Girls of Glass

by Brianna Labuskes

  “You’ve lost me, kiddo,” Bridget said, but she didn’t sound lost.

  “The good guy,” Alice said again. “When you tell your story, you’re the good guy, right?”

  The taxi pulled into the parking lot of her building. Alice tossed some bills at the driver and climbed out into the still-warm air.

  “Sure,” Bridget said.

  “But other people have stories, too,” Alice said. It was gibberish at this point, but she was still talking. “The not-good guys.”

  The pause this time lasted three flights of stairs. Alice thought the woman might have hung up.

  “They want to be known, too,” Bridget said. Gone was the usual easiness in her voice.

  “Do you think they deserve it?” Alice tripped over a discarded shoe but landed on her mattress. “To be known?”

  “No,” Bridget said, her voice sure, certain. “They don’t.”

  Alice nodded, letting the phone drop to her side.

  Tell me a story, she thought. Make it a good one.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

  TRUDY

  August 4, 2018

  Six days after the kidnapping

  Trudy and Zeke didn’t bother with the stale croissants and hard-boiled eggs their motel offered as a poor excuse for breakfast.

  Instead, they picked up dollar hash browns and coffee at McDonald’s and sat on a curb in the parking lot, letting the grease burn their fingertips.

  “Where are we going to start?” Zeke asked the question she’d been trying not to think about, because she didn’t really have an answer. When she’d left St. Petersburg, it had been emotion driving her, but she hadn’t thought ahead. They were looking for a needle in a haystack when they didn’t even know what a needle looked like.

  She squinted at the sky. “Let’s go to his old neighborhood.”

  “Your grandfather’s?”

  “Sterling’s, yes.” Trudy stood up, warming to the idea, which had been an offhand thought to begin with. People loved to gossip. “Maybe someone remembers him.”

  Her shadow fell along Zeke’s face as he just sat looking up at her.

  “Trudy.”

  She had zero desire to engage in the conversation he wanted to have—where she might have to dodge questions she didn’t know how to answer. Like, what were they doing here, chasing shadows and whims? So she pointed to the Honda parked a few spots away. “Driver, to the car.”

  He rolled his eyes but pushed to his feet. “Don’t be an asshole,” he said, but it lacked any bite.

  Before he got behind the wheel, though, he looked over the roof of the car. “What do you really think you’re going to find?”

  Shrugging one shoulder, she avoided his eyes by opening her own door and sliding in. “Nothing, probably.”

  Zeke had an old GPS hookup, and Trudy put in Sterling’s old address. She knew it well. There was a small painting of the house he’d grown up in that hung in his office at the mansion, and the inscription on it was those familiar numbers. Trudy thought he kept it there as a reminder of how far he’d come. Mellie thought it was a reminder of how far he could fall. Neither of them asked Sterling.

  “What if you do find something?” Zeke asked after the GPS’s calm British voice directed them out of the parking lot.

  “I would be ecstatic.”

  He glanced over. “Would you?”

  “If we find something that proves my grandfather was in any way connected to Ruby’s murder, then I will personally put a bullet through his cold, black heart myself.” It was a foolish thing to say. She was eighteen. What was she really going to do? But she said it anyway and believed it a little.

  At the next stoplight, he pushed his shades up to meet her eyes. Whatever he saw there made him nod and turn back to the road.

  They drove the rest of the way to the neighborhood with only the GPS breaking the silence.

  The house was still there. Not much had changed, and it looked so similar to the one in the painting that it gave her chills. This was where evil had been born, had grown into what it was today.

  Getting out of the car took a little pep talk to her legs, which didn’t want to move. She slowly crossed the street, hesitant at the foot of the stairs. Zeke didn’t push her. He seemed to get it.

  Finally, her knuckles paused before she rapped on the door, almost afraid of what she would find. But she needn’t have worried. A small, nervous man answered, tangling his fingers together over his mustard-yellow sweater-vest.

  He was new to the area, had moved in not too long ago.

