I Love You More: A Novel (33 page)

“Wow,” he said. “We got them then, right?” We were at Cooper’s Alleys having a beer. It was packed, the tourist season was back in full swing, so finding two seats together had taken some maneuvering.

“Maybe,” I said. “The note didn’t say who she was meeting.”

“So what do we do now? Bring them all in?”

“If you wouldn’t mind, I’d rather ease into this. Verify I’m absolutely right before we do anything.”

“What’re you thinking?”

“Asking the kid. It’s obvious she knows something. I’m just not sure how much.”

“How do you know she’ll tell you?”

“She trusts me.” Saying those words made my stomach hurt.

I’d decided to stay away from Hollyville for a while. I needed some distance to get my thoughts in order. I even quit calling Diana; thinking about her sitting there waiting for my call somehow made me feel less like a cop who broke protocol and more like a man who was in control. But after several days, I was not only itching to call, I realized Diana hadn’t called me, and any notions I’d had of taking control of myself and my relationship with Diana slipped away.

“Mama’s been sick all week,” Picasso said when she answered the phone.

“Did she go to the doctor?” I asked.

“He said the flu is going around. He told her to get plenty of rest and drink a lot of water. I said she should call again, but she won’t. I don’t know what to do. I’m really worried.”

I immediately got in the car and drove.

I used the spare key Diana had given me to let myself in. She looked like shit. She hadn’t showered in days. Her skin was gray, hair matted. She was burning up. I carried her to my car and drove to the emergency room. I thought I’d known that I loved Diana Lane, but that day as I waited for the doctor to come out and give me the prognosis, I realized I’d break if something ever happened to her. When I was finally allowed to see her, she was sleeping and hooked to an IV.

“She’ll rally,” the doctor said. “But it’s a good thing you brought her in when you did. Pneumonia isn’t anything to play around with.”

I cashed in on some unused vacation time, stayed with her those nights in the hospital, took care of her when she got released. Other than my daily trips to the grocery or drugstore, and walking Picasso to and from school, I was by Diana’s side.

One night, I decided to head out to the back porch and have
a drink; I hadn’t touched the juice since some time during my stuck phase. One became several. At some point, I closed my eyes. My parade of words got longer and longer, and then it went crazy. Instead of streaming, it spun through my mind, creating layers and layers of concentric rings, each new one closing in on me, until I was inside a swirling mathematical vortex, the words adding and subtracting—guilty/not guilty, prison/acquittal, murderer/innocent—until only two remained.

Rendezvous, Picasso
.

It was about a month before Mama’s, Jewels’s, and Bert’s reunion, and a few months after the Ryan Anderson walking Lucy Baxter home incident. Long enough for Lucy and me to have become best friends (as it turned out we were the only two Aquarians in our grade and we smart innovators needed to stick together so we could cause world change); for the two of us to have done some major Get Back at Ryan Anderson pranks, like puncture the tires on his bike and glue the pages of his math book together; for Ryan to have gotten a new girlfriend, Kelly Morgan of all people; and for Detective Kennedy to have temporarily moved into our house.

Mama had gotten sick with pneumonia and Detective Kennedy came to take care of her. I’d forgotten how much I missed having a daddy; it was like being part of a family again, an even better family. Detective Kennedy walked me to and from school every day, did things he said he would, seemed really interested in everything I had to say, and knew as much or more than Daddy about pretty much everything, including Pablo Picasso. He took me to a traveling retrospective exhibit at the Mint Museum of Art in Charlotte and, so I could remember what I’d seen, bought me an expensive book about the artist. Now, we’d studied Pablo Picasso in school, so I didn’t need the book or the exhibit to tell
me that he and another artist named Georges Braque created cubism, but seeing so many of his paintings, especially the cubist ones, in person did help me to understand what Pablo Picasso had meant by that quote:
Art is a lie that makes us realize truth
. There were all those angles put together in the shape of a woman (for instance), and although anyone could see it wasn’t a woman, the paint and the brushstrokes and the colors and the composition made it something even better. The lie made the truth prettier. As I’ve come to learn through this whole Daddy dying experience, sometimes people prefer a lie to the truth. But the thing is, if you aren’t careful, that can get you in trouble.

Detective Kennedy is a good example of this. He knew all along that Mama, Jewels, and Bert knew one another before Daddy died, and he suspected them of killing Daddy, and yet because he liked Mama so much, from the very beginning when he first walked into the beach house that day, he chose not to see the truth. But the biggest irony of the whole Kill Daddy mess was when I realized
I
had actually become a victim of my own name. Because Detective Kennedy had been being so nice to Mama and me, I chose not to see that he was a detective.

It happened on the way home from school one day. Detective Kennedy suggested we stop off at Dairy Queen. He ordered for us: a chocolate cone for him and a vanilla for me. I’m not too big on cones, but at least he’d remembered the vanilla part. He suggested we eat at one of the picnic tables outside, which was fine by me. The table was right out front between the Dairy Queen and the road, so everyone in the world could see us. I felt proud and safe.

As usual, I was wearing my school uniform. Detective Kennedy almost always wore a suit when he was being in his official capacity, but since he’d been staying at our house he was dressing more casually. That day, he wore jeans, a
pink
polo shirt (which looked pretty nice on him, but still surprised me), and running shoes. He didn’t look anything like a detective, but people were staring
and whispering anyway. Ever since Mama and he began holding hands in public, the rumors had started up all over again. I guess that goes to show that there’s no such thing as a dead rumor; at best rumors hibernate. None of this penetrated my Super Picasso armor. Lucy Baxter and I just ignored them. That was the difference between her and Kelly Morgan; Lucy was loyal.

