by Lou Berney
Wyatt had no idea where O’Malley came up with the shit he came up with.
Wyatt’s back was to the storeroom door when it banged open. In the time it took him to turn around, he was sure Mr. Bingham had busted them.
O’Malley said, “What the hell?” Grubb stood up too fast and lost his balance. Karlene screamed. Theresa grabbed Wyatt’s wrist and squeezed hard. That’s when Wyatt knew something bad was happening. Until then he didn’t know if the rubber pirate mask was somebody’s idea of a joke.
Of them all, O’Malley kept his head. He stayed cool. “Hey,” he told the robber in the rubber pirate mask, “get out of here.”
Wyatt, then and now, couldn’t believe the balls on O’Malley. For a second it seemed the robber might actually back out of the storeroom and shut the door behind him. Was there, possibly, an alternate universe where the robber in the rubber pirate mask backed out of the storeroom and shut the door behind him?
But he didn’t. “Everybody out,” he said, waving his gun. “Let’s go.”
“Stay cool,” O’Malley said. Talking to the robber, talking to the rest of them. “Okay. It’s no biggie. We’re all cool.”
He led the way. Grubb next, then Melody. Wyatt saw the robber check out Karlene as she passed, his eye on her. Just one eye—the rubber pirate mask had a rubber eye patch. It was a terrible mask for a robbery. Who wore a one-eyed mask to a robbery?
In the projection booth, O’Malley tried once more to save them.
“Wait a second,” he told the robbers, fighting against the cord that tied his hands behind his back. O’Malley tried to turn over and sit up. He had great faith in his ability to talk his way out of anything. “Just listen.”
“Shut up,” a robber said, the one who’d peeled the pantyhose off his head. Wyatt couldn’t move. He was too scared, his hands were tied too tight. From the corner of his eye, he saw the robber lift his shotgun and bring it down on O’Malley’s head.
Mr. Bingham did nothing, said nothing, absolutely useless as always. Theresa’s face was turned toward Wyatt, but her eyes were closed. Wyatt closed his eyes, too. He could smell the perfume Theresa always wore. It sounded like Melody was sobbing, but really she was praying.
PleaseJesuspleaseJesuspleaseJesusplease.
The first gunshot, so unbelievably loud, was almost a relief. Wyatt knew that all this would be over soon.
The waitress had come back. She looked at Wyatt’s bowl and then glowered at him.
“What’s wrong?” she said. “You don’t like?”
He took out his wallet and paid his check. “Just too much,” he said.
It was too much. He shouldn’t be here. He should never have come.
Julianna
CHAPTER 8
Julianna located Ben in the break room. His scrubs today: a deep, rich burgundy. Papal, almost, lacking only an ermine collar. He was talking to Donna, who listened with great interest. Who pretended to listen with great interest.
“Ben?”
He didn’t love interruptions. He smiled, his beard parting—two rows of small, too-white teeth.
“Hi, Julianna. We were just discussing the schedule.”
“Ben. I’m not feeling so great.”
“Oh,” Donna said, and clucked sympathetically.
Ben continued to smile at Julianna. Her shift had just started. He didn’t love unexpected developments. He did not.
“I think I better go home,” Julianna said.
Ben’s management style owed much to the principles of non-violent resistance. He was Gandhi, prepared to smile and wait until the British surrendered to exhaustion and stopped beating him with their rifle butts.
“Diarrhea,” Julianna said. “You know. Whoosh.”
Ben’s beard finally closed back over his teeth.
“Oh, no!” Donna said. Cluck, cluck. Trying to help Julianna out but overdoing it.
“Did you take some Imodium?” Ben said.
“Ben,” Julianna said. “I don’t know if I want to talk about my diarrhea. Do you?”
He did not. He made a quick decision.
“Go home!” he said. His idea now. “Get well!”
Donna sent a text before Julianna was even out of the building: LIAR.
Julianna sent one back: WHO ME?
OUTLET MALL?
AND PEDI MAYBE. A lie on top of a lie.
