Page 110 of Pieces of Her (Andrea Oliver 1)

Andy had been telling herself for days that Laura was a criminal. Hearing the theory confirmed was like a punch to her gut.

“I pay to keep that out of the top searches. It’s not cheap, but—” She shrugged, her eyes on Andy again. “You did google me, right? Found my address through the property tax records. Saw my course schedule, read my shitty student reviews?” She was smiling. She seemed to like the effect she was having. “Then, you looked at my CV, and you asked yourself, UC-Berkeley, Stanford, West Connecticut State. Which one of those doesn’t belong? Right?”

Andy could only nod.

Paula started chopping up a potato. “There’s a women’s federal corrections facility near West Conn. Danbury—you probably know it from that TV show. They used to let you do a higher ed program. Not so much anymore. Martha Stewart was a guest, but that was after my two dimes.”

Two dimes?

Paula glanced up at Andy again. “People at the school know. It’s not a secret. But I don’t like to talk about it, either. My revolutionary days are over. Hell, at my age, pretty much most of my life is over.”

Andy looked down at her hands. The fingers felt like cat whiskers. What awful thing did a person have to do to be sentenced to a federal prison for twenty years? Should Laura have been in prison for the same amount of time, only she had stolen a bunch of money, run away, created a new life, while Paula Kunde was counting the days until she was old enough to work in the prison kitchen?

“I should—” Andy’s throat was so tight she could barely draw air. She needed to think about this, but she couldn’t do that in this stuffy kitchen under this woman’s watchful eye. “Leave, I mean. I should—”

“Calm down, Bambi. I didn’t meet your mother in prison, if that’s what you’re freaking out about.” She started on another potato. “Of course, who knows what you’re thinking, because you’re not really asking me any questions.”

Andy swallowed the cotton in her throat. She tried to remember her questions. “How—how do you know her?”

“What’s her name again?”

Andy didn’t understand the rules of this cruel game. “Laura Oliver. Mitchell, I mean. She got married, and now—”

“I know how marriage works.” Paula sliced open a bell pepper. She used the sharp tip of the blade to pick out the seeds. “Ever hear of QuellCorp?”

Andy shook her head, but she answered, “The pharmaceutical company?”

“What’s your life like?”

“My li—”

“Nice schools? Fancy car? Great job? Cute boyfriend who’s gonna do a YouTube video when he proposes to you?”

Andy finally picked up on the hard edge to the woman’s tone. She wasn’t being matter-of-fact anymore. The smile on her face was a sneer.

“Uh—” Andy started to edge toward the door. “I really should—”

“Is she a good mother?”

“Yes.” The answer came easy when Andy didn’t think about it.

“Chaperoned school dances, joined the PTA, took pictures of you at the prom?”

Andy nodded to all of this, because it was true.

“I saw her murdering that kid on the news.” Paula turned her back on Andy as she washed her hands at the sink. “Though they’re saying she’s cleared now. She was trying to save him. Please don’t move.”

Andy stood perfectly still. “I wasn’t—”

“I’m not saying ‘Please don’t move’ to you, kid. ‘Please’ is a patriarchal construct designed to make women apologize for their vaginas.” She wiped her hands on a kitchen towel. “I was talking about what your mother said before she murdered that boy. It’s all over the news.”

Andy looked at the muted television on the wall. The diner video was showing again. Laura was holding up her hands in that strange way, four fingers raised on her left, one on her right, to show Jonah Helsinger how many bullets he had left. The closed captioning scrolled, but Andy was incapable of processing the information.

“The experts have weighed in,” Paula said. “They claim to know what your mother said to Helsinger—Please don’t move, as in Please don’t move or the inside of your throat will splat onto the floor.”

Andy put her hand to her own neck. Her pulse tapped furiously against her fingers. She should be relieved that her mother was in the clear, but every bone in her body was telling her to leave this house. No one knew she was here. Paula could gut her like a pig and no one would be the wiser.

“It’s funny, isn’t it?” Paula leaned her elbows on the counter. She pinned Andy with her one good eye. “Your sweet little ol’ mother kills a kid in cold blood, but walks because she thought to say Please don’t move instead of Hasta la vista. Lucky Laura Oliver.” Paula seemed to roll the phrase around on her tongue. “Did you see the look on her face when she did it? Gal didn’t look bothered to me. Looked like she knew exactly what she was doing, right? And that she was a-okay with it. Just like always.”