Suicide Blondes

by T. Blake Braddy

  Suicide Blondes

  A Nashville Suspense Novel

  T. Blake Braddy

  Jinx Protocol

  For Beau, for giving me a reason to dream big.

  Contents

  Read Like a ‘Queen’

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Epilogue

  This Email List May Ruin the Edge of Your Seat

  Read Like a ‘Queen’

  Join the T. Blake Braddy Email List, and you’ll get ‘Crystal Queen,’ the first Rolson McKane book, FREE.

  https://mailchi.mp/668a05145352/crystalqueen

  1

  I’m pretending to work when my mom calls. I don’t even bother to look at my phone, because I know it’s her. There’s something otherworldly or precognitive about a daughter’s relationship with her mother—she can just feel a phone call coming on. Something in the rhythm of it, the ebbs and flows, that tells you without telling you. And no matter how far away you move, a mother can always detect when you don’t want to talk.

  That’s when she strikes.

  Plus, because of everything that...happened way back when, people don’t much want to talk to me. I get an occasional call from your garden variety true crime crank, posing as a journalist, when in reality he—it’s always a he—is really looking for an edgy story for his blog. Other than that, I might as well be invisible.

  Or dead.

  The phone buzzes again, rattling on my desk. Reminding me of its existence. Begging for attention. Pleading for me to tend to it.

  I don’t fall for the bait that easily.

  I’m nobody’s candidate for World’s Best Daughter, but I would challenge anyone to endure my mother’s endless ruminations on her mortality. She’s been “dying” for the last twenty years, give or take. It’s never once been true—not a single time—but she is convinced it’s the big one at least twice a year. Whenever brain cancer or lupus or Parkinson’s drags one of her bridge club buddies down to the dear hereafter, I have to hear about it. Since I’m an only child—dad’s been gone since my freshman year—I am the point of contact for her histrionics.

  And yet she’s still here. Sounds callous. I get it. But you can bury your mother only so many times before the idea of her death becomes a little...stale.

  The phone rattles, beckoning me once more.

  Last chance, it seems to be saying.

  I’m not going to pick it up, I tell myself.

  But then I sigh.

  Like always, something in me breaks, and I can’t quite let the call go to voicemail. I slide my thumb across the screen’s display, anticipating her litany of grievances, pretending to be shocked about the color of her neck mole or the longevity or persistence of her headaches. Maybe she’s sleeping too much, or not enough, or the hallucinations mean she’s in the last stages of some neurological disease.

  “Mom, this isn’t a good time,” I say, staring at the nearly blank document on my computer screen. “I’m really busy—”

  Only, it isn’t her on the other end.

  For a moment, I wonder if someone’s stolen her identity. But then, why would they be calling me?

  I check the display again.

  It’s her phone. Her number. But the voice on the other end is a young-sounding nurse at the hospital where my mother practically has her own ward. As the woman speaks—telling me this isn’t normal protocol but that my mother had begged her—the subsequent words pass through my ears and into my brain, but the shock won’t let them sink in.

  All of a sudden, my whole body is trembling.

  You can never guess when it is the call, and no matter how many times you play it out in your head, it’s impossible to prepare yourself for the real thing.

  And this is the real thing.

  This is the call. The thing you prepare yourself for when you occasionally look up from your computer screen or your phone and think, At some point, I will cease to be me, and the ground will open up wide and swallow me whole.

  By the time I replace my phone to its current position on my desk, my eyes are brimming over and I’m having trouble catching my breath. As if the roof of the office has just been ripped off, and the loss of cabin pressure is sucking the breath right out of me.

  The nurse had used a whole lot of lingo, but the gist of it was, Your mother doesn’t have long to live. If you want to say goodbye, get home right this instant.

  So, naturally, I go out for a smoke. I need something to get my hands to stop shaking, or at least get my mind off how they won’t stop shaking.

  I get up and amble past all the cubicles at the start-up where I work in a non-creative position writing code. I suspect this place is a money pit, a simple but effective way for tech billionaires to launder money, but I never name it aloud, mostly because I don’t think I can find another job where people will literally leave me alone for twelve hours a day, sixteen during crunch periods.

  I stop at my supervisor’s desk, dreading the conversation I’m about to have.

  Ian, the human equivalent of a man bun, smiles benignly as I tell him about my needs. Being a people first organization, how I function is a top priority for the project managers, and the touchy-feeliness of it all sometimes makes me want to gag.

  It’s the sort of place that strives not to look or feel like work. There are scooters in the office. Ping pong tables in the break room. Some people sit on bean bag chairs. They’d prefer you use the term inspired employment or something equally as euphemistic.

  When I’m done half-explaining myself, I just come out with it.

  “I need a cigarette,” I say, my voice quavering, and he frowns disapprovingly.

