“Stop it,” I said, checking the road. Deserted. I should have kept my mouth shut. “We don’t know enough—”
“She was pregnant and I never laid a hand on her,” he said. He backed up and eyed the dent. “I think there are a couple of words I can use if I feel like it.”
“It’s just high school, right?” I said. “It’s all in the past.”
The problem with that: there would be no answers, no putting anything to rest. I felt scared for his next girlfriend, for the next woman he took home. For myself, alone with so much anger. The kind of anger I’d never seen in person. I remembered the swipe in the wallpaper in Maddy’s room at the Mid-Night.
“I’m sorry,” I said, and retreated to my car.
My hand shook at the door handle. I wanted to say I didn’t think he’d done it. But the last two days had taught me a few things about how much I trusted, how much I assumed. Fitz was right. I had to be more careful.
I slid into my car. Beck stood by as I brought the rattling engine to life and pulled a U-turn back to town. He didn’t move, not until I was out of sight of his truck, not until I was gone.
At Lu’s house, the porch light was out. I rang the bell and waited for what seemed a long time before the door opened. Lu peered out. “Hey,” she said, drawing the word out. She wore a sweatshirt too big for her with the sleeves rolled up. For some strange reason, tears stung my eyes. I remembered the way she’d cradled me away from the sight of Maddy, calling me gentle names. I supposed most people expected these things from their mothers, but if one source of comfort was closed off, at least I had Lu.
“Hey,” I said. “I’ve missed you.”
“I’ve missed you, too. It’s weird, isn’t it? Not having the Mid-Night to go to.”
It was weird, too, that I still stood on her porch, dusk at my back. “Can you, uh, talk?”
“Sure.” She opened the door and slipped outside. She sat on the top step and patted the spot next to her. “The kids—better to hear ourselves,” she said. “Carlos is in a mood, anyway.”
“Did he have to take on extra hours?”
She glanced up and down the street. “He asked for them. I don’t know, Juliet. I might have to go on one of the services for a while, clean some rich lady’s home or something. My own house is too clean now, you know? I see a piece of lint, and I have to stop and pick it up, and I look at it, try to decide where it came from. And the kids are screaming at me, and Mamá is here all the time, watching game shows with the TV yelling, and now Carlos—” She flicked her hand at the closed door. “He doesn’t want me to go back there, even if it opens tomorrow.”
I could see why. Until this thing was solved, who was to say the Mid-Night was safe? And if it never got solved, better to be in a group of cleaners in a little yellow car than to be the single cleaner going in and out of dead people’s motel rooms. “He’s just worried about you,” I said.
“He’s worried about … a lot of things.”
“Like what?”
“Oh,” she said, letting her eyes wander from me down the block again. “Nothing.”
We sat in silence for a few minutes.
“Nothing?”
She hung her head. “Maybe his job. The things on the news—it’s not good for us right now. He keeps saying the immigration people will come, this and that.”
“But,” I said. “But you’re legal. Aren’t you?”
Her look was sharp. “Yes, of course, and Carlos and the kids and Mamá. You don’t know what it’s like, and it’s not just us we have to think about. Carlos’s uncle Lester just came over, and his cousins—”
“What do they have to do with Maddy? Or me?”
Lu rubbed a spot on her elbow, trying not to look at me.
“Lu?”
“Just—everything,” she said, sighing. “The police have been in the neighborhood all day. Coming to the doors, questions, questions.”
I couldn’t think what she was talking about. “Today? Oh—” The attack the night before, the possibly Hispanic male. “Oh, no.”
“Yeah, it’s bad,” she said. “Someone says ‘brown skin’ and we spend the day saying ‘yes, officer, no, officer.’”
“I didn’t even think—”
“You’re lucky that way,” Lu said. “How many questions did you answer today? How many times did they come sit at your kitchen table and ask you everything. So much everything, I think why they didn’t ask the color of my underwear today. How many times did they come to your house?”
