“What about your guests?”
“They’re going,” he said, walking over to the door with a heavy tread and closing it.
“It’s time for Judge Judy!” his granny said, which made me wonder, because how does a blind person know what time it is? Antone used the remote control to turn on the television. It was a black-and-white, total Smithsonian. After all, she was blind, so I guess it didn’t matter.
Next thing I know, I’m alone in the room with the blind woman, who’s fixated on Judge Judy as if she’s going to be tested on the outcome, and I’m eyeing her potato chips, while Antone and Molly start making the kind of noises that you make when you’re trying so hard not to make noise that you can’t help making noise.
“Antone?” the old lady called out. “Is the dishwasher running? Because I think a piece of cutlery might have gotten caught in the machinery.”
I was so knocked out that she knew the word “cutlery.” How cool is that?
But I couldn’t answer, of course. I wasn’t supposed to be there.
“It’s—okay—Granny,” Antone grunted from the other room. “It’s—all—going—to—be—Jesus Christ—okay.”
The noises started up again. Granny was right. It did sound like a piece of cutlery caught in the dishwasher. But then it stopped—Antone’s breathing, the mattress springs, Molly’s little muffled grunts—they just stopped, and they didn’t stop naturally, if you know what I mean. I don’t mean to be cruel, but Molly’s a bit of a slut, and I’ve listened to her have sex more times than I could count, and I know how it ends, even when she’s faking it, even when she has to be quiet, and it just didn’t sound like the usual Molly finish at all. Antone yelped, but she was silent as the grave.
“Antone, what are you doing?” his granny asked. Antone didn’t answer. Several minutes went by, and then there was a hoarse whisper from the bedroom.
“Um, Kelley? Could you come here a minute?”
“What was that?” his granny asked.
I used the remote to turn up the volume on Judge Judy. “DO I LOOK STUPID TO YOU?” the judge was yelling. “REMEMBER THAT PRETTY FADES BUT STUPID IS FOREVER. I ASKED IF YOU HAD IT IN WRITING, I DON’T WANT TO HEAR ALL THIS FOLDEROL ABOUT ORAL AGREEMENTS.”
When I went into the bedroom, Molly was under Antone and I remember thinking—I was a little high, remember—that he made her look really thin, because he covered up her torso, and Molly does have good legs and decent arms. He had a handsome back, too, broad and muscled, and a great ass. Brandon had no ass (con), but he had nice legs (pro).
It took me a moment to notice that he had a pair of scissors stuck in the middle of his beautiful back.
“I told him no,” Molly whispered, although the volume on the television was so loud that the entire apartment was practically reverberating. “No means no.”
There was a lot of blood, I noticed. A lot.
“I didn’t hear you,” I said. “I mean, I didn’t hear you say any words.”
“I mouthed it. He told me to keep silent because his grandmother is here. Still, I mouthed it. ‘No.’ ‘No.’” She made this incredibly unattractive fish mouth to show me.
“Is he dead?”
“I mean, I was totally up for giving him a blow job, especially after he said he’d give me a little extra, but he was, like, uncircumcised. I just couldn’t, Kelley, I couldn’t. I’ve never been with a guy like that. I offered him a hand job instead, but he got totally peeved and tried to force me.”
The story wasn’t tracking. High as I was, I could see there were some holes. How did you get naked? I wanted to ask. Why didn’t you shout? If Grandma knew you were here, Antone wouldn’t have dared misbehave. He was clearly more scared of Granny than he was into Molly.
“This is the stash house,” Molly said. “Antone showed me.”
“What?”
“The drugs. They’re here. All of it. We could just help ourselves. I mean, he’s a rapist, Kelley. He’s a criminal. He sells drugs to people. Help me, Kelley. Get him off me.”
But when I rolled him off, I saw there was a condom. Molly saw it, too.
“We should, like, so get rid of that. It would only complicate things. When I saw he was going to rape me, I told him he should at least be courteous.”
I nodded, as if agreeing. I flushed the condom down the toilet, helped Molly clean the blood off her, and then used my purse to pack up what we could find, as she was carrying this little bitty Kate Spade knock-off that wasn’t much good for anything. We found some cash, too, about $2,000, and helped ourselves to that, on the rationale that it would be more suspicious if we didn’t. On the way out, I shook a few more potato chips on Granny’s plate.
