by Tawni O'Dell
“He wasn’t thinking straight,” Sandra argues, already trying out her courtroom schtick. “He was overcome by grief and rage.”
“Which describes ninety percent of people who kill other people.”
“Chief Carnahan, you promised to behave.”
“Counselor, I’m not a dog. Don’t tell me to behave.”
Neely and Tug glance at each other. Something like amusement passes between them.
Tug’s face suddenly brightens.
“Your fingernails,” he says. “They’re just like Cami’s. They even got the sparkles.”
Sandra glances down at my hands, then up at my face, and I know she’s thinking if need be this can be used as further proof that my hormones are out of whack.
“They’re sort of a tribute to her,” I tell him. “I was talking to a few of her friends who said she had them done like this before . . .”
I don’t finish my sentence.
“I remember,” Tug says. “She and Jessy got in a big fight about it.”
“A fight about her nails?”
“Yeah. They were always getting in stupid fights over nothing.”
“How did the fight go?” I ask him. “Do you remember?”
He closes his eyes and lets his head loll back on his neck as if this is the only way he can conjure up memories of his home.
“Jessy told her they were ugly. Made her look like a stripper or something like that. Camio said she was just jealous ’cause she didn’t have any money and her life was over ’cause she had a baby.”
“Did they fight a lot?”
“I guess so. Things got worse between them after Goldie was born. Jessy started getting meaner to everyone. Mom said it was because she was tired and depressed, having a baby wasn’t easy.”
He opens his eyes and lowers his head.
“Jessy couldn’t afford anything and here was Cami getting presents from her boyfriend all the time and working at Dairy Queen, buying herself fingernails and other stuff,” Tug goes on. “I guess I couldn’t blame Jessy for being mad.”
He looks down at my hands lying on the tabletop with their bedazzled nails.
“She was really mad that night. I remember thinking if she had an ax, she’d cut Cami’s hands right off.”
A surge of excitement courses through me followed by a stab of sadness when I realize what I may have uncovered.
I flex my fingers. I can almost feel the splash of gasoline and the searing heat of the fire beginning to devour them.
chapter twenty-two
FOR ALL OUR supposed God-given common sense my churchgoing friends constantly reference or the obvious fact of our bigger brains and therefore superior reasoning abilities, I find humans to be even less capable of unlearning behavior than other animals.
I’ve seen my sister work miracles on dogs where abuse and neglect have elevated their fear to the point where they have become mindless feral beasts whose reaction to any creature is one of vicious self-defense. With incredible patience and persistence, Neely is able to return them to their trusting selves. They find loving homes and live happily without ever reverting to their previous aggression.
Yet abused children often grow up to be abusers even though their common sense tells them it’s wrong and their big brains remind them how much pain they experienced and they know firsthand how damaging that pain can be. Time and again I’ve seen adults grow up to become the very parent who treated them badly.
We are what we know. Not what the world tells us we should be. Not even what our own hearts want us to be.
Neely and I used to wonder if something bad had happened to our mom to make her the way she was, some cataclysmic trauma or even some insult given at the wrong time by the wrong person that changed her. We never knew her father, but from all accounts he was a decent, hardworking man. Grandma had her quirks, but no one could ever fault her in the doting category of motherhood. As far as we knew, Mom grew up in a normal home with normal parents and was cherished. She certainly wasn’t ever neglected.
Over the years, I’ve been a keen observer of mothers. I’m sure some of this interest comes from the fact that my own fell short in the role and then was taken from me too soon so there was never any chance for her to ask for my forgiveness. I’ve discovered not all mothers provide the unconditional love that’s supposed to be hardwired into their DNA. Some people simply aren’t capable of loving anyone, even their own children, or what passes for love in their minds isn’t what most of us expect.
With Miranda and Shawna as role models, what kind of mother is Jessy destined to be? I wonder. From the glimpses I’ve seen she seems to love Goldie. She appears to be taking care of her as best she can.
I don’t like the suspicions I’ve begun to have about her any more than I liked hearing about Camio’s manipulation of her and how ugly their fights could be, but I know I can’t let my personal feelings get in the way of this investigation.
Jessy has an alibi. One of her friends swears she was with her at her apartment during the time Camio was murdered. Nolan never talked to the girl personally but apparently felt her statement was solid. Almost as important in crossing her off the suspect list, Jessy didn’t seem to have a motive and appeared to be genuinely torn up over her sister’s death. Maybe as important, it’s hard to imagine a girl with a baby attached to her hip as a killer.
People lie. Nolan knows this better than anyone. For this reason I know he won’t be upset if I interview Jessy’s alibi witness myself. Even so, I decide not to tell him. For now.
After we’re done talking to Tug, Neely swings by my place and picks up Mason. I swing by the hair salon Snips, where Jessy’s friend Gina works.
She’s happy to talk to me. She finishes adding a few strokes of hair color to a customer’s head, sets her timer, and joins me outside in the sunshine.
I blink up at the turquoise sky and the two blindingly white clouds stuck to its surface. For the hundredth time this week I make the observation that this weather can’t last.