The parking garage was deserted, her windows tinted, so Julianna changed out of her scrubs right there, in the front seat of her car. She pulled on a pair of jeans, a sweater. She caught a glimpse of herself in the rearview mirror. Would Genevieve even recognize her now? Julianna wondered. Likely not. When Julianna saw old photos of herself, age ten, eleven, twelve, she saw a girl who was still a girl: flushed cheeks, always smiling, honey-colored hair, honey-colored eyes that hid nothing from the camera.
Julianna knew, without a shadow of a doubt, that she’d recognize Genevieve now. Genevieve was already a woman when she disappeared, almost eighteen years old, the woman she was going to be. Time would have altered only her edges, her surfaces. Genevieve’s skin, Julianna suspected, might show the years. All those hours she spent working on her tan, all that cocoa butter and baby oil. No one had warned her. And probably she would have softened in certain places, rounded out in others. But she’d still be a knockout. Even more of one. She’d still be Genevieve.
Julianna tried a smile for the rearview mirror, but that didn’t help. It wasn’t the same smile. Genevieve wouldn’t recognize it in a million years.
She checked the location of the Indian casino on her phone. It was just south of Norman, I-35 the whole way. She made a left out of the parking garage in case Ben was spying on her. Not a far-fetched possibility, and he knew she lived north. Okay, Ben, two can play at this game. She circled the block and caught the highway off Fifth Street.
It was a warm October day, sunny and so blue. In fact, Julianna had warned Genevieve about laying out. In seventh grade Julianna learned about the ozone layer, about melanoma. But when did Genni ever heed a warning? Julianna remembered a quote Genevieve had found somewhere. It became her mantra:
When faced with two evils, choose the more interesting one.
Genevieve claimed it was from Aristotle. Or Shakespeare. Her story shifted. Years later Julianna searched for the quote and discovered that its source was the dissolute Scottish aristocrat who founded the Dewars whiskey empire.
Genevieve would still be a knockout. She would still be wicked and hilarious. When Julianna imagined her now—alive, age forty-three—this was how she imagined Genevieve: married to a rich, handsome guy ten years older than she was and sleeping around on the side with a rich, handsome guy ten years younger than she was. Having the time of her life, you better believe it.
It took Julianna about twenty minutes to reach Norman. She drove past the exit to the university—her alma mater, though so much of her undergrad years were now just a soft, tuneless blur. Julianna had started smoking pot her freshman year and thought it might save her life. It hadn’t, but she’d given it every chance in the world. She’d given it the old college try.
The Indian casino was five minutes farther south, almost to the town of Chickasha. Julianna didn’t know the name of the tribe who owned the casino. The Chickasaw? That seemed a reasonable guess. One of Oklahoma’s Five Civilized Tribes. Which, a title like that, had taken all the fun out of studying them in junior high.
The casino was enormous, with an even more enormous parking lot. Ten-thirty on a Tuesday morning and it was packed with cars. Julianna pulled in to an empty space. She didn’t have a plan, not really.
Inside, the casino was what she had expected. Smoke and clang, wolfish retirees bent over the slot machines, slapping away. A cocktail waitress passed by. Julianna stopped her and asked how to find HR. The waitress pointed to a door on the
other side of the floor.
An unsmiling security guard. Two doors and a hallway. Finally Julianna found herself in a small, windowless office, across the desk from a chipper blonde in her early twenties. French nails, pearl earrings. The whole package. GKODB!
GKODB stood for “Go Kappa or die bitch!” It’s what the Kappa sorority girls at OU always said to each other. Julianna’s first roommate had pledged.
“So,” the chipper blond sorority girl said. “You’re interested in joining our family here?”
Julianna noted that none of the casino employees she’d encountered so far—the cocktail waitress, the security guards, this girl—looked Native American. Maybe the casino had made the tribe so rich that its members no longer had to work jobs like these.
“I’m very interested, actually,” Julianna said. She remembered the note scrawled in the margin of Crowley’s interview transcript:
Lies like he breathes.
“Sweet!” the chipper blonde said. “You know you can do all this online now? It’s super easy. But it’s even better you’re here in person!”
