequently made offerings to her, asking for her help with papers or exams, or in dealing with the usual vicissitudes of academia. ‘This was Meredith’s,’ Emily explained. ‘She gave it to me, and I’m going to give it to Meredith’s mother. Do you think that will be OK?’

I gave my daughter a hug, kissed her cheek and sent her on her sorrowful errand. ‘I think Meredith’s mother would appreciate it very much.’