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“Are you deluded? Mom, there is nothing Americans love more than murder. Your story is all over the news! People are already trying to dig up information about you and your family! Harper told me she’s even heard your name mentioned on a podcast!” Diane snapped.
“Podcasts. . . those are like radio shows, right?” I asked. “A couple of them have already contacted me via my lawyer, asking for interviews.”
“What did you say?” Rose asked. I shrugged and turned to Harper.
“What do you think? Should Grandma do the podcasts?”
Harper nodded at me. “Yeah, you should go onMy Favorite Murder; that’s the best one,” she said. Diane’s eyes bulged.
“And I’ll have to pick one, will I? A favorite murder?” I asked.
“No, it’s just a name,” Harper said. “Why?” she asked, eyes lighting up with curiosity. “Do you have one?”
“Of course,” I said. “Isn’t that inevitable?”
“Look at what you’ve done!” Diane cried, collapsing onto the bed. I frowned at the way the springs squeaked. I am very particular about mattresses. I never let the children jump on them when they were kids. “Harper is going to be permanently scarred by all this!”
“I think it’s kind of cool actually. My grandma is a famous murderer!” Harper said brightly. We all frowned at her. Even I felt a bit strange about that one and I loved the little weirdo.
“Harper, go wait in the lobby,” Diane ordered, thrusting her lean, gym-toned arm at the door. Harper frowned and skulked off, hunching over her Harry Potter book so that no one could see her preteen body. When she was gone, Rose sat next to Diane on the bed. It always shocked me to realize that they were in their sixties, as if my brain was stuck in the time when they were little girls, and I was in my thirties.
“Why did you do it, Mom?” Diane asked quietly. I was surprised by the question. The twins had always been incurious, willing to accept anything so long as they got their ice creams and sparkly dresses. I could have shot someone right in front of them and all they would have asked was if you could get bloodstains out of silk.
“Well, it’s complicated,” I began, thinking about how to explain how few options I’d had, how many people had hurt me. But Diane cut me off.
“Why did you have to confess? Fine, you did some terrible things. But nobody knew! You’re like a minute from death; you could have taken this to the grave and saved us the embarrassment!”
“Yes, I could have,” I said with a nod. “But sometimes you just want to make somethinghappen.”
“Well, now I have to ask. Did you kill our father? The police said you confessed to killing people in different states. Was New York one of them?” Rose asked.
“Do you really want to know?” I replied. “Or do you just want to wait for the podcast?”
Chapter Two
It was around that time that I decided to actually do a podcast. Nobody read books anymore. Even when I was born, folks were worrying that the radio would kill reading. Now, people wanted everything in a sentence or less or their minds started wandering. Besides, I was ninety years old; I wanted my story to come outnow. I could have done a documentary or a TV interview, but podcasts seemed to be the new thing. And Harper loved them, so that sealed the deal.
Choosing the podcast, however, would be a tough decision. I had been contacted by a handful of people through Arthur Tisdale, who had disapprovingly passed on the messages (lawyers never approved of interviews), and so, on Tuesday, I sat down and called each of them back. It had been less than a week since I had killed Warren, less than a week since I’d done the most radical thing I could think of: confess. And already life was getting interesting again.
The first was a woman called Holly Blue, although I suspect that if I checked her birth certificate, I would find something blander.
“I do a podcast calledBadass Women, and I would love to do a whole season devoted to you. My last season was on Heidi Fleiss, a woman who ran an upscale prostitution ring in Hollywood. I also did a season on Bonnie Parker, you know from Bonnie and Clyde?”
“Tell me, what exactly is your definition of badass? Is it a good thing? Because you seem to be mostly focusing on whores and killers,” I said, squinting in confusion.
“A badass woman is independent. She knows what she wants out of life and isn’t afraid to get it. She often goes against what society expects of her, whether that’s in how she dresses or who she sleeps with. You may not like her, but you have to respect her,” Holly replied. She recited her spiel in a sing-song way, as if she’d memorized it.
“So, it’s okay for women to murder people to get what they want?” I asked.
“Well, maybe not murder,” Holly backtracked. “But you know. . . if she wants to wear revealing clothes or sleep with a lot of guys, no one should judge her for that. Or if she wants to have adventures, or become an outlaw, that’s cool.”
I hung up, already bored of this woman’s ramblings.
The next people I talked to, a trio named Andy, Tobin, and Greg, immediately turned me off by telling me they did “comedy true crime” and that they were “stand-up comedians” as well as podcasters.
“Yeah, so we tell crime stories, but we improvise and riff along the way. Some people can’t handle it, because we’re not afraid to get a little offensive, but most of our listeners fucking love us,” Andy bragged. He seemed like a boy who communicated mostly through high fives.
“What kind of jokes would you be making about me?” I asked. There was a pause as they considered this. If they had been smart, they would have soft pedaled it, tried to get me on board. But then again, if they had any sense, they would have become stockbrokers, not comedians.