by Leah Stewart
“You idiot, I’m going to test positive for marijuana,” I say. “You think they’ll just let that slide? Remember Bob Anderson in Sports? He got fired for smoking dope.”
Evan reaches out a hand toward me. I step back. “I’m sorry,” he says.
“Maybe I should tell them to test you too,” I say. I hear how my voice comes out, cold and sharp.
Evan recoils as though I’d struck him. “You were acting crazy, and I had seen the needles,” he whispers. “I just wanted to help.”
“Needle,” I say. “One needle.”
“I’m sorry,” Evan says again. “It’s just, in my experience, where there’s one there’s more.”
“Two and two equals four,” I say. “That rhymed. Did you notice?”
“Don’t make jokes.” He reaches for me again, and again I step away. “Please, Olivia.”
I take a few steps backward, watching his face, those big brown eyes gone shiny with tears. He says, “You’ve been crazy lately. I just want to know what’s wrong. Hannah says . . .”
“You’ve talked to Hannah?” I imagine the two of them, their heads together, whispering my name. “Are you checking all your sources? Have you talked to David? I bet he’d give you some good quotes. Maybe he already has.”
“You know that’s not fair.” I take another step backward, then turn on my heel. He grabs my arm. “Don’t go,” he says. “We need to talk.”
“We’ve talked enough,” I say, wrenching my arm free. “I don’t feel like being interviewed.” I walk away. He calls my name. I don’t look back.
Allison Avery is disappearing. Nothing I can come up with will put us back on the front page. I’m at the police station, paging through the day’s reports without reading them. Morris isn’t here, and Nash will only say that he has nothing to say. There was no mention of the girl on the twelve o’clock news. Things change. More people die, get raped, get shot, get robbed. It’s the rare murder that lasts. I try to focus on the names in the stack of papers in my lap. The latest victims, the most recent offenders.
“Olivia Dale,” a deep voice says. I look up and see Officer Smiley standing over me.
“Officer,” I say. “How’s it going?”
“Not bad.” He grins. “I saw your story.”
It takes me a moment to realize that of course he means the one about him. “Oh yeah? What happened with that? Is he in jail?”
“You didn’t hear?” He shakes his head, eyes narrowed. “I thought you’d have followed up.”
I feel stung. “I got busy.”
“With that doctor’s kid, right?” When I nod, he says under his breath, “Yeah,” and that one soft word feels like an indictment.
“What happened?”
He shrugs. “She came in and paid his bail. I’m waiting to get the call that he’s shot her.”
“I’m going to do a series on domestic violence,” I offer. I’d nearly forgotten that idea.
“Great,” he says, his voice neutral. “I’m sure that’ll help.” He touches my shoulder gently. “See you around.”
I watch Officer Smiley walk away down the hall, his powerful stride, his gun tight against his hip, his air of authority and purpose. I feel like a child, small and afraid.
• • •
I spend the afternoon trying to let it go. I don’t make a single phone call regarding the Avery investigation. Instead, I call David for the first time since Saturday night, and apologize like a good girl. He’s not angry. He, too, sighs and talks about his worry for me. Then I write the stories I’m supposed to write. A two-year-old child run over by a truck. A liquor store holdup. I call the highway patrol to check fatalities. I am distant but polite with Evan. Maybe we’re even now, depending on how you weigh our crimes.
At 5:35 my phone rings and before I touch the receiver I know it’s Peter. “Can you come see me?” he asks as soon as I say hello.
“I’m really busy, Peter.”
“I need to talk to you.”
“We’re talking.”
There’s silence. “Why are you being this way?” He sounds hurt. “Why would you be angry with me?”
I sigh. “I’m not angry. I’ve had a shitty day.”
“Every day is a shitty day,” he says. “I just want to see you.”
I give in. I tell him I’ll stop by on my way home.
No one answers the door at the Averys’ white house. I walk around the house, looking up at the windows, searching for movement. No lights are on, no figures pass behind the windows. In the backyard I pull a leaf off a tree and shred it, tearing along the veins. I reach for another, and hear movement inside the greenhouse.
