“I just don’t like knives. Or guns.”
“This from the woman whose hands are basically lethal weapons.”
They both laughed at that, each recalling how they had met, grateful for the release of shared laughter.
He changed the subject. “The biggest bummer is that I used that number on the applications I submitted, so if anyone calls, I’ll never know. But hey, some other bum might get a job now.” He tried to laugh at his joke. “It’s not like anyone’s gonna call anyway. No one wants a homeless druggie working for them.”
“Ex-druggie,” she said. She paused. “Right?”
He gave her the same bemused grin. “Yes, ex.”
“I was worried today that that’s what happened. That you’d had a weak moment and maybe done some drugs and OD’d—I saw on Dr. Phil once how it’s easy for people who get clean to OD because they go back and do the same amount they used to—or whatever—and it’s too much because they’ve lost their tolerance and so it kills them and . . .” The worries of the day rushed back in a whoosh of emotion. The tears came, and she knew she was powerless to hold them in. “I was afraid that’s what had happened and maybe you’d fallen in that lake and it was you they found.” She didn’t know if he could even understand her through her tears.
He pulled her to him. “Shhh,” he said. “I’m here. I’m OK. I’m sorry I scared you.”
She nodded into his shoulder. Again, they were silent. As each minute passed, they relaxed into each other more and more.
She was starting to think he’d fallen back asleep, when he spoke. “I have to admit: it’s nice to have someone worried about me. Someone who’s waiting to see if I come home.” He chuckled. “Though I guess this isn’t really a home.”
“It’s a start,” she said.
“You really think that?” This time he sounded like a child, small and scared.
“I do,” she said.
“Thank you. For believing in me. I can’t tell you—I mean I honestly can’t put into words—just how much that means to me. How much you’ve helped me. I don’t know what I’d have done if you hadn’t found me that day sneaking out of here.”
“I’ll get you another phone. Tomorrow,” she said.
He raised up on his elbow and looked down at her. “It is tomorrow,” he said.
She smiled up at him, thinking what they must look like, huddled together in a garden shed, on a bedroll, her in a white old-lady nightgown, him in the clothes he’d worn that day, both of them grinning like idiots. “I guess it is,” she said. And then he kissed her, just a chaste touch of his lips on hers, there and gone. But the touch memory, and the feeling that came with it, would stay with her for hours.
“I should get back inside,” she said.
“Yes,” he agreed. “And I’m sorry if that was wrong of me to do.”
“It wasn’t wrong,” she said. And as she said it, she knew that that wasn’t true, but it was true, all at the same time.
Nico
He’d made John Hobgood, the medical examiner, promise to call him as soon as an ID was made on the body, no matter how late it was. He’d slept with his phone on, resting on his chest so it would wake him. He was a notoriously deep sleeper, thanks to spending his youth sharing a room with Matteo, who had been a night owl, playing music, talking on the phone, leaving the lights on till the wee hours. Nico had had to get his sleep somehow, burrowing into unconsciousness with the same determination and tenacity he applied to the rest of his life. He didn’t know whether to blame Matteo or thank him for that.
When the phone rang in the wee hours, he woke up, immediately alert and aware, none of the usual confusion and fog clinging to him. He knew exactly who would be calling and why.
He answered the phone. “It’s him, isn’t it?” was all he said.
There was a pause. “Yeah,” Hobgood said. There was another pause. “I’m so sorry, man,” he added.
Nico found that he couldn’t form words to answer his friend, a man who’d bent some rules and outright broken others for him on investigations in the past. A man he owed many favors to. A man who would understand that he simply couldn’t speak at that moment. A man who would expect that the only response he’d receive from Nico was the dial tone buzzing in his ear.
