Turning on the Tide

by Jenna Rae

  “It’s too big a risk.”

  “The risk is letting this freak think she can harass you like this.”

  “If she actually threatens me, or if I think she’s following me or anything like that, I’ll tell Del. But, please, don’t interfere, please?”

  “I don’t know.” Marco eyed her. “What if—”

  “Just wait for a week or two, okay? Then, if you’re still worried, we can talk.”

  He shook his head. “One week, and I mean it.”

  “How’s Phil?”

  “God, Lola!” Marco laughed. “That’s the least subtle change of subject ever!”

  She grimaced. “Sorry. I just want to be as good a friend to you as you are to me.”

  “You are far too easily pleased.”

  “I feel so stupid. I must have led her on without realizing it.”

  “I doubt that.” He grabbed her hand. “Listen, honey, crazy people don’t need to be led on. They do all the leading. Don’t blame yourself. Okay?”

  She shrugged, unable to speak.

  “Hey.” Marco’s voice was soft, and his eyes searched hers. “Don’t you know, I think of you as the little sister I never had? I don’t want anything bad to happen to you.”

  Lola was embarrassed to find that she was crying again. “Oh, Marco, what did I ever do to deserve you?”

  “You got lucky.”

  “Yes, I did.” Lola shrugged again.

  “Honey, call me any time, okay? If things get worse.”

  “I keep hoping she’ll just get bored and go away.”

  “You and me both, sis.”

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Del was still in a fog when she walked into the kitchen. She couldn’t stop thinking about the woman she’d seen riding with Lola the night before. This was absurd, obviously. She’d spent the night hoping to recapture some sense of her relationship with Janet, maybe hoping Janet would just show up there at the motel. She should have followed Lola. Or at least called her to check in either last night or sometime over the course of the long day. Or actually talked to Lola when she called. Something. Because this too-little-too-late curiosity was frustrating and scary and made her stomach hurt. Who was Lola with? Why was she with someone else? Was she cheating?

  That last one made her stop short. She looked at the clock. It was ten at night, but Lola’s new purse—the purse she’d bought on the sly, keeping the receipt out of the monthly budget file—wasn’t on the hook by the door. Del bounded up the stairs. No one was home. The closet door was ajar, and Del held her breath as she eased it open further. Del’s dress uniform hung in its plastic dry cleaner’s sheath. Del’s other clothes were arranged on wooden hangers. Lola had replaced the plastic ones months before, after asking permission, of course. Del didn’t have an extravagant wardrobe, just the essentials, but she still had more clothes than Lola owned. All were Del’s now. The other side was empty. In the back sat the camping gear and gun safe. Nothing of Lola’s. The top of the dresser held nothing of Lola’s. Del waited until she’d gone through every drawer in the dresser, the bathroom, the office. Lola’s stuff was all gone.

  Several hours later, Del was sitting at the kitchen table, a mug of vodka in front of her. She’d finally noticed the envelope stuck to the fridge with a magnet, ripped it open, read Lola’s letter. She couldn’t do more than sit and breathe for a long time. She examined the letter again, but she couldn’t remember what the words meant. She tried a third time to understand. Still nothing. She pushed the letter away.

  “What do you need?” Del glared at her wavy reflection in the chrome-plated toaster. Lola had replaced the battered yellow one, the one that used to smoke and burn the toast every time, no matter how closely Del watched it. It had never occurred to Del to replace it, had it? And of course Lola had asked permission. Just like always. She’d been a guest, hadn’t she?

  Del spent her second consecutive sleepless night walking around the house and noting the ways Lola had made it a home with her thoughtful little gifts. She’d knitted the beautiful red throw tossed over the back of the couch, put plants in all the rooms. She’d been careful, always checking to make sure it was okay to do any little thing. But she’d kept at it, turning the cold, lifeless rooms into homey dens of warmth and comfort and companionship. And Del had never thanked her, never told her how much she appreciated Lola’s efforts. She’d never told her how happy she was Lola was in her life. She’d taken her for granted. Why? Because she wasn’t a nymphomaniac, like Janet? Del peered out her living room window at Lola’s house up the street, wondering what Lola was feeling right now, if Lola still loved her, the way her letter insisted she did.

