by R. J. Jacobs
“Then she got in my car with me and I drove her to the Belle Meade Police Station.”
“Is that right?”
My heart pounds.
“Ms. Duval, this was around what time?”
I have to think. Time is bent by what happened. It has become strange. I feel like it is still happening, like I’m still there, like there is no such thing as time now. Why are they talking to me like this when Finch filed the police report? Is this a trick?
“You were asked to leave the party around seven, correct? So, walk to your car, then drive up Chickering puts us at what? 7:15 or so?”
Williams keeps looking at Marion. “Finch James had been at her friend’s house since earlier that afternoon,” he says.
But that can’t be. I saw her. I picked her up, dripping wet, terrified, and drove her.
I did not imagine it.
I’m shaking my head, as the hot press of tears returns from confusion, frustration—feelings I don’t have time to feel because Williams asks, “Do you remember where you were last week?”
“The Petersons’ party?”
His speech slows again, like he’s trying to bring a small child up to speed. “And you knew Owen and Shelly would be there too, right?”
I shake my head. “I knew there might be celebrities, but I had no idea it would be them.”
Detective Williams pops his knuckles. “You mean, just by complete coincidence, the very people you’d been following around the country happened to show up at the party you were working? I think you knew there was a chance.” He looks at me like he expects I’ll change my story.
Did I know? Am I only telling myself I didn’t, making up a story the way I did during all that time in the dark? The thought makes me shiver; I don’t want it to be true. I want my memories and thoughts to be completely real, like everyone else’s. I remember the uneasiness I had while signing Ken’s form, and when the front door of the Petersons’ house opened, I sensed something. Didn’t I? Didn’t part of me recognize Owen and Shelly were there even before I saw them?
I’m still thinking about Williams’s question. I don’t answer right away. When you don’t talk, people think all sorts of things. They take their fears and put them on you.
Type Shelly James stalker into an Internet search engine. There’s my picture.
Type Shelly James biggest fan into the same engine. Same picture comes up.
When I worked at the kennel, a girl who worked with me said, “Oh, I like the James Family.” And I said, “Not as much as I do.” Then she said she was sure she was a bigger fan, and I told her how the word fan didn’t apply to me, and when I started to talk about their set lists, she got quiet and made a funny face and said, “All right, whatever, I guess you win,” very snarkily, before she said, “Did you ever think maybe you like them a little too much?”
That was a month before I left to follow their tour. By then, I already knew I shouldn’t talk about Owen and Shelly. No one would understand.
“Jessie?” Detective Marion asks me. “Just so we’re clear, did you know Owen and Shelly would be at the Petersons’ party?”
I look at them both before I shake my head.
Williams lowers his chin. “Was it you who brought Shelly James the opioids?”
I feel my eyes go wide. It’s like he’s asked the question in a language I hardly know.
“No,” is all I can say.
Williams closes an eye and points at my bedroom like he is taking aim. “How do you feel about us having a look through your room?”
“Fine,” I say, though I try not to look at the dresser’s bottom drawer.
Detective Marion nods, but Williams leans toward me so far that the side of the table creases his shirt. He’s testing me, maybe, asking something off base to see how I will react.
But my mind is racing. I remember the slur in Shelly’s words the night of Sean’s graduation party and replay the conversation I overhead between her and Owen. I picture her smile on the last two magazine covers I saw her on. I flash to the warmth, the love in her voice as she thanked everyone during the CMA awards. And then to the way she nearly tripped walking off the stage.
To hear the police say it is a nightmare that keeps finding new levels, a dream that continues unfolding like origami. But they’re right to ask. And I wonder about the connection, too, between those pills Owen wanted her to stop taking and where she was going the night before, right before she was killed.
I tell the police a little about what I’d heard her and Owen discussing at the Petersons’ party, and about how she’d seemed less than sober as she made her way through the party.
Marion asks, “Did you hear Owen mention where any substances came from?”
“No.”
“Or which substance specifically he was referring to?”
“No.”
Williams interrupts. “For being as close as you were, you weren’t actually listening very carefully, were you?”
The question hits me like a slap across the face.
“Hey,” Marion says to him. I see his jaw tighten and his lips press together. His chair screeches as he pushes back from the table. Both their coffee cups shake so hard I think for a second they might fall over. “Talk to you a second?”
He puts his hand on Williams’s shoulder. Williams looks at me like I’ve just gotten him in trouble before following Marion through my sliding glass doors out onto my porch. The door makes a heavy shuffling sound as Marion pulls it closed. Most people don’t know about how strong my hearing is, or forget. I block out all the other morning sounds and focus on just the sounds of their voices. I miss a word every so often, but I can tell what they’re saying. I understand a lot about what they’re saying just from the tone of their voices, and from the way each of them stands.
The way Williams folds his arms and leans against the railing reminds me of a boy who lived in the foster home where I was for a while. Once, he slapped the back of my head so hard my scalp stung above my ear and asked me, “The fuck do you always wear those headphones? The fuck are you listening to?” I was walking, away, anywhere. I held my CD player against my chest, the plastic warm in my hands. For a year after I left the closet, I couldn’t fall asleep unless my hand was touching the CD player.
