“Whoa,” Boggs said. “What’s this about your wife?”
Geneva touched Atul’s hand. “It was years ago. A car accident.” She turned to Atul. “That was in Tallahatchie County. These people would not have been involved.”
“Okay, okay,” Boggs said. “I’m sorry about your wife, sir, but let’s get back to the business at hand, so to speak.” He turned to Chandra. “Why don’t you walk me through what happened. Start at the beginning.”
Chandra looked at her father. “I was camping with a friend.”
“Friend’s name?”
“Debbie,” said Atul.
“I need her whole name,” Boggs said. He looked at Chandra.
“I don’t want to get anyone in trouble,” Chandra said.
“No one’s in any trouble,” Boggs said. “But I am going to have to speak to everyone involved.”
Chandra looked down at her lap.
“Tell him,” Atul said. “What is the matter?”
“It’s just that…” Chandra kept her head down. She spoke so softly Geneva had to lean in to hear her. “I wasn’t with Debbie.”
Atul stood. “What do you mean? You said you were going camping with Debbie. You told me you were with Debbie. Now you say you were not? What is the truth?”
Chandra looked up, her face pale and tear streaked. “I was with friends, but they are boys and I knew you wouldn’t let me go.”
Atul slapped Chandra across the face. “You filthy whore.”
“You are the one who’s filthy,” Chandra said. “You think I don’t know that you cheated on my mother with this woman?” She pointed at Geneva. “You think I don’t know that she’s married? That she has children?” Chandra shouted, her voice thick with anger.
“I am your father.”
“Big deal. It isn’t all that difficult to get someone pregnant.”
“This is what you learn in college? To speak to your father like this? To spend the night with boys? I am sending you to live with your grandparents in Mumbai. You think I am strict? Wait until you spend a few months with your grandmother. You will be lucky to leave the house. You will not date. She will choose a husband for you. That is, if she can find one who will accept a woman of such loose morals.”
“Atul!” Geneva touched his arm. “She’s not a child. You have to let her make her own decisions. This is America.”
Atul spit on the floor in front of her, a wad of stringy, yellow mucus. “That is what I think of America.”
“Okay, okay.” Boggs came around the desk and wiped up Atul’s spit with a wad of tissue, as if cleaning up bodily fluids were something he did every day. “Let’s all just calm down. Let’s all just take a minute and calm down. Sir,” Boggs said to Atul. “I understand that you’re upset, but you can’t be slapping people right here in the sheriff’s office. If it happens again, I’m going to place you under arrest. Do you understand?”
Atul held his arms out, wrists together. “Arrest me. I don’t know how things could be any worse. You might as well arrest me.”
Boggs looked at his wad of tobacco with longing. “Why don’t you go get a cup of coffee or something while I talk with your daughter? It might be easier if we could talk in private.”
“I am going nowhere,” Atul said.
Geneva checked her watch. “Is there a phone I could use?”
Boggs pointed to the phone on the counter at the entrance to the office. “Dial nine.”
Geneva dialed the number to her house and turned her back on the three of them. She put a hand over one ear to drown out their conversation. The phone rang and rang, but no one picked up. It was just after nine in the morning. Where could Bobby and Melody be at this hour? She hung up and pretended to study the Wanted posters. Chandra had shocked her with the news that she knew about Atul and her from even before her mother had died. She wondered if Atul’s wife had known about them, as well.
“That’s quite a story,” Boggs said. “We don’t have a body. No one’s been reported missing.”
“But I saw it happen.” Chandra pouted, crossed her arms like a spoiled child.
“All I’m saying is that it would be a hell of a lot easier for me to investigate if I actually had a victim, or if I knew where to look for one. The details seem a little fuzzy.”
“I was scared,” Chandra said. “I just ran away. I didn’t have a map. I didn’t check my watch.”
Boggs leaned forward, folded his hands on top of the legal pad. “Now, I’m not insinuating anything, but I need you to be honest with me. Were you all using any illegal substances?”
Atul exploded. “We are not going to sit here and be insulted. I cannot believe you accuse my daughter of doing drugs. You do not have a body, so she must have been on drugs? Is that it?”
