Pieces of Her

by Karin Slaughter

  Andy made it as far as the stairway landing before she had to stop to readjust her load. Her shoulders felt boneless. Either she was still exhausted or she’d lost all of her muscle mass from sitting in the car for almost ten hours.

  She scanned the numbers as she walked along the narrow balcony on the top floor. There were burned-out hibachi grills and empty beer cans and greasy pizza boxes in front of some of the doors. The smell of cigarettes was strong. It brought back the memory of Laura bumming a smoke off the orderly in front of the hospital.

  Andy longed for the time when her biggest concern was that her mother held a cigarette between her finger and thumb like a junkie.

  Behind her, a door opened. A disembodied hand dropped an empty pizza box on the concrete balcony. The door slammed shut.

  Andy tried to calm her heart, which had detonated inside her throat when the door opened. She took a deep breath and let it go. She readjusted the sleeping bag under her arm. She mentally summoned her father and tried to make a list of things she would need to stop doing. One, stop panicking every time she heard a noise. Two, stop falling asleep in public places. That seemed a hell of a lot easier than it was proving to be. Three, figure out what to do with all of the money. Four, locate another library so she could read the Belle Isle Review. Five, stop being weird, because right now, if the cops happened to follow her trail, the first person any of the potential witnesses would think of was Andy.

  Then they’d get Daniela Cooper’s name, and the car details, and that would be it.

  Andy looked out at the road. There was a bar across the street. Neon signs filled the windows. The parking lot was packed with trucks. She could hear the faint clink of honky-tonk music. In that moment, she wanted a drink so badly that her body strained toward the bar like a plant reaching up to the sun.

  She put down the suitcase and used the key to open the door to her room. It was the kind of cheap place Laura used to book for vacations when Andy was little. The single window looked out at the parking lot. The air-conditioner rattled below. There were two queen-sized beds with sticky-looking bedspreads and a plastic dining table with two chairs. Andy gladly put the heavy take-out box on the table. The chest of drawers had a place for a suitcase. She lugged the Samsonite on top. She dropped the tote bag and make-up bag and the sleeping bag on the bed. She lowered the blind on the window and dragged closed the flimsy blackout curtain. Or at least tried to. The curtain rod stopped an inch before the window did. Light bled in around the edge.

  A flat-screen television was mounted on the wall. The cords hung down like tendrils. Out of habit, Andy found the remote and turned on the TV.

  CNN. The weatherman was standing in front of a map. Andy had never been so relieved to see a hurricane warning.

  She muted the sound. She sat down at the table. She opened the Styrofoam box.

  Fried chicken, mashed potatoes, green beans, a cornbread muffin. She should’ve been disgusted, but her stomach sent up a noise like the Hallelujah Chorus.

  There was no silverware, but Andy was no stranger to this dilemma. She used the chicken leg to eat the mashed potatoes, then she ate the chicken, then she used her fingers to go after the green beans, then she used the cornbread like a sponge to clean up any edible pieces of fried chicken skin or green bean juice that she had missed. It wasn’t until she closed the empty box that she considered how filthy her hands were. The last time they’d been washed was in the shower of her apartment. The cleanest thing she’d touched since then was probably the desk in Laura’s secret storage unit.

  She looked up at the television. As if on cue, the story had switched from the hurricane to her mother. The diner video was paused on Laura holding up her hands to show Jonah Helsinger the number of bullets.

  So weird, the way she was doing it—four fingers on the left hand, one on her right. Why not hold up just one hand to show five fingers for five bullets?

  Suddenly, the image switched to a photograph. Andy felt her heart do a weird flip at the sight of Laura. She was wearing her standard going-out-to-parties outfit of a simple black dress with a colorful silk scarf. Andy knelt in front of the TV so she could study the details. Laura’s chest was flat on one side. Her hair was short. There was a lighted star behind her, the topper on a Christmas tree. The hand on her waist must have belonged to Gordon, though he’d been cropped out of the image. The photo was probably from Gordon’s most recent office Christmas party, which Laura had never missed, even when they’d wanted to kill each other. She smiled at the camera, her expression slightly guarded in what Andy always thought of as her mother’s Gordon’s Wife Mode.

