A Grown-Up Kind of Pretty (30 page)

“Dude!” Raymond Knotwood said, dropping to his knees, his oversize eyes going even wider with interest. “Like a secret message?”

“No,” I said, instantly and a hair too loud. I forced a smile and tried to sound casual. “She’s supposed to pick out pictures that relate in some way.

It’s to help her brain. But I can’t see how these have anything to do with one another.”

“Oh, wel , that’s cool, too,” Raymond said. Patti drifted past him, coming to stand by me. Raymond dealt the photos back out in a row, like he was laying down a hand of solitaire. “Oh, man! A Machiavel i ring!” He touched the picture of Liza’s hand.

“A what?” I asked.

“Mom never paints her nails,” Mosey said, crowding closer.

“That’s what struck me, too, but what’s a Machiavel i ring?”

Raymond Knotwood said, “See how the gem is tipped up? There’s a secret compartment under it. Like, the Medicis and al those murdery people in the Renaissance would put poison in there, and then they’d flip it open and dump it al casual into someone’s wine. Like at court.”

“Secret compartment. I don’t see another picture that could mean a secret place, though,” I said. I looked back at Liza, sitting on the floor with Bogo in her lap now. She didn’t react, but maybe she hadn’t heard me?

Mosey’s cheeks washed a faint pink. “Why would Mom be showing you pictures about having a secret place? She doesn’t have a secret place.”

I said, soothing, “I’m sure she’s not saying that at al .” It was a mistake to ask for help. What if we did figure out Liza’s message and it wasn’t something I could pass off as therapy?

Raymond was looking at Mosey with his head cocked, making a thinking face. He saw me watching him watch Mosey, and he flushed and turned his attention back to the pictures. He rearranged the order, twice, and then he tapped the photo of the ring and chuckled.

“Got it.” He shot a show-off’s grin to Mosey, peacocking his big brain like tail feathers. “In the ring pic, it’s not nail polish or the secret compartment that matters. See this frog? It’s poison frogs that are jewel-colored, so birds know not to eat them. I saw it on Discovery Channel.

Snake skin, snake, poison, that’s obvious, right? And this”—he waved the eye patch photo—“forget pirates. It’s the skul and crossbones. They put that on cleaning products so people who can’t read don’t drink bleach.” He was so proud he was vibrating, and Mosey rewarded him with an admiring smile. He held up the picture of the tiny flowers. “I don’t know what these flowers are, but I’d bet they are toxic enough to flat kil you.”

“Naw,” said Patti softly.

“You know this plant?” Raymond said. “Are you sure it won’t kil you? Because everything else here wil .”

Patti’s eyes were bright beneath her shaggy bangs, and it was sweet to see how pleased she was to be helping. I gave her nearby calf an encouraging squeeze, and she flushed red and said, triumphantly, “You won’t die or nothing, but you sure dun wanna get in it. That’s the flower part of…
poison
ivy.”

“Shazam!” Raymond Knotwood said. He reared up for a high five with Mosey. “Poison. These pictures al show poison.”

He’d said it loud, and Liza banged the floor with her hand, cal ing, “Yes, yes, yes!” Bogo barked along with her pounding.

“I told you he was great at this,” Mosey said, beaming at Raymond like she had invented him.

“Great job,” I said, smiling, trying not to seem impatient to get them gone. “Mosey, I want to keep working with Liza some, since it’s going so wel .

Can you kids throw the lasagna in the oven and go ahead with supper?”

“Sure,” Mosey said. She headed for the kitchen.

Raymond Knotwood stood and went after her, saying over his shoulder, “Cal me if you get stumped again.”

Patti stayed a second longer. I smiled up at her and said, “Good for you! I didn’t even know poison ivy had a flower.” She flushed even darker and ran after her friends. I shook my head. Bogo wasn’t the only stray that Mosey had adopted for us al recently.

As soon as she was gone, I walked fast on my knees to Liza. “Someone put poison in a cup? A cup of poison?”

“Cup poison,” Liza repeated, slurry but firm. Her good eye blazed with a bright and fervent triumph.

I lowered my voice to a bare whisper. “Is this something to do with Mosey? You poisoned someone to get Mosey?”