Once, and only to drive me home. But then I did tend to run into Courtney everywhere I went these days.
“Do you mean Courtney? I mean Officer Howard? She came here?”
“That one, the other one, some new ones I never saw before. Carlos says he can’t take all this. This, this terror—what’s the word, what they’re doing?”
I thought for a second. “Terrorizing.”
“Because it happened at the Mid-Night, they think Carlos—” She pulled her knees up to her chest and curled around them. “I wish things could go back.”
“Me too.” At the same time I said it, though, I realized I meant it only by half. If I could have saved Maddy, I would have gone back. But if I couldn’t, I knew I would do anything not to have to live it again. I took a quick look at Lu. I never wanted to go back to the Mid-Night, and not just because Maddy had died there. Because I wanted more. I deserved more, and so did Lu—
The door opened behind us, a string of Spanish trailing off into silence.
Lu said a few words to the dark figure there, and the door closed again.
“Was that Carlos?” He was usually friendly, always taking the time to say hello.
“He’s—”
“In a mood, yeah, you said.” But I knew which mood, now—the same one that seemed to be infecting most of the town. Wherever I went, people started to edge away. “I guess the invitation to come over anytime is withdrawn.”
“You have to understand, Jules,” Lu said. “He’s scared. He’s scared because I’m scared, and the kids—they know something is wrong. It has to go back at some point, right?”
“I don’t see how things are ever going back, Lu,” I said. “Maybe we should start wishing for something else. Something new.”
“Easy for you to say,” she said. “White girl scrubbing the toilets. Give me a break.”
I froze. “I cleaned as many toilets as you did.”
She rolled her eyes. “You could be in an office—”
“Cleaning an office.”
“Or in the bank, maybe,” she said.
I could picture Shelly’s face if I asked after jobs at the bank. “You think I haven’t imagined a different life? Same as you?”
“You say the same, but you don’t know. I walk in, and all anyone can think is what the brown girl might steal.” She gave me a pointed look. I’d never stolen anything from her, but maybe I hadn’t been as careful as I could have been around the shampoo bottles and the lotions. Or the lost-and-found box. “You get to walk into a room, any room, and be who you are.”
“You seem to think that’s someone worth being,” I said.
“Stop feeling sorry for yourself,” she mumbled. “Why are you being like this?”
“Being like … what? Sad that a friend died? Sad that another friend is leaving me on the porch?” She flinched. I stood up. “I’m sorry you’re getting bothered by the cops. It’s not fair—but none of this is my fault. I expected you to understand. You saw—” My voice twisted into strangeness. “You saw her. Of all people, I thought—”
I’d expected something from her that she didn’t have to give. She sat with her arms clutched around her knees. To keep from trembling, maybe. To keep from saying other things she hadn’t been able to tell me, or didn’t want to tell me. She was right. We weren’t the same. We didn’t have the same experience of the Mid-Night or of the town. As much as we’d talked about what we wanted from this life, had we ever talked about what we’d go
tten, what we might have to settle for?
The Lu who’d sweet-lady’d me away from Maddy’s body was gone. This was someone else, someone I didn’t know. She’d seen Maddy swinging from the balcony and thought—what?—just a white woman on the wrong end of something, none of her business? A good excuse as any to cower on the steps and not look in my direction. As long as she didn’t see me, none of this was hers. None of this touched her.
I stumbled through the yard toward my car. I might have looked back if Lu had made even a small sound or movement. But she didn’t. I drove away, watching to see if she would change her mind and stop me.
Now.
Or now.
Or before I turned at the next block and could no longer see the small form huddled under the darkened porch light.
“Now,” I said under my breath. Then she was gone.
CHAPTER TWENTY
On my street, our house was a beacon, lit from within and without. I parked the car and stared, looking over my shoulder to see if the neighbors were at their windows, wondering. Down the block, a patrol car had taken up residence in front of Mrs. Schneider’s house.
