Playing Dead

by Julia Heaberlin

  Jack’s gun was wedged between the cushion and the frame. Had he been reaching for it before I made him stand up?

  I emptied the chamber, stuck the bullets in my pocket, and placed it on the mantel. Fully wired, I glanced at my watch. Ten till one.

  Jack said the answer wasn’t in his Jeep. I tended to believe him. The thought of hauling those files in here and pawing through them was overwhelming. It could take days, and I’d still be nowhere.

  I walked back into the kitchen and nudged Jack with the toe of my boot. Still out.

  I pulled up the leg of his jeans and carefully removed his backup weapon, emptied the chamber, and stuck it in the refrigerator.

  The door to the laundry room was shut.

  I never left it shut.

  I kicked it open and crouched down. Nothing sprang out. Jack didn’t budge.

  Gun drawn, I flipped the switch in the laundry room.

  Nobody.

  I breathed.

  I was facing the map tacked to the wall and the jagged black route I’d drawn across it.

  Two of the newspaper articles began to nag at me: the one about a city councilman’s race in Norman, Oklahoma, and, of course, the tragic story of Jennifer Coogan’s murder in Idabel. They were the only two clippings from the same state and were No. 1 and No. 2 on the map going chronologically by date.

  The thought slammed into me like things often do when you’ve thought too hard about them, as if it had always been there, just waiting for a lull.

  The University of Oklahoma was in Norman. Jennifer Coogan was a student at the University of Oklahoma, waitressing for the summer back home in Idabel. That had to mean something, didn’t it? Was the crooked line the path of a serial killer? Why, why, why would my mother know anything about that? And how could it have anything to do with Anthony Marchetti? Or Rosalina? Or the man snoring on my kitchen floor? Or me?

  I headed to the computer. Obsessively, I raked through the archives of newspapers located in the cities on my map. I searched the FBI official missing persons list, along with a number of other sites. No murders, and no girls went missing in the month before or after the dates on the clips. The city councilman in Norman was squeaky clean and long retired. His name popped up as an elder at the First Presbyterian Church.

  The time on the computer screen read 3:08 a.m.

  I got up and kicked Jack again, noticing for the first time that he no longer had a sling. Was that a fakeout, too?

  “Ow,” he grumbled, turning over, never opening his eyes.

  Back in the laundry room, I flipped off the computer and leaned in to lift the blind on the window, staring into the inkiness of the backyard. Empty, open space.

  Jack R. Smith appeared to be on an obsessive quest. Like me.

  I didn’t think he was my primary enemy, but how many times did the plucky heroine get that part wrong?

  A half an hour later, I was creeping down the hill, Daddy’s hunting backpack slung over my shoulder, stuffed with my laptop, two pairs of my new lace underwear, a T-shirt, a pair of jeans, the Beretta, and a toothbrush.

  “I need a rental car,” I told Victor when he cheerfully pulled up in his taxi to our rusty mailbox on the main road ten minutes later. “Find me one at this hour and you’ll get my undying gratitude and a hundred-dollar tip.”

  “Where the hell are you?”

  The fury in Lyle’s voice through my cell phone was the jolt I needed to stay awake. I was driving through a rare Starbucks-free zone, my eyes drooping dangerously with jet lag and the monotony of navigating country roads for two and a half hours with very little sleep.

  “I’m in Melissa. No, wait, that was a while ago. I’m just outside of Paris. Oui, oui.” I offered up a weak laugh.

  “What the hell are you doing up near the Oklahoma border?”

  You couldn’t throw Lyle, not even for a second. It wouldn’t surprise me if he had every city and town on the U.S. map memorized, along with their latitude and longitude.

  Paris, Texas, was a fly speck on the map, a place to grow up and leave. Its importance in the universe shot up mildly when the enterprising Boiler Makers Local #902 constructed a sixty-five-foot Eiffel Tower replica in the center of town. As I whizzed past, I noticed the addition of a large red cowboy hat perched jauntily on top of it.

  “I’m going to Idabel,” I said in a small voice. “Alone.”

  The deep silence that followed hurt my ears more than the yelling.