She rummaged around for an application. Julianna looked at the bank of file cabinets along one wall. Crowley’s failed job application might be in one of those cabinets. And Julianna might be able to find it, if she could think of a way to get the sorority girl out of the office for a few minutes. The cabinets might be locked. If Crowley’s application had been submitted online, Julianna was screwed. She hadn’t even considered the possibility. There was a computer on the desk, but it was almost certainly password-protected.
Crowley was the missing piece. He had to know something—something—about what had happened to Genevieve. If Crowley didn’t know, who did?
Julianna realized that the sorority girl had stopped rummaging around and was just staring at her now, smiling.
“You don’t remember me, do you?” she said.
Julianna tried to place her. She was too young. She would have been way behind Julianna at OU, fifteen years or more. She looked as if she’d barely graduated.
There was something vaguely familiar about her, though. The brightness of her eyes. Her French nails.
“My name’s Ariel Figg,” the girl said. “Last May? I threw up everywhere from the anesthesia, and you were super sweet about it.”
“Oh.” The hospital, the recovery suite—not college. Julianna tried again to place her. Last May. She still couldn’t do it. “Oh, of course.”
“I had a D&C,” the girl said. “I don’t remember what that stands for? But Dr. Bazile, I remember he described it kind of like scooping out a cantaloupe. He was trying to make me feel not so scared beforehand, but I thought that was pretty gross.”
Dilation and curettage, a minor surgical procedure that cleaned out the uterus after a miscarriage.
“Dr. Bazile is a good doctor,” Julianna said, which was more or less true.
“I’m doing great now,” the girl said. Ariel. “Good as new!”
“I’m glad.”
“God has a plan. At least that’s what I’ve always heard.” She laughed. “Are you a Christian? Never mind. I have another question.”
Julianna knew what it was going to be. She wondered what the chances were—that she’d run into a former patient here.
“Why do you want a job here when you’re already a nurse?” the girl said.
The file cabinets along the wall appeared to be unlocked. One drawer was pulled partway out. Julianna could ask for a glass of water. That might give her a few minutes alone in the office. She could say that yes, she was a Christian, too, and she wanted to join the family here at the casino because she wanted a less stressful career, one in which the emotional toll—bonding with your patients, suffering as they suffered—was not so heavy. And would it be too much trouble to get a glass of water, please? Ariel?
Instead, though, Julianna said, “I don’t. I don’t want to work here.”
The girl’s expression remained bright and chipper. “Oh!” she said. “You don’t?”
“I wanted to get an address. I wanted to find a way to get the address of a man who applied for a job here. It’s the only way I know how to find him.”
Julianna hesitated, then decided to see what the truth would do to that bright, chipper expression.
“He might know what happened to my sister,” she said. “She disappeared twenty-six years ago and was never found. Her body was never found. She was kidnapped and murdered.”
Nothing happened to the girl’s expression. At least nothing that Julianna had expected—no shock or horror, no flush of embarrassment. The girl fingered one of her pearl earrings, and her bright eyes searched Julianna’s face with interest, with curiosity.
“I’m just thinking about God’s plan,” she said after a long moment.
“Okay,” Julianna said.
The girl reached across her desk and pulled the computer keyboard over.
“What’s his name?” she said.
“Crowley,” Julianna said, surprised. “Christopher Wayne Crowley.”
“I shouldn’t do this.” The girl looked back up at Genevieve and laughed. “But fuck it, right?”
GENEVIEVE’S DISAPPEARANCE FROM the state fair had been news for about a day. Okay, maybe for a couple of weeks. She was beautiful—the Daily Oklahoman ran her picture with every story, a photo of her from the previous year’s U. S. Grant High School yearbook. Genevieve had thought the photo made her look bucktoothed. She’d thought her ears, in general, were freakishly small. It didn’t, they weren’t.
“You don’t think my ears are too small, do you?” Genni would say. “Do you think people notice my tiny ears?”
And then she’d turn to Julianna with her eyes so crossed you almost couldn’t see the irises, just wet white jelly. It was demented. Julianna would shriek, mostly with laughter.
Genevieve who could keep a straight face forever, even when she was crossing her eyes like that, would say, “What is it? It’s my tiny ears, isn’t it?”