  Del eyed herself in the window’s gray reflection. “She left. She can claim to feel whatever she wants, it’s what she did that matters. She met somebody else while you were off thinking about humping your ex, and it’s your own damn fault.”

  She talked to herself in the shower while the sun came up. “You didn’t deserve her anyway,” she told herself, almost choking on the stream of water. “She was too good for you all along, you just didn’t want to see it.”

  It was a relief to go to work. Del sat at her desk, ignoring her hangover and wishing she had a clear enough head to actually figure out where Janet was. Dozens of missing women in the city, Janet missing and maybe in trouble, and Del was sitting here like a lump and completely useless. Looking at Phan, Del saw him watching her.

  “What?”

  “You’ve been doing that a lot lately.”

  “What?”

  “Rubbing your arm.”

  Del looked down. “Yeah, it’s a little sore. No biggie.”

  Phan frowned. “Any tissue damage?”

  Del shrugged. “I doubt it.”

  “What does the doc say?”

  Del colored. “I didn’t actually tell him it hurts.”

  “Mason—”

  “I know.” She waved away the subject. “Listen, it’s nothing.”

  He shook his head. “Listen yourself, macho Mason. I don’t plan to get shot because your ego won’t let you make sure you have two working arms. Go to the doc, or I go to Wonderbread and get you put on desk duty.”

  He waited for her reluctant nod.

  “We’re done here. The storm is getting lousy, and I want to be home when Kaylee gets there.” As if to underscore his words, sheets of rain slapped the windows with sudden, increased force.

  Del nodded and rose to pull on her jacket, unable to hide a grimace of pain. Phan raised his eyebrow as he pulled on his own jacket, and Del diverted his attention.

  “How’s she doing?”

  He shrugged. “I’ll let you know tomorrow. Haven’t seen her for a week.”

  “How come?”

  Another shrug. “Says she wants to stay with her mom.”

  “And you’re letting her get away with that?”

  Phan’s laugh was dry and humorless. “I can’t wait till you become a parent, Mason. It’s a lot harder than it looks.”

  “It looks pretty damn hard from here.”

  Phan’s laugh had warmed her until she’d gotten home. She had to strip down in the garage and drape her rain-soaked clothes over the utility sink Lola had asked her to install but which wasn’t yet hooked up to the plumbing. Shivering, Del raced upstairs to the shower and stood under the pounding waterfall, letting the heat and pressure warm her and loosen the muscles in her neck and shoulders.

  “You’re being wasteful,” she told herself after several minutes. But she didn’t want to leave the shower. It wasn’t until the water started to cool that she shut it off and grabbed a towel. She dressed as quickly as she could, telling herself the chill she felt was from the weather, but turning up the heater didn’t make a difference. Before too long, she was busy telling herself she’d pulled on a buttoned shirt because she liked it better, not because it hurt her shoulder to put on a pullover.

  Del leaned over and rested her cheek against Lola’s pillow, closing her aching eye
s. She breathed in Lola’s scent or the memory of it—she wasn’t sure which it was—and felt a sob shudder through her. Hadn’t she already done this? Hadn’t she already cried like a baby on Lola’s pillow? She shook her head.

  “No more of that.” She stripped the bed and bundled the sheets and pillowcases into the washing machine, using only her right arm. “That’s enough.” The cycle started, and Del turned away from the rocking appliance.

  She was able to keep busy for almost three hours, cleaning the house, doing laundry, paying bills. She managed to do all of this without using her left arm, and she managed to ignore that fact, for the most part. She gnawed on a microwaveable burrito while standing over the sink and noted the burrito was nearly the last edible thing in the house. How could that be? It wasn’t like Lola had been gone for long. Still, there it was.

  “She used to buy the food,” Del told no one.

