• Cate had grabbed the wrong deodorant while she was at the grocery store, and the new sickly-sweet smell was clinging to her blazer and mixing with the scent of her shampoo.
    She turned on her recorder and tried to pretend she was a woman of the 50s, curled hair and long, red-nailed fingertips idly twirling a fountain pen over a yellow legal pad. (Read: she’d never written on a typewriter, and she might be jaded for it.)
    It started with a dead girl in a ditch.
    You’ve heard this one before.

    ----

    Walsh had a girlfriend in the same way that guys in Cate’s freshman year had girlfriends; oh I really do love her, he might say, we make it work.
    Walsh rubbed his eyes, one cubicle over from her, clenched his cell phone between his shoulder and ear, said, “Thanks, Alex, thanks. Really. Some time soon, when we’re not swamped any more. All right, man. See you.”
    Cate had known an Alex in college, with floppy brown hair and square glasses. She’d slept with him, once. “You going home tonight?” she asked.
    Walsh laughed, hollow. “Are you?”
    DURHAM, NC – she typed. Then she deleted it.

    ----

    It didn’t really help that the girl’s name was Emily. Like there weren’t enough Emilys.
    “She was going places,” said her neighbors, elderly man, elderly woman.
    Cate tried not to think about her own mother drinking boxed wine and calling her every week.
    “ ‘Going places’?” said Andy. He glared at her. “What the ********? You’re a woman, Cate, I thought you’d be better at getting the real s**t out there. Picking up the emotion. No one needs to know she was going places; she would’ve have been gone to the places already.”

    ----

    The rumors went: Emily? Emily with the brown hair and thin shoulders? She’s the one in the ditch. Heard she was whacked by the mob. Heard she was doing this professor and his wife found out. Heard it was a senator (not the DC senator, just a state senator).
    Like there was a mob in North Carolina. Like vengeful housewives happened this much. Like anyone would have cared if she wasn’t in a ditch. Like her name was Emily at all.
    Emily with the brown hair and thin shoulders, eyes wide like something was going on behind you, she lived the ordinary life. She ate Ramen noodles under wavering lights in humid apartments.
    Try to read something political into this; if Cate was a better person, she could write about taxes and public education and the corporate world fighting against the minimum wage.
    No one ever talked about conspiracies in these crimes anymore. Cate pulled her jacket close. Rain soaked the front of her slacks. She walked away from Emily’s apartment complex, disappointed that it was so average. This was just inspiration for another Cold Case episode.

    ----

    A while ago, it had happened like this: Walsh swallowed his drink, stiff scotch on the rocks, while Cate stuck with her cosmopolitan, the only drink she’d known how to order when she’d first gone out to a bar with her mom. She had been fifteen and the bartender had laughed.
    A couple guys at the bar, a couple girls. She tried to remember how it used to be, dimly lit patios and wall-thumping stereos, throwing up on the lawn, coke in the bathrooms.
    “I get this feeling we’re doing it all wrong,” she said to Walsh.
    Walsh scratched at his stubble. He would be thinking about Tina, the girlfriend, who was a year older. Tina studied philosophy in grad school. “Well, have we been doing it right before?” he asked. Then he laughed. “Don’t take the piss out of it, Cate. I’ve been spending the week pretending I’m in DC, talking about Larry Craig and House majority or some rehashed s**t. People in this city aren’t as dumb as Andy thinks. Jesus.”
    His shirt was mostly unbuttoned, his sleeves flapping as he moved his hands. Cate tapped his arm. “Nah, you’ve got it backwards, too,” she said.

