Dear Daughter (37 page)

The boy’s salute was 100 percent irony free. “Yes, Ma’am,” he said.

Rue winked at me. Or she tried to, anyway—she was drunk enough that she had to do a sort of Bell’s palsy thing to make it happen. But I admired her dedication.

We passed a flock of boys whose T-shirts displayed muscles that would soon give way to boozy those-were-the-days mush. One slung an arm around Rue’s shoulders and tried to steer her toward him. She plucked his sleeve between two fingers and lifted his arm off.

“I don’t even want to know where that hand’s been,” she said.

Eventually we came to a group of girls who were practically dripping with ennui.

“Rebecca? My friends. My friends? Rebecca.”

There was a ripple of laughter as they took me in. I sighed.
Plus ça change
.

A girl I recognized from the potluck dinner stepped forward. “Rue, if I’d known you were looking for a rescue dog I could’ve given you directions to a shelter.”

Ten years earlier I might have taken a moment to appreciate such a neat bit of honeyed menace. Hell, I might have even done so ten
days
earlier. But that night I was just so totally over it.

I turned and left the room.

“No, you guys, you guys, you guys,” Rue was saying behind me, “you don’t understand. Rebecca is my—wait!”

She caught up to me on the porch. “Where are you going?”

“I’m leaving. Have a nice life.”

She clutched at my sleeve. “Take me with you.”

I brushed her off. “Go back inside, Rue. I’m not some ticket to a better life. I’m not Tessa.”

“Good.”

I stopped. “What?”

She stumbled, and I caught her by the elbow. She looked up at me. “Tessa would never say yes. She’s kind of mean, isn’t she? And you’re . . . slightly less mean.”

I ran a hand over my face.
Shit.

“Okay, fine,” I said. “Come on.”

I’d figure out what to do with her later. Maybe when she was sober I could drop her at a rest stop or a McDonald’s or an insane asylum.

We weren’t even halfway to the truck when she started whining.

“Rebecca,” she said, “my hands are cold.”

I gave her my gloves. “Here.”

Twenty feet later: “The rest of me’s cold, too.”

“Jesus,” I muttered. “Fine, take my coat.” I began to unzip it, then stopped, remembering the police files I’d stashed in the coat pockets. I reached to pull them out, and—

“Fuck!”

Rue giggled. “Has anyone ever told you that you have kind of an anger management problem?”

“Shut up.” The files were gone. The only time I’d been away from my coat was when I’d fallen asleep—briefly and apparently unwisely—in Leo’s bed. That sack of shit. I was such a fool.

I yanked my arms out of the coat and stuffed Rue’s arms in. She snuggled into it with a sigh. “Where are we going?” she asked.

“To my underground lair.”

She giggled again.

By the time we got to the barn, my teeth were chattering, and I’d lost feeling in half my fingers. My lips even
felt
blue. It took me three tries to slide open the door, my feet struggling to get a grip on the cold ground. I pulled Rue in after me.

She ran a finger over the hood of the truck. “Sweet ride.”

“Bite me.”

I opened up my bag and fumbled with my shaking hands and clumsy fingers for the keys to the truck. Eventually I got a grip on something that felt like a car key and pulled it out. The light from the phone wasn’t much, but I managed to get the key into the lock, and—it didn’t fit. It didn’t fucking fit. My mother had lied to me and Noah had lied to me and Leo had lied to me and, God, even
I
was probably lying to me. Was it too much to ask for a single goddamn thing to go my way?

I spun and hurled the keys against the wall. They ricocheted off a rack of rusty tools and disappeared into the darkness.

Why must everything suck so hard all at once?

I sat down and let my head fall forward. I rubbed my shins with my hands to keep them from going as numb as the rest of me, but then I thought,
Fuck it
.
Let ’em fall off
.

A tap on my shoulder. I looked up. Rue was holding the keys in her gloved hand. She shifted uncomfortably. “I’m sorry,” she said.

