‘That doesn’t matter,’ Luna said. ‘You might want to contact the hospital and see when you’ll be able to bring her home.’
‘Well now, somebody’s gonna have to bring her back here. I don’t got a car in the daytime, my man has to work, ya know. And if she’s gonna need special care, they’re gonna have to put her someplace else. I don’t have time to be taking care of a special needs kid, know what I mean? I got four kids in diapers here and then five others. Who’s got the time for changing bandages and shit?’
‘Thank you for your time, ma’am,’ Luna said, and pushed me down the broken steps and over to her car.
As we drove back down the dirt road, I said, ‘Boy, Willis is going to be surprised when he gets home to find another girl living there.’
BLACK CAT RIDGE, TEXAS, 1999
There were three bodies inside the trailer, those of two men and a woman. One had been identified as Billy Dave Petrie, the other two were man and wife, and they’d all been dead for several days.
After Luna answered the questions of the Washington County sheriff’s department personnel, we headed home, Luna dropping us off at our house where we gathered the kittens and their paraphernalia, packed a suitcase for ourselves, and dropped the kittens off at the nearest boarding facility. Then Luna took us to a motel on the outskirts of town.
‘I’m getting sick and tired of unsolved cases,’ she said, once we were safely inside our ‘no-tell-motel’ room. ‘We’re at a standstill. Larry took us to Clyde who took us to Billy Dave, who, frankly, ain’t taking us nowhere no how. And this isn’t even my only whodunnit.’
‘You’re working on another case?’ I asked, stretching out on the bed.
‘Yeah. Remember that school counselor, Mrs Olson, who died in the car wreck last week?’
‘Yeah, I read about it in the paper,’ I said, almost too tired to make my mouth move with the words.
‘Turns out it wasn’t an accident. Somebody cut her brake line.’ She shook herself and stood up from the bed. ‘I gotta get out of here before I take your lead, Pugh, and fall asleep.’
‘I’m not asleep,’ I said, at least I thought I did.
I heard the TV go on. ‘Pugh, wake up. You have a husband right here,’ Luna said, ‘and they got that special TV here! Bye, y’all.’ And she was out the door.
Willis pulled me down on the bed. ‘You sleepy?’
We cuddled while we watched the picture on the TV. It was entirely too bizarre even to try to describe. Willis turned his head sideways, staring at the screen. Then the other way. Finally, he nibbled my ear. ‘You wanna try that?’
I pulled at his T-shirt. ‘Is our Blue Cross paid up?’
We were half undressed and pursuing a rather unusual line of foreplay when I sat bolt upright in the bed, knocking Willis to the floor.
‘What the hell?’ he said, rubbing his head.
‘Mrs Olson!’ I said loudly. Willis turned off the TV. ‘She was Monique’s sponsor in the PAL program!’
‘The what?’ he asked, crawling back up on the bed where he began nibbling on parts of me.
I pushed him away. ‘Peer Assistance and Leadership! At the high school! The juniors and seniors counseled the freshmen and sophomores!’
‘OK,’ Willis said. ‘Now the big question: So?’
‘So . . . I don’t know! But there’s got to be a connection. We thought all this time somebody was after Roy! But don’t you see? It didn’t have to be Roy. It could have been Terry, or Aldon . . . or Monique! Monique is murdered and then her counselor is murdered! That’s a coincidence?’
Willis shrugged as he leaned towards my neck, his tongue searching out that particular spot. ‘Could be . . .’
I jumped off the bed and pulled the sheet up to cover my body. It’s not what it used to be, but Willis still seems to have a one-track mind when it’s bared to him.
Willis moaned. ‘Jeez, Eeg! Enough! We’re in a motel room. The kids are fifty miles away – safe. We’ve got a dirty movie on the TV. Relax, damn it!’
I picked up the phone and dialed Luna’s home number, giving her the information I’d given Willis.
‘Hum,’ she said.
‘Hum?
Hum?
That’s all you’ve got to say?’
‘What? OK, it’s a coincidence!’
‘It can’t be!’ I yelled. I took a deep breath and plunged ahead. ‘All I’m saying is we may have been looking in the wrong place. It doesn’t have to have been Roy who was the target. It could have been Monique.’
‘Monique and Mrs Olson were running drugs through the school? Jesus, E.J.’
‘No! Luna, listen to me! Something they had in common – something to do with the PAL program.’
