“She’ll rally,” the doctor said. “But it’s a good thing you brought her in when you did. Pneumonia isn’t anything to play around with.”
I cashed in on some unused vacation time, stayed with her those nights in the hospital, took care of her when she got released. Other than my daily trips to the grocery or drugstore, and walking Picasso to and from school, I was by Diana’s side.
One night, I decided to head out to the back porch and have a drink; I hadn’t touched the juice since some time during my stuck phase. One became several. At some point, I closed my eyes. My parade of words got longer and longer, and then it went crazy. Instead of streaming, it spun through my mind, creating layers and layers of concentric rings, each new one closing in on me, until I was inside a swirling mathematical vortex, the words adding and subtracting—guilty/not guilty, prison/acquittal, murderer/innocent—until only two remained.
Rendezvous, Picasso.
Picasso
It was about a month before Mama’s, Jewels’s, and Bert’s reunion, and a few months after the Ryan Anderson walking Lucy Baxter home incident. Long enough for Lucy and me to have become best friends (as it turned out we were the only two Aquarians in our grade and we smart innovators needed to stick together so we could cause world change); for the two of us to have done some major Get Back at Ryan Anderson pranks, like puncture the tires on his bike and glue the pages of his math book together; for Ryan to have gotten a new girlfriend, Kelly Morgan of all people; and for Detective Kennedy to have temporarily moved into our house.
Mama had gotten sick with pneumonia and Detective Kennedy came to take care of her. I’d forgotten how much I missed having a daddy; it was like being part of a family again, an even better family. Detective Kennedy walked me to and from school every day, did things he said he would, seemed really interested in everything I had to say, and knew as much or more than Daddy about pretty much everything, including Pablo Picasso. He took me to a traveling retrospective exhibit at the Mint Museum of Art in Charlotte and, so I could remember what I’d seen, bought me an expensive book about the artist. Now, we’d studied Pablo Picasso in school, so I didn’t need the book or the exhibit to tell me that he and another artist named Georges Braque created cubism, but seeing so many of his paintings, especially the cubist ones, in person did help me to understand what Pablo Picasso had meant by that quote: Art is a lie that makes us realize truth. There were all those angles put together in the shape of a woman (for instance), and although anyone could see it wasn’t a woman, the paint and the brushstrokes and the colors and the composition made it something even better. The lie made the truth prettier. As I’ve come to learn through this whole Daddy dying experience, sometimes people prefer a lie to the truth. But the thing is, if you aren’t careful, that can get you in trouble.
Detective Kennedy is a good example of this. He knew all along that Mama, Jewels, and Bert knew one another before Daddy died, and he suspected them of killing Daddy, and yet because he liked Mama so much, from the very beginning when he first walked into the beach house that day, he chose not to see the truth. But the biggest irony of the whole Kill Daddy mess was when I realized I had actually become a victim of my own name. Because Detective Kennedy had been being so nice to Mama and me, I chose not to see that he was a detective.
It happened on the way home from school one day. Detective Kennedy suggested we stop off at Dairy Queen. He ordered for us: a chocolate cone for him and a vanilla for me. I’m not too big on cones, but at least he’d remembered the vanilla part. He suggested we eat at one of the picnic tables outside, which was fine by me. The table was right out front between the Dairy Queen and the road, so everyone in the world could see us. I felt proud and safe.
As usual, I was wearing my school uniform. Detective Kennedy almost always wore a suit when he was being in his official capacity, but since he’d been staying at our house he was dressing more casually. That day, he wore jeans, a pink polo shirt (which looked pretty nice on him, but still surprised me), and running shoes. He didn’t look anything like a detective, but people were staring and whispering anyway. Ever since Mama and he began holding hands in public, the rumors had started up all over again. I guess that goes to show that there’s no such thing as a dead rumor; at best rumors hibernate. None of this penetrated my Super Picasso armor. Lucy Baxter and I just ignored them. That was the difference between her and Kelly Morgan; Lucy was loyal.
