Lie Still (31 page)

She smacked her lips together and pulled out a pearl-handled revolver that looked like a kid’s toy gun just as we hit the highway. Suddenly the passenger-side window was wide open, bringing in a rush of traffic noise and damp, polluted wind. I hardly had time to wonder what the hell was happening when Letty took direct aim at a 70-mile-an-hour speed limit sign closing in on us. I heard a light pop.

“Right in the middle of the zero, going 65,” she said with satisfaction,
drawing the gun back in. “The sign says 70. You can speed up a little. I certainly haven’t lost my touch since Daddy trained me on that little .22. If you don’t believe me, turn the car around and see the dent for yourself. Like a bullet through the heart.”

“No, that’s OK. I believe you. Impressive. That’s good, you’re putting the gun away.”

It calmed my nerves to say that out loud, while inside I raged at myself for putting my unborn baby in the car with this lunatic. I’d consider myself safer with a killer who cut up people like they were Thanksgiving dinner than with this 250-pound, unpredictable housewife/former beauty queen on a boiled egg and nitrates diet. Unless they were one and the same person.

I trained my eyes on the taillights in front of me.

Only twenty more miles. Tub. Bubbles. Laser beams.

“Did I scare you, honey?” Letty asked. “You look kind of green. Pull over up here at the Braum’s. Now that the rain’s stopped pissin’, I can take the wheel. Maybe we could drive through for a scoop of peanut butter pretzel. It’s amazing what can make you feel better. Four or five of those Little Debbie cakes always do the trick. I store up on the heart-shaped vanilla Valentine ones. I think they taste better than the Christmas trees or the Easter ones even though they are supposed to be exactly the same thing, just cut in different shapes. I don’t think it would hurt too much if I ate a few of those tonight. I bet all this grief is burning extra calories.”

My hands clenched the wheel tighter. “I’m fine, Letty. No problem driving.”
And no way in hell am I letting you take the wheel
.

Letty contemplated my rigid profile while I frantically punched radio buttons to break the tension or whatever it was now lodged between us. Maybe I shouldn’t worry. Maybe this was a perfectly normal one-on-one atmosphere with Letty Dunn.

“How about a little music to relax us?” I asked. “Or NPR?”

Letty slapped my hand away.

“Honey, let me do that. I only listen to country.” For the next fifteen minutes, Letty ignored me and sang along squeakily about how her give-a-damn was busted and how tequila makes her clothes fall off and how she’d happily pack a lunch and stuff Earl in the trunk ’cause Earl had to die. She nearly busted my eardrums with the chorus, “I’d like to check you for ticks.”

My give-a-damn was temporarily busted, too. Country music was making sense. Just screw and drink and shoot if necessary. It was a life philosophy that the very poor and the very rich had in common.

“Sorry,” she said, during a commercial. “I’m musical. Singing was my pageant talent. Now people can mostly hear me at First Baptist. You should come the next time I do ‘He Touched Me.’ I’ve saved a few souls for Jesus with that one. They stream down the aisles. The preacher likes to keep me in his pocket for revival time.”

“Uh-huh.” I turned onto the exit ramp for Clairmont.

Three more minutes and I’d be off this roller coaster. I probably wasn’t going to die today at the hands of Letty Dunn.

I braked the Escalade sharply at my front curb, and exhaled.

“Thank you.” Two soft words, intended for a higher power than Letty.

“You owe me one.” Letty unbuckled her seatbelt.

“Yes, I certainly do.” I cleared my throat. “Letty, will you please do me a favor and not mention this to Mike? You know, about picking me up? The car stalling at the airport? I don’t want him to worry about any of it. With the Caroline stuff going on.”

Letty narrowed her eyes at me. This Phi Beta Kappa pageant queen was nobody’s fool.

“Honey, I won’t tell Mike if you don’t tell Harry. He thinks I’m at Pilates. Like I’m going to do that liberal shit.” She grinned. “Now you owe me two.”

When she lurched over to embrace me, I had a fuzzy thought that she might be about to stick a knife in my ribs.

The next morning, wrapped in a robe, wet hair in a towel turban, my mind briefly, pleasantly repressing everything, I found the letter in the stack of yesterday’s mail on the side table by the door. Mike must have dropped it there.

Stamped, no return address, careful print lettering in blue ink, every sentence on a single line, like a free-verse poem.

Dios bendiga a su nino
.

I plugged the words into my iPhone app translator.

God bless your little boy
.

Who was Maria’s man? And what did she understand about Caroline after reading those diaries? Did they point to her killer?
Was Maria hinting that I should tell Mike to forget the files and read the diaries?

Caroline’s killer had cut her up, buried her in the backyard, and topped off her grave with a sarcastic makeshift cross like a decoration on a Halloween cupcake. For the last hour, I’d been trying to forget, to reacquaint myself with routine things: the cantankerous hot-cold shower, a cup of loose-leaf Fruta Bomba tea, the daisy wallpaper that now seemed comforting enough to leave stuck to the kitchen walls until the end of time.

But the carefully constructed dam I’d built in my head was bursting, flooding my head with horrible images. I considered Caroline’s last unspeakable hours aboveground,
really
considered them, for the first time. Her lovely, fine-boned face twisted in pain. Her honeyed voice begging for mercy as the knife slid deeper into her like she was a stick of butter. I thought about how much I’d complicated things by digging into my past. If it was simple, like Mike said. If her killer was my stalker. If my past had nothing to do with all of this. The baby rolled over restlessly.

The other piece of paper I held in my hand was a note from Mike, left on his pillow, asking me to meet him for lunch. He signed it,
Love, Mike XXX
. Always three
X
’s for some reason, no more, no less, no
O
’s to water it down.

