even though she knew it was partly a lie. And for a second she remembered the secret that, brutally, she now held alone, the event that existed in the memory of no one but her.
She felt a wave of tiredness, one of those that seemed to taunt her. She knew that if she did not surrender to it immediately, closing her eyes this instant, the moment would pass. Perhaps this was how surfers felt on the ocean, confronted by the rare perfect wave that seems to say, ‘Ride me now or lose me forever’.
‘Yes, well. It’s done.’
‘And she understood it was Abigail. Did you need to explain that?’
‘I think she understood. I said it was peaceful, that it was an accident.’
‘Maybe we should have said she’d gone travelling or something.’
‘Don’t be ridiculous, Madison. It’s everywhere already. When I went to see Mom, they were showing a picture on the local news. That’s why we had to tell her. Better coming from us, or rather better coming from me, than the TV.’
‘What picture?’
‘From the high school yearbook.’
‘Jeez.’ There was a silence down the line. ‘Quincy, you still there?’ Another pause and then her sister’s voice.
‘I think it’s because of you.’
‘What, the picture? I would never—’
‘I don’t mean you gave it to them. I mean this interest in Abigail. It’s because of you.’
‘I’m not sure that makes—’
‘Of course it is. It’s all over Weibo, tributes from journalists and news people. And on the Times website: “Abigail Webb, sister of the award-winning LA Times reporter.”’
‘Is that what it says? I had no hand in that, Quincy, I promise.’
‘Well, the damage is done. You can’t change your precious career, can you? That’s why I’m going to the school now, to pick up the kids. I’ve got to get to them before Facebook does. Though I’m probably too late.’
But those were the only two calls she took. The rest, Maddy let pass. Once or twice, she checked her texts: messages of sympathy and shock from friends, colleagues, from Howard on the newsdesk, scolding her for filing in such circumstances (adding that they planned to run the piece tonight and she should call if she had any suggestions for accompanying graphics), even from Jane Goldstein herself. And a couple from Jeff Howe, unreturned because they were apparently offering no news. ‘Just wanted to check in, see how you’re doing. If there’s anything …’
She thought about resting but was too agitated even to attempt it. She was aching all over, the bright, pulsating centre of the pain as always radiating out from, and homing in on, her lower back. All she could see was Abigail on that slab.
The pacing back and forth in front of the window was providing nothing except the illusion of respite. Maddy returned to the computer, to look again at the tabs she’d left open. One was on the pharmacology of a heroin overdose:
Heroin is an opiate, similar to morphine but more potent, quicker-acting and more addictive. It acts as both an analgesic (pain suppressor), and an anxiolytic (anxiety suppressor), as well as producing a feeling of euphoria.
There was information on the signs that any doctor would look for if presented with a person suspected of an overdose: weak or no pulse, delirium, drowsiness or disorientation, low blood pressure, shallow, slow or laboured breathing, dry mouth, extremely constricted ‘pinpoint’ pupils, discoloured tongue, lips and fingernails turned blue, muscle and stomach spasms and constipation.
Jessica had seen the strange colour of Abigail’s tongue and had reported the blue of her lips – though, poor thing, she had assumed those were things that happened to every dead body. Abigail had been her first corpse.
It struck Madison that Abigail would have been just as clueless. Thank God, she had seen no such horrors in her short, bright life. That stuff had been left to Maddy, who had seen enough nastiness for both of them. She had done her best to spare her younger sister.
But she had not done enough.
The subject will typically pass out very rapidly in what may feel like a euphoric, rapturous rush. The breathing will slow, they will become cold and sweaty, the hair can become matted with sweat, excess saliva may exit the mouth, so that the subject can appear to be drooling, although the mouth will also be dry. Eventually, the breathing stops entirely and later the heart will follow.
None of that was any comfort now, but Maddy filed it away for later use: the meagre solace that her sister did not die in pain.
There was a bit more – about how heroin could elude an initial examination by a coroner because the key chemical agent disperses within the body after death – but none of it helped. She headed to the search window on the machine and typed the words ‘heroin’, ‘death’ and ‘Los Angeles’.
A raft of news stories appeared. New figures released by the Health and Human Services Department, the opening of a rehab clinic in Burbank, academic research on methadone by UCLA. She refined the search adding the initials, ‘LAPD’.
That turned up some brief stories from the Metro section of the LA Weekly:
A batch of heroin linked to a number of fatalities is believed to have claimed the life of a known drug user in South Central LA. The 33-year-old man died suddenly at a property on Normandie Avenue shortly after 5pm Wednesday. Police are not treating the death as suspicious and have referred it to the coroner for an inquest. ‘The deceased was a known drug user and his death follows a number of other deaths of drug users in the region in recent weeks,’ said a police spokesperson.
There was the story of a mother in Vermont Square who had narrowly escaped eviction after a court found that she had knowingly allowed her twenty-seven-year-old son to store heroin and crack cocaine in his bedroom. Another about an addict jailed for dealing drugs to a cop. And one more about a successful, undercover police operation that had ‘smashed’ a drugs ring operating out of Boyle Heights.
The problem was in that first story: known drug user. That there was a whole netherworld of dealers, addicts and corrupt cops, themselves addicts; of skeletal teenage girls selling their bodies to pay for the next fix; of men who would roam the city looking for coin boxes, on payphones or parking meters, to smash, hoping to disgorge enough quarters to pay for another bag of powder – that this Hades existed in the streets and alleys of this city, she already knew. It had been part of her beat. After child abuse stories, it was the area of crime reporting she hated most.
But that was not Abigail’s world. No one could have been further from it. Quincy’s words from early this morning – You don’t always know everything – resurfaced once more, as they had all day. Whatever Quincy had meant by that, it surely didn’t extend to Abigail sinking to the level of those lowlifes.
Madison stared at the screen, suddenly aware that she didn’t even know what she was looking for. She sprang back up and paced again, her teeth crunching down on the top of the plastic pen she had been chewing for the last half-hour.
Drug addicts who’d died of drug overdoses were not going to help. She needed to find people like Abigail, those who were avowedly non-junkies who had nevertheless died that way.
But how? As she walked around the room, she thought of the story she would write reporting what had just happened to her sister. What would the headline say?
She rushed back to her seat and typed the words in the search window:
Mystery heroin death
A string of items appeared, one linking to a novel, another to a TV movie, a third to a story in London three years earlier. She added another word to her search. California.
Now the page filled