She takes a drag off a cigarette and a slurp of a Big Gulp and nods her head in agreement.
She’s wearing a long black tank top spangled in flat silver studs over leggings and a pair of sandals exposing yellow polished toenails, each adorned with a different character from South Park. Her shoulder-length hair is dyed a shocking shade of purplish red that reminds me of a time when Neely, Champ, and I were experimenting with condiments for our school lunch sandwiches and mixed grape jelly and ketchup together. It wasn’t good to eat or to look at.
“How’s Jess doing?” she asks me.
“I’d think you’d be better able to answer that question than me,” I reply, a little surprised.
“I just thought if you’re here wanting to talk about her maybe it’s because you’ve seen her. I haven’t talked to her since it happened. She’s kind of gone off the grid. Camio’s death really wrecked her.”
“They were close?”
She blows a stream of smoke out the corner of her mouth.
“Sure.”
“What about you and Jessy? Do you see each other a lot? Must be hard with the baby.”
“She doesn’t let Goldie get in the way of anything. She takes her with her everywhere. It’s kind of sweet.”
“And kind of something else?” I ask her.
She flicks some ash on the pavement and shrugs.
“She never gets a break from her. I still feel kind of bad I said no to her that day and wouldn’t watch Goldie for her. But babies freak me out. I’m scared the whole time I’m going to break them.”
“What day was that?”
She looks at me for a second, then her eyes flit away nervously.
“Did Jessy ask you to watch Goldie the day Camio was murdered?” I prod her.
She smokes and drinks, stares at the sky, then her toes.
She’s already given away the answer. I just need her to realize this and say it out loud.
“Yeah. Sure,” she finally admits
. “I said no, so we just hung out together instead.”
“Instead of what?”
“Instead of her going where she wanted to go without Goldie.”
“Where was that?”
“I don’t know.”
“I think you know where she wanted to go. Can you tell me?”
“Why?”
“Because in an investigation like this, the smallest detail can end up being very important. Don’t you think Jessy wants Camio’s killer to be caught?”
She thinks about this for a moment.
“I don’t see how it can help, but she was going to see Goldie’s baby daddy. She was hoping to hook up with him and didn’t want the kid around.”
This is the first I’ve heard about Goldie’s father.
“What’s his name?”
“Kirk.”
“Last name?”
“Don’t know. He’s a bartender at the Rusty Nail.”
“Are he and Jessy serious?”
“Huh? No way. He was a one-time thing and she got pregnant. They don’t have anything to do with each other.”
“What about Goldie?”
“He knows about her. I think he offered to give Jess some money but he doesn’t want to be a dad. Sorry, but I’ve got to get back to work,” she finishes hurriedly.
She takes a final drag off her cigarette and tosses it on the ground. I raise my eyebrows at her and she picks up the butt.
“I’d like for you to come to the station with me. I think we should talk further.”
She runs a hand through her tomato-grape hair and lets out a deep, frustrated breath.
“Okay,” she says. “She wasn’t with me. Okay? She was with Kirk. She asked me to lie because she didn’t want her family finding out. They hate the guy.”
“I thought they didn’t know him.”
“The Trulys don’t have to know you to hate you.”
All the tension leaves her body. Like most people keeping a secret, the revelation has freed her.
She tilts her head back and smiles up at the sky.
“God, I feel so much better,” she cries. “I didn’t like lying to the cops, but I didn’t think there was any harm in it. It’s not like Jess killed her sister. She has a good alibi, she just doesn’t want anyone to know its Kirk.
“Am I in trouble?” she thinks to ask.
“No,” I tell her.
“Is Jessy?”
“No.”
“I wish I could do something for her.”
“You could help her with her roots,” I suggest.
“Yeah, right.” She laughs. “She likes them that way.”
I CONTACT the Rusty Nail and get Kirk’s last name and phone number. He doesn’t respond to my calls throughout the day and leaves me no choice but to ambush him at the bar.
I call Neely and ask if she can bring Mason to my house after work instead of me picking him up, stay for dinner, and then watch him while I go talk to Kirk. She agrees.
I’ve often wondered at the wisdom behind naming a bar and eatery after something that evokes images of rotting boards and tetanus shots but apparently it never bothered anyone else. The Rusty Nail has been here forever and has always thrived. In my mom’s day it was a dive—dark, dank, claustrophobic hole, devoid of women, and silent except for the sounds of empty glasses and bottles clacking on the bar top and the drone of a sports announcer coming from a solitary flickering black-and-white TV. In many ways it was reminiscent of the mines where most of the patrons worked, and many of them sat hunkered down over their drinks as if they were still toiling in the tunnels.
Sometime during the nineties, ownership changed hands. The two neighboring storefronts were up for sale, too. The establishment tripled in size and acquired a kitchen. Now it’s a loud, slick sports bar like a thousand others across the nation.
For some reason, they kept the name and also attempted to keep some of the original spirit by covering the walls with a pasteurized mishmash of blue-collar manliness: sports memorabilia, brand-new parts of old-model cars, a length of shiny railroad track, a mounted deer head.
