Playing Dead

by Julia Heaberlin

  Jack transferred the prescription bottle out of my reach, onto the mantel.

  “I make an excellent doctored-up Prego.” He held up the jar. He had a new sling, I noticed. Bright blue. “Are you in for dinner? I came by to do a little more research with you.”

  Well, I was in no shape for that.

  But, to my surprise, I was ravenous.

  “Go for it,” I said, my eyes drifting closed.

  He didn’t seem to expect any assistance in the kitchen and I was incapacitated enough not to give him any. He efficiently turned out a Caesar salad, warm French bread, and a decent “doctored” sauce piled with a mountain of snowy Parmesan cheese. He brought our plates out on two old metal Beatles TV trays he found in the pantry.

  I didn’t want to think too deeply about where Jack learned to provide such a simple, warm act because then I’d have to accept Jack as a human being with actual feelings. One-dimensional asshole Jack was enough for me.

  He hinted that he could spend the night so we’d be ready to get to work in the morning. In my chemically induced haze, this seemed perfectly logical. Like a civilized divorced couple, we agreed he could take over the guest room downstairs for the night. I told him where the sheets were. Making his bed seemed a little too intimate and I wasn’t sure how steady I’d be on my feet. He insisted on cleaning up the kitchen by himself and later, while I cuddled with Peter Rabbit and kept my eyes half-open to the game, he texted his boss.

  As Jack settled in to watch the eighth inning of a Rangers blowout, I pushed myself up from the couch.

  “Let me know how it ends,” I told him. “I’m going to bed.”

  “I’ll go with you. Help you navigate the stairs.”

  I shrugged and headed for the staircase, my comforter slung over my shoulder and trailing behind me, Linus-style. Jack caught me when I tripped on it a few steps from the top.

  In my room, I kicked some clothes on the floor out of the way and fell on the bed, not bothering to untangle the sheets or say good night.

  A wispy thought floated to the surface as I drifted again on that lovely sea.

  Wasn’t it most likely that Anthony Marchetti was warning me about Jack?

  Wouldn’t a reporter choose to do his research with a fellow reporter? Or by himself? Why the hell had I let my guard down?

  Jack was busy at the window, checking the lock, pulling down the shade, before moving deliberately toward the bed.

  He reached down, looming over me.

  I wanted to protest but I couldn’t.

  He grasped my wrist firmly.

  He was feeling my pulse.

  The last thing I remember is Jack’s silhouette, carved out by the hall light as he leaned against the doorframe.

  I have no idea how long he stood there.

  CHAPTER 16

  My eyelids struggled to open, and when they did, I was confused. Lights out, shade pulled, a glimmer of gray coming through.

  Music drifted up the stairs.

  Dreamy. Sad.

  Mama playing.

  Am I still asleep? Thunder rumbled like distant drums, and the first drops of rain slapped the window.

  I pinched my arm. It hurt for a full five seconds. Definitely wide awake. Still, the music drifted up.

  Where in the hell is that coming from? Where, I suddenly remembered, is Jack?

  I sat up abruptly. Last night’s clothes, still on. Thank God.

  I stumbled to the hallway.

  Chopin.

  “Hello?” I called, moving tentatively down the stairs, the grand piano emerging into view like a black, shiny beast. I half expected to see Mama sitting there in her hospital gown.

  The piano bench was empty, coated with a fine layer of dust.

  The living room, empty.

  The music still playing.

  Nocturne No. 19.

  One of three nocturnes my mother loved to perform.

  Now its notes were filtering under the closed kitchen door.

  Physically, achingly pulling me against my will.

  I held my breath and threw open the door.

  My eyes set on it the second I stepped onto the cold tile. Mama’s old radio by the kitchen sink, blaring. I thought it was broken.

  I made four quick strides and flipped it off, whipping back to survey the room, getting my bearings in the sudden silence, trying to slow my heart. One of Granny’s pale green antique McCoy mugs sat on the table holding the dregs of cold coffee. It was next to a cheap fold-out driving map of Oklahoma I’d never seen before. The newspaper story of Jennifer Coogan’s murder was paper-clipped to it.

  The louvered door to the laundry room began to slowly slide open.

