“It’s a pleasure,” Brewer says. It’s then that he smiles.
“No problem,” Kateri says. She folds her arms and retreats to her office.
* * *
She passes by twice, hours apart, and can see from the window in the door and from the two-way mirror in the observation room that David Brewer sits with Shannon Jenkins for more than three hours. He takes notes on a yellow legal pad, his handwriting slanted and hard. Some items are underlined, others starred. She catches a glimpse of Shannon’s face, lit up with recognition, and then he shakes his head.
But I didn’t, she imagines him saying.
She’s not sure why it makes a difference to her at all.
She watches Shannon move his hands around the table, plotting out, she thinks, the layout of the house, the kitchen, Pearl’s bedroom, Birdie’s safe spot in the closet. She wants to tap on the glass. You have to tell the truth, she thinks. Tell him everything.
He was a soft-faced boy, she thinks, the first time she talked to him. Soft and scared. And now something has crept in at the edges, has hardened the bones in his cheeks and jaw. Something has left a shadow under his eyes and around his neck like long fingers.
She looks at the way the bruises are disappearing on his skin. Where the thumb would have gone. Where the fingertips were. She puts her hand to her own throat and feels, recognizes what it was that unsettled her before.
There’s no way Pearl Jenkins’s hand was that big.
* * *
On her way back from Interrogation B, she swings by Hurt’s office to see if he’s in yet. It’s past three. His office is still generic, still like he’s using borrowed, temporary space. The chair pushed in, the computer monitor off.
She walks around the desk and opens a side drawer, not sure what she’s even looking for.
A lint roller. A small paper copy of Be Here Now with an ornately illustrated cover. A river stone. She closes the drawer abruptly, and when it slams, she jumps.
On her way out, she glances at the reception desk.
“Any word from Detective Hurt?” Kateri asks, her phone buzzing in her pocket with a text message.
“No, ma’am,” Dawn says.
She turns her back to Dawn’s desk as she reads the message.
It’s an unknown number: Envious of the person who does get to have a drink with you, Detective. Maybe we can fix that.
Kateri stands still in the middle of the reception area, Dawn answering the phone, keyboards clacking away, the printer whirring and spitting out pages.
Bear? she types and sends, and regrets immediately not using a more formal tone.
What big … eyes you have, he answers.
She laughs aloud, but it’s tight and nervous.
She deletes the messages, her hands jumpy. And then regrets that too.
TWENTY-ONE: SHANNON
TUESDAY, OCTOBER 10
He finally told me. I was afraid to ask, and threw myself into work—shifts at the diner, work in the house—and it took more than a week before I could ask anything. What did she mean? What didn’t I know? I couldn’t even begin to explain what I did know.
I could hardly listen. I watched his face, his hair, his eyes, his hands. The way he breathed. His mouth.
They got married when he was thirty.
She wanted a baby. He didn’t.
He hadn’t really even wanted to get married.
They’d been living apart since before Bee was born.
“Bee?” I asked him.
“Like a bumblebee,” he said.
“Like a birdie,” I said.
“Or a bear,” he said, getting closer.
I thought it, or rather saw it in my head, the sentence, typed out and lit up, but it was Bear who said it aloud: “We belong to each other.”
* * *
We sat on the bed with the dog. I had never finished the basement after I hid the gun and uncovered the photos. After I smashed my face into the wall. I had a tender spot that would turn green in a day. I’d left the basement half done, partially masked, the coat uneven. I started upstairs instead, painted a gray bathroom, a green bedroom. I asked Bear to explain the business to me. I asked him what else he had done, what he had kept a secret.
“It’s my mother’s company,” he said.
He was such an adult to me, I had never even imagined him with a mother. Or a family. I stopped him.
“Are there more of you?” I asked.
He laughed. “There’s only one of me,” he said.
I stumbled. “I mean, you know, brothers and sisters.”
“No,” he said. “Just me, and my mom, who took over my dad’s company after he died.”
“Do you work for her?”
“Sort of,” he said. “I invest her interests.”
“Right,” I said, faking it. I’d been making seven dollars and fifty cents an hour for four years.
“It’s a complicated web of transactions right now.” He pressed his lips together.
“Is that the secret?” I asked. “That you don’t really work for her? It’s just like, money?”
“No,” he said.
“What is it?”
He took his hand from mine and tucked his hands between his knees. “I got in trouble as a kid,” he said. The dog stretched between us, his frog legs out behind, his head ducked underneath a pillow.
“Legal?” I said. I couldn’t imagine him committing a crime. Stealing. Why would he steal? Then it occurred to me. I could imagine him raping someone. I thought about the power he held when he leaned over me. I held my breath and waited.
“Yeah,” he said, “although nothing ever really came of it. So,” he said. “I don’t have a record.”
“Were you arrested?” I asked.
“Yes,” he said, “but it was all expunged.”
“What happened?”
“I got in a fight,” he said. “The summer right before I went to college.”
“That’s it?” I said, waiting.
“No,” he said. I watched him blow out a long breath. “The other kid died.”
“How?” I yelped. “From the fight?”
“Yeah,” Bear said.
“How?”
