What Strange Creatures (32 page)

I was wrong about my mother bearing no emotional surprises. Handing the paper back to her, I tried to breathe normally—the way they tell you to do on airplane videos that teach you how to use those snout masks right before you’re about to die.

Clearly this was the universe answering my recent doubt. I just didn’t know what it was telling me. It was like all the penis visions God sent Marge when she doubted him; the message was garbled at best.

“At least Jeff looks okay,” my mother offered.

“Yeah. He doesn’t look particularly criminal, if that’s what you’re getting at.”

“And your hair looks nice,” Mom added.

“Right. I look fabulous.”

I could feel my mother waiting for a more dramatic response. I took a sip of coffee.

“Why did you bring this here?” I asked.

“I thought you’d want to see it before you headed back to work.”

I dumped some more sugar in my coffee and took a gulp. “This really makes it difficult for me to carry through with my plan. My plan to go in confident and dignified and businesslike even though everyone will surely know that my brother’s been arrested for murder one. This makes it ten effing times harder.”

My mother slid the newspaper out of my view. “Would you rather someone at work showed you?”

“Who would be insensitive enough to do that? Give me those doughnuts, please.”

My mother pushed the plate closer to me. “Save a couple for your brother. I’m going to his place next.”

“What, you think I’m going to scarf them all down?”

“I don’t know.
I
might, if there was a picture in the paper of
me
eating a dog’s ear.”

I grabbed the ickiest, gooeyest pink-frosted doughnut from the plate—an act of self-hatred. “Jesus, Mom. Did you come here because you wanted to make me feel better?”

“Mostly I came because I was worried about you. You didn’t answer when I called last night.”

“You called? I was here.”

I knew she’d called. I hadn’t answered. Probably she was here now to sniff around and see if I’d been with a man the night before.

“Theresa?”

“Yes?”

“Do you . . . have someone in your life right now?”

Exactly.

“Mom, does that
really
matter to you at the moment?”

“Of course it matters. It matters to me how you’re doing. It’s a rough time. It actually would make me feel better to know you have someone who’s supporting you. Like I have Ned.”

I looked down at my napkin to find one bite of doughnut left. I couldn’t remember eating the first bites or what they’d tasted like.

“I’ve got everything I need,” I said. “Let’s just focus on what Jeff needs. I’m sorry to cut this short, but I have to fix my hair.”

My mother regarded me with a frown. “I’d like to meet him,” she said.

“I’m sure you would.” I smiled.

I knew that my mother would take this as a personal challenge, but I didn’t care. My brother was accused of homicide, and there was a picture in the paper of me looking like a circus geek. My mother’s interest was now officially one of the more positive elements of my life. Maybe I could learn to embrace it.

At Whitlock’s I kept my head down and worked on copy for our new Cocktail Candles. The marketing plan was to push them hard in retail stores in college towns like ours—so I was to make the copy young and snappy.

I started with the Margarita Buzz candle. The note on the sample said this was to be the “kickiest” of the Cocktail collection. It was pale yellow-green with a grainy, “salty” appearance.

I sniffed it and scribbled:

A refreshing citrus blend with a dash of salt. Kick back. You deserve it!

No, no,
no
. I erased
“You deserve it.”
College-age kids didn’t need to be told they deserved anything. They just went ahead and took it. Also, “dash” felt vaguely middle-aged, too. Like Mrs. Dash salt substitute. I scribbled:

Want to get fucked up? For the price of this candle, you can probably buy a decent-size bottle of Cuervo.

That made me feel younger, but not much better.

I set aside Margarita Buzz and looked at the other candles on my list: Midori Sour, Jell-O Shot!, Beer Pong, Pomegranate Martini, and White Russian.

Beer Pong was of course the worst. The others were clearly for sorority girls. Beer Pong was so they’d have something to buy their boyfriends, I guessed.

