Dear Daughter (13 page)

The door to the bar flew open and a drunk couple staggered out, holding on to each other to keep from falling over. We watched them shuffle down the street until they vanished into the darkness.

“So why are you really here?” Leo asked.

“How many times am I going to have to answer that question?”

“Yeah, well, if I remember correctly, you originally said you were on your way to Montana.”

“I don’t exactly give my number out to men I’ve just met. I’m not that kind of girl.”

“Hm.” He took another drag. “I guess we’ll see about that, won’t we?” He smiled, and in the warm glow of the cigarette he wasn’t half as ugly as I’d thought he was.

Something flared behind my ribs.

I wasn’t really surprised.

Like most affectations, my dismal taste in men has become a habit. The last guy I slept with was this dude Kristof (you didn’t think I’d actually have sex with that gross Grant guy, did you?), and his name alone probably tells you all you need to know. I remember Kristof as being literally from Transylvania, but of course I don’t actually remember for sure. He was certainly from somewhere in Eastern Europe. Slovenia, maybe? Slovakia? Some country whose language gave the court interpreters major trouble, anyway.

Kristof had been in L.A. for a year or so when I saw him for the first time, cutting a line of coke in a club on Melrose like he was Michelangelo with a cube of baby laxative–laced Carrara. When Kristof wasn’t pursuing me he was pursuing some career I never bothered asking about—modeling, probably, because he was almost too pretty: finely boned and smooth-cheeked, with a soft, labial mouth. A cherub who’d discovered Pilates and porn. Had I been twelve years old I would have believed him to be the most exquisite thing I’d ever seen. At seventeen, though, I knew him to be uncanny, and even as I finally let him at my dress and my neck and my thighs, I wondered if kissing him would be like kissing a carcass or kissing an alien. I already knew it wouldn’t be like kissing a man.

Not that I particularly cared.

It was Kristof I was with the night of the murder—I met him just after I’d stolen my mom’s boots, an hour or so before I left for Ainsley’s party. We’d arranged to meet in the billiard room, which my mother had meticulously designed to evoke a sense of Old World grandeur, a time when men were men and women were chattel. There was wood paneling and framed portraits and expensive brandy, a walk-in humidor and a twelve-gauge Winchester on the wall. (Not that I need to remind you of that.) It smelled of leather and lemon Pledge.

I don’t think my mother could possibly have spent more time decorating any other room in the house, and yet it was far and away the room she frequented least. Which made it the room I frequented most.

When Kristof arrived I offered him a drink, a cursory nod to something like respectability, but he took the glass from my hand before I could fill it. Moments later I was busy dealing with the flurry of his advance. I can report that in the end he was more alien than carcass, which is to say that it could have been worse. I was mildly diverted, anyway. Enough so that by the time I registered the sound of footsteps in the hallway, we’d already been walked in on.

There were four of them standing in the doorway—all men, presumably guests looking to enjoy a cigar—and when none of them apologized for the intrusion, something uneasy slithered through me. When Kristof swore at them in whatever it was language he spoke, three of them scuttled off, but the fourth lingered in the doorway. I hooked one leg around Kristof’s hip for balance and reached over for the shotgun—my mother always kept it loaded. I hefted it to my shoulder and leveled it at the intruder’s face. He stared at me for a long moment before stepping back and letting the door swing closed. I didn’t lower the gun until I was sure he was gone.

Then I hiked up my skirt and let Kristof fuck me against the Louis XV credenza.

There are those for whom recklessness is a state of abandon. Of thoughtlessness. Of a conscious decision to ignore repercussions and eventualities. And I bet it’s liberating for them, like spinning in circles and falling to the ground. But that’s not me. My recklessness was a demonstration of restraint. I spun in circles to prove I could walk a straight line after.

Kristof talked enough during that he never noticed I didn’t talk at all, and though I shuddered when his fingers brushed my bare skin, like all the men before he mistook distaste for desire. A few minutes later he threw back his head and bleated a series of meaningless adverbs while I thought about all the things you can make another person’s body do.