  “She used to be here, and she would cook for me and write me little notes and leave them all over the house. She made this place feel—”

  Del dropped the rest of her burrito into the trash, giving in and trudging upstairs and to bed. The sheets smelled clean and untouched, and she wished she’d put off washing them one more day.

  “She left me,” Del whispered, rubbing her left arm. “She left me.”

  By the end of the week, she was ready to give in and get her arm checked out. Phan insisted on driving her, going in with her.

  “Are there particular motions or activities that cause the discomfort?”

  A shrug from Del. At Phan’s glare, she waggled her head. “It feels weird if I try to sleep on my left side. It hurts a little, not where I got shot. Up here.” She pointed at her shoulder. “Uh, putting on a shirt. Picking things up. Reaching for things. Carrying pretty much anything. It feels like the top of my shoulder’s gonna pop right off. Like it’s already popped off, only you can’t see it from the outside.”

  She had to go back the next day for an X-ray and an MRI, and it was nearly a week before she got a call from the nurse practitioner. She was at her desk, ignoring Phan’s intent stare, and hung up the phone with a grimace.

  “You off the streets?”

  Del picked up the phone to slam it down again, but the plastic receiver just tapped against the plastic base, and she glared at the thing in disgust. “Remember the old phones? Weighed thirty pounds? If you slammed the phone, it sounded like it?”

  Phan rolled his eyes. “Talk to me?”

  Del made a face. “Okay. The shoulder is wrecked. I didn’t really get the technical explanation. I was supposed to go see some doctor after I got released to set up physical therapy—”

  “You didn’t.”

  “No.”

  “So now you’re pulled.”

  “Sorry. I don’t even get to sit behind a desk. I’m completely off work for a week, at least, then desk duty and physical therapy, no lifting, no anything. They won’t say for how long. Shit, Phan, I’m sorry.”

  “It might not be such a bad thing.”

  “I can work the Hahn case.”

  “Exactly.”

  “It’d be nice if I had a plan.”

  “Well,” Phan stood and grabbed his jacket. “Now you have time to come up with one. See you tomorrow. No, scratch that, I’ll talk to you tomorrow.”

  The next morning, Del went over her extensive notes on Janet for the first time in several days. She sat at the kitchen table, organizing the limited and disparate pieces of information on note cards, the way she used to years ago. It felt strange, going back to the old way of looking at things, the way Halloran, her training partner back when she was a rookie, showed her. He’d known she’d make detective someday, long before she’d even thought about it.

  “Think like a scientist,” he’d said. “Look at the data without any emotional bias.”

  His advice had been invaluable, and it had shaped her both as a cop and as a person in general. It had also dovetailed with his other big advice, “Cool it, kid.”

  “Wish you were here now,” she muttered aloud. “Sure could use your thoughts on this shit.” She tried to imagine Halloran was sitting in front of her, taking her in with his calm gaze, assessing and guiding her. She hadn’t thought about Halloran in a long time, and it was strange to realize he was dead, had been for years.

  Her father might be dead too, for all she knew, Momma too. Daddy would know what to do, she realized. Daddy and Halloran seemed very different on the surface, but they were both smart and tough and strong. They were also the most important influences on her, the two people she’d most admired and wanted to emulate. Would they be proud of her? Would they think she was a good person, a good cop? Del thought about herself as a kid, so determined to grow up to get away from her lousy parents and to be a good person. What would that kid think of Del now?

  “Oh, Daddy,” Del heard herself whisper. “Why did everything have to change?”

  Janet and Daddy had that in common—they did everything right until they were sure Del loved them, and then they turned on her and broke her heart. Funny, hadn’t she thought just a few weeks ago that Janet was like Momma? Maybe she was like both. Selfish, slippery, volatile, often drunk and unreliable—it was like Janet had been designed specifically to act just like both of Del’s parents.

  “No wonder I fell in love with her. It was like coming home.”

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  “Let me get this straight.” The bored man on the other side of the table scratched at a patch of eczema on his hand. “You met a woman. You went out with her. You gave her your number, and she texted you. Right?”

