Playing Dead (18 page)

The boy looked up from thumbing the phone, ticked off.

“Mommy,” he said, pointing at me, “that lady made me lose my place in Doodle Jump. I died.”

“Shut up, kid,” Jack said to him.

The mother had the grace to look embarrassed. The grandmother smothered a smile.

To me, Jack said, “I don’t know who Tuck’s father was. That’s your brother, the one who died, right?” He paused, sounding … sympathetic. “I had a brother who died. Something else we have in common.”

Before I could respond, the toddler spit out the pacifier with enough velocity that it ricocheted off Jack’s cheek. It took only seconds for the pacifier addict to recognize his terrible mistake in judgment. His wail resounded like a tornado siren.

Jack seemed a little stunned, by both the plastic missile and the decibel level a two-year-old can reach. I got up and retrieved the pacifier from under our table while the mother dug furiously through the sixty-three Velcro pockets of her diaper bag.

“Pacifier wipes,” she muttered. “Where are the pacifier wipes? Oh, here they are.” She pulled out a small plastic tub with antibacterial promises stamped all over it.

Grandma was now on her feet. “Christ almighty, you actually
paid
for those?
This
is how you clean a pacifier.”

She grabbed the pacifier out of my hand, stuck it into her Styrofoam cup of iced tea, gave it a few good swirls, and plopped it in the mouth of the wailing boy.

Then she grabbed the phone out of her other grandson’s hand and said firmly, “Eat your damn taco.”

The kids shut up.

“Grandma should have a reality TV show,” Jack said.

“Smith, focus on me, OK? I want to see those FBI files. And my mother’s. And my brother’s. Uncensored.”

“Impossible. What I got is already censored. Stuff blacked out.”

I reached into my purse and pulled out a key.

“I recently discovered the contents of a safe deposit box in my mother’s name,” I said. “She never told anyone. Not even her lawyer.”

Jack leaned in, practically salivating.

This dance was one I had practiced over and over again with patients. Give some, get some. However, I was reluctantly coming to terms with the fact that Jack Smith was different, like no one I’d ever encountered. A whole new can of beans, Granny would say. My usual tactics weren’t going to work.

“Tit for tat,” I said. “That’s the deal. And I’m not talking about my 34Cs.”

It was my first pitiful attempt at a joke in two weeks.

Inside, I wasn’t laughing.

Something
else
we have in common
, Jack had said about my dead brother.

What the hell did that mean?

C
hristy King was a sixteen-year-old sent to Halo Ranch from the Las Vegas foster care system, a one-time runaway who hyperventilated every time she stuck her foot in the stirrup.

I was suddenly, irrationally consumed with guilt about her.

Had I been kind enough?

Before the state snatched her up, Christy had been beaten by a pimp almost daily for a year. She had arrived at Halo near comatose emotionally. A couple of times at the stables, when I pushed her too hard to get on the horse, she keeled over at my feet.

I think I had been kind. After ten lessons, she was able to saddle up. After eighteen lessons, she sat on the horse. After twenty-five lessons, she walked the horse around the pen with me holding the reins. After thirty lessons, she rode the horse, by herself, fifty yards and back. She never worked up to a trot, but we declared victory.

I must have been kind, because she made progress both in the stable and away from it. She hugged me goodbye on her last day, as a social worker and her new foster family waited awkwardly by a Volvo station wagon. She said that I’d changed her life. That she’d never forget me.

Yes, surely I was kind.

But I didn’t really
understand
. I didn’t have a clue how it felt to have her breath sucked away, her body and brain collaborating in a war against her soul.

The helplessness.

The desire to run.

Not until now.

After lunch, I returned to the house, opened the door to Daddy’s home office, and fired up his copier. In three hours, Jack Smith would be breathing down my neck again.

He promised to meet me back at the ranch with his notes and files on the Marchetti case. I promised to reciprocate with the contents of the safe deposit box.

I didn’t mention to Jack that Lyle would be joining us. Lyle wanted his own copies of the checks and newspaper articles and didn’t mind the drive over to pick them up. Neither of us thought it was a good idea to copy them in the middle of a curious newsroom. And he was eager to get a good look at Jack himself.

As for me, I wanted to spend a little alone time with the newspaper articles before either of them arrived.

I left my MacBook charging on top of the dryer and spread the seven yellowed articles out on Mama’s desk. The late-afternoon sun drifted in like the cone of a spotlight, doing its best to comfort me.

My mother was a fan of riddles. Every kid in elementary school wanted an invitation to our Halloween parties because of the elaborate treasure hunts she devised.