  “Lyle? Say something. This is my life, you know. I’m going to lose my mind if this goes on much longer.”

  He made his usual grunting sound. Good, bad, or indifferent, I couldn’t tell, but I was pretty sure he was tussling with himself. He let his reporters do stupid, dangerous things all the time in pursuit of truth and you rarely found their skeletons hanging from trees.

  He finally spoke. “You’re talking to Jennifer Coogan’s parents?”

  “I spoke with them a little while ago. They’re expecting me. So is the sheriff. He’s pulling the file. Very cooperative.” I hesitated. “I told them I was a journalist.”

  “That’s just dandy,” he shot back sarcastically. “I expect a call as soon as it’s over. In fact, I want a call every twenty-four hours, just to know you’re all right. I’m extremely pissed off that you are doing this on your own.”

  “Sorry,” I said meekly.

  After we hung up, my guilt got the better of me. I dialed Hudson, knowing he wouldn’t answer because he let everything go to voicemail when he was on a job. I told him that Jack was laid out drunk on my floor with a Jeep full of documents parked out front. I said I was taking a little trip, but not to worry, that I would see him soon. It was like dropping a little bomb into his cell phone. I was glad I wouldn’t be there when it went off.

  Two hours and a Big Gulp Dr Pepper later, I pulled up to a renovated green storage unit with a flashing red “vacancy” sign. A white banner stretching across the low-slung building advertised itself as the “Sunset Motel, Idabel’s Bargain Bed, Under New Management.”

  The Sunset Motel sat across the street from the Charles Wesley Motor Lodge, a palace in comparison, but the Lodge was booked solid with a bunch of Eagle Scouts. Only in Oklahoma would a religious icon get his own motor lodge. Wesley wrote six thousand hymns, including Granny’s favorite, “Christ the Lord Is Risen Today,” which she belted out a cappella.

  The bare-bones, photo-free website said the Sunset Motel had plenty of its rooms available—I could now see why—and a customer review raved about “good heat, AC, and hot water” although, unfortunately, “there isn’t a good place to pull your boat and four-wheelers up to your door.”

  The strip of rooms faced the main road with barely enough concrete parking in front to keep the end of the cars out of traffic. No office in sight.

  As I crammed my car sideways into the lot, searching for a sign of life, I decided it was probably as good a place as any to hide from the mob. Bullets wouldn’t fly through steel, for one thing. I’d kept one eye on the rearview mirror all the way here, looking for more Louies. I was sure there were more ants in the pile he crawled out of.

  I honked twice, and after a few minutes, a scraggly man in a white T-shirt and jeans came out of one of the units. He stuck his head in the car window, providing a suffocating whiff of bad breath and body odor.

  “Sixty dollars a night, cash,” he said. I opened my purse and handed over $120. From his happy expression, this didn’t happen very often.

  “Two nights,” I said. “I have a reserva—”

  “Don’t need to know who you are.” He thrust a metal key at me through the window. It dangled off a crudely whittled pine bear, a homey touch, maybe what he did in his spare time.

  “Key says thirty-two,” he said, “but you’re in number five. No service after eight.”

  Uh-huh.

  I watched him walk back to his unit, which probably served as both office and home, before making a tight U-turn into space No. 5.

  I op
ened the door to a room more pleasant than its manager—a wood-paneled space right out of the 1960s, including a red phone with an old-fashioned round dial. I liked the clicking noise when I stuck my finger in a hole and gave it a whirl. I thought briefly about calling Hudson again. The room smelled musty but not too bad. And it was deliciously cool.

  The king-sized bed sank easily from the weight of a thousand bodies before me and boasted a scratchy polyester bedspread with a pinecone motif, a few mysterious stains, and pillows that were hard as rocks. I fell asleep instantly.

  CHAPTER 25

  Jennifer Coogan’s childhood home was a small gray box on the outskirts of town. It looked sad, like it gave up after her murder. Slack curtains hung in the windows on either side, making me think of weeping eyes. A wreath with faded yellow daisies that should have been tossed years ago hung on a front door with black paint peeling off in little curls.

  Granny said black doors kept demons in. Or encouraged them to come. I couldn’t remember which.

