Safe from Harm (9781101619629) (19 page)

Annie poured a glass of wine—it being Saturday, she gave herself permission—and walked over to plant a kiss on the top of my head. “You really should read Rebecca's instructions, Bear. Pugs are prone to the pharyngeal gag reflex, also known, descriptively, as a reverse sneeze. It's something to do with their short noses and anything at all can set it off. Excitement, for instance. Dust. Tommy has had plenty of both today. It's absolutely not dangerous and if we did nothing at all, that pug would have been fine. But if you stroke their throats, it helps to calm and relax them and that helps them through the attack. It's all in your info pack, Bear.”

Uh-huh. I don't expect to be studying
info packs
when I have grandkids; I'm
sure
not doing it for pugs.

The doorbell rang, sending the pugs into atonal howls and Jo tearing down the stairs to answer the door. She walked into the kitchen with Alex in tow, holding a ridiculously extravagant bouquet of two dozen roses (yes, I counted them—I wanted to know) ranging from a creamy white to pink, deep rose to burgundy. Jo handed them to her mom to admire and said, “Alex, those are my favorites. How did you know?”

I happen to know that yellow roses are actually Jo's favorites. She was acting shy with me, not sure about her reception. I made sure to give her a squeeze.

While Annie Laurie arranged Jo's roses in a crystal vase, Jo and Alex went to the television room to watch a movie.

“Keep the door open!” I yelled up after her and got snorts in return. Baby Bear is a lousy chaperone. He would never let anyone hurt Jo, but smooching doesn't bother him. It bothers
me
.

Annie Laurie made a tray with a plate of crackers, a block of Monterey Pepper Jack cheese, and two apple juice bottles and took it up to the kids. I told her I wanted to know if that door wasn't full open and Annie Laurie snorted at me, too. The pugs, who had been watching this food preparation with interest, scrambled up after her so they could commence begging.

Thirteen

D
etective Wanderley called around five. He wanted to come over and speak to Jo. I trudged up to the television room, making as much noise as possible, to tell Jo to expect Wanderley in half an hour. Jo and Alex were sitting in front of that ridiculous cartoon with a milk shake and a meatball as main characters. The pugs seemed avidly interested in the cartoon, but Alex and Jo weren't actually watching it; they were engaged in an intense conversation. I didn't like that, but I liked it much better than an intense anything else. Jo jumped up, looking unnecessarily alarmed, but Alex tugged her down and said something soothing, and she relaxed against his shoulder.

“'Kay. Be down soon.”

Annie Laurie put a pitcher of ice water and an assortment of glasses on the family room coffee table, and then made up a tray of tuna salad sandwiches. The pugs, sensing the possibility of another meal, raced down the stairs in a panic that they might miss a morsel. They were lucky not to upend themselves—with those big, heavy heads and those disproportionately small butts, it's a hazard.

I told Annie it wasn't necessary to feed Wanderley, and that I was surprised she would think to, what with Wanderley practically accusing our child of being a member of the Medellin cartel, but Annie murmured, “Coals of fire, Bear, coals of fire,” and added a bowl of potato chips and paper plates and napkins. That made me think we wouldn't be having dinner, we'd be having interrogation tuna, instead. The pugs indicated that tuna was fine with them, and they waited at the coffee table with increasing impatience, Tommy going so far as to stand on his hind legs to scan the table and presumably report his finds back to Mr. Wiggles.

Once Wanderley arrived, he said he wanted to visit with Jo alone, but Annie and I agreed that we weren't having that. First of all, Jo is a minor, and secondly, didn't he see the coffee table spread out with drinks and sandwiches? Maybe he thought that was all for him?

Alex shook hands with Wanderley and then left, his hands buried in his jacket pockets. Wanderley helped himself to sandwich halves like a man who thinks good homemade tuna sandwiches are a dinnertime treat. Tommy and Mr. Wiggles gathered at his ankles and looked at him expectantly. Wanderley, who is clearly made of stern stuff, pretended they weren't there. After swallowing the half a sandwich he had fit into his mouth, Wanderley said to me and Annie Laurie, “What I want tonight are Jo's thoughts and Jo's words. You're going to want to help her out. I'm asking you not to. If you feel like I've asked something inappropriate, you can stop me. But please don't answer for Jo, and please don't interrupt her. Are you both good with that?”

Why Wanderley thought it was necessary to spell that out for us, I don't know. We agreed that Jo could answer for herself, and I broke a sandwich half into two pieces for the pugs in order to purchase thirty seconds of peace. Jo indignantly gave Baby Bear a whole half sandwich for himself and an exasperated Annie removed the sandwich plate to the kitchen. After that, the pugs settled down for a nap, and Wanderley's entire attention was on Jo.

Jo picked up two walnuts from the bowl on the coffee table and rolled them back and forth in her hands. They made a loud, gritty noise and I wished she would stop, it made her look nervous, but I had my instructions from Wanderley so I didn't say a word.

