Between them, they’d lain down for five abortions, seven plastic surgeries, and two arrests for public intoxication (literally, the cop had ordered them flat on the ground). They always voted a straight Republican ticket-except for Obama, because they both had always wanted to “do a black man.” The person they liked least in Clairmont was, not surprisingly, Letty Dunn, crossed out with the pen in a blink of sobriety (but not well enough to keep me from figuring it out) and replaced with “the pharmacist at Walmart because he won’t refill our Ambien without calling Dr. Gretch.”
I wondered whether the pharmacist they complained about was the one Tiffany mentioned was her husband. And whether that would aid or hinder her efforts to get in. I was beginning to understand the entanglements of small-town society. Take a step and your high heel was stuck in somebody’s net.
Jenny and Mary Ann shelled out their secrets for bonus points, leaving little need for Caroline to fill out the space she’d left for her own personal critique. What else was there to say? Caroline admitted both of them as members on the same day six years ago, maybe because Jenny’s husband ran a local branch of Bank of the West and Mary Ann’s owned half of Grandes Cielos, a popular upscale restaurant and shopping development at the east edge of Clairmont. I think that because those were the only facts highlighted, presumably by Caroline, in fluorescent yellow. I absently bit into the half an egg salad sandwich that Maria had wrapped up for me.
The only things that Caroline did personally note about the two women, scribbled and dated after a monthly meeting several years later, were that Mary Ann’s in heat all over town and Jenny’s breasts looked as hard as rocks tonight. I couldn’t see either of these women, who thrived on self-imposed drama, as interested enough in anything but themselves to be involved in Caroline’s disappearance. What was their motive? These two weren’t hiding a thing.
I’d avoided Letty’s file, intimidated by its thickness. A headache ebbed and flowed and the baby kicked, suggesting that I needed to get out of this cramped space. I tackled the cookie. Delicious.
Maybe one more file. Misty’s appeared to be a fast read. Thin. Probably a single page.
A tiny moth of paper fluttered out, onto the floor of the passenger seat. I bent down to pick it up. I felt like a rope was being pulled tight against my stomach.
Caroline’s pretty handwriting was upside down. I righted it.
A stranger is someone you know.
I turned the piece of paper over. A single word, scribbled in pencil.
A question really.
Alice???
An hour later, I swung open the door of Copy Boy.
I didn’t want anyone in Clairmont to see what I was doing, so my iPhone led me here, to a low-end, family-owned Kinkos competitor in a town fifteen miles away. Seven former customers had posted online that the service sucked.
For ten minutes, the high school kid behind the counter lazily watched me struggle to figure out an off-brand Japanese copier the size of a small Toyota. The machine was loaded with enough buttons to fire a cruise missile. Actually, there were probably fewer buttons involved in firing a cruise missile.
“I just want to make a fucking copy! Where the fuck’s the button that says ‘make a fucking copy’?” I didn’t normally cuss at high school boys-I’m a good Catholic girl who normally doesn’t cuss out loud at all-but the hormones were coursing and I was furiously tugging on a Yankees sweatshirt even though it was 102 outside. Retail air-conditioning in Texas summer is like a brisk fall day in Manhattan.
Copy Boy sighed heavily. New Yorkers aimed the F word like a Smith & Wesson into city streets and cafés, at perfect strangers, over the mildest of infractions, and the rubber bullets bounced right off. Here in Clairmont, it occurred to me that I hadn’t heard the word in polite company, only on HBO.
He strolled over, hit the “reset” button several times, thrust his hand out for the first stack of papers without looking at me or them, slapped them into the correct slot, punched four more buttons, and we watched them happily collate.
In the kind of voice reserved for small children, Copy Boy explained how to repeat those steps for the next batch of papers. He stood a foot from me at all times, like he feared I might bite. Actually, I might. After a paper jam and brief battle with the credit card scanner, I was good to go.
The edges of the other files stuck out of my purse. Tempting. Was it more illegal to copy other people’s files? I glanced over at Copy Boy, all plugged up with his iPod, head down, and thumbs moving like the legs of a speeding roach across his phone. He would be a terrible witness in court.
I reached over to my purse, opened another file, slid the papers in place, and pressed “collate.”
“I didn’t do it.”
I laid the police reports that Mike tossed in my face the night before neatly onto the shining glass surface of his desk.
I had driven directly to his office from the copying store. I gave him no warning. Angie, the temp secretary that Mike said was living a second life as a dancer in a cage at Cowboys Stadium, cheerfully waved me into his office “as a surprise.” She scored the best flat-abs-to-big-boobs ratio I’d ever seen. Mike had conveniently left that part out.
Mike glared at me, then took a tense stroll over to shut the door. I glanced around the room, the first office he’d ever occupied that didn’t roll on wheels and come fully loaded with a trunk of armor.
The interior designer had opted for saccharine. Creamy walls. Wedding-cake crown molding tacked into every nook and cranny possible. Forgettable modern paintings with bright slashes of color. Two floor-to-ceiling windows overlooked a bare, plant-free courtyard open to the blazing sun. I wandered over to look out. A dead vine drizzled over a gazebo. Four iron benches at the corners, probably heated to 150 degrees, waited to grill somebody’s rear end. Designed, I guessed, by a non-Texan.
“I can’t hear the screams of the prisoners,” I said. The architect of this three-year-old building had stuck the booking area and soundproof holding cells in the basement. Mike found this an oddly primitive concept. He’d joked about people disappearing off the Clairmont streets, never to be seen again.
He pressed an intercom button on his phone and spoke roughly. “Hold my calls, please.”
“Just like in the movies.” I was trying for a way in.
I dropped into a hard upright, green-striped upholstered chair in the corner and couldn’t help but think how good he looked in blue.
“Can I be Katharine Hepburn?”
“You think this is funny?”
Just like that, he turned me on, and not in a good way.
“No, Mike.” My words were taut with anger. “I do not think this is funny. I think it is shocking that you think that I could kill a man and then hide it from you for our whole marriage.”
Mike’s eyes bored into me, disbelieving.
“How can you possibly put this on me?”
The words were in there, ready to go. About how I tried to confess everything to Mike the night before our wedding and give him the chance to opt out. How he had deserved to know what he was getting into. How I stopped myself from telling him on a blanket in Central Park and after I met his mother and on the night we wrote our wedding vows.
“I don’t think you killed a man, Emily. Christ, you can’t even watch CSI reruns without changing the channel. What I think is that you will never, ever tell me the complete truth about yourself. I think we’re done with the surprises and then Whoops, look out, here comes another kick to the nuts.”