Blood red and dead in a bed
. A clue stuck in the thorns of a withered rosebush.
The only place where death comes before life
. A slip of paper peeking out of the D’s of our ancient Webster’s dictionary.

I pushed away the memories. My clever mother’s mind was
gone, poof, like it had been sucked out by a vacuum cleaner, leaving a few dust bunnies and me struggling to figure out the most difficult riddle of her life.

These newspaper articles meant something important to her, I was sure.

I started with the murdered girl in Oklahoma. It was hard to glean much from the faded picture of Jennifer Coogan, except that she was pretty and wore a crown. The headline was brutal and to the point:
OU STUDENT SHOT, RAPED, AND DUMPED IN LITTLE RIVER
, with an insensitive underline:
Police Say Former Miss National Teenager Runner-up Unrecognizable When Found
.

Twenty-five years ago, on the last night of her life, Jennifer Coogan was nineteen. She had just finished her freshman year at the University of Oklahoma and was waitressing back home in Idabel for the summer, living with her parents. Idabel surely was the safest place in the world for her to be that summer, except it wasn’t. After closing up after a late-night shift at a local restaurant called the Cedar House, she walked to her ’72 baby blue convertible and met the devil that her Baptist preacher ranted about on Sunday mornings.

If I’d learned anything from Grandaddy, it was that small towns were microcosms of big cities. Evil thrived quietly behind the screen doors.

The article was brief and didn’t get into a lot of detail. Nineteen-year-old Jennifer was raped, tortured, shot twice in the back of the head, and tossed into a local river. No suspects yet. The first inexplicable murder in Idabel in forty years. End of story.

I shivered despite the sun’s efforts. Was Anthony Marchetti involved in this? Was that the connection? The murder could be his work, but why would a Chicago mobster care about a young girl in the boonies of Oklahoma?

I moved on, poring over every word of every article with
Mama in mind, trying to find anything that would connect her to the stories or at least something that tied them together. Most had been clipped from unremarkable newspapers from far-ranging cities in Oklahoma, South Dakota, New York. Four out of the seven contained either misspellings or grammatical errors, a sad commentary on the future of the English language and journalism in general.

My favorite wasn’t a story but a captioned picture of an ambulance driver in Boone, North Carolina, with a little gap-toothed girl who held the large bean he’d pulled from her nostril. The EMT looked about eighteen, the kind of skinny, pale kid who sat unnoticed at the back of science class until you needed a pencil and then he’d always loan you one. His sheepish grin lit the photograph with an element of wonder that he’d achieved the kind of hero status where flashbulbs go off.

Wait a minute. Staring at that ambulance driver, I suddenly saw a connection, one that seemed unlikely to be coincidental.

The picture and the six other stories each appeared on an inside page, at the top right or left corner, so every one included a dateline and the name of the newspaper. With the bean hero’s photograph, the clipper had taken extra precautions to include the date and city, making an awkward dogleg with the scissors.

Maybe the
stories
weren’t important. Maybe the
places
and
dates
were. I ran to the kitchen and rummaged through the junk drawer that used to hold our school supplies.

Way at the back, I found what I wanted, an old but extra-large map of the United States, last used for a weekend-killing geography project assigned by Mrs. Stateler, known less affectionately in the halls of Ponder Middle as Mrs. Hate-her.

I grabbed the newspaper articles from the desk, along with a black marker, and spread the map on the kitchen table. I attached a number, 1 through 7, to each of the articles, organizing them
chronologically by date. Then I wrote the corresponding number for each town and city on the map. With an unsteady hand, I drew a crooked line on the map, connecting them.

Could this be the path of a serial killer? If so, why wasn’t every story about a murder? Was it another of Mama’s clues, the answer encrypted in the words? Or in the numbers? I stared at the map, trying different approaches, before total frustration kicked in.

Then I piled the newspaper articles onto the map and carried the whole mess back to the utility room. With random tacks from Mama’s drawer, I stuck the map to the wall above the desk and tacked the newspaper articles near their cities of origin.

I still couldn’t see a pattern.

I turned to my laptop with the idea of researching the newspaper stories further, but the internet refused to connect despite the twenty-year-old technician who assured me this morning that it was up and running like a jackrabbit.

What the hell.

Was someone messing with that, too?

Lyle’s T-shirt read: “My Kid’s an Honor Roll Student at CHHS.”

Lyle didn’t have any kids at CHHS. He didn’t have any kids.

“Jack Smith seems to check out,” he said, without preamble, as
soon as I opened the door. “The switchboard operator at the magazine did direct me to a voicemail box for a Jack Smith. I’d feel better if I’d been able to talk to my friend who works at
Texas Monthly
, but he’s out of town.”