Page 19

CHAPTER 18

August 19 th

9:40 PM

T HE UNANSWERED QUESTIONS buzz through my head, loud and hideous like June bugs. Why won’t Harmony tell the police where the car is? Does she know where it is at all? Who was the first to suspect that my mother was missing? How long did they take to report her absence to the police? And where, where, where are the shoes? I can’t get them out of my mind. A dozen cops combed the woods for hours, but somehow the shoes eluded them.

Killers like to keep trophies—locks of hair, severed body parts, mouthfuls of teeth. A pair of cheap shoes wouldn’t be the sexiest souvenir, lower risk but also lower reward, but it might scratch the same itch.

When I tell Sara we need to search my father’s liquor store, a devilish smile splits across her face. She grabs her keys from the coffee table, swings open the front door, and gestures grandly to the threshold. “After you, my lady.”

So here we are, parked in the parking lot of the abandoned post office, steeling ourselves for the crime we are about to commit—or, more accurately, I am steeling myself. Sara jitters with anticipation like a prize racehorse at the starting gate. She assures me we have nothing to worry about: this is Annesville, after all. The liquor stores here get broken into every other week.

“There’s witnesses everywhere,” I say. Lining the sidewalks are the local drunks, the homeless people with nowhere else to go.

“I have cash. We give them twenty bucks, they won’t say shit—and besides, do you really think they want the cops to show up?”

“Fuck, this was a bad idea.”

To my surprise, Sara nods. “I haven’t felt this much adrenaline since the last time I stole a car. I forgot how addictive it is.”

I committed a crime of passion, but Sara committed crimes of adrenaline— crimes , plural, because she had stolen more than a dozen cars before she was finally caught. She targeted junkers and jalopies, cars that wouldn’t exceed the value threshold for her crime to escalate from a misdemeanor to a felony. The first time she fucked up was her first time stealing a car on the Nebraska side of the state line. Dirty and beat-up on the outside, nothing to write home about, the Volvo boasted thousands of dollars in custom engine modifications. The owner used it to street race down in Scottsbluff. Class IIA felony, same as me. Our sentences were identical.

Hot air billows through the car when she opens her door. Unlike the last few nights, there has been no relief from the heat after sunset today. I steal the claw clip from Sara’s cupholder and twist my hair into a pathetic excuse for a bun to keep it off my damp neck.

“And you’re sure we can just waltz right in? The door won’t be locked?”

“I know where he keeps the spare key,” I say as we start walking.

“That was years ago.”

“He hasn’t moved his recliner since then. I can’t imagine he’d move the spare key.”

Most of the men (all of them are men—not a single woman among them) on the sidewalk ignore us or nod politely when we pass. They slump against the cinderblock wall in sweat-soaked shirts, beer cans and whiskey handles at their sides, passing the hours with games of cards, dice, and dominoes. The only man who bothers us is squat and curly-haired, holding a cloudy-eyed chihuahua in his arms. He thinks his vulgar comments about my body will shock me, but they won’t. I’ve heard them all before.

On his wrist is a tattoo of five dots. I gesture to it. “How long were you away?”

“A nickel,” he says. Five years.

“Me too,” I reply.

“Yeah? What for?”

“Aggravated assault.”

I lift the hem of my shirt just enough to show him my quincunx tattoo, tucked beneath my ribs, right where you might try to shank me. Four dots to signify the prison walls, a single dot in the middle to represent the prisoner. Kiera’s offered to cover it for years, but I’m too fond of it. Baby’s first ink. I traded a whole book of stamps for it.

A tenuous understanding emerges between me and the man with the chihuahua: we are part of the same terrible club. He spits into the gutter and staggers toward the men playing dice. The dog yips at me and Sara or, more likely, at nothing at all, just the void of its blind eyes.

We round the corner and slip into the narrow, lightless alleyway between the liquor stores and the auto repair shop’s junkyard. There is someone snoring in a sleeping bag and someone masturbating furiously near the dumpsters, but otherwise, we’re alone. I grab the metal rod leaned up against the wall, which is just long enough to extend above the awning over my father’s door. I flail blindly for a while before I hear metal grating against metal, then yank the pole back toward me. The keys fall into the weeds without a sound.

I was with my father one day, maybe eleven or twelve years old, when he retrieved his spare keys from atop the awning. I can’t remember why I tagged along with him to the liquor store that day. He pressed a finger over his lips and shh ’d me as he poked around the awning with the metal rod, and the gesture filled me with treacherous warmth because it was the first time my father had asked me to keep a secret that didn’t involve hurting me. By then I was old enough that my fear of him was beginning to calcify to hatred, but not old enough to resist my biological hardwiring. Part of me still remained hungry for him to love me in the innocent, wholesome way other fathers loved their daughters.