  Before I got out of the car, I wondered for the hundredth time why Mama would save a story about a college girl’s murder that took place more than two hundred miles away.

  I knocked on the door, my stomach protesting a breakfast of a melted Snickers bar and a warm can of Coke from the Sunset’s vending machine. A woman with bright red hair opened up instantly, as if her hand had been on the knob. Unsmiling, wary.

  “Are you the reporter?” A slight Oklahoma twang.

  “I’m Tommie,” I said. With effort, she stretched her mouth into something resembling a smile.

  “I’m Jen’s mother. Come on in. I got my family here waiting.”

  The living room was painted a harsh yellow, an unsuccessful attempt to make the room appear cheerful. While most people reserved the shrine for the bedroom, the Coogans had crowded the tiny living room with everything Jennifer—soccer and pageant trophies, track ribbons, framed fingerpaint drawings, even a dusty volcano science project with a blue ribbon hanging off it.

  The pictures of her that covered the walls and the tables and the mantel were an assault. There was no other way to describe it. I couldn’t turn my eyes without seeing Jennifer as a baby, as a pageant contestant, as a graduate.

  Jennifer wasn’t just pretty, I realized. She was at least five steps up from pretty. Big green eyes, softly curling auburn hair that fell past her shoulders, and a permanent, genuine smile. I wondered what tiny flaw made her the Miss National Teenager runner-up instead of the queen.

  “Please. Sit down.” Jennifer’s mother gestured toward a highback rose-and-vine-printed chair with dark wood trim that matched the small couch. It held a weary-eyed gray-haired man and a plain young woman who looked ready to run from the room.

  “I’m Leslie. This is my husband, Richard, and our daughter, Amanda. Amanda took off from her job at Wood’s Auto to be here. She was eight when Jen died.” I did the math. That would put Amanda in her early thirties. And desperately unlucky to have to grow up in this claustrophobic house with a ghost she could never live up to.

  I let an awkward silence lay among us and studied the three of them, now in a prim row on the couch. Above their heads, a large silver crucifix hung between two Olen Mills portraits of a smiling Jennifer in the head-tossed-over-the-shoulder pose, probably taken shortly before her death. She was one of the few people I’d ever seen who took to that pose naturally.

  Leslie Coogan’s red hair, surely gray underneath, was bottled. My hairdresser said anyone could be a redhead, you just had to find the right color red, but he hadn’t met Leslie Coogan. Another morbid salute to Jennifer? Amanda’s left hand sparkled with a tiny diamond. She was getting out, thank God. Richard Coogan’s grimace reminded me of a patient whose morphine had worn off.

  Still, I felt something that resembled hope emanating off that couch. It was as if all three of them were waiting for me to tell them that, twenty-five years later, it was all just a big misunderstanding and that Jennifer wasn’t the bloated thing dragged out of the river, after all.

  “Do you think you’ll be able to find the killer after all these years?” Mrs. Coogan asked, eagerly leaning forward, saving me from an introduction.

  “I can’t even begin to promise you that,” I said.

  Richard Coogan contemplated me as if I were another giant disappointment in a life crammed with them. “Nothing could make it worse. Our lives have been over for years.”

  I’m not sure anybody but me noticed the slight twitch of Amanda’s lips when he said that.

  Richard spit out the saga of Jennifer’s murder like a well-rehearsed speech, mostly things that matched my internet research. But I didn’t interrupt. I needed to feel his pain for myself, a part of my process. Sadie had warned me for years that it was dangerous for me to carry around so many people’s hurt.

  “Jen always closed up alone every third Saturday night,” Mrs. Coogan told me. “I told Richard he should go up and check on her when she wasn’t home by midnight. But Richard said nothing bad ever happens in Idabel. And we went to sleep.” Tears welled in her eyes.

  “Tell me about her boyfriend at OU. The one who disappeared. Did you meet him?”

  Mrs. Coogan pulled a tissue out of her sweater pocket and dabbed her eyes.

  “No, but she really liked him. They talked on the phone a lot. His name was Barry. They’d been dating for about five months. Jennifer said he didn’t like his picture taken so we never knew what he looked like. The police found that real suspicious.”