Detective Kennedy licked a drip of chocolate ice cream off his hand. “Sure gets hot here early, don’t you think? It’s not even officially summer yet.” He didn’t seem to want me to answer his question. Detective Kennedy was big into rhetorical questions. We both licked for a while and then he dropped the first bomb.

“Bet your mama is excited about her reunion with Jewels and Bert.”

The safe feeling scurried away as fast as a cockroach. I stopped licking and practically dropped my cone. All I said was “Reunion?”

“Yeah, you know,” he said. “When people get back together again after a long time apart.” Did he think I was two years old? I knew what
reunion
meant.

So there I was, cornered, like a bug by a cat. Should I act dumb? Should I ask who Jewels and Bert were? Should I tell him they weren’t planning a reunion, at least that I knew about? But if I did that, it would be like admitting that Mama knew Jewels and Bert. I decided not to say anything, which I guess was kind of like acting dumb. That worked for about five seconds.

“Rainy Cove Park, right?” he asked.

And right then and there it was like the road and the ground shook and the Dairy Queen and the picnic tables and the utility poles and the cars driving by started crashing and breaking and collapsing into a big black hole while I just stood there watching. And I remembered the sad expression on Detective Kennedy’s face when he was looking at Mama’s catchall book, and the fear I’d felt then, and how I’d pushed it away because lying to myself was easier than believing what I knew to be true, that Detective
Kennedy
had
seen that note about Rainy Cove Park that Mama wrote in the margin, just like I’d seen it that day when I tried to tell Mama I knew what the three of them were planning.

As if the first bomb hadn’t caused enough chaos, he dropped a second.

“Did your mama tell you we found the gun?”

Found the gun?

I started sweating, and not because it was hot out. My heart was obviously pumping so much blood to the rest of my body that it was boiling my skin. Detective Kennedy was staring at me. I wondered if he’d watched Mama’s face when he told her about finding the gun like he was watching mine.

I shook my head no.

“That makes sense,” he said. “She’s probably protecting you.”

“From what?” I asked.

“Well, you know, uncomfortable information. Some kid, about your age in fact, found it washed up on the sand about a mile from the beach house. We didn’t connect it to your daddy’s murder right away, but when we ran the ballistics—” He stopped. “You probably don’t know what ballistics means, do you?”

Seriously? Of course I knew what ballistics meant, and not from one of my dictionaries. I watched TV, didn’t I?

“No,” I said.

“Well, it means we had the gun studied to see if its bullets matched any recent shootings on Cooper’s Island. Took us a while because we only went back a few months at first, and then Mack, Detective Jones I mean, thought we should check back further, so we were able to match them to the ones that killed your daddy. But that still didn’t necessarily mean it was the same gun. Lots of guns use the same bullets. Then we ran the serial number. Did you know your daddy had a gun, Picasso?”

“No, sir.” I could feel my face getting red, and then my eyes got so wet I couldn’t see through them.

“I’m sorry, sweetie,” Detective Kennedy said, but I barely heard him because I’d started crying.

I couldn’t believe it. I’m not even sure what started it. And when I say crying, I mean tears were running out of my eyes so fast they were falling off my chin before I even had a chance to wipe them away with my sleeve. I was really embarrassed, but as it turned out it was a good thing because Detective Kennedy got all concerned.

“I didn’t mean to upset you,” he said in a very soft and soothing voice. “You’re so smart that I keep forgetting you’re only a kid.”

He came around to my side of the picnic table like he was going to put his arms around me or something, but there was no way I was getting hugged. Besides, my ice-cream cone, not to mention my hand and part of my arm, was a gloppy mess by then. I stepped over the bench, walked to the trash can, and threw what was left of my cone away. Luckily I remembered there was one of those napkin holders on the metal shelf by the Dairy Queen’s outside window, so I grabbed a bunch and started wiping the sticky cream off me. I remember I rubbed for a long time. I think I was trying to figure out what to do or say next. I didn’t understand why Detective Kennedy was telling me all that stuff. I guess it could’ve all been innocent, like maybe he was just filling me in, which would be pretty cool, because that would mean he really did think I was smart and that he wasn’t just saying so, but then I started thinking that maybe none of it had been true, that he’d just been pretending to be Mama’s boyfriend, and maybe just like Ryan Anderson and Daddy, he had done it all for selfish reasons, in this case so he could catch Daddy’s killer, which under different circumstances would be a good thing, but in this circumstance definitely wasn’t, and so maybe I should just raise my head high and stomp, stomp, stomp away from Detective Kennedy and keep stomping until I got home, and then never ever talk to him again. I was so confused I couldn’t tell the difference between whether
I just
wanted to believe
that Detective Kennedy had good intentions, or whether deep down I knew that what I felt was true: that Detective Kennedy
was
different, that he really did love Mama and me, and that he would never intentionally hurt us.

Then I realized none of my thoughts even mattered. What had happened, happened. Daddy was dead, and the police had the gun that shot him. Which meant if this whole story were a painting, the painting would suck. I hadn’t lived up to my name. Instead of making things prettier, everything, all the rumors, all the lies, all the deception, was its ugly self. And maybe because at that moment I felt like my heart was breaking into a million pieces and that it would never ever grow back together again, and my stomach was churning so bad I thought I might throw up, I asked Detective Kennedy the question I most wanted an answer to, but had always been afraid to ask, at least out loud.

“Is Mama going to—?”

Before I could get the last word out, I started to sob.