A Grown-Up Kind of Pretty (9 page)

He answered, Nah, out in front with others.

That got my attention. Others?

Dood, 1/2 of Immita is in your front yard.

The chief was talking to Big now, pointing this way and that, from the wil ow’s remains to the truck to the box, so I slipped inside the house. I hurried through the kitchen to our den. I jumped up on Big’s saggy sofa, and my feet sank up to the ankles into the cushions.

I lifted one of the blind slats an inch so I could peek through on the sly, and al my breath came whooshing out of me. More than twenty people were standing in clots of three and four on our personal grass, whispering and shrugging and watching our closed front door like any second they expected Oprah to pop out and make concerned eyebrows and narrate.

Most were from our neighborhood—some Perkinses and Places and Baxters, al the Daughtrys, and even Emily Beaumont with her brand-new baby in a strol er. They must have seen both of Immita’s cop cars parked in front of our house and come down to eyebal us. But I also saw Margee Beechum, who used to work with Big, and the Beechums lived al the way over past Chester Street. I blinked, unsure how the news could have gotten so far already.

That’s when I saw Mrs. Lynch’s skinny-skank daughter, Olive, wearing a jean skirt cut off so short that if she sat down, I’d have been able to read it was Thursday off her days-of-the-week panties. She was stomping it out from one group to another like a rexed-up Bond girl, face lit up in a vile grin. No doubt she was spil ing those make-believe gory details I’d heard Mrs. Lynch saying into her cel , about how I’d hid a pregnancy and the bones were my secret murdered baby. And why not? I was Liza’s daughter, just like Liza was Big’s. A baby at fifteen was practical y my destiny. I felt my stomach seizing up, heating and curling, going harder and smal er like a Shrinky Dink.

I forced my gaze away from Olive and saw we’d even attracted some of the Duckins family: two skinny young-man Duckins with only one shirt between ’em and a haggedy old-woman Duckins, who peeked out like some kind of wild animal between the curtains of her long fuzzy hair. A whole slew of them lived outside Immita on a big piece of trailer-dotted land everyone cal ed Ducktown, and they were al cousins and brothers and aunts with one another so many times over that it was hard to tel who was exactly related and how. Growing up, I’d had six or so in school right around my grade, but I was a sophomore now, and only one was left. Either the rest had failed so many times I’d left them behind by middle school or they had plain dropped out.

OMG I spy Duckins!!!!11111one!!eleventy, I texted to Roger.

He texted back, IKR How did they hear?

I had no idea. It must have been drums or some kind of disaster osmosis, because their phones and power were always getting shut off for not paying and they were so clannish that no one I knew even had a Duckins’s number.

I texted, They smel ed our blood in the water?

Next a yeti wil come then, Roger shot back.

But it was weirder than a Yeti. It was an ice-white Mercedes convertible, and the top was down, so I could see Claire Richardson with a silk scarf over her white-blond pouf of hair. I would have known it was her with the top up; there was only one car like that in Immita. Roger cal ed the whole family the Rich-as-shits, but everyone knew it was
her
family money; her creeper husband was the footbal coach at Pearl River High, and on that money he couldn’t even pay her shoe bil . They had three boys, and two of them had gone to Pearl River to play for him. Everyone cal ed him Coach and made a big deal because we won al the time, even though we were division two and footbal is stupid anyway.

They had another boy who had asthma and a huge brain, so he went to Calvary. He was a junior the year I was there, so Mrs. Richardson had been around a lot, running boosters and the science fair. Every time she saw me, she looked at me with her thin, pale lip curled up like she was smel ing poo. She’d always made it a point to come over to me to say hel o, but not to be nice. It was so she could lean in too close, sniff-checking my breath for booze and peering real y hard at my pupils. Liza said it was because she’d been tight with Mrs. Richardson’s oldest daughter, Melissa, back in the day, and Mrs. Richardson stil part-blamed my mom for getting Melissa into drugs and al the bad stuff that happened with Melissa later.

The Mercedes slowed to a turtle creep, and for a second I thought she might actual y stop and get out, let her pink-frosted toenails touch Slocumb soil, but a state highway patrol car turned on our street and came along behind her. Mrs. Richardson sped up and cruised on by. I guess three cop cars was one too tacky for her.

I dropped the blind slat into place and turned around and sat on the sofa back. I couldn’t stand to see who would come gawk at us next. My phone vibrated again, Roger texting, Starving. Pls put in a fridge. Also a toilet.

