Jex Malone (10 page)

“Oh Nat, I find planning an utter waste of time,” Deva responds, flipping a section of glossy black hair. “Let's just go and see what happens. Worst comes to worst, we'll just get an eyeful of that luscious little brother of hers.”

“Who's Lucas?” I ask, not remembering seeing that name in the case file.

“Not Lucas—luscious,” Deva responds. “As in tall, dirty blonde, longish hair slicked backed off his face, searing green eyes, and tanned. Muscular, too. Cooper Matthews.”

“Still, I call him Mike Myers,” Deva sniffs.

“Wait, I know that name. What's Mike Myers from the
Halloween
movies have to do with Patty Matthews?” I say, now thoroughly confused.

“Oh, Deva thinks the little brother killed Patty,” Cissy pipes up again. “And I agree with you—that's the craziest thing I ever heard. He was just a little kid when she was killed. But she said it once in third grade and then it started this big rumor and sort of socially ruined him forever.

“At least until he grew up and got hot,” Deva interrupted, again. “Hotness trumps weirdness. Hotness trumps vanishing, probably-murdered-my-sister any day.”

“He's not going to pull out a snack of Rice Crispy treats and open the family photo album,” Nat interjects.

“He only hates me, but just mildly dislikes Nat and Cissy and doesn't even know Jex,” Deva says. “We can build on that foundation.”

So here we sit: Deva at the wheel of the bright red golf cart with tan leather seats, headlights, windshield wipers, and a built-in cooler to keep drinks frosty in the summer heat.

Nat is in the front passenger's seat—she called it the “death seat” as we all piled in—and Cissy is next to me nervously chewing her fingers. On the stereo is that vintage song “Don't Stop Believing.” It should be our theme song.

Deva flips down the visor and a lighted makeup mirror appears. Before she hits the gas, she checks to see whether her mascara has smeared in the heat. It hasn't. I make a mental note to ask her what brand she's wearing.

“That window right there,” Nat whispers and points as we turn down Fallon Drive. “It's Patty's bedroom window.”

There are no curtains over the window, but someone has nailed up an old comforter to keep people from seeing in.

“Jex—any ideas on what next?” she poses.

I shake my head as in “totally clueless.”

Deva parks across the street and takes the keys out of the ignition, dropping them directly into her jeweled bra.

“I guess we do need a plan,” she mutters, her self-confidence suddenly gone and her voice sounding a little scared. Nat and I jump out of the golf cart at the same exact time, running on pure adrenalin. She takes a step forward; I take two.

We're actually doing this.

The front door is faded red, but it's so weathered that it's warped at the bottom. A worn brownish mat reads “Welcome,” but clearly no one who lives there really means it. The yard is mostly dirt and a few patches of grass, surrounded by a chain-link fence. I can see a small shed in the back for yard tools.

A puke-green colored station wagon sits in the driveway over a large sticky oil stain on the cement. The other car isn't there, Cissy notes, which means Patty and Cooper's mom, Ricki, is gone—at least for now.

Cissy tells me that Ricki drives a vintage navy blue Trans-Am with a sparkling gold eagle on the hood and plays her Van Halen and Def Leopard cassettes in the tape deck. That is not a typo.
Tape deck.

“So, Ricki must be pushing fifty now. Female. Caucasian. Wrinkly. Enough lines on her face to show a life lived pretty hard,” Nat says, sounding like the FBI agent she imagines herself to be in ten years. “But she's stuck in another decade. She still has long, straight brown-blonde hair. Same green eyes as Cooper. Truth be told, she's still in pretty good shape. Some of the dads on the block still stare at her.”

“I see her at the supermarket. She works as a checker. She always wears the same pair of blue jeans and usually a black low-cut tank top under her smock,” Nat continues.

A beat passes. Then another.

I remember—suddenly out of nowhere—a moment when I was a little girl and hearing my dad talk to someone on the telephone.
“You always start at the scene of the crime,” he said. “Canvas the scene. Look for clues. Clues are there to be found. You just have to be smart enough to find them.”

“Hey Jex, it's your show,” says Nat, now clearly annoyed at our lack of focus on the task at hand. “If we're going to do something, let's get going. The sky isn't looking too good—look how dark the clouds are now.”

Cissy clutches her stomach again and moans. Looking toward the horizon, I can't believe how the once cloudless pale blue summer sky is now dark green headed towards inky black. A big desert storm is definitely brewing in more ways than one.

“This is no time to wimp out,” I announce, walking faster while the others wordlessly follow.

We march down the sidewalk and push open the creaky wire gate. I'm more than a little creeped out to be walking up the same sidewalk that Patty might have used—and maybe her killer made use of while escaping.

Killer? Oh gosh, now I really have to go to the bathroom.

Focus!

My knuckles hit the front door.
Nothing.

It's easier the second time I knock.
Nothing again
.

Looking back at the others, I reach over and ring the doorbell.
Nothing still
. Really? How long has that thing been broken?

“Well, we tried. Can we go home now?” Cissy whispers with real hope in her voice.

