She adjusted her glasses and I could see a movement in her throat as she swallowed. She said, “He has a gun, Mr Croft.”
I reached into my windbreaker and slid the .38 free and held it out. “So do I.”
Her voice went higher. “Mr. Croft, he’ll shoot you.”
“I don’t think so, Miranda.”
She pleaded. “Mr. Croft.”
“Forget it, Miranda. I know what happened.”
She shook her head, her arms pointed straight down, her hands balled into fists at her sides. Confusion twisted her features. “What are you talking about?”
“Did Biddle figure out that you stole the necklace? Or did you tell him?”
She shook her head, pale brown hair flying, “Mr. Croft, honestly, I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Where’s Killebrew, Miranda? How come he hasn’t shot me yet?”
Abruptly she straightened up, crossed her arms over her breasts. She said nothing. The light was fading more quickly now, all the color in the world moving toward gray.
When Rita had laid it all out for me this afternoon, my first reaction had been disbelief. The girl had seemed, the two times I saw her, too young and too vulnerable. Too innocent. And maybe those of us who see so little of it are the ones who most want to believe in innocence.
But the indications, the signposts, had been there all along. The clothes on the mother’s floor, the earlier robberies, the necklace never turning up, the fact of Biddle’s—and Killebrew’s—fondness for young girls.
I asked her, “Did you know it was the real necklace when you took it? Or didn’t you care? Were you just trying to hurt your mother?”
She spoke, and her voice was petulant. “I think you’re going crazy, Mr. Croft.”
“The clothes, Miranda. Your mother’s lingerie. Tossed all over the room. Killebrew wouldn’t have done that. No professional burglar would.” There had been no vandalism at any of the houses Killebrew had actually robbed. That had been what Rita meant, that had been the thing that wasn’t in the reports. Nolan hadn’t noticed it, or hadn’t cared; he had wanted to nail Killebrew.
She said nothing.
“Your friend Nancy Garcia,” I said. “Her family’s house was robbed two years ago. It was in the police reports, and a friend of mine talked to her mother today. You knew what a real burglary was like; you knew the details. You knew how to fake one.”
She merely stood there, watching me.
“You came back to the house, punched in the right sequence for the alarm—your brother had set it, hadn’t he.”
Still nothing from the girl.
“You knocked out the window in the living room, to make the burglary look real, and then you went upstairs and went through your mother’s room.”
She said, and her lip was curled in a sneer, “You can’t prove any of this.”
“I don’t know why you were so angry at your mother—”
“You saw the way she treats me.” She spat the words at me, fast and vicious. Then, as though regaining control of herself, she began to speak calmly, deliberately. “She hates me. She orders me around. She makes me feel stupid and ugly and clumsy.” Suddenly the girl cocked her head and said, “Why does she do that, Mr. Croft?” Asking me with genuine curiosity in her voice, as though there were actually an answer, and I knew what it was.
“I don’t know, Miranda. She’s afraid, probably. Most of us are afraid of something. Of growing old. Of losing her control, maybe. Of losing her looks.”
I could hear the disbelief in her voice. “But she’s beautiful.”
“But that won’t last forever.”
I saw that she didn’t really accept it. When you’re sixteen, everything lasts forever.
“She sent Frank away,” she said.
“You and Frank were …” I hesitated, looking for the right word. There really wasn’t one.
“He liked me,” she said. “He said he liked me a lot. He gave me cocaine. We had a lot of good times.”
It had been Miranda and Biddle talking about cocaine that her father had overheard, not Kevin and Biddle. And that had been, as Leighton admitted later, the reason he had fired Biddle.
“Your mother didn’t send Frank away, Miranda.”
“Yes she did. She used him, she had an affair with him, and then she threw him away.”
“Did Frank tell you that?”
“He didn’t have to. I’ve got eyes, you know.”
“Miranda, when did Frank find out about the necklace?”
“Two weeks ago. I told him.”
“You were seeing him again.”
“He came to the house and asked me to meet him. He said he still liked me.”
Had Biddle suspected all along that the girl had taken it? Possibly. He’d worked there, almost lived there for a long time. He must’ve seen how things were with the mother and the daughter.
“Why’d you kill him, Miranda?”
“I didn’t mean to. I really didn’t. He said he talked to you and found out we could get money for the necklace. He was going to sell the necklace back to the insurance company. He said we could go away together.”
I nodded. Although the air had grown cold, my hand was beginning to sweat along the grip of the revolver.
“But I didn’t want to. The necklace is mine now. It belongs to me. I didn’t want to sell it.”
“He threatened to let people know that you’d stolen it.”
“That was when I knew he was lying. About liking me. He only wanted the necklace. He wanted the money.”
“You had him meet you at the arroyo.”
