Natalie paused in the gift card aisle of the supermarket. She wanted to buy Luke something funny and goofy, reminiscent of their childhood, some private joke they used to share, like Monty Python’s Ministry of Silly Walks. Luke used to imitate John Cleese’s funny walks in the backyard, raising his long legs absurdly high, and Natalie would laugh so hard she’d double over, tears running down her cheeks. She couldn’t find any Monty Python–themed birthday cards, so she hunted down the worst card in the rack. It was an old joke between them. Last year for her birthday, Luke had given her a card with a dancing unicorn that spilled neon-colored glitter all over her when she opened it. Corny the Unicorn Says Happy Birthday!
God, it was awful.
Now it was her turn to return the favor. And she found just the thing. On the cover was an illustration of a glass half full of red liquid, with a bunch of heart-shaped balloons floating in the background. Inside the card, it said: Glass half empty: Sorry I forgot your birthday! Glass half full: But I’m super early for next year! Happy Birthday!
There was only one checkout lane this evening. Three people were in front of her. Natalie glanced at the tabloids and noticed a front-page story about the Crow Killer. She didn’t dare pick it up. She couldn’t stand the thought of reading another article about herself—one reporter had depicted her as a local hero whose sister was a cold-blooded murderer; another reporter dug into her family history and found that she was distantly related to a notorious local witch from the 1800s. Not even Natalie knew that. In fact, she doubted it was true. The online stories were the worst, full of sensational misinformation and gossipy rumors, and she was relieved that the media had moved on for the most part. This article was the first of its kind in several months, and she wondered what the angle was. The case had been stalled out since August. Luke was handling all inquiries now, relieving her of the pain of having to answer more questions about Grace.
She piled up her groceries in front of an acne-scarred young clerk, who smiled at her as he swiped her items across the scanner. He dropped everything into a membrane-thin plastic bag and said, “That’ll be thirty dollars and twenty-two cents, ma’am.”
Oh fuck, she thought, I’m a ma’am.
“I mean,” he corrected himself, “Detective Lockhart.”
She glanced at his name tag. “Thank you, Christopher.”
“Sure thing.” He had a wide, forgiving smile, and she briefly wondered how he knew her name, but then she realized he’d probably read about her in the tabloids on his lunch breaks. “Any news about the woman in the dumpster?” he asked, while she opened her wallet, took out her credit card, and inserted it into the payment reader.
“Sorry, Christopher, I can’t talk about that. It’s confidential.”
“I only ask because my mom runs the Laundromat across the street.”
“Oh,” she said, nodding. “You must be Christopher Delgado, then.” The Laundromat was called Delgado’s Wash and Fold.
“You’re sticking it in the wrong way.”
“What’s that?”
“Your card.” He pointed it out, still smiling. “It goes the other way.”
“Hey, I knew that. Ha-ha.” Natalie smirked and reinserted her card. “Did the police talk to your mom yet?”
“Yeah, they asked her a bunch of questions. She doesn’t know anything. But it made her cry.” He rang up the receipt. “She remembers your dad, Officer Joey. When my grandpa first started the Laundromat, his burglar alarm kept going off in the middle of the night. And every time he’d call your dad, and your dad would come right over to check it out, even though they both knew the alarm was probably broken. Your father never seemed to mind, and they got to be friends.”
“That’s a nice story,” Natalie said, smiling. “Say hello to your mom and your grandfather for me.”
“I will.” He handed her the receipt. “Have a good evening, Detective.”
“You, too, Christopher.”
“Stay safe out there.”
Outside, the luminous orb of the moon had a soft red ring around it. This ring, Natalie recalled from her college ecology class, was composed of ice crystals very high up in the clouds, but some of the locals believed that a red ring around the moon was a bad omen. A pagan sign of negative influences coming your way. God, she hoped not. She shivered as she crossed the supermarket parking lot. It certainly felt as if negative influences had taken over recently.
She got in her car and drove home. The cleanup efforts were progressing at a nice clip, and they were further along than they’d been around this same time last year. Traffic wasn’t bad. By the time she got home, a stiff breeze was up.