I was about to say the same thing back when the keys swung into the light of the phone, and something flashed gold. I grabbed the keys and looked at them, really looked at them. They weren’t Kayla-the-hotel-girl’s keys. They were my mother’s—the ones I’d found in her closet the night she died. And there, among house keys and car keys and all the keys that probably opened the locks to a hundred different secret doors, was a small, worn gold key with a number on it.

It was a safe deposit box key.

And there was no doubt in my mind where that safe deposit box was.

SATURDAY 11/9/2013 5:05 AM PST BY TMZ STAFF

JANIE JENKINS

CAUGHT ON TAPE!

BREAKING: A car matching the description of the one stolen from a motel in McCook, NE earlier this week . . . and suspected to have been stolen by Janie Jenkins . . . was caught on a traffic camera located on I-385 near the South Dakota–Nebraska border at 4:32 p.m. CST on Monday, November 4th.

Although this would have put Jenkins on a direct path to the Canadian border, there is no sign that she crossed over into Saskatchewan . . . and she hasn’t been spotted anywhere else in the Great Plains. However, TMZ can exclusively report that just yesterday, Noah Washington, Janie’s lawyer, was spotted boarding a plane to Rapid City, South Dakota.

This can be no coincidence . . . have the two arranged a secret meeting somewhere in South Dakota? TMZ will keep you up to date on every new development as we finally close in on Janie Jenkins.

CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

It was 4:00 in the morning by the time we got to Custer. I figured the bank wouldn’t open until nine at the earliest, so I found a parking garage where we could inconspicuously spend the rest of the night. Rue had fallen asleep as soon as I’d snapped her into her seatbelt. She was snoring.

I kept the truck’s engine idling as long as it took me to feel really warm, then I pulled myself up into a ball, tucked my hands between my legs, and waited. The truck was warm and moist, the windows fogged over from our breath. As usual, I was afraid to go to sleep, although this time I had a good reason to worry that someone might sneak up on me. I kept pinching myself awake, little nips on my face and my neck and the undersides of my forearms. I sang the alphabet backwards. I counted to a thousand in French. I recited the creative directors of Dior in chronological order—but then I got stuck on Galliano. God, I didn’t even know if Galliano was still there. I didn’t know
anything
.

Which brought me back to Leo. I picked through our every interaction, trying to figure out what I’d missed, but every time I saw the same thing: a guy who was kind of a jerk and kind of a know-it-all, but also kind of decent. There was nothing about him that said, “I like to hoard pictures of dead women and then also fuck their emotionally vulnerable daughters.”

(But don’t get the wrong impression—I wasn’t upset that I’d slept with him. I was upset that I’d
liked
him.)

Rue shifted in her seat, mumbling something incoherent. In profile, I realized, I could see the family resemblance. Her coloring was totally different, but the slope of her nose, its upturned tip—just like my mother’s. Before the rhinoplasty, of course. Rue’s lashes were so long they lay heavy on her cheek, the shadows they cast rippling along with her dreams. I reached over and tugged up the collar of her coat—of
my
coat. I smoothed back a stray piece of her hair.

I watched her for a long time before I finally curled back into my ball.

•   •   •

The Jenkins Savings and Loan was about what you would expect. A square brick building, a rectangular sign. A freestanding ATM like you’d find in the back of a shitty bar. Inside was shabby industrial-grade carpeting, two desks—one for a loan officer, one for the manager—and two tellers. A velvet rope as thick as my thigh and redder than a maraschino cherry marked out the waiting area. A little bit of L.A. in South Dakota.

“Can I help you?”

A pillowy woman with rosacea and a trapezoidal haircut approached me with a smile. I held out my key.

“I’d like to access box 117,” I said. She told me to take a seat while she found the key and signature card. I wiped the sweat from my face with the back of my hand. I hoped they didn’t ask for ID; I hoped my mother’s handwriting hadn’t changed over the years.

Five minutes later the woman’s head popped up from behind a filing cabinet. “Oh! You’re Miss Kanty!”

I tried to smile. “You know who I am?”

She emerged with the register, which she laid on the desk. “Of course I do,” she said. “A few years ago when the lease was up I spent
ages
trying to track you down. But I couldn’t find hide nor hair!”

