The Decoding of Lana Morris (6 page)

Spink says, “I don’t think the weather chick selection process is brain-based.”

Nobody laughs. Nobody offers another comment, even though this rain seems to have materialized out of nowhere, without even a hint of the usual darkening advance of black clouds. The radio’s off, the windshield wipers click back and forth, back and forth. For K.C.,
Trina, and the others, the drive, the adventure, and the day are over. They’re silent when they turn off the highway, and they’re silent when they pull up in front of Chet’s house. Chet gives the others a quick nod, then throws open the car door and ambles toward his house without any concessions to the downpour whatsoever. Whereas Lana, following him out, slams the car door closed, tucks her box under her arm, lowers her head, and runs for it.

On the porch of her house she shakes herself doglike, then looks around for a rag. She is wiping the wet from her black leather box when Tilly pushes open the front screen door.

“ ’Ronica wants you,” Tilly says, “and she is mad!”

“Veronica’s always mad,” Lana says. “It’s her reason for living.” But after stashing her box under a chair cushion, she says, “Mad about what?”

“Dunno,” Tilly says. “Something, though.”

Lana glances into the lighted house and instinctively raises her left hand to touch the two-dollar bill that isn’t there.

A
s Lana steps inside, Veronica is in the living room putting in a video, and when the Snicks hear this, they’re drawn to the TV like metal to magnet, Tilly included. Lana glances at the screen: it’s Clifford, the big red moronic dog.

“Sit,” Veronica says when Lana follows her into the kitchen, and the first thing Lana notices is that there’s a fire going in the wood-burning stove at one end of the kitchen. It’s been raining, yes, but it’s June and there’s no need for a fire. Lana, seating herself at the kitchen table, finds herself staring at a sealed manila envelope propped against the napkin holder. It’s unmarked, but as far as Lana’s concerned, it might as well wear a label saying O
MINOUS
.

The fire makes a ticking noise. Veronica, tight-lipped, keeps working on dinner. She pours a huge box of generic potato flakes into a mixing bowl, adds hot water, and lets it sit. She goes into the pantry and comes out carrying a package of brownish ground meat wrapped in bloodstained butcher paper, which she lays into a bowl along with two boxes of Hamburger Helper. From a bin by the stove she breaks off a clove of garlic, lays it on a cutting
board, and only when she is through mincing it does she say, “Where is it you went this morning?”

“Who says I went anywhere?” Lana says, a standard delaying tactic. She knows who said, of course—Tilly. She couldn’t help it. What came into her mind went out of her mouth. Most of the time it was endearing.

Veronica measures oatmeal into a cup, then reaches for the salt and says, “You’re saying you didn’t leave without permission in the trunk of a boy’s car?”

A sudden shift and crackle from the woodstove. “No,” Lana says. “I did leave. But not in anybody’s trunk and I just went to the library.”

Veronica lets her eyes fall on her. “The library, you say.”

Lana doesn’t like lying, but she knows enough about it to know that if you’re going to lie, you have to sell it. “That’s right,” she says in a firm voice. “The one at Tenth and G.” The only library in town, actually.

“What did you check out?”

“Nothing,” she says. “I just sat there at a desk along the north wall and read old newspapers.”

“For five hours.”

Lana glances out the window, which is slightly ajar. The rain has stopped. “It was interesting,” she says. “One weird thing, though. The weather report didn’t say anything about rain.”

Veronica stares at her a second or two, then says in a cold, hard voice, “Open the envelope.”

Lana points to the manila envelope in front of her. “This one?”

Veronica gives her a don’t-play-stupid look.

Lana unclasps the envelope, tips it, and six or seven
sheets of yellow paper slide out. They are sketches of Whit.
Her
sketches of Whit.

“How …,” she starts to say, but stops. There is no how or why. Foster kids have no safe zones.

Veronica, all ice, says, “I thought since you were gone, I might as well tidy up your room. I noticed the high spots especially needed cleaning. Do you know what I thought when I came upon your primitive little drawings of my husband? I thought,
Well, well, well
.”

Veronica is quiet then, but there’s more; Lana can feel it. There’s more and it’s worse.

Veronica wipes her hands on her apron and pulls a small sandwich bag from her pocket. It contains a half-dozen red capsules, which she pours onto the table. She smiles at Lana. “Familiar?”

