“I didn’t have a clue, Jesse. I swear to God,” Steve said. “I mean, who understands teenage girls? Was she moody sometimes? Sure she was. Could she be a pain? Yeah. But I couldn’t have asked for a better child.”
Jesse turned to the wife. “That the way you saw it, Patti? You were a teenage girl once.”
“Once,” she said, “a million years ago, before everyone had a cell phone. Before social media. Before...” Her voice drifted off. “It’s hard being a teenage girl, even a pretty one.”
“I heard Heather hurt her back during a routine at the Holiday Show. Did she see a doctor for treatment?”
“First we took her to Doc Goldfine,” Steve said. “He’d taken care of her since she was born.”
“Then he recommended we take her to a spine and back specialist, Dr. Nour at the hospital.”
“And?”
Steve Mackey raised his palms to the ceiling and shrugged. “Patti took her and dealt with it.”
“She did an MRI and found a few compressed vertebrae. She prescribed rest, massage, PT, and gave her something for the pain. Motrin, I think. Eight weeks later she was back at it, dancing, cheerleading, all as if she hadn’t been hurt in the first place.”
Jesse said, “I know Doc Goldfine, but could you give me a number for Dr. Nour?”
It went on like that for fifteen or twenty minutes. Everything according to Steve and Patti was fine up until the moment Patti found Heather unresponsive in her bed. Jesse thanked them and gave them the usual line about calling if there was anything else they could remember or if something had slipped their minds. But just as he was about to leave, he stopped.
“Did Heather ever mention a boy named Chris Grimm?”
Steve Mackey’s face was blank. It was clear to Jesse he had never heard the name before. “No, sorry. Should I know him?”
“Not necessarily,” Jesse said. “Patti?”
“No.”
Jesse knew she was lying. He also knew this wasn’t the time for accusations or to bring up the things Megan, Darby, and Richie had said about Heather stealing from them. He shook Steve Mackey’s hand, hugged Patti, and left, once again saying how sorry he was.
At the door of his Explorer he looked over the roof toward the Mackeys’ house and wondered again if Heather’s death would bind Steve and Patti together or blow them apart.
Twenty-four
She paced along the worn-out rug of the motel room, tried ignoring the cloying odors of pine-scented ammonia and sex that seemed to seep out of the mattress and the harvest-gold quilt. She managed to deal with the odors, but what she couldn’t deal with were the mirrors — the cheap imitation Deco mirrors on the walls and the heart-shaped mirror above the bed. She couldn’t deal with the mirrors because, for the time being, hers was the only image reflected in them. And she was disgusted by what she saw and what she was about to do.
Oh, she had seduced men and women before. She had no issue with seduction, per se. She liked it, was good at it, and up until she seduced Chris Grimm, she enjoyed her conquests. Before she got hooked, sex was sometimes the only thing that helped her get through the day. Now only one thing really mattered in her life. It was what she woke up yearning for, spent her days fantasizing about, and went to bed dreaming of. A little green pill. Sex was now a distant afterthought. She still kind of enjoyed it, but only once she was sure she knew where her next high was coming from.
The thing was, what she had done with Chris, and what she was about to do, was like shooting fish in a barrel. But she was already in too deep to complain about the dirt in the pool she was swimming in. She needed those pills and, as she had proven yesterday with Mr. Sarkassian, she was willing to do just about anything to make sure she wouldn’t get cut off. She remembered what her uncle Ted used to say about people. “You take food, electricity, and warmth away from folks for two days and the façade of civilization and morality is quickly stripped away.”
Oxy, too, Uncle Ted, she thought. She supposed her sense of right and wrong had gone out the window that first time she was gripped by fear and desperation at the thought of not being able to dose herself. At that moment she knew she would do anything. Forget just fucking for it, or seducing a teenage boy. She knew that she would kill for it if she had to. And that realization shook her to her core. She also knew what would be waiting for her at the end of the road without her connection to Arakel. What waited for all opioid addicts when there were no more doctors willing to write prescriptions because of back pain, or knee pain, or... When the pills ran out, there was heroin. That was a step she never wanted to take.
She considered herself lucky that the last doctor she tried to con into giving her pills saw potential in her and introduced her to Sarkassian. He kept her in pills and, to her shame, she was willing to do whatever he asked to stay in his good graces.
There was a knock on the door. Now she used the mirror, trying not to look too carefully into her own eyes. She took a deep breath, loosened the knot of her blue satin robe, making sure her cleavage showed. She strode to the door, opened it, smiled a crooked come-and-get-it smile at the girl standing in the doorway.
“Come on in, Petra,” she said. “I’ve been waiting.”
Petra was the “everybody’s friend” girl in school. The heavyset girl with the lovely skin and the pretty face who lacked confidence and was always willing to melt into the scenery. Maybe she would have matured beyond that in college and blossomed into a more secure and confident woman. But since she had slipped and broken her femur last fall, she had become a prisoner of those same little green pills. Petra stepped in, closing the door behind her. She started to say something about how she had never done anything like this and how she had been desperate to try and...
“Shhh!” The older woman placed her index finger across Petra’s lips, placed a few strands of long black hair behind the girl’s ear. Then she leaned over and pressed her mouth against the girl’s.
Petra was shaking but soon gave in to the moment, opened her mouth, and let herself be kissed deeply. She kissed back. The woman let her robe fall to the floor.
An hour later, Petra lay with her head against the woman’s left breast, tucked under her arm. And as insecure teenagers are prone to do, she asked if she was any good at it and wondered if she had been pleasing. The older woman tilted Petra’s head back and kissed her.
“You were wonderful.”
Petra smiled so earnestly that the older woman almost threw the girl out. In the end, though, she didn’t. She couldn’t, and continued holding the girl as if this was the first step in a long, true romance. Looking up into the ridiculous heart-shaped mirror, she was horrified at the level to which she had sunk. But as she felt the hunger beginning to gnaw at her, she pushed ahead with the reason any of this had come to pass.
The woman straddled the girl, stroking her hair, kissing her softly on the lips.
“Petra, I need you to do something for me,” she said, cooing.
“Anything. God, anything for you.”
There they were, the magic words — Anything for you. Chris had said the same.
“Would you like to be with me again, Petra?”
The girl tensed, fearing her dreams would collapse like all of her other dreams of the girls and boys she had wanted to be with. She fought back tears.
“Yes, more than anything. Please don’t hurt me.”
The woman lied. “Never, baby. Never.” She stroked Petra’s face, stopped, and reached under the bed. When she came back up, she held a vial of pills in her hand. “These are for you.” She gave the vial to Petra. The girl’s eyes lit up. “And you’ll never have to worry about getting them or having me ever again. There’s a new locker number. I’ve written it down for you. The combination will be the same. Do you understand?”