Let Me Go (16 page)

“Not really,” Susan said. “I mean, it was implied that I shouldn't leave. Leo was supposed to bring me home this morning. But then Archie showed up in a mud-covered tuxedo with blood on his head.” Susan knew this was sounding ridiculous, but she continued. “He got me out of there. Then an FBI surveillance van picked me up. And I had to go to FBI HQ downtown. I've spent the last hour trying to identify mug shots of Russian gangsters. They wouldn't even let me draw masks on any of them, even though I told them that was the only way I'd ever recognize anyone.”

Bliss picked up the apple that was now firmly secured on a Popsicle stick and, holding it by the stick, dipped the apple into the pot of hot caramel. “Was the party fun?”

It was all the yoga and meditation, Susan decided. Her mother had thrown herself into both since Pearl had been killed. It was possible she had actually meditated her blood pressure down to a permanent semiconscious state. Susan threw a glance at the caramel apples Bliss had already finished and laid out on wax paper. “No one eats those, you know. Their moms make them throw them away. It's got to be store-bought, or it might be poisoned or filled with razor blades.”

Bliss lifted the apple and held it above the pot, letting the extra caramel drizzle off in thick ribbons back into the pan. “I know,” she said. “But I've been making Halloween treats for twenty years, and I'm not going to stop because some people are paranoid,” she said. She set the apple down on the wax paper with the others, and stabbed another Fuji with a Popsicle stick. “That's when the police state wins,” she added.

Pearl had only lived with them a few days. She was a seventeen-year-old runaway who had once Tasered Archie to the point of unconsciousness, but Bliss had always had a soft spot for anyone with an anti-authority streak. It had been more than two months since Pearl had been dragged from their house and murdered. Bliss still wouldn't talk about it.

Still, you'd have thought with all they had been through that her mother would be a little more concerned about Susan's welfare. Gretchen Lowell was on the loose. A psycho had snuck in their back door with a machete last summer. Pearl had been murdered.

“I'm going to lay down,” Susan announced huffily.

“
Lie
down.”

“Whatever.”

“Susan?” her mother said.

Bliss was standing over the caramel pot, an apple in her hand. The Jefferson Starship album hit a scratch and skipped. For the first time, Susan noticed how pale her mother was, the circles under her eyes. She hadn't gotten a good night's sleep since Pearl had died. Bliss looked down and jammed another Popsicle stick into an apple. “What are you doing, sweetie?” she asked.

“Excuse me?” Susan said.

Bliss wiped her hands on a dishrag, came around the counter, put her palms on Susan's cheeks, and stared deep into her eyes. Her hands smelled like marijuana and caramel and coconut-scented lotion. Susan didn't like where this was going. “You have all these story ideas,” Bliss said gently. “These book concepts. You can live here, rent-free. But you have to
do
something.”

A thread of panic pulled tight in Susan's stomach. “I freelance,” she protested.

Bliss smoothed Susan's hair. “You haven't written anything in two months,” she pointed out.

“I've been doing a lot of thinking,” Susan said, voice rising. “Did I mention that I was kidnapped?”

“You can't wait for life to fall into place, sweetie,” Bliss said, squeezing Susan's head between her hands. “Don't worry about the direction. Just move.”

Susan stammered, not knowing how to respond. This was all she needed, new age wisdom from her mother. This was a woman whose pubic hair was currently waxed in the shape of a pot leaf and who had once woken up to find a tattoo of Salvador Dalí's mustache on her hip with no memory of how it had gotten there. “Just move? Did you see that on a bumper sticker?” Susan asked.

Bliss let go of Susan's face. “Your father said it once to me,” she said. “We were high on psilocybin and wandered away from a Rainbow Gathering into a national forest and got lost.”

Susan didn't point out the fact that most likely her father hadn't meant those words to be some big metaphor—he was just trying to get them out of the woods. She didn't want to quibble. Her mother wasn't wrong. Susan didn't exactly have a five-year plan. The
Herald
would certainly never take her back. Susan looked down at her pale, hairy knee poking through the hole she'd pulled apart in the black opaque fabric of her tights. It had started out the size of her pinkie, but she'd worried it and worried it and now it was big enough to put her arm though. How could she take care of herself? She couldn't even take care of a pair of tights. She couldn't even remember to shave her legs. “Don't worry about the direction,” Susan repeated. “Just move. Got it.”