“Hey,” the boy kept on. He shoved my back—he talked like mean laughter. “You fucking deaf?”
I walked faster. When I thought about trouble, I pictured having to move to another house again, I pictured more packing, more introducing. My stomach felt like spoiled food. His foot slammed into the back of my leg. I fell forward, my pants ripping open at the knee, dust and bright-red blood at the edges. He shoved my shoulders into the gravel. Somehow, I kept my hands around the CD player like a shield that kept it from breaking apart. The rocks reddened the tops of my hands. He reached for the Discman.
“Gimme that.”
I took hold of his wrist and sank my teeth into his arm until I could taste his blood. He started screaming, yanking his arm away, and I ran into the shadows to hide. Soon, I could hear shoes brushing through grass, voices calling out to each other while I stayed very dim and listened to the wind making a shushing sound like the trees were talking. The word for something that is difficult to explain … The wind sounded like a mystery. I stayed hidden until the light touching the forest’s edge became dark.
Now, neither officer takes his eyes fully off of me as they begin to talk. I wonder if maybe they want me to listen.
Marion asks, “What’s the matter with you?”
“The matter with me? You could be a little more dialed in. You work for the family, right?”
Marion drops his gaze very slightly. “What are you getting at?”
“I mean, don’t you care? We’re talking to a murderer.”
My hands seem to go numb when I hear that word, and the edges of my vision blur slightly.
“We’re talking to a troubled person,” Marion answers calmly.
“You’re not
thinking right.”
“This girl called us. I think she’s trying to help. Look, it makes sense she’d want to watch them or even follow Shelly or whatever, but why would she want Shelly dead? Think about it,” Marion says.
Williams crouches down, pinches something off the concrete and examines it. “Rejection,” I think he mumbles. He sounds impatient.
“She’s had plenty of that already. Eight months in jail and a restraining order? What would’ve been different this time?”
Williams drops whatever he was holding and stands. “Maybe she hit her breaking point when Robert Holloway turned her in. Maybe she knew that was really going too far.”
No. I feel my head shaking back and forth as I rub my hands over my legs.
“Even if someone’s in a state—a manic state, paranoid, whatever—even if they’re deluded, there’s a logic to what they do, right? If you buy the premise, their behavior usually makes sense. If you think the CIA really is watching you through your television, it’d make sense to be scared.”
“So?”
“I’m just saying, if she wanted to be included so badly, which is what she said when she got arrested, why on earth would she want to kill any of them?” I hear an emotion in Detective Marion’s voice that I can’t name no matter how hard I try to think of the word.
“You’re forgetting that she’d planned to stab them already.”
My stomach tightens. Of course, I realize, he’s just saying what everyone already thinks: I was dangerous before, why wouldn’t I be dangerous now? But Marion seems to be defending me. That, I don’t understand.
“I …”
“What?” Williams makes a sound halfway between a laugh and a snort.
“I was never convinced she meant to attack anyone,” Marion says.
“Sure as hell looked like that to me. But it’s your left arm that has the scar.”
Then for a moment they turn and I can’t hear what they are saying no matter how hard I listen. All I can think is: Finch was at a friend’s house? What? I took her to the police station. I know what I did.
Everything swirls in my mind. Maybe they know I can hear and are trying to trick me, I can’t help but think.
I know what I saw: A person had chased me off the trail. A man—I remember his baseball cap and his phone. I know I saw him. Finch did too. It is like her memory backed mine up.
But something Williams said to Marion sticks in my mind: “You work for the family.”
That’s not true, I realize. Marion worked for the family until a few weeks ago. I learned that when the security guard showed up for a background check and I went to hide in the bathroom. I’d expected Marion then.
And not that I would believe a word Robert Holloway said, but he’d confirmed it: “Marion is no longer employed by the family. He’s focusing on his main job being a Metro detective as of about three weeks ago.”
A shiver goes up my spine as I watch Marion’s and Williams’s lips move, but I can’t hear what they’re saying. And I start to wonder: Was Marion fired? If so, why? Could the reason have made him so upset with Shelly James that he would want to kill her?
I study the shape of Marion’s head, the angle of his neck to his shoulders, his close-clipped hair, trying to match them with the man on top of the hill. The dark had made seeing details hard. Still, I know it was a man I saw from the way the shadow moved and the heaviness of his footfalls. I can’t see any direct similarities between Marion and the man I saw, but then a new thought makes me stop looking for any. If Marion were the man who had chased me, why would he be defending me now? Why would he have told Williams he thought I was trying to help them?
Those two facts wouldn’t fit together.
I hear a chiming sound and Detective Williams takes his cell phone from his pocket. A few seconds later, his lips mouth the word “fuck.” “Hey, I have to take this,” he says to Detective Marion.
Marion nods once quickly, then comes back inside, sits down, and folds his hands on the table. Williams closes the door behind him. It makes a noise like a bag being sealed, trapping air inside.
I don’t know how I can look at Detective Marion, but I don’t want to look away either.