Natalie stood in silent contemplation outside the weathered, gray-shingled house while the wind blew through her hair, cooling her face. Five years ago, the trees across the street had been damaged by Dutch elm disease, and you could still see the blighted dead wood among the healthy trees.
A few leaves rattled across the porch, lifted by the breeze. Night gripped the woods in a shroud of fog. She stood in the front yard and thought about the deer coming into the garden last summer and eating all the flowers.
Hey, brat. Where you at?
The memory of her sister’s voice hit her like a rock. She could smell Grace’s orange blossom perfume. Sometimes her memories were so vivid, Natalie swore she could’ve held them in her hand and turned them this way and that. What to do with all these aching memories? How was she supposed to live with this new narrative?
A clammy, flypapery feeling enveloped her. Thank God Joey never found out about Grace. It would’ve broken his heart. He was pivotal in getting Justin Fowler sentenced to life in prison. He worked hard for a conviction. And now, to realize he’d been wrong all along—not only wrong, but misguided and clueless. To find out that one of his beloved daughters had killed his other beloved daughter—it would’ve absolutely crushed him. She was glad he died thinking he’d done the right thing.
Natalie figured that was what prayer was all about—asking forgiveness from the universe. This was why she kept so busy. She relished working late in the office, being the first to arrive and the last to leave. Physical and mental exertion didn’t bother her. It was a feature, not a bug. Because as long as she was working, she wouldn’t have to cope with her unfathomable grief.
Natalie gathered her groceries from the trunk. The lawn felt unnaturally spongy. Her fingers were ice-cold. She unlocked the front door and turned on the lights, taking gradual possession of the house. She put her groceries away in the kitchen, then moved through the downstairs rooms, holding herself as if her shivering bones might break.
Natalie had picked up a nausea she couldn’t shake, and it burned on the floor of her stomach. Walking through these deserted rooms, she worried that somehow she didn’t measure up—as an aunt, as a daughter, as a sister, as a cop. Ever since Grace’s death, she’d believed that she could keep the nightmares at bay by weight lifting and jogging, training hard after work. Between the Exercycle, the treadmill, and Joey’s old barbells, Natalie had put on a bit of muscle to make up for the weight she’d lost. Things died in her fridge from lack of interest. Once a week, she went through the leftovers and tossed everything out. Then she’d take another trip to the grocery store and stock up again, but she wasn’t eating properly. She wasn’t hungry. She was more anxious than hungry lately, and her face had taken on an angular, predatory look. Sometimes when she caught her reflection in the bathroom mirror, she was surprised by how different she looked. She gave off a disturbing don’t-fuck-with-me vibe.
Now she started the coffeemaker, went into the living room, opened her laptop, and checked her emails. Her screen saver was an old photograph of the family—Joey, Deborah, Willow, Grace, and Natalie during happier times. Her father’s police badge gleamed in the low light. All her life, Natalie had thought of the Lockharts as the good guys. To go from being perfectly normal, respected members of the community to being the type of family that spawned murderers was the worst kind
of hurt there was.
Instead of finding peace and calm inside herself, instead of being able to forgive not just Grace, but herself, Natalie wanted to rip the world apart with her bare teeth, to locate the root of this evil and tear it to pieces. She wanted to burn it all down and start over—her childhood, the past, these bittersweet memories. She wanted to declare war on the unknowable, amorphous evil that had taken over their town, to face it, confront it, and destroy it. In the deep recesses of her body, Natalie wanted to reclaim her honor and win. She wanted to taste victory in her mouth. Only then would she be able to find any so-called peace.
By the time she’d finished her reports for the day, Natalie couldn’t stop yawning. She sought comfort in the quilt she’d dragged down from the attic two months ago—Willow’s old quilt with its pattern of Renoir-inspired dancers. She picked up the remote, turned on the TV, and watched a rerun of Gilmore Girls. She preferred late-1990s sitcoms that featured characters as glib and snarky as Lorelai and Chandler Bing.