  Suddenly, the house wasn’t silent anymore.

  It was filled with a bloodcurdling scream. Mine.

  Jack emerged.

  “What the hell is wrong with you?” he snapped.

  “You purposely scare me,” I said, breathing hard. “Did you mess with the radio?”

  He gave me an odd, pitying look.

  “It’s a nice station. Classical. Out of Dallas.”

  “Mama’s favorite,” I said dully.

  “That’s where the dial was set when I turned it on.”

  He stepped toward me and I lunged a step back.

  “Is there anything that would calm you down? That’s not in the Xanax bottle?”

  You getting the hell out of my house.

  “Dr Pepper,” I said.

  I dropped into a chair because my legs had turned to rubber. Jennifer Coogan’s sweet face smiled up at me from the newspaper article, telling me I was overreacting.

  “I borrowed your computer.” Jack handed me my drink. “Checked into the newspaper articles. My FBI source emailed me some information on that girl who was murdered in Oklahoma. Are you calm enough to hear more?”

  I nodded, itching to slap his patronizing face, considering the possibility that he had done more with my computer than use the internet. Most reporters—hell, most people—wouldn’t be caught dead without their own laptops or smartphones. I dredged my brain trying to remember what would be on mine that I didn’t want him to see.

  “I thought it was possible that Jennifer Coogan was a hit.” He pointed to the headline on the table: WOMAN’S BODY FOUND IN LITTLE RIVER. “The FBI was called in briefly on it because it was unusual. Two agents from Oklahoma City. Both retired now. Jennifer was raped and shot in the back of the head, then dumped here.” He took a pencil and circled a blue squiggle that represented the Little River.

  “She was duct-taped to a jumbo can of hominy and a six-pound can of ready-made nacho cheese sauce from the restaurant where she worked. One was strapped to her feet, the other around her chest. But everything else about it looks kind of professional.”

  “A can of nacho cheese sauce,” I echoed miserably.

  “The cans are details not released to the press. The killer or killers weren’t too bright if they intended to send her permanently to the bottom of the river. Kids out fishing found her body around dawn three days after she went missing. She’d washed up between a couple of rocks in a tiny inlet. The thing is, the girl was no one. A college student home waitressing for the summer. No criminal record. Conservative family. A career beauty contestant in high school. Runner-up in Miss National Teenager her senior year. Traveled very little outside the confines of her pageant schedule and her move to college. Not many girls her age lived a safer lifestyle.”

  The idea that Jennifer Coogan was “no one” said volumes about Jack.

  “How did you really get this stuff?” I asked.

  He dumped the cold coffee in the sink, as if he didn’t hear me.

  “There’s never been any connection drawn between Coogan’s case and your mother’s,” he said. “We probably shouldn’t read too much into them. Your mother does have mental issues.”

  She didn’t when she put those articles in that box, I thought. And when did Jack and I become a “we”?

  “So, one of y
our FBI sources found this information in an old file? Jennifer Coogan’s file? He just came up with it this morning?” My voice was sharp with skepticism.

  “It’s a pretty sure bet that murdered girl and Anthony Marchetti have nothing to do with each other.”

  “Whoever said they did?” Interesting that Jack had been drawn to Jennifer Coogan, too.

  “You know, Tommie, I think it’s a good idea if I head out. I seem to be making you … agitated.”

  And you’ve gotten whatever you could out of me, I thought.

  As soon as the door clicked shut, I tossed the Dr Pepper can into a paper bag under the sink I’d rigged up for recycling and walked a direct path to the living room, where I threw the deadbolt. The prescription bottle was there, perched on the mantel, beckoning. My hand closed around it, and I wondered, not for the first time, why it had been prescribed for a man who hadn’t shown me a moment of visible panic in his life.

  In seconds, I stood over the toilet in Mama’s bathroom, tossing the pills into the water and flushing them away.

  I headed back to the laundry room feeling a whole lot better about myself.

  Personally, I wasn’t done with Jennifer. My laptop was still on the dryer, fully charged. I unplugged it and powered it up on Mama’s desk. It didn’t take long to figure out that Jennifer’s sensational murder had resonated throughout the state of Oklahoma and into bordering Texas towns.