Detective Kennedy licked a drip of chocolate ice cream off his hand. “Sure gets hot here early, don’t you think? It’s not even officially summer yet.” He didn’t seem to want me to answer his question. Detective Kennedy was big into rhetorical questions. We both licked for a while and then he dropped the first bomb.
“Bet your mama is excited about her reunion with Jewels and Bert.”
The safe feeling scurried away as fast as a cockroach. I stopped licking and practically dropped my cone. All I said was “Reunion?”
“Yeah, you know,” he said. “When people get back together again after a long time apart.” Did he think I was two years old? I knew what reunion meant.
So there I was, cornered, like a bug by a cat. Should I act dumb? Should I ask who Jewels and Bert were? Should I tell him they weren’t planning a reunion, at least that I knew about? But if I did that, it would be like admitting that Mama knew Jewels and Bert. I decided not to say anything, which I guess was kind of like acting dumb. That worked for about five seconds.
“Rainy Cove Park, right?” he asked.
And right then and there it was like the road and the ground shook and the Dairy Queen and the picnic tables and the utility poles and the cars driving by started crashing and breaking and collapsing into a big black hole while I just stood there watching. And I remembered the sad expression on Detective Kennedy’s face when he was looking at Mama’s catchall book, and the fear I’d felt then, and how I’d pushed it away because lying to myself was easier than believing what I knew to be true, that Detective Kennedy had seen that note about Rainy Cove Park that Mama wrote in the margin, just like I’d seen it that day when I tried to tell Mama I knew what the three of them were planning.
As if the first bomb hadn’t caused enough chaos, he dropped a second.
“Did your mama tell you we found the gun?”
Found the gun?
I started sweating, and not because it was hot out. My heart was obviously pumping so much blood to the rest of my body that it was boiling my skin. Detective Kennedy was staring at me. I wondered if he’d watched Mama’s face when he told her about finding the gun like he was watching mine.
I shook my head no.
“That makes sense,” he said. “She’s probably protecting you.”
“From what?” I asked.
“Well, you know, uncomfortable information. Some kid, about your age in fact, found it washed up on the sand about a mile from the beach house. We didn’t connect it to your daddy’s murder right away, but when we ran the ballistics—” He stopped. “You probably don’t know what ballistics means, do you?”
Seriously? Of course I knew what ballistics meant, and not from one of my dictionaries. I watched TV, didn’t I?
“No,” I said.
“Well, it means we had the gun studied to see if its bullets matched any recent shootings on Cooper’s Island. Took us a while because we only went back a few months at first, and then Mack, Detective Jones I mean, thought we should check back further, so we were able to match them to the ones that killed your daddy. But that still didn’t necessarily mean it was the same gun. Lots of guns use the same bullets. Then we ran the serial number. Did you know your daddy had a gun, Picasso?”
“No, sir.” I could feel my face getting red, and then my eyes got so wet I couldn’t see through them.
“I’m sorry, sweetie,” Detective Kennedy said, but I barely heard him because I’d started crying.
I couldn’t believe it. I’m not even sure what started it. And when I say crying, I mean tears we
re running out of my eyes so fast they were falling off my chin before I even had a chance to wipe them away with my sleeve. I was really embarrassed, but as it turned out it was a good thing because Detective Kennedy got all concerned.
“I didn’t mean to upset you,” he said in a very soft and soothing voice. “You’re so smart that I keep forgetting you’re only a kid.”