“And sweetie?” Bliss said, walking back around the counter.

“Yeah?” Susan said with a sigh.

Bliss's smile vanished and she gave the caramel pot a determined stir. “Everyone loves my caramel apples,” she said. She picked up a Popsicle stick and stabbed another apple.

“I know,” Susan said.

Bliss gave her a satisfied nod.

“I'm going to
lie
down,” Susan said, turning for the stairs.

“Pigs can't look up,” Bliss said.

“Excuse me?” Susan said.

“Pigs can't look up,” Bliss said. “They can't see the sky.” Bliss gave Susan a helpful smile. “We all have problems.”

“Thanks,” Susan said slowly. Bliss's smile widened. Susan jabbed a thumb at the stairway. “I'm going to
just move
to my room now,” she said. Then she swiveled around and marched upstairs, the wooden stairs creaking under her feet. The smell of caramel followed her down the hall all the way to her bedroom. She thought of it that way now—her bedroom. When she'd first moved back in with her mother she had thought of it as her childhood room, or the guest room, or the room in which she was staying, or her mother's meditation room. But it had been over a year since she'd moved back home, and more than seven months since she'd been fired from the
Herald,
and it wasn't feeling so temporary anymore.

She didn't even bother to kick off her shoes before she flopped down on her futon. Her hair-spray-coated hair crunched as it hit the pillow.

Halloween. Susan wasn't sure she could take it. All those people acting like it was fun to splatter fake blood on their clothes and savage innocent pumpkins. If any kids came to their house dressed like Gretchen Lowell, Susan was going to pepper-spray them.

Then there was Leo. Had Susan really thought he'd choose her over his obsession to put his father in jail? Was he supposed to drop everything and get her off the island? He'd allowed her to be used as some sort of bargaining chip. And then he hadn't even shown up the next morning to make sure she got home. That had been Archie, as usual.

The light of the late-morning sky poured through Susan's sheer curtains. Downstairs, Bliss flipped the record over and side B of Jefferson Starship's
Knee Deep in the Hoopla
drifted through the floorboards. Susan knew that album by heart. Every word. It had been her father's album. When she was ten, he had taught her how to play “We Built This City” on the kazoo. She'd sounded good, too. It had only occurred to her later that her father's enthusiasm for the song was ironic.

She rolled over on her side and put a pillow over her head, and then practically choked on the trapped hair-spray fumes. This wasn't even Jefferson Starship's best album. She threw the pillow on the floor and sat up.

It was useless. She was too wound up to sleep.

Susan got out of bed, pulled her laptop off her desk, got back under the covers, and started to write.

 

CHAPTER

23

 

A cheerful sign
on Rachel's front door spelled out H
APPY
H
ALLOWEEN
in silver glitter. A small black cat made out of tinsel and wire sat on the hall floor just to the left of the door. Archie nearly tripped on it. He took a minute, before he knocked, to recover some composure. He ran his hands through his hair and wiped the grit from his eyes. He touched the scab at his hairline to make sure it wasn't actively bleeding. It wasn't. This was as good as it was going to get. He knocked.

Rachel opened the door within moments. Her face lit up when she saw him and her smile widened into a huge grin. She was radiant. He had never seen her look happier. She lifted her arms as if she were going to throw them around him, but then her eyes filled with tears and she lifted her shaking hands over her mouth. Her shoulders trembled. “Sorry,” she said. She gulped back a small sob. He could see the lines of worry on her face now, the tension in her arms. She glanced at him, and there was a flicker of terror in her eyes. “I thought you were dead,” she said.

Archie stood in the doorway, confused. The pills were wearing off, and he felt headachy and tired. He had not expected Rachel to burst into tears at the sight of him. If his brain had been working faster, he might have been quicker on the uptake. But it took him a long moment, standing there dumbly as she sniffled, to put it together.