He wasn’t the only one wanting a safe place to take a pee. I had one more pee stick in my backpack, and I would so literal y have kil ed for three minutes alone in a gas-station ladies’ room watching the white window stay blank and pure and tel me this was going to somehow, somehow be okay.

I texted back, O wah, suckitup. U have that Coke bottle. Boys can P anyplace.

Just then I heard Chief Warfield’s voice, coming from the kitchen. Big answered him. I couldn’t make out the words, but it sounded like they were heading my way. I knew that Big would crap if she caught me standing on the cushions—
My furniture is not a jungle gym, Mosey
—but I paused. If they saw me, they would only send me away. I was flat done trying to pinch Liza awake and getting shushed by Big before I could even ask a question. I stuffed my phone in my hip pocket and clambered over the back of the sofa. I lay across it, then tipped and slid down the wal and landed behind it. There was a narrow crack of space there, just big enough for me to lie sideways with my nose smel ing under-the-sofa dust bunnies and my butt pressed hard against the wal .

As the swinging door opened, Chief Warfield was saying, “…lived in this house how long? Thirty years, about?”

“A little less. Since Liza was a baby,” Big said.

He said, “That bone doc out there guesstimates the box has been down there more than ten years and less than twenty-five. So you would have had the house then.”

There was silence, and it stretched and kept right on stretching. I found myself smiling, proud. Big and me, we watch a lot of
The Closer
and
Law

& Order
reruns, and she knew he was fishing. She wasn’t going to say an answer until he asked a question.

So he did. “You have any idea who buried that box in your yard?”

“No,” Big said. She sounded near.

“No?” he said back, fast. “It’s your yard. You must have a thought on the topic.”

Big landed on the sofa right in front of my face. It creaked as she settled. “The yard wasn’t fenced when I got the house, and we didn’t have the patio. It was al woods. Anyone could have come up through the trees.”

I breathed through my mouth, trying to be super quiet.

“When did you fence it?”

“Soon after Mosey and Liza came home. So maybe ten or twelve years ago?”

She wasn’t giving him a thing he didn’t ask for. After another waiting pause, he said, “Why?”

Right then stupid Roger texted me. My butt was pressed hard into the wal , and the vibration made a little buzz of sound against it. I sucked in my stomach and tried to press my hips forward. There was a pause, and then Big cleared her throat in this careful way that usual y meant I was about to get grounded. Al she said, though, was, “Liza started working with the dog rescue, fostering. She needed a fenced yard.”

“So you don’t know anything about the remains?” Warfield asked.

Big answered, calm and sure, “I told you, no.”

I blinked. I never thought she would tel him what my mom had said, about it being her baby, but I also never had a clue that Big was such a super liar.

Warfield said, “Al right, then. I need a minute now to talk to Mosey.”

My heart stuttered. When I try to lie, I can feel my eyes opening too wide, and my mouth goes funny. Big busts me out every time. But I would have to lie, and at least as good as Big. Right now my mom didn’t have enough consonants to defend herself if Chief Warfield took it in his head that she’d snuck-pregnanted a baby and somehow hurt it. That was so unpossible, though. I knew it wasn’t true al through my whole body before my head even realized that the police or even Big might think it. My mom would never, and that was al .

But Chief Warfield didn’t know Liza like I did. To him she was some ex-druggie bartender with a crazy, made-up religion. He hadn’t seen her spend months slow-coaxing brokenhearted dogs back to trust, some of them so cagey and bad-habited that anyone else would have put them to sleep. He didn’t know that if a person had hurt Liza’s little helpless baby, we would have dug up that person’s bones from under the wil ow, too, and most of them would have been busted.

Big wasn’t having it anyway. “You leave that child be. Mosey’s home from school il today, and she does not need any kind of stress while trying to fight off a flu.” She knew I was skipping and not any kind of sick, but she’d already told such a pile of big fat lies that I guess she felt she might as wel be damned for a hundred as for one. “And what can she tel you anyway? If that box is at least ten years old, Mosey would have been a kindergartner at most when it was buried.”

“Al righty. It can wait. I’l go ahead and talk to Liza, then.”

Big snorted. “I wish you luck with that.”

He said, “Tyler says she seems to understand most of what people say?”

