the volunteer coordinator at the animal shelter where Zoe used to walk dogs and clean cages during high school—that with every passing week, the likelihood that Zoe will return alive and unharmed has diminished.
I do the mental math. It’s June 28. That means it’s been almost eighteen weeks since Martina recorded this episode and twenty-six weeks total since Zoe disappeared. It will be six months on Tuesday. There’s still one episode of Missing Zoe remaining, but I know she hasn’t been found. After Episode Four, Martina’s trail went cold.
I listen to Zoe’s teacher talk about her academic promise. How she excelled in math and science, how she was a student leader, involved in multiple clubs and activities. How it came as no surprise when Zoe landed the internship in California the summer after her first year at Brown, when those spots were typically reserved for juniors. I listen to her friends talk about her bright and easygoing personality, how she loved animals and baking, how she planned something thoughtful for all her friends’ birthdays, without fail, every single year. She didn’t drink, brought huge pitchers of her own juice blends to parties, which somehow everyone thought was endearing, not dorky. She loved Caden. She loved her family. She had the most volunteer hours in her graduating class.
It’s a nice character study of Zoe. It’s clear that everyone liked her. All the episode seems to prove is how unlikely it is that Zoe Spanos had any enemies in Herron Mills. Martina ends the episode on a hopeful note that she’ll still get to talk to Caden, to Aster, to George and Joan Spanos. That she’ll uncover information the police discarded or didn’t think was important about the fall leading up to that night, the night itself. But I saw the way Martina looked at Aster on Main Street earlier this week. It was a look of failure. A look I know really well.
By the end of the episode, the water has turned lukewarm and my fingers have puckered into prunes, but I don’t want to get out. “I’m sorry,” I whisper out loud, although I’m not quite sure why. I’m sorry we look alike? I’m sorry you’re gone, and I’m here, in Herron Mills, where you should be? I’m sorry I stepped unwittingly into your life? I don’t know, I don’t know, I don’t know.
“I’m sorry,” I say again. The urge to apologize is strong, the need clawing at my throat like angry talons. “I’m so sorry, Zoe.”
I stumble out of the tub and dry myself off. Wrapped in my robe with my hair twisted in a towel on top of my head, I sit in the center of the bed and open Google. I type Zoe Spanos into the search bar and click through the first few results. Most links take me to news articles from January about Zoe’s disappearance, then a few more recent posts with paltry, unsatisfying updates. There are a couple older hits from the Jefferson website and the school paper’s online archive. Most compelling of all, there’s an open-access web forum set up by Zoe’s college friends where people from all facets of her life—Brown, Jefferson, Herron Mills, and beyond—have posted everything from theories to photos to open messages for Zoe.
I read everything. Then I read through her LinkedIn profile, her intern bio from last summer on the research center’s website, even a long article about Brown’s fund-raising campaign for a new campus lab that quotes Zoe only once, but I somehow read through to the end. By the time my phone warns me it’s reached 15 percent battery life, it’s almost midnight. Eyes stinging and skin crawling with the persistent sensation that there’s something ever so slightly familiar about everything I just found, I reach for my charger, then force myself to turn off the light.
10 NOW
September
Herron Mills, NY
MARTINA SITS ON the family room couch with Mami, suffering through the commercial break before the eight o’clock news. Pampers. Coleridge Audi. A new drug treatment for fibromyalgia. She wishes her dad were here to cut the tension in the room with his warm smile and quick laugh, but he’s at the shop, closing up for the night. Martina has two siblings, both brothers, both older, both no longer living at home, so it’s just Martina and Mami tonight. Mami thinks her daughter’s interest in the Zoe Spanos case is unhealthy. Morbid. But even Mami can’t tear her eyes away from the screen tonight because the autopsy