by Jody Gehrman
Detective Schroeder sits across from me in my office. His calm, gray eyes and his long, square jaw were built to intimidate. I can tell he’s taking everything in as his gaze sweeps around the room and lands on me. He studies me with a cold, clinical interest, giving nothing away. His expression is as blank and impenetrable as a stone wall. Even though I’ve done nothing illegal, I feel compelled to confess.
He glances at his notepad. “You and the victim were close?”
“No.” I say it too quickly, though, and he squints at me disconcertingly. “We were getting to know each other. A couple dates. Nothing more.”
“How did you meet?”
“My friend Zoe set us up.”
“Zoe Tait?” His eyes skim his notebook again before meeting mine.
“Yeah.”
“And how did Ms. Tait know him?”
“I think they met through Bo. Her husband. I actually didn’t know that until the other day. Apparently Bo and Raul were roommates back in Chicago. Funny how you don’t always make those connections. I just know Zoe really likes—I mean, liked—Raul.” Switching to the past tense, I feel even more self-conscious.
He nods, urging me to go on.
“Anyway, Zoe thought we’d enjoy each other, so she fixed us up.” The nickname she gave him, Abs Lincoln, pops into my brain; I have to bite back a nervous giggle.
He notices. “Something funny?”
“No, I—nothing. Sorry.”
The pause lingers longer than it should. It’s an old detective trick—silence. Most people will rush to fill the void, say something they don’t mean to say. I can feel myself itching to speak. Instead, I hold his gaze and say nothing.
He gives in at last. “How many times did you go out with him?”
“Only a few times.”
“A moment ago you said a couple dates. Was it two dates or three?”
“Um, let’s see. Once to dinner, once to the theater, and one time he came over to my house, had a beer.”
After another interminable pause, he says, “Was it serious between you two?”
“No, not at all.” I stand and shove my hands into my pockets. “You want something to drink? Cup of tea? Coffee? There’s a faculty lounge just down the hall. I can make you something.”
“No, thank you, ma’am.”
The “ma’am” stings. He sees his mistake and backtracks.
“Miss Youngblood, can I be frank with you?”
I nod, not trusting my voice, and sit again.
“We’re trying to understand the events leading up to the murder. It seems the victim had a very active—” he hesitates “—social life. We’re looking for any connections that might help us piece together what happened.”
“You mean he was sleeping with a lot of women?” I suggest.
He tilts his head back and forth, noncommittal. “It does appear he had a number of female friends.”
“I only know my part,” I say. “We weren’t that close.”
“Were you aware of his other relationships?”
I bite my lip. “Um, no. Not until recently.”
Again his eyes rake over me, that clinical doctor’s gaze. I feel myself start to blush.
“You’ll forgive me for being indelicate, but were you intimate with the victim?”
“I just said we weren’t that close.” I try to give him a prim look, but he’s not buying it.
His face is that of an exasperated parent forced into asking his teen an embarrassing question. “Did you have sex with him?”
I sigh. “Once. Yes.”
“When was that?”
I blink at him, decide there’s nothing to be gained by lying. “The night he died.”
SAM
I walk a lot when it’s dark inside me. The feel of my feet hitting the ground reminds me I’m alive. I like to get my heart pumping, break a sweat. This morning, in the brisk November air, my skin tingles with the cold.
I’ve made a fatal mistake.
It was impulsive on my part, that email. I’m not afraid to admit it was out of line. You should be free to choose if and when you fire your agent.
Still, come on, the woman was a cunt. Her rejection email was so boilerplate, so unimaginative. And her “feedback” to you? Please! That was a boob-punch, not a critique. I know the agent’s the business side of the house, we’re the creative, but do you want someone in your corner who sends emails that cold and unhelpful? She takes the English language and turns it into a blunt instrument.
Forget her rejection of me. It’s you I’m worried about. She wasn’t good for you. A decent agent doesn’t tell you to put something away. What the hell’s that? You’re an artist; you need guidance and encouragement, not judgment. I know I’m not seasoned in the business, but basic human decency requires an agent to support what you’re trying to do. You’re the genius. She’s the hired help.