“It’s the opposite of hiding the keys under the doormat, butterfly,” he said when he finally got the keys. “Out of sight, out of mind.”

“You really can’t teach an old dog new tricks,” Sara says as I ease the key into the lock. I expected it to resist, as if it could somehow sense that I was an intruder, but the door glides on its hinges like they’re buttered. We steal into the storeroom, nothing but boxes of liquor and old paperwork piled high on the wobbly desk shoved against the wall. A box fan hums in the corner. “I wish we could burn this fucking place down,” she says.

“I am not going away for arson.”

“Let me dream, okay?” she whispers. “What are we looking for?”

“I’ll know it when I see it.”

“Explain for those of us who won’t know it when they see it.”

“Her shoes, her jewelry, anything that looks like it belonged to her. Some piece of her that he has no business having.” I let out a heavy sigh. “Sara, I know you said his alibi is solid, but I need to make sure it isn’t him.”

“I’ll take the storeroom if you want the register.”

She wants the storeroom so she can rummage through my father’s paperwork, but I don’t force the issue. We keep the lights off to maintain what little secrecy we have; the slivers of moonlight lancing between the blinds will have to be enough.

It resembles every other liquor store I’ve been in, snack aisles in the middle and liquor aisles on the fringes, tiny shot-sized bottles of liquor filling the endcaps. I consider drinking one but think better of it when I remember Sara is only ten feet away. Cigarettes are locked up behind the cabinet (locked in the most literal sense of the word, with a heavy chain and padlock strung around the glass cabinet). Between shelving units drilled into the walls are glossy posters of women in bikinis eating burgers, women in bikinis posing on monster trucks, and women in bikinis with crisp American flags cloaking their shoulders. The posters make me queasier than the mothball-mixed-with-piss odor in the air.

The cash register is locked, but every other drawer is ripe for the picking. I comb through colorful lotto scratchers and crumpled receipts, old to-do lists and fast food burger wrappers. Two bullet casings rattle around the bottommost drawer, but I don’t let myself get excited by the discovery. My mother wasn’t shot. Some other poor bastard was. Mitesh Jadhav.

In the end, I find nothing to connect my father to my mother. I find something much worse instead.

Hidden in the shadows behind the cash register, thumbtacked beneath a calendar of swimsuit models, are three pictures I’ve never seen before. Left to right: me, Harmony, Grace. We’re all frozen at sixteen or seventeen, not quite girls and not quite women, posed in front of the gnarled oak tree in the backyard. The hemlines of our dresses ride high. Our dark hair waterfalls over our shoulders in tight, springy curls. It would be less violating to be one of the women in the calendar.

The memory bubbles to the surface, my hair sizzling as my mother wraps it around her curling iron. The pink babydoll dress I’ve been instructed to wear belonged to my mother once upon a time. It was designed for a narrow, lean body. With my curves, it looks obscene. My mother pauses after every lock of hair to sip her drink and swallows her ice cubes whole. “Just a few pictures,” she says. “It’ll make your father happy. It’ll be over like that.” She punctuates her sentence with a snap and a smile.

A fourth picture has fallen to the floor. My mother. My mother at sixteen, wearing the same pink dress, smoothing the fabric over her modest baby bump. Radiant and sun-soaked, she smiles at her unborn baby. She vows that they will share a lifetime of unquenchable love, but this promise, like all her promises, is too easily broken. There will be gin bottles strewn throughout the house, blankets stained by bodily fluids, doorless bedrooms, and broken cheekbones. There will be a car pitched into reverse on a tepid March morning before church. There will never, ever be enough love.

My father may not have been the one to end my mother’s life, but he killed her all the same. The happy girl in this photo died a long time ago.

It is not sadness that envelopes me then but rage. The emotions are more alike than you think, sharp at their edges and black at their cores. The difference lies in how long you can tolerate them. Sadness will live inside of you forever, but rage demands to be acted upon to its fullest, most terrifying extent.

Our search, just like every search for my mother’s body, yields no helpful clues. We’ve come full circle.

Once we’re back on the reservation, I ask Sara to make a pit stop at her brother’s trailer.

“Please don’t tell me you and him are buddy-buddy now,” she grumbles as we turn off the main road. We jostle violently over a pothole. “That would put me in a coma.”

“I’m thinking maybe he can tell me something I don’t know yet. He’s the closest thing I have to a friend in law enforcement.”

Five minutes later, we pull up to his trailer. I’m relieved to see the front porch empty and curious how I failed to notice the snowflake-shaped Christmas lights strung along the eaves last time I was here. Sara starts to get out of the car with me, but I shake my head. “I want to go alone,” I tell her, “in case I need to charm him.”

