by Tami Hoag
Franny rolled his eyes. “Like anyone would want them.”
“Does anyone in particular jump to mind?”
“No, no. I’ve heard the odd catty remark, that’s all. She’s a sexy single mom—she must be a slut. That kind of thing. It’s 1986, for God’s sake,” he said. “Single women have children. Hello: The scarlet letter went out with the poodle skirt.
“What about her daughter?” he asked. “Where is she?”
“In the hospital,” Vince said. “Unconscious, the last I heard.”
That was the final straw for Franny. Color slashed across his pale cheeks and his eyes all but disappeared behind an angry brows-down squint.
“When you find who did it,” he said, “do the world a favor and just shoot him.”
“If only life was that simple,” Vince said.
“It should be,” Franny declared. “Bad people off the planet! Now! More wine for the rest of us!”
He raised his glass in a toast and tossed back the last of his cabernet.
16
Sara walked around her sculpture, trying to concentrate, trying to focus and see the direction she needed to go. Nothing came.
She had a vision a week ago, when she started the project. It was supposed to be about strength and femininity. The metal—the strength—would bend but not break. From the wounded heart would flow feminine beauty in the form of hand-painted silk ribbons.
But as she looked at the piece now, she saw nothing but a mess of twisted wire and steel mesh. Car Wreck on a Stick. That was what it looked like.
Anxiety swirled through her. Fragments of the morning kept flashing through her mind like a strobe light. Detective Mendez, grim faced, mustache framing his downturned mouth. Marissa’s house. The ruined studio. The ruined art.
“Ms. Fordham is deceased.”
Oh my God.
“Ms. Fordham is deceased.”
“Oh my God,” she whispered, trembling.
In her mind’s eye she could see Marissa walking, talking. She used her hands when she spoke as if she were trying to draw a picture to illustrate her point. Vibrant. Animated. Full of life.
“Ms. Fordham is deceased.”
She felt nauseous.
She reached out and tried to adjust a piece of the wire mesh, and nicked the tip of a finger. A droplet of blood rounded bright red like the sudden bloom of a flower on a cactus, then rolled off her fingertip to splash like a tear on the heavy canvas drop cloth that covered the garage floor.
They had converted the space above the garage into a studio for her some months ago. But it was no place for a sculpture as tall as this was, made from steel and requiring welding. She had commandeered this far stall of their three-car garage for the project.
Her studio upstairs was a beautifully lit space with plenty of room for painting and crafts projects, and working with the silk, her latest passion. Although in empty moments when her head wasn’t full of whatever she was working on, she could never escape the thought that the studio was her consolation prize. It was her payment for not divorcing Steve.
He had been cheating on her with Lisa Warwick, a nurse who had volunteered her time to advocate in family court for women from the Thomas Center. Just as Steve devoted hours and hours of his time—their time—to the same cause.
Sara had suspected for a long time, but had never had the courage to confront him. If she had confronted him, she would have then had to confront the reality of the next step. Did they go to counseling? Did she just divorce him? Could she ever trust him again?
The answer to the last one was no. He had never admitted to the affair. To this day, he had never accepted culpability. Typical lawyer. His accomplice was dead. There were no witnesses to testify against him. But Sara knew, and Steve knew she knew. And she got a lovely art studio out of it, but her self-esteem had taken a beating.
She accepted that and lived with it, but she wore that mantle of the betrayed wife like it was made of chain mail and coarse hair. It was heavy and uncomfortable, but she couldn’t get out of it. She told herself she did it for Wendy. She hoped that was true. She hoped that was right.
Wendy loved her father. She very much enjoyed being the center of her parents’ world. She didn’t need to know that her parents’ marriage no longer existed in a true sense of the word. At least, that was what they all pretended.
Sara tried again to focus on her work, walked around to see it from a different angle. It didn’t look like anything.
She wondered if it would have looked like something to Marissa.
“Ms. Fordham is deceased.”
Murdered.
Oh my God.
A car door slammed in the driveway, making her jump. She pressed her bleeding hand to her heart and glanced at her watch. Must be car pool. Wendy coming home. Time to pull herself together. She forced a smile as she turned. It froze and cracked as her husband came into the garage.
“Oh. I thought you were Wendy. You’re early.”
“I heard some bad news,” he said. “About Marissa Fordham.”
“Where did you hear it?” she asked stupidly, as if no one else would know by now. As if it were somehow her terrible secret to keep.
“Detective Mendez told me you were there, at her house.”
“Marissa and I were supposed to work this morning. I got there and ... he told me.”
“Are you all right?”
“No. Of course not. Are you?”
Steve had known Marissa. As part of his volunteer work for the center he had helped with setting up the copyright on the poster so the proceeds of sales would go directly to the Thomas Center.
She had wondered if that was all her husband had done with Marissa. The curse of the woman scorned: to look at every woman her husband had contact with and wonder if he was sleeping with her too. Marissa was beautiful, headstrong, sexy—a description people had used for Sara what seemed an awfully long time ago ... How strange that was, she thought now, remembering that she and Marissa were close to the same age.