  “I bought it from a nice young family about last year,” he said, the air whistling just slightly out of his left nostril.

  They nodded their thanks and were about to leave when Trudy remembered to ask, “Do you know any of your neighbors? Ones who have been here for a while?”

  He shook his head and then paused. “Well, Mary Jo. Down the street and around the corner. It’s a small yellow house with a wind chime on the porch. She might be able to help you.”

  Trudy smiled once more and then started down the steps behind Zeke.

  “Let’s check out a few more of the neighbors before heading over to Mary Jo’s,” she said when they hit the sidewalk.

  Four more stops later—an older lady who smelled of cats, a no-answer, a young family with a baby, and a middle-aged couple who’d moved in ten years ago but still didn’t know the Burkes—and Mary Jo was still looking like their best option.

  “You don’t have to say it,” Trudy said to Zeke as they started toward the yellow house around the corner.

  “Didn’t say anything.”

  “You were thinking loudly.” She jabbed her sunglasses into her hair.

  “I’ll try to keep it down in the future.” There was a smile in his voice.

  “You think this is a goose chase.”

  “I think it’s a place to start,” Zeke said. “When no one else seems to be doing anything productive.”

  And that took the fight out of her.

  The front of Mary Jo’s house was tidy but eclectic. The nervous man had been right about the wind chime, except there wasn’t just one of them. They all hung along the rim of her porch, their jewels glittering in the sun. The mailbox was a basset hound with sad eyes and a gently wagging tail that came and went with the breeze.

  She lifted her eyebrows at Zeke, amused. He smiled back.

  A woman pushing eighty answered on the second knock. She was small, bent with age, and her wrinkled, papery skin hung on her bones. Her thick tortoiseshell Coke-bottle glasses sat at the edge of her nose, one wrong shift away from slipping off.

  She looked Trudy and Zeke over, her eyes sweeping along their bodies. “No soliciting,” she yelled, and then made to slam the door in their faces.

  “Oh wait.” Trudy managed to sneak a foot into the entryway as she slapped her hand against the wood, stopping it from closing.

  Mary Jo glared down at Trudy’s leg, and Trudy wondered if she was in real danger of losing it. “We’re not selling anything,” she rushed to say.

  The woman’s gaze snapped up to her face for a minute before she went back to imagining the ways she could chop off Trudy’s foot. Probably.

  “I’m Trudy and this is Zeke,” Trudy said, the words tumbling out in a rush. “We’re told you might be able to help us with some information we’re looking for. About a family that used to live in the neighborhood.”

  That seemed to be the right thing to say, because Mary Jo relaxed her grip on the door, just a little bit. This time when she looked up, she really looked at them.

  “Why didn’t you say so?” she asked, as if she’d given them any chance. Trudy swallowed back a snarky response and smiled.

  “So sorry,” Trudy said. She could deal with a cranky old bitch if it meant getting answers. “Would you be able to answer a few questions for us?”

  Mary Jo rubbed at the corner of her mouth, spreading the waxy red lipstick into the lines of her skin. “Who do you want to k
now about? Lots of families lived here.”

  “The Burkes.” Trudy reached for her great-grandfather’s name. “Beau Burke.”

  Mary Jo stilled, and then her eyes darted between them. “You blood, then?”

  There was something in the way she asked the question that put Trudy on alert.

  “No.”

  Mary Jo rubbed her thumb in that spot again, smearing the bloodred color farther onto her cheek. “You’ll want to talk to Judith,” she finally said.

  Trudy’s breath caught. “Judith?”

  Holding up one finger, Mary Jo stepped back, digging into a massive tote bag on the table just inside the entryway.

  “I’ll ring her to let her know you’re coming. It’s two blocks over, that way.” She waved in the general direction away from where they’d come.

  Zeke nudged up against her shoulder, but she didn’t take her eyes off the woman who was now bent over a piece of scrap paper, copying over an address.

  “Here.” Mary Jo slid it across to them when she was done. “Glad you’re not family.”

  Trudy picked up the address, running the pad of her finger along the neat lines of ink. “Why’s that?”

