The skull is being tucked under one of the hoods. The buzzing of the saw drifts through glass, like it is floating down the street on a lazy Saturday.
When the first Susan returns to the counter, a new one-inch-square hole glares out of the top of her head.
One more degradation in an endless string of them.
I’m sorry, I say silently. But there is no toothless, hollow answer in my head.
The Dremel saw drills a leg bone while the piece of skull is scrubbed raw in the second station. The technicians have forgotten us, slipping into a comfortable rhythm. I don’t know what I was expecting, but not this surreal, matter-of-fact routine.
“It must be especially exciting to work on the Black-Eyed Susans,” Sarita says brightly. The student from Oxford. Her voice is British, clipped. Her black heels are too high. “It must be an honor for these techs. These must be your best.”
I can feel Jo’s body go taut as if it is my own. “To them,” she says. “And to me, this case… these bones… are no different than any other bone entrusted to us. Each one represents the same thing. A family, waiting.”
Admonished. All of us.
“Why are there three bones?” Bill shifts the conversation abruptly. “For two unidentified skeletons? I thought you only tried one bone from a victim at a time.”
“Now, there’s the question I’ve been waiting for.” Still an edge to Jo’s voice. “The girls’ skeletons were ransacked by critters over time. Moved by their killer at least once. The old case file documents foreign soil along with the red clay mixture in that field. So, of course, not every bone was there. Our forensic anthropologist laid out what was exhumed from the two caskets, and counted. He counted three right femurs.”
I hear someone suck in a strangled breath. It takes a second to realize it’s me.
“Three skeletons, not two,” Bill whispers, as if I can’t do the math.
Five Susans in all, not four. One dead girl named Merry, three gnawed-on nobodies, and me. Another member of my tribe. Another family, waiting.
I’m the one, a Susan says conspiratorially. I’m the one with the answers.
Jo shoots me an odd look, even though I know I am the only one who can hear.
Tessie, 1995
I wonder what he is looking at first.
The girl without a mouth. The girl with a red blindfold. The spider’s web with the trapped swallowtail. The faceless runner on the beach. The roaring bear, my personal favorite. I’d worked hard on the teeth.
“Did you remember to bring your drawings today?” he had asked first thing.
Anything was preferable to talking about the day of my mother’s death. Last time, he might as well have taken a hot poker and stuck it in my belly button.
And what did he learn? That I heard nothing. Saw nothing. That all I remember is a vague image of blood, but that was dead wrong, because the police told me there was no blood. All of it seemed so freakin’ off point. Another way to clutter up my head.
So, yes, I brought drawings today. As soon as he asked, I handed Doc a white cardboard poster-mailing tube. It once held the Pulp Fiction poster now hanging over Lydia’s bed. Lydia had rolled up my drawings carefully after our three-hour session sprawled on the rough Berber of her bedroom floor surrounded by a kindergarten chaos of paper and crayons and markers.
She didn’t like my idea when I sprang it on her two days ago, but I begged. More than anyone else, she understood my fear-that someone else would find out my secrets before I did.
So she’d ridden the bus back to the TCU library. Skimmed The Clinical Application of Projective Drawings. The Childhood Hand That Disturbs. And, because she was Lydia: L’Imagination dans la Folie, which translates to Imagination in Madness, some random tome that studied the drawings of insane people in 1846. She had educated me on the principle of the House-Tree-Person test. House, how I see my family. Tree, how I see my world. Person, how I see myself.
When it was all over, the black crayon worn to a flat nub, I thought we’d faked it pretty well. Lydia was even inspired to draw a picture herself, which she described to me as an army of giant black-and-yellow flowers with angry faces.
The doctor is sitting directly across from me, not saying a word. I can hear the crisp rustle of paper as he flips from one sheet to the next.
The silence has to be something they teach all these manipulative bastards.
Finally, he clears his throat. “Technically excellent, especially since you have no vision. But, mostly, cliché.” No emotion in his words, just a statement of fact.
My scars begin to thrum. Thank God, I didn’t give him my real drawings.
“This is why I don’t like you.” I speak stiffly.
“I didn’t know you didn’t like me.”
“You don’t know? You’re like all of the others. You don’t give a flip.”
“I give a flip, Tessie. I care very much about what happens to you. So much that I’m not going to lie to you. You obviously spent some time on these drawings. You are a very smart, talented girl. The thing is, I don’t believe them. The angry animal. The girl who has no voice. The idea of running along the ocean’s abyss. These Jackson Pollock black and red swirls. They’re all just a little too pretty. Too pat. There is no single emotion that connects these drawings to one another. They stand alone. That isn’t how trauma works. Whatever emotions you are feeling right now… they connect everything.”
His chair creaks as he leans over, placing a sheet in front of me. “Except for this one. This one is different.”
“Am I supposed to guess?” Trying to be sarcastic. Trying to figure out how he saw through me so fast. Which drawing he found meaningful.
“Can you?” he asks. “Guess?”
“Are you really going to make me play this game?” I grip Oscar’s leash like a lifeline, letting it bite into my flesh. Oscar obediently clambers up. “I’m going home.”
“You can go home anytime you like. But I think you want to know.”
My stillness says everything.
“Tell me.” I barely croak it out, suffused with rage.
“The field of strangled flowers. Leering. The little girl cowering. It’s terrifying. Messy. Real.”
Lydia’s drawing. She’d spent two hours on it while singing along to Alanis. Got a plastic smile on a plastic face.
Lydia used to laugh about the fact that she couldn’t even draw Snoopy.
She hadn’t told me about the little girl. I wanted to see.
I dropped the leash and scooted myself to the edge of the cushion, words rushing up my throat before I could stop them.
“What would you say if I told you that the main thing I’ve been drawing…” I suck in a breath. “Is a curtain. Over and over, until I want to crawl out of my skin?”
“I’d say, it’s a start.”
A slightly higher pitch to his voice. Is it hope?
Tessa, present day
I jiggle the key into the first of two locks on the front door. My mind is dwelling on pristine white laboratories and trees made of brittle bones and the fraction of statistical hope that one of the three tiny pieces of dead girl will lead somewhere. All the way home, there was blessed silence from the Susans. While the lock refuses to cooperate, a shadow clobbers into mine, making me gasp.
“What are you so damn jumpy for, Sue?”
Euphemia Outler, right-hand neighbor. Known to me as Effie, to Charlie as Miss Effie (despite a marriage or two) and to a few mean boys on the block as Miss Effing Crazy. She is an ex-science professor, a self-employed suburban spy, and an early dementia patient who regularly calls me Sue-not because of my past, but because it is her only daughter’s name, the one who lives in New Jersey, who had decided when her mother turned eighty, What the hell, out of sight, out of mind.