by Dan Wells
Was Marci helping Brooke deal with a situation she couldn’t face? Or was she stealing her life away, second by second?
And which one did I want: the smart, capable girl I loved, or the screwed-up girl who wanted to die?
I set down the bread and watched them talk.
About ten minutes later Corey and Paul walked out, Jessica and Brielle leaving with them. Marci walked back to me and wiggled her eyebrows dramatically—something Brooke had never done, but I’d seen Marci do it a hundred times. “Eating out of the palm of my hand,” she said. She picked my zucchini bread and popped it into her mouth. “Turns out this town has an ice cream place by the delightful name of Kitten Caboodle. We’re meeting those young ladies and gentlemen there tonight.”
I nodded. “Suckin’ on chili dogs outside the Tastee-Freez.”
“What?”
“Classic rock,” I said.
“Cool,” said Marci. “But first, how about a little thanks? I’m, like, Brielle’s best friend in the world, after ten friggin’ minutes.”
“Yes,” I said, silently chastising myself. “You were awesome. If I could talk to people that easily, I … don’t even know what I would do. Have a way happier life, for one thing.”
“And you do things I can’t do,” she said. “We’re a great team.”
“Yeah,” I said, looking at the open door. “Between the two of us, I figure we make just about one whole person.”
We hung around a little longer at the church, meeting various community dignitaries and trying to seem as innocent and pious as possible. I even thought about quoting some of the scriptures I knew, but decided that the strong focus on death would make that seem creepy instead of faithful. Having Ingrid with us did wonders, as everyone in town seemed to know her and respect her. We rode her reflected goodwill for all it was worth. We even chatted with Corey’s parents, Steven and Jennifer, though it was mostly just small talk to get them to like us. The real questions could come later. When it was all over we helped clean up and carry all the plates home—not just Ingrid’s, but Beth’s as well. She hobbled behind us with her cane, remarking on how much brighter the neighborhood seemed now that everyone had come out of hiding, and spinning out grand plans for the neighborhood watch.
At the house, we unpacked some of our things, hanging our clean clothes in the closet of the pink bedroom to help air them out a bit, giving them the chance to smell like a home instead of a highway. Later we washed all the dirty dishes from Ingrid’s baking, then walked out to Main Street to look for a place to get a real haircut. We found a salon with one lone stylist, a woman named Cindy, who cut my hair short and trimmed Marci’s short bob all the way down to a pixie cut. Two dollars and eleven cents left.
We stepped outside, where we’d left Boy Dog tied to a pole, and looked around. I brushed at the back of my neck, trying to dislodge the last of the itchy hair clippings. It was past dinnertime, but we’d filled up on bread and brownies at the community meeting, and were so accustomed to going hungry that we didn’t feel any need for food. We strolled the two blocks toward Kitten Caboodle, which turned out to be a small stand with no interior seating—just a drive-thru window in the back and a walk-up window in front, next to an asphalt lot with five round tables. These were bright red, made of old, scratched fiberglass, and bolted to metal frames with semicircular benches. The frames, in turn, were chained to the ground, and I wondered what high school prank had necessitated that measure. We asked the clerk for a paper dish full of water for Boy Dog, and sat in the late evening light and waited.
“What day is it?” asked Marci.
“Wednesday.”
“I mean what day of the month?”
I thought for a minute. “July something,” I said at last. “It was on the news show we saw the other day, so just add two and there you go. I don’t remember what to add two to, though.”
“July,” said Marci. “Where were you for the fourth?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “On the road somewhere.”
The girls showed up first and they immediately fell into a conversation about Marci’s hair.
“I’ve always wanted to try mine that short,” said Brielle, touching her own very long hair. “But I think my parents would blow a fuse. And Paul would hate it.”
“Does Paul like you or your hair?” asked Marci.
“He likes her butt,” said Jessica.
“Can you blame him?” asked Brielle with a grin.
“Seriously, though,” said Marci. “If he likes you, he’ll like you no matter what your hair looks like.”