Violet
October 11
She texted Casey first thing that morning but got no response. It was Sunday, the day she and Micah had planned to go to the storage unit. But now that it was happening, she didn’t think she had the balls to go through with it alone. She needed Casey to go with her but hesitated as she wondered whether Casey could be nice to Micah for a whole afternoon. Still, Violet didn’t know how to be alone with him for that long. And she had no one else to ask. Feeling desperate, she tried Casey again an hour later. She put 911 in the text this time, hoping that would get Casey’s attention. Sure enough, her phone rang almost immediately.
“Violet?” Casey’s voice sounded anxious. “What’s wrong?”
Violet paused, feeling bad that she’d worried Casey. “Well, um, nothing big.”
“Nothing big? You don’t use 911 for nothing big! That means emergency.” The tone of Casey’s voice sounded familiar. Violet had heard it a number of times, but always directed at Nicole, not her.
“I’m sorry,” Violet said. “I texted you earlier and didn’t hear back, and I was starting to get worried I wouldn’t hear back in time.”
“I was asleep,” Casey grumbled.
“Oh,” Violet said. She hadn’t considered that. She’d barely slept the night before and had been up since light first streaked the sky, trying to figure out what to wear and what to say. She would be with Micah Berg for hours. A few minutes of conversation was fine; she’d managed that already. But hours? She couldn’t be funny and smart for hours. It was impossible.
“So what was your nothing-big 911?” Casey asked. Violet could hear her covers rustling. Casey truly had just woken up, wasn’t even out of bed yet. Violet felt heartened that she hadn’t blown her off.
“Well, I’m going with Micah Berg today for this, um, well, it’s kind of a secret mission, and I wondered if maybe you’d like to go with us?” She wondered as she said it if Micah Berg would want Casey to know his suspicions about his father. Probably not, she decided. She hadn’t thought this through, thinking more of her own nerves than Micah’s needs. “I’m doing some investigation into my mother’s case. You know, on my own. And Micah said he’d go with me.”
Casey sniffed. “Well, he doesn’t have much else to do, so he might as well.” Violet could picture her pursing her lips in that way she did when she didn’t like something.
“Well, I just thought maybe you’d like to come with us? Help us out?”
There was silence, and for a moment Violet was conflicted. If Casey said yes, Micah might be mad that she was there. But if she said yes, then there would be someone else to take the pressure off being alone with him for that long. “I’d normally say yes, but I can’t today. I’ve got a lunch date.”
Violet felt relieved and disappointed at the same time. “Oh, with Eli?” she asked, even though she no longer cared. She needed to get off the phone with Casey and get back to figuring out what to wear and what to say. Maybe she could make a list of topics to discuss, questions to ask, and amusing anecdotes that she could share to keep the conversation going.
“Actually, no,” Casey said, surprising Violet. “Not with Eli. With someone I met. Someone new.” Casey was being coy.
“What about Eli?” Violet asked, feeling strangely defensive of Casey’s ex-boyfriend. Maybe because she knew what it felt like to be dumped by a Strickland sister.
“He’s around, too,” Casey said, and giggled.
“Casey!” Violet said. “You”—she realized she was talking loudly and lowered her voice lest her grandmother overhear—“you had sex with Eli.”
Casey’s tone changed. “I’m well aware of that, Violet.”
“Well, isn’t that supposed t
o mean something?” Violet didn’t know what it meant exactly, only what she’d seen on TV and heard whispered about in school.
Casey was quiet for a long time. When she spoke again, her voice was flat. “It doesn’t mean nearly what they tell you,” she said. “It doesn’t have to mean a thing.” There was another long pause, and Violet was just about to speak up when Casey spoke again. “Just ask your mother,” she said.
Violet sputtered as she tried to come up with something to say in response, but Casey interrupted her.
“No, Violet, I don’t mean that as a dig against her. I mean it as a compliment. I think maybe your mom had it figured out. She took control of sex. She used it to help herself. And I think maybe that’s the best thing any of us can do. I think she was onto something.”
“My mom’s in jail,” Violet said, hearing how small her voice sounded, how weak.
