“Honey shaved his head,” JT said. “He had a cane, and he was sitting up front, big as fucking Dallas, in the handicapped seat of a bus bound for LA, like no one could see through that shit. What an idiot.”
“What will happen now?” Annie took the heated soup out of the microwave and set it on the table in front of JT.
“They’ll extradite him, bring him back here. Audi acted like he didn’t know what he’d get charged with. He said they don’t have all the evidence together yet. I told him he better not say the word accident to me or I’d go through the phone and wring his neck.”
“Where are the crackers?” Annie shifted things around in the cabinet next to the sink. She was sick of it, the whole ordeal. Every indication so far was that the shooting was exactly that, a horrible, tragic accident. But Bo was gone, regardless, and nothing was going to bring him back. Let him rest in peace, she wanted to say. Let us all rest in peace.
But JT didn’t want peace. He wanted revenge.
She sat down across from him. “I called the coroner’s office. They’ll release Bo’s body to the funeral home tomorrow. We need to talk about final arrangements.”
Because they had both heard Bo express a wish for it, they asked that he be cremated. The funeral home director suggested that since they weren’t active members of a church, they might want to hold a service at the funeral home itself. There was a small chapel there for that purpose, but JT and Annie said no. It would only draw the media attention that was currently trained on Lauren Wilder’s family back to their own, and neither Annie nor JT could tolerate the idea of being back in the news.
A couple of days later, after collecting Bo’s ashes, they drove to the switchyard, where he had often sought refuge. Annie carried the canister, and JT walked alongside her, hands shoved into his jacket pockets. She was nervous and wished she could say how little she knew about how to do this, but he seemed so remote from her, and she was hesitant to intrude on his silence.
They threaded their way between the corroding walls of a half dozen long-out-of-service railcars, went another fifty yards or so beyond them, and finally Annie stopped at a spot where the weed-choked rails curved right before losing themselves in the blue distance. A crenellated lacework of clouds clung to the horizon, and although the sun had risen above them, the morning was chilly with a bit of wind. As if by mutual consent, Annie and JT turned their backs to it, facing east, facing the light, and when she opened the canister and tipped it, gently shaking it, they didn’t look at each other. Instead, they looked out, watching as the wind picked up Bo’s remains, scooting them into the air above the rusty tracks and off into the tall grasses that sprouted along the rail bed. It took only moments for the last of him to be gone, to be free.
Annie’s throat knotted with the urgency of her tears, and when JT put his arm around her, she turned her face into his shoulder.
Cooper was sitting on her front steps, Rufus beside him, when she got home. Rufus came to greet her on the front walk, brown eyes liquid with joy, tail wagging. She bent to pat him, to talk silly dog talk to him.
Cooper stood. “Are you okay?”
She shook her head, and when he came to her, she went into his arms, and she cried, and with her face pressed against his chest, she told him about scattering Bo’s ashes.
Once she was quiet, Cooper led her to the steps. Rufus followed, and they sat down.
“I don’t want your pity,” Annie said, wiping her eyes.
“Who said anything about pity?”
She brought her knees close to her chest and wrapped her arms around them. It was cold. She ought to invite Cooper in, make hot tea, share a muffin. She’d brought a few home from the café, apple strudel, a recipe she’d invented.
“I might pity you,” Cooper said, “if I didn’t know how strong you are, but even strong people can use a shoulder now and then. They can use a friend.”
“Yes.” But he had her wrong, she thought. She wasn’t strong. She was lost, as lost as Bo must have felt when he set off walking down that country road to his death. She had resigned herself to never knowing why he’d been there in the first place. The police hadn’t been able to tell her, and if Lauren’s sister, Tara, knew, she wasn’t saying.
“Look, if you want me to leave you alone, all you have to do is say so.”
Annie met Cooper’s gaze. “You’ve been so kind to me, you and your family. I don’t deserve it. I’ve been ungrateful. Mean,” she added.