The point being, she can suck my dick.
Not to be crass, I’m just saying.
I walk faster, trying to ignore the numbness in my face. An icy breeze whips through a pile of dead leaves. They float into the air like weightless ballerinas.
Even if I walk to Canada, I won’t be able to distance myself from my mistake.
You have to understand, I did it for you. Except you don’t understand. I know you don’t.
I’m doing everything for you. Raul. Maxine. Everything.
Crossing Blackwell Park, I reach into my coat pocket for my earbuds. Most of the time I like to stay tuned in to my environment, make sure nothing’s creeping up on me, but today I require music. It’s a primal instinct, like the need for food or water.
I put my iPod on shuffle, trusting my fate to random chance. “Sugar Magnolia” starts playing. That song takes me right back to Eva. Back to the aching, shivery fever dream of my first love.
We lived at The Mercury Ranch half a year. It was a long time for Vivienne. We didn’t stay with Phoenix for more than a month, though. After that, they got bored with each other, and we moved into a one-room cabin inhabited by an old, drunk painter named Gottschalk Breiner, a German dude with a thick accent. Motherfucker Number Nineteen. He was grumpy on the rare occasion he was sober. Only happened once or twice. He was harmless when drunk, given to singing German folk songs and painting with his fingers. He smoked endless hand-rolled cigarettes and drank red wine from a brass goblet. I was re-reading Lord of the Rings, and Gottschalk struck me as the perfect hobbit. His cabin even looked hobbity, with its roof covered in green grass and its tiny, crooked chimney.
By March, Eva was three months pregnant, and I was out of my mind. She was still sleeping with Troll on a regular basis. I couldn’t reconcile her innocence with her treachery. She had a way of coaxing secrets from me, things I couldn’t bear to tell anyone, even myself. Her wild-animal nature leached the truth right out of me. Her flawless face never showed surprise or disgust. She just took it all in, absorbed my evil like a flower takes in rain.
I tried so many times to convince her we had to leave. She had a fatalistic stubbornness. I didn’t think she loved Troll—how could she? But she wouldn’t leave him, either.
She died on March thirteenth, her sixteenth birthday. It seemed fitting that a creature so feral should die before she had the burden of fitting in. She claimed she wanted to leave Mercury Ranch, but I knew she never would; she had big dreams, lofty and gossamer-thin. She wanted to run a dance company in New York, live in SoHo. She had it all planned out, but only in childlike terms, with zero understanding of the endless obstacles before her. Her black gypsy eyes only saw wonder and possibility. She had none of the rusty, hard cynicism that caked my heart. Years of trailing in the wake of Vivienne and her Motherfuckers had bruised me. Eva’s eyes sparkled. Next to her, my dark, brooding intensity looked like what it was: damage.
I was a twisted, burnt can full of holes, and she was a perfect gleaming flower. Even with Troll violating her night after night, she maintained a creamy innocence I could never understand.
Here’s what I learned from Eva: It’s not healthy to show people the basement of your soul. Keep them upstairs, in the kitchen or the bedroom. Never give them a tour of your cellar, where the air is fetid and dank. Don’t point out the cockroaches skittering across the dripping, slimy walls. Don’t show them where you’ve hidden the bodies.
Nobody can forgive you for that.
I took her to an old abandoned well on the edge of the property. We held hands all the way there. I kissed her for a long time, savoring the sweet taste of her mouth. She became obsessed with pomegranates after she got pregnant. You could always tell when she’d been eating them. I remember her full lips were swollen from my kisses and stained red from their seeds.
I shot her with Phoenix’s .45—just once, straight through the heart, from about five feet away. It was a mercy killing. I’d asked her one last time if she’d leave with me. Her eyes filled again with that terrible pity, like she knew something I didn’t. Like I was naïve. A dreamer.
She toppled backward into the well, making no sound. I peered down at her through the gloom. I imagined her eyes were open, looking up at me with blank surprise, but of course I couldn’t see that far down, couldn’t make out details in all that shadow.