“Go home! We just got here!” I whisper back. In a single jump, I bound off the front porch and head around the side of the house. If we can't get in, at least we should look around the outside.
Clues are there to be found. Clues are there to be found.
I keep hearing my dad's voice in my head and for once I don't try to delete it.

“Hey, uh, Jex, isn't this illegal?” Deva calls, following after me despite the fact that her heels keep sinking into the backyard sand. Nat and Cissy are trailing a few steps behind.

The backyard isn't much better than the front. My feet crunch over dry dirt-sand, and I notice a rusty maroon bike is leaning against some metal lawn furniture that has also seen better days. I even see an almost completely faded little boy's blue tricycle. I don't know what possesses me as I climb the concrete steps to the narrow back patio, grab the handle of the screen door, and pull on it.

Locked!

Relief and disappointment rolled into one washes over me.

Wow, I just came very close to actually walking into someone else's house. Breaking and entering. What the heck has gotten into me? Wasn't one brush with the judge enough this year or any year?
Whatever it is inside of me … it won't stop, which is why I press my face to the biggest window in that pit of a yard.

Cupping my hands against the smudged glass, I can see an old blue couch in a family room and a television on wooden stand. A pile of old tabloid issues is stacked on the floor, which is covered in ratty brown shag carpet. On the wall are some framed, faded photographs of a girl smiling prettily. Long blonde hair, cute turned up nose.

Patty.

The sight of her takes my breath away—so different from the copies of pictures stuffed into the police file. The photos used for the fliers that were posted around the neighborhood made her look much older—harsher and harder than the cute-as-a-button girl staring down from the wall at me.

The police had asked her parents for the most recent photo they had of her to help people spot her, and they picked one taken a few weeks earlier while she hung out with her boyfriend and best friend, her hair in crinkly waves and pulled up in a scrunchie ponytail holder.

She was wearing a hot pink tank top and Daisy Dukes, her best friend in a faded school T-shirt beside her, sticking her tongue out to the camera, which I guess is held by the boyfriend.

The girls look older and wiser—but not in a good way. The Patty I'm looking up at on the wall looks normal, fresh, and real.

I can feel the sun beating down on my back as I try to refocus on the rest of the dark, uninviting room. I just want to stare at Patty, but feel like I have to avert my eyes.

What I find is even more pleasant. Her artwork is up on the wall and it's really good. Not good as in “kid good,” but “professional good” like you could sell it to somebody and they would put it up in their living room. There are two paintings of meadows with sweeping green grassy landscapes and a little white house in the distance. She painted a slightly older blonde girl holding hands with a little dark-haired boy. You don't see their faces, but only their backs as they run through the grass together. In the far distance is the hint of a rainbow and in the lower right corner of both pieces is a small rainbow. I'm guessing that little stamp is her thing.

It's her artistic signature.

My eyes dart left and I see the kitchen counter is surprisingly clean and tidy. A little calendar hangs on the wall with various appointments written in red marker.
Just like any other family
, I think to myself,
before their teenage daughter was murdered
.

I squint to read what's written on the calendar and press my face even closer to the window, turning my head just a few centimeters to get a better view.

Suddenly shock ricochets through my whole body and I stifle a scream.

Two intense green eyes, the same shade as the ominous sky overhead, are staring back at me from the inside.

“Never underestimate a man's ability to underestimate a woman.”

—V.I. Warshawski

What the—

This face—this face is staring back at me and it's both frightening and intriguing. But it's mostly frightening. After he whips open the back door, it takes a breathless second for me to realize it's a pretty nice face. This is clearly not the time to evaluate hotness. Plus, I'm clearly off my game out here.

Okay, okay. Think fast.
Why are we here again? Didn't we have a good excuse? Think. Think. Think.

Wow, his eyes are really green, like landing in Ireland green or the green of the most perfect field of summer grass. That jaw is pretty square. I didn't know that they came this cute in Nevada.

“What are you doing here?” the face says directly to us, clearly annoyed and not in the least bit friendly. Maybe I don't want to go to Ireland. Ever.

Take. Ireland. Off. List.

He must have seen us coming from one of the windows. It would have been hard to ignore Deva speeding up in that ridiculous revved-up golf cart, and we probably should have been a little quieter opening the back gate. Which was unlocked. Don't leave your gate unlocked if you don't want people to come look in your windows—okay, even I can't excuse that kind of bad behavior.

I am so losing my edge out here.

The eyes keep looking at us, sizing us up, and then returning back to my face. Obviously, he knows Deva, Nat, and Cissy—he's known them for years, even though I am getting the full sense now that they've never actually had anything to do with each other.

Which makes me wonder what in the heck is wrong with these girls—how could you
not
talk to this boy all these years? I don't care what kind of freak show his family is, because that's just a bad twist of fate or genetics or the universe. One question remains: Didn't they see those green eyes?

“Hi Cooper!” Nat speaks up with a kind of fake breeziness she obviously can't carry off because she's too serious 99.9 percent of the time.

“We were just in the neighborhood. Thought we'd stop by,” she breezes, but the winds of faux friendship fall flat.

Cooper's expression goes from intense to confused in an instant.

“Can I help you with something?” he responds sternly, cocking his right eyebrow in a question mark to emphasize his point.