“You’ve been going through a very rough time,” Cooper said.
She shook her head. “We’re so different, Cooper.”
He asked her what she meant, but how could she tell him that when she thought of his family, his big, happy family, when she thought of the radiating waves of doting parents, grandparents, aunts, uncles, and two dozen cousins that were included in Cooper’s circle, she knew she didn’t belong there? It didn’t matter how much she might want to be part of such a family, yearn for it even, she knew it wouldn’t work. She couldn’t abandon JT to his sorrow and guilt, couldn’t leave him and Bo behind her like closed chapters in a book, and what part of that grim life could she bring into a future with Cooper?
He deserved better.
Not that he’d asked to share a life with her. He had only asked for her friendship. But why go there at all? It was best this way, ended before it ever began, before she could hurt him more than she had already. She stood up. “I should let you go,” she said, “before you and Rufus freeze.”
Disappointment flared in his eyes, but all he said was, “All right, then” and “I guess I’ll be seeing you sometime.” He looked down at Rufus. “You ready, buddy?”
Rufus wagged his tail uncertainly, looking from Cooper to Annie, and the worry and dismay in his eyes nearly shattered her resolve. Swiftly, she bent and hugged him, and without another glance at him or Cooper, she left them standing on her front steps. It took every ounce of her will to close her door.
As Annie had anticipated, there was nothing in the coroner’s final report to indicate Bo’s death was other than accidental.
The evening after the ruling became official, Annie made lasagna and brought it to JT’s house.
“You heard the news.” He was grim but quiet.
Annie braced herself. “I did. It’s what we expected, right?”
“Yeah, but you know what pisses me off? How every time I turn on the TV, I have to look at that asshole Wilder’s mug shot. I have to listen to the hundred-and-ten ways he ripped people off, but not one of those media ghouls ever mentions the fact that he also shot my son. It’s like it never happened.”
No one cares.
They’ve all forgotten.
Annie waited for JT to say these things, too.
But he didn’t. Instead, he said he’d gone for a drive earlier.
Annie looked at him.
“I went to see where Bo was killed.”
“Why?”
“I needed to see where it happened, if it was true you couldn’t see the road, the way the detectives said.”
Annie drank her iced tea. It was what Detectives Cosgrove and Willis had reported after they’d examined the scene. They’d found it to be exactly as Tara Tate described it. Some of the cans and bottles Greg and Jeff used as targets were still standing on the ledge. There were shell casings on the ground, in a pattern consistent with target practice. They’d found the gun, too, an old Colt .45, in the woods across the road, where Tara had said Jeff tossed it.
“Could you see the road?” Annie asked JT.
“No,” he said, and the syllable rang with his resentment.
Annie kept still.
“It tears me up, all three of them getting off like what they did was nothing. It’s not right.” JT dropped his fork onto his plate, making a clatter.
“Sheriff Audi didn’t say they’d get off. Maybe Tar
a will, but Jeff and Greg are both being charged.” Annie set down her fork. She wasn’t hungry.
Greg Honey was still awaiting extradition, but when Annie had last spoken to Sheriff Audi, he’d said it was only a matter of days until the man would be returned to Lincoln County, where at the very least, like Jeff, he’d be charged with evading the police, hampering their investigation, and concealing evidence. There could be other charges made against them. Fines might be levied. The search for Bo had cost the county a lot in man-hours.
“Bo’s death is still an active homicide investigation,” Audi had said, and he’d qualified that by explaining he meant in the way that someone had taken the life of someone else.
“It’s bullshit,” JT said. “That Tate woman—how in the hell do you sit by and let the cops and other folks—hell one of them was her own sister—how could you let the search go on and not contact somebody?” He wiped his face with his napkin, and his hands shook.
Annie wondered if every meal would be like this, eaten in an atmosphere of bitter hostility.
JT wasn’t finished. “I tell you what. I ever see one of those assholes on the street, I won’t be responsible for what happens. You think if I whip out my gun and shoot one of them, they’ll rule it an accident and let me off?”
