in her sunless room to mourn and heal in solitude. I returned to the autopsy report, poring more carefully over the organ-by-organ rundown at the end of the document. And there it was, ripe for the noticing:
Thickened uterine tissue suggested early pregnancy; progressing normally before spontaneous abortion.
Six weeks before early August. Mid-June, shortly before she and Alex split. Had Alex known? Had she been planning to keep it? And why the hell had Kevin been the one to accompany her?
I returned to the main index. There was a folder named D_ASUSEEEPC that I’d been avoiding because I found its name so inscrutable, but finally I opened it and gasped, all the blast-from-the-past sensations pinging around my skull. There was a screengrab of an old computer desktop, files and icons everywhere like stickers on a little girl’s notebook. Asus was a kind of computer. I Googled the folder name and there it was, Edie’s clunky old laptop: the Asus Eee PC 100HE. There was just one other file in the folder, a Word document. I clicked on it and felt my breath catch in my throat.
The suicide note. The Word document had been opened at 8:12 p.m. and then auto-saved at 11:44, around the time when the first responders appeared. I cross-referenced time stamps: My Flip cam video ended at 11:11; the 911 call came in at 11:32. Damn—a part of me had hoped I’d absolve myself here, that somehow I’d wandered into the room with a camcorder minutes after Sarah had called the cops. A video I’d coincidentally deleted shortly after, assuming it was a gross drunk record of us embarrassing ourselves. Only to rediscover it almost exactly ten years later. It rushed up through me again like a geyser, a sharp What the fuck?
But an autosave told us nothing. I opened the Word file; it was so old I could only view it, not access it. It blinked back at me, three mini sentences I hadn’t actually seen with my own eyes (as far as I knew), but that we’d heard about and discussed among ourselves:
I love you. I’m sorry. Goodbye.
All at the top left of the page, uncentered, unstyled, ugly. That didn’t seem like Edie, either—she was a visual creature, she liked symmetry and pretty, arty things. She would have centered the note, a few inches on the top and bottom, that middle I’m marking the center like a spire.
How easy it’d be for someone else to fake the note. Three sentences, no detail. Really, it couldn’t have been more than a two-step cover-up, one easily gleaned from decades of TV watching: Press her fingerprints onto the gun and leave it near her; grab her laptop, open a file, and hastily type something out. (Had she used a password? If so, her closest friends would have known it; we were constantly passing around computers, pulling up YouTube videos or photos or music for all to enjoy. Which meant our fingerprints would be on everything as well.)
I checked for tags on the file, any additional information. I rubbed the edges of my fingernails across the flat pads of my thumbs and stared hard. What was I missing?
I got up and poured a glass of water, an old trick a former boss had taught me to do whenever I was stumped. Walk away, come back to it with fresh eyes. I slid the suicide note aside and checked online what metadata a circa 2009 .doc file typically shows. Something slid into place: Date Created. Why had the embedded info on this file shown me Last Opened and Saved At, but not the creation date? I checked again—the Created On listing was blank, two little hyphens where a date should have been. What a bizarre thing to be missing.
There was nothing else in this folder, nothing else from her Asus. I selected another one and felt something rip through me.
Five death-scene photographs—all time-stamped JPEGs. They were still just a string of letters and numbers, their file names, but if I double-clicked I could see Edie the last way that any of us saw her.
My heart banged. I guzzled my glass of water, spilling a little onto my chest. My hand shook as I set the cup back on its coaster.
I filled my lungs up with air and pushed it out. One look, all at once, careful and thorough just to see if there was anything odd in the periphery, anything investigators had missed. I would keep my eyes moving,