She closed her eyes and saw the flush of Grace’s cheeks as she stood on the edge of the cliff. No, don’t! Grace spoke in a monotone. Her eyes ghosted like the deer in the garden. She stepped off the cliff and was gone.
Natalie sat up straight. She could feel a static discharge on the back of her neck as she remembered her old sketchbooks. She and Bella used to hang out upstairs in Natalie’s room after school, where they’d make fun of their teachers and draw satirical pictures of their classmates and write embarrassing “confessions” in Natalie’s sketchbooks. Then Bella would go home and practice her violin, while Natalie stashed everything under her bed for next time.
She hadn’t looked at these sketchbooks in ages. She didn’t even know where they were. But her pack rat mom kept everything—Protector of the Kingdom of Memories, Grace used to jokingly call Deborah. Their mother had saved every last scrap of the girls’ homework, their letters, their diaries, and doodlings. She’d packed their childhoods away between layers of tissue paper underneath the attic eaves, where the paper wasps built their menacing nests.
The attic door creaked like the opening of a tomb. Natalie climbed the narrow stairs and pulled on the long chain that switched on the overhead bulb. The smell of wet insulation and mothballs hit her, and it made her skin crawl. The attic felt like a time capsule, trapped in amber. There were stacks of old photo albums, corroded kitchen appliances, glued-together pieces of furniture, old movie posters inside the umbrella stand, a rack of her father’s police uniforms preserved in mothball-smelling clothing bags. She paused to rub the goose bumps off her arms.
Tucked under the rafters was a collection of boxes, long forgotten and thick with dust—each one labeled and dated in Deborah’s careful handwriting. The top of Natalie’s head skimmed along the sloped ceiling made of pit-sawed timbers as she crawled around under the creepy dark eaves, squinting at labels, and sliding out storage boxes one at a time. She pried off the lids and got a whiff of mildew or newsprint or oil crayons or wool.
She clapped the dust off her hands, brushed the cobwebs out of her hair, and sat cross-legged on the floor, her neck tensing as she pulled things out at random. She found a packet of old rolling papers inside Grace’s Disney pencil case, a tattered butterfly net no good for catching anything, Willow’s red vinyl purse full of absurdly bright lipsticks. She found things she’d forgotten about completely, like her funky Reservoir Dogs T-shirt and a compilation tape from Bobby Deckhart—Soundgarden, Pearl Jam, Nirvana, and for a splash of irony, Abba.
Then, like the surprise in the bottom of a Cracker Jack box, she stumbled across Bella’s old letters tucked away in a box of stuffed teddies and old Barbie dolls.
34
Natalie hadn’t read Bella’s letters in a long time, but now she dug them out and read them in search of clues. She studied the snapshots. There were three letters addressed to Natalie altogether, postmarked from Los Angeles, Chicago, and New York City. Each envelope included a Polaroid picture of Bella that seemed to prove she was okay. She didn’t appear to be intimidated or scared for her life or suicidal. In her letters, Bella insisted that she’d left town of her own free will. But there was something about them that irked Natalie to this day.
When Bella disappeared on the night of their high school graduation, both girls were on the cusp of exciting things. Natalie had gotten into Boston University, and Bella had received a generous scholarship package from the Harrington Brock Music Conservatory. But all Bella wanted to do was escape. “Let’s travel around the world and stay in youth hostels across Europe.” She’d marked up an atlas of all the places she wanted to visit. “I love the idea of Thailand, don’t you?”
During their sleepovers, Natalie and Bella would confide their deepest secrets. “I don’t want to play concertos,” Bella told her once, “I want to live them. Let’s have big bold lives, Natalie. Those old composers had the most amazing adventures. Bach played his violin in the middle of the Black Forest at midnight, and Mozart made fart jokes. Peter Warlock was into black magic, and Franz Liszt had affairs with married women. We could have affairs with Italian men. Italians are the best lovers, you know,” Bella said, as if she knew. “Avoir une bonne vie. Have a good life.”