  “What about the letter?” Amanda prodded her, in a barely audible voice.

  “Oh, yes.” Mrs. Coogan got up and opened a drawer in an end table stuffed with letters and cards. “He did write her letters over the summer. I couldn’t find them anywhere when the police asked for them, not in her room or her car, but this one arrived a few days after she died. The police fingerprinted it but couldn’t find anything. Maybe he used gloves. Here it is.”

  I tried not to appear too eager as she handed over a small white envelope with Jennifer’s name and address in clean, bold printing. Not cramped and distressed, like a maniacal killer of young women. No return address.

  I scanned the one-page letter written on a spare sheet of notebook paper. It was a short, funny note about his landlady’s obsession with her poodle, Queen Anne Boleyn. He liked his new bartending job. He missed Jennifer.

  No misspellings or grammatical errors. Based on this single piece of evidence, I liked Barry.

  I handed the letter back and Mrs. Coogan placed it carefully in the drawer.

  “He signed it with six X’s and ten O’s,” she said.

  I stood up. “Thank you so much for your time. I’ll let you know right away if I find anything that sheds light on your daughter’s case.”

  “That’s it?” Red splotches spread like a weather map over her face. “You’ve got nothing for us?”

  Amanda was up in a flash, moving toward the door, pulling me with her.

  I hesitated as we reached the door and decided it was worth the risk.

  “Just one thing. Do any of you know an Ingrid McCloud? Or did Jennifer?”

  All three of them stared at me blankly.

  “An Ingrid Mitchell? A Genoveve Roth?”

  They shook their heads.

  “Um, well, thank you, anyway, for your time.”

  “Don’t mention it,” Mrs. Coogan said sarcastically. “Really, don’t.”

  Amanda pulled me with her onto the stoop, and the door shut a little harder than it needed to behind us. I wondered briefly whether her parents were getting out a gun or a bottle of vodka to put themselves out of their misery. The statistics on couples staying together after the loss of a child were staggeringly depressing.

  “I call it the House of Pain.” Amanda slid on a pair of cheap drugstore sunglasses as we walked down the concrete walk. I noticed she stepped carefully over each crack.

  “I got that line from my high school trigonometry teacher. He used to greet us at the classroom d
oor with ‘Welcome to the House of Pain.’ Only it was funny when he said it. My therapist thinks it’s kind of funny when I say it. At least, he thinks it’s a positive sign.”

  I wondered about the credentials of a therapist who set up shop in Idabel, but, then again, it looked like there was plenty of ripe material here.

  We had parked back-to-back on the street in front of the house. A pink rabbit’s foot dangled from the rearview mirror of Amanda’s canary-yellow beater Toyota. I wanted to tell Amanda that I’d lost a brother, but I didn’t. I didn’t know which was worse: for her to live in that horrid museum to Jennifer or for me to exist in a home wiped clean of any sign that Tuck ever existed.

  Amanda opened the Toyota’s door and tossed in her purse. All fingers present and accounted for. Amanda was about the right age to fit Adriana Marchetti’s profile if she’d lived. This new habit of counting strange women’s fingers had obsessed me for an hour in the Chicago airport. That placed me on the scale of crazy an inch or so below Rosalina.

  “I’ll tell you what I told the cops,” she said. “They didn’t listen because I was just a kid. Jennifer loved that guy Barry. I always thought that whoever killed Jennifer killed him, too. They just did a better job of making sure he wasn’t found.”

  I waited forty minutes in the “interview” room of the McCurtain County Sheriff’s Office, a small, stuffy space crammed with an old school lunchroom table, a microwave that predated my birth, a coffeepot, and a humming refrigerator with a sign that read, “To Prevent BIOHAZARD, All Leftover Sack Lunches and TUPPERWARE Will Be DUMPED Daily at 5 p.m. ON THE DOT. NO EXCEPTIONS.” I decided the author uppercased the appropriate words.

  Aging posters, the only attempt to spruce up blinding white walls, warned against the perils of alcohol, pot, and getting in cars with strangers. Too late for me.