“Look, mister, I’m just asking her the same questions we would ask anyone under these circumstances. Now, we’ve had no reports of a murder, and no one has reported anyone missing, but in the past two weeks, we’ve had a real significant increase in burglaries and vandalism. We’ve had boxes of cold medicine swiped from local pharmacies. A woman was raped and beaten on Saturday evening, the same night this alleged murder took place, and not too damn far from the river where your daughter thinks she might have witnessed this murder. We didn’t find any body, but we did find a good supply of marijuana and what looks like the start of a big batch of methamphetamine in an abandoned camper out by the river. And the description we got from our rape victim matches the one your daughter just gave us of her friend. So I’m not accusing anyone of anything. I’m just trying to get to the truth.”
Geneva watched Chandra and knew that Boggs had hit on something. She was lying, either for her father’s sake or to protect herself. Whatever she’d learned in her first year of college, it wasn’t going to be enough to pull one over on Deputy Buster Boggs. Geneva had underestimated him; he was sharp as a blade.
“Atul,” Geneva said. “I really think it would be better if you let Chandra talk to the deputy alone. You’re making her nervous.”
“I know what I saw,” Chandra said. “That man cut Reese’s throat. He did it right in front of his kid, right in front of that little boy.”
Geneva coughed. She felt like she’d swallowed a jagged shard of ice. How many men traveled around with little boys? Hadn’t Pisa said there was trouble? Geneva realized she might be harboring the criminal on her land, and she still hadn’t reached Melody to warn her about Pisa’s son. This was what happened when she ignored Pisa’s advice. After all these years, she ought to know better.
“I believe a private conversation is what’s called for,” Boggs said.
* * *
Geneva wished she’d never brought Atul and Chandra here. What would Pisa do to her if she put her son in danger? What could she do? Geneva could never figure out just how powerful Pisa really was. Were her gifts mostly about predicting the future, or did she actually set things in motion? And what about her son? Was there really just a bit of trouble, or was her son a murderer? Not that murder wasn’t sometimes justified. Geneva knew good and well that some people needed killing. She didn’t trust Chandra. The girl could hardly open her mouth without lying. Any boy she was running with was bound to be trouble.
“I have to leave soon,” she told Boggs. “We’ll just get a cup of coffee, give you a bit of space.”
“That’ll do. Give us a half hour or so.”
As they left, a shrill alarm buzzed through a gadget on Boggs’s desk. He punched a button and the noise quieted. “Weather alert,” he said. “Big storm moving in.”
In the alley, the trustees were gone. Rain came down in sheets. A big storm, indeed. “I wonder if I have an umbrella in the car?”
“What difference would it make?” Atul said. “Water is not the enemy.” He sulked, furious at Geneva for taking him away from his daughter.
She drove into the rain, navigating the half mile to the bakery by memory as much as by sight. It was the same place she’d met her lawyer after
she poisoned Bruce. Her windshield wipers slapped furiously without improving her visibility an ounce. She gripped the steering wheel and leaned forward, tried to bring the road into focus. All she saw was a wet, gray scrim of rain and sky. The car seemed to be skimming along a river rather than rolling along the road. This was not Geneva’s first flood. She doubted it would be her last.
“You came to me in a storm like this,” Atul said.
She remembered. Thirteen years ago, she’d seen Pisa and was heading home when the rain began to fall. She pulled into the Jolly Inn to wait it out. Atul was there alone, his wife and daughter off visiting relatives. When she entered the lobby, soaked and shivering, Atul made her sit, wrapped her in a large, clean sheet, and brought her a cup of tea spiced with ginger and cloves. She told him she only needed to rest for a few hours, to wait for the storm to let up. He gave her the key to a room. “You must shower and put on dry clothes. You will be sick if you do not.”
“Oh, I don’t want to be any trouble,” she’d said, though she enjoyed the fuss he was making.
“This storm is not going to let up today. You cannot continue on in this weather. You will shower and put on dry clothes and then eat with me. I am all alone here, and there will be no customers today. Not unless there are other mad women driving around in the rain.”