  “Nasty people, those Burkes,” Mary Jo muttered, her attention on her phone. “Judith will tell you all about them.”

  Judith’s house was small and lovely and painted a robin’s-egg blue.

  “Are we really doing this?” Zeke asked, his eyes on the crisply white front door.

  “She’s probably an eighty-year-old woman,” Trudy said, trying to convince herself as well. “What is she really going to do to us?”

  “Feed us poisoned cookies,” Zeke said, but he started toward the stairs. She followed. “And then bake us in her oven.”

  Judith, it turned out, was a petite woman with delicate bones and thinning silver hair that she had tucked back into a low chignon. She wore a pink cardigan despite the heat, and it matched the twin rose splotches on her cheeks.

  “Mary Jo said you were asking about the Burkes,” Judith said as they settled into the overstuffed couch across from her chair. She’d poured them tea and had store-bought cookies arranged on a fine china plate in front of them. This was a woman who was craving visitors. Trudy realized they could use that loneliness, that desperation, for human interaction.

  “Yes,” Trudy said, attempting a sip at the tea. It was too bitter, but she drank it anyway. “Did you know them?”

  “Mmmm. Horrible family,” Judith said with the same disgust Mary Jo had unleashed. “You said you weren’t relations?”

  Trudy shook her head and decided for a small bit of honesty. “I think the boy . . . Sterling, was it?”

  Judith nodded.

  “Him, yes. We think he was involved in something bad,” Trudy said. “We’re trying to find out more.”

  “That sounds like him,” Judith said, drinking her own tea, her watery blue eyes curious.

  The woman was younger than Mary Jo. Closer to her grandfather’s age.

  “Could you tell us about Sterling?” Trudy asked.

  “Mean to the core, that boy was.” Judith set the cup onto its saucer and crossed her legs. “My sister went to school with him. I was a few years behind them, but he was a piece of work even then.”

  “Oh yeah?” Trudy prompted. It sounded right.

  “Even back then, no one wanted to say anything bad about the golden boy.” There was a sneer in Judith’s voice. “Didn’t matter what he did.”

  Trudy shifted forward. “What did he do?”

  “Drugs, sex.” Judith shrugged. “Got in an accident once when he was younger. One of the passengers died. Sterling was drunk in the back seat, but rumor has it that he’d actually been driving. The child who he switched spots with got jail time. Now look at Sterling. No one even talks about it, do they?”

  Bitterness. There was so much bitterness that it dripped off Judith’s tongue. “Your sister was in the car?” Trudy guessed.

  The woman’s eyes widened. “Yes. She broke her leg. It took years of therapy to fix. Still walks with a limp.”

  “Did she testify? Your sister? That Sterling was driving?”

  Judith’s shoulders tightened. “Yes.”

  “They didn’t believe her, though.” It was Zeke who said it, and it wasn’t a question.

  “Even back then he got what he wanted,” Judith said. “Have you met him?”

  “Yes,” Trudy whispered.

  “Then you understand what it’s like.”

  Trudy nodded. “Yes.”

  “I see him on the news still, sometimes,” Judith said, her fingers twisting together. “Plays golf with the governor.”

  And the senators. And the mayor of St. Petersburg. Sterling owned the state. Anything they did to expose him would stretch far beyond a ruined reputation. Everyone connected to him would be tainted by his mess.

  “He’s in St. Petersburg now?” Trudy asked.

  “Hmmm, yes.” Judith’s eyes sharpened. “Where did you say you all were from?”

  “Miami.” The lie came swift and easy.

  Judith looked away, staring at a painting of water lilies that hung on the wall. Trudy wondered if they’d lost her.

  “Is there anything else?” They hadn’t found the right question yet. They needed to find the right question. The one that would lead them to an answer.

  Judith was pleased to keep talking while she topped off their nearly full cups. Desperate for company, Trudy thought again.