Inside, Peter stands with his back to me, running his fingers over one of his trees. His T-shirt clings to him, wet with sweat, and I watch the muscles in his back contract when he bends to clip a branch. Ten minutes, I think. Then I’ll go. He turns, scissors in hand. “Olivia,” he says. “You came.”
“What did you need?” I ask, trying to sound brusque.
He smiles. “Let me just finish this,” he says, and bends back to his tree.
My heart jumps wildly inside my throat. In this moment there is nothing but my desire, as though everything I am has contracted to a point. I could cross over to him, drop my bag on the floor, and lay both hands, fingers spread, on the small of his back, which would be hot and damp and tense with surprise beneath my palms. Then slowly, slowly, I could slide my hands around to his stomach, slip them up inside his T-shirt and touch his soft belly, skin against skin.
I cross my arms over my chest. “I’ve got to go home, Peter. What did you want?”
He turns, frowning, the sharp edge of his scissors pointed at me. “Why are you being such a bitch?”
What can I say? Because I’m worried I can’t control myself? I say, “I’m in a hurry.”
“Just get the fuck out, then, if it’s so goddamn difficult to give me five minutes of your time.”
“Fuck you,” I say, suddenly blinking back tears. “You called me and I came. What do you want?”
He comes toward me now, waving those scissors. “The story’s over, is that it? So I’m of no use to you now?”
“That’s not . . .”
“What about all that concern for me?” He’s right in front of me now. I keep my eye on the moving point of the scissors. “Was that faked?”
“My concern was real,” I say slowly. At least it became real, and that’s what matters now.
He mimics me. “My concern was real. Oh, Peter, how are you? I’m so sorry about your poor dead sister, at least as long as she sells papers.”
“Listen to me.” I reach for him but he steps back.
“I don’t have to listen to you. I’m nothing more than a story to you, am I.” He leans in again, bringing the scissors an inch from my hand. One quick jab and he could sink the point into my skin. “Fuck you,” he says. “Fuck you.”
Carefully I reach out my hand. I close my fingers around the scissors, and when I feel his grip slacken I take them from his hand. He stares at me. “Did you think I was going to hurt you?” He sounds as though he’s going to cry.
“Of course not,” I say, though for a moment anything seemed possible. Slowly I set the scissors down.
“I would never hurt you,” he says. His eyes are filling with tears. He bites his lip. “I’m sorry,” he says. “I don’t know what’s the matter with me.”
“It’s okay,” I say. I pull him to me, his head against my shoulder, and he begins to shake. I hold him as tight as I can.
“Olivia,” he says. “I think I love you.”
“Oh, honey,” I say. I think, My God, he’s seventeen, as though I’ve only now learned it.
He lifts his head to look at me. “I mean it,” he says. “I love you.” His eyes keep searching my face, his hand clutching at my arm. The need is so naked in him, I can’t help but say it. “I love you, too.” He presses his lips against mine, hard, urgent, then leans back. That smile of his li
ghts up his face, beautiful.
I feel about a million years old.
18
I leave Peter with promises that I’ll see him again soon. He stands in the driveway and watches me go, his body leaning after my car. I drive all the way home with a lump in my throat and when I get there I go straight into my bedroom and curl up in a fetal position on the bed. I’d like to hold myself and sob, like I watched Carl do, but no tears come. This day has left me hollow.
The phone wakes me early in the morning. I lie there for a moment, my skirt twisted up around my waist. The ringing stops. I undo my bra and run my fingers over the painful red ridges it’s left in my skin. I hear Hannah shout, “Wake up, Olivia. It’s for you.”
“Good morning, gal. Up and at ’em. It’s gonna be a long day for you.” It’s Sergeant Morris and he sounds happy.
“What time is it?” I squint at my clock.
“Early. But you’ll be glad I woke you.” He pauses, letting the suspense build. “It’s the Avery case. There’s been an arrest.”
I’m stunned.
“Olivia? Are you still there?”
“Who?” I say.
“Three kids in Bolivar,” he says. “They tried to use her credit card at the gas station there. The Mississippi cops called us.” His voice turns hard. “We’ve got them cold,” he says. “We found her underwear in one of their bedrooms. The ringleader. Jared Gillespie.”
