Unrevealed

mandatory. I didn’t have one. I figured by the looks of her, she was probably so broke that she didn’t own a cell phone.
    By Sunday afternoon, I was obsessed with Ellen’s story. I thought about the tragedy of losing both her sister and brother so close together and I understood why she chose to disappear into a bottle. I wondered, briefly, if the story of the brother and sister’s death might have made it to some news show. I’d seen plenty of post-9/11 human interest stories on TV and in the newspaper — stories that followed victims’ families and revealed everything from suicides to new relationships. Call it curiosity, but I opened my laptop and searched “Frank Challis photography Vermont” based on the limited information Ellen had given me. The very first website was “Frank Challis Photography” and mentioned “In Memoriam” in the brief description. I clicked on the link and read about Frank’s work. There was a beautiful shot of Vermont in the wintertime. I looked closer at the photo and saw the copyright. It was 2007.
    I went through photo after photo and found current dates on most of them. Finally, at the bottom of one page, it read, “To contact Frank directly…” and gave a number. If Frank was dead, he sure as hell took great photos from the grave.
    My eyes drifted to the “In Memoriam” link at the top of one of the pages. I clicked on it. It loaded slowly. First I saw the name “Marge” and then “Challis” appear. The
photo took longer to load. But once it did, I stared in stunned silence. It was Ellen.
    Sure, she looked younger and fresher, but it was Ellen. There was the striking brown mole by the right side of her bottom lip and the same haircut, with less gray. Even entertaining the idea that she and her “sister” were Irish twins, the chance of both of them having a large mole in the same location was a billion to one.
    “Fuck,” I said out loud. Not so much angry as confused. I thought back on the conversation I’d had with her. Little by little, the jigsaw puzzle started to make sense. I had wondered why “Ellen” knew so much about Marge’s private thoughts and — how an estranged sister was able to tell me what Marge was going through and how it was affecting her. When she described the phone call that Frank allegedly told her about, she was really telling me what she saw out that window of tower one and what she felt at that critical moment. And when she told me, regretfully, that she shouldn’t have let Marge die, that she “should have helped her more,” believed in her, and filled her with hope instead of making her believe she wasn’t worth saving, the poor woman was actually talking about herself. The addict she used to be. The one Frank tried so desperately to help.
    I think I understand why she killed off Frank in her head. Once she “killed” herself, she had to “kill” him as well to assuage the loneliness. If he weren’t dead in her mind, she might get weak when she was drunk and call him up to hear him tell her that everything was all right and that she wasn’t a bad person. But as each year passed, and Marge Challis remained on the 9/11 victim list, the chance to resurrect her “dead body” and come clean became more unfeasible. Even though that’s what she wanted more than anything. After she got sober and the cobwebs cleared, she came face-to-face
with herself. She didn’t want to be “dead” anymore. So she reinvented herself, like we all do when we shake loose the shadows of addiction. She became Ellen Brigham, went to more meetings, and finally got the guts to approach me and partially reveal her stained soul. She was on step nine in AA: making direct amends to people, whenever possible, for past wrongs. The problem was, the “dead” can’t make direct amends.
    I played back the visit to its conclusion, and I remembered the look she gave me right before she left — the look that almost pleaded with me to read her mind. “ I just wish ,” she stated. It had seemed odd to me then but not now. I was pretty sure that what she wished more than anything was for Frank to know she was okay. Like it was up to me to be a good PI, put the pieces together, maybe contact him, and… what? What in the hell was I supposed to do? I couldn’t call Frank out of the blue and drop that bomb on him. Fuck that shit. It’s called direct amends for a reason, not amends via a third party who also happens to be a drunk. No. I’d talk to