Wanderley got right down to business. “We can't find Phoebe's phone, Jo, we didn't find it here, it's not in her car, or her room. Do you have any idea where it is?”

Jo shook her head.

Wanderley made a
tsch
sound. “I don't like that. I really don't. We'll subpoena the phone company but that's always a battle.” He sighed. “Well, then.”

He took his paper plate to the kitchen to load up on more sandwiches. From the kitchen he said, “It looks like Phoebe died from a drug overdose. Some kind of barbiturate, maybe. We won't know for sure until after the autopsy, but that's what we're guessing.” He came back, his plate piled high. “Any idea where she could have gotten the drugs?” He looked all casual, but he watched Jo carefully.

Jo had no reaction other than to frown. No flush, no trembling, no tears. My girl might be “guilty” of converting to Catholicism, but she wasn't feeling guilty over drugs. My insides relaxed.

“You mean like names? You want me to give you names? Because I don't know,” she said. “I hear things—I might have an idea, but nothing I'm sure enough of to tell you. I don't run with that crowd, and it's not like they put ads in the school newspaper, you know.”

Wanderley nodded and took a bite. “It's just—well, Phoebe hasn't been at Clements long—only a few months, and you're one of her only friends, and—”

“I wasn't her friend.” Jo's frown deepened and then she looked up at Wanderley, eyes wide with surprise, half smiling. “You think she got them from
me
!” She turned to me and her mom to make sure we'd gotten the joke.

Wanderley said nothing. He stood there, studying her. The silence grew. Jo looked around again. Three serious faces looked back at her.

“You really do. You think she got them from me.” She shook her head hard. “I don't do that stuff. I know some dancers do, but not me. It messes with your timing. The girls at the ballet school? The ones who use, they don't use downers, they use uppers—helps them keep the weight off. But it makes them twitchy. Know what I mean?” She mimed a quick spasm.

Wanderley said, “Had you ever seen Phoebe do drugs before last night?”

Another emphatic head shake. “I
didn't
see her doing them last night. And, no. I've never seen her take anything, other than a drink now and then. And she did more talking about drinking than drinking. She didn't smoke. Her mom smoked and she got cancer.”

Wanderley nodded. “Did she talk about drugs?”

“No. Not with me.”

“But with someone else?” He was quick to pounce on the limitations of her answer.

“How would I know if she talked about drugs with someone else? If I was there when she talked about it, then she would have been talking about it with me. Right?” Jo was using her You Big Dummyhead tone of voice, but Wanderley didn't want me to step in so I let him handle the inflection issue.

“So you don't know anything about drugs.”

Jo's eyes got slitty. She paused in the middle of gathering her hair up. “For real? You're asking me that? I go to school at Clements. So yeah, I know something about drugs. But I don't do drugs. I don't sell drugs and I don't know where Phoebe got her drugs.
If
she got her drugs.
If
.” Jo twisted her hair up in a band and bent to pick up a sleeping Mr. Wiggles. She draped the pug over her lap. He didn't wake up.

Wanderley had Jo go through her evening again—she didn't say anything she hadn't said last night. He nodded and acted like he was checking his notes. He wasn't. Then he sprang this:

“Do you know why Phoebe would want to kill herself, Jo?”

“I don't know why
anyone
would want to kill themselves. If you don't want to live, why don't you go to Darfur and try to get some good done before someone else does the job for you? That's suicide by proxy but the good kind.”

That made some sense to me. I made a note to run it by Carol Thompson; she might want to use it with her next suicidal client.

“Really?” Wanderley's unibrow did that up and down thing. “What about a terminal patient, could you understand someone like that killing themselves?”

Jo shook her head hard enough to shake strands of hair loose from the knot on top of her head. “It's not the same. That's not killing yourself. That's, like, speeding death up. If you're going to die anyway, it doesn't count.”

“Hmmmm. Well, everyone's going to die sometime, but people
do
kill themselves. Why do you think they do that?”

Her answer had the relentless simplicity of the young. “Because they're quitters.”

“Really? So you think Phoebe was a quitter?”

“No.”

“No?”

Jo, who had answered the question already, stared back at him.

He said, “You don't think Phoebe was a quitter?”

Jo said nothing at first. I heard one of the walnuts crack. She said, “She wasn't a quitter. She was a fighter.”

“Tell me about that,” said Wanderley.

“You know. All the things that happened to her.”

Wanderley was patient. “No, I don't know. I know her mother died and she went to live in a nice house in a nice neighborhood with her dad and stepmom and two stepbrothers. It's hard to lose your mom, but it sounds like Phoebe landed on her feet. You see it differently?”

Jo held up a finger. “First she had to deal with her mom and dad divorcing. Then”—she held up another finger—“her dad got married like half a second later to that awful stepmother.”

