Girls of Glass

by Brianna Labuskes

  Grief did strange things.

  “She also feels guilt over something,” Alice continued. “But to assume it’s for killing Ruby is making a leap that’s not necessarily there for us to make.”

  “Just . . . ,” Nakamura started, then trailed off. One hand was cupping the gear stick, the other cradling the steering wheel, and his eyes, hidden behind dark sunglasses, were on the road.

  “You don’t need to tell me,” Alice said.

  He glanced at her. “You need to be careful.”

  “I just said you don’t—”

  “I know what you said.” He cut her off as he downshifted and made the left into the police station parking lot. “And I think I did.”

  Exhaustion throbbed through the police station, a tangible thing that clung to the faces of everyone there. It may have been only hours since Ruby Burke’s body had been found, but they had all been working nonstop since the girl had been reported missing four days ago. It was starting to show.

  Clothes had gone unchanged, jelly and mustard stains ignored. The comb-overs had wilted into sad wishful thinking, and oil saturated the strands of those who had hair. A vague mustiness permeated the air, and they all universally decided not to acknowledge it.

  Alice wasn’t the only one with deep bruises beneath her eyes that betrayed a severe lack of sleep. There were only two cots in the back storage room, and they’d taken them on a rotating basis.

  It wasn’t that they’d never had a missing-child case—now a murder case. They had plenty. The ones they were familiar with, though, involved poor black kids whom the general public didn’t care about.

  Ruby Burke, though. St. Petersburg royalty? A beautiful strawberry-headed cherub with bright blue eyes and a smile that spoke of innocence that needed protecting? She brought out the vultures.

  There was the media with a twenty-four-hour news cycle to fill and clicks to gin up for advertisers. An army of white vans had set up camp outside the station’s doors, and Alice found herself tripping over bored, shellacked news anchors with disturbing frequency. She hadn’t been able to walk by a TV in days without seeing Ruby’s face.

  There were the concerned citizens. Both the ones who made hushed phone calls at 3:00 a.m. with “tips,” and the mothers, dressed for PTA meetings, who had many thoughts on children that they believed needed to be shared with overworked and stressed police officers immediately.

  There were the genuinely disturbed. Men and women who thought they were guilty, who turned themselves over for crimes they hadn’t committed, hoping for notoriety, hoping for shelter, hoping to quiet the incessant voices in their heads.

  Then there were the rest. The curious, the frightened, the ones who wanted to be told it couldn’t happen to them.

  They were all the same. Vultures picking at scraps of rotted flesh.

  A crime board had been set up in one of the conference rooms, away from the windows, away from any prying cameras, and the chief was ushering all the available officers into a semicircle. She and Nakamura perched on the table running along the back wall, their feet swinging a few inches off the floor.

  Deakin clapped his large, meaty hands, and the sound snapped through the low-level chatter. The silence that followed pressed into her eardrums.

  “No ransom note,” Deakin started, turning to face the board full of pictures and layouts and timelines. He tapped on one of the pictures of Ruby, his finger hitting the middle of her forehead. “No contact with the family for four days.”

  That didn’t look good for Charlotte.

  “We had an Amber Alert out within two hours after she was reported missing from the beach,” Deakin continued. “Charlotte Burke last saw her daughter at one in the afternoon on Sunday, July 29. They’d gone to St. Pete Beach for the day, leaving their home at around five in the morning.”

  It had been an unusual trip, Charlotte had told them. She’d had the urge to take Ruby for a special day but hadn’t wanted to go to one of the ritzier beaches they normally frequented.

  “This morning, a jogger found Ruby Burke on a private strip of beach just north of the city. Wrapped in a sheet, her clothes still intact, with no signs of trauma,” Deakin said. They were the facts. But that didn’t mean Alice had to like the way they were being presented. Nakamura sensed how she’d tensed and leaned his shoulder into hers. It might have been a warning. It might have been an offer of comfort. She moved away.

  Weakness was not to be tolerated. No matter how small the gesture.