“You don’t even have a gun—”
“Wilder’s wife,” JT said.
“What about her?” Annie asked. “She hasn’t done anything. She wasn’t there.”
“She’s a dope fiend. Probably had Wilder screwing people out of their hard-earned cash to finance her habit.”
“That is ridiculous, even for you!” Annie threw down her napkin.
JT looked at her in amazement.
“I can’t stand this. If you’re going to give yourself a heart attack, you can do it alone.” Without waiting for an answer, Annie took her plate into the kitchen, set it in the sink, walked out the back door, got into her car, and drove home.
That night, unable to sleep, she sat on her front porch, huddled in her jacket, fists pushed into her pockets.
Earlier that day, at the café, Madeleine had said nearly the same thing as JT, that she wanted the three who were to blame for Bo’s death to pay. She wanted them to be sentenced to serving time in prison. Life, she had said. A life for a life, she meant.
“It’s not right, them letting Tara Tate go,” Madeleine echoed JT’s opinion. “It’s as if the justice system in this state doesn’t consider what she did criminal. It makes me so angry.”
“Don’t do this to yourself,” Annie said. “You’ll make yourself ill.”
Madeleine didn’t answer; she only stood there, trembling, incensed, hurt.
Taking a chance, Annie reached for her, putting her arms carefully around the old woman’s shoulders, bringing her into a tentative embrace.
Madeleine had bent her face to Annie’s shoulder. “I can’t help it,” she had said. “I loved that boy.”
Annie lowered her forehead to her knees now, feeling the night chill, feeling the concrete step, hard and cold underneath her. It couldn’t go on, this terrible, wounding hostility. It was as if Bo kept dying over and over.
He would hate it, she thought.
She was sweeping her front stoop on the next afternoon when she heard a car, an SUV, stop in the driveway. She looked up, and her eyes connected with Lauren’s through the windshield, and the moment spun out as fragile and delicate as handblown glass. Annie couldn’t move. She watched Lauren get out of the car, and when she leaned through the driver’s-side window toward the passenger seat, she saw the other woman. Their voices carried on the breeze.
“I can’t,” said the woman.
“You wanted to come” and “It’s the right thing,” said Lauren.
And now Annie realized the passenger was Tara Tate, Lauren’s sister.
Annie didn’t know what to do. She turned to go into the house; then clutching the broomstick, she thought, no, she wouldn’t run from them like a scared rabbit.
Tara got out of the car and met Lauren in front of it. Lauren kept her glance on Annie as she approached, but Tara watched her feet, shuffling along as if she were old.
“Can we talk, please?” Lauren asked, pausing at the foot of the steps.
“How did you know where I live?”
“Your address is in the book.”
Annie looked off, down the street.
“Tara asked if I’d bring her to you,” Lauren said.
“Why isn’t she in jail like your husband?” Annie asked as if she didn’t know. As Cosgrove had explained, being complicit in a crime wasn’t necessarily illegal.
Tara looked up now. “I wish I were.”
Annie thought she would feel the same if their positions were reversed.
“I’m so sorry,” Tara said, “and I know it means nothing, changes nothing, but I wanted to tell you anyway.” Her words dissolved, and for a long misshapen moment, there was only the sound of her breath, ragged with the attempt to quiet her tears.
They rimmed her chin, fell onto her crossed arms. Tara seemed unaware of them.
Annie said, “Detective Cosgrove told me you tried to save him.”
Tara swiped at her eyes as if they made her mad. “I wish I’d done more.”
“What? Like reported it?” Annie asked sharply.
“Yes,” Tara answered.
A car passed in the street. There was a honk; the driver waved. Annie didn’t wave back. She looked at Tara. “Did Bo—did he say anything?” She hated how her voice broke. How it sounded as if she were pleading. She pressed her fist to her mouth.