Her husband shook his head, hands on his hips. He was standing not three feet away from her. There had been a time when they both would have closed that distance and she would have been in his arms.
“No,” he said. “It’s terrible.”
“What’s going to happen to Haley?”
“I don’t know.”
She went to push a chunk of hair out of her eyes and smeared blood across her cheek.
“You’re bleeding,” Steve said.
Once he would have taken her hand and kissed her wounded finger.
“I cut myself.”
“Why don’t you wear gloves when you’re working on this thing?” he asked, more annoyed than concerned.
Suffering for your art? Mendez had asked her.
She wondered what either of them would think if she told them the physical pain was a relief.
Another car door slammed out on the street, and the opportunity was lost—not that she ever would have taken it. Her daughter was home. Time to put on a happier face.
17
Wendy went to her room as soon as dinner was over and the kitchen was cleaned up. She tended not to hang around downstairs when both her mom and dad were home because they weren’t happy and everyone was tense and it sucked. And it was her fault, which sucked even worse.
Her parents stayed together because of her, because that was what she wanted. Only it wasn’t. She wanted them to go back in time and be happy the way they used to be—that was what she wanted. If she could have time-traveled like Michael J. Fox in Back to the Future, she would have gone back and changed so many things.
She would have gone back and made sure that whatever had happened to make her parents fall out of love never happened. She would have gone back to that day last October and made sure she and Tommy didn’t take the shortcut through Oakwoods Park, and they never would have found that dead body, and none of what had happened would have happened.
But she couldn’t trave
l back in time. She couldn’t fix what was wrong between her mom and dad. And she was too afraid of losing what family life she had to tell them not to try anymore.
Restless and depressed, she wandered around her sunny yellow bedroom with its white wicker furniture and her stuffed animals on the bed. Her Barbies lived in their own little cul-de-sac in the corner in the pink Barbie dream house with the pink Barbie Corvette parked beside it.
Wendy felt like she was in somebody else’s room. The room of a stupid happy child who didn’t know the things Wendy knew.
She turned her radio on and sat down on the bed. Her newest favorite song was playing—“True Colors,” by Cyndi Lauper. She had been crazy for the song “Girls Just Wanna Have Fun.” She would always sing along and dance and be ridiculous when the song came on the radio. Her mom had joined in with her sometimes. Tommy had always blushed and practically died of embarrassment when she did it.
Tommy wasn’t allowed to listen to popular music because his mother was a bitch. Wendy wasn’t actually allowed to use that word, but she used it all the time in her head—and out of earshot of adults. Janet Crane was an evil bitch. She had always been a bitch to Tommy, and then she took him and left, and nobody knew where they were.
Wendy kept hoping she would hear from him, that he would send her a postcard or a letter or something just to let her know he was all right and that he was thinking about her. They had been best friends since the third grade. But more than a year had passed with no word. In her darker moments Wendy wondered if the Evil Bitch might have killed him, just like Tommy’s father had killed all those women.
The world was such a dark place. So many bad things happened. It made her feel stupid to have a sunny yellow bedroom.
After everything that had happened with the murders, and Tommy’s dad attacking Miss Navarre, and Tommy disappearing, Miss Navarre had tried to get their fifth-grade class interested in something good, something positive.
They had begun to follow the space shuttle program and learn about the astronauts and the scientific experiments they would perform on the next mission. It had been especially fun because one of the astronauts—Christa McAuliffe—was a schoolteacher. They had all been so excited to watch the launch on the twenty-eighth of January. But seventy-three seconds into the flight the space shuttle Challenger had exploded, killing everyone on board right before their very eyes.
Weeks later the navy had found the crew compartment in the ocean with the bodies of all seven astronauts still inside. Wendy had had nightmares for weeks about looking inside the capsule and seeing the rotting corpses.
And not long after that a nuclear power plant had a meltdown in the Soviet Union, and killed and poisoned thousands of people and animals and the environment, and now there would be freaks and mutants there like something out of a horror movie—only it was real.
It just seemed like everything in the world was bad and wrong.
Now her mother’s friend Marissa was dead. Wendy had known Marissa too, and Marissa’s daughter, Haley, was so cute and sweet. Wendy had begged and begged to babysit for Haley, but her mom thought she was too young and wouldn’t let her babysit until she was at least thirteen. Two whole years away.
And her parents wouldn’t say exactly what had happened to Marissa, but Wendy knew she had been murdered, because she had heard part of the story on the news.
She didn’t know why people did these things. Why had Tommy’s father killed those women? Why would anyone kill Marissa? No adult had given her a real answer. They didn’t know. Did people just wake up one day and decide they wanted to kill? Did they just get so angry they couldn’t stop themselves?
She had especially wondered about that because of Dennis Farman. Dennis was just a kid, like she was a kid, like Cody Roache was a kid. He had always been a bully, had always liked hurting people—maybe because his father had picked on him and hurt him, Miss Navarre had said—but why had he decided that fateful Saturday to bring a knife to the park and stab Cody and try to stab her?