  “We’ve put a rush on the autopsy report, but that’s still hours if not several days from telling us anything,” Deakin continued, his mouth tight at the corners. Alice knew from experience that if there was one person in this town who would refuse to bend to Sterling Burke’s pressure, it was their coroner. “I’ve put in a search warrant request for the house, too, but that’s taking a bit of time.”

  Alice and Nakamura had been in the place often over the past few days, but it had always been limited to the rooms the Burkes allowed them to be in. They’d always been watched, accompanied, and then swiftly escorted out when their interviews were over.

  They needed that search warrant. Alice needed it. There were secrets in that house, and she wanted to find each one of them.

  “Nakamura and Garner are taking point on this, but I can’t stress enough how important the case is.” The chief’s eyes flitted to them and then away again. It didn’t even need to be said. They’d all felt the pressure over the past four days. They’d seen the governor in the chief’s office. They knew the media was just waiting for them to fail. “This is all hands on deck.”

  “It’s gotta be the mother, right?” one of the uniformed cops shouted. He was young, still had the pimples and the cocky attitude to show for it. “Gotta be.”

  Deakin tipped his chin toward them. “Did you get anything out of her?”

  Nakamura shook his head. “Lawyered up.”

  “Might as well have confessed, then,” the cocky little shit chimed in again.

  Alice pushed off the table and walked over to the kid, her movements slow and deliberate. The room’s eyes were on her, but she didn’t care. Let them watch.

  Emotional. Erratic.

  She didn’t stop until her knees were almost pressed up against his thigh, her boots nudging his. He was forced to twist his neck into a painful angle to look up at her.

  She let her eyes drag over him—a slow, derisive sweep—let the air become taut between them. Let the words he’d so carelessly tipped out into existence replay in his head as he was forced to remember exactly who she was.

  “You seem to be under the mistaken impression that anyone in this room gives two shits what you think when time and again you’ve proven you don’t even have enough IQ points to rub together,” she finally said, low and calm. “If I hear one more word from you other than ‘Yes, ma’am, how do you take your coffee?’ I will personally shove my foot so far up your ass your tonsils will be bruised.”

  And then she turned and walked out of the room.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  TRUDY

  July 3, 2018

  Twenty-six days before the kidnapping

  The hot, muggy air turned Trudy mean. Or meaner. She didn’t necessarily consider herself to be a particularly kind person to begin with. But the water that clung to each particle of oxygen she dragged in along with the nicotine clogged the passageways of her lungs and turned her tongue vicious.

  “No one likes you here,” she said, shifting her gaze to the quiet boy perched on top of the picnic table beside her. He’d sat silent through her first two cigarettes, and she was bored, waiting for him to speak.

  There was something about Zeke Durand that people might call beautiful. His skin was dark brown and smooth; his hair, close-cropped; his jaw, strong. The shoulders she let bump against her own uncovered ones were broad, and the muscles of his biceps strained the ink of the tattoos that danced with each shift of his arm.

  His eyes, though, were wha
t made him different from the rest of the cookie-cutter teenage boys who thought blond tips were something to swoon over. He turned them on her now, and the sunlight caught the edges of his irises where a deep blue ring dissolved into crystal teal. They slanted down at the corners, except when he smiled.

  “I’m aware,” he said, his voice too smoky for such a summer day. Then he went back to reading his thick leather-bound book, ignoring her once more. People didn’t ignore Trudy.

  She shook her curtain of white-blonde hair so that it bared her throat to his view as she pressed her palms against the table. The position wasn’t subtle, but it rarely failed to get her what she wanted.

  Zeke’s gaze dipped to her exposed flesh, traveled over her body to the chest that only hinted at cleavage, paused at her smooth, naked midriff where a diamond glittered in the dip of her belly button, then caught again at the frayed edges of her cutoff jeans.

  There was supposed to be hunger on his face when he looked back at her. But there wasn’t. Instead, his expression was blank—a neutral mask, with only a slight upward slant of his lips that was far more mocking than aroused.

  “Not interested, sugar,” Zeke said, holding her gaze.