“No.”

Veronica simultaneously nods and smiles. “I found them on the same top closet shelf, right along with your little drawings of my husband.”

Lana knows this is a lie. She’s seen pills like these—they look like methamphetamines—but they aren’t hers. “You planted them,” she says.

Veronica blinks a calm blink. “Ah,
you planted them
. The familiar first line of defense for those caught red-handed. Which is what makes it so fortunate that my friend Louise happened to be here when I found them. Louise was so surprised. She said she thought you seemed like such a nice girl.”

Louise, Lana knows, is a born-again who sees Veronica as a potential convert, one that, for degree of difficulty, would earn Louise more than the usual number of
conversion points. In other words, Louise is the kind of person who can be easily duped.

Lana goes to the living room, pulls Tilly away from the Clifford cartoon, and leads her into the kitchen. She points at the pills. “Have you ever seen me with these pills?”

Tilly, face white, closes her eyes and shakes her head no, and Veronica laughs a harsh, derisive laugh. “Thank you, Tilly,” Veronica says. “Go on back to the show now.”

Tilly is happy to be set free, but she doesn’t go back to the show. She carries a pink shoe box into the backyard, where Lana can see her walking back and forth on the worn, wet grass, looking for prize specimens. The window is still ajar, and Lana knows that Tilly can hear every word Veronica says.

“Let’s see. Three years ago I was Citizen of the Year in this twerpy burg. Louise is the president of the Angel Society, and her husband is a church deacon. Now who do you think is the credible source here?—Louise and me, or a shoplifting, foul-talking foster kid and her little half-wit friend?”

Lana stiffens and glances toward the window. “She’s not a half-wit.”

Another hard laugh from Veronica. “You’re right. It’s more like a quarter.”

Lana wants to ask why Veronica is in the foster-mothering business instead of doing something more suited to her skills, like, for just one example, becoming president of the Sizzling Bitch Society, but she just clamps her lips and watches Tilly scanning the grass, her head tucked low.

Veronica moves close to pick up the pills, then the drawings. Her hands leave behind the smell of garlic.

“These,” she announces, holding out the drawings, “go into the fire.”

She opens the front door to the wood-burning stove and shoves them in. For a moment Lana can see Whit’s face on one of the curling sheets, and then it’s turning black as Veronica closes the door.

She holds up the plastic bag of red pills. “And these will go downstate to social services with an affidavit signed by Veronica Winters and Louise Booker. If laboratory analysis shows they contain an illegal substance, you’ll be getting a new address.” She smiles and drops the bag into her blue purse, which she then locks into the cupboard over the fridge. “When it comes to drugs, this house has-a zero-tolerance policy.”

From overhead, Lana hears the sound of footsteps, hard-heeled and snappy. Then the flushing of the toilet, the running of water. Lana can tell Veronica hears it, too, because her eyes shift and her face takes on a listening stillness. Whit’s been napping, Lana bets, and now he’s getting ready to go out. That’s his pattern.

“So what are those pills you planted in my room?” Lana says, and Veronica, snapped free of her listening, says, “What?”

“The pills you put in my room. What are they?”

“Oh. Those.” A smile. “You tell me—they were in your room. Not that what you say matters. What counts is what the lab says.”

Lana wonders how long this will take. With the state you never knew, but she has the feeling drug analysis goes to the front of the line.

A staccato click of quick steps on the wood stairs and then Whit breezes through the kitchen on his way out.
He’s wearing a faded Huskers baseball cap, which he tips to say grinningly, “Night, ladies, using the term loosely.” Then he stops at the computer set up on a desk in the corner and does some clicking. The computer has programs on it for the Snicks, but Whit mostly uses it to download sports events and radio shows that he listens to while he drives or paints houses.

“Where’re you going?” Veronica says, and it secretly pleases Lana that she uses the same icy tone on Whit as she uses on her. One more thing she and Whit have in common.

Whit grabs an apple from the kitchen counter and says, “Got to see a man about a dog,” then throws a wink past Veronica toward Lana.

“You’re not going anywhere, Lucian Winters,” Veronica says.