    ----

    The cute thing about Tina—and Cate had seen it at Christmas parties and barbeque socials—was this nervous habit she had of drawing her lower lip over her teeth and running her tongue above it. Walsh had fallen in love with her at a pastry shop some time ago and now they had a cat. Funny story, actually: Walsh had told this to Cate in the first week they met (for the record, Walsh was here first. Cate had said, “This is just an in-between place, I’m moving on to something better.” “We all are, honey,” he’d replied.)
    Cate had asked Walsh, maybe the third day in, “What’s Tina’s thesis?” and he made this funny flailing gesture.
    “I stopped trying to understand,” he explained. Then, between sporadic bursts of typing, “What’s your story?”
    “Vandalism in St. Peters and St. Bernadine’s. Someone lit the altars on fire.”
    “No,” he said, pulling at his tie, “I meant—what’s your story.”
    Cate looked over her glasses at him. Local Churches Broken Into, Defiled was the basic idea, and that was all she had on her screen. She said, “Oh, you mean do I have a Tina.” Which was sweet of him to ask. Not that she would know, but Walsh usually acted sullen and worried, picking constantly at his fingernails. She suspected it was a work personality cultivated to pretend that nothing mattered. “No,” she answered with a grimace.
    Walsh fixed his face almost neutral and said, “Oh, okay.” Cate wanted to tell him that she had had a Tina; his name had been Keith. His name was still Keith, only now he was married to a girl named Nicole. Sometimes he still called. (Theirs hadn’t been a dramatic break-up, nothing definite except for graduation, where they’d parted on a note of “I’ll call you later, okay?”) She wanted to tell Walsh about Keith and his quiet house, no laughter except for the track of Hannah Montana which his little girl watched.
    But none of this had mattered then.

    ----

    Her mother called. “What’s up, buttercup?” she asked.
    “I’m alive,” said Cate with deadpan delivery. Out of the corner of her eye, she could see her fingers gripping her phone. Her nail polish was chipped, her eyeliner was smudged. She’d forgotten her umbrella earlier. There were still some people to impress, she guessed, even though they were few and far between.
    Her mother replied, “Well, so am I.”

    ----

    Girl Found in Ditch, Cate had imagined, and wondered how many headlines already said that. Black Dahlia and all of her friends.
    One of these days, maybe tomorrow or the day after, beneath the fold of the front page Local & State section, you might see a grainy picture of a black bag spread over grass, and the headline would read, “TRAGIC DEATH” or something, and that would be about Emily in the ditch.
    Emily in the ditch had a last name, Raskolnikov. Her family emigrated from Russia a couple generations ago. They landed on Ellis Island and settled in Hell’s Kitchen. Think top hats and Tammany Hall, the stuff Scorsese’s dreams were made of. She was a hard-worker go-getter. Other résumé words. Tragic.
    She didn’t have any relations: her brother was killed in a skiing accident, both parents from strokes. She’d sold the family business (furniture) and sent the money to a cousin in Russia who hadn’t lived at the address for years. Like the little saint that could. Going places.
    There was no clear motive.
    “The American dream ended with Emily,” would’ve been a nice touch, but it sounded trite and anticlimactic, even as the keys clicked under Cate’s fingers.

    ----

    A few months ago, Keith had called her. Her phone had rung “Auld Lang Syne” and like a reflex her hand twitched towards it.
    Walsh kept his hold on her fingers, and she let it go to voicemail. “Real journalism is dead,” she declared. Walsh raised his eyebrows. “Society killed it.”
    “Wasn’t journalism made to serve society? It’s whatever society needs it to be.”
    “Well there’s journalism. And then there’s real journalism.”
    And yes, this was the worst foreplay she’d ever initiated.

    ----

    Cate read her own article in the proofs late at night, right before circulation. Nothing to do at a time like that but dwell. “Hey, Walsh,” she said. “What’s that word the law people use? It’s not ‘murderer,’ because that’s in here maybe fifty times. What the ********, how did this happen?”
    Walsh said, “He’s doing it wrong. You can’t make a media darling through print anymore.”
    “I really don’t care,” said Cate, “I’m just having problems with the fact that ‘murderer’ is the first word three lines in a row.”
    “You’ve got to have video,” Walsh continued, “or a letter or some primary source. It’s a shame the perpetrator didn’t make a tape.”
    “That’s it. ‘Perpetrator.’ And Andy’s not stupid. He’s just new.”
    Walsh snorted, as though to say there wasn’t any difference. A girl in a ditch was a girl in a ditch.

