Her name was Emily Charlotte LeBeau, and she had never considered her bad luck.
She had friends, a family out there, though sadly she’d been disconnected from both of late. This was not intentional. Her mother had left when she was young, gone to marry a man shrouded in excitement, and her father, though caring, had never truly been able to move on. Little Emily had grown up at his knee, around the blue crab fishery where he worked, pitching in to sort catch or carry boxes when she wasn’t staying with her grandparents up in Baton Rouge. They had a skip they took out trawling for shrimp or crawfish on weekends, and one time Emily found an injured baby pelican tangled in fishing line which she cut free and nursed back to health. It might have been that bird, Pepper, which set Emily on the path towards veterinary science, or maybe the constant injuries sustained by her grandparents’ two dogs Duck and Gordon, black and white patched basset hounds with heads so full of love there was no room left for brains.
She’d been an outgoing girl, humble, gregarious. Never afraid to muck in when something needed doing, never shy to stay back or clean up. At eleven she’d manifested the power of floramancy, which always made her Pa say she should be a gardener, but Emily preferred animals. Besides, she always riposted, the two went hand‑in‑hand when you think about it. By the summer of her fifteenth birthday her grandparents’ big backyard was so green and chock full of perfect bird habitat that Emily’s Memaw joked they should start charging folk to come and admire it.
Emily did alright in school, was doing okay in college. Academics were never her strongest suit, but she could knuckle down with the best of them and only really did the whole partying thing as much as was socially required. She’d moved out early on because the college she’d got into was out of town, and though living with her Pa was good for the most part there were still days when she’d come home to find him stoned out of his gourd and crying, begging Em to help contact her mom. Emily wanted no part in his schemes or wallowing. She had other family filling the space her mother left, and no desire to disturb the foolish woman with the love she was missing out on.
At twenty, Emily took up with her then boyfriend, a gangly, curly‑haired Econ major named Josh. Josh had aspirations of being a musician and the ability to crush diamonds with his teeth, but he veered between artistic endeavours and the desire to make money hand over fist. He was funny, chatty and quick‑tempered, and the two got along like a house on fire, or so Emily thought. Then, only a few months prior to her death, Emily discovered him cheating. The revelation broke her heart, but in hindsight it was typical – Josh did always seem to believe, without reservation, that he was entitled to everything and all.
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Unfortunately Josh was local to their college, and when he and Emily split the ties binding him to their friends ran older and deeper than hers. These aftershock betrayals hurt Emily almost worse than the original schism, because she felt like she had shown these so‑called friends naught by love and loyalty – but the knowledge of Josh’s cheating clearly carried insufficient toxicity to poison most wells. Emily was tough though, and had endured abandonment before, and likely could have weathered this latest round of other people’s failings too, were it not for the second hammer blow: she was getting kicked out of college. Far more than Josh’s betrayal, this Emily did not understand. There’d been an incident, sure, where perhaps she’d held a dog down a little firmly, but the Shi Tzu’s owner had been completely unreasonable and more overanxious than the pooch. Yet somehow the woman’s complaint stuck, then soured, then spread, until finally the university found it all too difficult. Far easier to drop a student than fend off a maniac. They had no loyalty to a nameless girl.
Devastated and alone, Emily moved back in with her Dad, but his old, scarred heart brushing up against her newly wounded one only led to conflict. She’d half left, half fled, with little more than a pain in her chest and a backpack over her shoulder. Nothing seemed to be going right; so Emily did what her heart told her to do, to sail solo into uncharted waters, and followed a job ad to a new city to regroup and recover. And she had been recovering. In a homey yet frugal one-bedroom apartment overlooking a train line, she’d filled a home with houseplants, painted mugs and a second‑hand corduroy couch, and watched Simpsons reruns while pretending to study. Her old connections, though frayed, had been slowly mending. She’d called her Pa and they’d talked long and exchanged sorrys. A few of her old friends had reached out. Her expulsion was on appeal and she’d had positive talks with a local veterinary school, who’d indicated their incredulity at a fourth-year being expelled for a complaint of that nature. Her job set good hours and paid hard cash, and she loved the routine and chatting to her regulars. She’d woken up that Tuesday morning in September thinking only of the bright blue sky, and how later she might see about going swimming. Emily was a good swimmer, a great diver. Her eyes never stung.
The man who killed her did not know this, nor would he ever. All he knew was that she was there, unmoving, on the floor of his kitchen. Thought eluded him, as did calm and stable breath. There was little for him to do but sob and rock Emily’s body desperately, clinging to her weight, her fading warmth.
The sounds of his cries carried through windows he’d opened a thousand years ago for light and ventilation, the girl’s delivery van sitting abandoned outside. That they would raise concern and curious alarm in his neighbours did not occur to him. Nothing occurred to him, for his fracturing mind had room left only for Emily, and the sight of her eyes staring empty into the abyss.