Now just as many women come here as men. The place reverberates with the sound of raised voices trying to compete with the noise coming from the twenty TVs. On weekends they compound the problem by having live music.
It’s a weeknight and I arrive around seven, before it gets too busy.
As I walk in and glance at the bar’s name etched on the door, I can’t help thinking about Jessy noticing the scar on Camio’s foot in the crime scene photo. She remembered it came from a rusty nail and the wound got infected. That kind of attention to her younger sister came from either truly caring about her or creepily chronicling everything about her.
Kirk is easy to spot. The other bartender working tonight is a girl.
I’ve changed into jeans, heels, and a champagne-colored silky tee with a little bling. I sit down at the bar near Kirk and immediately take out my phone so I blend in with everyone else.
He makes his way toward me.
“What can I get you?” he asks.
I ignore him for a moment while I finish my imaginary tweet: Getting hammered at the Rusty Nail. #get it?
He’s not a bad-looking kid and he knows it. A few suitably defiant but basically nonthreatening tattoos. Carefully considered stubble. A crop of wheat blond, purposely mussed-up hair. An onyx stud earring and a woven leather choker.
“A sultry night like tonight makes me feel like I’m south of the border. I’ll have a Corona and don’t forget the lime.”
“South of our border is Maryland,” he volleys back.
I smile at him.
“You’re a smart-ass. And you know your geography. I like both those qualities in a man.”
He brings me my beer. I nurse it while he tends to other customers. He stops by a couple of times to check on me. We make a little more small talk.
I’m trying to decide how to bring up the topic of Jessyca when one of the blaring TVs does it for me. An update of Camio’s murder flashes on one of the news channels. Fortunately, it doesn’t include any of my interviews.
Kirk happens to be standing in front of me when we both catch the video.
“Did you hear about the murder of that girl?” I ask him. “Pretty awful, huh?”
“Yeah.”
“I hear you’re a friend of her sister’s.”
He gives me a startled look. I sip innocently at my beer.
“The dead Truly girl’s sister? Who told you that?”
“The girl who does my hair,” I explain. “She’s friends with her. Jessy, right? When I told her I was meeting someone here tonight she said Jessy has a thing for the hot bartender at the Rusty Nail. I assumed that’s you.”
The stroking of his ego works. He drops his defenses for a moment.
“I might know her,” he concedes. “I wouldn’t call us friends, though.”
“What would you call her? The mother of your child?”
His glib exterior cracks into a million pieces of panic. “Hey, whoa.”
He lowers his head and leans across the bar. I do the same.
“Where did that come from?” he whispers to me.
“I’m the chief of police,” I whisper back.
I reach for my creds and place them on the bar in case he doesn’t believe me. It happens all the time, because I’m a woman and I don’t resemble the eighties stereotype of a gym teacher or an Eastern European athlete; I also look exceptionally good tonight.
“Are you kidding me?” He keeps his voice lowered. “Is she getting the police involved? Can she even do that? I told her I’d give her some money but I’m not paying child support and I’m not changing diapers.”
I think about my own dad having this same conversation with my mother. Or did he? I only have my mother’s version of what went on between them as told to her mother, and she didn’t provide many details. I also have no way of knowing how much of it was true. This is one of the biggest regrets of my
life: having the master plan of my creation and the question of my desirability be in doubt. I don’t care what Miranda Truly says about my paternal grandmother’s feelings toward my mother and me. She could be lying, too.
“Legally, if Jessyca wanted to pursue this matter, you’d have to pay child support if the child is yours,” I tell Kirk. “But that’s not what I’m here about.”
I fall silent for a second and let him stew.
“You don’t seem to have any doubt that you’re the father,” I observe.
“I don’t know for sure,” he says, “but I figure why would she come and tell me this kid is mine if she wasn’t going to shake me down or try and get me to marry her? She said she just wanted me to know I had a kid. That it was the right thing to do. So I figure she’s probably telling the truth. But if she tries to get me to pay up, we’re getting a DNA test.”
“You’re a real stand-up guy.”
“It wasn’t my fault,” he insists angrily.
He walks away but returns almost immediately.
“I don’t have to talk to you. Do I?” he asks.
“Nope,” I reply. “How about another beer?”
This time, he doesn’t rush back. He busies himself with other customers, laughing with a few of them, trying to seem blasé, but I know my presence here at the end of the bar is killing him.
He finally returns and sets another bottle in front of me. The lime wedge is missing. I know he did this on purpose.
“Why wasn’t it your fault?” I ask him, and give him a sympathetic pout. “Did your daddy never have the sex talk with you? Were you absent the day they explained how babies are made in health class?”
“She lied to me,” he says, lowering his voice into a whisper again and leaning into my face. “She told me she was on the pill.”
“But you still used a condom?”
“She asked me not to. She said it felt better. I’m not going to argue with that. Why am I talking to you?”
He stands up and stalks off again but boomerangs back. His type needs constant vindication.
“You have no idea what it’s like being a guy.”
“You’re right. Educate me.”
“You want to have sex, right?”
“I’m with you so far.”