Annie and I both said, “Jo!” and we both got a look from Wanderley. It was Annie's first time having one of Wanderley's glowers aimed at her—
I
get them all the time.

Jo ignored us and held up a third finger. “Three. The awful Liz was pregnant with twins even before she walked down the aisle in a poofy white dress that was designed for the child bride of a shah.” She took in our expressions. “That's how Phoebe described the dress. I mean, she wouldn't have been showing, but that's how I see it.”

Jo coughed and Annie poured ice water into the glass she held out.

“And that's not cool, the being pregnant part. Especially because Phoebe said her dad had like started this whole new life and this whole new family, and he was all like you are so nearly grown up and, oh, you'll understand the new babies neeeeed me so I can't take you to practice or come shopping with you or give you a birthday party or whatever. Only she wasn't completely done being a kid, she still needed her dad, you know? And you can be the prettiest girl on earth, which Phoebe wasn't, and you still aren't going to be as cute as a new puppy and that's pretty much what you're competing with. Phoebe was only . . . give me a sec.” She furtively counted on her fingers. “She would have been like, thirteen, right?”

Wanderley said, “Fourteen. Phoebe was eighteen, Jo. She was going to turn nineteen this coming January.”

“Are you sure? She was just starting her senior year—”

I said, “She missed a lot of school, taking care of her mother. She had to repeat a year.”

“Yeah?” Jo gave that some thought. “Then that was Liz's fault, too. So all of a sudden, she hardly ever sees her dad, and he's all rich now, and about to be a dad all over again, only the whole subtext here is this time he's going to do it right, like that being Phoebe, he really screwed it up with Phoebe, which makes her feel all fine and great, right? She loved her little brothers because she couldn't help herself, but it was kind of hard, seeing the way they were growing up and remembering the way she grew up.”

I said, “Subtext?” and Jo colored and said, “That's what Phoebe called it. I looked it up. I'm using it right, right?” I told her she was, thinking that in a short period of time, Phoebe had left her impression on Jo.

Jo had trouble regaining her story and Wanderley cleared his throat and asked me if I didn't need to go work on my sermon for tomorrow or something. I said I'd be quiet.

Jo tried again. “Well, anyway, so after her dad left, Phoebe and her mom are living in this tatty little trailer in a tatty little trailer park—”

Wanderley frowned, “Really? Your dad told me Liz had bought Phoebe and her mom a new mobile home.”

“She did. It was better than the first one, but it's still a trailer and it's still in a trailer park.”

Waverly said, “Have you been there?”

I don't know how he knew to ask—it hadn't occurred to me.

“Yeah, Green Vista. I went there with her once. It's near Hobby Airport.” Her eyes widened as soon as it was out of her mouth. Jo isn't allowed to take off like that. She can't leave First Colony, our little part of Sugar Land, without permission. Hobby Airport was forty minutes away.

Annie said, “When did you go there, Jo?” Wanderley tried the look again, but Annie ignored him.

Jo pulled free a strand of hair and got very busy checking the tip for split ends. “That time she took us to the movies, me and Alex. That's why we went to the later movie, because she took us the long way. That's how she said it, ‘We'll go the loooong way to the theater.' And it was, too—it took us two hours to get there and back—Phoebe said it was because of the Friday afternoon traffic.”

Annie said, “Why didn't you ask us, Jo?”

It was a dumb question—I agreed with Jo. “Because you would have said no, that's why. And when I told her I couldn't go, Phoebe acted like I thought I was too good to go to a trailer park. She called it ‘slumming.'” Jo looked up at Wanderley. He was closer to her age than he was to mine. Her eyes looked heavy. “I'm sorry she's dead and all that. I wish she were alive and she could get a job and save up and move to New York and have a
life
. But she wasn't a nice person, you know. She did mean things.”

Wanderley had crushed a handful of potato chips in his hand and was feeding broken pieces to the pugs. Baby Bear had tried one and decided that the effort was too much for the tiny reward.

“What kind of mean things?”

She shook her head. “Stuff.”

“Can you tell me about the ‘stuff'?”

No, she couldn't or wouldn't. Jo kept her eyes on the tip of hair she was worrying.

“Go on,” said Wanderley. “Tell me about Green Vista.” He gave me and Annie a look that meant, “No more interruptions!”

“It's not that bad a trailer park. Not that I'd ever been to a trailer park before, but it wasn't what I imagined. It has trees. It's like an itty-bitty town. There's streets and some of the trailers”—she gave a shudder—“you can't believe people live there, but some people build porches on to the trailer and put up bamboo fences so they have some privacy when they're sitting outside and they have outdoor grills and flowers planted and the sides of their yards are picked out with bricks or tires that they painted white. You can tell they've made a real home there. But honestly, her dad is living in this completely posh house that's probably three times as big as ours is and he's driving a sweet car and Phoebe and her mom are living in a trailer that looks like one of Nana's vintage flour canisters. Does that sound right to you?”