  She unmuted the sound.

  “. . . on the off-chance that it might happen. Ashleigh?”

  Andy had missed the story. The camera cut to Ashleigh Banfield, who said, “Thanks, Chandra. We have breaking news about a shooting in Green County, Oregon.”

  Andy pressed the mute button again. She sat on the edge of the bed. She watched Ashleigh Banfield’s face go into a split scene beside a run-down looking house that was surrounded by a SWAT team. The banner said: Man kills own mother, two kids, holding injured wife hostage, demanding pizza and beer.

  Another shooting.

  Andy flipped the channels. She wanted to see the photo of Laura again, or even to glimpse Gordon’s hand. MSNBC. Fox. The local news stations. All of them were showing the live stand-off with the man who wanted pizza after murdering most of his family.

  Was that a good or bad thing—not the man killing people, but the news stations covering it live? Did that mean they’d moved on from covering Laura? Would there be another killing machine to profile?

  Andy’s head was shaking even before she asked herself the obvious question: where was the story about the body of Samuel Godfrey Beckett being found in Laura Oliver’s beachside bungalow? That was big news. The victim had been felled by a frying pan, ostensibly by a woman who had hours before killed a police officer’s son.

  And yet, the scroll at the bottom of the screen contained the usual headlines: another senator resigning, probably because of sexual harassment, another gunman shot by cops, interest rates going up, healthcare costs on the rise, stock market drops.

  Nothing about Hoodie.

  Andy felt her eyebrows furrow. None of this made sense. Had Laura somehow managed to keep the police out of the house? How would she even do that? The 911 text Andy had sent provided legal cause for them to break down the door. So why wasn’t Killing Machine Strikes Again being shouted about all over the news? Even with the SWAT stand-off happening in Oregon, the last photo of Laura should have been her mugshot or, worse, video of her entering the jail in handcuffs, not a photo from a Christmas celebration.

  Andy’s brain was overloaded with all the whats and whys.

  She let herself fall back onto the bed. She closed her eyes. When she opened them again, there was no light coming from around the closed curtain. She looked at the clock: nine thirty in the evening.

  She should go back to sleep, but her eyes refused to stay closed. She stared at the brown spots on the popcorn-textured ceiling. What was her mother doing right now? Was she at home? Was she talking to Gordon on a jail phone with a thick piece of glass between them? Andy turned her head to look at the television. Still the SWAT story, even this many hours later. Her nostrils flared. The bedspread smelled like a bear had slept on it. Andy sniffed under her arms.

  Ugh.

  She was the bear.

  She checked the lock on the door. She closed the hotel latch. She wedged one of the chairs underneath the doorknob. Someone could still break the large window to get in, but if someone broke the window to get in, she was fucked anyway. Andy peeled off the jeans and polo shirt and underwear. Her bra was disgusting. The underwire had rubbed the skin raw underneath her armpit. She threw it into the sink and turned on the cold water.

  The hotel soap was the size of a pebble and smelled like the last vestiges of a dying bouquet of flowers. She took it into the shower and betw
een the soap and the shampoo, the tiny bathroom took on the scent of a whore house. At least what Andy thought a whore house might smell like.

  She turned off the shower. She dried herself with the hotel towel, which had the consistency of notebook paper. The soap came apart in her hands as she tried to clean the stink out of her bra. She spread the crappy hotel lotion on her body as she walked into the bedroom. Then she wiped her hands on the towel to get the lotion off, then she washed her hands at the sink to remove the fuzz from the towel.

  She unrolled the sleeping bag on the bed. She unzipped the side. The material was thick, filled with some kind of synthetic down, and with a nylon, waterproof outer layer. Flannel liner. Not the kind of thing you’d ever need in Belle Isle, so maybe Laura hadn’t pulled Idaho out of thin air after all.

  Andy opened the suitcase and picked off the top row of twenties. Ten across, three wide, times $2,000 was . . . a lot of money to hide inside of a sleeping bag.