“Antone?” she said. “Are you going out again?”
Molly grunted low, and that seemed to appease Granny. We walked out slowly, as if we had all the time in the world, but again I had that feeling of a thousand pairs of eyes upon us. We were in some serious trouble. There would have to be some sort of retribution for what we had done. What Molly had done. All I did was steal a few potato chips.
“Take the Quarry Road home instead of the interstate,” I told Molly.
“Why?” she asked. “It takes so much longer.”
“But we know it, know all the ins and outs. If someone follows us, we can give them the slip.”
About two miles from home, I told her I had to pee so bad that I couldn’t wait and asked her to stand watch for me, a practice of long standing with us. We were at that point, high above the old limestone quarry, where we had parked a thousand times as teenagers. A place where Molly had never said no, to my knowledge.
“Finished?” she asked when I emerged from behind the screen of trees.
“Almost,” I said, pushing her hard, sending her tumbling over the precipice. She wouldn’t be the first kid in our class to break her neck at the highest point on Quarry Road. My high school boyfriend did, in fact, right after we broke up. It was a horrible accident. I didn’t eat for weeks and got down to a size 4. Everyone felt bad for me, breaking up with Eddie only to have him commit suicide that way. There didn’t seem to be any reason to explain that Eddie was the one who wanted to break up. Unnecessary information.
I crossed the hillside to the highway, a distance of about a mile, then jogged the rest of the way. After all, as my mother would be the first to tell you, I went for a run that afternoon, while Molly was off shopping, according to her mom. I assumed the police would tie Antone’s dead body to Molly’s murder and figure it for a revenge killing, but I was giving the cops too much credit. Antone rated a paragraph in the morning paper. Molly, who turned out to be pregnant, although not even she knew it—probably didn’t even know who the father was, for sure—is still on the front page all these weeks later. (The fact that they didn’t find her for three days heightened the interest, I guess. I mean, she was just an overweight dental hygienist from the suburbs—and a bit of a slut, as I told you. But the media got all excited about it.) The general consensus seems to be that Keith did it, and I don’t see any reason to let him off the hook, not yet. He’s an asshole. Plus, almost no one in this state gets the death penalty.
Meanwhile, he’s telling people just how many men Molly had sex with in the past month, including Brandon, and police are still trying to figure out who had sex with her right before she died. (That’s why you’re supposed to get the condom on as early as possible, girls. Penises drip. Just FYI.) I pretended to be shocked, but I already knew about Brandon, having seen Molly’s car outside his apartment when I cruised his place at 2 A.M. a few nights after Brandon told me he wanted to see other people. My ex-boyfriend and my best friend, running around behind my back. Everyone feels so bad for me, but I’m being brave, although I eat so little that I’m down to a size 2. I just bought a Versace dress and Manolos for a date this weekend with my new boyfriend, Robert. I’ve never spent so much money on an outfit before, but then, I’ve never had $2,000 in cash to spend as I please.
Rea
d on for an exclusive extract from Laura Lippman’s forthcoming novel The Innocents.
Autumn 1977–Spring 1978
CHAPTER FOUR
It was Mickey who decided we should be a group, that the duo of Mickey and Gwen should be joined to the trio of the Halloran brothers. Before, we were two and three. Five together was stronger than two and three. Our country’s own Department of Defense, Sean later pointed out, was contained within the Pentagon, so it must be the strongest thing possible.
But our coalition began as a dispute, an argument over territory. Although the Hallorans lived on Sekots, at the far end of the neighborhood, they often used a vacant lot at the end of Gwen’s street as their makeshift kickball field. The squarish mound of grass was just large enough to approximate an infield, but the lack of an outfield was problematic, dangerous even. A strong kick—and all the Halloran boys were powerful—inevitably sent the ball into the street or skittering across the foundation of a long-abandoned springhouse on the other side. And while Wetheredsville Road—oh, how Gwen complained about having to learn to spell her street name—was not heavily trafficked even then, the mill was still open and enormous trucks rumbled past several times a day.
