I Scream, You Scream

by Watson, Wendy Lyn

  I looked away, off into the darkness. I knew all about putting one step in front of the other no matter where the path was leading. I didn’t even get to choose that first step myself. My mama took it for me, when she threw away the handful of college brochures that came in the mail and the notice about signing up for the SAT.

  Every part of me—my chest, my cheeks, even the palms of my hands—tightened, as if I’d been dipped in shellac that was beginning to harden and dry.

  “Southern Methodist is hardly a slaughterhouse,” I said.

  He blew a stream of air through his nose and ran his free hand through his wind-tousled hair. “Dammit, Tally. You just don’t understand.”

  He was right. I didn’t understand. I didn’t understand how someone could throw away a perfectly good chance to get a degree and make connections, the sort of connections that got you a steady job in an air-conditioned office. The kind of job where you could wear starched shirts and shiny shoes and go to the doctor without a dock in your pay.

  “Tally, I don’t want to end up in some miserable, soulless, dead-end job like my dad.”

  From what I’d seen, every job was miserable, soulless, and dead-end. Some just paid better than others.

  “So what are you going to do?” I asked softly.

  “I don’t know,” he said, all bluster and bravado. “I’m gonna be a screenwriter. But first, I’ll travel some. See the country. Maybe go to Europe.”

  “Oh.”

  “You could go with me,” he said.

  I heard a boyish note of pleading in his voice, and that made me angry. We both knew I couldn’t go with him. We both knew I had to watch after my mama. And besides, I didn’t know how much it cost to fly to Europe, but it was surely more than I had saved up at the credit union. We both knew I couldn’t go with him, but he asked anyway, so I would have to tell him no.

  My face now so stiff that it felt like a mask, I shook my head.

  “And I won’t wait for you, either,” I said, my voice sounding like that of a stranger. “I can’t.”

  He stood up, hurled his dripping ice-cream cone into the nearest trash barrel, and loomed over me. I don’t know where I found the courage, but I raised my chin and looked him in the eye.

  “So that’s it?” His words hung between us, as hard as flint.

  I felt scooped out and hollow inside, the space Finn had occupied suddenly empty. The words I’d rehearsed all day turned to ash in my mouth, and I barely managed a nod.

  He shoved his hands deep in his pockets and hunched his shoulders. “Dammit, Tally.” I expected him to say more, to protest or rail against the unfairness of it all, but he didn’t. Just cursed, then stalked off, leaving me alone in my new white sundress and thin-soled sandals.

  From across the parking lot, I heard the roar of a revving engine, the angry sound surprising the other customers into a momentary silence. The Scirocco pealed out of the lot, spitting tiny pebbles in its wake.

  I looked down in time to see a drop of ice cream mixed with chocolate coating slip from the edge of my hand and fall to my lap. With trembling hands, I threw the sad mess away and dabbed at the stain with a fresh napkin. My efforts only made the mark spread, and tears of frustration choked me.

  I went home that night and soaked my dress in hot water and borax. The stain faded but never disappeared. And I didn’t see Finn Harper again until he turned up on my porch that unseasonably warm October night.

  And by then, I knew, it was far too late. The boy he was then, the woman I was now, were all but strangers.

  chapter 15

  The mini in MiniAmp suggested that the item was miniature. Relative to what, I couldn’t say. During the Battle of the Hearing Aid, Bree, Grandma Peachy, and I looked at devices as tiny as my pinkie nail, and the MiniAmp looked huge by comparison. In reality it was only about the size of a cheap plastic cigarette lighter, but when it was hanging off the side of my head, it seemed enormous. As I casually strolled across the floor of the Lady Shapers, I felt like a Flintstones character, with a brontosaurus bone swinging from my ear.

  As expected, the Furies—JoAnne Simms, Jackie Conway, and Trish Paolino—were lined up on a row of elliptical trainers, their legs churning and arms pumping in perfect sync with one another as they chatted, matching bottles of neon green Vigor in their cup holders. Until I walked in, they had the place to themselves. Simultaneously, without breaking stride, they fell silent and pivoted their heads to watch me enter. I threw them a nonchalant little wave and headed for the piece of equipment farthest away from them—a clunky, outdated cross-country ski machine.