< Messages
    Noah    
Contact

Monday 9:34 PM

Are you there?

Monday 9:47 PM

Answer me please.

I need to talk to you. It’s important.

Monday 10:04 PM

Jane. I know why you said what you said. I don’t care.

Don’t worry this isn’t some fucking love letter.

Monday 10:13 PM

Goddammit write back.

Monday 10:37 PM

WHERE ARE YOU

CHAPTER ELEVEN

I considered Leo. He looked nothing like Kristof except in the way that one bad idea looks like another.

“What?” he asked.

“Take me back to your place.”

He coughed up a cloud of smoke. “You’re unpredictable, I’ll give you that.”

“It’s not like that. I just want to talk,” I said.

“I can’t tell if you’re joking.”

“Not into it? No worries, that’s cool. I’m happy to have a chat with the state police about how I saw you with Master Criminal Walt Freeman this afternoon.”

“Not joking, then.” He ran a hand through his hair, scratching at the nape of his neck. “Serves me right for being a Good Samaritan.”

“I always thought the Good Samaritan was a smug son of a bitch.” I pulled at his arm. “Come on, Officer, let’s go.”

He stubbed out his cigarette. “It’s Chief, actually.”

“Of course it is,” I muttered.

We walked in silence the rest of the way, turning south on Percy then west on First Street, passing another series of bricked- and boarded-up businesses. It wasn’t late, but there wasn’t anyone on the street. There wasn’t anywhere for anyone to go.

He set a brisk pace, and I was out of breath by the time we got to his house, a run-down Italianate chipped in gray and topped by a cupola that tilted left at a seventy-degree angle. A real Boo Radley special. The front yard was fenced in by the kind of brutish chain link you’d expect to see at a junkyard. In the driveway, two rusty motorcycle skeletons were propped up against a cinder-block wall, partially hidden by the white Crown Victoria. When we walked up the front steps we passed a sign with a picture of a Bichon Frise and the words “Shave and a Haircut—Two Biscuits!”

It wasn’t until I absently cataloged the sign as Not Something a Killer Would Have that I realized I’d never stopped to wonder if Leo had been the man I’d heard in my mother’s closet that night.

When he opened the door, I hesitated.

Then a ball of white fluff ran at us, and I forgot to be wary.

Dogs: my other weakness.

Leo bent over and scooped up a puppy that could’ve fit in a Marc Jacobs hobo bag, pinning it under his arm and muzzling it with his free hand. “This is Bones, and, yes, he bites. You two will get along just fine.”

I scratched Bones behind his ears before I could stop myself.

Leo gave me a bemused look and carried the dog into the back of the house, leaving me in the front hall. I heard the rustle of a bag followed by the metallic clatter of kibble being poured into a bowl.

I wandered into the living room. A pair of blue chintz sofas sat on a thick pile rug; the walnut coffee table was stacked high with what appeared to be gardening magazines. A philodendron sat in one corner.

I frowned. A philodendron was
definitely
not something a killer would have. Or a dirty cop, for that matter.

“Are you sure this is your house?” I asked when he returned.

“It’s my parents’ house. They moved about ten years ago to a place Cora’s folks found them in Florida. They love it. My dad found a D&D meet-up and my mom has time for her orchids.”

“Haven’t gotten around to redecorating, huh?”

“I like it like this.”

He crossed his arms, waiting for my next move.

But because suddenly I wasn’t sure what my next move was, I walked over to the fireplace to look at the framed photos on the mantel.

Leo and Kelley as children, splashing in a lake. A man and a woman in formal dress, standing outside a church.

“Your parents?” I asked.

He nodded.

Leo in a soccer uniform, a ball balanced on his toe. Kelley, wearing a tutu and a bored expression.

“Are you going to tell me what you want?” he asked.

“In a minute,” I said, thinking furiously. I’d thought I had Leo’s number, but maybe I didn’t understand him at all. What kind of a person kept so many family photos?

What kind of a person kept
any
family photos?