“People always say that,” said Brielle. “But it always sounds so one-sided to me. I’m not the only one in this relationship.”
“You’re the only one wearing your hair,” said Jessica.
“But there’s something to be said for accommodating someone you like,” said Brielle. “If it was a big deal, sure, I’d cut my hair off. But if I don’t really care either way, and he cares a lot, why not keep it long?”
“What kind of accommodations does he make for you?” asked Marci.
Brielle pursed her lips and didn’t answer. After a moment she looked at me. “What do you think, David? Guys like long hair, right?”
“I don’t like having to tuck it behind my ears all the time,” I said. It wasn’t what she meant, but I was only half paying attention, and unhelpful sarcasm was apparently my default mode. I looked up the street. Where was Corey? Was waiting for him at a specific time and place a trap? Would he try to hurt us so publicly?
“I mean on girls,” said Brielle. “Paul or no Paul, and I say this in all humility, this is man-catching hair.”
I looked at her and admitted to myself that she did indeed have incredible hair. It had looked good at the church meeting, but she’d obviously done something to it since; it was wavy and full and caught the setting sun perfectly. I imagined myself combing it, flat on an embalming table, over and over until it shone like gold—
“It’s not about bodies,” I said. “It’s about whoever’s inside of them.”
I looked at Marci. In Brooke’s body. She looked back, saying nothing, then turned to Brielle. “If only it were that easy, huh?”
“I don’t want a boyfriend ’til college,” said Jessica. “All the boys are idiots.”
Marci looked at me with a wicked grin. “Preach.”
“Boys aren’t that bad,” said Brielle.
“I don’t mean all the boys in the world,” said Jessica. “I mean all the boys here. They’re the same boys I’ve known since preschool. Braden Cole is the cutest boy in my grade, and he threw up on me on a kindergarten field trip.”
“If you don’t want boys who throw up on you, college is going to be a big surprise,” said Marci. I looked at her, wondering at the comment—she’d died as a sophomore in high school. But I supposed she had plenty of memories mixed in with her own, memories belonging to girls Nobody had killed when they were older. Had she torn through a university once, thinking that the perfect life she wanted might be there? I wondered how long that had lasted, and what kind of life, if any, might finally satisfy her. And I wondered how much of Nobody’s restlessness was still there, latent in Brooke’s fragmented mind.
“I love your highlights,” said Brielle, looking at Brooke’s blond hair again. “Are they natural?”
“They are!” said Marci cheerfully. “And I love them. It’s kind of fun being blond—”
She didn’t look at me, but I could tell from her sudden pause that she was frozen in shock at the accidental slipup. Marci had had dark black hair all her life.
“Did you dye it?” asked Jessica.
“I had it black for a while,” said Marci, touching Brooke’s hair with her fingertips. “This is great, but … I kind of miss the old hair.”
“You look great blond,” said Brielle. “It suits you.”
Corey came from behind the ice cream stand, stepping softly as if he was trying to sneak up on us, but I saw Boy Dog
’s head move. I turned my own head just enough to see Corey from the corner of my eye.
“Welcome to the Kitten Caboodle,” I said, summoning all my will not to look at him directly—to allow him to sneak up behind me. I was, for a moment, terrified.
“We just call it Caboodle’s,” said Paul, walking behind Corey.
“Is that the owner’s last name?” asked Marci. Her eyes lit up. “Does that mean his first name is Kitten?”
“Don’t I wish,” said Paul.
“It’s just a cute name,” said Brielle. “I don’t think it means anything.”
“It’s a pun,” said Jessica.
“Obviously it’s a pun,” said Paul. “We mean beside that.”
“Five-oh,” said Corey, looking past us toward the street. We turned and saw a man walking toward us, swaggering slightly in the brown uniform of the state police.
“Crap,” said Brielle, muttering so softly I could barely hear her. “Officer Cuddles.”
“Good evening to you fine young ladies,” said the officer. “Are these boys bothering you?”
“No, Mr. Glassman,” said Brielle.