He seemed to hold his breath. I had never seen him stressed, not even when Meghan was there. And I wasn’t sure he was now. He might be pausing for effect. But I was on edge, listening to the story, waiting.
“I hit him,” he said. Then, “With a bat.”
It was so quiet I could hear the refrigerator come on in the kitchen. “You killed him,” I said.
“I was seventeen,” he said.
“And nothing happened?”
“No,” Bear said. “I mean, a lot happened, but my father’s lawyer took care of all of it.”
“If anyone knew I even thought about killing someone, I would be in jail,” I said.
“I know,” Bear said. “It’s a terrible misuse of privilege. But that’s what happened. That’s the thing. That’s the secret,” he said. “Meghan likes to hold it over me.”
“The secret is that you killed someone,” I said, my voice high, on the edge of hysteria. I got up off the bed.
“Shannon,” he said, trying to appeal to me.
I couldn’t stop the words from coming out of my mouth. “You killed someone,” I said. “You killed another kid.”
“Shannon,” he said again.
I covered my own mouth. I thought I might scream.
“I’m not telling you to scare you,” he said. “I’m telling you the truth. I’m not dangerous,” he said. “I was a stupid kid. It was an accident. I meant—I meant to knock him out,” he said. He held his hands open, palms up, waiting for me to take them. “I’m not going to hurt you,” he said.
I was shaking inside.
“Listen,” he said. “I could have told you anything, but I told you the truth. I could have made something up, right? The secret could have been that I cheated on Meghan.”
“You are cheating on Me
ghan,” I said.
His voice was low and determined. “I told you the truth.” He made his face softer, his eyes bigger, his mouth loosened so it wasn’t so rigid. “Please,” he said.
“Please what?” I said.
“Come back here,” he said, holding his hands out.
I was still standing in the room, wringing my hands. Buddy rolled over onto his back, and Bear slapped his belly. The dog groaned with pleasure, his lips loose, his eyes half closed.
I got back on the bed, the dog between us, and I sat quiet for a few heavy moments, until Bear put his hand behind my knee, fingers moving in the crease. The dog snuffled back under the pillows, and I thought that maybe there would be a million things running, manic, through my mind, but all I could see was his face telling me: the other kid died.
I thought about Meghan saying they weren’t together, that they had an agreement, the long stroke of her finger down her jaw. “What happened to Meghan’s face?” I asked him.
“We were in a car accident,” Bear said.
“Really?” I asked.
He took his hand away. “You can believe me or not believe me. I didn’t hurt her. Or I did hurt her, in many awful ways, but that was not one of them.” He pushed the dog off the bed with a sweep of one leg, and Buddy stretched on his way, his hind legs hooked on the mattress, dragging. “If you don’t believe me,” he said, “this will never work.”
I sat, small and dumb. “What will never work?” I asked.
He came toward me on all fours. “You and me,” he said. He took my face and kissed me. “I’m not lying to you,” he said. “And I’m not trying to hurt you. I want you to trust me.”
The room felt like a vacuum. Everything felt different—his hands, the way he moved me around. Like I could feel his fingerprints on my bones. And nothing outside that room was real.
It was hard to pay attention. I kept thinking of the dead kid, bleeding out, his head bashed open. Maybe it hadn’t been that hard. Maybe his death was delayed.
My distraction stopped him.
He stopped. In the middle of kissing me, when he had already pushed the covers on the bed down to make a space for us, had already gotten undressed. He stopped, leaned over me, and I snapped my eyes open, like I was coming back from the dead, like I was coming up for air.
He leaned into my neck. “I want you to trust me,” he said.
“Okay,” I said. It was empty.
He ran his hands along my collarbone, up, onto my neck. And then pressed his thumb into the side of my windpipe, his fingers tight.
“Do you?” he asked.
“Yes,” I whispered.
“Things are going to scare you,” he said. “But it’s okay. I’m not dangerous,” he said. “You think the wrong people are trying to hurt you.”
He tightened his hand, and he thrust hard into me so that my whole body was jolted with a shot of pain. My mouth opened, and I gasped.
“Now?” Bear said.
I shook my head. I didn’t know what he was asking.
“Do you trust me?”
My air was tight. My chest panicky. My heart raced hard, and a fine sweat broke out along my shoulders, down my back, across my forehead. He squeezed.
“Tell me,” Bear said, between his teeth as his back arched and pumped. “Tell me.”
My eyes streaked pink with shooting stars when I came. My head was like a pounding balloon. My vision began to darken from the outside in.
“I trust you,” I mouthed. But my limbs were weak. My voice gone.
* * *
In the morning, I leaned into the mirror, inspecting my own face. Normally, I avoided it. I was disappointed by my own mediocrity. My left eye was bloodshot in a way that was different from smoking or drinking. The redness was heavy in one spot, with a streak of blood. Underneath both my eyes were dark freckles, not pigment but blood, rising up from underneath the skin.
It hurt to swallow.
My neck was shadowed with the shape of Bear’s hand. A deep, dark thumbprint along my windpipe and a stretch of fingers around the side.
I thought: He’s going to kill me.
Just like he killed that other kid. And some expensive lawyer is going to erase me from history. Like I never was.