They stayed up late, talking and playing blackjack. She wore his wife’s clothes while hers dried. She hadn’t set out to seduce him, but the storm kept raging and he kept bringing her good things to eat and drink. What was she supposed to do? She stayed for three days. “You will come back to me,” Atul said when she left him that first time.
Bruce had said he could smell Atul on her. Maybe he could. They fought. Bruce demanded to know his name, but Geneva denied, denied, denied. She taunted him. In a fit of fury, Bruce flung her mother’s antique water pitcher. He aimed to hit her, but she ducked and the crystal shattered against the wall. It rained down in sharp, dangerous shards that matched her mood. “You’ll regret that, darling,” she told him. “Just wait and see.”
A few weeks later, she fetched what she needed from her father’s old shed. The smell was the same as it had been all those years before, sharp and sour and raw. She put a spoonful of rat poison into her mixing bowl and whipped up a batch of Bruce’s favorite cookies, oatmeal with butterscotch and chocolate chips. She made a clean batch for the kids. “These are for you,” she told Bobby and Melody. “But these are just for Daddy.” Bruce gobbled the cookies. He had no knack for moderation.
It was nearly a day before the sickness set in. Geneva worried that she hadn’t used enough, or that the poison was too old to be effective. But just as she’d given up watching him, his nose started bleeding. His gums leeched pink onto his toothbrush. His piss splashed rust-colored into the toilet. “I’m dying of thirst,” he told her. “I’m too tired to move.” He begged Geneva to take him to a doctor. How could she refuse? Urine samples, blood samples, too many questions. The doctor had seen it all before. Rat poison was common and people were careless, he said. He shot Bruce full of vitamin K and prescribed activated charcoal to absorb any remaining poison in his system. The law required that he lecture Bruce about wearing gloves, washing his hands, keeping children and animals away from treated areas. All the while, Geneva stood in the corner of the room, waiting like a hawk on a branch. She watched Bruce’s face, so full of frustration as he insisted he hadn’t touched any rat poison.
It took him longer than it should have to work it out. God knows, she didn’t marry him for his smarts. He was running down a list of everything he’d done in the past forty-eight hours. When he got to the cookies, he fell silent. He stared at Geneva. She stared right back at him. “You did it,” he said. “You tried to kill me.”
“You broke my water pitcher,” she told him.
The doctor called the sheriff, though Bruce told him not to bother. He said he would handle it himself. Geneva had been grateful to be led away in handcuffs. Better to be locked up than to go home with Bruce at that moment.
* * *
She’d spent a few bleak months in a mental hospital where no one, as far as she could tell, was actually crazy. It was a dumping ground for folks who couldn’t conform, and Geneva knew she was not a misfit in the dingy gray hallways of the hospital. Even so, she had no intention of going back. By the time she came home, plump and slow from the drugs, Bruce had forgiven her. Or maybe he’d just remembered what she was capable of doing when pushed too far. Either way, she came and went as she pleased, and saw Atul as often as she wanted. Now it seemed her brazen betrayals might catch up with her. Pisa had warned her about consequences. “The universe will find balance. Wrong will be set right.”
She pulled the car into the bakery parking lot and watched the rain fall. Was the universe seeking balance by punishing her now? As she sat there in a parking lot in the middle of a storm, things were happening beyond her control. Chandra was telling her story to Deputy Boggs, Pisa’s son was camped out on her land, her daughter was home after three years on the road, her son was alive but not well, her husband was dying, her lover sulked. If she could go back and start over, she’d listen to Pisa. Yes, she would. Now she had to push forward. She had to see it through.
Chapter Sixteen
Melody was dead tired but slept badly. She dreamed she was being hunted by a pack of hungry wolves. To protect herself, she tossed small children to the growling beasts. She woke before dawn in a sweaty nightmare panic. At least she wouldn’t have to lie there and pretend to sleep, as she did on the road. Even in good times, Melody slept poorly, suffered from hellish dreams, and woke before sunrise. When she was sharing a tour bus or cheap hotel room with her bandmates, she couldn’t just get up and get on with her day. Now, in her family home, she was free to roam at all hours. Everyone in her family woke early, and it was normal to find one or all of them prowling around the house before daylight.
