Where Have All the Pretty Things Gone by Sitara S
I absolutely despised my sister but that didn’t mean I was glad to see her hanging from the garage ceiling like a rag doll with a belt around her neck.
The light above her had been left on, humming faintly, bleaching her skin to something waxy and unreal. Libby always loved attention, even in silence. Especially in death.
I remember thinking how stupid it was that the garage door was still half open. The neighbours would see. Mrs. Alder from across the street would whisper. Someone would call it unfortunate. Someone would call it a shame that a detective’s sister had ended like this. For a moment, I didn’t move. I stood with my keys pressed between my fingers, feeling their edges bite into my skin, and tried to make the scene rearrange itself into something ordinary.
But Libby’s head lolled at an angle that couldn’t possibly be staged.
Her note was taped to the inside of the mahogany door leading into the kitchen. She had placed it so meticulously that it was unmistakeable and impossible to miss. Like a museum label beside an exhibit.
‘Emily,
I have now gone to the place where all the pretty things have gone. Hopefully I’ll find more peace in death than I could in life.’- Libby
No apology. No explanation. That girl never believed she owed anyone anything.
It wasn’t long before tragedy permeated every bit of conversation I had. It was the word that circulated through the house in the days that followed, drifting from room to room with the scent of lilies and the warm, heavy smell of overcooked pasta bakes neighbours left on the kitchen counter. Tragic and sudden, they said, though Libby had always had a talent for suddenness. She changed her hair without warning, dyed it different colours between one morning and the next, vanished for days and returned with stories that were never quite believable. If anyone would disappear in the middle of a sentence, it would be her.
The officers were quiet and efficient. I knew both of them from the academy in Michigan, before I had graduated in Detroit the summer Libby met a writer she never really got over. The one with a thin scar along his chin was Tom, and the other was Alex. They asked me the standard stuff of if I’d noticed changes in her mood or if she’d seemed withdrawn. I said no. I said yes. I said I didn’t know. All answers felt equally untrue.
Tom told me they were sorry for my loss. I remember staring at the mark on his face because it felt easier than looking at my sister’s body being lowered unremarkably, respectfully, onto a stretcher.
After the funeral (closed casket, at somebody anonymous’ insistence) people returned to their lives with surprising ease. I suppose they missed her, but nobody loved her enough to put themselves on hold for her memory.
That damn note, though, it stayed with me. ‘I have now gone to the place where all the pretty things have gone.’
Libby had always been infuriatingly obsessed with pretty things. Dresses, boys, sunsets, herself reflected in shop windows. As children, she was always used to say that ugly things didn’t deserve to last. God, if I’d ever met a true psychopath, it was her. A torturous, cruel, broken psychopath who had been my sister and was now dead.
The four weeks after this practically passed in a blur. The bank required documentation, since the ‘accident’ had happened outside of the precinct where I usually worked. Here, for once, I wasn’t a detective, just another citizen filling out forms.
So, I drove to the station on the east side of Burbank to request a copy of the report.
The building hadn’t changed since I scuffed those cream tile floors alternating with a rusty grey pattern and first decided to become an investigator. The woman at the front desk looked up as I approached, her expression polite but distracted.
“I’m here about a report,” I said. “A suicide. Four weeks ago. Libby Emmanuels.”
She nodded.
The clacking of the keyboard filled the space between us. I watched the harsh blue light make her sallow face look even more hollow and noticed how the beadings on her glasses were cracked and needed replacement. Every small detail catalogued itself in my mind.
“I’m sorry,” she said after a moment. “Could you repeat the name?”
“Libby Emmanuels.”
More typing. She frowned, perplexingly.
“I’m not finding anything under that name.”
I gave a short laugh before I could stop myself and touched my hand to my face. I had not realised the flush in my cheeks burning bright beneath my touch. “That’s not possible.”
“Do you have the date of the incident?”
I told her.
She typed again, slower this time. “There’s no record of a suicide on that date connected to that name.”
My mouth went dry. “I believe Officers Tom and Alex were there.”
She hesitated. “Are you sure?”
“It happened three blocks from here. On Bourbon Street.”
The woman studied me more carefully now, as if searching for signs of confusion she could gently correct. Undoubtably, she wanted to. I only wanted her to quickly correct her error before I lost patience.
“Let me search by surname,” she said.
Emmanuels.
Her fingers paused.
Something shifted in her expression. Something closer to uncertainty.
“There is a death recorded under that surname,” she said slowly.
Relief moved through me in a thin wave. “That’s her.”
Her gaze lifted to meet mine.
“It’s not Libby.”
The station was hit by a crash of silence.
“Then who?” I asked.
She turned the monitor slightly toward herself, reading carefully from the screen.
“Emily Emmanuels. Female. Twenty-two. Deceased four weeks ago. Cause of death: suicide.”