“He’ll be right back,” Marion says. He scratches the side of his head and looks around awkwardly, like he isn’t sure how to look at me either. Or what exactly to say. His head falls slightly to the side. His voice sounds a little like Ms. Parsons’s as he asks, “How are you doing with all this?”
I can’t tell if this is a detective trick or not. “Okay,” I answer.
Like a reflex, my hand slides to touch the spot where I’ve carried my knife in the past—that place on my thigh seems bare now.
He shifts restlessly in the chair, glances in Williams’s direction, and asks me, “Did you get any sleep last night?”
The pace of my breathing has picked up. I shift in my chair as I search for words. “No,” I answer. “I didn’t sleep at all, I think. You asked me a lot of questions this morning, but has anyone asked you … where you were last night?”
“No one yet,” he says. His skin seems to flush a little. He works his jaw back and forth before answering. “I’ve been up since yesterday morning. I was packing up to spend the night camping when I my phone rang. I work … I used to work security for the James family. You knew that?”
I nod.
He narrows his eyes a little. I expect frustration, defensiveness, but I realize from the way he puts his elbows on the table and leans forward that he’s curious. Truly curious.
“Jessie, what makes you ask that question?”
I swallow, my mind racing through the possibilities. I think of how he reached out to me after my arrest last year. My gut tells me I can trust him.
From the corner of my eye, I catch Williams looking in, at Marion. I wonder what my neighbors think about a uniformed cop marching around on my porch. I can only hear the edges of Williams’s voice from outside; he’s dropped it to a whisper.
“Jessie,” Marion asks quietly. “Did you hear something about me?”
I want to tell him what I’m thinking. I draw a breath when the glass door slides open again. Williams’s shoulders are pulled back. He has a strange look on his face.
Something has changed. I feel the difference in the air, and it scares me.
Marion’s head swivels and his professional-sounding voice returns. “What’s up?” he asks. He doesn’t seem to sense the same danger in the room that I do.
Williams frowns at me before shifting his eyes back to Marion. “We need to go,” he tells him. “Right now.”
* * *
Detective Marion tells me not to leave town, and it isn’t long before the front door is shut behind them. Finally alone again, I remember something. Something I saw a year before and forgot. No, something I made myself forget because I didn’t want it to be true. I told myself I couldn’t have seen what I did, that what had happened was a joke, or that it wasn’t actually Owen and Shelly.
The show was in St. Louis—one of the biggest crowds of the tour—and they were late getting on stage. The tech guys were running back and forth across the stage, signaling to the sound booth. There was a rumble of restless energy in the crowd, a small sigh when another warm-up song began playing through the PA. Then, finally, a thumbs-up, lights dimming. I could see the side of the stage from where I sat—high and on the side, which usually let me see everything.
Owen and Shelly were there—her two steps ahead, him carrying his guitar by the neck. But before she went forward, her head turned. Owen grabbed her arm, roughly enough that her curled hair shook. She said something; her mouth seemed to spit out the words.
And then his mouth formed the word “bitch.”
Shelly smiled and shook her head. She walked on stage, waved, and the crowd went wild. Owen waited for just a beat and then followed her.
10
The regular sounds of daytime return: the chugging of old air-conditioning units, singing from
upstairs. Across the courtyard, someone plucks a bass in an odd, complicated rhythm. I try to process what just happened, but the energy for that has drained out of me. I set my head down on my kitchen table. It feels empty from worrying. I must fall asleep because I begin to dream.
I’m inside Ms. Parsons’s office when I see two police cars through the window behind her. She shakes her head, guilty over being the bait in a trap. “They arrived right before you got here,” she says, “I’m sorry.”
Then the hallway door opens. Police circle around me, their dark uniforms seeming to block out all the light. One wears a small microphone on his left shoulder that squawks like the old radio in my first foster home. Daylight looks like a precious thing I may not see again. My legs begin to shake as footsteps echo in the hall. When Detective Marion steps through the door, my stomach sinks. Marion presses his lips together, looking at me just as he did when I was sentenced to jail: confused by who I am—and sorry, and careful.
He clears his throat. “I need you to turn around and put your hands behind your back.”
I do just as he says. I lean against the cold tile in the hallway and hear the zip of handcuffs. I hoped I would never hear it again, but it is too late. Ms. Parsons raises her hand, waving good-bye as Detective Marion shuts the door. Her expression says she knows she’ll never see me again, and I want to tell her it’s okay, and that I appreciate everything she’s done for me, and that giving me the strawberry Pop-Tarts and granola bar was so kind it made my heart hurt. But I can only walk straight through the double doors at the end of the hallway into the cruel light of day. I hear Detective Marion’s footsteps behind me, his breathing, the rattle of his keys. I feel eyes watching us from the courtyard as he walks me to the police car …
Beside me, my phone is ringing, bringing me back. I’m in my kitchen again, pushing onto my elbows, rubbing my eyes. I follow the sound to my bedroom and answer, looking out my window as Ms. Parsons’s voice enters my ear.
“Jessie?”
“Hi,” I say.
The space outside my window looks normal—waving branches and sun and squirrels—but the worry in Ms. Parsons’s voice makes my heart ache a little.
