I nodded without looking and breathed in deep from my toes. The air was suddenly infused with the smell of pineapple. Letty was digging a finger into a small pot designed in the shape of a coconut and animatedly smearing on lip gloss. This did not slow her down from talking in the slightest. “They won’t release her body until after the autopsy. She was naked. Did you know that? Somebody carved her up like a turkey. It makes me scared to go out and scared to stay in. Ever since she went missing, I’ve had my son Reggie’s baseball bat at the door and this gun in my purse at all times.”
She smacked her lips together and pulled out a pearl-handled revolver that looked like a kid’s toy gun just as we hit the highway. Suddenly the passenger-side window was wide open, bringing in a rush of traffic noise and damp, polluted wind. I hardly had time to wonder what the hell was happening when Letty took direct aim at a 70-mile-an-hour speed limit sign closing in on us. I heard a light pop.
“Right in the middle of the zero, going 65,” she said with satisfaction, drawing the gun back in. “The sign says 70. You can speed up a little. I certainly haven’t lost my touch since Daddy trained me on that little.22. If you don’t believe me, turn the car around and see the dent for yourself. Like a bullet through the heart.”
“No, that’s OK. I believe you. Impressive. That’s good, you’re putting the gun away.”
It calmed my nerves to say that out loud, while inside I raged at myself for putting my unborn baby in the car with this lunatic. I’d consider myself safer with a killer who cut up people like they were Thanksgiving dinner than with this 250-pound, unpredictable housewife/former beauty queen on a boiled egg and nitrates diet. Unless they were one and the same person.
I trained my eyes on the taillights in front of me.
Only twenty more miles. Tub. Bubbles. Laser beams.
“Did I scare you, honey?” Letty asked. “You look kind of green. Pull over up here at the Braum’s. Now that the rain’s stopped pissin’, I can take the wheel. Maybe we could drive through for a scoop of peanut butter pretzel. It’s amazing what can make you feel better. Four or five of those Little Debbie cakes always do the trick. I store up on the heart-shaped vanilla Valentine ones. I think they taste better than the Christmas trees or the Easter ones even though they are supposed to be exactly the same thing, just cut in different shapes. I don’t think it would hurt too much if I ate a few of those tonight. I bet all this grief is burning extra calories.”
My hands clenched the wheel tighter. “I’m fine, Letty. No problem driving.” And no way in hell am I letting you take the wheel.
Letty contemplated my rigid profile while I frantically punched radio buttons to break the tension or whatever it was now lodged between us. Maybe I shouldn’t worry. Maybe this was a perfectly normal one-on-one atmosphere with Letty Dunn.
“How about a little music to relax us?” I asked. “Or NPR?”
Letty slapped my hand away.
“Honey, let me do that. I only listen to country.” For the next fifteen minutes, Letty ignored me and sang along squeakily about how her give-a-damn was busted and how tequila makes her clothes fall off and how she’d happily pack a lunch and stuff Earl in the trunk ’cause Earl had to die. She nearly busted my eardrums with the chorus, “I’d like to check you for ticks.”
My give-a-damn was temporarily busted, too. Country music was making sense. Just screw and drink and shoot if necessary. It was a life philosophy that the very poor and the very rich had in common.
“Sorry,” she said, during a commercial. “I’m musical. Singing was my pageant talent. Now people can mostly hear me at First Baptist. You should come the next time I do ‘He Touched Me.’ I’ve saved a few souls for Jesus with that one. They stream down the aisles. The preacher likes to keep me in his pocket for revival time.”
“Uh-huh.” I turned onto the exit ramp for Clairmont.
Three more minutes and I’d be off this roller coaster. I probably wasn’t going to die today at the hands of Letty Dunn.
I braked the Escalade sharply at my front curb, and exhaled.
“Thank you.” Two soft words, intended for a higher power than Letty.
“You owe me one.” Letty unbuckled her seatbelt.
“Yes, I certainly do.” I cleared my throat. “Letty, will you please do me a favor and not mention this to Mike? You know, about picking me up? The car stalling at the airport? I don’t want him to worry about any of it. With the Caroline stuff going on.”
Letty narrowed her eyes at me. This Phi Beta Kappa pageant queen was nobody’s fool.
“Honey, I won’t tell Mike if you don’t tell Harry. He thinks I’m at Pilates. Like I’m going to do that liberal shit.” She grinned. “Now you owe me two.”
When she lurched over to embrace me, I had a fuzzy thought that she might be about to stick a knife in my ribs.
The next morning, wrapped in a robe, wet hair in a towel turban, my mind briefly, pleasantly repressing everything, I found the letter in the stack of yesterday’s mail on the side table by the door. Mike must have dropped it there.
Stamped, no return address, careful print lettering in blue ink, every sentence on a single line, like a free-verse poem.
Dear Ms. Emily:
I am taking your husband’s advice.
We are leaving town to stay safe.
Those women are bitches.
The man you heard that day is helping me.
He turned out not so bad.
I read Ms. Caroline’s diaries from when she was little.
I do not hate her anymore.
I understand.
My niece is writing this.
I did not find my file.
If you do, please burn it.
God forgive me for my sins.
Dios bendiga a su nino,
Maria
Dios bendiga a su nino.
I plugged the words into my iPhone app translator.
God bless your little boy.
Who was Maria’s man? And what did she understand about Caroline after reading those diaries? Did they point to her killer? Was Maria hinting that I should tell Mike to forget the files and read the diaries?
Caroline’s killer had cut her up, buried her in the backyard, and topped off her grave with a sarcastic makeshift cross like a decoration on a Halloween cupcake. For the last hour, I’d been trying to forget, to reacquaint myself with routine things: the cantankerous hot-cold shower, a cup of loose-leaf Fruta Bomba tea, the daisy wallpaper that now seemed comforting enough to leave stuck to the kitchen walls until the end of time.
But the carefully constructed dam I’d built in my head was bursting, flooding my head with horrible images. I considered Caroline’s last unspeakable hours aboveground, really considered them, for the first time. Her lovely, fine-boned face twisted in pain. Her honeyed voice begging for mercy as the knife slid deeper into her like she was a stick of butter. I thought about how much I’d complicated things by digging into my past. If it was simple, like Mike said. If her killer was my stalker. If my past had nothing to do with all of this. The baby rolled over restlessly.
The other piece of paper I held in my hand was a note from Mike, left on his pillow, asking me to meet him for lunch. He signed it, Love, Mike XXX. Always three X’s for some reason, no more, no less, no O’s to water it down.
A versatile letter, the X.
Kisses.
Multiplication. The Roman numeral ten. The twenty-fourth letter in the modern Latin alphabet. The unknown African tribe Malcolm X descended from. The signature of an illiterate human being.