Luna sighed. ‘Fourteen-year-old kids griping because their mothers make them take out the garbage? I’ve got one of those. Believe me, it’s not worth killing over.’
‘Check the school!’ I insisted.
‘I’ve checked the school! Fifty times! Everybody loved Mrs Olson. Nobody wanted to off her.’
‘But you said somebody did!’ I insisted.
There was a long silence on the line. ‘E.J., go screw your husband,’ she said, and hung up on me.
With nothing better to do, I took her advice.
GRAHAM, THE PRESENT
Didn’t do things exactly as my mother had ordered me to. We drove Lotta home first. I did go inside, but Manny said Lotta’s parents were both asleep, so I left without having my big discussion with them. Her mother would have just started crying and her father would have taken out his gun and shot me, and I thought there’d been enough of that already. I kissed her goodbye then went back outside to the Valiant where my buds awaited.
And then we headed in search of the stalker. Lotta said he’d gone over the bridge into Black Cat after he’d tried to dump her in the river, but I knew there was no place for him to hide in Black Cat. All there is here are people’s homes, and lots of them. But there was a lot of country around Black Cat and he could be hidden out in a cabin, like when he first took Liz back in April, or just laying low in the trees like a homeless person. I still wasn’t exactly sure what he looked like, but I knew what he didn’t look like – a homeless person. I was going to find him, and then, well, it wasn’t going to be pretty.
ELIZABETH, APRIL, 2009
‘Let me out!’ Elizabeth yelled for what felt like the millionth time. She was on the floor of the back seat of Grandma’s old Valiant, her hands and feet bound with duct tape. He hadn’t taped her mouth, and she was glad for that. She never saw his face. He’d shoved Megan down and grabbed Elizabeth’s head, burying it in the seat, and holding it there as he got in the driver’s seat and spun out of the Pizza Garden parking lot. They were several miles down the road before he stopped the car and bound her hands and feet with the duct tape and threw her in the back of the car, the entire time keeping her face turned away from him. He also hadn’t said a word.
He was driving moderately, probably the speed limit, Elizabeth thought, not wanting to draw the attention of the police. If she’d been in the trunk, she thought, she could kick out one of the tail lights like she saw on ‘Oprah’ that time, and get the police to stop them. But lying on the floor of the back seat, she had no options.
Finally she decided to try some finesse. ‘Aldon?’ He didn’t answer. ‘Why are you doing this?’ Still no answer. ‘I want to see you. I want to talk to you about what’s happening. I don’t understand why you’ve thrown me back here! I’m your sister!’
It was as if the car was driving itself. There was no sound, no movement from the front seat. Elizabeth tried again. ‘Is it because I brought Megan with me? I’m sorry about that, but I don’t drive. She had to drive me here. Is that what you’re mad about?’ Still only silence met her words. ‘She doesn’t know, if that’s what you’re worried about. She thinks I was meeting a boy. I mean, you know, like a boyfriend. I didn’t say a word about you, Aldon! You told me not to. And I’ve always done what you told me to do, haven’t I, big brother?’
Softly, from the front seat, he said, ‘You were a good baby sister.’
Elizabeth felt her skin crawl. Was it better having him answer her? At this point she wasn’t sure. ‘And you were a good big brother,’ she said.
‘I tried,’ he said. ‘I saved you that night.’
Mama E.J. had told her that her real mother, Terry, had fallen on her when she was shot, keeping her safe with her dead body. She said Aldon had been found on the stairs, trying to run away. ‘Yes, I know,’ Elizabeth said. ‘I always knew it was you who saved me.’
‘I’ve changed, Bessie,’ he said. ‘Physically and emotionally. I’m not the same Aldon you knew.’
‘How could you be?’ Elizabeth said. ‘After what you’ve been through.’
‘I’ve had work done to hide my appearance,’ he said. ‘That picture I sent you on email was taken right before I had everything done.’
‘Oh,’ she said. And she knew in that moment, although she’d thought she’d known all along, at this point she really knew: This was not Aldon. Aldon had been dead for the past ten years, just as she’d always been told. Tears sprang to her eyes as the half-hope left her. She really hadn’t known which to hope for – that her brother Aldon was alive and that her adoptive mother and father were evil, or that her world was just as she’d always thought it was, and still without Aldon.
Something in her tone must have alerted the driver. He said, ‘You don’t believe me.’