Liza’s mouth worked, silent, and I knew there were a thousand other thoughts washing around in her brain, but al she could do was say it again.

“Cup poison!”

I shook my head, and she pushed al the air out of herself in a frustrated gobble of sound.

“No, no. I can get this. You were trying to lead me someplace, weren’t you? When you left the house. A place that has something to do with a cup and poison…”

“Cup poison,” Liza said, stil slurry, but she had those words now, and she wanted me on point.

“Who?” I said. “Who did the cup poison?”

Her eyes fil ed up with tears, the good one faster, and I wasn’t sure if it was relief or sorrow, if I was asking the right question or the exact wrong one. Her good hand lifted off Bogo’s head and opened, and she placed her palm flat on her chest, patting at herself. She patted three times, tears spil ing over now and running in two thin rivulets down her cheeks. One plopped onto Bogo, and he looked up and whined, worried and sorrowful.

“You?” I said. “You?” She kept patting. “Someone poisoned you?”

I had a thousand more questions then. Where and when and how and what did this have to do with Mosey, but then, like an audible click in my head, part of it came clear for me. A cup, poison, and the walk toward Woodland. Woodland was the first turn Mosey used to take back when she was walking to Calvary every day.

“The night you got sick. That godforsaken Calvary End-of-School Luau. Are you tel ing me…?” My hand went to her weak hand, ran up her wasted arm to touch the sagging side of her lovely face. “You can’t be saying someone did this to you? On purpose?”

Tears spil ed down Liza’s face. Her relief was confirmation. “Cup poison,” she said, weeping, but triumphant. She owned these two words in this moment, whether she would keep them or not.

“Who?” I said. “Who?”

I grabbed the tops of her arms, watched her face close as she went inside herself, trying to find her way to the name. My mind was racing now, my heartbeat speeding up to match it. That night, at Calvary, she’d been going to meet someone, I’d felt certain. She’d been so dol ed up, not saying exactly that she had the money for Mosey’s tuition but implying that she was about to have it. Liza always played her man cards close, usual y because she was with the wrong man. Sneaking and sex were welded in her head, and I’d worried she was suckering some married man into paying.

But maybe “suckering” was too nice a word? If Liza was seeing a married fel ow on the sly, she could have asked him to pay Mosey’s tuition.

That was more like blackmail than suckering.

I read mysteries and thril ers, and I’d read my share of true crime, too; this was the exact kind of thing that drove the quiet, never-hurt-a-fly guy next door to murder. A married fel ow, a pil ar of the community, he might trade Liza’s life to keep his own on course.

“Was it Steve Mason?” I asked. She’d been climbing him like he was her own personal oak tree when she col apsed.

Liza blinked at me. Made her “no” noise. She closed her eyes, sinking down into herself, maybe seeking the right name, maybe too exhausted to keep going.

Every second of the next part of that awful night was seared into my brain. I remembered her dropping her cup, the dregs of one of those Virgin Coladas splashing the legs of the woman in metal ic sandals. That foamy drink looked so much more sinister in my memory now. I’d shoved my way through the crowd toward her and picked up that cup. I’d smel ed it, thinking Liza had been drinking, but I’d smel ed only the suntan-oil stink of coconut and pineapple. Al that sugar, had it masked the taste of something bitter and unwholesome? What had happened to the cup?

After Liza col apsed, my memory decayed into a blur of panic. The ambulance ride. The hospital. Had I thrown the cup away? Dropped it on the ground?

I remembered those cheerleaders in their hula-girl costumes, weird fleshy leotards under the coconut bras. I guess Claire Richardson thought it was better to look deformed than slutty. They had passed around the drinks and macadamia-nut cookies and big wicker bags ful of fruit-snack samples and coupons for 10 percent off backpacks for next year at Target. I’d been carrying my good clutch, and I’d put it down inside that wicker bag. I remembered holding the wicker bag in my lap like it was a baby, unthinking, al the time we waited at the hospital. I was pretty sure I’d taken it home. Then what? Had I thrown out a bag ful of free samples and coupons? It didn’t seem like me.