    ----

    She called Keith on the way home from work, one in the morning on his cell. There were runs in her stockings, how cliché. “Hey, baby, sorry I missed your call.” (He’d left no messages, five hang-ups in a row.)
    “Oh, it’s okay.”
    “No, really, what’s the matter?”
    “It’s fine. It is, I just had this—moment. Where I just thought I needed to see you to like—remind me of what you looked like. It was dumb, you wouldn’t have come.” It was like stepping back in time. The same conversation with different beginnings. Cate wanted to tell him that she’d gotten a new job, in Virginia, in California, in China; maybe he should stop calling.
    “They found a dead girl in a ditch yesterday. Or the day before, whatever,” said Cate. “I wrote an article on her past and her potential and the brutality, but it was a little—dry. Overdone.”
    “Like a steak?” he asked, and she smiled. Thought about him stretching his arms back, double-jointed shoulders rolling around.
    “I’ll see you, then?”
    “Yeah, later,” he said. Nicole said something, sleepy in the background. Cate hung up.

    ----

    There was a dead girl in a ditch.
    It had almost been routine, like a cycle of well I took the last one among the Local & State writers.

    ----

    Walsh offered her lunch.
    Cate accepted.
    Over club sandwiches and glasses of sweet tea, he said, “Your lead is absolute s**t,” smiling as he bit his pickle. They had the paper spread between them. “It’s ridiculous. Did you watch a Lifetime movie while you were writing it?”
    “Well,” said Cate. “Keith—you know Keith? Well it doesn’t matter anyway—I talked to my friend Keith the other day, and he’s terrified that his daughter’s going to grow up in a household with no joy.” She imagined three flashes in the dark, captured in red all over Emily’s white dress. (In reality, it hadn’t happened that way. In reality, Emily’s neck had been snapped, and she was wearing a velour track jacket, the fabric still soft when a jogger found her.)
    “Christ.” Walsh swallowed. “You’re not writing a ******** novel.”

    ----

    There was a follow-up the next week in the Saturday edition, intended for reading with coffee at noon. Mystery remains unsolved. It was already too late for the local news stations to make a big deal out of it.
    “I wasn’t the girl who only had guy friends growing up,” she said, trying it out in her mirror, emphasizing different words. She wondered who to say this to, whether it was worth it. She wondered if Emily had been that kind of girl, if Emily had ever thought she might become an Other Woman, if Emily had made plans for escaping her disappointingly average apartment.
    Emily was dead. It was a fun little fact. The new thing, Emily in the ditch, a girl in the wrong state with the wrong face. She could’ve been famous.
    Keith called. She felt obligated to answer this once. “My sister,” he said, and Cate tried to remember her name. “She had a baby, a daughter, and she’s single mom. She wants me to name her. What do you think?” Which really meant, this one’s ours, baby, she’s a could-have-been.
    “I knew an Emily. Emily’s nice,” she said. Walsh snorted in bed beside her and she waved at him.

    ----

    “It almost breaks your heart, doesn’t it?” asked Andy. He sat half-on her desk, left thigh over her file of local interest pieces.
    “Hmm?”
    “This job. So many stories, and you can only write bits and pieces of them. Like flipping through the channels on TV, and only catching one or two lines from each show.”
    “Sure.”
    “Sure? What’s that supposed to mean?”
    Cate looked up and glared at him, mouth steady and computer blank. “I don’t know,” she answered. It was raining outside and her skin prickled in the fluorescent light. Morgue lights looked like this, her father had told her once.

    ----

    Walsh proposed to Tina. He told Cate seriously, apologetic in a dignified way, sleeves rolled up and tie still on. He wore suspenders, which made her feel like she was in a black-and-white movie. She needed a cigarette and a flounce. “Well, that’s good,” she said. Dramatic entrances and exits—they took too much energy and required too much dedication.
    She leaned back precariously in her squeaky chair. “That’s great,” she said. “Are you headed home?”
    Walsh laughed dryly. “God, no,” he said.
    Cate stretched and stood, put on her trench coat, fastened the buckle. “I’m out,” she said. “Congratulations,” she added, hollow and obligatory. Her phone buzzed with a missed call.
    “And tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow,” said Walsh.
    There was a dead girl in a ditch. Somewhere.