She had been worried about him.

Archie had not seen that coming. He'd been an idiot. It simply had not occurred to him that she would worry, not like Debbie had. It just wasn't their dynamic. “I got your messages,” he said. She had left four messages last night, and another three that morning. He had not called her back. The texts had been casual, just checking in. He had missed the signals.

Their dynamic, apparently, had changed, when he wasn't looking.

For a detective, he wasn't very good at noticing these things.

Rachel wiped the tears off her cheeks. She was still sniffling. She could barely look at him.

“I had bad cell reception,” Archie said. He reached a hand and touched her wet cheek. “I'm not dead,” he said.

Her eyes moved up his face and stopped at his hairline. She swept a forelock of his hair to the side and studied his head wound, the line between her eyebrows deepening.

“You should put some ice on that,” she said. Then she stepped back. It was an invitation.

Archie slid past her into the apartment. She was wearing tight white jeans tucked into brown boots, and a fitted white T-shirt and vest. Her blond hair was tied back into a ponytail. He caught a whiff of vanilla and coconut and could feel his body respond. He tried to distract himself.

Rachel's apartment was the same layout as Archie's, but less depressing. The furniture matched. The walls were painted. She had cork floors and granite countertops and stainless steel appliances. There were always fresh flowers on the glass coffee table. Halloween decorations were tucked here and there—a ceramic jack-o'-lantern on an end table, a spider constructed out of the same black tinsel and wire as the cat in the hall sat on the kitchen bar.

“Sit down,” Rachel told him.

Archie walked to her butter-yellow leather sofa and sat down. He watched her in the kitchen getting the ice, the daylight blazed through her factory windows and made his skin warm. He worried that if he blinked too long, he'd fall asleep.

“I didn't have cell reception until this morning,” Archie explained again. “And then”—he considered name-dropping the FBI, but knew he couldn't—“I had a meeting.”

She walked across the room to him, carrying a gel ice pack wrapped in a dish towel. Then held the gel pack out, one hand on her hip. Her brown leather belt had a shiny gold buckle shaped like a lion.

“I'm sorry,” he added, taking the ice pack, eyes on the lion. “That you were worried. I should have prepared you more … for this.” Archie placed the ice pack against his forehead and flinched from the cold. It woke him up a little.

“I want to talk,” Rachel said.

Now he'd done it. He looked up at her. She had her other hand on her hip now, too.

They were going to have a conversation, he realized. Archie didn't know a lot about women, but he had been married and he knew when a conversation was coming, and he knew that when a woman wanted to have one, the best thing you could do was get it over with.

“Right,” he said.

Rachel placed her hand on the gel pack and held it against Archie's head until he let his own hand fall away. Then she stepped around his knees. He expected her to take a seat next to him on the sofa, but instead she lowered herself onto his lap.

Archie didn't know how to respond. He kept his hands at his sides, unsure what level of affection he should exhibit in this situation. Rachel was sitting across his thighs, her legs stretched out on the sofa, her back resting against the sofa arm, holding the gel back against his skull. He was fully awake now.

“Why haven't you introduced me to your kids?” Rachel asked.

Archie had hoped she'd start with something easier.

She looked at him, waiting.

Archie chose his words carefully. “I didn't know you wanted to meet my kids,” he said.

Rachel frowned. She tilted her head slightly. He could feel her shift against his groin. The pill bottle in his pocket pressed into his thigh. He hoped she didn't think it was an erection.

He cleared his throat, and tried to explain. “I don't want to confuse them,” he said.

Rachel sat forward, her weight off the pills, and put her free arm around his neck. “How am I confusing?” she asked.

Archie sighed. “How do I introduce you, Rachel? As my downstairs neighbor?”

She glanced at him hesitantly. “You could try girlfriend.”

This was the opposite direction that Archie thought this conversation would go. His discomfort must have been obvious.

“Okay,” Rachel said quickly. “Then tell them I'm your sweetpatootie. Or special friend. Or sex kitten. Whatever. I don't care. Just introduce me. I don't want to be a secret.”