  Beautiful, popular girl, brave enough to tackle Whitney Houston songs for the talent portion of her competitions. She dreamed of world peace and a career teaching deaf students, until she was raped, shot, and tossed in a river like trash in the town where she trick-or-treated and got her first kiss and made brownies out of a box at slumber parties. She’d been turned into a terrible cliché a hundred times over on blogs and murder websites that thrived on digging up dead girls.

  I hit the jackpot with The Oklahoman’s coverage. When I searched in their archives for Jennifer Coogan, eighty-two stories popped up. They could be mine for $3.95 apiece or I could pay $19.99 for a bundle of twenty-five. Otherwise, I’d have to be satisfied with the headlines, the bylines, and the first two lines of each story.

  I could tell just scrolling through the list that two ambitious reporters churned out double-bylined 1A stories for three weeks, inside follow-ups for months, and a front-page one-year anniversary piece headlined WHAT HAPPENED TO JENNIFER? The most recent brief, only six months ago, said that 48 Hours had been sniffing around, considering a segment. The producers were following up on a tip about Jennifer’s boyfriend at OU, who had disappeared around the same time as her murder.

  I whipped out my credit card and spent the next hour and a half printing, reading, and highlighting.

  Jack might not think Jennifer Coogan had anything to do with Anthony Marchetti, but I wasn’t so sure.

  Then, in the schizophrenic manner that had become my life, I ran upstairs, dug the pink letter out of my purse, and checked to be sure, even though I’d memorized the telephone number days ago.

  I dialed before I could change my mind.

  A brisk secretary answered: “Pfieffer, Smith, and Zemeck. How may I direct your call?”

  Jack Smith had searched the house while I slept.

  If I hadn’t been in my current obsessive-compulsive, paranoid state, I probably wouldn’t have noticed. But there were signs. The blue and white plastic ice trays in the freezer were stacked in a different color order. Blue, blue, white, white, blue, blue. A drawer in my mother’s room stuck out a quarter of an inch. The contents of my backpack were still messy, but slightly neater.

  I stared at myself in one of Nordstrom’s three-way mirrors, thinking I’d dropped at least a size in the last two weeks. A pretty export from Britain named Beatrice was eyeballing me at a 6 and asking whether I thought jade, mint, or celadon would work better with my coloring. I was wondering whether Jack Smith was a professional investigator for hire or a hit man.

  Today, though, it was Rosalina Marchetti who was pulling at the strings, the zippers, the snaps, the buttons. Mr. Zemeck, her Chicago lawyer, had been terse in our two back-to-back conversations about my trip tomorrow to see her. He wearily recited Rosalina’s instructions for me.

  “Show up at two. Dress for high tea. Wear green. Turn off your cell phone. No perfume.”

  “Green? As in the color of the Grinch and dill pickles?”

  “There’s no need for sarcasm. She’s eccentric.” And then, a little huffily: “If you have to buy something to wear, send the receipt to my secretary.”

  “Money’s not an issue,” I said.

  “I’m sure.” A small sigh escaped through the phone, and I pictured a rattled little man with a paunch, ready to retire from a life attached to a mobster’s wife.

  Less than an hour later, his secretary had reserved a room for me at a downtown Chicago hotel that she cheerfully described as “the hippest thing” and emailed my ticket with an open-ended return. Sadie consulted me several times by cell, on both fashion and my impending trip. Mama was going to finish out the week at the hospital before returning to the nursing home, probably with no memory of ever having left.

  Beatrice handed me a pile of greenery and in a few minutes I ventured out of the dressing room in a mint-colored sundress with so many inside hooks and strap crossovers that it needed a book of directions. But it worked. Oddly elegant. Cinched in all the right places.

  Beatrice gave me a thumbs-up.

  “I’m going to look for shoes,” she said, glancing at my scuffed cowboy boots. “Back in a sec.”

  It was late, almost closing time for the store. She’d left me alone with a three-way mirror and a row of closed dressing-room doors. Ten of them. Taunting me. I fell to my knees and almost stood on my head to check for any feet. My phone buzzed in my purse on the floor, near my ear, and I banged my head hard on the leg of a chair.

  “Dammit!”