  She laid the stacks out in a flat row along the bottom of the bag. She smoothed down the nylon and pulled up the zipper. She started to roll the sleeping bag from the bottom, but the money bunched into a lump. Andy took a deep breath. She unrolled the bag again. She reached into the bottom and pulled the stacks to the center. She rolled the bag carefully from the top, secured it with the Velcro strap, then stood back to judge her work.

  It looked like a sleeping bag.

  Andy hefted the weight. Heavier than a sleeping bag, but not so that you’d become alarmed and think there was a small fortune inside.

  She turned back to the suitcase. A third of the money was left. Bad guys in movies always ended up in train stations, which had lockers, which made it easy for them to hide money. Andy doubted there were any train stations in Florence, Alabama.

  The best solution was to split it up. She should probably hide some of it in the car. There would be space inside the spare tire well under the trunk. That way, if she got separated from the sleeping bag, she could jump in the car and still have some cash. For the same reason, she could put some of the cash in her purse. Except that her purse was back in her apartment.

  Andy found the hotel notepad. She wrote purse at the top, then soap, lotion, bra.

  She dumped out the white tote bag. Flashlight. Batteries. Three paperbacks, unread, the titles popular approximately eleven billion years ago. The plastic first aid kit had some Band-Aids. Andy covered the scrape on her shin, which she suddenly remembered was caused by the pedal on her bike. She used the alcohol wipes to clean her blisters. It would take more than Band-Aids to get her feet into something more than Crocs. There was a cut on the side of her foot that looked pretty bad. She slapped on another Band-Aid and prayed for the best.

  The Ace bandage gave her an idea. She could wrap some of the cash around her waist and secure it with the bandage. Driving would be uncomfortable, but it wasn’t a bad idea to keep some of the money as close to her as possible.

  Or was it? Andy remembered an NPR story about cops in rural areas pulling people over and confiscating their cash. Civil forfeiture. The Canada license plate would make her the proverbial sitting duck.

  Andy unzipped the make-up bag. She opened the phone. No calls.

  She pulled the Daniela Cooper driver’s license from the black vinyl bag. Andy had taken the Canadian ID, health insurance card and car registration with her when she left the storage unit. She studied her mother’s photograph. They had always looked like mother and daughter. Even strangers had commented on it. The eyes were a dead giveaway, but their faces were both heart-shaped and their hair was the same color brown. Andy had forgotten how dark her mother used to keep her hair. Post-cancer treatments, it had grown out in a shockingly beautiful gray. Laura wore it fashionably short now, but the Laura in the driver’s license photo wore her hair down to her shoulders. Andy’s hair was the same length, but she always kept it in a ponytail because she was too lazy to style it.

  She looked at the mirror across from the bed. Her face was ragged. Dark circles were under her eyes. Mirror Andy looked older than her thirty-one years, that was for damn sure, but could she pass for the woman in the photo? Andy held up the driver’s license. She let her eyes go back and forth. She scrunched her wet hair. She pulled down the bangs. Did that help or hinder Andy’s ability to look twenty-four years older than she actually was?

  There was one way to get an honest appraisal.

  Andy rinsed her bra in the sink. The hotel soap had made it smell like Miss Havisham’s asshole, but that was actually an improvement. Patting it dry with the towel transferred white fuzz onto the material. She used the hairdryer until the bra was only slightly damp. Then she dried her hair messier than usual, pulling it forward, styling it close to the way Laura wore hers in the Canada license photo. She put on another pair of jeans, another white polo shirt. Andy cringed as her feet slid into the Crocs again. She needed socks and real shoes. And she needed an actual written list to keep track of everything.

  She grabbed a $2,000 brick of twenties, split it in two and shoved one half into each of her back pockets. The jeans were old, from a time when manufacturers actually sewed usable pockets into women’s wear. Still, the bills stuck out like large cell phones. She transferred some layers into her front pocket. She looked at herself in the mirror. It worked.

