I was keenly aware how vulnerable I was. How easy it would be to rip away the afghan hugging my body, the one that used to lie neatly folded across the back of my grandmother’s couch.
How no one would hear while the glass and metal and rock bit into my back.
He watched me until I disappeared behind our fence.
7
Mike was propped up by a pillow on the bed, reading glasses slid down on his nose, as he studied a thick manila file folder. A stack of folders toppled over on the floor on his side of the bed.
All through dinner and a little late evening yard work, I hadn’t said a word about my visit with Caroline or the club membership she dangled like a glittery prize. I’d rattled on about a quick trip to Whole Foods. About the baby clothes that arrived in the mail from his sister in New Jersey, the one who would glue an Apple product to her ass if they invented one to go there. She had wrapped up a tiny onesie stamped with IPOOD and another that read, GET OFF FACEBOOK AND FEED ME.
The onesies made me laugh. That laugh, a long nap, and three small plastic cups of Jell-O chocolate pudding temporarily flicked Caroline back into the weeds where she belonged. She was nothing more than a Vegas psychic in Southern drag, I told myself. The carved box, the obscenely hot room, that giant, ridiculous portrait-her props. She had picked at our scabs, hoping they’d bleed, probably having no idea how we got them. Except for the specificity of the name “Alex,” the words on those pieces of paper could apply to thousands of people, if not millions.
But now, in bed with Mike, Caroline the mantis was creeping back, one green blade of grass at a time.
“I think there is something weird about Caroline Warwick,” I said abruptly. “She is really pushing the issue of me joining her little club. The one I told you about the other night after her Bunko party.”
Mike rested his glasses on his head and put the folder down. His face wore the “You are six months pregnant so I’m going to stop what I’m doing and listen to you” look. Usually, I loved that look.
“Did I tell you about the pink room? Her collection of diaries?” I knew that I hadn’t, but I needed to ease in. “I came across a room on my way to the bathroom the night of Caroline’s party. It was like a creepy museum to some little girl. Very… pink. Old movie posters, a teddy bear, a bunch of old diaries on a shelf. I’m beginning to wonder whether Caroline replicated the room from her own childhood. If those diaries are hers.”
“So? We’ve all got our quirks. I still dream about a Derek Jeter-themed bathroom.”
“Uh-huh. We’ve discussed. I’m not going to listen to a lifetime of No. 2 jokes.” I punched him lightly on the arm.
“The club might be a good way for you to get to know people.” He said it absently, his eyes roaming back to the folder on the bed between us.
Not that interested. Part of me was glad. The part that wanted to figure out a few things first. I reached over and placed the folder back in his hand, glancing at the name on the file tab.
“Who’s Jimmy Cooper?” I asked.
Mike had committed every single night to reading at least twenty old file cases from Clairmont’s criminal history. He wanted them wired in his head before they were wired into a new, high-tech computer system arriving at his office next week. The database was Mike’s first request after taking the job. He had figured it would take two years or maybe never to get approval. Instead, a big fat check to pay for it landed on his desk the next day.
“Jimmy Cooper is a man with a lifetime of drunk and disorderlies.” He scribbled a few notes, presumably about Jimmy Cooper, on the yellow legal pad in his lap.
I watched my stomach contort like a circus show, the baby punching out his nightly workout.
I juggled myself over onto my side, rubbing Mike’s thigh.
“Stop doing that unless you’re serious,” he said.
“Does anything bad ever happen in this town?” I asked.
“The last homicide was about two years ago. Domestic. A trailer park case just inside the city limits. The city council conveniently redrew that line two months later so it didn’t show up in their statistics. In the last seven years, the city has recorded two murders and two suicides in its jurisdiction. The man in the trailer park who beat his wife to death with a coat hanger. And an unsolved in 2002-a Jane Doe from God-knows-where dumped on the side of a county road west of town. FBI profilers came in on that one because of similarities to the murders of two young females in Boston and Philadelphia. The same ligature marks.”
He reached for the half-empty Abita on the nightstand. “A couple of recent suicides. A local high school student hung himself in his bedroom after a girl broke up with him.”
“Who found him? His mother?” My gut twisted into the complicated knot that it performed earlier in the day, with Tiffany breathing into my face.
“I shouldn’t tell you any of this,” Mike said. “You should be thinking nice baby thoughts. Bunnies and flowers.”
“Who was the other one? The other suicide?”
“Really?”
“Really.”
“The wife of the First Presbyterian minister overdosed on a cocktail of prescription drugs. Helen Mayse. Three months ago. That’s all you’re getting out of me tonight.”
“Helen?” I sat up. “I think Caroline was talking about her today. I think she’s the woman who died and left a spot open in that stupid club. Caroline didn’t give any hint of a suicide.”
“You saw Caroline again today?” He gave me an odd look. “You didn’t mention it.”
“It was just a quick glass of iced tea with a few women at her house.”
Mike shrugged. “Suicide still carries a stigma. People won’t talk about it.” He banged me on the head with the folder. “Come on, honey. This is just your run-of-the-mill small-town stuff. Relax. I’m glad you’re getting to know people.”
Caroline’s macabre performance this afternoon was stuck like a clot of bread in my throat. It was just as much a lie because I held it in, an excruciating lesson I had learned over time. This lie of omission was already casually walking over to the little nest inside I’d made for the others.
The baby was operating the dimmer switch for my brain. My eyes drooped.
“I hear you.” I fluffed up my pillow and laid down again. “Bunnies and flowers.”
Eleven hours later.
My name, “Emily Page,” stood out in bold type on the printed label.
The package was thin and brown, stamped crookedly several times in red ink with PRIVATE. No stamps. No return address.
The package, propped up against the doorframe, had grazed my feet as soon as I stepped onto the side porch to water a dying pot of impatiens. A familiar flutter of fear, but I pushed it away. She’d never hand-delivered anything before. She was old. Far away.
She could have hired someone. You don’t really think she’s going to kill you herself, do you?
I headed back inside to the kitchen and snatched a paring knife out of the wood block on the counter.
The package was thin enough to be empty, but I knew better. I slid the knife under the flap and reached my hand down deep, pulling out a sealed legal-sized envelope. Blank. White. No writing. I dropped the knife and slit the envelope open with my nail. I unfolded the single piece of paper inside. Surely it was a leftover form from our real estate agent we still needed to sign.
It wasn’t anything nearly so simple.
The type blurred in my shaking hands, but a cop’s wife instantly recognizes a police report. I caught a name, and a terrible verb.
I could see Pierce’s face in my mind. Hear his voice. Lie still.
I smoothed it out on the kitchen table. I’d never seen this-didn’t even know it existed-but Officer Marilyn Hinks got all the basic details right. Thirteen years ago, a sophomore female, Emily Waters, entered the Windsor University campus police office at 3:13 a.m. to report a rape.