Unrevealed

afford even half of my usual $175 an hour plus expenses.
    Without answering her question, I asked another. “What do you need?”
    “I was wondering if you can find dead people?”

    “Sure,” I said, taking a hit off my cigarette. “I just go to any morgue or cemetery and there they are. Dead people.”
    “I should rephrase that,” Ellen said, struggling with her thoughts. “My older sister, Marge Challis, she was last heard from back in the fall of 2001.”
    I dropped my cigarette to the pavement and snuffed it out with the toe of my cowboy boot. “I need a lot more than that.”
    “Like what?”
    “Like her last known location and the date she went missing.”
    “That’s easy. She was in tower number one on 9/11.”
    Well, that got my attention. I agreed to meet Ellen at my office the next day. She showed up early, dressed almost exactly the way she’d been outside the meeting. She said she’d taken the bus and walked five blocks to my office. She looked like she’d come right out of the homeless shelter. Her graystreaked brown hair was half-combed and her face appeared haggard. I hadn’t noticed the brown mole at the right corner of her bottom lip the night before.
    After sitting down across from me, Ellen removed a large blue binder from her cloth bag. She was quick to apologize for her unkempt appearance, telling me she hadn’t slept a wink the night before. It had taken her six years to get the guts to talk to somebody.
    “Can I smoke in here?”
    “Denver building code says no. I say why the fuck not?” Ellen nervously rummaged through her bag, coming up empty-handed. After about a minute, I handed her a pack of Marlboros. Ellen took a cigarette out and handed the pack back to me. “Keep ‘em. So, what’s the story?”
    Ellen lit up, took a meaningful drag and gathered her thoughts. “Her name is Marge Challis.”

    “Is?” I questioned.
    Ellen tilted her head. She struggled with the concept. “Was.”
    “Challis her married name or — ”
    “No, she never married.” Ellen spelled the last name out for me so I could make a note.
    “So, your last name of Brigham is — ”
    “I got married young and divorced. But I kept his name.…”
    I noticed how Ellen’s voice inflected upward right then. It could be the sign of a lie but it could have also been nerves.
    “Marge was having trouble back then.”
    “What kind of trouble?” I asked.
    “Emotional and financial.” Ellen looked me in the eye straight on for the first time. “She had a 9:00 a.m. job interview for a secretarial position in tower one. If she didn’t get the job, she was basically gonna be kicked out of her apartment. She was drowning in credit card debt. Life had become unlivable.”
    I noticed that when Ellen talked about her sister, she seemed to have an outstanding grasp of what her sister had gone through.
    Ellen continued. “Marge always wanted to be successful. Marry the good guy, live in the nice house, maybe have a kid. But deep down she never thought she was good enough to deserve any of that.” Ellen took a deep drag on her cigarette. “This is real hard for me.”
    “Take your time.”
    “She got involved in drugs.” Ellen looked ashamed. “Ecstasy and pills. She did meth for a while. That fucked her up.”
    “How old was she in the fall of 2001?”
    “Twenty-eight.”

    “Twenty-eight?” I questioned.
    “Yeah.”
    “So, she’d be thirty-four now?”
    “Yeah. That’s right.”
    “And she’s your older sister?”
    Ellen shrugged. “Yeah. What’s the problem?”
    The woman sitting across from me looked fifty. Her face was gaunt and aging rapidly. The gray in her hair lent even more maturity. I wanted to be diplomatic but diplomacy has never been my forte. “How old are you?”
    Ellen hesitated slightly. “Thirty-three.”
    Good God , I thought. Talk about rode hard and put away wet. I thought I looked like shit for thirty-five, but the woman sitting across from me had obviously experienced one helluva stressful life to look that bad at thirty-three. “You’re thirty-three?” I said, just to make sure my hearing wasn’t going.
    She could see that I was confused. “Marge and I are Irish twins,” Ellen offered, using the term for siblings born less than twelve months apart.
    “Any other siblings?”
    Ellen’s eyes welled with tears. “There was a brother. Frank. He was really good to Marge. He gave her money when she was broke and never expected it to be paid back.