  “Screw you.” She straightened. “As if I’d let you fuck me.” It was probably a lie. But there was her pride to maintain.

  He didn’t call her on it, just lifted one dismissive shoulder in a lazy man’s shrug. “What do you want?”

  She hopped off the picnic table. If there wasn’t any reason to press her body against his, she preferred to be pacing. The dirt was dry, and her black Chucks kicked up dust as she trod over the worn earth of the old playground.

  People had mostly forgotten it existed. It was in the wrong part of town. Families like her own would never step foot here, thinking their precious babies would get hep C just from looking at the rusted equipment. For the less fortunate, exhausted parents, well, they didn’t have the time or energy to drag their kids to the park anymore. They plopped them in front of SpongeBob SquarePants and then went to their second jobs or went to get high or went to get drunk.

  The seniors from the public high school used the park at night for screwing and drinking and smoking, and the cigarette butts and used condoms that littered the ground when the sun came up attested to that. But during the day it was usually abandoned.

  Except for Zeke Durand.

  Trust me. The simple command from the email was on a constant loop in her head. But it didn’t matter if she did or didn’t trust N. The address that had been in the message was in Tampa, and she had no way to get there that wouldn’t alert her grandparents. She’d been trying to figure out a solution to her problem for two days. It was only this afternoon she’d thought of Zeke.

  Zeke Durand had shown up in town a few months earlier. Normally, Trudy wouldn’t have had any interactions with him. They weren’t in the same social circle—he went to public school, he lived in the wrong part of town. If her grandmother found out that Trudy even knew his name, she’d be grounded for weeks.

  But one day not long after graduation, she’d been out with a few girls whom she tolerated for the sole reason that they were Hollis approved and provided an excuse to leave the mansion. One of them was having a fling with a poor kid from the public high school and had dragged the rest of the group to the beach to meet up with him. Zeke had been there, quiet and brooding and keeping to the far edges of their little circle. People talked about him behind upturned palms as if he couldn’t hear the whispers that weren’t whispers.

  Trudy had mostly ignored the gossip, except for a few details she’d filed away for safekeeping.

  “You have a car,” she said now, one of those tidbits she’d kept.

  “I’m aware,” he repeated, his honeyed accent a little different from the lilt to her own words. But it was just as dry, just as slow. New Orleans, if she had to guess.

  “Don’t be rude,” she said, but really she appreciated his saltiness. He’d need it around here. As long as he didn’t mouth off to the wrong person.

  “Ah, ma’am, I am so sorry, ma’am.” He let his voice turn deep Alabama and held his hand over his heart in fake contrition. There was something hard in his eyes that Trudy recognized as a mirror of herself. This was someone with hard edges, who suffered no fools. This was someone who was intimately familiar with how awful life could be. This was someone who carried on anyway.

  She shook her head, wanting to rid herself of fanciful thoughts of camaraderie and friendship. Neither had a place here. “So you have a car.”

  “Ah, you’ve remembered you need something from me.” He didn’t look up. “I’ve seen what you have to offer in return, and, again, I’m not interested.”

  When she was turned down, it was usually from uppity jackasses who thought she was essentially walking syphilis. But there wasn’t that same slow condescension in his voice they used when passing on any unspoken offer.

  So the rejection, his just slightly on the wrong side of a polite no-thank-you, didn’t hurt coming from Zeke Durand. She didn’t really know him, hadn’t really spoken to him on the few occasions their groups had collided. But there was something about him, something in him that made the jitters that forever crawled along her skin calm just a bit. It wasn’t sexual. There was just a recognition there. One damaged soul to another.

  “I’ll get you money,” she said. She didn’t have it yet; that’s why she needed him. But it was unlikely he’d notice her careful wording, that he wouldn’t just assume things because of who she was.

  He glanced up at that, his finger holding a line on the page as if he had actually been reading. She rolled her eyes.

  “I’m not selling you my car,” he said, but there was curiosity there. It was a victory in and of itself. Curiosity she could work with.

  Trudy popped her hip, finally feeling in control of the situation. “I’m not asking you to.”