That’s enough about Eva. She’s not important now.
I shouldn’t have sent that email. Just because I deleted it from your sent mail doesn’t mean Maxine couldn’t forward it to you.
God, I’m never going to forgive myself for this.
What I do, I do for you. I want to protect you from fucktards like Maxine and Raul. Your skin is much too delicate, too thin and luminous, to withstand their brand of abuse. You need protection. More than that, you deserve protection. I know you don’t see that yet, but in the end you’ll thank me.
Does that sound presumptuous?
It’s only because I know you so well that I dare to be bold. I’ve read both your novels so many times, I’ve committed whole sections to memory. Pay Dirt was, let’s face it, about four thousand times better than Hidden Depths. I’m not trying to be harsh, just honest. The sophomore novel is always doomed when your debut’s so fucking brilliant. It took my breath away. The first time I read Pay Dirt, I knew if I couldn’t be a writer, I’d kill myself. What’s the point of living if I can’t make beauty? If I can write something half as true as Pay Dirt before I die, I’ll go with a smile.
I’m through the park and on the sidewalk now. The Grateful Dead keeps unfurling into my ears, their voices gentle as ghosts. As I pass Forest Books, a poster in the window stops me. It’s a big photo of you. You’re looking sideways at the camera. Your Mona Lisa grin holds all the secrets worth knowing. LOCAL AUTHOR KATE YOUNGBLOOD READING TONIGHT AT 7:00.
You hate readings. I can just tell. You’re not one of those tacky publicity whores. You’re subtle, private.
I go inside, pulling my earbuds out and stashing them in my pocket. The bell jingles on the door, and the woman at the counter looks up. She’s tall, bony, with gray, frizzy hair and a necklace that looks like it’s made from children’s bones. She glances my way, then returns to sorting through the stack of books before her.
“Can I help you?”
“Do you still have that first edition Lolita?”
She looks up. Her gaze assesses my worth, decides I could be harboring a secret trust fund. “I believe we do. Would you like to see it?”
I tell her I would. She leads me to a glass case at the back of the store.
I’ll use the money I got from pawning Raul’s shit. Soon enough, you’ll understand how right we are together. You’ll see how hard I’ve worked to remove all obstacles. Until then, I’ll have to be patient. It’s not easy, but I’ve got no choice.
KATE
I hate readings. Why I even do them anymore is a mystery. It’s not like many people come. Even the ones who show rarely buy books. Lately, I don’t even have anything new to read—nothing I’m excited about. I suppose I’ll trot out Pay Dirt, read the same old passages I usually choose. I’ll behave like some washed-up one-hit wonder, trying to get excited about the number I’ve played a thousand times, the single burst of inspiration I’ve clung to for years. The usual suspects will show: a couple students; a gaggle of menopausal women wearing practical shoes and eccentric glasses; one creepy man who will ask bizarre, vaguely belligerent questions; the homeless woman who will tear through the cheese and crackers while the employees agonize about how to get rid of her.
Tonight, though, my dread runs deeper than garden-variety pre-reading anxiety. Cold fear coils in my belly like a snake. It could be Raul’s death. I haven’t slept well since the night he died. The night we had sex. The next morning, Zoe went into labor. The two events have somehow gotten confused in my mind. In the vast, inhospitable wilderness of my nightmares, Drew’s tiny, old-man face and Raul’s splattered brains get spliced together like a bad student film.
As I’m trying to decide what to wear, my phone buzzes on my dresser.
It’s a text from Zoe.
So sorry! Bo had an emergency at work and Drew’s too fussy, don’t want him screaming through your reading. Sell lots of books and bask in limelight for me! xxoo, Zoe.
I sigh. This is no surprise. New moms are notoriously unreliable. She swore she wouldn’t join the army of women we’ve known over the years, the ones who could always be relied on for cocktails or a quick coffee—until the first baby came. Then they disappeared, retreating to a shadowy underworld of other moms, where they planned mysterious rituals called “playdates.”