I hurried out of the car and up the walk. The front door was open. “Mom?”
I heard the TV, the microwave. Finally. Finally we’d reached the upswing of my mother’s psychosis, and every electronic appliance in the house hummed with her manic energy.
“Mom?”
“There you are, Juliet, my God.” My mother appeared in the kitchen doorway, one hand to her throat. “Why didn’t you tell me?”
“Tell you.” I heard a chair scraping the floor behind her, and then Courtney stood there, uniformed and watching. “Oh,” I said. “I mean—I didn’t know how.”
“Well, it turns out it’s very easy,” my mom said. The hand at her throat fluttered. “Officer Howard here assumed I knew.”
Courtney had always been one for breaking news. “Well, you didn’t. She doesn’t read the paper,” I said, giving Courtney a hard look. The police had been visiting Lu’s house, so I supposed it was my turn. “What are you doing here? Did something happen?”
Courtney tilted her head, reminding me of the tiny sparrows that fought over spilled pizza crusts near the Mid-Night’s bin. “Actually, I thought you were the one with something to say.”
Vincent. God, this town. “Maddy’s fiancé made it to town. But I guess you know that.”
“That poor man,” my mom said. Behind her, the microwave dinged, and she didn’t notice.
We both looked at her, then each other.
“Thank you for talking with me, Mrs. Townsend,” Courtney said. “Sorry to bring you such awful news.”
Mom nodded and turned back to the kitchen.
“Is there somewhere we can talk?” Courtney rolled her eyes in my mother’s direction. “Without disturbing anyone.”
I’d led her halfway down the hall to my room before I realized I could have put us on the front porch, as Lu had done to me. In a lucky move, I’d left the running man from Maddy’s room in the car.
I opened the door, suddenly seeing the room through the eyes of a visitor. It was a child’s room. I lived in a child’s room, slept in a child’s bed. I still had clips from high school up on a bulletin board on the closet door, and some of my biggest trophies still stood on the dresser. I had blamed Maddy for my inertia, but she hadn’t decorated my room.
“It’s been a while since I had a guest,” I said, trying not to think how long ago I’d cleaned the place. “Maddy. Maddy was probably the last person here, senior year.”
Courtney’s sparrow eyes took it all in. She walked to the bulletin board and peered at it.
The photo Maddy had left me lay on my bed. I pulled the comforter up over it. Courtney turned around in time to see me tucking the cover around the pillow. I sat down on the edge of the bed.
“It might be time for a change of season in here,” she said. “Maybe a—” She waved her hand. “Facelift?”
She had alighted on the kindest possible thing to say. I was on notice. “You know all about the thing with Vincent, right?”
“I would never take a storytelling opportunity from you,” she said. “Is this the bathroom?”
She’d opened the door and helped herself to the light switch before I could answer. “Nice lighting,” she said, leaning into the mirror, then rooting through the bottles in the mess on my vanity. “What kind of scent do you wear?”
“What? I don’t wear anything … much.”
Her fingers landed on the spice cookie perfume bottle just once, and then moved on. I tried not to imagine the mechanics by which her knee might nudge the bottom drawer and reveal the bits of shiny trash hidden there.
Not stolen, exactly. Nothing prosecutable. I thought.
“The car smelled sweet after you got out the other night—cinnamon, maybe. Is it shampoo?”
“Maybe. Look, Courtney, what do you want?”
She finally turned her attention away from the bottles and came to lean in the doorway. Her gold badge gleamed.
My palms, dormant for most of the day, began to hum.
I ran them across my jeans to remind them of their recent interaction with the gravel road. I looked up. Had she heard about that already, too?
“What I really want is to solve this murder and get promoted,” she said. “Or use it to leverage a spot on a unit in Indianapolis or Chicago. Anywhere that isn’t here. That’s what I want. What would I settle for tonight?” Her eyes were bright with ambition, but as soon as I saw it, she seemed to realize what she was saying. The raw desire dropped away. “I’d settle for even a tiny shred of information that I don’t already have about Maddy’s murder.”