Big said, “Seems to, yeah. But it doesn’t mean that she can answer you. She’l say yes or no if you ask her whether she wants to watch TV. She can point to the kind of fruit juice she wants.”

Warfield said, “Stil .”

“Fine. You’l have to come back, though. She was so upset over her wil ow, and she hasn’t got a lot of reserves these days. She’s sleeping hard.”

I heard Chief Warfield stand up, and he said, “Al righty. When?”

There was a thinking pause, and I guess Big didn’t see a way to stop him.

“I’m free most evenings,” Big said. “Cal first.”

His voice was going away, like he was walking back toward the kitchen as he said, “Let the ME through when he comes.”

I heard the swinging door swoosh open and closed. A bare second after it stopped swinging, Big said, “Mosey,” so soft that it was plain she knew I was there somewhere. I poked my head up over the sofa behind her.

“Big,” I said, and she jumped and craned herself around to look at me.

“I thought you were in the foyer,” she said. That’s what she cal ed the teeny cube of hal way that hooked so people at the front door couldn’t see right into our den.

I said, real quiet, because I didn’t want her to shush me again, “When did Liza have another baby?”

Big looked genuinely surprised, and then she said, “Do what, now?”

I scrambled back over the sofa and hopped down and sat in the chair closest to her. The second I did, the phone in my pocket vibrated; Roger was sending another text, silent this time, because my butt was pressing on a cop-warmed cushion instead of a wal .

I said, “She said those bones were her baby. You heard her.”

Big shook her head. Her eyebrows came together, and she said, “Mosey, honey, I know she was saying something, but I’m not sure you understood her right.”

I shook my head. “I understood her fine. You did, too.”

Big said, “Okay. But, Mosey, I would have known if she’d ever had another baby. She didn’t. You know her brain is very, very hurt. My best guess is, somewhere in her memories she knows something about whose baby that is. You know how your mother is about strays. Maybe she helped some girl along the way, some girl whose baby died, who didn’t have anyone.” Big seemed so sure and calm, and I could total y see my mom helping out some runaway. She had a thing for strays that would surely stretch to a sad, lost stranger girl whose baby’d died. I felt the weirdest feeling of unpinching then. It was like I’d had a hundred awful crab claws clutched onto my spine without me knowing, and al at once a good half of them had let me go.

I said, “Did you know our whole front yard is ful of rubberneckers? Not like just our neighbors, but Olive and some others who live al the way across town.”

“Good Lord, how did they— Oh. Mrs. Lynch.” I nodded, and Big turned to look toward the bedrooms, where Mrs. Lynch was pretending to watch my mother while burning through her phone minutes. Big turned back to me and blew exhausted air out her nose. “Okay, Mosey. I am going to go sweetly as I can tel Mrs. Lynch everything I know so she is at least spreading the truth. Then I am sending her right home, and I’l tel her daughter and any other yahoos on our lawn to move it on along. Don’t fret.”

She went down the hal to talk to Mrs. Lynch, and I got up, too, and went to the kitchen, needing to move. On the way I checked my phone and saw I had two more texts from Roger.

The first one said, Time for Occam’s razor.

I felt my heart speed up a bump as the swinging door flapped like a wing behind me. I sat down in one of the kitchen chairs and braced my elbows on the table. Occam was one of Roger’s heroes, although who beyond Roger has a medieval friar as a hero, I do not know. Occam’s razor was a theory that said to find the simplest explanation, because it is almost always true.

His next text said, If the baby is yer moms, but she was only pregnant once, what’s the simplest explanation? I knew he wouldn’t be asking me Occam-style if he hadn’t already applied it and had what he thought was the answer. The way Roger liked to use the razor was to cal his explanation for anything the simplest and insist that Occam proved he was right.

I chewed my lip, thinking, and then, final y, I got it. I texted back, Holy shit!

He texted, I no rite? So who are you, then?

I thumbed in, A twin? I’m a twin and she buried another twin.

I waited. After a minute he texted, Secret dead twin is not simple, U tard. Stil , I could kinda see it. Somehow my twin wasn’t alive, and my mom maybe had crazy-bad postpartum and buried him in the yard and then grabbed me and took off hitchhiking to not think about him al dead and buried there. Stil , Roger wasn’t texting anything, and that sounded more
Days of Our Lives
than simple. Anyway, there was a picture of my sonogram on the mantel, and I sure looked to be floating around al by myself in there.