I put my pen to my notepad:

Certainly you already know that you are growing up in a culture that wants to market everything to you ten times over. You’re supposed to buy stuff that reminds you of something else you bought. Like if you enjoy red velvet cake, you have to try the red velvet ice cream and the red velvet deodorant and of course the red velvet candle. But let’s get real here. Don’t let us market your own degeneracy back to you, my friends. Nothing can really smell like Beer Pong but Beer Pong, and thank the sweet Lord for that. Someday you might really, desperately need $20 for something and not have it. In these uncertain times, I can’t promise that won’t happen to you, sadly. But if it does, you might at least feel infinitesimally better about it had you not, at this carefree point in your life, spent $20 on a candle that smelled like molasses and beer burps.

I put aside Beer Pong and leaned back in my chair, raised the Midori Sour to my nose, and inhaled it until I felt light-headed. I’d probably been sniffing at that thing for twenty minutes when my cell phone rang.

“I was wondering how you’re holding up,” Zach wanted to know.

“I take it you saw my picture in the paper.”

I heard him take a deep breath.

“You are talking to a famous woman,” I said, to save him the trouble of having to come up with something reassuring to say.

“Are you sure you’re all right?”

“Did I say I was all right?”

“I guess you didn’t.”

Zach was silent for a moment, and so was I.

“Did you go check out Wallace’s appearance the other day?” he asked.

“No,” I lied, since the slipping of the phone number would surely sound pathetic. “I tried, but by the time I got there, he’d moved along.”

“Oh. Well, I spoke to Janice Obermeier. And she told me something really interesting.”

“What’s that?”

“Kim claimed to have footage of Andrew’s original confession. And a few hours of his questioning beforehand. It showed coercion on the part of the police.”

“Really?”

“Yeah.”

“That would damage Donald Wallace quite a bit. If he’d seen it and it never made its way into the original trial.”

“I checked,” Zach said. “There was never any mention of a videotape of his confession in the original trial. It wasn’t standard practice back then.”

“Now . . . why didn’t Janice Obermeier take that seriously?” This didn’t sound right to me. “Why didn’t she demand to see the tapes?”

“I think she thought Kim was nuts. Still does. Seemed surprised I was asking about her.”

“And why would Colleen Shipley give Kim such a thing?” I asked.

“I don’t know,” Zach said.

“Maybe it was in a box with the other footage,” I suggested. “Maybe she gave her the wrong thing or gave it to her by mistake. I think Colleen Shipley was operating on a vigilante sort of level to begin with.”

“What makes you say that?”

It was time to come clean. “Zach—I’ve met Colleen Shipley. The day I saw you for coffee.”

“Oh.” He paused. “Why didn’t you tell me?”

“Hold on,” I said, getting up and making my way out of the office, down the stairs to the Whitlock’s employee parking lot.

Once I was a few steps from the building, I started to tell Zach about my trip to Raymond Realty.

He interrupted me. “I think we
really
need to find whatever footage Kim had.”

“Easier said than done. I’ve had a few leads. And none of them has yielded anything.”

“What leads?”

“I don’t have time to tell you everything. I’m supposed to be working, and everybody’s keeping a pretty sharp eye on me today, considering.”

“When do you get off work?” Zach asked.

“Four-thirty.”

“Maybe it’s time you let me buy you dinner. I’ll get takeout at the falafel place. Is that good? You want to do your house or mine?”

“Mine,” I said. I didn’t want to neglect my animals any more than I already had. I gave him my address.

“Great. How about . . . six?”

When I returned to my desk, I sat and stared out the window at the giant Whitlock’s candle for a good ten minutes.
Light,
my mind ordered it.
LIGHT.
Then I heard myself say the word out loud.

I wasn’t embarrassed, though, because I had no embarrassment left. A little despair, maybe. Maybe a lot. But no embarrassment. I buried my head in my hands and wondered what had ever made me expect the world to service me with little miracles.

I didn’t go crazy cleaning up for Zach. I figured that a guy who was still interested after seeing that picture in the paper was likely into quirks. Nothing says eccentricity like cat-haired couches and empty yogurt containers full of pennies. I did, however, light a Peony Patch candle to cover up any pet smells I might’ve grown immune to in recent weeks.

Zach arrived in a cloud of spicy-bean smell, his hair tousled and his hand outstretched with a big brown take-out bag. There is something so sexy about a man bearing prepared food. In that moment I wished I’d done a bit more primping. Applied some mascara at least.