I had talked to the fiancé, and I bet she hadn’t. Loughton would be keeping some of the low-hanging fruit to himself. My dumb luck—some might say bad luck—had given me more access to a suspect than her job had. Courtney was indifferent now, hanging out in my bedroom as though we’d always done so, but I couldn’t think of another reason for her to be here. I felt the old buzz of competition. She was here because I had better information, maybe better ideas. “Has her purse turned up yet?” I said, and I enjoyed Courtney’s expression traveling between raging curiosity and nonchalance. An ambitious woman who thought ambition was dirty. Maybe she would have done better not to have any, as I had done.
But of course I carried my own dirty desires around with me, too. We all did. What Maddy hadn’t wanted people to know about her. What I didn’t want anyone to know about me or my family. The filth was inside, invisible.
“Her phone did,” Courtney said. “Crushed, in the bin, and wiped.”
The phone rang. We both turned to look, and then my mother called my name from down the hall.
“Probably the school—er, Fitz, I mean. To see if I can sub.”
“By all means,” she said. “Lean times with the Mid-Night closed.”
When I picked up the phone, the caller drew an indignant breath and unleashed a tirade of noise. Shelly. I held the phone away from my ear and checked to see if Courtney was getting what she’d come for.
“How am I supposed to pull this off?” Shelly cried. “The reunion and now a funeral? Why did you give him my number? How am I going to explain this to—well, anyone? Juliet, really, how? Surely there’s someone more—more appropriate.”
“You met him,” I said. “And he’s a mess. I just thought—well, Shelly, who’s more appropriate than you to help him pull it together? You’re the only one of us with this kind of organizational skill.”
She sniffed. “I know what blowing smoke up someone’s skirt sounds like, Juliet.”
“I’m not, I swear. He seemed so lost, and Gretchen can’t be trusted to do it well, and you’re so good at this kind of thing,” I said. “It’s not flattery if it’s true.”
Courtney made a noise behind me. I whipped around, my heart racing, sure she’d be elbow deep into the bottom drawer of the vanity or spraying herself with Maddy’s perfum
e, but she was still in the doorway. She raised her eyebrows at me.
“Fine,” Shelly said. “I’ll help a possible murderer bury his strangled wife, but you have to work it out in trade.”
My hands, at least, had stopped itching. “What then?”
“I help him, and you help me—with the reunion,” she said. “People think it comes together by magic, but it does not.”
I turned to Courtney, who was watching me as though I were her favorite TV channel. “When is it again?”
She sighed. “Saturday, Juliet. This Saturday. And thanks to you, it just became a memorial service, too.”
Right after I hung up the phone with Shelly, it rang again. “You’re so popular,” Courtney said, crossing her arms and settling in.
This time it was Fitz. “I hate to ask for another day, Jules—”
“It’s OK, I could use—I mean, I’m really enjoying it,” I said. “I’m just having them run. Was there anything else you wanted them to do?”
“You got them to run? They always complain when I make them do that.”
“Oh, they complain,” I said. “I recruited a new thirty-two-hundred-meter runner for you. Jessica somebody?”
Fitz was silent for a moment. “That’s incredible,” he said. “What did Mike say?”
I blushed a bit. Coach had said I had a good instinct, and I must have lit up like a twelve-year-old at the praise. All the girls ended up with a crush on one of the coaches, but I thought mine should have dissipated by now. “He was impressed. He said you’d had an eye on her.”
“Well, of course,” he said. “Who wouldn’t—”
“I’m sorry if I overstepped.”
“Not at all, not at all,” he said. “I was just thinking about the rest of the team, how she might fit in. Mickie runs the thirty-two hundred, but since when is it a problem to have two teammates challenging one another? You know that better than … anyway, maybe some drills for the girls tomorrow. There will be more whining for you to put up with, but you seem to have the talent for getting them to do what you want.”
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