Trying to control her thoughts and tears, Elizabeth said, ‘Of course I do, Aldon.’
There was a laugh from the front seat. ‘No you don’t. But that’s OK. I don’t really care. You ever see
Aliens
?’ he asked. ‘The second one. Where that Marine gets scared and he yells, “Game over, man, game over.” You ever see that?’
‘Yes, I saw that,’ Elizabeth said, remembering parts of that movie that had scared her so badly she had nightmares.
‘Well, Bessie,’ he said, pulling Grandma’s Valiant to a stop. ‘Game over.’
ELIZABETH, THE PRESENT
Mom called earlier in the evening and said she’d pick us up in the morning to take us to Codderville Memorial Hospital, where Alicia was. I was too . . . everything, I guess, to go to sleep. I just paced the room that Megan and I shared at Grandma’s and worried. Everything was my fault. Everything. Even the guy stalking me in the first place was my fault. I don’t know what I did to him, but I did something that started this whole thing. And now look what had happened. Alicia had been shot, Megan had been shot, Lotta had been kidnapped, Mom had almost been arrested, and Myra Morris – oh, yeah, don’t forget Myra Morris! – was dead. D-E-A-D dead. Like, she wasn’t coming back. Like her whole life was ahead of her and now it was no more. Gone.
Fini!
I’m not being melodramatic. I’m just telling it like it is: It was all my fault. Maybe my birth parents dying was my fault, too! Who knew? I know I was only four, but four-year-olds are people, too, ya know? I had to
do
something!
Fix
something! But the only thing I could think to do at this moment was go to the hospital and see Alicia. My mother had been up there, said Alicia had been given a pain pill and was resting. But that didn’t mean I couldn’t just go up there and sit beside her. Yes, I know. There were rules, like visiting hours, and crap like that, but under the current circumstances who could possible argue my point? And if someone tried to, well, then, I’d just sneak in there and hide.
I got dressed while Megan slept, ready to quietly sneak out of the house.
E.J., THE PRESENT
Luna and I sat in my living room with a bottle of wine. I needed it. I was glad we didn’t have scotch in the house, or bourbon, or heroin. Just kidding. It had been a rough evening. I left the girls at Vera’s where I knew they’d be safe. Vera had so many dogs that there wasn’t much of a chance anybody could sneak in.
‘I’ve been thinking,’ I said to Luna.
‘Always a bad sign,’ she said, helping herself liberally to my $9.95 bottle of white.
‘No. Really. We’ve been assuming all along that this stalker is some stranger who fixated on Bessie for some unknown reason. What if he’s not? What if it’s someone she knows? Or someone we – the family – know?’
‘Happens,’ Luna said.
‘Of course it happens!’ I snapped. I mean, really. ‘But who? Have you thought about that?’ I said, accusingly this time.
‘Yes, as a matter of fact I have. I talked to Elizabeth about any boys who’ve been bothering her at school, or boys who just look at her funny—’
‘This isn’t a boy at school. He’s too old,’ I interjected.
‘We didn’t know this in April when I talked to her about it!’ All right, now she was getting testy.
I apologized in an unconvincing manner and she went on. ‘You don’t have any youngish men in your circle of friends that I’m aware of . . .’
She looked at me. ‘No, we don’t,’ I answered.
‘How about at church? I asked Elizabeth that but she couldn’t think of anybody,’ Luna said.
‘At church? The youth group director is a guy, but he’s like six-four, so he’s not the one. There are a few eighteen-year-olds in the youth group, but they’re girls.’ Then I thought about someone. It made me feel horrible to think of him, but I did. ‘Ah, there might be someone,’ I said.
‘Who?’
My shoulders slumped and I felt like crying. I didn’t want to accuse him, to sic the cops on this young man, but . . . ‘There is a young man at church. He’s mildly retarded. He used to come with his elderly mother every Sunday, but she passed away recently.’
‘When?’ Luna demanded.
‘Let me think. March? Yes, I believe her service was right after St Patrick’s Day because there were still some green decorations in the Sunday school wing when I went to her service.’
‘The stressor!’ Luna declared.
‘The huh?’ I asked.
‘The stressor. His mom dies in March, Bessie is kidnapped in April. Where is he living now?’
‘I think he’s still in his mom’s house. He’s only mildly retarded, but very shy—’
‘Has he been around the girls? How tall is he? Does he have the smarts to do the computer crap?’