distraction of Oscar and Jemima, who kept sneaking into the dining room to ask her questions like what was her favorite month and did she know if snails had bones. At five o’clock, she packed up her things and trekked home, where she joined Frank and Louise for dinner and their nightly two episodes of Madam Secretary.
For so many years in New York, she had lamented her rigid work routine and taken its security for granted. Freelancing, flexible hours, mobile workspaces—these had been the perks she and her friends sought to obtain. As members of New York’s liberal-arts-educated, semi-creative class, they considered predictability boring, even pathetic. So it was with some shame that Kate now found herself taking pleasure in her rigid schedule. All that flexibility and looseness was for people who could hold themselves together. People who could be trusted to take care of themselves. Maybe predictability was what she needed now. Maybe the routine could work like an elastic band. Wrapping around her, holding her in.
* * *
She wasn’t sure what to do with Frank and Louise’s information about Miranda’s death—if you could call it information. After Monday’s dinner conversation, Kate had discreetly buried the travel hair spray in the bathroom trash, then retreated to the guest room and spent several hours researching Miranda’s death online. After watching a bootlegged copy of a 60 Minutes documentary on the subject, Kate had fallen deep into the rabbit hole of a forum called Murder Solvers. The reigning theory among the so-called Solvers was that Miranda had fallen victim to a serial killer who had been preying on teenage girls in Sonoma in 1992 and 1993. There was also speculation that Miranda’s art dealer had killed her in order to limit supply and raise her value. Jake was a popular suspect (“IT’S ALWAYS THE SPOUSE!!”). Possible motives included: a mistress, a murder-suicide pact, exhaustion from Miranda’s sadomasochistic sex games. Theo’s name cropped up, too: some Solvers believed he had been playing with the gun and it had gone off accidentally; others thought he was a child psychopath. In one of the more convoluted hypotheses, several well-known New York artists had hired an assassin as part of a complex revenge plot dating back to a declined party invitation in the early 1980s.
The site trafficked in paranoia. Still, compared with some of the other threads on Murder Solvers, Miranda’s was pretty bare. There was a lot of chatter about the documentary, and then about specific photographs, trying to decipher possible clues in the background. But without any new leads over the years, the debate dried up. Some people thought the topic should be closed altogether.
This forum is called MURDER Solvers, one person wrote. Why r we discussing a suicide? I watched the whole 60 Minutes & this thing is a crock of shit. Everyone knows the lady was depressed. Just google MIRANDA BRAND PSYCH WARD. Pls lets focus on REAL mysteries. Ones we can actually SOLVE w/ known facts.
He was right that the Solvers’ theories lacked evidence. There was no sign of the inconsistencies that Frank and Louise had mentioned. Nothing from the police report was publicly available. There was nothing to prove or disprove any of the assertions, including the theories about Theo.
Don’t be ridiculous, Kate told herself, clicking out of the window. Your boss did not kill his mother.
But. She knew the kinds of things that men could hide.
* * *
Miranda and Jake had kept so many papers. It made no sense. Multiple folders with the same useless labels, like 1991 MISCELLANEOUS or SOME MEDICAL. Coupons and bills layered together. Letters always packed inside their ripped envelopes. Jake had written Miranda hundreds of notes, always starting M— and ending Love, Your Jake, as if reminding Miranda she owned him. Miranda had never thrown them away.
Then there were the receipts. Infinite receipts. Postage, groceries, gas: nothing unusual, except the quantity of the documentation. Miranda and Jake had even taken home receipts that didn’t belong to them: there were two restaurant receipts signed G—(squiggle) BO—(squiggle), and a $380 purchase from a bookstore in San Francisco made by someone with the unlikely name Ranger Wittensdorf. Stuffed in a shoebox were about fifty receipts from a San Francisco parking lot chain with an annoying habit of putting their dates in the corners, which then wrinkled and tore. All the little shards that fell off everyone’s life. Kate’s job was to stick the Brands’ shards back together again.