  I didn’t have a clue how to use the ski machine, but I needed to be far enough away that the three women would feel comfortable resuming their conversation. So I turned on the MiniAmp, flipped the switch to use the directional mic, and adjusted the mic from its front to its side orientation. Then I carefully clambered up onto the narrow wooden skids, trying to snug the toes of my cross-trainers into the cupped metal toe caps.

  But as soon as I got one foot in place and shifted my weight to that leg, the pressure sent the ski sliding backward. With my weight balanced precariously on one leg, the unexpected movement pitched me forward, and I clotheslined myself across the metal railing wrapped around the front of the machine.

  In my MiniAmped ear, I heard a chorus of chuckles and snorts.

  I gathered my dignity as best I could and, with all the grace of a vaudevillian doing a pratfall, managed to heave myself into position on the ski machine. My legs shook, and the skis slid back and forth by fractions of an inch until I got my balance. Tentatively, I grabbed the simulated ski poles and began shuffling my feet forward and back. After a few hesitant repetitions, I found an awkward rhythm.

  Once I felt sure I wouldn’t go flying off the back of the machine, I turned my attention to JoAnne, Jackie, and Trish.

  Following Alice’s advice, I closed my eyes and began moving my mouth slightly, occasionally nodding, as though I were having a deep conversation with someone on my cell phone. I felt like a lunatic, but after a few beats of quiet, nothing but the faint squeak of one elliptical trainer and the soft whisper of their gym clothes rustling, my ruse paid off as the three women began to converse in stage whispers.

  It took me a few seconds to find just the right angle for my head, so I heard their voices rather than just the ambient noise of the fans and cardio machines, but once I did, I could hear them speak with astonishing clarity.

  “Can you believe she’s here? I mean, how do you even go out in public after a scandal like she’s been through? It’s all so white trash.” I knew for a fact that Jackie Conway dated her second cousin in high school, so I don’t know who died and made her an arbiter of class.

  “I feel bad for her.” From the glee in her voice, it sounded as if Trish Paolino didn’t feel a lick of sympathy for me.

  “Honestly, it’s hardly Tally’s fault that her husband cheated on her.” And that, without question, was JoAnne Simms.

  “Of course it’s not her fault that he cheated,” Jackie said. She spoke slowly and with exaggerated emphasis, as if she were talking to a toddler. “I was talking about the murder.”

  “That’s hardly her fault, either,” JoAnne countered.

  “I wouldn’t be too sure,” Jackie said. “Everyone’s looking at the husband right now, but have you met the man? He doesn’t have the good sense God gave little bitty bunnies. My money is on her.” By which she presumably meant me.

  Someone snorted. “I can think of a dozen people who wanted Brittanie Brinkman dead, just off the top of my head,” Trish said.

  “Wanting the girl dead and actually killing her are two very different things,” Jackie noted. “I would need a pretty powerful motive to kill someone in cold blood like that.”

  “Or you’d need to be crazy,” JoAnne added. A shiver went down my spine. Bat-shit crazy, I thought.

  Jackie and Trish laughed, and then I heard deeper breathing and swallowing as the three women fo
llowed the Lady Shapers creed of hydration, hydration, hydration.

  “Well,” Jackie continued, “my cleaning lady plays canasta with Vonda Hudson, who works down at the police department, and she told me that Wayne and Tally are each others’ alibis. He said he was with his ex-wife the night Brittanie died. That’s mighty convenient, if you ask me.”

  Trish gasped, suitably shocked. “But I heard that Wayne was in the house that night. He listened to Brittanie cry out for help but just ignored her.”

  JoAnne tutted softly. “You two need to stop listening to gossip. Wayne wasn’t home that night, but he wasn’t with Tallulah, either.”

  I was so intent on listening to the conversation behind me, I completely forgot about my cover. When the ladies grew suddenly silent, I realized I had, at some point, stopped moving my feet. I opened my eyes and saw my reflection in the mirrored wall, my mouth hanging open just slightly, my head cocked at an awkward angle, and my body frozen in midglide.