“For my sake, don’t elaborate.”

I’m perfectly happy to let her believe I’m talking about flirtation instead of blackmail. I promise to be back in a few minutes and jog to Daniel’s front door.

He answers the door with that same WORLD’S BEST DAD mug in hand, which he hurriedly sets on the end table. “Most people call before showing up at someone’s house.” Then more quietly, a plea, “My daughter is here, Providence.”

“I can hear you talking about me.”

Defeated, Daniel invites me inside. The trailer screams bachelor pad with its movie posters on the walls (he is apparently the world’s biggest fan of No Country for Old Men, with not one, not two, but three iterations of Javier Bardem staring blankly across the living room) and cheap, mismatched furniture.

A teenage girl with fuchsia-streaked hair paints her nails on the couch. She is thin and ungainly, her limbs stretched like taffy. She blows on her nails before toggling her fingers at me in a bashful wave.

“Scarlett, this is Aunt Sara’s friend, Providence. Providence, this is my daughter Scarlett.”

Scarlett’s smile reveals two rows of fluorescent orange braces. “I really like your name.”

“I like yours too.”

“My dad doesn’t like it,” she says. “Apparently my mom went rogue when she filled out the birth certificate. They were supposed to name me Lauren.”

“We’re divorced,” Daniel explains.

I have to get this conversation back on the rails. I’m dangerously close to getting the entire verbal family tree. “It’s nice to get to know you better, but I need to talk to you alone. It’s about my mother.”

Daniel motions for me to follow him down the hallway. I boil with jealousy at the wholesome pictures on his walls: him cradling Scarlett as a baby, him with Scarlett on his shoulders in front of the elephant exhibit at a zoo, him holding Scarlett’s tiny hand as she’s dressed in a bumblebee costume for Halloween.

I hesitate infinitesimally at the threshold of his bedroom but step forward anyway. Involuntary response. My brain can’t help but short-circuit at a man inviting me into his bedroom, unable to interpret it as anything other than a fly hurtling toward a spider’s web. The air in here is antiseptic with alcohol. Coffee mugs everywhere. The bed is unmade.

“I want to see the files you have on my mom.”

“Sheriff Eastman is—”

I interrupt him with a sharp shake of my head. “I know you must have something. Please, Daniel.”

“I can’t share confidential documents with you just because you’re my sister’s friend.”

“Please don’t force my hand.”

“Providence, I don’t know what you think—”

I tap my nails on the handle of an abandoned mug. “I think you went to rehab once upon a time, which means you’re not just having a few drinks on the down-low. You’re an alcoholic. I think your sister would never recover if I told her you were drinking again. I think …” The next hit is below the belt, so cruel I almost let my sentence fizzle without launching this final barb, but I came here on a mission. I refuse to be derailed by imprudent pangs of sympathy. “I think you have a daughter you should consider. Scarlett must remember you going to rehab. I bet it’d crush her to see you do it again.”

His face remains steady, handsome features turned to stone, but his eyes betray the fury churning beneath his stoic surface. “Fuck you.”

“Don’t play chicken with me, Daniel. You’ll lose every single time.”

“You want the files?” He yanks the drawer of his nightstand so hard that the handle pops off. He keeps the handle squeezed tight in his fist, knuckles whitening, veins in his forearms bulging obscenely. “Here. You can have them if it means I never have to see your face again.”

The fat manila folder thrust into my arms is bound shut with rubber bands: BYRD, E.—HOMICIDE (COPIES) . I look at the treasure trove in my hands and swallow my budding guilt. I have the vague sense that my mother would be disappointed in me for doing this.

“And Providence? Don’t you dare say my daughter’s name again.”

The documents cover my air mattress. Copies of everything. Copies of interview transcripts, copies of handwritten notes, copies of every report from every database my mother was entered into, copies of pictures taken throughout the years, copies of the medical examiner’s report, copies of copies of copies clipped together like a Russian nesting doll. Once I start, I cannot stop.

I find the original missing report. It was logged by a deputy whose name I don’t recognize, but his signature is alongside Josiah’s at the bottom of the paper. It reveals nothing new. My mother was last seen leaving Bible study. She arrived on foot. She was wearing a long blue dress with white polka dots, white kitten heels with a plastic ribbon on the toes, and a rose gold crucifix. All of this I already know, but the three lines concluding the report, thoughtless data entry to the deputy who typed this up, send a chill down my spine.

LAST KNOWN CONTACT: THURSDAY, AUGUST 6TH, APPROX. 7:30PM

REPORT ENTERED: AUGUST 7TH, 5:48PM

REPORTING PARTY: GRACE BYRD

Grace.