“Officer Glassman,” said the officer. I looked at his name tag and saw the vague outline of a name that might be Glassman; I looked at his face instead and saw clearly Sara’s features reflected in him—the same nose, the same shape in the cheeks. He was definitely her brother. He looked at Jessica and Brielle, lingering just a little longer than he needed to on each one, then turned to look at Marci. “You’re new in town.”
And there was that old, familiar feeling again—not hate, but a sudden, almost crystalline clarity: I could kill this man without the tiniest bump in my heart rate.
No.
“Just passing through,” said Marci. Her endless joviality was gone, replaced by a brusque dismissal. She acknowledged him, gave the barest minimum of an answer, then turned away. She looked at Corey—why at Corey, of all people?—and nodded her head toward the ice cream stand. “We gonna get anything?”
The dark, near-scowl on Officer Glassman’s face showed that he didn’t like being ignored and he had the authority to make sure we noticed him. “What’s your name?” he asked. Almost as an afterthought he turned to me as well. “You too, kid. What’s your name?”
“David,” I said.
“Got any ID?”
“What flavors do they have?” asked Marci, still looking at Corey.
“I asked for your name,” said Glassman again, louder this time.
“Marci,” said Marci, looking at him again. “Are you from around here?”
It was obvious that Glassman was a jerk, and judging by the nickname Officer Cuddles, he had some kind of a reputation. Based on the way Corey and Paul looked uncomfortable, but Jessica and Brielle looked outright disgusted, it wasn’t hard to guess where that nickname had come from. The look on his face oscillated between lechery and anger; he could barely keep his eyes off of Jessica’s legs, easily visible in her jean shorts. And any time his look strayed elsewhere it was on one of the other girls, and well below their eyes. The local kids were all staying quiet, implying that this kind of thing happened often enough to be familiar, but never got bad enough to merit fighting back. I assumed he would pester us a little, maybe leer a bit, and then move on. He certainly wouldn’t try anything in the middle of Main Street like this.
But he might still insist on seeing our ID. And he looked like the kind of guy who, when we couldn’t show him any, would relish the opportunity to throw his weight around a little. We might lose everything we’d worked for, right here at Caboodle’s.
“I grew up here,” said Glassman. “Dillon’s first settlers were Glassmans.”
“Did they work in glass?” asked Marci. She didn’t smile when she said it—she wasn’t flirting—but she was definitely playing him a little. Feigning interest in his story to help him feel important, trying to defuse the initial burst of anger that had prompted him to ask for our IDs. Ignoring him had been her first gambit and it had backfired; now she was trying to keep him friendly.
“I … guess so,” said Glassman. “I hadn’t really thought about it.”
“Maybe in England they did,” said Marci. “And then when they came over here they started farming. Or ranching, I guess.” She scrunched up her forehead and nose, twisting her lips in an adorable look of innocent confusion. I worried she was taking it too far. “Do they have a lot of ranches around here?”
“This is corn country,” said Paul. “Well, corn now. A lot of it used to be wheat—”
“It was the government subsidies that changed the focus,” said Glassman, stealing back the spotlight without even looking in Paul’s direction. “Biofuels and whatnot. It doesn’t pay to be in anything but corn these days.”
“Being a cop’s more interesting anyway,” said Marci, but Jessica’s face fell so fast when she said it that I knew Marci had made some kind of blunder, tripping over some invisible Dillon trip wire.
Officer Glassman’s eyes darkened—his eyebrows knit together and his eyeballs appeared to get darker in their shadow. “You got a problem with the state police, missy?”
“Marci,” said Marci, and Glassman and I both stared at her in shock—he was already getting angry and she’d corrected him, blunt as could be. But even as he was starting to snarl out a protest, she laughed out loud—high peals of laughter that seemed to shake her whole body. She covered her mouth with her hand and raised her eyebrows, trying to stifle the laughter, and then started spewing out a high-speed apology: “Oh, I’m so sorry I’m so sorry, I thought you were saying my name and so I was telling you it was Marci, I’m such an airhead, I’m so sorry, please, um, please—” She looked as apologetic as a person could look while trying not to laugh, and her laughter was so infectious that Glassman and Paul both started chuckling with her. None of the rest of us did, though I tried to smile to keep the general atmosphere going.