  The sky had turned a dusty rose by the time Trudy started back to the house. The long summer days had a way of stretching the colors and light so that there were always a few hours that the world lingered in a golden time. Everything was soft and slow and gentle. It reminded Trudy of bare feet on warm grass and cool glass firefly jars in grubby hands.

  Innocence.

  She tripped over the word but didn’t let her thoughts loiter along the syllables. Instead, she focused on the way the air licked at the delicate layer of sweat that coated her lower back despite the lack of fabric there, the way the scent of the lilacs that crawled up a decaying fence coated the inside of her nostrils, the way the sugar from her Coke turned her tongue lethargic and syrupy. Anything to forget how she used to believe there was such a thing as innocence.

  Just as she had the thought, a small body crashed into her legs.

  “Dee-Dee.” Ruby’s voice was muffled against Trudy’s thighs, but the delight in it was unmistakable. It was as if she hadn’t just seen her a few hours ago.

  “Baby.” Trudy peeled Ruby’s fingers from her flesh so that she could kneel in front of the girl. “What are you doing out here?”

  Ruby’s eyes went wide, and she glanced back down the block. The house was visible, but still much farther away than the distance Ruby was allowed to venture by herself.

  “I was on an adventure,” Ruby said, her smile going mischievous. Trudy couldn’t help but grin in response.

  “Oh yeah?” she asked, taking Ruby’s hand and tugging her along. It was unlikely Ruby was in any real danger, but she was only five years old. Jesus Christ, Charlotte was a horrible mother. And Trudy knew horrible mothers—it wasn’t exactly like Mellie was much better. Or Hollis, for that matter. “Where were you off to, then, little one?”

  Ruby giggled, swinging their hands, then leaning her weight into Trudy. “The ocean. Wanted to see the dolphins.”

  “And their underground palaces?” Trudy asked, knowing the answer.

  “Uh-huh.” Ruby nodded, letting Trudy’s hand drop so she could skip ahead. “And to rescue the
prince who’s stuck in the tower.”

  Trudy watched the girl’s strawberry curls catch the fading sunlight as she bounced away, still chattering on about the stories Trudy liked to tell before bedtime. They’d cuddle up in Ruby’s big bed, surrounded by stuffed animals in the neon glow of the plastic stars glued into pretty constellations on Ruby’s ceiling. Trudy would whisper stories of brave princesses rescuing princes in distress, and Ruby would shriek and laugh and gasp at all the right places.

  They rounded the side of the house to enter through the kitchen. Less chance of catching questions that way.

  Ruby was still talking, as she tended to do with zero need for an attentive audience, when Trudy saw Charlotte. Her aunt was a slim figure curled into one of the chairs on the back porch, a full glass of wine caught between two delicate fingers.

  It was her eyes, though, that spooked Trudy. They were empty, staring at some point in the distance, unblinking.

  “Go inside, baby.” Trudy cupped the back of Ruby’s head and nudged her to the door.

  “But . . . ,” Ruby whined, clearly caught midstory.

  “Now.”

  It was only at the sharp tone that Charlotte looked up. The black of her pupils ate up most of the crystal-clear blue of her irises, and it took a second for her to focus.

  “Shit, Charlie.” Trudy dropped her voice so that it wouldn’t carry. “Are you high?”

  Charlotte rubbed the heel of her hand against one eye before bringing the wineglass to her thin lips to gulp at the straw-colored liquid.

  “No,” she finally answered, the denial almost disappearing into the wind.

  Trudy scoffed. “It would be a hell of a lot more believable if you didn’t need to drink half a bottle before answering.”

  She didn’t wait for her aunt’s response. She didn’t even care if there was one coming. It didn’t matter. What mattered was Ruby and the way she was dipping her finger into the bowl of icing the cook had left out on the counter as Trudy walked into the kitchen. The thick, pink substance was caught halfway to her mouth, and Ruby’s dimples deepened as she realized it was Trudy, and not Mrs. Blake, coming to redden her behind. She plopped the glob in her mouth.