“My God,” I say under my breath.
“There’s going to be a press conference this afternoon,” he says.
“Did they know her?”
“Doesn’t look like it,” he says. “Stranger killing, just like we thought.”
“But why did they do it?” I say. “It doesn’t make sense.”
“Lord, I don’t know,” he says. “Thirty years I’ve been doing this, and I can tell you—it never makes sense.”
When I’m off the phone, I run to the bathroom. For several minutes I kneel on the floor beside the toilet bowl. I feel like I’m going to be sick. Instead what comes out is a rush of tears. My whole body shaking, I put my face in my hands and sob, and that is how Hannah finds me, half-naked over the toilet bowl, my face a sticky mess.
She kneels beside me and holds me against her, and when she asks me what’s wrong her voice trembles like she’s going to cry too. I can’t tell her. I just keep shaking. Hannah helps me stand. She helps me undress and turns on the shower. Underneath the stream of water I stand with my eyes closed, my face in my hands, until my body stills.
On the other side of the curtain, Hannah is asking me if I’m all right.
I open my eyes. There are the same blue tiles, the same green shower curtain I see every morning before I go to work. If this were any other day I’d be hurrying through this shower, singing while I washed my hair, anxious to follow up on the big break I’d just gotten. The scoop. So today I will finish this shower and get dressed and call Peggy and drive to Bolivar, Mississippi, in search of Jared Gillespie. I will find out how old he and his friends are and whether they have criminal records. I’ll ask anyone who might know when they did it, and how, and where, and why.
This is my job. This is just my job.
The last time I was in Bolivar, it was to cover a story about the Board of Aldermen’s attempt to get a local monument repaired. It was a memorial for the town’s Confederate dead, and the problem was that in the forty years since its building, it had begun to lean. When two aldermen went out and took measurements, they confirmed what everyone had feared: the monument leaned, six inches to the North. At the meeting, an old man with a beard stood up and said, his voice breaking, “It’s a mockery to the boys that gave their lives fighting the Yankees. Our monument should be straight. Upright,” and he snapped his legs together like a soldier coming to attention.
In this town there are three places of business, a general store, a diner, and a gas station. When I pull into the gas station, a boy about Peter’s age comes out and motions for me to roll down my window. He squints in at me. “What’ll it be, ma’am?”
“Regular, please,” I say. He starts the pump running and leans over my windshield with a squeegee, methodically running it in neat lines across the glass. I watch his face. He is whistling, eyes focused on the water running down the windshield, never glancing at me on the other side of the glass. I get out of the car. “Been a lot of excitement around here,” I say, leaning against the door.
“Oh yeah,” he says. He straightens up, puts the squeegee away, and heads toward me. “ ’Scuse me, ma’am,” he says, and I press up against the door so he can get by. He whips the pump out of the car and screws on the gas cap with a practiced air.
“You know those boys?” I let my voice slide into a drawl.
“Could you pop the hood?”
I lean inside the car and pull the lever. When I straighten up he is under the hood of my car. His voice emerges, muffled. “The ones killed that girl in the city, you mean?”
“Yeah,” I say. “You know them?”
“I seen ’em around,” he says. “This is a little town.” He comes out from under the hood, holding the dipstick. “You need oil.”
I nod, and he goes about adding the oil. “You know where Jared lives, then?”
“Oh yeah, I know,” he says. He straightens up and lets the hood drop, gently, then gives it a quick slam into locked position. “It’s hard to find.” He wipes his hands on a rag. “I could take you.” He doesn’t look at me, pretending nonchalance as he runs the rag over each finger. His body is drawn up straight while he waits for me to answer. He wants to go. He’s curious.
“Okay,” I say. “Let’s go.” I get back in the car. He goes around to the passenger side and vaults into the seat. Then he holds out his hand to me. “Name’s Mike.”
“Olivia,” I say, giving his hand a hard squeeze. He’s covered in a fine layer of dust and his blond-brown hair falls in his eyes. He reminds me of my high school boyfriend, coming to my house after driving a tractor on his father’s farm, his skin powdered with dirt and hot to the touch.
