Part 15 (1/2)
”I want all your information and any names you can remember of anyone you ever saw her with. Don't forget your phone number and address.”
I stare at the paper for a second. Then, I take the pen and begin writing.
”So.” He leans back, stretching his arms a bit as I write. ”How do you think she ended up in water?” I look up with a start.
”Water?”
”So you don't know everything, Miss Morgan?”
I feel my hand shake around the pen.
”I don't know anything. What water?”
”You tell me. Your friend drowned.”
My head is throbbing when Detective Cudahy hands me the gla.s.s of warmish water. I can't keep my lies straight. I slide my hat off my head and into the palm of my hand. It is moist where my forehead has strained against it.
'You're telling me she didn't die from being ... from being shot.” Unconsciously, I touch my hand to my own face.
”The shot was postmortem.”
”So it was all an accident? She just drowned?”
”I don't think so. Accidental drowning victims don't usually end up with their faces blown off.”
”Why was she shot then?”
He tilts his head. ”Could be to try and prevent identification of the body. Or he's just in a violent rage. It's hard to tell just yet. She wasn't in the water that long. Just long enough to fill her lungs and sink her like a stone.”
I twitch, involuntarily. ”But the papers ...”
”She was found in the Hills, but we kept the water stuff out of the press. It may help down the line.”
”So she drowned and then someone shot her and then just ... just dumped her there?”
”Far as we can tell.”
”Drowned in the ocean?”
”Salt water.”
”What would Lois have been doing in the ocean?”
”Thought maybe you could tell me. Her boyfriend have a boat?”
”I don't... know,” I say, trying to process it all. Trying not to think of Lois, face in dark water, floating. ”Maybe you'll ask around for us.” He looks at me hard in the eyes.
”In your circles, you might be able to find out things we can't.”
At this, I almost want to laugh.
”I'll try. I will,” I reply, not knowing what I mean by it.
You have to ask it: Who would cry for Lois Slattery, with all her slurry glamour, her torn and fast-fading beauty-beauty mostly because you could see it vanis.h.i.+ng before your eyes? Her loss meant nothing and she would not be missed, not even by me. I wouldn't miss her-not in a way as true as she deserved.
But there was something that lingered, her whole life a dark stain, spreading. A pulsing energy racked tight and always threatening to burst through its borders, its hems, its ragged, straining edges. She would have been happy to know how ripely powerful she would become in death. She had been waiting for it.
The next day ... the next day, very early, I am walking from the office to my cla.s.sroom. I'm thinking of how many days it's been since I've seen Mike Standish, how many calls of his I've left unreturned. He is filled with the promise of distraction. But now is not a time for distraction.
I'm walking through the still-empty hallways when I feel her. I feel her even before I see her, hear her. She's leaning against the door of my cla.s.sroom, humming and patting her nose with a powder puff from the ivory compact in her hand.
”So our carpool days are over,” she says evenly, looking only in the mirror.
”I have a lot of new responsibilities,” I say, walking closer.
”I understand,” she says, snapping the compact shut and looking at me.
I try so hard to read her, to read the look in her eyes. I try so hard I feel I'll bore through.
But she just smiles impersonally, superbly, like a showroom model, a beauty queen.
”Well, let's not forget, Lora.”
”Forget what?”
”About us. Sisters,” she says. ”About how we're sisters.”
Alice pulls open my cla.s.sroom door for me. A draft whistles through from within.
”Who could forget?” I say, hard. ”Who could forget that?”
She only smiles in return, and in her smile I can see nothing, not a stray flicker of fear or anger or anything at all. But what I now know is this: There's a reason she's wearing this blankness, this mechanical look stripped of her heat, energy, her intermittent chaos. There's a reason she's wearing this face. And I'm the reason.
Ellie Marbury, fifteen years old with gum in the corner of her mouth, wearing a sloppy joe sweater the vague color of store-bought pound cake, is whispering feverishly to Celeste Dutton as I try to keep the attention of twenty girls on a warm Friday afternoon.
When I confront both girls after cla.s.s, Ellie, with all the petulance of a teenager unaware she is already at the height of her rather wan beauty and it will all be downhill from here, a.s.serts, ”Mrs. King sure was acting funny today.”
”Oh?” I say, emptily.
Ellie's eyes grow wide. ”Y-e-a-h,” she says, stretching the word out and spitting her gum into the trash can I hold before her.
”She kept running over to the window and running all around the room.”
”It was like she had ants in her pants or something.” Celeste, always acting younger than her age, giggles.
”And then she told everyone that one day we'd understand how hard it is to be a woman,” Ellie adds, half snickering and half eyes popping. Both girls seem torn between laughter and discomfort.