A sound burst from Tara’s chest, liquid and hurt.
“Tell me,” Annie said.
“He wanted help, that was all. He wanted someone to help him.” Tara half turned as if to leave, staggering slightly.
Lauren steadied her.
Annie wiped furiously at her eyes.
“I know it doesn’t matter,” Tara said, “that it’s no comfort to you or Bo’s dad, but I will never forgive myself.”
Annie had nothing, no words.
“If there were a way to undo it—” Tara’s voice slipped.
Lauren pulled her closer.
Moments of silence ticked past, hot and bright as sparks.
Annie looked at Lauren. “I heard about your husband.”
Lauren’s mouth flattened, and there was a look of forbidding in her eyes. The subject was off-limits. Taboo. The word came into Annie’s mind.
She set the broom against the porch post, meaning to go into the house, to close the door in their faces, but instead, she turned back. “How could you?” Walking to the edge of the stoop, she addressed Tara. “If you’d shot an animal, some varmint, you’d have had the decency to bury it.” Annie clamped her jaw.
“Greg is back. He got here late last night. He’s been charged. You heard, didn’t you?”
Lauren offered this as a consolation prize. What did she want? Thanks? A reward?
“He and Jeff will be punished,” Lauren said. “At least Detective Cosgrove told me they wouldn’t just get off.”
Another consolation prize, Annie thought. She wondered if Lauren wanted her husband to pay for what he’d done. What must her and her children’s lives be like now, with their dad jailed and facing a whole laundry list of federal charges, including bank fraud? The media had dubbed him Bernie Madoff Junior, as if it were funny. But some folks around town, who were as mad as JT, called him a lot worse. A goddamn liar, a fucking thief. They said he was a coward. He’d been respected as a businessman, a neighbor, and a father, and deeply admired for the care he’d taken of Lauren throughout her long ordeal. Now they felt betrayed.
Annie looked at Lauren. “Nothing will bring Bo back,” she said.
“No,” Lauren answered.
“I always felt a
s if something terrible would happen to him.” Annie felt compelled to say it.
“Your mind goes to the most horrible places,” Lauren said. “It isn’t your fault,” she added.
It was what Annie’s mother would have said, and it touched the painful crux of it, the bruised heart of Annie’s grief. She looked away.
“You did everything you could for Bo.” Lauren spoke so softly, as if she and Annie were alone, and there was nothing between them but the connection of the heart they had shared when they met. “It was his choice to live the way he did, to put himself at risk. He wanted to be independent. He wanted to be free, and you gave him that. You gave him his dignity.”
Annie didn’t answer; she couldn’t. It was everything she needed to hear and couldn’t yet believe, from the most unlikely source. “I’m going inside now,” she said.
“Thank you,” Tara said, and Annie nodded.
Down that same long tunnel in her mind, where there was sadness for the others who had been impacted by this senseless tragedy: Lauren’s children, poor Madeleine and Charlotte Meany, other innocent and mostly innocent bystanders, there was also hope. Annie hoped things would work out for Tara; she hoped Lauren and her children would be all right, and going into the house, she thought how strange and surprising it was that she could feel as bad for them as she did for herself.
30
Annie was kinder to me than I deserve,” Tara said.
They had stopped by her house after leaving Annie’s so Tara could pack some clothes, her toothbrush, the basics of what she’d need to stay with Lauren a few days. Neither of them wanted to be by themselves. Lauren wasn’t sure which one of them needed the other one more. She put the socks and underwear Tara brought her into Tara’s quilted tote. “It was brave what you did, facing Annie. I’m proud of you for it.”
“If I were her, I think I would want to rip out my guts.”
Lauren zipped the tote closed. “Come on, girlfriend. Let’s go home.”
Drew was at the island, eating a bowl of Honey Nut Cheerios. He greeted his aunt, but all he said to Lauren was, “When are you going to the store? There’s nothing to eat.”
Crooked Little Lies Page 34