A versatile letter, the
X
.

Kisses.

Multiplication. The Roman numeral ten. The twenty-fourth letter in the modern Latin alphabet. The unknown African tribe Malcolm X descended from. The signature of an illiterate human being.

Christ.

At whatever ungodly hour Mike arrived home last night, I was knocked out in a dark, dreamless sleep. I briefly remembered warm lips brushing my cheek, his hand tracing over my belly.

By some miracle of God, a Clairmont towing company named Hooker Services Inc. dropped the Volvo at a local service center long before Mike slipped into bed. Joe Ray Hooker was also a lay preacher at Sunset First Baptist. He asked for $219.23 and took my credit card over the phone. I told him to tip himself another $50 but to please not tell anyone where he picked up my car. He told me that was between “you and the Lord.”

I pulled off the towel, shook loose my hair, and picked up my purse from the couch. The cell phone was in the front left pocket.

It was 10:30 a.m. here, and in Lawrence, Kansas. A perfectly respectable time to call. Cereal had been eaten, coffee had kicked in. If Brad wasn’t lying, Renata Tadynski was expecting me. The first ring sent me to voicemail.

“Hi. It’s Miss T. If you’re a parent calling about a student, please remember that middle-schoolers are certifiably crazy, that grades don’t really count until high school, and that Colin Powell was a C student in college. Then let me know when and where I can reach you and a brief message about why you’re calling. Everyone else just leave a name and number.”

Breezy. Confident. Funny. She was a teacher. Not at all like the frightened girl rubbing the varnish off her rosary beads.

“Hello.” Then I babbled. “This is an old acquaintance of yours from Windsor. Emily Page. Well, I used to be Emily Waters—but then, I’m not sure you even knew my last name. Or remember my first. I think we both experienced something … terrible.”

Now, why, why did I say that?
I readjusted, trying to sound more professional. “Brad Hellenberger gave me your number. I need to speak with you. Please call me at this number as soon as possible.”

I clicked off without saying goodbye and sank into the couch. Belmont hopped onto what was left of my lap and stretched out comfortably, purring like an idling Harley, doing his part to hatch our egg. Love was a bit much to ask of him, but he was
making more of an effort. Once a day, I’d smash his obnoxiously cute furry face up to mine, and say, “Please love me, Belmont.” He would suffer through it. This morning, he lapped milk and I sipped coffee. We weighed together. I stood on the scale while he hung from my arms like a lazy dead thing, then stood on it without him. I subtracted from my large number to determine his large number. We needed to rethink the wet cat food and the red Doritos.

“Belmont, I think I’m going crazy.” I whispered it and scratched him behind one ear, wondering whether the cat could hear the baby’s heartbeat and Baby could feel the vibration of Belmont’s purring, if they enjoyed some private connection I couldn’t share.

The phone rang, shrill and loud, shattering the peace, and I banged my shins on the coffee table.

“Shit,” I said aloud, rubbing my legs. “Get it together, Emily. Stop cussing.”

The phone rang again, and again, as grating to me as a crying baby who didn’t share my DNA. Maybe like one who did.

I walked slowly toward the kitchen, praying that someone sane would be on the other end. That seemed a lot to ask.

Four rings. Five rings. Six rings. Seven rings.

I was in the kitchen now, staring at the machine.

PRIVATE CALLER
.

My hand rested on the receiver.

Please let it be Aunt Tilda in Minnesota, complaining that her retirement center’s cafeteria had switched from cream cheese to cream cheese
spread
and that she sure as heck wasn’t paying $3,000 a month for cream cheese spread, now, was she?

Please, let it be her
.

“Hello?”

“Hello,” he said.

Not a voice synthesized by a computer device, so easy to do
in the comfort of your own home these days. Apparently, he wasn’t worried about me recognizing it.

I didn’t.

He cleared his throat.

It sounded like he had a cold. Or that he smoked a lot.

He clicked off.

He said hello
.

My mind was light, like it was flying off into the field of daisies on the wall.

But it whispered one more thing.

X marks the spot
.

I imagined brute hands holding a child’s treasure map.

A red line that ran straight to the X that was me, and my baby.

“T
hat’s it,” Mike said grimly. “I’m putting a private tail on you when I’m not around. One of the guys is going to do it off the books. I’ll pay for it myself.”

We sat across from each other in a booth at a small, family-owned barbecue joint on the outskirts of the town, waiting for a woman named Wanda to yell out our order. We met for a late lunch around two, plenty of time for me to buck up. Our only companions were a couple of farmers in dirty overalls sucking down freshly brewed Lipton tea chunked with ice. Unlimited refills for seventy-nine cents meant the tip would likely be more than the bill.

Charred air, French fry grease, and the sweet smell of sauce churned my stomach, but not enough to stop me from ordering up the Combo Chopped Beef Sandwich Plate with extra onions and dill pickles.

“You didn’t recognize the voice.”

“Mike, we’ve been over this. I can’t recognize a person based on the word
hello
and the sound of him clearing his throat.” I knew that he wanted me to mimic it. No chance in hell was that happening.

“I’m nowhere good on this. No discernible prints on anything we sent to the lab except for the thumbprint on your easel. Billie’s running it in another database, but I don’t have much hope on getting a hit.”

“What about the cigar?” I asked.

Mike hesitated.

“Tell me,” I demanded.

“Made in Kentucky. The brand’s been around for at least a hundred and fifty years. Artesian springs. Dark, fertile soil. It all adds up to a damn fine cigar but not much else. You can buy them online.”