Leo’s high school graduation. Kelley’s college graduation. Leo’s police academy graduation.
Family trips to San Francisco, Seattle, the Grand Canyon.

I came to the last photograph. It was a group shot, with a dozen or so people standing in a ragged line. Leo looked to be in junior high. Kelley was just a little girl.

“What’s this?” I asked.

Leo came up behind me to get a closer look.

“That’s from the town’s hundredth anniversary,” he said. “There was a whole thing.” He pointed to a blond teenager who had the gaunt look of either a recent growth spurt or not enough food. “See, that’s Eli.”

“Who’s that next to him?”

“His sister.”

“Pretty,” I said.

He made a noise of agreement.

I sucked in a breath and rolled my next question around in my mouth, trying to feel out whether or not it was the right thing to ask.

I asked it anyway:

“What’s her name?”

“Tessa,” he said.

In a show of superhuman restraint, I kept my face from betraying any signs of the firestorm of absolute incomprehension that raged through me.

“You know what?” I said after a long moment. “I changed my mind. My questions can wait.” I took a shaky step back. “But I think I’ll take that cigarette after all.”

•   •   •

I won’t say I ran out of Leo’s house, but I didn’t exactly walk out of it, either. As soon as I turned onto Main Street the wind whipped up, knocking me off balance. It took tremendous effort to keep my feet under me, but I refused to slow down until I spotted a corner I could duck behind. I stopped and put the cigarette Leo’d given me between my lips.

My hands patted down my pockets reflexively, but—
shit
. I didn’t have a lighter. I dug around the bottom of my bag, fingers skidding . . .
Yes!
I pulled out a matchbook, plucked a match, and struck it. A flare of light, a butterfly kiss of heat. I was just about to touch the flame to the cigarette when I saw it.

The cigarette fell from my lips. I didn’t move to catch it.

I’d forgotten about the matchbook.

I was the one who called the cops, you know—after I found my mother. After I found my voice. But I’d had a cigarette first. I’d backed away from the body and the blood and rifled through my things for a light, as frenzied as if it had been 4,147,200 seconds since my last cigarette then, too. Finally I’d found this matchbook. It was nothing fancy. Just the plain white cardboard kind you get at a gas station. The perfect size for a single, bloody thumbprint.

Through the flicker of the flame, I saw my mother’s face as it had been that morning, slack and juicy, a tomato crushed underfoot.

The wind blew again, extinguishing the match. I tossed it to the ground and lit another.

My mother, earlier that same night, plucked and polished and poised, except—was that a spark of anxiety in her eyes?

I lit another.

My mother, when I was very young, her nose still too tipped-up, her lips too thin.

Then I pulled out the photo I’d stolen from Leo—and lit one last match.

I let out a breath. In the picture, Eli’s appearance was so different: His shoulders sagged, and his clothes looked like they’d never wash clean. Tessa wasn’t much better. Her clavicles jutted up beneath her skin. Her hands hung limply at her sides. Her smile was cruel, but she was so young and pretty that had anyone else found the picture they would have been hard-pressed not to smile back.

Not me, though.

Nope.

Because Tessa was my mother.

The match burned down to my fingertips. I didn’t feel a thing.

From the Diary of Tessa Kanty

August 15, 1985

Fuck this place.

CHAPTER TWELVE

When I woke up the next morning—in my room’s impeccably restored claw-foot bathtub—the photo was still clutched in my hand. I peeled my eyes open so I could look at it for the eightieth or so time. Apart from Tessa and Eli, there were four families in the shot: Kelley and Leo’s; Renee’s; Walt’s; Stanton’s. The slim, silver-haired woman with her arm around Leo was his and Kelley’s mother; the round-shouldered man with the sunny smile was their father. The old women whose face was wrinkled through with good humor must have been their grandmother.

Renee and her mother were equally blond, equally hard-edged.

All five members of Walt’s family wore Vikings jerseys.

Stanton’s wife and son looked like they wanted to be absolutely anywhere else in the world.