Over the baba ghanoush, I told Zach about going to Kim’s old apartment and finding nothing. Explaining about Nathan was a little harder. For that I waited till the main course. First I detailed the easy parts—about how Jeff knew that Kim had been using Nathan’s video-editing software and equipment. And that he did some VHS-DVD conversion for people’s old wedding videos.

“I’ve gotten to know Nathan pretty well over the last week or so,” I said slowly.

“You didn’t know him before?” Zach asked.

“No.” I decided to get it over with as quickly as possible. “But I kinda wormed my way into his place. We hung out a little. I managed to take a look at some of what he had. After he went to sleep.”

A falafel ball fell out of Zach’s sandwich and onto his paper plate.

“I think I get what you’re saying,” he said, then covered the ball with a napkin, as if it embarrassed him.

I quickly avoided a lengthier discussion of the matter by describing the footage I’d seen of Dustin.

“Dustin’s a pretty confused kid,” Zach said.

“What about his brother?” I said. “You said you got to know him a little better.”

Zach shrugged. “Not much better. But my sense was he was much more able to take care of himself than Dustin was.”

“He seems a bit devious to me.”

Zach made a face at me. “Based on
what
?”

And then I had to tell him about that adventure, too—my brief encounters with Troy Richardson and Trenton Halliday.

“It may just be that Troy’s mistaken. Maybe Dustin told him he was going to be with his brother but took off on his own. Alternatively, he’s with Trenton and Trenton’s being protective—understandably so, if Dustin really is in a bad way right now. If Trenton doesn’t know what you’re up to, he may not be willing to put you two in touch.”

“I bet he’d trust
you,
though. He knows you well enough that if you asked, he’d tell you where Dustin is and what he’s up to.”

“I wouldn’t go that far. But I can try. I’ll have to think of a reason I’m asking, one that he’d buy. I’ll work on that. I’m still thinking, though, that the footage from that Shipley woman is what’s gonna get us somewhere on Wallace.
That’s
what I’d like to get my hands on, if I were you.
That’s
what I think Kim was probably going to confront Wallace about when she went to that town meeting.”

Rolf strutted in and did a flying leap onto the fridge.

“Wow,” said Zach.

“I do wish I had that footage of Dustin,” I said. “For what it’s worth. Maybe I could leverage it somehow.”

“Leverage?” Zach looked skeptical, his expression matching Rolf’s.

“Nathan’s onto me now, though. I don’t think I’m getting back in there.”

Zach ate in silence for a few minutes, thinking about this. His pita bread was coming apart, getting yogurt sauce all over his fingers.

“Maybe if you just explained to him how much is at stake, he’d let you have one more look?” he asked.

“I’m afraid if I explain that, he’ll hand everything over to the police and we’ll never see any of it again.”

“Are you really that distrusting of the police?”

“Given everything I’ve been hearing, and the possibility that someone as powerful as Donald Wallace could be involved, I want to be careful. And make sure Jeff has everything
they
have.”

“Okay. I get it.”

Zach broke a piece of pita off his mangled sandwich and nibbled on it, staring up at Rolf, who’d begun to doze. “I’ve got a couple of ideas,” he said.

“Okay?”

“Wallace did some advocacy work early in his career that connects pretty well with some of the stuff I usually write about. At-risk youth. I could ask him to do a story on that, set up a time to meet. Maybe I could surprise him and tell him I have the tapes. Or know about the tapes. See what happens.”

“Maybe . . .”

“If I connected with his office, I’d bet they’d jump on it. A feel-good story about his advocacy work would do him some good right now.”

“But then you’d have to
write
that story,” I pointed out.

“Nah,” said Zach. “I could take my time with it. And then if it doesn’t run before the election, no one will follow up or care.”

“But Donald Wallace probably isn’t going to go for a bluff,” I said, thinking of his unthreatened expression at Sally’s. “None of this is going to work if we don’t have it. I . . . just have that feeling.”

Zach nodded. “You’re probably right. And I think Nathan is our best bet for that.”

“I told you he won’t—”

“Maybe you shouldn’t ask him for it,” Zach said. “Maybe you should just take it.”

“How do I do that? Storm his house with an automatic weapon?”