  Judith told them about all the other people in the car. She told them about her sister’s lifelong recovery from the incident. She told them about Sterling’s girlfriends, which leaned toward jealousy rather than the derision Judith was probably going for, and the guys he hung out with—“Hooligans, the lot of them.”

  But nothing struck Trudy as off. Zeke nudged her, and when she looked over, he tipped the screen of his phone in her direction. They’d been there for more than an hour and had nothing to show for it. Other than confirming Sterling was as big of an ass back then as he was now.

  Judith was settled in, though. Neither Trudy nor Zeke had spoken in the past twenty minutes, but it didn’t seem to matter. Stories tumbled from her lips like birds that had been caged.

  Trudy shifted when the woman took a rare pause. “Judith, I’m so sorry, I think we have to be going. But thank you so much for your help. It was really informative.”

  Dismayed eyes flicked down to the mostly full plate of cookies and then back to their faces. “I have more snacks.”

  It was pathetic, and not in a way that Trudy could mock. She slid a look toward Zeke, who was frowning but also shifting back against the couch once more.

  “Sure, we can stay a little longer,” Trudy said, and Judith’s face lit up.

  “I’ll just go . . . ,” and she waved toward the kitchen before scuttling off.

  Trudy turned toward Zeke and shrugged. “Sorry. I couldn’t . . .”

  “No.” He shook his head. “That was just . . . sad. I don’t mind staying.”

  She pressed her lips together. The unspoken thought that hung between them was that they had nowhere else to be. No more leads to follow. All the time in the world to listen to Judith blather on about Sterling’s schoolmates. “She doesn’t know anything.”

  Zeke didn’t contradict her. “I know you were hoping she would.”

  Trudy nodded, not sure if there was anything else to say, really, but it didn’t matter if there was. Judith bustled back in the room with a second plate of the same cookies.

  Twenty minutes later, Trudy was regretting her moment of kindness and contemplating the best way to extract themselves from the situation without having to face Judith’s hurt–puppy dog eyes again, when something snagged her attention.

  “. . . nasty family, too,” Judith said with the same disgust she’d used for the Burkes. She hadn’t seemed to realize her audience was no longer even engaged with what she was saying. “The Becketts. Not a good boy in that bunch.”
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  Beckett. Beckett. That name sounded familiar, like a song she could hum while forgetting the lyrics.

  “I’m sorry, who?” Trudy straightened from the bored slouch she’d fallen into. Her tone must have brought Zeke out of his daze as well.

  Judith’s eyes found hers, seemingly surprised she was getting a response after so much silence. “The Becketts.”

  Breathing in sharply through her nose, Trudy swallowed her knee-jerk, impatient response. “And who are they, again? Related to Sterling?”

  “No, not family,” Judith said, her thin eyebrows coming together. Perhaps she’d already explained this. Trudy shouldn’t have tuned out.

  “I mean, are they connected to the Burkes? Were they friends with Sterling?”

  Why would Trudy know the name otherwise?

  Judith shook her head. “No.”

  And after more than an hour of chattering at them, this was when Judith decided to clam up. Maybe because they were finally paying attention. There was something about an interested audience that lonely people craved and savored.

  “But . . . ?” Trudy let the question trail off, not even knowing how else to prompt her to tell more. She didn’t know the right question to ask.

  “The boys were terrible,” Judith said. “Don’t know where they went wrong; their mama was a saint. She was friends with my girl.”

  “So not with Sterling,” Trudy confirmed, her shoulders dropping. She would have gone back to tuning the woman out, except . . .

  Beckett.

  “No, Nathan—the oldest—was just out of high school, and Sterling was already in his robes. Sterling didn’t even know Nathan. But that boy was following in his footsteps, nonetheless.”

  “Same trouble?” Trudy guessed. Nathan Beckett. One more note in the song slid into place, but the lyrics were still out of reach. Where had she heard the name before?

  “Not quite the same.” Judith tapped a nail against her teeth. “Sex, drugs, yes. But he wasn’t as charming. Couldn’t get away with things like Sterling could. Until he did.”

  “What did he get away with?” Trudy asked.