Mickey, who cared nothing for the field but liked to cut through it to reach the stream, decided the Halloran boys were presumptuous. The lot was not theirs to annex, she argued. Not yours, either, Tim argued back. You don’t even live in the village. Mickey countered that Gwen, as the resident of the last house on Wetheredsville Road, should have the right to use the lot, or not use the lot, as she saw fit. The boys should have to pay Gwen to use the field, Mickey insisted.
“Or”—and this was clearly where she had been heading all along—“let us play, too.”
It was fall. The promise, the glow of back-to-school had already faded. Gwen’s denim binder was full of torn papers, and she could never find her little box of reinforcements. At St. Lawrence, Go-Go had already been given multiple detentions, and Sean was bored by the writing assignments, which never allowed him to show his range. Tim was getting by at Cardinal Gibbons, but getting by was Tim’s particular genius. A letter had already been sent home to Mickey’s mother, noting that she was not working up to her potential. That is, the letter was sent, but it never arrived. Mickey stuffed it under a rock in the hills behind the Robisons’ house, where she arrived every day and waited for Gwen. When Gwen got off the private bus that took her to her door, she found Mickey in the kitchen, eating cookies and drinking one of her mother’s diet sodas. Gwen wasn’t allowed to have diet soda, but Mickey was, because she was a guest. Years later, when her mother was dying of bladder cancer, Gwen couldn’t help thinking of all those diet sodas. She knew science was not on her side, but the notion still persisted. She tricked Annabelle into thinking sparkling water was a treat, making it in a penguin-shaped canister from Williams-Sonoma that produced wonderful belching noises, sometimes adding juice and slices of lemon to give it something extra. But it was all parental sorcery, and Gwen knew that Annabelle would see through the ruse eventually, start asking for soda, or god help her, putting Equal in her cocoa.
When they were indoors, Gwen set the agenda, teaching Mickey how to play the elaborate make-believe games that were the cornerstone of Gwen’s de facto only-child status. Miller and Fee were both gone now. But the girls spent as little time as possible indoors. Mickey was restless. Mickey liked action, she wanted to move. She wasn’t a particularly good athlete, as would become evident when the girls joined the Halloran boys’ kickball game. Mickey was wildly uncoordinated at almost any organized sport. Yet, stalking through the woods, climbing over and under fallen branches, jumping rocks across the stream—no one was more graceful or strong. Mickey could even do chin-ups, something no other girl of our acquaintance could do. She said she had won the Presidential Medal for Fitness, although she never remembered to show it to Gwen on those rare occasions Gwen was allowed to go to Mickey’s house.
The day that Mickey decided to crash the kickball game was early November, the first fair day after a week of lashing rains. The hills and fields were muddy, and Gwen’s mother, sighing, reminded her to come in through the basement, please? And leave her boots down there? Please? Mickey didn’t even have boots, but she said her mother didn’t mind if her tennis shoes were caked with mud. “You just have to let it dry and then it brushes off as easy as anything,” she told Gwen.
But despite the break in the rain, Mickey didn’t want to roam the hills today, looking for places they could claim as their own. Instead, she led Gwen up the road and across the street, to the vacant field where the Halloran boys were playing kickball.
“We want to play,” Mickey said to Sean.
“No thanks,” he said. “It works best with three.”
Tim was less polite. “Go screw yourselves.”
Gwen sucked in her breath. That was a curse, or as good as. Go-Go was delighted, repeating it over and over. “Go screw yourself, go screw yourself.”
Mickey was not easily intimidated. She put her hands on her hips and stared Sean down. “This lot doesn’t belong to you.”
“Doesn’t belong to you, either.”
“It belongs to her, though.” Pointing at Gwen. “To her family. They bought a whole bunch of land when they built their house.”
“No way,” Sean said. We all knew—except gullible Go-Go—that it was an outrageous lie.
“Go look it up,” Mickey said.
“Where?”
“Downtown.”
“Get out of here,” Tim said.
Go-Go was running in circles. “Go screw yourself, go screw yourself, go screw yourself.”
Sean took Mickey’s measure. “You any good?”
“What does it matter? It will be a better game with five than with three. We’ll play two-on-two, with a permanent pitcher.”