  I’m not surprised by the reaction. It’s almost comforting, given the bit of news which has just ripped the veneer of comfort from my life.

  Still, I can’t help but be annoyed.

  Among the granola-loving crowd at Morning Manatee—ugh, I know—smoking plays in the same ballpark as burning crosses or eating corn-fed beef. The lifers here are way into smoothies and pilates, a juice cleanse or a morning run, while I’m more of a bourbon-and-Ambien kind of gal. I don’t fit in, not in the least, but I’m quiet and somewhat productive, so I’m allowed to exist within their organic cult.

  But the smoking. It seriously bums Ian out.

  He leans contemplatively back in his chair.

  “I hear you,” he says. When combined with the beatific smile, it’s his introduction to a long-winded rant about the environment.

  Instead, his face contorts into a look of concern.

  My second surprise of the day.

  “It’s your mother,” he says, sage-like.

  I bunch up all my emotions into a tight knot and respond, “She’s not doing well.”

  It’s all I can manage without tearing up, and that seems like enough for him. He nods, showing me the top knot on the back of his skull, like a tumor made of hair.

  “And I assume you’ll need some time off.”

  “Listen,” I say, not quite ready to broach the topic, “I know it’s getting crazy here, pre-launch and everything—”

  “Say no more,” he says, hold one of his long-fingered hands up to sil
ence me. He cannot be aware of how passive-aggressive that gesture is.

  “It probably shouldn’t take more than a week or so,” I say. “Maybe two at the most. It just depends on—”

  I can’t finish the sentence.

  He watches me idly, holding up a box of tissues I refuse, before continuing.

  “I know,” he says. “These things, they are never expected. I am totally in tune with that. I get it. I am with you. Take as much time as you need. Not the time we allow.”

  There is an awkward silence, wherein I ramble through a paragraph strewn with gratitude. Like a résumé littered with buzzwords.

  He lets me finish and then steeples his fingers in front of his face.

  “Not to pry,” he says, “but it’s coming up on the twenty-year anniversary, isn’t it?”

  I nod. It’s my hope that he doesn’t dredge up the past, but I’m willing to cop to anything to get downstairs for my cigarette.

  I need one.

  “This place,” he says, “works very much like a family. You’ve got a lot going on up top, so you can take that time to clear your mind. We’ll need you in full form when you get back, so it’s actually good this is happening right now. I mean—”

  He catches himself, mid-faux pas, and blushes.

  I wave it off.

  With a cigarette perched between my lips, the world makes a lot more sense. I stare emptily at the Seattle skyline. I wonder what it looks like from the top of the Space Needle, how it would feel to base jump off of it. Or just not open a parachute and see the ground come rushing up at me from below.

  Anything to keep me from thinking of my mother, but of course that doesn’t work. I’ll be going back home for the foreseeable future.

  Nashville.

  The word sticks in my brain like popcorn seeds to teeth, and I mull over Music City and all my own personal associations with it as I finish off a second cigarette. My head spins from the nicotine, and relish the high.

  Growing up, Nashville was a blinking, shuffling, denim nightmare, a place to grow up and move away from. But even on the other side of the country—as far away from Nashville as possible, without jumping into the ocean—I can’t escape it.

  The city haunts me, though I am its most prominent monster.

  Someone talking angrily on her cell phone seems to recognize me, and her eyes go dull as she passes by. She looks like she wants to say something.

  She ends up twisting her mouth into a frown and rolling her eyes.

  My past owns me like an old debt I cannot escape.

  I’d nearly forgotten about the network TV from a few weeks back. These things pop up occasionally, stoke the flames of everyone’s anger, and then eventually calm down. I’ve learned how to keep my head down and avoid public confrontations.

  These things can end up on the internet, after all.

  It’s like an omen, this woman’s reaction. Foreshadowing. Even without the blonde hair, with shades on, I am recognizable as one of the quote-unquote Suicide Blondes. It speaks to just how angry the story makes everyone.

  Understandably.

  I’ve tried for twenty years to escape the title, the reputation, the truth. Nashville isn’t just my home; it’s where I helped kill someone.

  Later, I’m standing over an empty suitcase in my smallish, underfurnished apartment, waiting for the clothes, shoes, and make-up to dive in so I can attempt to be on time for my flight, when my phone chirps, a bird with no nest.

  I check the phone’s display, see the familiar blue-and-white icon which means someone has posted something.

  It doesn’t take much to distract me.

  This moment breaks the fever of pretending to pack.

  Instantly, I’m entranced, and the distraction feels like two mid-afternoon cigarettes.

  If the brain had salivary glands, then that sound—any digital sound, really—would have the brain drooling. It’s the clarion call of our generation. The Pied Piper of post-9/11 America.

  But it’s not all candy.

