Page 15 of The Deepest Lake
Later: Happy Birthday to me! Not an auspicious start.
Another one: Typing these not knowing when they’ll actually send since Wi-Fi is on the fritz. I’d really like to call you but I can’t.
Later: Can’t complain. Mimosas with a view.
Later: I’m sorry I’ve been so out of touch.
Later: I love you Mom.
Later: I’m sorry.
There were never any more texts.
There was no information at all, until Rose and Matt decided that five days was too long to go without contact—that it wasn’t like Jules to drop out of touch so suddenly with no explanation.
It took two more days to launch a full search, thousands of miles away from home. Six weeks later, that search ended, though according to the police, giving up on finding a body didn’t equate to closing the official investigation. Still, it seems the same to Rose. No active search, no likeliness of getting significant leads. Whether they were hoping for a body to lovingly bury or only a sense of Jules’s final moments, Rose will always feel like they gave up too soon.
Tired of wandering, aware that siesta is upon them and many of the shops have closed for the afternoon, Rose retraces her steps downhill, toward the waterfront, and stops at the pizzeria she spotted earlier.
She is shown to a small table in the back, where she orders bread sticks—the smallest item she can find—and a diet soda. She sends Matt and Ulyana a text confirming she has safely arrived. Then she pulls out her e-reader and college-lined notebook, arranging them around her place setting.
Travel was never Rose’s forte, but organization always has been.
In the first weeks following Jules’s disappearance, Rose divided a notebook into four parts: background on Guatemala, police and investigator findings, messages from Jules and facts about Eva Marshall (birth name: Patricia Eve Myron) and Casa Eva.
In the first part of the notebook, she summarized Guatemala items gleaned from the news. There was a story about a young Japanese tourist who was beaten and died of her injuries. There was an equally brutal story of an Alaskan tourist falsely suspected of baby stealing, beaten so badly by a mob that she was left in a coma. Then there was the bigger, longer-term view: Guatemala’s recent civil war, the country’s role as a narcotics corridor and the plight of migrants trying to escape the reach of gangs.
Rose’s small reward for finishing her review of Guatemala background notes is to flip to the next section of the notebook, where she can review the findings from the police. Here’s where they logged the cursory info on the arrested drug dealer named Francisco “Paco” Marroquín and, in more detail, the arrest and later whereabouts of the German backpacker. Matt had pledged to keep an eye on Luka Bauer, via an American colleague who worked in the boy’s hometown of Stuttgart. If he makes one wrong step, if he bothers any young woman, if he gets picked up for something as minor as riding the U-Bahn without a ticket, I’ll find out about it.
So, that was that. A local drug dealer, punished. A young man who spent at least a few hours with Jules, identified. As far as the police were concerned, the drugs and the stolen book weren’t necessarily directly connected to Jules’s death, only to Jules herself, helping with the timeline and a portrait of how she was spending her time—not always with the most savory characters. The nailed-down details made it possible to attach other smaller details, gratifying Matt, especially.
Rose turns the page, willing herself to see it as an objective observer, someone who might notice something new. She rereads the highlights of Eva’s statement to police, including the overlap with the German backpacker’s assertion of a key detail. Eva said she’d been forced to “let Juliet May go” when Jules insisted on her plan to go on the dawn volcano hike with Luka, “regardless of her work responsibilities mere hours later.” Jules had left Eva’s orbit twelve hours before the hike and a full day before she was seen swimming.
None of these investigatory details are as important to Rose as Jules’s own words. This is where the essence of Rose’s daughter still persists, her voice captured in the third section of the notebook: a patchwork of pasted emails, texts and Instagram captions written out longhand.
These are amazing women, Jules wrote in a rare, longer email just after getting the personal assistant position. They’ve gone through so much and yet they are strong, honest, generous and resilient. I’m so honored to help organize their trip just a little, to give them some comfort and troubleshoot so they can focus and get the love and help they need so they can write and tell their truths.
Knowing what some of them have gone through makes me feel I’ve led a sheltered life. I should feel lucky, but I don’t. How lucky can I feel when I have nothing to say, no stories to share? I know you won’t get that part. Moms are supposed to want their children to lead boring, safe lives. I get it.
But let me tell you about Eva! She is the most beautiful and badass of them all. If you still haven’t read her first memoir, the one I’ve been telling you to read forever, you should.
Rose has Jules’s copy of Eva’s first memoir, the one taken from the German backpacker and returned to them—a treasure because it bears the marks of Jules’s many rereadings over the years. She read it soon after Jules disappeared and has thumbed through it many times since, even though it’s not her kind of book. It’s her daughter’s kind of book. That’s what matters.
Last Gasp (or The Mascot, as the UK edition was called) is about Eva Marshall’s years as a runaway teenager, daughter of wealthy absentee parents from Palo Alto who never once came looking for her. Eva lived as a groupie in the world of London punk rock, from its late heyday in 1978 through the death of Sid Vicious in early 1979 and just beyond. A young American innocent abroad, Eva contributed no skills as a musician, but she did often pose nude—flat-chested, raccoon-eyed, with a blond buzz cut—on liner notes and in flyers. Within limited circles, she became a symbol of that era.
No wonder Jules developed a crush on Eva when she was only a high schooler. It wasn’t just that Eva lived a more adventurous life, it’s that she turned every sad or scary thing that ever happened to her into a globe-trotting career. Maybe even into art. It was a much better story than Rose’s own: settle on a business degree because it seems practical, marry young and start a kitchen reno company.
Rose is more interested in the epilogue to Eva’s adolescent story than the punk memoir itself. After moving from London to New York, Eva piqued the interest of a major imprint. This was the Mommie Dearest era, back when nearly all autobiographies were about celebrities. Eva Marshall, a nobody, published a memoir when she was only nineteen years old. No wonder so many readers took notice.
In her early twenties, Eva next tried acting and singing, but the New York stage didn’t embrace her the same way publishing had. She lived off magazine freelancing for a couple of years, then turned to fiction, where she flourished commercially, if not always critically, for several decades. Some of Eva’s novels were dismissed for being too domestic, “women’s fiction,” with much attention spent, as one reviewer quipped, “on babies, bodies and bonding,” often of the female-friendship variety.
Rose flips to her cut-and-paste compilation of Eva’s newspaper and magazine essays, which spawned an equal number of counter-essays by other writers who got a kick out of criticizing Eva for “oversharing.”
In her fifties, Eva admitted that she was estranged from the daughter she’d had at age twenty. A web journalist gleefully accused her of deserving the rift, given how often she’d invaded that daughter’s privacy, using her as fodder in personal essays. But even when Eva wrote only about herself, the critics excoriated her. Eva wrote candidly about her small breasts, grown saggy after childbirth and breastfeeding. A critic sniped, “Many of today’s writers have an unfortunate tendency to navel gaze; Eva Marshall’s attention doesn’t even reach that far.”
Reading that comment now, while sipping at the warm remains of her second diet soda, Rose feels a hollow and fading sort of satisfaction. Despite Matt’s constant reminder that Eva answered their key requests—filing a police statement, bringing her house manager to do the same—Rose always felt that Eva was holding back. The most detailed thing Eva told police was that she “got the impression Jules frequently traveled alone and disregarded common-sense precautions.” But Eva also said, “Following our brief interview I saw her so infrequently that I’m not the best person to make guesses about her risky habits or state of mind.”
Eva’s actions might not be suspicious, but they were, at the very least, unkind. Maybe Eva had spent only moments face-to-face with Jules, if Jules was just one staffer of many. But Jules had spent years with Eva as a devoted reader. Did that matter? Should it?