  With a sinking sense of dread, I slid my eyes to the side and, one by one, met the gazes of JoAnne, Jackie, and Trish, who had also stopped in midrotation on their elliptical trainers. Jackie and Trish wore matching thin-lipped, arched-eyebrow expressions of high indignation . . . basically, exactly the expressions I would expect from hoity-toity ladies who caught someone shamelessly eavesdropping on their conversation.

  But JoAnne’s reaction puzzled me. Her mouth quirked in a wry smile, and her eyes danced with silent laughter.

  Then she winked at me.

  I hightailed it straight from the Lady Shapers to the Dalliance Police Department.

  The brusque young officer at the front desk looked at me as if I were a criminal when I asked to speak to Cal, and while I waited in one of the rock-hard Naugahyde chairs, the young man kept shooting narrow-eyed looks my way, as if he were waiting to catch me red-handed, doing something illegal.

  “Tally Jones,” Cal said from the hallway that led to the back of the station. He braced his hands on the doorframe and leaned into the waiting room, rocking up on his toes. “What brings you down here this fine day?”

  I scrambled to my feet. “I think I may have some information about Brittanie’s murder.”

  I expected Cal to look shocked, for him to demand the information right away . . . some sort of excitement. But instead, Cal just smiled one of his stingy, enigmatic smiles. “Well, then,” he said, “you better come back and fill me in.”

  This time we met in Cal’s “office,” which was really just a modular cubicle of tan fabric and beige laminate. A couple of trophies for marksmanship served as bookends holding a half dozen plastic binders upright on a little shelf. A coffee cup, emblazoned with a cartoon of a dog trying to trick a cat into climbing into a clothes dryer, held down a stack of papers. Otherwise, there wasn’t anything personal about the desk at all.

  “Can I get you a cup of coffee or a soda?” he asked as I sat on a hard plastic chair.

  “No, thanks.”

  “Suit yourself.” He sat in his desk chair, leaning back so far, it was clear the springs were shot, and took a sip from the coffee mug.

  “Cal, I think JoAnne Simms might have killed Brittanie,” I blurted.

  One eyebrow cocked up. “Really. And what makes you think that?”

  I explained to him about JoAnne calling Brittanie a slut and how maybe Brittanie had an affair with Garrett Simms. And I explained how JoAnne seemed dead certain that Wayne wasn’t home the night Brittanie died—which both bolstered Wayne’s story and raised the issue of how JoAnne knew who was in the house and who wasn’t. And, finally, I explained how JoAnne had access to the sports drink that Brittanie used. She easily could have poisoned the Vigor before Brittanie brought it home from the Lady Shapers.

  Throughout my whole story, Cal’s expression never changed.

  “Well, that’s quite a tale, Tally. But I don’t think it holds much water.”

  “Are you kidding me?”

  “No, ma’am,” he said with a wry smile. “I’m not much of a kidder.”

  “But JoAnne had means, motive, and opportunity,” I insisted.

  Cal shook his head. “I think you’ve been watching too much television. That’s not really how we solve crimes. See, we look for evidence.”

  Maybe he wasn’t a kidder, but he sure was a smart-ass.

  “Besides,” he said, “it sounds like half of Dalliance had motive, and everyone had means—antifreeze isn’t exactly uncommon, especially with winter coming on. As for opportunity, well, that’s a little tricky.”

  “How so? It had to be someone who had access to the Vigor, either before or after it got into Wayne and Brittanie’s house.”

  “Nuh-uh.” He shook his head, as though he was real sorry to be the one to break the news to me. “The state lab tested the empty bottle of Vigor from Brittanie’s bedside table, and every other bottle in the house and in the recycling, and they couldn’t find a trace of ethylene glycol.”

  “What do you mean?” I knew exactly what he meant, but I just couldn’t quite believe it.

  “I mean that however Ms. Brittanie Brinkman consumed a lethal dose of ethylene glycol, it was not through a poisoned sports drink. And, in fact, from what the ME has been able to piece together, it looks like she ingested the poison between seven and ten the night before she died.”