“Stay here,” I said to Liza, which was crazy. It wasn’t as if she was about to leap up, trit-trot out of the house, maybe go dancing.

I could hear Mosey and her friends laughing in the kitchen as I tore down the hal . I ran into my bedroom and threw open the door to my closet, which was a cataclysmic mess. My good clutch was back on the high shelf, gathering dust, waiting for me to have someplace special to go. So much crap was piled on the floor. I started digging through it, hurling shoe boxes and laundry out until my room looked near as bad as Liza’s.

Then I saw it. The gift bag from the luau. It was in the bottom back corner, so crumpled that the cheap wicker had sprung into twigs down one whole side.

Al the air came out of me in a rush. I hoped. I hoped so hard it almost stooped to praying. I pul ed the bag open, peering down. I saw the cup at once. It was crushed in on itself but present, nestled between a sample-size fruit rol -up and a brochure about the Jump Rope for Heart program.

I’d read enough cop books to know not to touch it. There was a pencil in the bag with an ad for the Knotwoods’ car dealership on it, and I grabbed it and threaded it into the crumpled opening of the cup.

I lifted it out, holding it up high, and inside I could see a faint crust of dried white along the seam at the bottom. I carried the cup to my dresser and set it down, stil careful not to touch it with my hand. Then my knees got weak and I had to sit.

Hope warred for room with an equal share of leg-shaking rage. Hope because, if she’d been poisoned, maybe there could be a better kind of help for Liza, and at the same time some bastard had tried to kil my kid. Under al of that, I was shaking with strange relief; I’d always thought the stroke was a late gift from Liza’s drug abuse, and the drugs were mostly my fault. If I’d been tougher, more diligent, less naïve…But this cup could hold proof that Liza was hurt for a reason other than my failures as a mother.

I sat trembling on the bed, wishing that hope and rage and weird relief were al I felt.

But there was more. I couldn’t help it. Inside me, under al my skin, sex was lighting me up. It flexed and pul ed in a shivery, whole-body clench.

The cup, the dried white seam of Virgin Colada, these things were physical evidence. A cop problem, and I knew only one cop who would help me on the quiet. My blood sped up, zinging through my body, heart pounding to the rhythm of his stupid name.

I left the cup where it was for now. I needed to get a ziplock bag from the kitchen and seal it up, but first I went back to Liza’s room to get her off the floor. She was slumped there, exactly where I’d left her, and no Bogo. He’d been seduced away by the smel of Stouffer’s drifting from the kitchen.

Liza didn’t react when I came in. I had to lift her mostly on my own steam. As I settled her into her wheelchair, I tried to get her to focus on me.

“Liza, I need to know who did this. I need a name.”

Liza’s eyes widened, but she wasn’t looking at me. She was staring past me, at something so far away it must be through the wal , outside the house, maybe on the other side of the world.

Her breath sounded shaped. I put my ear close to her mouth and said, “Please, baby, say it. Say a name.”

She inhaled, and when the air came back out, it had a name on it. A name from long ago. The last word in the world I expected to hear.

“Melissa.”

My own breath stopped. I grabbed her shoulders. “When did you see Melissa Richardson? Liza? Liza?”

She didn’t answer me.

I gave her a little shake, asked again, “Who poisoned you?”

Her eyes closed, but her good hand came up and clenched my forearm.

She said it again, louder, clearer. “Melissa.”

No mistake.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

Liza

LIZA’S ROOM IS a sea of photographs, and they rise and fal around her, wavering as she sways and sinks. Her memory is an ocean, but there is only one tide, one current, one place to wash up. Liza finds herself again being driven to those white sands. Melissa Richardson waits there, on a sunless day too gusty and cold for September in Mississippi.

Noveen is driving. They are both so pregnant that they barely have room for breathing. She herself is stretched to a thin shel . The eyes of boys, something she has always owned, slide away from her now, fearful or sniggery. She can’t sneak a beer, or six beers, or light up, or drop ’cid, because there isn’t enough of her. She is a husk, and anything she puts in wil go straight to her chewy center. She wonders if after the baby is out she wil ever be Liza again, or only someone’s mother, like Big.