She decided to make good use of the time by searching for clues of her mother’s whereabouts. In her parents’ bedroom, she pulled everything she could find from the closet and chest of drawers. She piled it all on the bed and sat cross-legged in a mess of dusty boxes and old photo albums. The first box, an old cardboard boot box, overflowed with yellow newspaper clippings, nearly all of them featuring Melody’s mother wearing some sort of fancy white dress and, often, a tiara. She was the Maid of Cotton, Miss Junior Miss, Miss White Forest Senior Year, homecoming queen, prom queen, and, of course, a young bride. All of it just reinforced Melody’s belief that beauty was more important than substance to most people. How else could her mother, selfish and crazy as a loon, have ever become so popular? Melody moved on to a huge album. A spider skittered out from between the pages, and she brushed it off the bed with a shudder. The book was filled with photographs. Melody flipped through the snapshots. Familiar scenes flooded the pages: her father holding a big catfish, her mother laughing at something off camera, Bobby as a toddler, Melody as a teen. She didn’t want familiar scenes from the past; she wanted something that would lead her to her mother today. In the past, Melody was too timid or too young or too awed by her mother to tell her how she felt. Not anymore. Now she couldn’t wait to find her mother and tell her that she was selfish, insane, and mean as a snake. Someone had to say it.
She heaved the album aside and pulled out a small box. It was a child’s keepsake box, with a slot for a key. She pried it open without much force. A lemony scent filled the room, and a few bits of brown and green flecked out onto the quilt, a dried plant from an old corsage or a clipping from the wishing bushes out back. Mama had brought the wishing bushes back after an unexplained disappearance. She never told Melody or Bobby where the bushes had come from, just that they should plant them and make a wish. She’d disappeared a dozen times over the years, always without notice and never with an explanation. Once, just once, she took Melody along.
At ten years old, Melody was awkward and miserable. Melody did not yet know that most ten-year-old girls were a
wkward and miserable; she imagined she was unique. She spent the first week of summer vacation sulking because her best friend, her only friend, abandoned her for a group of girls who specialized in whispered insults, haughty superiority, and cruel giggling. One girl, the leader, had a grating, nasally voice that carried even at a whisper. “Gawd,” the little brat would say when Melody climbed from the bus in the morning. “Is that whatcher wearing today?” Or, as Melody shuffled through the cafeteria line, “Y’all know I’m not one to judge, but if I was to get fat, I don’t reckon I’d help myself to a piece of cake. That’s just me.” While Melody was glad to be done with school for a few months because it meant a break from the relentless cruelty, she was already dreading the next year. Summer offered her no opportunity to make things right or make new friends. Melody’s family lived so far out of town that summer meant three months of isolation. While other kids went swimming and ate snow cones and played baseball, Melody was stuck out on her mother’s useless land. She spent the last week of the school year plotting ways to set things right, but then she heard her former best friend whisper “white trash” when she walked into math class. She was doomed and she planned to spend the summer sulking. Her mother told Melody she had no intention of spending her days with a mopey, depressed, ungrateful child. Melody imagined her mother had spent her own youth surrounded by friends who couldn’t get enough of her great beauty. How could she understand what it felt like to be plain and unpopular?
One early morning, her mother woke her and said they were going away for a few days. Melody, still half-asleep, asked a few questions and tried to pack a bag, but Mama pushed her into the car while the sun was barely beginning to peek over the horizon. “We’re going to see someone,” Mama said. “Someone who might be able to help you.”
She drove Melody to a house that seemed to stand alone at the edge of the world. The house was surrounded by cottonwoods and live oaks. The trees sparkled, prisms and bright blue bottles hung from the branches. Women appeared and disappeared, and Melody couldn’t tell them apart. They wore loose cotton dresses and no makeup. Melody thought they seemed exotic. There were no men. A couple of the women tended a plot of fragrant herbs and flowers that seemed to pulse with butterflies and ruby-throated hummingbirds.
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