“No harm done, Marci,” said Glassman. He hesitated a moment, thrown so thoroughly off his guard that he didn’t know what to say next. “You, um, here for ice cream?”
“What flavor do you recommend?” asked Marci, recovering her composure just slowly enough to make the laughter look sincere. She wiped a tear from her eye to complete the effect.
“Raspberry,” said Glassman. “Dillon’s famous for its raspberries.”
“Awesome,” said Marci, and she jumped up from her seat on the scratched red table. “Thanks! Come on guys.” She motioned to us with her head, sticking her fingers in the back pockets of her jeans, and turned her back on Glassman to walk to the ice cream counter.
The rest of us took our cue and followed Marci, while Glassman just stood dumbly and watched, completely outmatched in Marci’s verbal chess game. He didn’t try to stop us—the conversation had arrived at his own dismissal so naturally he couldn’t protest it. I waited the longest, letting the rest bunch up in the line while I watched Glassman’s face. The last one to go was Jessica. As she turned, she dropped her phone. She stopped to pick it up, grimacing in fear that she’d somehow broken the spell, but all Glassman could see was her butt, bent over and pointed right at him, perfectly displayed in her tight shorts. He stared at it, and I saw him swallow and clench his fists. I looked away, not wanting him to see that I had seen him. When Jessica walked past me I moved directly behind her, cutting off Glassman’s view.
At the bar, we all made pointless small talk, not daring to look back. After a minute or two, I glanced back as discreetly as I could, hoping not to see him still standing in the same place. The truth was almost as bad—he was across the street, sitting in his squad car and staring.
I couldn’t say for sure at that distance, but I’d have bet anything he was staring right at Jessica.
“Thanks for getting rid of him,” said Brielle. “And please teach me how to do that.”
“He’s not gone yet,” said Corey. I hadn’t even seen him look. Jessica turned and looked at the squad car.
“Fr
ickin’ Cuddles,” said Paul. “That guy gives me the creeps.”
“You’re not the one he was undressing with his eyes,” said Brielle.
“I take it he does that a lot?” I asked.
“That’s the rumor,” said the kid behind the counter.
“He was always pretty touchy-feely,” said Brielle. “But after he left Dillon to join the state police we heard about a girl in another town—”
“Crosby,” said Paul.
“No,” said the kid behind the counter, “it was Taylorsville.”
“It was somewhere,” said Brielle. “Nobody knows exactly what happened, but he’s totally a skeeze.”
“Sounds like an urban legend,” I said.
“It definitely happened,” said Paul. “I met a guy who knew the girl he attacked.”
“If it definitely happened he wouldn’t still be a cop,” said Marci. Her father was a cop. “They hate pedophiles more than anything.”
“Maybe,” said Jessica. She didn’t seem convinced.
“You saw the way he was looking at us,” said Brielle. “Even if there wasn’t a girl in Crosby or wherever, there’s going to be one someday. Somewhere.” Glassman started up his police cruiser and pulled out into the street, driving away. Brielle watched him go, her eyes cold. “If he comes after you, Jess, I’ll kill him.”
17
It started with a scream. Distant, it sounded like, but nothing in Dillon is all that distant. I learned later that it was only a few blocks away from our guest room in Ingrid’s house, which isn’t that far for a scream to carry. Pretty far to wake someone up, though. I was lying on the floor and opened my eyes, not even sure what had woken me. Brooke was asleep on the bed; I didn’t let myself look, but I listened, and her breathing was soft and steady. Boy Dog was snoring on the floor. I was in front of the door, blocking Brooke from leaving, and anyone else from entering. The house was quiet, as was the town. The light of a pale quarter moon drifted through the slats in the window blinds.