Gwen assumed she would be the permanent pitcher. She was. She rolled the ball across the plate, first to Sean, then to Tim, then to Go-Go, finally Mickey. Tim’s ball came back at her, hard, right to her midsection, and it clearly wasn’t accidental. Gwen clamped her lips tight to keep from crying.
But it was a better game, just as Mickey had said. She and Tim faced off against Sean and Go-Go. Gwen was supposed to get a turn at some point, but she didn’t, not that day, and not often in the days ahead. The game evolved into something more like football or rugby or dodgeball, with complicated rules about tackling and catching. We became attuned to the noises of the street, the sound of approaching cars and trucks, and learned to time the action of the game around the traffic. We fought sometimes, went home early, yet came back together the next day, or the day after if there was rain. We suspended the games during the heart of the winter, but started playing again long before spring. The Halloran boys were baffling to the girls. Sometimes they presented as a unified front, sometimes it was every man for himself, and, most often, it was two against one, with Go-Go, the baby, the odd one out. And Go-Go was easy for the girls to gang up on as well, so it was just as often four on one. Every group needs its goat, and Go-Go was the inevitable choice in ours.
We were having a four-on-one day in late April, a cranky, frustrating day in which all the gains of spring seemed to have been lost. The sky was gray, the air had a real chill in it, and the things that had budded and bloomed over the past month looked miserable. Daffodils and tulips bent their heads, beaten down. On the way to the field, Go-Go jumped on one of Tally Robison’s flowerbeds with both feet, irritating the rest of us, who understood our freedom came at a price. If we gave adults any reason to complain about us, we knew we would lose privileges.
But Go-Go became only more intolerable when we tried to explain to him why he shouldn’t jump on flowers. He pinched the girls, he pulled at their clothes, he flailed at his brothers. Finally, in frustration, Mickey threw the red rubber ball over his head, into the street. Later, she said it wasn’t on purpose, which would fit with her general incompetence on the playing field, yet it had seemed delib
erate to the rest of us, an exaggerated, high, arching throw that would have soared over anyone’s head, but especially over little Go-Go’s. There’s no doubt that she said: “Go get it, you moron.”
Which Go-Go did, despite the rumbling noise that we all knew to heed. He dashed into the road after the bouncing ball just as one of the huge mill trucks came around the curve, going much too fast, but we all knew the mill trucks went too fast and it was our responsibility to be careful. The rest of us watched, frozen, mesmerized. We were going to see someone die. We watched the truck bearing down on the boy and the ball, saw the ball disappear under its wheels, heard terrible noises—honking, brakes squealing. But Go-Go seemed to change the rules of physics, accelerating so that he reached the other side of the road just before the truck passed by. We were amazed to see him, upright and laughing, after the long truck had passed.
Tim was the first to speak.
“Screw you, Go-Go,” he said. “The ball is ruined.” But his tone was admiring, almost reverential, his voice shaking.
The ball had been split by the truck’s wheels. We looked at the flattened red mass. “That could be Go-Go’s head,” Gwen said. We all nodded. He could be like one of the squirrels we saw in the road, a red smear with hair sticking out of it. We weren’t to touch the squirrels, or any other roadkill, lest we risk rabies.
Sean ran across the road and grabbed his brother by the arm, shaking him violently, angrily.
“Don’t ever do that again.”
“But Mickey said—”
“Mickey’s not the boss of you.”
“No one’s the boss of me,” he countered, pushing out his lower lip.
Without a ball, kickball was over. We couldn’t get a new ball unless we told a grown-up what had happened, and no one thought that was a good idea. And, although it was hard to envision on such a cold, gray April day, summer was coming, and not even our odd brand of kickball/dodgeball/rugby could fill those longer, emptier days. We needed a new game. Mickey suggested an explorer’s club. Sean and Tim said it was babyish, yet the next day we all ended up following her deeper and deeper into the woods, marveling at the things we found. Abandoned campsites, downed trees. Beer cans, garbage. “Teenagers did this,” Go-Go would say solemnly, as if Tim and Sean were not already teenagers, Mickey and Gwen both about to turn thirteen that autumn. Teenagers were fearsome creatures to Go-Go.
Femme Fatale and other stories Page 10