Though I’ve tried to prepare myself for Zoe’s inevitable abandonment, her text makes the snake in my belly coil tighter.
I text back.
No worries.
What a lie. Worrying is all I do these days.
The email Maxine forwarded has me creeped out. I’ve read it over and over, trying to understand. Clearly, somebody hacked into my gmail, but who would do that? It’s not like they spammed my contacts with offers of penile enlargement. Whoever it is obviously knows me, and, for some reason, wants to destroy the tattered remains of my career.
I tell myself to get over it. Could be a crazy fan, a jealous colleague, a student pissed off about a grade. I changed my password to something wildly complicated. Hopefully it won’t ever happen again. I’ll probably never know who did it, so there’s no point obsessing.
It could be Sam. The rogue thought bursts through the static in my brain.
I refuse to believe that. He’s my star student. His eyes on me in class are the only thing keeping me going lately. That look he gives me, like we share a secret nobody else in the world can possibly know. It’s intoxicating.
Anyway, why would he do such a thing? It makes no sense. Sure, Maxine rejected him. And okay, so that was kind of my fault, since I was too distracted to offer him the feedback he clearly needed. But what does severing my connection with Maxine do for him? Nothing. I’m his mentor. My success equals more opportunity for him. Conversely, my failure means diminished opportunities.
I refuse to believe he wanted to exact revenge. He doesn’t strike me as vindictive. Plus he didn’t even seem upset about Maxine’s rejection. When I admitted my mistake, the notes on chapter seven I failed to explain, he acted like it was no big deal. And, yes, I’ve seen how calculating he is. The way he arranges his expressions carefully, like an alien impersonating a human being. Still, that doesn’t mean he’s vindictive.
Sighing, I yank a dress from my closet and pull it over my head. It’s not my most glamorous look, but it will have to suffice. Add a simple necklace, tights, boots, a velvet duster, and I’ll pass for an author.
Tonight, that’s the best I can do.
* * *
The reading is predictably underattended and lackluster. Austin Kleeg, the bookstore owner, optimistically sets up a couple dozen seats. Only about half of them are taken.
Sam arrives a few minutes after I’ve taken my place at the podium. He slips into the back row, not tak
ing his pea coat off. As I read from Pay Dirt, he watches me with such intensity, I find my eyes swiveling toward him then veering away repeatedly. He’s like a too-bright light I’m both drawn to and repelled by. The vortex of his presence tugs at me relentlessly. It’s exhilarating and exhausting. When I do look at him, my cheeks heat up, my heart pounding obnoxiously. One of the women in the front row turns to scan the room; my stomach flips over. I lose my place, have to pause and find it again. It must be painfully obvious how distracted I am by the boy half my age sitting alone in the back row. Do they see in his gaze what I see—all that heat stirring just below the thin layer of ice?
Afterward, a few middle-aged women from my yoga class come over and have me sign their copies of Pay Dirt. They purchased them ahead of time, which is bad for the bookstore, but I can’t help feeling a little flattered that they already own it. When they’ve gone, nobody else approaches me. I look around for Sam. He seems to have left.
As if conjured by my thoughts, he intercepts me as I head for Austin to say goodbye. He steps out from the Mystery section, making me flinch in surprise. He smiles and takes a hesitant step toward me, almost like he’s asking permission to approach. It could be one of his many practiced expressions, but something feels different about this smile—more authentic. I give a little wave. Fucking idiotic thing to do. He closes the distance between us, eyes sparkling.
“That was amazing.” His voice is low, like he’s sharing a secret.
I bat a hand at him before I can stop myself. Another stupid move. Jesus, I’m a mess. “Thanks for coming. It’s very nice of you. I hate these things.”
“I’ve always wanted to hear you read from Pay Dirt. It’s my favorite.”
“Not a hard choice. My other book sucks.” I don’t know why I’m going for self-deprecating. The poor showing and the lackluster sales make it obvious I’m pathetic—no need to underline it. Modesty only works if you’re a rock star, and I clearly don’t qualify.