Bella called Mr. Striver “my smother-mother daddy” and said he kept her in a box. “Not a literal box,” she explained, “but a psychological box where I can’t breathe. He’s got my whole life planned out for me, and basically I’m going to be a violin soloist, whether I like it or not.”
At the same time, Bella also stood up for her father. “He works so hard and cares so much, it makes me cry. He dreams about having this genius child, and I can’t help thinking—what if he’s right? What if I am a genius? I definitely don’t want to be average. I secretly hope I am a genius.”
“We’re all fucking geniuses,” Natalie said.
“Right.” Bella laughed. “We’re the Brilliant Misfits.”
More than once, Natalie had witnessed Mr. Striver’s overbearing attitude toward his daughter when she visited Bella at home or at Striver’s Music Shop after school. He would say inappropriate things like, “Bella’s violin costs more money than my car!” and he’d make cringeworthy jokes about the violin’s f-holes. Bella would say, “Dad, stop. You’re embarrassing yourself.” He would remind Bella to smile. “Recital face! You have to have your recital face on, darling. Remember to smile!” Behind his back, Bella made monster faces and called him her stage mom with a dick.
The day before I decided to do it, to finally run away from it all, Bella wrote in one of her letters to Natalie, Dad was in the kitchen making pancakes and listening to Prokofiev. His eyes were closed, and he was swaying to the music when I walked in. “Listen to this cadenza, Bella,” he said. He had a glass of wine in one hand and a spatula in the other. Wine for breakfast again. Uh, yeah, Dad. “We’re going to put a little meat on Bella’s bones,” he said.
He ruffled my hair, and each time he dropped another pancake on my plate, he said, “Here you go, my angel. Eat up. Put a little meat on those bones.”
I couldn’t help rolling my eyes. “Dad-dy … stop it.”
“Wha-at?”
“You’re acting weird today.”
“I’m in a good mood. What of it?” He laughed it off.
After breakfast, we practiced a Mozart concerto, and for some reason I kept flubbing it. I think it’s because I just don’t like playing duets with him anymore. He’s no good at it. Especially when he’s wasted. There is no expression in his music. It’s just mechanical and dead. Halfway through, he screamed at me, “That’s not right! Get it together! Where’s your head?”
I felt nervous and wanted to stop, because he was acting a little erratic, but he wouldn’t let me stop, and so we both had to keep playing this crappy duet over and over again. It was agony, because he kept yelling at me, when he’s the one who sucks at this. And it made me feel bad to think that way. Sometimes I hate him so much—but then I hate myself for hating him.
&n
bsp; That night, he came into my room, sat on the edge of my bed, and said, “I’m sorry, Bella,” and I could smell the wine on his breath.
“It’s okay.”
“I’m too hard on you, sweetheart.”
“No, Dad. It’s fine.”
“But look at you, going to the conservatory on a scholarship. You’re going to be a star one day, Bella.”
“Don’t worry about it, Dad.”
He nodded, and the bed shifted under his weight from the bobbing of his head. He finally got up, and I could feel the heaviness receding, and I was so relieved. He took his smelly wine breath and all his stupid, overbearing concerns with him and left the room, leaving me in peace. All of this would’ve been too much for me, if I didn’t have a secret plan out of Dodge.
A secret plan.
Natalie reread the last sentence.
Bella had never explained in any of her letters how she’d gotten the hell out of Dodge. All she said was that she was happy now (this was twelve years ago), still playing her violin and at peace with herself. There was a hippieish tinge to her newfound freedom—I’m more “me” than I’ve ever been; I’ve found peace and I hope you do, too; there’s more to life than ambition and discipline; I’m finally embracing who I am. Bella played the violin now because she loved it, she explained, not because she had to. She was satisfied, content, and fulfilled with her life, and she wanted the same for Natalie.
Natalie rubbed her fatigued eyes, then picked up the phone and called Max.
“Yello?” came the familiar response.
“It’s Natalie. We need to talk. Do you have time?”
The Wicked Hour Page 19