  At least a million people per year crash their cars because of cell phones. Because the urge to be involved in someone else’s world—or to create your own—is too great to ignore.

  This is my generation’s great struggle. Darwin’s plan for Millenials.

  And I am not immune to it.

  I check my phone and see: Someone I know has updated her status.

  Not just anybody.

  Madeline St. Clair.

  The Queen of Green Hills.

  The Bitch of Belle Meade.

  One need only peer at her profile to see she doesn’t live like the rest of us. Oh, she eats and shits and probably still has her period—I assume—but she doesn’t exist in any world but her own, and she decides whom she let across the velvet rope of her friendship.

  Even if it’s had its own sort of miraculous revival, Nashville hasn’t changed that much, especially when it comes to the Belle Meade crowd, the upper crust of southern gentility. The people may change, but the last names never do, and the St. Clairs have been in Nashville since before the first bricks of Fort Negley were set.

  It’s absolutely annoying.

  I read the status, and my stomach does a backflip.

  > Looking forward to the twenty-year reunion with all my girls! it says, and I can’t help but scream FUCK! into the pillow next to my computer.

  It’s that time of year. It’s that year.

  Twenty years, coming up.

  Couldn’t my mother die some other point in my life? Any other point in my life?

  The comments are all what you’d expect, obsequious servants to heir St. Clair—she never took her husband’s last name, because why would she—trying desperately to win her favor.

  It’s been this way her whole life. Madeline’s only existed in a world where people agree to each and every request because they’re afraid of what will happen to them if they don’t. She is like a mercurial, inbred king of some foreign country, with an executioner on hand for all of her public pronouncements.

  I will avoid the blade. My FaceBook persona is one I’ve crafted out of whole cloth, in part because I like the anonymity, but mostly for the simple reason that no one would knowingly befriend someone they considered a murderer.

  Well, I mean, unless I had something like the St. Clair fortune backing me. Then, silly obstacles like bullying someone into committing suicide would be a footnote in her life.

  Which it is.

  No one seems to mind who she is and what she’s done. Madeline St. Clair has never suffered a moment’s worth of setbacks for her role in Everett Coughlin’s death. She’s the socialite of all socialites.

  She has as much blood on her hands as I do. Or Gillian. Or Audrey.

  Everybody knows. Nobody cares.

  Nobody, it seems, except me.

  I’ve spent the whole of my adult life in hiding, like a refugee from my homeland. I haven’t exactly been dreaming of going back to Nashville, but it would be nice to be able to walk down the street without people staring.

  Because of the way I’ve been portrayed over the years—the mastermind of an adolescent plot to destroy another kid’s life—I live my life like a Yeti Charles Manson. Widely reviled, rarely seen.

  I’m not a victim or a survivor or anything. I don’t believe I’ve been given a raw deal. I was totally complicit in the whole debacle. I deserve the title Suicide Blonde.

  But I’m not the only one.

  And there’s no way to tell my side of the story.

  There is no my side of the story. Not really.

  I don’t do interviews. There’s no need to. The public has made up its collective mind, and I am the Jim Jones of this whole People’s Temple. I’ve always felt like trying to make some grand gesture about, well, spreading the blame out would only make me look bitter.

  Not that it’s untrue.

  I am bitter.

  Depressed, even. I spend entire nights with the sides of my pillow pressed against my ears, stari
ng at the ceiling, trying to make sense of my life.

  But none of it makes sense. I can’t escape any of it.

  If I were a murderer—a killer—then it would be easy to put the instrument of my evil away. The gun I’d used to fire on my victim. The knife I’d used to stab them.

  I can’t. How do you deprive yourself of a computer? Of social media? Of your phone?

  Each day I wake up, I am reminded of what I did. And I should be. What I did was horrible. And yet, I wish each and every night for some kind of absolution.

  Twenty years on, and I’m still wishing for it.

  There’s a part of me that thinks maybe I could bounce back, if only I could get the right break. I don’t even know what that means.

  I just know, I hate Madeline St. Clair. I hate her for who she is and what she represents. I’m not the only one. I am intimately aware of the jealousy that surrounds her like a cloud—an intoxicating perfume of envy—but my reasons are wholly my own.

  These are the things I think of when I stalk Madeline online.

  I’ve spent the last twenty years hiding from myself, from them, from it.

  But that time is over.

  Now, I’m heading back to Nashville.

  Here we go.

  The first thing I notice after de-planing at BNA is just how corporate Nashville has become. There’s always been a price tag dangling from the city, but the booming economy has turned Music City into a Metropolitan dollar sign.

  You can buy red, white, and blue shirts emblazoned with the unofficial motto, I Believe in Nashville, or hats festooned with the airport’s logo, if that’s your sort of thing. Aw shucks propaganda.