Did he just go crazy? Did people just go crazy? Would she go crazy? Would her dad go crazy? Would a crazy person come in their house one night and kill them just because he felt like it?
Wendy wandered into her bathroom and looked at herself in the mirror, and wondered whether other people wondered these things too or whether she was losing her mind. How did people know if they were going crazy? If they were crazy didn’t they probably think they were normal, and everyone else would think they were crazy?
Just to try to do something normal, she brushed her teeth and took the scrunchie out of her hair. She had done her hair that day mostly down but with some messy sections snatched up into an off-center ponytail that looked like a blond fountain coming out the top of her head. She liked to dress like her favorite singers: Madonna, Cyndi Lauper, the girls in the Bangles. Although she didn’t put as much effort into it lately as she once had.
Everyone told her she looked just like her mother, which she did. They had the same thick, wavy hair that was all different shades of blond but darker at the roots. They had the same unusual blue eyes. Wendy had grown nearly two inches since fifth grade. In another year or two she would be as tall as her mother.
As she crawled under the covers of her bed she made a vow to herself not to end up as unhappy as her mother.
She snuggled her favorite brown teddy bear and kissed his nose. She was going to grow up to be a famous journalist, and she was never going to get married—until the perfect man came along.
She pressed her cheek to her bear’s head and whispered his name as she closed her eyes: “Tommy.”
18
On the other side of town, in the county mental health facility, Dennis Farman wondered too, what made people crazy.
He sat on his bed in his room, all alone because there were no other kids in the place, and because people thought he was dangerous and would probably kill a roommate in his sleep. The lights in his room had been turned out for the night, but pale yellow light came in from the hall, and white-blue light came in through the window from the parking lot.
He had none of his own prized possessions here. The pocketknife he had stolen from his dad’s dresser—the one he had used to stab Cody—had been taken by the detectives. He had put all of his most treasured things in his backpack that day, including the dried-out head of a rattlesnake he had watched a gardener kill with a spade. He never got his backpack back after they arrested him.
The knife had been the most important thing. He had always pretended that his father had given it to him for his birthday when he was nine. He had made up all kinds of fantasies about his father showing him how to use it, the two of them camping out and using the knife to cut branches and gut fish. The truth was, his father had never given him a present, had never even remembered his birthday.
When Dennis had asked Miss Navarre when he could get his knife back, she had looked at him like he was crazy. Maybe crazy ran in his family. He was locked up in a mental hospital after all.
Dennis had never thought of his father as crazy, just mean. But in the end, everyone said he had to have lost his mind to do what he had done.
People didn’t think Dennis knew what all had happened, but he did. He had never told anyone, but he had been right there the night his father had beaten his mother to death. Hiding up in his room, he had heard every slap, every curse, every cry. It hadn’t been the first time (so he didn’t think his father had gone crazy, just that he was drunk and mean, as he often was) and he hadn’t thought his mother would die, but she had.
The rest of what had left him an orphan he had heard in bits and pieces, listening to people when they didn’t know it. That was one thing he was really good at.
He had been in a room at the sheriff’s office when it happened, on account of everyone making such a stink about him stabbing Cody—who didn’t die. Some stupid cow from Child Services had been trying to get him to draw pictures of his feelings. What the fuck was that? You couldn’t d
raw a picture of something you couldn’t see.
Anyway, his dad had come into the sheriff’s office and took the sheriff hostage and threatened to kill him. But in the end he had killed himself.
His dad was a loser. Dennis was glad he was dead. And his mother was a stupid, useless drunk who never did anything for him. All she ever did was yell at him. He didn’t need her.
He didn’t need anybody.
Nobody liked him anyway. He had never had a real friend. Everybody said Cody had been his friend, but Cody had only been his friend because he was afraid of Dennis and it was smarter for him to be Dennis’s friend than not. Stupid little cockroach. Dennis had showed him.
Miss Navarre didn’t like him. But she came to see him anyway.
Dennis knew she had married the FBI agent, but he wouldn’t call her by her married name. She would always be Miss Navarre to him. She was trying to help him. Nobody else wanted to help him. Everybody else wanted him to go to prison and rot there for the rest of his life. He had heard people say over and over that there was no fixing what was wrong with him.
But Miss Navarre was trying to help him.
Sometimes he dreamed about Miss Navarre.
Sometimes he dreamed about doing things to her. Bad things, dirty things.
Dennis knew all about sex. He used to like to go around at night and look in people’s windows. He had seen all kinds of people do all kinds of things to each other: men with women, women with women, men with men. A lot of it was gross, but he got excited anyway.
He had watched Miss Navarre with the FBI guy do it on the back porch of her house. He had never thought of her doing anything like that. She was a teacher. He never thought of teachers having sex or having to go to the bathroom or farting or anything like that. It made him angry that she wasn’t as perfect as she pretended to be. She was just a slut, fucking a guy on her back porch.
But she came to see him.
She tried to help him.
She was pretty.
She was a whore.