“I wanted to frighten him away. I thought if I showed him the gun, he could see that I was serious and he’d leave me alone. But he only laughed at me, and then he kept coming at me. I really didn’t mean to kill him. I swear I didn’t.”
“What about Killebrew?” I said. “Did you really mean to kill him?”
She pursed her lips and shook her head, suddenly stubborn. “I don’t have to answer any of your questions.”
“He has to be dead, Miranda. It’s the only way you could make this work. Did you know him before this? Was he somebody else who gave you cocaine?”
“I’ve got to get away,” she said, and there was a frantic edge to her voice. “You don’t understand. Nobody does. Nothing’s right anymore. It’s like, since it happened, since I shot him, it’s like there’s this glass wall between me and everything else, you know? Like I reach out to touch things, or be with people, and I can’t get to them. I’m trapped inside there, and I don’t want it to be that way anymore. I’ve got to go away, Mr. Croft. I’ve got to get out, and I need that money.”
She didn’t understand yet, she might never understand, that no matter where she went, the wall of glass would be there, separating her from the rest of the world. It’s the human condition—we’re all of us separated, one from another, by those same walls. Miranda had just run up against hers earlier than most of us do.
I shook my head. “I’m sorry, Miranda.”
She frowned. “What’s going to happen to me?”
“I think we’ve got to talk to the police. The two of us.”
“They’ll tell my parents,” she said. “And then they’ll send me away.”
“I think your parents will help you, Miranda.”
“Not her. She’ll say it’s what I deserve.” She uncrossed her arms and her hands moved toward the pockets of the racing jacket.
I knew what she was going to try. There was one other person who had to be out of the way before this thing would work. I raised the gun. “Don’t, Miranda.”
“I’m cold, is all,” she said. She shrugged, and then she smiled. In the twilight, for a moment then, she looked the way she would in a year or two, still young, but tall and poised and very beautiful. “You’re not going to shoot me just because I’m cold.” She put her hands in her pockets.
I pulled the trigger.
The slug couldn’t have co
me closer to her than three feet. But she’d never been shot at before. Her hands jerked from her pockets, empty, and her mouth fell open. When I reached her, she was shaking. I took the pistol from her jacket pocket and slipped it into the pocket of my windbreaker. I put my hand on her shoulder. “Come on, Miranda. Everything will be all right.”
It was the second time I’d said that today, and both times it had been a lie.
BUT FOR A WHILE THERE, it seemed as though perhaps I hadn’t lied, that everything might, in fact, turn out all right. At least for Miranda.
Because the girl was sixteen years old, the state had the option of charging her either as an adult or as a juvenile. If charged as an adult, and convicted, she faced a mandatory life sentence in the penitentiary, with no parole for thirty years. If charged as a juvenile, she faced a year in the New Mexico Girls School, in Albuquerque.
Derek Leighton got her the best lawyer in the state, a former governor with a lot of flash and dazzle. From what I understand, Miranda’s testimony to the police and to the courts was impressive. She seemed open, honest, and sincerely repentant. She admitted shooting Biddle, but claimed it was an accident. She admitted stealing the necklace and the gun, and keeping them, but claimed she was sorry. She admitted shooting through my living-room window, but claimed that she hadn’t meant to hurt anyone, only to scare her mother and me, and to stop me from looking for the necklace. That last part, at least, I believe.
She claimed she knew nothing about Killebrew or his disappearance, and that part the police believed. The official theory was that after shooting at John Lucero and me, he had left the town, left the state, left the country.
Rita didn’t agree. She was convinced that the girl had gotten in touch with him somehow, had lured him off somewhere and killed him. I was inclined to agree with her; I’d seen Miranda reach into that windbreaker for the gun, and I’m certain that she intended to use it.
The court chose to try her as a juvenile. She was indicted for second-degree homicide, and she was convicted and sentenced to a year in the Girls School. She was due to be released in about three months.
Two weeks ago, a pair of hikers found a man’s decomposed body in a shallow grave in the forest up by the ski basin. The police investigation established that the man had been killed there, on or near the spot where he was buried, that he’d been buried almost immediately after having been shot, and that this had all occurred approximately a year ago, last spring. The run-off of winter’s meltwater, and the foraging animals, had exposed the body. Dental records from the penitentiary helped identify it as Killebrew’s, and the forensic lab of the state police had no trouble, even after all this time, matching the slug found in the body with the others fired from Miranda’s gun.
Her trial is set for next month. And the betting is that everything, this time, will not turn out all right.
I found the necklace, that day last year at the Cerillos turn-off, in the glove compartment of her Jeep Renegade, which she’d parked on the other side of the mound of boulders. Atco paid the finder’s fee to the Mondragón agency, but Allan Romero told Rita that Derek Leighton never reimbursed them for it. He didn’t want the necklace back.
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This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
copyright © 1987 by Walter Satterthwait
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