He came around to my side of the picnic table like he was going to put his arms around me or something, but there was no way I was getting hugged. Besides, my ice-cream cone, not to mention my hand and part of my arm, was a gloppy mess by then. I stepped over the bench, walked to the trash can, and threw what was left of my cone away. Luckily I remembered there was one of those napkin holders on the metal shelf by the Dairy Queen’s outside window, so I grabbed a bunch and started wiping the sticky cream off me. I remember I rubbed for a long time. I think I was trying to figure out what to do or say next. I didn’t understand why Detective Kennedy was telling me all that stuff. I guess it could’ve all been innocent, like maybe he was just filling me in, which would be pretty cool, because that would mean he really did think I was smart and that he wasn’t just saying so, but then I started thinking that maybe none of it had been true, that he’d just been pretending to be Mama’s boyfriend, and maybe just like Ryan Anderson and Daddy, he had done it all for selfish reasons, in this case so he could catch Daddy’s killer, which under different circumstances would be a good thing, but in this circumstance definitely wasn’t, and so maybe I should just raise my head high and stomp, stomp, stomp away from Detective Kennedy and keep stomping until I got home, and then never ever talk to him again. I was so confused I couldn’t tell the difference between whether I just wanted to believe that Detective Kennedy had good intentions, or whether deep down I knew that what I felt was true: that Detective Kennedy was different, that he really did love Mama and me, and that he would never intentionally hurt us.
Then I realized none of my thoughts even mattered. What had happened, happened. Daddy was dead, and the police had the gun that shot him. Which meant if this whole story were a painting, the painting would suck. I hadn’t lived up to my name. Instead of making things prettier, everything, all the rumors, all the lies, all the deception, was its ugly self. And maybe because at that moment I felt like my heart was breaking into a million pieces and that it would never ever grow back together again, and my stomach was churning so bad I thought I might throw up, I asked Detective Kennedy the question I most wanted an answer to, but had always been afraid to ask, at least out loud.
“Is Mama going to—?”
Before I could get the last word out, I started to sob.
Kyle
There are cases you take to the grave; I had a pretty good idea that this would be one of them, but not for the usual reasons. Usually it’s a case you can’t solve, that you keep picking at over and over in your head. Something you missed that bugs you. Something you can’t find, like that key. Something that plays with your mind. Maybe there never was a key, you think. Maybe there wasn’t a safe-deposit box. Maybe there wasn’t any money. The maybes can drive you crazy if you let them, but this case hadn’t been about maybes; it was about denial. The key, the interviews, the mix-ups with the wives, the time of death, the hair, Lindsay Middleton, all of it was just details. We always had motive. We always had opportunity. We always had our eyewitness: Picasso. I saw it on her face that first day when she was sitting on the sofa holding her mother’s hand so tight her knuckles were red. I saw it on my way down the beach-house stairs when she was working on her sand castle. I saw it when I looked up to see her staring at me right after I found the note in the catchall book. I saw it as she watched me from the window when I drove away from the house that next morning. Fierce protectiveness. Just like that dog in Michigan. And knowledge.
I lied to Picasso at the Dairy Queen that day in the way that any good interrogator does; I provided enough truthful information to make her believe that the crap I threw at her was true. As part of our routine investigation, we did run the serial number of Oliver Lane’s missing .38-caliber handgun, but we had nothing to match it against. There was no kid about Picasso’s age who found it washed up on the shore. There was no gun. I made it up so Picasso would think we had the evidence we needed to arrest her mother. The whole thing was a fucking ambush.
I’d hoped—hell, I’d wished with all my being—that the conversation would go a different way. That I’d find out the note in the catchall book had nothing to do with the wives or the murder of Oliver Lane. That somehow in some way her mother was innocent. That I’d been wrong about what I’d seen in Picasso’s face. But unfortunately it went exactly the way any good detective looking to solve a case would want it go.
Exactly the way I did not want it to go.
When Picasso asked me if her mother was going to jail, I could have lied, but I thought she deserved my honesty. I’d already done enough to hurt her.
“Probably,” I said.
“Can’t you stop it?” she asked between sobs.
“I wish I could, sweetie.”
She didn’t say anything for a while. She wiped the tears from her eyes, calmed herself. I watched a series of emotions cross her face. Then she said, “But what if she wasn’t the one who did it?”