  Andy scooped up more handfuls of strapped twenties and hid some between the mattress and boxspring. Others got folded into her wet towel, which she artfully arranged on the bathroom floor. The rest lined the bottom of the tote bag. She put the paperbacks on top along with the first aid kit and make-up bag.

  All of her machinations had left one row of bills on the bottom of the suitcase. Ten across, three wide, times $2,000 was . . . a lot of money to have in a suitcase. There was nothing to do but zip it closed and leave it out in the open. If someone broke into the room, they hopefully would be excited enough by the cash in the Samsonite to not look for the rest of the money.

  Andy slung the tote bag over her shoulder as she walked out of the room. The night air slapped her face like the sudden blast of heat from an oven door. She scanned the parking lot as she walked down the stairs. There were a few Serv-Pro vans, a red truck with a Trump sticker on one side and a Confederate flag on the other, and a Mustang from the 1990s that had the front bumper held on with duct tape.

  The diner was closed. The motel office lights were still on. Andy guessed it was about ten in the evening. The clerk behind the desk had his nose in his phone.

  She got behind the wheel of the Reliant and moved the car to the far end of the parking lot. There were security lights on the building, but several bulbs were out. Andy walked to the back of the station wagon and opened the hatch. She checked to make sure no one was watching, then pried open the bottom of the cargo area.

  Jesus.

  More money, this time hundreds, stacked all around the spare tire.

  Andy quickly pressed the floor cover back into place. She closed the hatch. She kept her hand pressed to the back of the car. Her heart was jackrabbiting against her ribs.

  Should she feel good that her mother had split up the money the same way Andy had intended to, or should she be freaked the hell out that Laura had so carefully thought out an escape plan that there was over half a million bucks stashed in the trunk of her untraceable car?

  This was the part where Andy wondered where she would’ve fit into Laura’s disappearance, because everything Andy had found so far pointed to only one person being on the lam.

  So Andy had to wonder: which Laura was her real mother—the one who’d told Andy to leave her alone or the one who’d said that everything she’d done in her life was for Andy?

  “Okay,” Andy mumbled, acknowledging the question had finally been asked, but fully prepared not to do any more thinking about it.

  The new Andy who did math and planned driving routes and considered consequences and dealt with money problems was wearing the hell out of the old Andy, who desperately needed a drink.

&n
bsp; She carried the tote like a purse as she walked toward the bar across the road from the motel. Half a dozen pick-up trucks were in the parking lot. All of them had signs on their sides—Joe’s Plumbing, Bubba’s Locksmith Services, Knepper’s Knippers. Andy took a closer look at the last one, which apparently belonged to a gardener. The logo on the side, a mustachioed grasshopper holding a pair of shears, promised, We’ll knip your lawn into shape!

  Every set of eyes inside the place looked up when Andy walked through the front door. She tried to pretend like she belonged, but it was hard, considering she was the only woman. A television was blaring in the corner. Some kind of sports show. Most of the guys were sitting one or two to a booth. Two men were standing around the pool table. They had both stopped, pool sticks in the air, to watch her progress through the room.

  There was only one customer sitting at the bar, but his attention was squarely focused on the television. Andy took a seat as far away from him as possible, her ass hanging off the stool, the tote bag wedged between her arm and the wall.

  The bartender ambled over, throwing a white towel over his shoulder. “Whatcha want, babydoll?”

  Not to be called babydoll.

  “Vodka rocks,” she requested, because for the first time since college, her student loan debt didn’t dictate her drinking habits.

  “Gottan ID?”

  She found Laura’s license in the make-up bag and slid it over.

  He gave it a quick glance. “Vodka rocks, eh?”

  Andy stared at him.

  He mixed the drink in front of her, using a lot more ice than Andy would’ve liked.

  She picked one of the twenties off the brick in her back pocket. She waited for him to leave, then tried not to set on the vodka like a wildebeest. “Personality shots,” her roommates used to call the first drinks of the night. Liquid courage. Whatever you called it, the point was to turn off the voice in your head that reminded you of everything wrong in your life.

  Andy tossed back the drink. The fiery sensation of the alcohol sliding down her throat made the muscles of her shoulders relax for the first time in what felt like decades.