“She won’t stay there,” Casey said. “You watch and see.” Violet could sense her smiling as she spoke.
“You don’t know anything,” Violet said, angry at Casey for saying what she’d said, for smiling as she’d said it.
Casey started to justify her comment, but Violet hung up the phone. She didn’t have time to waste on Casey Strickland and whatever was going on with her. She needed to get to that storage unit and see what might be hidden there that could help Micah Berg and, more importantly, could help her mother.
Hours later, hot, tired, and dirty, Violet couldn’t believe she’d worried about what to wear. She’d chosen jeans and a solid-color T-shirt, which seemed understated and suited for combing through a storage unit for something they hoped they would know when they saw it. But after digging through the stacks of boxes, all they’d found of note were some rather embarrassing photos of Violet, age three, and some old letters from a guy Norah had dated right after her divorce. Micah had started to read them out loud, but Violet had silenced him with a look. She didn’t want to hear whatever that loser had had to say to her mother.
“Look for papers, notebooks, legal pads, flash drives, floppy disks—anything that could contain a list,” she’d instructed Micah when they arrived. “And look for anything with the name Lois on it.”
“Lois?” Micah asked. “Is that, like, your mom’s code name or something?”
“No. It’s her silent partner. No one can figure out who she is. I read about it online. Someone who—if we could find out who she is—could probably tell us anything we want to know about that list.”
But they’d found none of those things so far.
She stood in front of the warped mirror on top of an old vanity that her mother had shoved into the corner and stared at her grubby reflection. She wiped away a smear of dust that had blended with the sweat on her face and decided she should’ve foregone the makeup she had so carefully applied and worn athletic shorts and an old T-shirt. She glanced over at Micah, flipping through a box of things that belonged to her father, oblivious to her presence. She shouldn’t have cared at all what she looked like for him. He’d hardly noticed.
“We’ve got just those boxes left,” she said, pointing at a stack of boxes behind him. “And then we’re done.”
He looked over at the last boxes and nodded. “I’ve basically lost hope that there’s anything in here.”
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I’d hoped we’d find the list.”
He shrugged. “At least we tried.” He held up a magazine, an old Sports Illustrated. “You mind if I keep this?” he asked.
She didn’t know why he would want some old magazine, but she didn’t figure anyone would miss it, so she nodded. “You can keep anything you want from that box,” she said.
“Whose stuff is it?” he asked.
She shrugged. “My dad’s.”
“How long have they been divorced?” He closed up the box, taking nothing else from it.
“Since I was two. I don’t remember them ever being together.”
“That’s kinda sad,” he said. “I can’t imagine my parents not being together.”
She wanted to ask: But you can imagine your father with a prostitute? But she didn’t. Mostly because she didn’t want to say the word prostitute to Micah Berg.
As if he were reading her mind, he said, “You’re probably wondering why I’d be looking for what I’m looking for if that was the case?”
She gave him a smile without showing any teeth. “Little bit, yeah.”
“I wouldn’t have thought him capable of something like that, but with everything that’s happened, he’s just been—I don’t know—different. Toward me, toward my mom. He seems like he doesn’t really want to be at home, like he’s sad all the time. And when I overheard him talking about . . .” He paused, then continued. “Well, about your mom’s arrest.” He glanced over at her apologetically. “He seemed like he was talking about it as more than just neighborhood news, as if he—I don’t know—had some involvement, or knowledge. Maybe.” He looked around the small room crammed with stuff. “I could’ve been wrong.” He sighed. “I hope I am.”
“I hope you are, too.”
The silence between them stretched uncomfortably, so she turned to the last stack of boxes and opened the top one. The sight of a whole stack of papers renewed her hope. She picked up the stack, thinking that underneath there could be a drive or disk or anything that could contain the file. But she found nothing under the papers, so she dropped to the ground and began going through them, discovering legal papers from her parents’ divorce, a whole pile of them traded between their attorneys for years.