“What you want at Jared’s house anyway?” Mike asks. “You don’t look like a cop.”
“I’m a reporter,” I say. “I want to talk to his family.”
“To get some insight and all?”
I nod, turning the key in the ignition.
“That’s cool,” he says.
He directs me off the main road down a series of dirt roads until we crunch over gravel and pull up to the house. It’s a tiny house, no better than a shack, really, with nothing around but tall grass and weeds and the requisite auto parts piled to the side. A black dog sleeping inside a pen lifts its head to look at the car but doesn’t bark. It yawns hugely and drops its head again. “They’re not home,” Mike says. “Car’s not here.”
For the first time it occurs to me that coming here alone with this boy was not the smartest thing to do. For all I know this isn’t even the right house. I sit for a minute with the car running. Mike swings open the door and vaults out. He disappears from view around the side of the house and then reappears, leaning in my car window. His face shines with excitement. “I scouted it out,” he says. “No one’s here for sure.”
Mike follows me around the yard as I circle the house. In the back, we press our faces to a window and peer inside at the living room. A few battered plastic toys lie in front of the television, which is the only thing in the room that looks new. “A kid lives here?” I say.
“Yeah,” Mike says. “Jared’s kid. A little girl.” Then he disappears. I stand with my hands cupped around my face, looking for details. The ironing board in the corner, a child’s pink dress waiting to be pressed. A ragged pair of women’s slippers beside the sofa, which is orange and velour and shredded on the sides, probably by the tabby cat now watching me from the back of the couch. Even the cat looks battered and used, one ear bitten jagged, burrs caught in its fur. I tap on the glass and the cat’s body stiffens. It leaps from the couch and disappear
s from view, then reappears suddenly on the windowsill, its nose working as though it can smell me through the glass. I scratch on the window with my finger and the cat puts its paw there, then looks at me, its eyes wide with curiosity, and meows. “What do you know about it?” I say, and it meows again.
“Hey!” Mike whoops from the side of the house. “Come here! I found something!”
Following his voice, I run around the house and smack into him. Together we stumble a step or two and then he puts his hands on my arms and steadies me, laughing. “Slow down, girl,” he says.
I step back out of his grasp. “What did you find?”
He gestures at the ground. “This is where they burn their trash.” The grass doesn’t grow inside this circle, which is littered with scraps and bits of wood and plastic. I grab a stick and poke at it. The wind catches a piece of paper and it flutters away.
A car approaches, bumping down the dirt road. “It’s them,” Mike says softly, and I drop the stick and move to the front of the house, standing with my hands clasped in front of me as the car turns up the hill and comes to a stop next to mine. I feel myself growing calmer. I know my part now. When the car door swings open and a woman gets out with a bag of groceries I go toward her with a sympathetic smile. “You look like you could use a hand,” I say, and wordlessly she hands me the bag. I balance it on one hip and extend my right hand. “Olivia Dale,” I say, and when she takes my hand and gives it a limp squeeze, I say, “So nice to meet you, Mrs. Gillespie.”
She nods, a sharp worry line appearing in her forehead. She is probably not long past forty, but she looks like an old woman. Her thin brown hair is pulled back into a ponytail, which she tugs on as she looks at me. Her pale flesh sags on her small frame—her breasts huge and ponderous inside her tank top, her legs lined with blue veins, her face puffy and pasty white. “Can I get another bag for you?” I say, and finally she finds her voice.
“That’s all right,” she says. “Only got a couple more.”
I wait while she opens the back door and heaves out two more straining bags. From behind the windshield, a little girl watches me, her features small and sharp beneath a mass of curly hair. When I catch her eye, she looks away, and then she swings the passenger door open and gets out. When she stands, I see that she is not a little girl, but a teenager, in a T-shirt and a tight pair of cutoffs. Her face is heavily made up, and from beneath her purple eyelids she watches me for a minute, before she opens the back door and leans in. She stands up slow, a child of about four clinging to her neck, almost as big as she is. Under all this weight the two women move toward the house, and I follow. Mike appears at my side when I reach the front door. I had forgotten all about him. “You don’t need to come in,” I whisper.