Oh, my God, do you remember that poster of Scott Baio you had? You thought I’d erased his eyes. You were so mad! You were twelve or thirteen. Genni loves Chachi, Genni loves Chachi. I thought you were going to kill me. I had to show you—it was just white construction paper that I’d cut out and Scotch-taped over Scott Baio’s eyes. I’d had to cut out dozens of white construction-paper eyes before I got it just right. He looked so scary! You told me that if the real Scott Baio went blind, it would be my fault. I cried and cried. Do you remember?
Genevieve had a little black-and-white TV down in her basement room. After Joanie Loves Chachi was canceled, they watched Charles in Charge. They watched The Facts of Life and One Day at a Time. Julianna was crushed when One Day at a Time was canceled. She had loved the show because it was about two sisters. Julianna was Valerie Bertinelli, and Genevieve was Mackenzie Phillips.
Julianna had even suggested they start calling each other by the characters’ names— Barbara for Julianna and Julie for Genevieve.
“I know!” Genevieve had said.
“Genni!”
“Let’s not and say we did!”
One time, when Genevieve’s disappearance was still news, Julianna had gone into the kitchen to make cinnamon toast for breakfast. The two detectives were there, drinking coffee at the table. They didn’t see her. The older detective tapped the newspaper in front of him, the photo of Genevieve. Julianna heard him say Genevieve had a face that played.
It hadn’t played for long, though. One problem, you see: Genevieve was almost eighteen years old when she disappeared. If she’d been younger, fourteen or fifteen, it would have made for a more compelling story, a simpler story. But because Genevieve was almost eighteen, her beauty—the directness of her gaze in that yearbook photo, the sly humor in her smile—had cut both ways. Julian
na could imagine now what a lot of people back then must have thought when they saw that photo in the newspaper or on the flyers that their neighbor Carol helped staple to telephone poles all over town. Genevieve looked like a girl who was looking for trouble. Was it really such a big shock that she’d found it?
And she’d grown up on the Southside, near Capitol Hill. That didn’t help. Genevieve was an indifferent student and not on the cheerleading squad. Her father: part Mexican, gone. Her mother: the kind of woman who married a part Mexican.
And, of course, new news kept crowding in, elbowing Genevieve aside. There was apartheid in South Africa and OU football and Patrick Duffy returning to the TV show Dallas. (The entire last season had been a dream!) In the middle of October, police tracked down the men responsible for the movie-theater massacre back in August and killed them in a shoot-out. That was all that Linda Cavanaugh on KTVY Channel Four talked about for days. In November there was Iran-Contra and a molester of the elderly who climbed through the windows of nursing homes. In December the molester was caught. A crash on the Broadway Extension killed an entire church choir. Genevieve disappeared again, from the news this time.
Crowley by then had disappeared as well. No new leads had emerged. No old leads paid off. January, February. The detectives stopped coming over every few weeks to give Julianna’s mother an update. The grim young one would just call now, to say that they continued to pursue every possible avenue of investigation.
Carol’s husband, Joe, came home from work one evening that spring and saw Julianna sitting on the front steps of the house on Twenty-seventh. He parked at his house and then walked back over, across the lawn lush with purple henbit and dandelion. For a few weeks in the spring, the weeds in Oklahoma City were beautiful. Joe sat down next to her. He smelled like the garage where he worked—like grease and men.
“Sometimes,” he said after they sat there in silence for a while, “life doesn’t make sense. You understand that?”
Julianna had gone inside without a word and shut the door behind her. She thought that might have been the last time she spoke to Joe. He and Carol moved that summer, to Colorado. Julianna learned later that the detectives had looked at Joe as a possible suspect. They’d looked at just about every man and boy who’d ever crossed paths with Genevieve. All the guys at school she’d ever gone out with, all her co-workers at Sonic, all her neighbors, old and new. Everyone had an alibi. Everyone checked out. Joe and Carol had been in Dallas the first weekend of the fair. Denny, the boy who lived down the block had been in bed with a broken ankle, suffered the day before while scoring a touchdown against the Carl Albert Titans.