This affects Whit not at all. He takes a crackling bite of the green apple. “Oh, I’m going somewhere, all right,” he says, and jangles his car keys. He begins to sing as he crosses the yard to the garage. “Some enchanted evening,” he croons in an exaggerated, comic way, but still, it sounds pretty good, “you will meet a stranger …”

Lana has the sudden sensation that she is locked into a dream, a dream that goes on and on and moves easily from the real to unreal, from the house here on Cedar Street to Miss Hekkity’s shop and back again, a sensation so unsettling that she pushes a fingernail into the palm of her hand until she feels actual pain. And—she runs a finger over her left ear—the two-dollar bill is gone.

So she isn’t dreaming.

B
efore dusk that evening, when Veronica’s in the backyard fiddling with her hollyhocks and trying to ignore the Snicks, Lana sneaks to the kitchen phone and dials Hallie’s private number.

“Hallie?” she says. Over the line, Lana can hear voices, clinking sounds, the happy shrieking of children, which is strange because Lana knows Hallie doesn’t have children. It was why, when Lana lived in Omaha, Hallie could occasionally take Lana to the movies, the mall, or the ice rink. “It’s me, Lana,” she says now into the phone.

“Ah,” Hallie says in her smooth, silky voice. “It’s Lana calling my private cell number … in the evening … after hours, and here I am at my niece’s eighth-grade graduation party wondering, Why would Lana do that?”

Lana sighs. Hallie is friendly when being friendly is her own idea, but it’s a different story when Lana’s doing the calling. “Veronica planted pills in my room,” she says anyway. “They look like meth.”

Calmly Hallie says, “By Veronica, I’m presuming you mean Mrs. Winters?”

“Mmm.” Through the window Lana watches Veronica pulling off her gloves and stepping into the garage.

“And why would Mrs. Winters plant pills in your room?”

“She says she’s going to mail them to a lab downstate and have them tested and that it will be my word against hers. Hers being like God’s, I guess.”

“Why would she do that, Lana?”

“Because she wants to get rid of me.”

Behind Hallie’s silence, Lana hears something new: the low throb of dance music. She stares across the lawn at the garage. Behind the grimy garage window, Veronica seems to be getting something from a cupboard.

Hallie says, “Why would Mrs. Winters want to get rid of you?”

Because she thinks I’ve got the wild eye for her husband
, Lana thinks, but what she says is, “I have no clue.”

Hallie doesn’t respond. Outside, Veronica emerges from the garage with a handful of bamboo stakes and a ball of twine, but they wouldn’t’ve come from the cupboard. Lana pulls hard on the stretchy coil of phone cord. “Hallie?” she says. “You still there?”

Hallie says quietly, “If she just wanted you out of there, all she would have to do is file a five-day notice with us. Which means that if what you’re saying is true, she not only wants you gone but wants you gone
with cause
.”

“Which means?”

“That you’ve regally ticked her off for some reason.”

For some reason
seems to hang suspended in the silence between them.

Outside, Veronica looks at the sky, then the street, then her watch.
Whit
, Lana thinks.
Veronica’s worried about Whit
. And what she’s doing to Lana is just one patch in the blanket she wants to wrap around Whit.

These are strange, alarming thoughts and Lana says with sudden vehemence, “So what are you going to do about this shit?”

“If I hear another vulgarity,” Hallie says evenly, “I will hang up,” and Lana knows she will, so she says in a softer voice, “Well?”

“Let’s see if anything goes to the state lab. Then we’ll go from there.”

Lana says, “That sounds like a mighty plan.”

“Cynicism is not a winning quality, Lana.” Then, “Fortunately, I know that behind the cynicism, there’s an endearing young woman of whom I’m fond.”

Lana doesn’t speak, and after a second or two, Hallie says, “Lana, you’ll have to excuse me, but I’ve just been asked to dance by a young man too handsome to refuse.”

After one last look out the window—Garth is sitting morosely against the fence, twisting Popeye’s head, and Veronica is tying a drooping purple flower stalk to a bamboo rod—Lana tiptoes through the house to the front porch, but the minute she gets to the porch and slides her hand under the chair cushion to remove the drawing kit, Tilly comes to find her, the old shoe box in her hand, her fingernails grubby from scavenging. Her interest in the kit is immediate. “That yours, Lana?” she says in her thick voice.

Lana nods.

“Where’d you get it?”