  “Yes. Several dozen times a day.”

  “She hasn’t threatened you.”

  Lola hesitated. “Not directly, no.”

  “She hasn’t shown up at your house or your job or whatever.”

  “No, but—”

  “You asked her not to contact you.”

  “Yes. If you would just read—”

  “There’s not a lot we can do.” He turned away from her and started stabbing at the keyboard of his computer. “We fill out this harassment complaint. It’s a misdemeanor. Goes in the computer, and you can update it every time she bugs you. Okay?” His drooping brown eyes pleaded with her to just nod, and she gave up and did so. Five minutes later, Lola was outside and looking around. She was on her own.

  Her phone buzzed again, and she knew she should ignore it. She managed to do so until she’d taken two different buses—six more buzzes—and gotten home. She checked all the windows and doors and turned on the alarm. She was by this time fighting tears.

  “Why is this happening to me?” It was familiar, the feeling of being hunted, and she hated the familiarity of it and the accompanying self-pity almost as much as the hunted feeling itself. She waited until she was in her bathroom with the door locked to read the texts that had come since she’d gone to the police station.

  The police can’t help you.

  I’m the only one who can.

  You need saving but not from me.

  You were lost but now you are found.

  Lola put the phone on the counter and turned to the mirror. She’d dressed carefully that morning, wanting to look respectable and credible so that the police would help her. But it hadn’t worked. Or it hadn’t made any difference. Why had she imagined it would?

  She logged in and checked the wording on the report. It read: “Complainant dated a lesbian named Starla and terminated the relationship. Starla is texting the complainant.”

  “This isn’t what I said at all!” Lola shook her head. “You didn’t even spell her name right. You didn’t care, did you? Nobody does. I didn’t explain it right.”

  The phone buzzed again, and Lola went back to her bathroom.

  “You can’t do anything right, can you?”

  It was Orrin, and Lola shook her head.

  “Apparently not.” The phone buzzed again. Her gaze flicked to her red-eyed reflection before she forced her gaze
away to check the name on the screen: Sterling.

  “I shouldn’t read them,” she explained to her mirror self. “But I feel like I have to know too.” Her reflection seemed dubious, so she continued. “What if she says, ‘hey, I’m coming to your house to kill you’? Don’t I need to know that?”

  Her reflection stared back at her with clear disdain. Then it flew away as she pulled open the medicine cabinet and put her cell phone on the bottom shelf inside. She eased the door shut. It was maybe three minutes before the phone buzzed again. Lola watched, but the door held.

  “The battery’ll die eventually,” she told her right-handed self. “I don’t have to do anything now. I went to the police, and I put the phone away, and now I don’t have to do anything.”

  The doorbell rang, and she jumped. Lola raced downstairs but hung back, checking the peephole before yanking the door open.

  “Del?” She looked terrible. Her hair was overgrown, her eyes, bloodshot. Lola gestured at Del’s sweater, which was spattered with some unidentifiable crud that looked like a few meals’ worth of drippings.

  “I have a shirt that would fit you,” she blurted out. “Clean. If you want it.”

  “What?” Del scowled. “A shirt? I’m not here for a shirt.”

  “I—would you like to come in?” As she led the way to the kitchen, Lola tried to catch her breath.

  We haven’t talked in over a week. You’ve been acting like I dumped you, but I didn’t. I said that in my letter, very clearly.

  What she said, though, was, “Can I get you some coffee? Something to eat?”

  She turned to see Del shaking her head no.

  “I can make my own coffee. I’m here because of Marco.”

  “Marco? Is he okay?”

  “He says you have a stalker.”

  “Oh.” Lola poured Del a cup of coffee and handed it to her, stalling for time. “No, it’s nothing. I already took care of it.”

  Why did I say that? I need her help. I need someone’s help, don’t I? But she didn’t know what to say.

  “Okay.” Del put the mug on the counter as though it were made of kryptonite. “If you took care of it, you took care of it.” She stalked back toward the front door, and Lola trailed after her.