  I wanted to throw the phone through the mirror but that would be bad luck.

  I looked at the screen. Private caller. I never used to think of that as a bad thing.

  “Tommie, are you alone?” Today Charla’s voice sounded like it belonged to a member of the mouse family: squeaky and barely audible. “You need to get this guard to lay off. I don’t want to be involved in your family shit, OK?”

  “You need to stop calling me,” I hissed. “I got the gist the first time.”

  “Be nice, will you? I’m under a lot of stress. Last night, the girl across from me hung herself with a pair of silk thong panties her boyfriend snuck in on his own ass. How would you like to wake up to that picture?”

  I wasn’t sure whether she was talking about the hanging or the cross-dressing.

  Charla carried on her rant, now at opera-level pitch. “The food is starting to make my butt look like a beanbag. Even if I get out, nobody’s gonna want me except some loser with a small weenie who bags at Walmart. And now I got myself an exciting new career working for the mob. So don’t you be a-messin’ with me. Do you want your message or not?”

  “Not really,” I said.

  “Honey, you better want it. This is scary shit. Word is, your Daddy has some super-impressive connections, inside and out. I’ve been here six months and I can’t even get a guard to bring me an extra piece of pie unless I let him touch a boob. Today, a badass guard showed me a morgue picture of someone they cut in Huntsville two weeks ago. Said it was just to give me a little incentive to do my job with you properly.”

  Don’t call him my Daddy.

  “Girl, are you listening? Your Daddy wants you to know that quote unquoth: ‘Chicago is a dead end.’ Do you think that’s one of those double entendors or whatever they call them?”

  CHAPTER 17

  I threw a beat-up old Samsonite of Daddy’s onto one of the double beds and applauded myself for arriving intact in Chicago, for not strangling a hapless man in the airport security line who looked surprised—surprised!—at the order to take off his shoes and remove his laptop fro
m its case, for not succumbing to a panic attack when the plane suddenly swayed fifteen thousand feet above the earth.

  The suitcase—hard maroon plastic with a lifetime of scratches—looked anachronistic against an austere modern room, not my taste but high above the noise of Michigan Avenue. The focal point was a sleek floor lamp with a blue neon light shooting up the side that could serve double duty as a nightlight.

  Almost everything in the room was coolly neutral—either white, off-white, gray, or black. In $300-an-hour-decorator-speak, the colors were likely something more poetic, like Lovers’ Moon, November Rain, and Midnight. Yep, the smart-ass part of my brain continued to click along. Maybe inspired by staring at the pink-purple OPI polish on my toenails named My Auntie Drinks Chianti. Pedicure by Maddie. You had to drink to make this stuff up.

  Three hours to go.

  My body had been buzzing like a dying fluorescent light since I woke up. Maybe a quarter of a pill of Xanax would have fixed that if I hadn’t been so rash.

  Plopping onto the other bed, I decided I’d rather be sitting on Black Diablo than alone in a hotel room in a strange city, wondering if I might be shot at in the next few hours or poisoned with a cup of high tea. I’d had plenty of time to interpret Charla’s warning about a dead end.

  I eased the green dress out of the hanging bag in the suitcase for something to do, wondering how many minutes I should allow to strap it on. It was the only dress I tried, but Beatrice insisted it was the one. Would the girl I had been a week ago have so docilely obeyed Rosalina’s peculiar request?

  I opened the mini-bar. No Dr Pepper. I grabbed a Milky Way, a Sprite, and a small can of cashews. When I finished downing that, I took a long shower, carefully applied makeup, pulled my hair off my face with two of Granny’s antique silver hair combs, all while trying not to think about how Rosalina Marchetti could destroy my world with just a few words.

  At one-thirty, when my nerves were about to explode, the doorman helped me climb into a cab. I barely noticed the buildings whizzing by, except when my Armenian driver screeched to a halt to deliver a stream of American curse words at pedestrian tourists. He specifically targeted anyone carrying a red American Girl bag. I counted thirty-two of them in one block and then stopped counting. I knew some mothers of Maddie’s friends who thought nothing of dropping two thousand for a mom-and-daughter weekend trip to the flagship store on Michigan Avenue.