“I live a very private life,” I said, hoping that would be the end of it.

I ran my pen down along the entries: My mother had accessed the box several times before the robbery, once five years later, and then one last time, just three months before her murder. I signed the book and handed it back.

The woman glanced down at my signature—a perfect replica of my mother’s, as it should be after all those account withdrawals I forged in high school—and nodded her approval.

“Looks good to me!” she said. “Let’s head on back!”

I followed her mutely, too nervous to speak.

“You might not know this,” the manager was saying, “but since we couldn’t find you, we eventually got in touch with your brother—he’s actually the one who’s been paying the rent on the box these past years, you know. He must be so happy to have you back.”

I just barely managed to keep my balance. Eli knew about the safe deposit box? Did he think Tessa was still alive?

“You mean you haven’t been to see him yet?” she asked, misinterpreting my silence.

“It’s my next stop,” I said, tightly.

Depending on what I’m about to find, anyway.

The manager turned her key in the door to box 117 and left the room with some sort of disproportionately affectionate valediction. I turned my own key, opened the door, and pulled out the drawer, heaving it up onto the table. It was one of the largest boxes in the vault, deeper than it was wide, about the size of a cooler you might take for a long day on the beach. I set my hand on the lid and closed my eyes.

“Please be a detailed and complete explanation of everything that has happened,” I said. “It would also be cool if there was an apology for that time Mom threw out my spike-studded Viv Westwood platforms.”

I opened the lid. Inside I found:

A stack of bills.

A piece of paper.

An engraved card.

A letter.

My hand went first to the letter, but I chickened out and
picked up the card instead. It was thick and expensive, printed on cream-colored linen stock and engraved in Edwardian script:
Many Thanks.
If I hadn’t already known whose box this was, the card would have removed all doubt. An actual thing my mother once said to me: “Unengraved stationery is like a fat girl without a bra.” I always thought that if my mother were going to come back from the dead for any reason other than revenge, it would be to chastise me for never having written a thank-you note for some birthday present I don’t even remember.

I opened the card. There, in my mother’s handwriting, was a single sentence:

If you weren’t such fucking pricks, I wouldn’t have had to take this in the first place.

The manager popped her head back in. “Is everything okay?”

It wasn’t until she asked that I realized I was laughing. I wiped the corner of my eye. “Yeah, no, it’s fine, thanks. I’ll just be a few more minutes.”

She left. Still sniffling, I tried to eyeball the number of bills in the box, but I could guess how much was there: $13,128—plus, probably, interest. My mother never liked to leave her debts unpaid, and apparently that applied to theft, as well. The sheet of paper, a legal document transferring possession of the money to the bank, confirmed this.

It was such a tiny sum, considering. I wondered what she’d bought with it. A new wardrobe? Her first surgeries? Prenatal vitamins? Or maybe a Swiss midwife who didn’t mind falsifying a birth certificate.

Finally I picked up the letter. The envelope was addressed simply: Jane. I opened it.

Dear Daughter,

Took you long enough.

Don’t tell me you really thought I’d let you find anything I didn’t want you to find? Get real, kiddo. You were meant to have this key. What were you looking for when you found it, I wonder. Earrings? A necklace? Class?

You always were so predictable. Does it bother you, to know that?

I thought we were going to work out at first, I really did. You were a beautiful baby from the start, with peachy skin and bright blue eyes whose whole reason for being open was to track the movement of my face. You smiled when you were just a week old. Sometimes I would wake you up just because I missed you. Oh, I thought we had something special, little girl.

Now I know you just wanted my milk.

Are you sorry that I’m dead? Yes, I know I’m dead. Inheriting the deed to the land in Adeline is the only thing that could have led you to this box. I’m not stupid, Jane. When I really want to keep something from you, I send it to my lawyers.

(What did you think of Jared, by the way? If you see him again, please thank him for passing on my message.)

Now, as I’ve always said, living well is the best revenge, and so far I’ve managed this brilliantly. And when I die, I hope to be very old and wearing Givenchy. But in case I have instead come to an exceedingly premature end, I need you to finish the job.