Worse, it was going to feel so good I wouldn’t stop it until it was too late.
* * *
Bear was in the kitchen, making breakfast, bacon and a diced-up potato, and when I came out from the master bedroom, showered, dressed, and feeling like someone else in a clean shirt and dry socks, Bear added an egg to the skillet and fried it over easy.
He put the plate in front of me and poured me a mug of coffee. I followed a vein of quartz in the stone counter top.
Things were getting away from me. At an alarming speed. The house, my mother, what to do with Birdie. I had wanted Bear to be a safe port, and I was beginning to question everything.
But even though I was the one who felt unmoored, I decided to turn it around on him. I wanted to see if I could get him to talk.
“What are you thinking?” I asked him.
“About what?” he said. He had a way of concentrating, looking down, his brows knit tight, his mouth a straight line, and then looking up and grinning like a fool, showing all his teeth. It was on the edge of cruel. I realized that part of his catlike quality was the potential to pounce.
I shrugged. He chuckled, like an adult humoring a kid. Then he said, “I don’t want you to go back there.”
“Home?”
He tipped his head to the side, leaned on the island, and took a potato off my plate with his fingers. “I don’t want you to stay there anymore,” he said.
I sipped the coffee, clenching my teeth to get past the ache in my throat. The coffee was better when he made it. He ground the dark oily beans and brewed it extra strong. But I missed the way my mother made coffee, with a cheap can of Bustelo, brewed in the percolator on the stove, mixed with just a hint of cinnamon.
“Well,” I said, my voice husky. “What are you asking me?”
Bear opened his hands on the counter, an offering. “I want you to stay here,” he said.
I started coughing. I felt a sharp piece of bacon in my throat and took a hot gulp of coffee.
Bear came around behind me and kissed the top of my head. “Do you want me to get you a ring?” he joked.
“You’re still married,” I said.
His hands moved down my sides, over my ribs, pressing. I couldn’t answer. I couldn’t say what was needling me: the wife, the baby, the dead boy. What I might have to do with Birdie, and when. I drummed my fingers beside the plate but didn’t notice until Bear put his hand on top of mine.
“You’re safe here,” he said. “You know that.”
I nodded.
“Let’s figure out what to do with your house,” he said.
“Like what?” I asked.
“Why let it go to auction?” he said. “You could sell it.”
“It’s not worth shit, Bear.”
He shrugged. “Somebody always wants real estate. Even if they don’t want the structure, they’ll want the land.”
My toes bounced on the rung of the stool. “You’ll never get my mother out of that house,” I said. “Not with Birdie.” I shook my head. “It’s …” I searched. “It’s her place,” I said. “It’s all she’s got.”
I couldn’t even begin to think of what I would tell them, how I would say that I was leaving. That I would live over here now.
Why? My mother would ask. Because he’s rich?
“Just … try to trust me,” he said, like he knew he’d get me to come around. He stroked the side of my neck with his finger, tracing the places that ached.
* * *
After breakfast, we put Buddy in the Land Rover, and Bear asked me what I needed from the house. Buddy butted his nose against the window in excitement. He knew we were headed toward the woods.
There wasn’t much. A few books, I thought. Some clothes. I want
ed to check on Birdie. I needed a moment alone with her, wanted her on my lap, wanted to rough up her curls, get her to belly laugh. I needed to know that I could see her whenever I wanted. What I really wanted was to take her with me. I would send her to school. Set things right for her. She still had a chance.
I told Bear I just needed to check on her.
“Of course,” he said. “You should.”
We parked in the lot and opened the door for Buddy, who tore off after a rabbit in the field.
“I want you to come here as often as you want,” Bear said.
“Okay,” I said.
“I’m not trying to take you away.”
“I know.”
He turned the engine off and just sat, looking at me.
“But,” I prompted, because I sensed it, that he wasn’t saying something.
“But I want you in my bed every night,” he said. He wasn’t smiling. It wasn’t flirtatious, and it wasn’t our bed. It was a demand.
I felt myself tremble. I clamped down. He cupped my knee and shook it. I tried not to think of what he might look like in a rage. Or with a bat in his hand. Or what I might look like with my head bashed in.
TWENTY-TWO: KATERI
TUESDAY, OCTOBER 31
Sometimes she wonders about her ex, Andrew. Her grandmother knew his mother, and Kateri can remember him as much as a little boy as she can a man. He knew all her shit. About her mother, about her father. When they got to nineteen and they were both done with the family drama that was no longer theirs, they got married in a courthouse, by a judge. Kateri wore a yellow dress and put flowers in her hair. His mother was there, with her grandmother, holding hands.
It lasted five years.
She had started college without him, commuting in her grandmother’s rusted-out Toyota with peace signs on the bumper. She hated it—the classes, the other kids, the delayed adulthood. She was eager to work, to start living. So she joined the force at twenty-one and was ready to make detective by the time their marriage was over. Andrew thought she was single-minded and selfish. She thought he wasn’t single-minded enough. She wanted him to be independent, for them to work hard, side by side. But she earned the money, and he resented that. They drank a lot. And fought. Or cried.
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