  “But that was . . .” A heavy sense of dread seeped through my limbs.

  “Yes, ma’am. That was during the Weed and Seed luau.” He took another sip of his coffee. “So that there creates a whole new mess of possibilities.”

  “I guess it does,” I said, my voice barely a whisper.

  “In fact, it’s a funny thing you should stop in to see me, because I was fixin’ to call you myself.”

  “Oh?” I fixed my gaze on one of Cal’s trophies, studying the gold plastic man, the places where the gold coating had chipped off, exposing some dark material beneath.

  “Yes, ma’am. It was some mighty dirty work, but we managed to track down a bunch of the bags of trash from the luau and have started going through them looking for traces of antifreeze.”

  “Really?”

  “Yep. It’s a big job”—he smiled—“as you can imagine. So far, we’ve only turned up one little item with any antifreeze on it.”

  I heard him speaking, but his voice was garbled and distant, as if I were underwater.

  “It was this little plastic cup. We asked around a bit, and some folks seem to recall you used those same little cups to serve the sauce for your ice cream.”

  I finally mustered the courage to look Cal in the eye. His tone had remained amiable throughout his monologue, but I saw then that his blue eyes were as hard and cold as diamonds.

  “Funny, huh?” he asked.

  It wasn’t funny at all, but I figured he already knew that.

  He shrugged. “Now, of course, it might just be a fluke. You know, there was a lot of trash all mixed up, so maybe some antifreeze—either the poison or just some random bit of refuse—came in contact with that little plastic cup. We call that ‘transfer,’ and it happens quite a bit. But we’re looking for more of those little red cups now.”

  Red?

  He set the coffee mug on his desk and drummed his fingers on the edge of his computer keyboard.

  “While the lab folks are looking through all that trash, though, I thought I might chat with you a bit. See if maybe you had something to add.”

  I cleared my throat and framed my question very carefully. “Are you implying that I poisoned Brittanie? With an ice-cream sundae?”

  Cal held up his hands. “Whoa. I’m not implying anything. But someone might get that impression, don’t you think?”

  I leaned forward, willing Cal to believe me. “Listen, I did not particularly care for Brittanie Brinkman. But I didn’t wish her harm.”

  He just smiled that Sphinx-like smile.

  “And even if I did,” I said, “even if I wanted to kill her, I sure as heck wouldn’t have done it by pois
oning an ice-cream sundae.”

  “No?”

  “No. First, poisoned ice cream—”

  “Actually, I think it’s the topping that’s the issue.”

  “Whatever. Poisoned sundae topping makes me look pretty guilty. And I’m not that stupid. And second,” I added, feeling a glimmer of hope that this might convince him of my innocence, “Brittanie had made it perfectly clear that she didn’t like ice cream. She didn’t like any sort of sweets, and said my ice cream, in particular, was too rich.”

  “Huh.”

  “Yeah, huh. So if I wanted to kill Brittanie Brinkman, why would I put the poison in the one thing I knew she would not eat?”

  He cocked his head, as though he was considering my point.

  “Oh,” I added, “and you said you found the antifreeze in one of the red cups?” He nodded. “Well, those cups were special—without pineapple—just for Wayne.”

  “Another one of your all-time favorite people.”

  I shot him an evil look. “But Wayne didn’t even get sick, so clearly there wasn’t any poison in the sundae topping.”

  Cal drummed his fingers in a curious rhythm, then squared the corners of the papers on his desk. “Well, Tally Jones, you’ve sure given me something to chew on. Like I said, it may just be a big coincidence that the lab found that antifreeze on your plastic serving cup. I’ll be sure to let you know if we need to see you back in here.”

  I nodded. But I couldn’t quite leave things hanging the way they were.

  I swallowed hard. “Am I a suspect?” I asked.

  Cal leaned back in his chair and brushed invisible crumbs from his tie. “I wouldn’t say ‘suspect.’ ” For an instant I felt relief so strong I thought I might start to cry. But then he shrugged and added, “I would say ‘person of interest.’ ”

  chapter 16

  “What’s the difference?” Bree asked as she eye- balled a couple of jiggers of tequila into the blender.