“They still planned it together,” I said. “But it’s possible the judge will go easier on her if she gives up the shooter. Think she’d do that?”
“There’s a clearing in the woods near the lake.”
“What?” I asked.
“At Rainy Cove Park,” she said. “That’s where they’re meeting. I followed them sometimes. I can draw you a map. That way you can get there before them, and you can hear for yourself.”
The Wives
It was as if there was an invisible magnet between us. When we were within arm’s reach, we paused, assessed one another. Yes, these were the faces we remembered. These were the eyes, the ears, the lips we imagined as we lay in our pink-petaled baths.
Together we inhaled our scent, that heady combination of Diana’s floral sweetness, Jewels’s musk, and Bert’s mountain air. Together we imagined lying naked on a cloud, basking in the nimbi only our particular triumvirate could birth. Together we released our bodies from their yearlong prison. Our shoulders dropped. Our chests collapsed. Our breath escaped. We extended our arms, entwined our fingers, raised our heads to the sky, and gave thanks for this day, this hour, this moment, this opportunity to reconnect.
This freedom.
And then we walked.
The path was the same as we remembered. There was the crunch of the twigs beneath our soles, the light openness narrowing to dense forest, the happy chirp of birds, the smell of wood and leaves, and yes there, barely visible through the trees, was the lake. We almost missed the fork. Could it be that no one had traveled our trail since? Was it possible that no soul had entered our magical piece of earth?
Diana tossed out the blanket she carried under her arm. It snapped, billowed, hovered, landed—the sameness of this small ritual was comforting. She smoothed out its corners while Jewels opened the picnic basket, extracted the plastic plates, silverware, and wineglasses.
“Champagne first?” Bert asked. It was the first words we’d exchanged in a long while.
“You bet,” said Jewels.
The cork popped, flew in the air.
“Here’s to getting away with murder,” Jewels said. That high-pitched clink. We sipped.
Diana unwrapped the saran from the sandwiches, balled it, tossed it on the blanket. “Egg salad,” she said. “Hope that’s okay.”
“Perfect,” Bert said.
“Just like that first time,” Jewels said.
“Yes,” Diana said. “I thought it was fitting.”
The air was still, the dense woods silent as we ate.
We felt a soft breeze. Tree branches moved. Leaves rustled. We shivered.
“My mother used to say that when it gets cold, there are ghosts nearby,�
�� Bert said.
“Shit,” Jewels said. “That’s all we need. Oliver’s ghost.”
An owl hooted in the distance, then again. A haunting ethereal song chimed in on the third hoot.
“What is that?” Jewels asked.
“A whip-poor-will,” Bert said. “Legend has it they can sense when a soul is departing.”
“You’re messing with us,” Jewels said.
“No,” Bert said. “It’s true.”
“Do you think it’s Oliver’s soul, that it’s been here all along?” Diana asked.
“It was a breeze, not a visitation,” Jewels said. “And a silly whip-poor-will doesn’t mean a thing. Oliver is dead, and his body is in the ground in a cemetery in Hollyville.”
After we ate, we placed everything but the champagne and glasses back in the basket, closed it, and as if on cue began removing our clothes. Shoes first, then skirts and blouses, and finally panties and bras.
We stood facing the lake, shook out our long straight locks, warmed our faces with the sun. Three blond goddesses of unique size and shape. We skipped into the warm summer water, splashed one another, dove below its surface, disappeared just long enough to cause any onlookers, or ghosts, concern, and then, in unison, popped our heads to the surface, smiling, giddy with joy, laughing with such abandon we might have been patients from a lunatic asylum. We swam: three sets of arms slicing through water, three sets of legs kicking up foam. After some time, we emerged, wet hair sticking to our heads and skin, strands falling over our naked breasts, winding through our bare armpits, the sun washing over us, fading us. Three heavenly messengers gliding through the air.
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