“Okay.” She fixed him with a firm stare. “But if I tell you, then you’ve got to tell me something that you’ve never told anyone else, either.”
“You got a deal, sweetheart.” He nodded eagerly. “Spit it out now, lay it on me, my curiosity’s killed the cat and the dog.”
She took another sip, wetting her tongue. “Okay. . well, I was born in Mobile, Alabama. My parents divorced when I was fourteen. My mom moved me and my big brother here to Atlanta, where she had girlfriends.”
Leon watched her, captivated.
“Anyway,” she said, “my mom’s a high school teacher, and she actually taught at the high school I was attending. When I was in eleventh grade-I’d just turned seventeen then-we got a new principal, Mr. Blunt.
“Mr. Blunt was-hell, I’ll be blunt, no pun intended. Mr. Blunt was fine. He had this smooth caramel complexion, this tall, lean physique, this cute little gap in his front teeth that some kind of way made him look smart and sexy at the same time. He was single, too. All my girlfriends and some of the female teachers would swoon over him every time he’d walk in to a room.
“My mom was right up there with them, too, going ga-ga. She’d talk about him over the dinner table with me almost every night. Mr. Blunt is so this, Mr. Blunt is so that, Mr. Blunt, Mr. Blunt, Mr. Blunt. She was completely lovesick.
“Next thing I know, Mom and Mr. Blunt are going steady.”
“For real?” Leon cackled. “She didn’t waste any time, did she, girlfriend moved quick to snap up old boy, huh, like zoom, zoom, zoom!”
“Mom was fast.” Simone paused for effect, and winked. “But. . I was faster.”
Leon threw his head back and erupted into a body-shaking laugh. “Hold on, hold on, hold on. Hold the phone! What? Did I hear you correctly? You were faster? What, what, what?”
“You heard me right.” She grinned. “Mr. Blunt had his eye on me from the first day he showed up at the school. Could you blame him? I don’t want to brag, but umm. . you’ve seen the curvaceous assets yourself, hmm?” She gave him a brief, flirtatious smile. Leon’s mouth hung open; he was literally drooling. “Now, Leon, imagine how luscious I was looking at seventeen, before these juicy hips and thighs had ever carried a child.”
“Wow.” Leon chugged his wine in one gulp, burped, shook his head. “The pictures I’ve got in my mind, the vivid skin flicks you’ve produced in my cerebellum with those words, have damn near rendered moi speechless, sugar pie, honey pie, goddamn, wow.”
“Uh-huh.” She took another sip. “But here’s the best part. My mom was clueless about me and Mr. Blunt, she thought he was her man and hers alone-until she walked in on us in his office after school. She found me riding that tasty thang of his like a cowboy right there in his desk chair, Mr. Blunt moaning and groaning like he was having a stroke.”
“Damn!” Leon shot to his feet, knocking over his cup. “That’s the craziest shit I’ve ever heard! Damn! What did Moms do then?”
Simone smirked. “What do you think? She kicked my ass out of the house. I had to go live with her girlfriend until I graduated. To this day, she’s never forgiven me. Women can hold a grudge like you’d never believe, honey.”
“Good God.” He sat down again, laughing, tears running from his eyes. “My dear, you’re something else, you’re a rare one indeed, a red diamond. I never would have imagined Clair Huxtable as a bona fide high school freak of the week. That is classic, in vino veritas, baby girl, straight up and down, no joke.”
Simone merely smiled. The story she had told him, of course, was a total fabrication. She and her mother were the best of friends, her mom wasn’t a teacher, and she had never slept with her high school principal. But Leon seemed to believe her; she had specifically concocted her tale to fit his overall worldview of women as dirty, scheming whores.
Now came the difficult part.
Sipping more of her drink, she nudged his thigh with the tip of her sneaker. “Now it’s your turn to confess, Leon. Tell me about something that happened to you when you were growing up, something you’ve kept secret.”
He rubbed his hands together. “I don’t have any stories that can measure up to that. I didn’t even graduate from high school, mademoiselle. I dropped out at sweet sixteen. I didn’t have patience for homework and schedules and sitting at a desk all day. I was too hot for my teachers to handle, too cold to hold.”
“Any stories about your family?” she asked gently. “Remember, it has to be something you’ve never told anyone. A secret.”
Lips pursed thoughtfully, he poured more wine for both of them, emptying the bottle. He took his cup, swirled it around, inhaled deeply of the aroma.
She kept her foot levered against his leg and stroked back and forth slowly. He glanced at her foot, his eyebrows twitching quizzically.
“Ready?” she asked, voice lowered to a pillow-talk hush.
“I need a cigarette, need that nicotine hit, got to get the synapses sizzling.” Hands jittering like excited birds, he shook a Newport out of the pack in his pocket. He took a deep, luxurious drag.
Simone braced for anything. But she was not prepared for what he said.
“I killed my mother,” Leon said.
61
On her hands and knees, Jada inched through the attic crawl space.
At first, she had tried to stand up and walk, but she had bumped her head against something hard, and the pain made her eyes water. Crawling was safer.
It sort of reminded her of the plastic tunnels you could crawl through at Chuck E. Cheese, or on the playground at McDonald’s. Except neither of those places had tunnels as dark and musty as this one.
A cobweb brushed across her lips. Her stomach churned with nausea, and she wiped the back of her hand over her mouth.
Chuck E. Cheese and McDonald’s didn’t have cobwebs in their play tunnels, either.
The walls and floor of the passage were wooden and smooth, though, and except for the occasional gross spiderweb, and the dust in the air that made her nose itch, it was okay.
She only wished she could hear if she was making a lot of noise. She was trying to move slowly, trying to be careful not to bump against anything, but there was no way to know for sure how quietly she was going.
But Giant had not come after her yet, and that was good. The tunnel was probably too small for him to squeeze into.
The cell phone bulged in the pocket of her pajama bottoms. She wanted to use it to call Daddy, but she worried that if she turned it on, it would make too much noise, telling Giant or Mr. Leon where she had gone. She had to wait until she was somewhere safe before she turned it on.
But where was she? It was so dark in there she couldn’t see anything. The tunnel sometimes slanted upward a little bit, and sometimes sloped downward some, sometimes curved around corners, and sometimes was straight, and occasionally, a thin trickle of light leaked inside through a small crack in the walls, but it was never bright enough for her to figure out her location in the house.
She hoped she wasn’t going around and around in circles. That would be very bad.
Her heart was beating hard, so hard she imagined it was booming in the space like a drum, letting Giant and Mr. Leon know exactly where she was. She imagined Giant punching his big fist through the wall and grabbing her ankle, and snatching her into the room with him, licking his lips. .
To calm herself down, she imagined, instead, that the tunnel walls were insulated with rubber, soundproofed, and that the passage actually led to her own bedroom closet at home. She would reach the end of it, find a door, push it open, and discover herself in the middle of her closet full of familiar clothes and shoes, and she wander out of it and into her room, and Mickey would greet her with a flutter of wings and a funny comment, and Mom and Daddy would be sitting on her bed, and Daddy would say, Hey Pumpkin, where did you go? We’ve been waiting for you. .