Some of the papers mentioned her. Her father, unsurprisingly, had not fought her mother for custody. But that was the only thing, from the looks of it, that he hadn’t fought her on. Violet sorted through them, trying to make sense of the legal jargon, to understand just what had transpired between her parents. It had been, from the looks of things, a bitter divorce. Her father had had the better attorney. If there was a winner in the divorce, he had won, conceding to give her mother the home they’d shared but leaving her with little support to afford it. She found pages of back-and-forth between the attorneys over this issue. How could her father have done that to them, to her? Her mother had never told her any of this, and of course, she did not remember. As far back as her memory went, they’d always been OK, better than OK, really. They’d always had the money to do whatever they wanted. Something must have changed. And then it dawned on her what had.
Micah came over and sat down beside her, his eyebrows raised hopefully. “Is there something in that box?”
She shook her head, feeling ashamed, though she didn’t know why exactly. It wasn’t her divorce. But in a way, it was. And the decisions that had come after, as her mother had built her business with a relentless drive Violet never understood, as she somehow got involved with this prostitution ring, all of it had started here, in these papers, as her mother had fought to keep her daughter in her home, to provide for her child. No wonder Norah had taken this storage room out in Violet’s name. She hadn’t wanted her ex anywhere near her things, because he seemed intent on taking whatever he could from her. The client list wasn’t in this storage unit, Violet understood. But their past was—a past her mother wanted to lock up and walk away from. Violet pulled the stack of papers to her chest.
“Seriously. If it’s bad, just tell me,” Micah said. “Don’t hide it. I need to know.”
She shook her head again. “It has nothing to do with your dad. I promise.”
He tried to tug the papers from her, but she held on tight, her eyes hard as she looked at him. “Seriously. It’s old stuff. Legal stuff. It’s nothing.”
He crossed his arms and cocked his head. “So prove it. Let me see.”
She shook her head more forcefully. “I swear to you on my mother’s life that this has nothing to do with the list,” she said.
He blinked at the intensity of her words, then nodded, satisfied that she wasn’t keeping something from him, and stood up. He reached out his hand, of
fering to pull her up. She shifted the papers into the crook of her left arm and reached out. He pulled her up, and the weight of the papers pulled her forward, into him. For a moment their bodies touched and their hands stayed clasped. Neither of them blinked as they studied each other. The only sound she could hear was their breathing. Then she remembered what she’d looked like in that mirror and pulled away. She didn’t want him seeing her this close up when she looked and smelled like she did.
She put the papers back in the box and moved it over to reveal the one underneath it. She pulled the lid off to find a box of old record albums that had likely belonged to her father. They’d probably fought about them long ago, and her mother had hidden them from him just because she could. Good for you, Mom, Violet thought. For the first time in weeks, she felt proud of her mother.
“You go through this one,” she told Micah, pointing at the albums. “I doubt there’s anything in here, but we might as well look just so we know.”
He mock saluted her. “Yes, ma’am.”
She sneered at him and moved out of the way so he could lift the box and begin. The next box held travel brochures, lots of them. She riffled through them, taking note of the many destinations her mother had been interested in: Hawaii, London, Australia, China. How interesting that this box existed in the same stack with the legal papers. How sad that even as she’d been fighting to keep her house and support her daughter, she’d been dreaming of escaping to someplace far away.
Micah, done with the albums, closed the box and looked over her shoulder, dangerously close again. “Does your mom like to travel?” he asked.
“No,” she said. “We never really went anywhere.”
“Well, she must’ve wanted to. At some point.” He reached into the box and held up a handful of brochures. “I’m getting some ideas for future trips.” She let him look through the brochures while she hurried through the last box, full of old fan magazines from when her mother was a kid: Teen Beat and Tiger Beat. From the looks of things, her mother had had a pretty big crush on Tom Cruise back in the day.
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